## Preface to the Second Edition (1869)

My friend Joseph Weydemeyer, whose death was so untimely, intended to
publish a political weekly in New York starting from January 1, 1852.
He invited me to provide this weekly with a history of the coup d’etat.
Down to the middle of February, I accordingly wrote him weekly articles
under the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Meanwhile,
Weydemeyer’s original plan had fallen through. Instead, in the spring
of 1852 he began to publish a monthly, Die Revolution, whose first
number consists of my Eighteenth Brumaire. A few hundred copies of this
found their way into Germany at that time, without, however, getting
into the actual book market. A German bookseller of extremely radical
pretensions to whom I offered the sale of my book was most virtuously
horrified at a “presumption” so “contrary to the times.”

From the above facts it will be seen that the present work took shape
under the immediate pressure of events and its historical material does
not extend beyond the month of February, 1852. Its republication now is
due in part to the demand of the book trade, in part to the urgent
requests of my friends in Germany.

Of the writings dealing with the same subject at approximately the same
time as mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo’s Napoleon le Petit
and Proudhon’s Coup d’Etat. Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and
witty invective against the responsible producer of the coup d’etat.
The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees
in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice
that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to
him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history.
Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d’etat as the
result of an antecedent historical development. Inadvertently, however,
his historical construction of the coup d’etat becomes a historical
apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into the error of our so-called
objective historians. I, on the contrary, demonstrate how the class
struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it
possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.

A revision of the present work would have robbed it of its particular
coloring. Accordingly, I have confined myself to mere correction of
printer’s errors and to striking out allusions now no longer
intelligible.

The concluding words of my work: “But when the imperial mantle finally
falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of
Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome Column,”
have already been fulfilled. Colonel Charras opened the attack on the
Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815. Subsequently, and
especially in the past few years, French literature has made an end of
the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism,
satire, and wit. Outside France, this violent breach with the
traditional popular belief, this tremendous mental revolution, has been
little noticed and still less understood.

Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the
school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called
Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is
forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place
only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free
poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves,
formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget
Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the
expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the
proletariat. With so complete a difference between the material,
economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the
political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common
with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High
Priest Samuel.

Karl Marx,

London, June 23, 1869

## I

Hegel remarks somewhere[*] that
all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He
forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière
for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793
to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the
circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do
not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing
already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as
they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating
something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary
crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service,
borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present
this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.
Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814
draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman
Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody,
now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the
beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his
mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses
himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and
when he forgets his native tongue.

When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a
salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St.
Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old
French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining
and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with
Roman phrases. The first one destroyed the feudal foundation and cut off the
feudal heads that had grown on it. The other created inside France the only
conditions under which free competition could be developed, parceled-out land
properly used, and the unfettered productive power of the nation employed; and
beyond the French borders it swept away feudal institutions everywhere, to
provide, as far as necessary, bourgeois society in France with an appropriate
up-to-date environment on the European continent. Once the new social formation
was established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared and with them also the
resurrected Romanism – the Brutuses, the Gracchi, the publicolas, the
tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober
reality bred its own true interpreters and spokesmen in the Says, Cousins,
Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants, and Guizots; its real military leaders sat
behind the office desk and the hog-headed Louis XVIII was its political chief.
Entirely absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive
struggle, it no longer remembered that the ghosts of the Roman period had
watched over its cradle.

But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it
nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to
bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman
Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the
self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the
bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the
high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of
development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed
from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois
revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois
transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted
Habakkuk.

Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of
glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given
task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding
once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.

From 1848 to 1851, only the ghost of the old revolution circulated - from
Marrast, the républicain en gants jaunes [Republican in yellow gloves], who disguised himself as
old Bailly, down to the adventurer who hides his trivial and repulsive features
behind the iron death mask of Napoleon. A whole nation, which thought it had
acquired an accelerated power of motion by means of a revolution, suddenly
finds itself set back into a defunct epoch, and to remove any doubt about the
relapse, the old dates arise again – the old chronology, the old names,
the old edicts, which had long since become a subject of antiquarian
scholarship, and the old minions of the law who had seemed long dead. The
nation feels like the mad Englishman in Bedlam [1] who thinks he is living in the time of the old Pharaohs
and daily bewails the hard labor he must perform in the Ethiopian gold mines,
immured in this subterranean prison, a pale lamp fastened to his head, the
overseer of the slaves behind him with a long whip, and at the exits a confused
welter of barbarian war slaves who understand neither the forced laborers nor
each other, since they speak no common language. “And all this,”
sighs the mad Englishman, “is expected of me, a freeborn Briton, in order
to make gold for the Pharaohs.” “In order to pay the debts of the
Bonaparte family,” sighs the French nation. The Englishman, so long as he
was not in his right mind, could not get rid of his idée fixé of mining
gold. The French, so long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid
of the memory of Napoleon, as the election of December 10 [1848, when Louis Bonaparte was elected President of the French
Republic by plebiscite.] proved. They longed to return from the
perils of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt [2], and December 2, 1851 [The date
of the coup d’état by Louis Bonaparte], was the answer. Now they
have not only a caricature of the old Napoleon, but the old Napoleon himself,
caricatured as he would have to be in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from
the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has
stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required
recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The
revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order
to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content –
here the content goes beyond the phrase.

The February Revolution was a surprise attack, a seizing of the old society
unaware, and the people proclaimed this unexpected stroke a deed of world
importance, ushering in a new epoch. On December 2 the February Revolution is
conjured away as a cardsharp’s trick, and what seems overthrown is no
longer the monarchy but the liberal concessions that had been wrung from it
through centuries of struggle. Instead of society having conquered a new
content for itself, it seems that the state has only returned to its oldest
form, to a shamelessly simple rule by the sword and the monk’s cowl. This
is the answer to the coup de main [unexpected
stroke] of February, 1848, given by the coup de tête [rash act] of December, 1851. Easy come, easy go.
Meantime, the interval did not pass unused. During 1848-51 French society, by
an abbreviated revolutionary method, caught up with the studies and experiences
which in a regular, so to speak, textbook course of development would have
preceded the February Revolution, if the latter were to be more than a mere
ruffling of the surface. Society seems now to have retreated to behind its
starting point; in truth, it has first to create for itself the revolutionary
point of departure – the situation, the relations, the conditions under
which alone modern revolution becomes serious.

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more
swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men
and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day
– but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a
long Katzenjammer [cat’s winge] takes hold
of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress
period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the
nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt
themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order
to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures,
weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their
opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise
before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the
indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created
which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call
out:

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

[Here is the rose, here dance!] [NOTE]

For the rest, every fair observer, even if he had not followed the course of
French developments step by step, must have had a presentiment of the imminence
of an unheard-of disgrace for the revolution. It was enough to hear the
complacent yelps of victory with which the democrats congratulated each other
on the expectedly gracious consequences of the second Sunday in May, 1852.
[day of elections – Louis Bonaparte’s term
was expired] In their minds that second Sunday of May had become a
certain idea, a dogma, like the day of Christ’s reappearance and the
beginning of the millennium in the minds of the Chiliasts [4]. As always, weakness had taken refuge in a belief in
miracles, believed the enemy to be overcome when he was only conjured away in
imagination, and lost all understanding of the present in an inactive
glorification of the future that was in store for it and the deeds it had in
mind but did not want to carry out yet. Those heroes who seek to disprove their
demonstrated incapacity – by offering each other their sympathy and
getting together in a crowd – had tied up their bundles, collected their
laurel wreaths in advance, and occupied themselves with discounting on the
exchange market the republics in partibus [i.e.,
in name only] for which they had already providently organized the
government personnel with all the calm of their unassuming disposition.
December 2 struck them like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, and those who in
periods of petty depression gladly let their inner fears be drowned by the
loudest renters will perhaps have convinced themselves that the times are past
when the cackle of geese could save the Capitol. [5]

The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and
red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet
lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and
the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté,
egalité, fraternité, and the second Sunday in May, 1852 – all have
vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies
do not make out to be a sorcerer. Universal suffrage seems to have survived
only for the moment, so that with its own hand it may make its last will and
testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the
people itself: “All that exists deserves to perish.” [From Goethe’s Faust, Part One.]

It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken
unawares. Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the
first adventurer who came along could violate them. Such turns of speech do not
solve the riddle but only formulate it differently. It remains to be explained
how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised and delivered without
resistance into captivity by three knights of industry.

Let us recapitulate in general outline the phases that the French Revolution
went through from February 24, 1848, to December, 1851.

Three main periods are unmistakable: the February period; the period of the
constitution of the republic or the Constituent National Assembly - May 1848 to
May 28 1849; and the period of the constitutional republic or the Legislative
National Assembly – May 28 1849 to December 2 1851.

The first period – from February 24, the
overthrow of Louis Philippe, to May 4, 1848, the meeting of the Constituent
Assembly – the February period proper, may be designated as the prologue
of the revolution. Its character was officially expressed in the fact that the
government it improvised itself declared that it was provisional, and like the
government, everything that was mentioned, attempted, or enunciated during this
period proclaimed itself to be only provisional. Nobody and nothing ventured to
lay any claim to the right of existence and of real action. All the elements
that had prepared or determined the revolution – the dynastic opposition,
the republican bourgeoisie, the democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie, and
the social-democratic workers, provisionally found their place in the February
government.

It could not be otherwise. The February days originally intended an
electoral reform by which the circle of the politically privileged among the
possessing class itself was to be widened and the exclusive domination of the
aristocracy of finance overthrown. When it came to the actual conflict, however
– when the people mounted the barricades, the National Guard maintained a
passive attitude, the army offered no serious resistance, and the monarchy ran
away – the republic appeared to be a matter of course. Every party
construed it in its own way. Having secured it arms in hand, the proletariat
impressed its stamp upon it and proclaimed it to be a social republic. There
was thus indicated the general content of the modern revolution, a content
which was in most singular contradiction to everything that, with the material
available, with the degree of education attained by the masses, under the given
circumstances and relations, could be immediately realized in practice. On the
other hand, the claims of all the remaining elements that had collaborated in
the February Revolution were recognized by the lion’s share they obtained
in the government. In no period, therefore, do we find a more confused mixture
of high-flown phrases and actual uncertainty and clumsiness, of more
enthusiastic striving for innovation and more deeply rooted domination of the
old routine, of more apparent harmony of the whole of society; and more
profound estrangement of its elements. While the Paris proletariat still
reveled in the vision of the wide prospects that had opened before it and
indulged in seriously meant discussions of social problems, the old powers of
society had grouped themselves, assembled, reflected, and found unexpected
support in the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty bourgeois, who all at
once stormed onto the political stage after the barriers of the July Monarchy
had fallen.

The second period, from May 4, 1848, to the end of May, 1849, is
the period of the constitution, the foundation, of the bourgeois republic.
Immediately after the February days not only had the dynastic opposition been
surprised by the republicans and the republicans by the socialists, but all
France by Paris. The National Assembly, which met on May 4, 1848, had emerged
from the national elections and represented the nation. It was a living protest
against the pretensions of the February days and was to reduce the results of
the revolution to the bourgeois scale. In vain the Paris proletariat, which
immediately grasped the character of this National Assembly, attempted on May
15, a few days after it met, to negate its existence forcibly, to dissolve it,
to disintegrate again into its constituent parts the organic form in which the
proletariat was threatened by the reacting spirit of the nation. As is known,
May 15 had no other result but that of removing Blanqui and his comrades
– that is, the real leaders of the proletarian party – from the
public stage for the entire duration of the cycle we are considering.

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois
republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in
the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of
the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which
an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly
the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal
event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed.
On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the
middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized
as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural
population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More
than three thousand insurgents were butchered after the victory, and fifteen
thousand were deported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat passes
into the background on the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward
again on every occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start,
but with ever decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter results. As
soon as one of the social strata above it gets into revolutionary ferment, the
proletariat enters into an alliance with it and so shares all the defeats that
the different parties suffer, one after another. But these subsequent blows
become the weaker, the greater the surface of society over which they are
distributed. The more important leaders of the proletariat in the Assembly and
in the press successively fall victim to the courts, and ever more equivocal
figures come to head it. In part it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments,
exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement in which
it renounces the revolutionizing of the old world by means of the
latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its
salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited
conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck. It seems to
be unable either to rediscover revolutionary greatness in itself or to win new
energy from the connections newly entered into, until all classes with which it
contended in June themselves lie prostrate beside it. But at least it succumbs
with the honors of the great, world-historic struggle; not only France, but all
Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the ensuing defeats of the upper
classes are so cheaply bought that they require barefaced exaggeration by the
victorious party to be able to pass for events at all, and become the more
ignominious the further the defeated party is removed from the proletarian
party.

The defeat of the June insurgents, to be sure, had now prepared, had leveled
the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and built, but it
had shown at the same time that in Europe the questions at issue are other than
that of “republic or monarchy.” It had revealed that here
“bourgeois republic” signifies the unlimited despotism of one class
over other classes. It had proved that in countries with an old civilization,
with a developed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production,
and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been
dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the
political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form
of life – as, for example, in the United States of North America, where,
though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually
change and interchange their elements in constant flux, where the modern means
of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather
compensate for the relative deficiency of heads and hands, and where, finally,
the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new
world of its own, has neither time nor opportunity left for abolishing the old
world of ghosts.

During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of
Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of
communism. They had “saved” society from “the enemies of
society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society,
“property, family, religion, order,” to their army as passwords and
had proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou
shalt conquer!” From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties
which gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the
revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the
cry: “property, family, religion, order.” Society is saved just as
often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is
maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois
financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal
republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as
an “attempt on society” and stigmatized as “socialism.”
And finally the high priests of “religion and order” themselves are
driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the
darkness of night, put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile;
their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens
broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the
family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies
by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses
bombarded for amusement – in the name of property, of the family, of
religion, and of order. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy
phalanx of order and the hero Crapulinski [a character
from Heine’s poem “The Two Knights,” a dissolute
aristocrat.] installs himself in the Tuileries as the “savior of
society.”

Footnotes

1.
Bedlam was an infamous lunatic asylum in England.

2.
The expression, "to sigh for the flesh-pots of Egypt" is taken from
the biblical legend, according to which during the exodus of the Israelites
from Egypt the faint-hearted among them wished that they had died when they sat
by the flesh-pots of Egypt, rather than undergo their present trials through
the desert.

3.Hic Rhodus, hic salta. See [MIA Encyclopedia]
for clarification.

4.
Chiliasts (from the Greek word chilias – a thousand):
preachers of a mystical religious doctrine concerning the second coming of
Christ and the establishment of the millennium when justice, universal equality
and prosperity would be triumphant.

5.
Capitol: A hill in Rome, a fortified citadel where the temples of
Jupiter, Juno and other gods were built. According to a legend, Rome was saved
in 390 B.C.E. from an invasion of the Gauls, due to the cackling of geese from
Juno’s temple which awakened the sleeping guards of the Capitol.

Preface | Chapter 2

Contents
## II

Let us pick up the threads of the development once more.

The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is
the history of the domination and the disintegration of the republican
faction of the bourgeoisie, of the faction known by the names of
tricolor republicans, pure republicans, political republicans,
formalist republicans, etc.

Under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe it had formed the
official republican opposition and consequently a recognized component
part of the political world of the day. It had its representatives in
the Chambers and a considerable sphere of influence in the press. Its
Paris organ, the National, was considered just as respectable in its
way as the Journal des Débats. Its character corresponded to this
position under the constitutional monarchy. It was not a faction of the
bourgeoisie held together by great common interests and marked off by
specific conditions of production. It was a clique of republican-minded
bourgeois, writers, lawyers, officers, and officials that owed its
influence to the personal antipathies of the country to Louis Philippe,
to memories of the old republic, to the republican faith of a number of
enthusiasts, above all, however, to French nationalism, whose hatred of
the Vienna treaties[79] and of the alliance with England it stirred up
perpetually. A large part of the following the National had under Louis
Philippe was due to this concealed imperialism, which could
consequently confront it later, under the republic, as a deadly rival
in the person of Louis Bonaparte. It fought the aristocracy of finance,
as did all the rest of the bourgeois opposition. Polemics against the
budget, which in France were closely connected with fighting the
aristocracy of finance, procured popularity too cheaply and material
for puritanical leading articles too plentifully not to be exploited.
The industrial bourgeoisie was grateful to it for its slavish defense
of the French protectionist system, which it accepted, however, more on
national grounds than on grounds of national economy; the bourgeoisie
as a whole, for its vicious denunciation of communism and socialism.
For the rest, the party of the National was purely republican; that is,
it demanded a republican instead of a monarchist form of bourgeois rule
and, above all, the lion’s share of this rule. About the conditions of
this transformation it was by no means clear in its own mind. On the
other hand, what was clear as daylight to it, and was publicly
acknowledged at the reform banquets in the last days of Louis Philippe,
was its unpopularity with the democratic petty bourgeois, and in
particular with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans,
as is indeed the way with pure republicans, were already at the point
of contenting themselves in the first instance with a regency of the
Duchess of Orleans[80] when the February Revolution broke out and assigned
their best-known representatives a place in the Provisional Government.
From the start they naturally had the confidence of the bourgeoisie and
a majority in the Constituent National Assembly. The socialist elements
of the Provisional Government were excluded forthwith from the
Executive Commission which the National Assembly formed when it met,
and the party of the National took advantage of the outbreak of the
June insurrection to discharge the Executive Commission[81] also, and
therewith to get rid of its closest rivals, the petty-bourgeois, or
democratic, republicans (Ledru-Rollin, etc.). Cavaignac, the general of
the bourgeois-republican part who commanded the June massacre, took the
place of the Executive Commission with a sort of dictatorial power.
Marrast, former editor in chief of the National, became the perpetual
president of the Constituent National Assembly, and the ministries, as
well as all other important posts, fell to the portion of the pure
republicans.

The republican bourgeois faction, which had long regarded itself as the
legitimate heir of the July Monarchy, thus found its fondest hopes
exceeded; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis
Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the
throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a
rising laid low with grapeshot. What it had conceived as the most
revolutionary event turned out in reality to be the most
counterrevolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the
tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life.

The exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from June
24 to December 10, 1848. It is summed up in the drafting of a
republican constitution and in the state of siege of Paris.

The new constitution was at bottom only the republicanized edition of
the constitutional Charter of 1830.[82] The narrow electoral qualification
of the July Monarchy, which excluded even a large part of the
bourgeoisie from political rule, was incompatible with the existence of
the bourgeois republic. In lieu of this qualification, the February
Revolution had at once proclaimed direct universal suffrage. The
bourgeois republicans could not undo this event. They had to content
themselves with adding the limiting proviso of a six months’ residence
in the constituency. The old organization of the administration, the
municipal system, the judicial system, the army, etc., continued to
exist inviolate, or, where the constitution changed them, the change
concerned the table of contents, not the contents; the name, not the
subject matter.

The inevitable general staff of the liberties of 1848, personal
liberty, liberty of the press, of speech, of association, of assembly,
of education and religion, etc., received a constitutional uniform
which made them invulnerable. For each of these liberties is proclaimed
as the absolute right of the French citoyen, but always with the
marginal note that it is unlimited so far as it is not limited by the
“equal rights of others and the public safety” or by “laws” which are
intended to mediate just this harmony of the individual liberties with
one another and with the public safety. For example:

“The citizens have
the right of association, of peaceful and unarmed assembly, of petition
and of expressing their opinions, whether in the press or in any other
way. The enjoyment of these rights has no limit save the equal rights
of others and the public safety.”

“Education is free. Freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the conditions
fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state.”

“The home of every citizen is inviolable except in the forms prescribed by law.”

The constitution, therefore, constantly refers to future organic laws which are to put
into affect those marginal notes and regulate the enjoyment of these
unrestricted liberties in such manner that they will collide neither
with one another nor with the public safety. And later these organic
laws were brought into being by the friends of order and all those
liberties regulated in such manner that the bourgeoisie in its
enjoyment of them finds itself unhindered by the equal rights of the
other classes. Where it forbids these liberties entirely to “the
others,” or permits enjoyment of them under conditions that are just so
many police traps, this always happens solely in the interest of
“public safety” – that is, the safety of the bourgeoisie – as the
constitution prescribes. In the sequel, both sides accordingly appeal
with complete justice to the constitution: the friends of order, who
abrogated all these liberties, as well as the democrats, who demanded
all of them. For each paragraph of the constitution contains its own
antithesis, its own upper and lower house, namely, liberty in the
general phrase, abrogation of liberty in the marginal note. Thus so
long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual
realization prevented, of course in a legal way, the constitutional
existence of liberty remained intact, inviolate, however mortal the
blows dealt to its existence in actual life.

This constitution, made inviolable in so ingenious a manner, was
nevertheless, like Achilles, vulnerable in one point – not in the
heel, but in the head, or rather in the two heads it wound up with: the
Legislative Assembly on the one hand, the President on the other.
Glance through the constitution and you will find that only the
paragraphs in which the relationship of the President to the
Legislative Assembly is defined are absolute, positive,
noncontradictory, and cannot be distorted. For here it was a question
of the bourgeois republicans safeguarding themselves. Articles 45-70 of
the Constitution are so worded that the National Assembly can remove
the President constitutionally, whereas the President can remove the
National Assembly only unconstitutionally, only by setting aside the
constitution itself. Here, therefore, it challenges its forcible
destruction. It not only sanctifies the division of powers, like the
Charter of 1830, it widens it into an intolerable contradiction. The
play of the constitutional powers, as Guizot termed the parliamentary
squabble between the legislative and executive power, is in the
constitution of 1848 continually played va-banque
[staking all]. On
one side are seven hundred and fifty representatives of the people,
elected by universal suffrage and eligible for re-election; they form an
uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National
Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, decides in the last
instance on war, peace, and commercial treaties, alone possesses the
right of amnesty, and, by its permanence, perpetually holds the front
of the stage. On the other side is the President, with all the
attributes of royal power, with authority to appoint and dismiss his
ministers independently of the National Assembly, with all the
resources of the executive power in his hands, bestowing all posts and
disposing thereby in France of the livelihoods of at least a million
and a half people, for so many depend on the five hundred thousand
officials and officers of every rank. He has the whole of the armed
forces behind him. He enjoys the privilege of pardoning individual
criminals, of suspending National Guards, of discharging, with the
concurrence of the Council of State, general, cantonal, and municipal
councils elected by the citizens themselves. Initiative and direction
are reserved to him in all treaties with foreign countries. While the
Assembly constantly performs on the boards and is exposed to daily
public criticism, he leads a secluded life in the Elysian Fields, and
that with Article 45 of the constitution before his eyes and in his
heart, crying to him daily: “Frere, il faut mourir!”
[‘Brother, one must die!’][83]
Your power ceases on the second Sunday of the lovely month
of May in the fourth year after your election! Then your glory is at an
end, the piece is not played twice, and if you have debts, look to it
quickly that you pay them off with the 600,000 francs granted you by
the constitution, unless, perchance, you prefer to go to Clichy[84] on the
second Monday of the lovely month of May! Thus, whereas the
constitution assigns power to the President, it seeks to secure moral
power for the National Assembly. Apart from the fact that it is
impossible to create a moral power by paragraphs of law, the
constitution here abrogates itself once more by having the President
elected by all Frenchmen through direct suffrage. While the votes of
France are split up among the seven hundred and fifty members of the
National Assembly, they are here, on the contrary, concentrated on a
single individual. While each separate representative of the people
represents only this or that party, this or that town, this or that
bridgehead, or even only the mere necessity of electing someone as the
seven hundred and fiftieth, without examining too closely either the
cause or the man, he is the elect of the nation and the act of his
election is the trump that the sovereign people plays once every four
years. The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation,
but the elected President in a personal relation, to the nation. The
National Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives
the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this
national spirit finds its incarnation. As against the Assembly, he
possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the
people.

Thetis, the sea goddess, prophesied to Achilles that he would die in
the bloom of youth. The constitution, which, like Achilles, had its
weak spot, also had, like Achilles, a presentiment that it must go to
an early death. It was sufficient for the constitution-making pure
republicans to cast a glance from the lofty heaven of their ideal
republic at the profane world to perceive how the arrogance of the
royalists, the Bonapartists, the democrats, the communists, as well as
their own discredit, grew daily in the same measure as they approached
the completion of their great legislative work of art, without Thetis
on this account having to leave the sea and communicate the secret to
them. They sought to cheat destiny by a catch in the constitution,
through Article III according to which every motion for a revision of
the constitution must be supported by at least three-quarters of the
votes, cast in three successive debates with an entire month between
each, with the added proviso that not less than five hundred members of
the National Assembly must vote. Thereby they merely made the impotent
attempt to continue exercising a power – when only a parliamentary
minority, as which they already saw themselves prophetically in their
mind’s eye – a power which at that time, when they commanded a
parliamentary majority and all the resources of governmental authority,
was daily slipping more and more from their feeble hands.

Finally the constitution, in a melodramatic paragraph, entrusts itself
“to the vigilance and the patriotism of the whole French people and
every single Frenchman,” after it has previously entrusted in another
paragraph the “vigilant” and “patriotic” to the tender, most
painstaking care of the High Court of Justice, the haute cour it
invented for the purpose.

Such was the Constitution of 1848, which on December 2, 1851, was not
overthrown by a head, but fell down at the touch of a mere hat; this
hat, to be sure, was a three-cornered Napoleonic hat.

While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy devising,
discussing, and voting this constitution, Cavaignac outside the
Assembly maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of
Paris was the midwife of the Constituent Assembly in its travail of
republican creation. If the constitution is subsequently put out of
existence by bayonets, it must not be forgotten that it was likewise by
bayonets, and these turned against the people, that it had to be
protected in its mother’s womb and by bayonets that it had to be
brought into existence. The forefathers of the “respectable
republicans” had sent their symbol, the tricolor, on a tour around
Europe. They themselves in turn produced an invention that of itself
made its way over the whole Continent, but returned to France with ever
renewed love until it has now become naturalized in half her
departments – the state of siege. A splendid invention, periodically
employed in every ensuing crisis in the course of the French
Revolution. But barrack and bivouac, which were thus periodically laid
on French society’s head to compress its brain and render it quiet;
saber and musket, which were periodically allowed to act as judges and
administrators, as guardians and censors, to play policeman and do
night watchman’s duty; mustache and uniform, which were periodically
trumpeted forth as the highest wisdom of society and as its rector -
were not barrack and bivouac, saber and musket, mustache and uniform
finally bound to hit upon the idea of instead saving society once and
for all by proclaiming their own regime as the highest and freeing
civil society completely from the trouble of governing itself? Barrack
and bivouac, saber and musket, mustache and uniform were bound to hit
upon this idea all the more as they might then also expect better cash
payment for their higher services, whereas from the merely periodic
state of siege and the transient rescues of society at the bidding of
this or that bourgeois faction, little of substance was gleaned save
some killed and wounded and some friendly bourgeois grimaces. Should
not the military at last one day play state of siege in their own
interest and for their own benefit, and at the same time besiege the
citizens’ purses? Moreover, be it noted in passing, one must not forget
that Colonel Bernard, the same military commission president who under
Cavaignac had fifteen thousand insurgents deported without trial, is at
this moment again at the head of the military commissions active in
Paris.

Whereas with the state of siege in Paris, the respectable, the pure
republicans planted the nursery in which the praetorians of December 2,
1851, were to grow up, they on the other hand deserve praise for the
reason that, instead of exaggerating the national sentiment as under
Louis Philippe, they now, when they had command of the national power,
crawled before foreign countries, and instead of setting Italy free,
let her be reconquered by Austrians and Neapolitans.[85] Louis Bonaparte’s
election as President on December 10, 1848, put an end to the
dictatorship of Cavaignac and to the Constituent Assembly.

In Article 44 of the Constitution it is stated:

“The President of the French Republic must never have lost his status of French citizen.”

The first President of the French Republic, L. N. Bonaparte, had not merely
lost his status of French citizen, had not only been an English special
constable, he was even a naturalized Swiss.[86]

I have worked out elsewhere the significance of the election of
December 10. I will not revert to it here. It is sufficient to remark
here that it was a reaction of the peasants, who had had to pay the
costs of the February Revolution, against the remaining classes of the
nation; a reaction of the country against the town. It met with great
approval in the army, for which the republicans of the National had
provided neither glory nor additional pay; among the big bourgeoisie,
which hailed Bonaparte as a bridge to monarchy, among the proletarians
and petty bourgeois, who hailed him as a scourge for Cavaignac. I shall
have an opportunity later of going more closely into the relationship
of the peasants to the French Revolution.

The period from December 20, 1848, until the dissolution of the
Constituent Assembly in May, 1849, comprises the history of the
downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic
for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the
field, and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the
time being, they are themselves thrust aside by the mass of the
bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as its property. This
bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. One section of it, the large
landowners, had ruled during the Restoration and was accordingly
Legitimist. The other, the aristocrats of finance and big
industrialists, had ruled during the July Monarchy and was consequently
Orleanist. The high dignitaries of the army, the university, the
church, the bar, the academy, and the press were to be found on either
side, though in various proportions. Here, in the bourgeois republic,
which bore neither the name Bourbon nor the name Orleans, but the name
capital, they had found the form of state in which they could rule
conjointly. The June insurrection had already united them in the party
of Order. Now it was necessary, in the first place, to remove the
coterie of bourgeois republicans who still occupied the seats of the
National Assembly. Just as brutal as these pure republicans had been in
their misuse of physical force against the people, just as cowardly,
mealy-mouthed, broken-spirited, and incapable of fighting were they now
in their retreat, when it was a question of maintaining their
republicanism and their legislative rights against the executive power
and the royalists. I need not relate here the ignominious history of
their dissolution. They did not succumb; they passed out of existence.
Their history has come to an end forever, and, both inside and outside
the Assembly, they figure in the following period only as memories,
memories that seem to regain life whenever the mere name republic is
once more the issue and as often as the revolutionary conflict
threatens to sink down to the lowest level. I may remark in passing
that the journal which gave its name to this party, the National, was
converted to socialism in the following period.

Before we finish with this period we must still cast a retrospective
glance at the two powers, one of which annihilated the other on
December 2, 1851, whereas from December 20, 1848, until the exit of the
Constituent Assembly, they had lived in conjugal relations. We mean
Louis Bonaparte, on the one hand, and the part of the coalesced
royalists, the party of Order, of the big bourgeoisie, on the other. On
acceding to the presidency, Bonaparte at once formed a ministry of the
party of Order, at the head of which he placed Odilon Barrot, the old
leader, nota bene, of the most liberal faction of the parliamentary
bourgeoisie. M. Barrot had at last secured the ministerial portfolio
whose image had haunted him since 1830, and what is more, the
premiership in the ministry; but not, as he had imagined under Louis
Philippe, as the most advanced leader of the parliamentary opposition,
but with the task of putting a parliament to death, and as the
confederate of all his archenemies, Jesuits and Legitimists. He brought
the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted.
Bonaparte seemed to efface himself completely. This party acted for him.

The very first meeting of the council of ministers resolved on the
expedition to Rome, which, it was agreed, should be undertaken behind
the back of the National Assembly and the means for which were to be
wrested from it under false pretenses. Thus they began by swindling the
National Assembly and secretly conspiring with the absolutist powers
abroad against the revolutionary Roman republic.

In the same manner and with the same maneuvers Bonaparte prepared his
coup of December 2 against the royalist Legislative Assembly and its
constitutional republic. Let us not forget that the same party which
formed Bonaparte’s ministry on December 20, 1848, formed the majority
of the Legislative National Assembly on December 2, 1851.

In August the Constituent Assembly had decided to dissolve only after
it had worked out and promulgated a whole series of organic laws that
were to supplement the constitution. On January 6, 1849, the party of
Order had a deputy named Rateau move that the Assembly should let the
organic laws go and rather decide on its own dissolution. Not only the
ministry, with Odilon Barrot at its head, but all the royalist members
of the National Assembly told it in bullying accents then that its
dissolution was necessary for the restoration of credit, for the
consolidation of order, for putting an end to the indefinite
provisional arrangements and establishing a definitive state of
affairs; that it hampered the productivity of the new government and
sought to prolong its existence merely out of malice; that the country
was tired of it. Bonaparte took note of all this invective against the
legislative power, learned it by heart, and proved to the parliamentary
royalists, on December 2, 1851, that he had learned from them. He
repeated their own catchwords against them.

The Barrot Ministry and the party of Order went further. They caused
petitions to the National Assembly to be made throughout France, in
which this body was politely requested to decamp. They thus led the
unorganized popular masses into the fire of battle against the National
Assembly, the constitutionally organized expression of the people. They
taught Bonaparte to appeal against the parliamentary assemblies to the
people. At length, on January 29, 1849, the day had come on which the
Constituent Assembly was to decide concerning its own dissolution. The
National Assembly found the building where its sessions were held
occupied by the military; Changarnier, the general of the party of
Order, in whose hands the supreme command of the National Guard and
troops of the line had been united, held a great military review in
Paris, as if a battle were impending, and the royalists in coalition
threateningly declared to the Constituent Assembly that force would be
employed if it should prove unwilling. It was willing, and only
bargained for a very short extra term of life. What was January 29 but
the coup d’etat of December 2, 1851, only carried out by the royalists
with Bonaparte against the republican National Assembly? The gentlemen
did not observe, or did not wish to observe, that Bonaparte availed
himself of January 29, 1849, to have a portion of the troops march past
him in front of the Tuileries, and seized with avidity on just this
first public summoning of the military power against the parliamentary
power to foreshadow Caligula. They, to be sure, saw only their
Changarnier.

A motive that particularly actuated the party of Order in forcibly
cutting short the duration of the Constituent Assembly’s life was the
organic laws supplementing the constitution, such as the law on
education, the law on religious worship, etc. To the royalists in
coalition it was most important that they themselves should make these
laws and not let them be made by the republicans, who had grown
mistrustful. Among these organic laws, however, was also a law on the
responsibility of the President of the Republic. In 1851 the
Legislative Assembly was occupied with the drafting of just such a law,
when Bonaparte anticipated this coup with the coup of December 2. What
would the royalists in coalition not have given in their winter
election campaign of 1851 to have found the Responsibility Law ready to
hand, and drawn up, at that, by a mistrustful, hostile, republican
Assembly!

After the Constituent Assembly had itself shattered its last weapon on
January 29, 1849, the Barrot Ministry and the friends of order hounded
it to death, left nothing undone that could humiliate it, and wrested
from the impotent, self-despairing Assembly laws that cost it the last
remnant of respect in the eyes of the public. Bonaparte, occupied with
his fixed Napoleonic idea,[87] was brazen enough to exploit publicly this
degradation of the parliamentary power. For when on May 8, 1849, the
National Assembly passed a vote of censure of the ministry because of
the occupation of Civitavecchia by Oudinot, and ordered it to bring
back the Roman expedition to its alleged purpose,[88] Bonaparte published
the same evening in the Moniteur a letter to Oudinot in which he
congratulated him on his heroic exploits and, in contrast to the
ink-slinging parliamentarians, already posed as the generous protector
of the army. The royalists smiled at this. They regarded him simply as
their dupe. Finally, when Marrast, the President of the Constituent
Assembly, believed for a moment that the safety of the National
Assembly was endangered and, relying on the constitution, requisitioned
a colonel and his regiment, the colonel declined, cited discipline in
his support, and referred Marrast to Changarnier, who scornfully
refused him with the remark that he did not like
baionnettes intelligentes [intellectual bayonets].
In November, 1851, when the
royalists in coalition wanted to begin the decisive struggle with
Bonaparte, they sought to put through in their notorious Quaestors’
Bill the principle of the direct requisition of troops by the President
of the National Assembly.[89] One of their generals, Le Flo, had signed the
bill. In vain did Changarnier vote for it and Thiers pay homage to the
farsighted wisdom of the former Constituent Assembly. The War Minister,
Saint-Arnaud, answered him as Changarnier had answered Marrast – and
to the acclamation of the Montagne!

Thus the party of Order, when it was not yet the National Assembly,
when it was still only the ministry, had itself stigmatized the
parliamentary regime. And it makes an outcry when December 2, 1851,
banishes this regime from France!

We wish it a happy journey.

## III

On May 28, 1849, the Legislative National Assembly met. On December 2,
1851, it was dispersed. This period covers the span of life of the
constitutional, or parliamentary, republic.

In the first French Revolution the rule of the Constitutionalists is
followed by the rule of the Girondists and the rule of the Girondists
by the rule of the Jacobins. Each of these parties relies on the more
progressive party for support. As soon as it has brought the revolution
far enough to be unable to follow it further, still less to go ahead of
it, it is thrust aside by the bolder ally that stands behind it and
sent to the guillotine. The revolution thus moves along an ascending
line.

It is the reverse with the Revolution of 1848. The proletarian party
appears as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois-democratic party. It is
betrayed and dropped by the latter on April 16, May 15,[90] and in the June
days. The democratic party, in its turn, leans on the shoulders of the
bourgeois-republican party. The bourgeois republicans no sooner believe
themselves well established than they shake off the troublesome comrade
and support themselves on the shoulders of the party of Order. The
party of Order hunches its shoulders, lets the bourgeois republicans
tumble, and throws itself on the shoulders of armed force. It fancies
it is still sitting on those shoulders when one fine morning it
perceives that the shoulders have transformed themselves into bayonets.
Each party kicks from behind at the one driving forward, and leans over
in front toward the party which presses backward. No wonder that in
this ridiculous posture it loses its balance and, having made the
inevitable grimaces, collapses with curious gyrations. The revolution
thus moves in a descending line. It finds itself in this state of
retrogressive motion before the last February barricade has been
cleared away and the first revolutionary authority constituted.

The period that we have before us comprises the most motley mixture of
crying contradictions: constitutionalists who conspire openly against
the constitution; revolutionists who are confessedly constitutional; a
National Assembly that wants to be omnipotent and always remains
parliamentary; a Montagne that finds its vocation in patience and
counters its present defeats by prophesying future victories; royalists
who form the patres conscripti [elders]
of the republic and are forced
by the situation to keep the hostile royal houses they adhere to
abroad, and the republic, which they hate, in France; an executive
power that finds its strength in its very weakness and its
respectability in the contempt that it calls forth; a republic that is
nothing but the combined infamy of two monarchies, the Restoration and
the July Monarchy, with an imperial label – alliances whose first
proviso is separation; struggles whose first law is indecision; wild,
inane agitation in the name of tranquillity, most solemn preaching of
tranquillity in the name of revolution – passions without truth, truths
without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events;
development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar,
wearying with constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations;
antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves up to a climax
only to lose their sharpness and fall away without being able to
resolve themselves; pretentiously paraded exertions and philistine
terror at the danger of the world’s coming to an end, and at the same
time the pettiest intrigues and court comedies played by the world
redeemers, who in their laisser aller [letting things go]
remind us less of the Day of Judgment than of the times of the
Fronde [An anti-royalist movement of 1648-53][91] – the official
collective genius of France brought to naught by the artful stupidity
of a single individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as
it speaks through universal suffrage, seeking its appropriate
expression through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the
masses, until at length it finds it in the self-will of a filibuster.
If any section of history has been painted gray on gray, it is this.
Men and events appear as reverse Schlemihls, as shadows that have lost
their bodies.[91a] The revolution itself paralyzes its own bearers and
endows only its adversaries with passionate forcefulness. When the “red
specter,” continually conjured up and exercised by the
counterrevolutionaries[92] finally appears, it appears not with the
Phrygian cap of anarchy on its head, but in the uniform of order, in
red breeches.

We have seen that the ministry which Bonaparte installed on December
20, 1848, on his Ascension Day, was a ministry of the party of Order,
of the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. This Barrot-Falloux Ministry
had outlived the republican Constituent Assembly, whose term of life it
had more or less violently cut short, and found itself still at the
helm. Changarnier, the general of the allied royalists, continued to
unite in his person the general command of the First Army Division and
of the National Guard of Paris. Finally, the general elections had
secured the party of Order a large majority in the National Assembly.
Here the deputies and peers of Louis Philippe encountered a hallowed
host of Legitimists, for whom many of the nation’s ballots had become
transformed into admission cards to the political stage. The
Bonapartist representatives of the people were too sparse to be able to
form an independent parliamentary party. They appeared merely as the
mauvaise queue [evil appendage]
of the party of Order. Thus the party
of Order was in possession of the governmental power, the army and the
legislative body, in short, of the whole of the state power; it had
been morally strengthened by the general elections, which made its rule
appear as the will of the people, and by the simultaneous triumph of
the counterrevolution on the whole continent of Europe.

Never did a party open its campaign with greater resources or under
more favorable auspices.

The shipwrecked pure republicans found that they had melted down to a
clique of about fifty men in the Legislative National Assembly, the
African generals Cavaignac, Lamoriciere, and Bedeau at their head. The
great opposition party, however, was formed by the Montagne. The
social-democratic party had given itself this parliamentary baptismal
name. It commanded more than two hundred of the seven hundred and fifty
votes of the National Assembly and was consequently at least as
powerful as any one of the three factions of the party of Order taken
by itself. Its numerical inferiority compared with the entire royalist
coalition seemed compensated by special circumstances. Not only did the
elections in the departments show that it had gained a considerable
following among the rural population. It counted in its ranks almost
all the deputies from Paris; the army had made a confession of
democratic faith by the election of three noncommissioned officers; and
the leader of the Montagne, Ledru-Rollin, in contradistinction to all
the representatives of the party of Order, had been raised to the
parliamentary peerage by five departments, which had pooled their votes
for him. In view of the inevitable clashes of the royalists among
themselves and of the whole party of Order with Bonaparte, the Montagne
thus seemed to have all the elements of success before it on May 28,
1849. A fortnight later it had lost everything, honor included.

Before we pursue parliamentary history further, some remarks are
necessary to avoid common misconceptions regarding the whole character
of the epoch that lies before us. Looked at with the eyes of democrats,
the period of the Legislative National Assembly is concerned with what
the period of the Constituent Assembly was concerned with: the simple
struggle between republicans and royalists. The movement itself,
however, they sum up in the one shibboleth: “reaction” – night, in
which all cats are gray and which permits them to reel off their night
watchman’s commonplaces. And to be sure, at first sight the party of
Order reveals a maze of different royalist factions which not only
intrigue against each other – each seeking to elevate its own
pretender to the throne and exclude the pretender of the opposing
faction – but also all unite in common hatred of, and common
onslaughts on, the “republic.” In opposition to this royalist
conspiracy the Montagne, for its part, appears as the representative of
the “republic.” The party of Order appears to be perpetually engaged in
a “reaction,” directed against press, association, and the like,
neither more nor less than in Prussia, and, as in Prussia, carried out
in the form of brutal police intervention by the bureaucracy, the
gendarmerie, and the law courts. The Montagne, for its part, is just as
continually occupied in warding off these attacks and thus defending
the “eternal rights of man” as every so-called people’s party has done,
more or less, for a century and a half. If one looks at the situation
and the parties more closely, however, this superficial appearance,
which veils the class struggle and the peculiar physiognomy of this
period, disappears.

Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great
factions of the party of Order. Was what held these factions fast to
their pretenders and kept them apart from each other nothing but
fleur-de-lis and tricolor, House of Bourbon and House of Orleans,
different shades of royalism – was it at all the confession of faith
of royalism? Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with
its priests and lackeys; under Orleans, high finance, large-scale
industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of
lawyers, professors, and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate
Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of
the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political
expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the
two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was
their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of
property; it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry
between capital and landed property. That at the same time old
memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions,
sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and
principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who denies this?
Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of
existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly
formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The
entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and
out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who
derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they
form the real motives and the starting point of his activity. While
each faction, Orleanists and Legitimists, sought to make itself and the
other believe that it was loyalty to the two royal houses which
separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided
interests which forbade the uniting of the two royal houses. And as in
private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of
himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one
must distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from
their real organism and their real interests, their conception of
themselves from their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found
themselves side by side in the republic, with equal claims. If each
side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against
the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests
into which the bourgeoisie is split – landed property and capital -
sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other.
We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed
property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been
rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society.
Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic
about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English
Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession
that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent.

The royalists in coalition carried on their intrigues against one
another in the press, in Ems, in Claremont,[93] outside parliament. Behind
the scenes they donned their old Orleanist and Legitimist liveries
again and once more engaged in their old tourneys. But on the public
stage, in their grand performances of state[94] as a great parliamentary
party, they put off their respective royal houses with mere obeisances
and adjourn the restoration of the monarchy in infinitum. They do their
real business as the party of Order, that is, under a social, not under
a political title; as representatives of the bourgeois world order, not
as knights of errant princesses; as the bourgeois class against other
classes, not as royalists against the republicans. And as the party of
Order they exercised more unrestricted and sterner domination over the
other classes of society than ever previously under the Restoration or
under the July Monarchy, a domination which, in general, was possible
only under the form of the parliamentary republic, for only under this
form could the two great divisions of the French bourgeoisie unite, and
thus put the rule of their class instead of the regime of a privileged
faction of it on the order of the day. If they nevertheless, as the
party of Order, also insulted the republic and expressed their
repugnance to it, this happened not merely from royalist memories.
Instinct taught them that the republic, true enough, makes their
political rule complete, but at the same time undermines its social
foundation, since they must now confront the subjugated classes and
contend against them without mediation, without the concealment
afforded by the crown, without being able to divert the national
interest by their subordinate struggles among themselves and with the
monarchy. It was a feeling of weakness that caused them to recoil from
the pure conditions of their own class rule and to yearn for the former
more incomplete, more undeveloped, and precisely on that account less
dangerous forms of this rule. On the other hand, every time the
royalists in coalition come in conflict with the pretender who
confronts them, with Bonaparte, every time they believe their
parliamentary omnipotence endangered by the executive power – every
time, therefore, that they must produce their political title to their
rule – they come forward as republicans and not as royalists, from the
Orleanist Thiers, who warns the National Assembly that the republic
divides them least, to the Legitimist Berryer, who on December 2, 1851,
as a tribune swathed in a tricolored sash, harangues the people
assembled before the town hall of the Tenth Arrondissement in the name
of the republic. To be sure, a mocking echo calls back to him: Henry V!
Henry V!

As against the coalesced bourgeoisie, a coalition between petty
bourgeois and workers had been formed, the so-called Social-Democratic
party. The petty bourgeois saw that they were badly rewarded after the
June days of 1848, that their material interests were imperiled, and
that the democratic guarantees which were to insure the effectuation of
these interests were called in question by the counterrevolution.
Accordingly they came closer to the workers. On the other hand, their
parliamentary representation, the Montagne, thrust aside during the
dictatorship of the bourgeois republicans, had in the last half of the
life of the Constituent Assembly reconquered its lost popularity
through the struggle with Bonaparte and the royalist ministers. It had
concluded an alliance with the socialist leaders. In February, 1849,
banquets celebrated the reconciliation. A joint program was drafted,
joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward.
The revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to
the social demands of the proletariat; the purely political form was
stripped off the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their
socialist point thrust forward. Thus arose social-democracy. The new
Montagne, the result of this combination, contained, apart from some
supernumeraries from the working class and some socialist sectarians,
the same elements as the old Montagne, but numerically stronger.
However, in the course of development it had changed with the class
that it represented. The peculiar character of social-democracy is
epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are
demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and
wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into
harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of
this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less
revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is
the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation
within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the
narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes
to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the
special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions
within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class
struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic
representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of
shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position
they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them
representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their
minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get
beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to
the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social
position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the
relationship between the political and literary representatives of a
class and the class they represent.

After this analysis it is obvious that if the Montagne continually
contends with the party of Order for the republic and the so-called
rights of man, neither the republic nor the rights of man are its final
end, any more than an army which one wants to deprive of its weapons
and which resists has taken the field in order to remain in possession
of its own weapons.

Immediately, as soon as the National Assembly met, the party of Order
provoked the Montagne. The bourgeoisie now felt the necessity of making
an end of the democratic petty bourgeois, just as a year before it had
realized the necessity of settling with the revolutionary proletariat.
But the situation of the adversary was different. The strength of the
proletarian party lay in the streets, that of the petty bourgeois in
the National Assembly itself. It was therefore a question of decoying
them out of the National Assembly into the streets and causing them to
smash their parliamentary power themselves, before time and
circumstances could consolidate it. The Montagne rushed headlong into
the trap.

The bombardment of Rome by the French troops was the bait that was
thrown. It violated Article 5 of the constitution, which forbids the
French Republic to employ its military forces against the freedom of
another people.[95] In addition to this, Article 54 prohibited any
declaration of war by the executive power without the assent of the
National Assembly, and by its resolution of May 8 the Constituent
Assembly had disapproved of the Roman expedition. On these grounds
Ledru-Rollin brought in a bill of impeachment against Bonaparte and his
ministers on June 11, 1849. Exasperated by the wasp stings of Thiers,
he actually let himself be carried away to the point of threatening
that he would defend the constitution by every means, even with arms in
hand. The Montagne rose to a man and repeated this call to arms. On
June 12 the National Assembly rejected the bill of impeachment, and the
Montagne left the parliament. The events of June 13 are known: the
proclamation issued by a section of the Montagne declaring Bonaparte
and his ministers “outside the constitution”; the street procession of
the democratic National Guard, who, unarmed as they were, dispersed on
encountering the troops of Changarnier, etc., etc. A part of the
Montagne fled abroad; another part was arraigned before the High Court
at Bourges;[96] and a parliamentary regulation subjected the remainder to
the schoolmasterly surveillance of the President of the National
Assembly. Paris was again declared in a state of siege and the
democratic part of its National Guard dissolved. Thus the influence of
the Montagne in parliament and the power of the petty bourgeois in
Paris were broken.

Lyon, where June 13 had given the signal for a bloody insurrection of
the workers,[97] was, along with the five surrounding departments, likewise
declared in a state of siege, a condition that has continued up to the
present moment.

The bulk of the Montagne had left its vanguard in the lurch, having
refused to subscribe to its proclamation. The press had deserted, only
two journals having dared to publish the pronunciamento. The petty
bourgeois betrayed their representatives in that the National Guard
either stayed away or, where they appeared, hindered the building of
barricades. The representatives had duped the petty bourgeois in that
the alleged allies from the army were nowhere to be seen. Finally,
instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic
party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness and, as usual
with the great deeds of democrats, the leaders had the satisfaction of
being able to charge their “people” with desertion, and the people the
satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with humbugging it.

Seldom had an action been announced with more noise than the impending
campaign of the Montagne, seldom had an event been trumpeted with
greater certainty or longer in advance than the inevitable victory of
the democracy. Most assuredly the democrats believe in the trumpets
before whose blasts the walls of Jericho fell down. And as often as
they stand before the ramparts of despotism, they seek to imitate the
miracle. If the Montagne wished to triumph in parliament it should not
have called to arms. If it called to arms in parliament it should not
have acted in parliamentary fashion in the streets. If the peaceful
demonstration was meant seriously, then it was folly not to foresee
that it would be given a warlike reception. If a real struggle was
intended, then it was a queer idea to lay down the weapons with which
it would have to be waged. But the revolutionary threats of the petty
bourgeois and their democratic representatives are mere attempts to
intimidate the antagonist. And when they have run into a blind alley,
when they have sufficiently compromised themselves to make it necessary
to activate their threats, then this is done in an ambiguous fashion
that avoids nothing so much as the means to the end and tries to find
excuses for succumbing. The blaring overture that announced the contest
dies away in a pusillanimous snarl as soon as the struggle has to
begin, the actors cease to take themselves au sorieux, and the action
collapses completely, like a pricked bubble.

No party exaggerates its means more than the democratic, none deludes
itself more light-mindedly over the situation. Since a section of the
army had voted for it, the Montagne was now convinced that the army
would revolt for it. And on what occasion? On an occasion which, from
the standpoint of the troops, had no other meaning than that the
revolutionists took the side of the Roman soldiers against the French
soldiers. On the other hand, the recollections of June, 1848, were
still too fresh to allow of anything but a profound aversion on the
part of the proletariat toward the National Guard and a thoroughgoing
mistrust of the democratic chiefs on the part of the chiefs of the
secret societies. To iron out these differences, it was necessary for
great common interests to be at stake. The violation of an abstract
paragraph of the constitution could not provide these interests. Had
not the constitution been repeatedly violated, according to the
assurance of the democrats themselves? Had not the most popular
journals branded it as counterrevolutionary botchwork? But the
democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie – that is, a
transition class, in which the interests of two classes are
simultaneously mutually blunted – imagines himself elevated above
class antagonism generally. The democrats concede that a privileged
class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation,
form the people. What they represent is the people’s rights; what
interests them is the people’s interests. Accordingly, when a struggle
is impending they do not need to examine the interests and positions of
the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources
too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people,
with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors.
Now if in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and
their potency impotence, then either the fault lies with pernicious
sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile
camps, or the army was too brutalized and blinded to comprehend that
the pure aims of democracy are the best thing for it, or the whole
thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an
unforeseen accident has this time spoiled the game. In any case, the
democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as
he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly won conviction
that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give
up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to
ripen to suit him.

Therefore one must not imagine the Montagne, decimated and broken
though it was, and humiliated by the new parliamentary regulation, as
being particularly miserable. If June 13 had removed its chiefs, it
made room, on the other hand, for men of lesser caliber, whom this new
position flattered. If their impotence in parliament could no longer be
doubted, they were entitled now to confine their actions to outbursts
of moral indignation and blustering declamation. If the party of Order
affected to see embodied in them, as the last official representatives
of the revolution, all the terrors of anarchy, they could in reality be
all the more insipid and modest. They consoled themselves, however, for
June 13 with the profound utterance: but if they dare to attack
universal suffrage, well then – then we’ll show them what we are made
of! Nous verrons! [We shall see!]

So far as the Montagnards who fled abroad are concerned, it is
sufficient to remark here that Ledru-Rollin, because in barely a
fortnight he had succeeded in ruining irretrievably the powerful party
at whose head he stood, now found himself called upon to form a French
government in partibus; that to the extent that the level of the
revolution sank and the official bigwigs of official France became more
dwarf-like, his figure in the distance, removed from the scene of
action, seemed to grow in stature; that he could figure as the
republican pretender for 1852, and that he issued periodical circulars
to the Wallachians and other peoples in which the despots of the
Continent were threatened with the deeds of himself and his
confederates. Was Proudhon altogether wrong when he cried to these
gentlemen: “Vous n’etes que des blagueurs”
["you are nothing but windbags"]?

On June 13 the party of Order had not only broken the Montagne, it had
effected the subordination of the constitution to the majority
decisions of the National Assembly. And it understood the republic
thus: that the bourgeoisie rules here in parliamentary forms, without,
as in a monarchy, encountering any barrier such as the veto power of
the executive or the right to dissolve parliament. This was a
parliamentary republic, as Thiers termed it. But whereas on June 13 the
bourgeoisie secured its omnipotence within the house of parliament, did
it not afflict parliament itself, as against the executive authority
and the people, with incurable weakness by expelling its most popular
part? By surrendering numerous deputies without further ado on the
demand of the courts, it abolished its own parliamentary immunity. The
humiliating regulations to which it subjected the Montagne exalted the
President of the Republic in the same measure as it degraded the
individual representatives of the people. By branding an insurrection
for the protection of the constitutional charter an anarchic act aiming
at the subversion of society, it precluded the possibility of its
appealing to insurrection should the executive authority violate the
constitution in relation to it. And by the irony of history, the
general who on Bonaparte’s instructions bombarded Rome and thus
provided the immediate occasion for the constitutional revolt of June
13, that very Oudinot had to be the man offered by the party of Order
imploringly and unfailingly to the people as general on behalf of the
constitution against Bonaparte on December 2, 1851. Another hero of
June 13, Vieyra, who was lauded from the tribune of the National
Assembly for the brutalities he committed in the democratic newspaper
offices at the head of a gang of National Guards belonging to high
finance circles – this same Vieyra had been initiated into Bonaparte’s
conspiracy and he contributed substantially to depriving the National
Assembly in the hour of its death of any protection by the National
Guard.

June 13 had still another meaning. The Montagne had wanted to force the
impeachment of Bonaparte. Its defeat was therefore a direct victory for
Bonaparte, his personal triumph over his democratic enemies. The party
of Order gained the victory; Bonaparte had only to cash in on it. He
did so. On June 14 a proclamation could be read on the walls of Paris
in which the President, reluctantly, against his will, compelled as it
were by the sheer force of events, comes forth from his cloistered
seclusion and, posing as misunderstood virtue, complains of the
calumnies of his opponents and, while he seems to identify his person
with the cause of order, rather identifies the cause of order with his
person. Moreover, the National Assembly had, it is true, subsequently
approved the expedition against Rome, but Bonaparte had taken the
initiative in the matter. After having reinstalled the High Priest
Samuel in the Vatican, he could hope to enter the Tuileries as King
David.[98] He had won the priests over to his side.

The revolt of June 13 was confined, as we have seen, to a peaceful
street procession. No war laurels were therefore to be won against it.
Nevertheless, at a time as poor as this in heroes and events, the party
of Order transformed this bloodless battle into a second Austerlitz.[99]
Platform and press praised the army as the power of order, in contrast
to the popular masses representing the impotence of anarchy, and
extolled Changarnier as the “bulwark of society,” a deception in which
he himself finally came to believe. Surreptitiously, however, the
corps that seemed doubtful were transferred from Paris, the regiments
which had shown the most democratic sentiments in the elections were
banished from France to Algiers; the turbulent spirits among the troops
were relegated to penal detachments; and finally the isolation of the
press from the barracks and of the barracks from bourgeois society was
systematically carried out.

Here we have reached the decisive turning point in the history of the
French National Guard. In 1830 it was decisive in the overthrow of the
Restoration. Under Louis Philippe every rebellion miscarried in which
the National Guard stood on the side of the troops. When in the
February days of 1848 it evinced a passive attitude toward the
insurrection and an equivocal one toward Louis Philippe, he gave
himself up for lost and actually was lost. Thus the conviction took
root that the revolution could not be victorious without the National
Guard, nor the army against it. This was the superstition of the army
in regard to civilian omnipotence. The June days of 1848, when the
entire National Guard, with the troops of the line, put down the
insurrection, had strengthened the superstition. After Bonaparte’s
assumption of office, the position of the National Guard was to some
extent weakened by the unconstitutional union, in the person of
Changarnier, of the command of its forces with the command of the First
Army Division.

Just as the command of the National Guard appeared here as an attribute
of the military commander in chief, so the National Guard itself
appeared as only an appendage of the troops of the line. Finally, on
June 13 its power was broken, and not only by its partial disbandment,
which from this time on was periodically repeated all over France,
until mere fragments of it were left behind. The demonstration of June
13 was, above all, a demonstration of the democratic National Guards.
They had not, to be sure, borne their arms, but had worn their uniforms
against the army; precisely in this uniform, however, lay the talisman.
The army convinced itself that this uniform was a piece of woolen cloth
like any other. The spell was broken. In the June days of 1848,
bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie had united as the National Guard with
the army against the proletariat; on June 13, 1849, the bourgeoisie let
the petty-bourgeois National Guard be dispersed by the army; on
December 2, 1851, the National Guard of the bourgeoisie itself had
vanished, and Bonaparte merely registered this fact when he
subsequently signed the decree for its disbandment, Thus the
bourgeoisie had itself smashed its last weapon against the army; the
moment the petty bourgeoisie no longer stood behind it as a vassal, but
before it as a rebel, it had to smash it as in general it was bound to
destroy all its means of defense against absolutism with its own hand
as soon as it had itself become absolute.

Meanwhile, the party of Order celebrated the reconquest of a power that
seemed lost in 1848 only to be found again, freed from its restraints,
in 1849, celebrated by means of invectives against the republic and the
constitution, of curses on all future, present, and past revolutions,
including that which its own leaders had made, and in laws by which the
press was muzzled, association destroyed, and the state of siege
regulated as an organic institution. The National Assembly then
adjourned from the middle of August to the middle of October, after
having appointed a permanent commission for the period of its absence.
During this recess the Legitimists intrigued with Ems, the Orleanists
with Claremont, Bonaparte by means of princely tours, and the
Departmental Councils in deliberations on a revision of the
constitution: incidents which regularly recur in the periodic recesses
of the National Assembly and which I propose to discuss only when they
become events. Here it may merely be remarked, in addition, that it was
impolitic for the National Assembly to disappear from the stage for
considerable intervals and leave only a single, albeit a sorry, figure
to be seen at the head of the republic, that of Louis Bonaparte, while
to the scandal of the public the party of Order fell asunder into its
royalist component parts and followed its conflicting desires for
restoration. As often as the confused noise of parliament grew silent
during these recesses and its body dissolved into the nation, it became
unmistakably clear that only one thing was still lacking to complete
the true form of this republic: to make the former’s recess permanent
and replace the latter’s inscription, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,
with the unambiguous words: infantry, cavalry, artillery!

## IV

In the middle of October, 1849, the National Assembly met once more. On
November 1 Bonaparte surprised it with a message in which he announced
the dismissal of the Barrot-Falloux Ministry and the formation of a new
ministry. No one has ever sacked lackeys with less ceremony than
Bonaparte his ministers. The kicks that were intended for the National
Assembly were given in the meantime to Barrot & Co.

The Barrot Ministry, as we have seen, had been composed of Legitimists
and Orleanists; it was a ministry of the party of Order. Bonaparte had
needed it to dissolve the republican Constituent Assembly, to bring
about the expedition against Rome, and to break the Democratic party.
Behind this ministry he had seemingly effaced himself, surrendered
governmental power into the hands of the party of Order, and donned the
modest character mask that the responsible editor of a newspaper wore
under Louis Philippe, the mask of the homme de paille
[straw man]. He
now threw off a mask which was no longer the light veil behind which he
could hide his physiognomy, but an iron mask which prevented him from
displaying a physiognomy of his own. He had appointed the Barrot
Ministry in order to blast the republican National Assembly in the name
of the party of Order; he dismissed it in order to declare his own name
independent of the National Assembly of the party of Order.

Plausible pretexts for this dismissal were not lacking. The Barrot
Ministry neglected even the decencies that would have let the President
of the Republic appear as a power side by side with the National
Assembly. During the recess of the National Assembly Bonaparte
published a letter to Edgar Ney in which he seemed to disapprove of the
illiberal attitude of the Pope, just as in opposition to the
Constituent Assembly he had published a letter in which he commended
Oudinot for the attack on the Roman republic. When the National
Assembly now voted the budget for the Roman expedition, Victor Hugo,
out of alleged liberalism, brought up this letter for discussion. The
party of Order with scornfully incredulous outcries stifled the idea
that Bonaparte's ideas could have any political importance. Not one of
the ministers took up the gauntlet for him. On another occasion Barrot,
with his well-known hollow rhetoric, let fall from the platform words
of indignation concerning the "abominable intrigues" that, according to
his assertion, went on in the immediate entourage of the President.
Finally, while the ministry obtained from the National Assembly a
widow's pension for the Duchess of Orleans it rejected any proposal to
increase the Civil List of the President. And in Bonaparte the imperial
pretender was so intimately bound up with the adventurer down on his
luck that the one great idea, that he was called to restore the empire,
was always supplemented by the other, that it was the mission of the
French people to pay his debts.

The Barrot-Falloux Ministry was the first and last parliamentary
ministry that Bonaparte brought into being. Its dismissal forms,
accordingly, a decisive turning point. With it the party of Order lost,
never to reconquer it, an indispensable position for the maintenance of
the parliamentary regime, the lever of executive power. It is
immediately obvious that in a country like France, where the executive
power commands an army of officials numbering more than half a million
individuals and therefore constantly maintains an immense mass of
interests and livelihoods in the most absolute dependence; where the
state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends, and tutors civil
society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its
most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to
the private existence of individuals; where through the most
extraordinary centralization this parasitic body acquires a ubiquity,
an omniscience, a capacity for accelerated mobility, and an elasticity
which finds a counterpart only in the helpless dependence, the loose
shapelessness of the actual body politic — it is obvious that in such
a country the National Assembly forfeits all real influence when it
loses command of the ministerial posts, if it does not at the same time
simplify the administration of the state, reduce the army of officials
as far as possible, and, finally, let civil society and public opinion
create organs of their own, independent of the governmental power. But
it is precisely with the maintenance of that extensive state machine in
its numerous ramifications that the material interests of the French
bourgeoisie are interwoven in the closest fashion. Here it finds posts
for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries
for what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, interest, rents, and
honorariums. On the other hand, its political interests compelled it to
increase daily the repressive measures and therefore the resources and
the personnel of the state power, while at the same time it had to wage
an uninterrupted war against public opinion and mistrustfully mutilate,
cripple, the independent organs of the social movement, where it did
not succeed in amputating them entirely. Thus the French bourgeoisie
was compelled by its class position to annihilate, on the one hand, the
vital conditions of all parliamentary power, and therefore, likewise,
of its own, and to render irresistible, on the other hand, the
executive power hostile to it.

The new ministry was called the Hautpoul Ministry. Not in the sense
that General Hautpoul had received the rank of Prime Minister. Rather,
simultaneously with Barrot's dismissal, Bonaparte abolished this
dignity, which, true enough, condemned the President of the Republic to
the status of the legal nonentity of a constitutional monarch, but of a
constitutional monarch without throne or crown, without scepter or
sword, without freedom from responsibility, without imprescriptible
possession of the highest state dignity, and worst of all, without a
Civil List. The Hautpoul Ministry contained only one man of
parliamentary standing, the moneylender Fould, one of the most
notorious of the high financiers. To his lot fell the Ministry of
Finance. Look up the quotations on the Paris Bourse and you will find
that from November 1, 1849, onward the French fonds
[government securities]
rise and fall with the rise and fall of Bonapartist stocks.
While Bonaparte had thus found his ally in the Bourse, he at the same
time took possession of the police by appointing Carlier police prefect
of Paris.

Only in the course of development, however, could the consequences of
the change of ministers come to light. To begin with, Bonaparte had
taken a step forward only to be driven backward all the more
conspicuously. His brusque message was followed by the most servile
declaration of allegiance to the National Assembly. As often as the
ministers dared to make a diffident attempt to introduce his personal
fads as legislative proposals, they themselves seemed to carry out,
against their will and compelled by their position, comical commissions
whose fruitlessness they were persuaded of in advance. As often as
Bonaparte blurted out his intentions behind the ministers' backs and
played with his “idees napoleoniennes,”
[100] his own ministers disavowed him
from the tribune of the National Assembly. His usurpatory longings
seemed to make themselves heard only in order that the malicious
laughter of his opponents might not be muted. He behaved like an
unrecognized genius, whom all the world takes for a simpleton. Never
did he enjoy the contempt of all classes in fuller measure than during
this period. Never did the bourgeoisie rule more absolutely, never did
it display more ostentatiously the insignia of domination.

I need not write here the history of its legislative activity, which is
summarized during this period in two laws: in the law reestablishing
the wine tax and the education law abolishing unbelief.[101] If wine
drinking was made harder for the French, they were presented all the
more plentifully with the water of true life. If in the law on the
wine tax the bourgeoisie declared the old, hateful French tax system to
be inviolable, it sought through the education law to insure among the
masses the old state of mind that put up with the tax system. One is
astonished to see the Orleanists, the liberal bourgeois, these old
apostles of Voltaireanism and eclectic philosophy, entrust to their
hereditary enemies, the Jesuits, the superintendence of the French
mind. However Orleanists and Legitimists could part company in regard
to the pretenders to the throne, they understood that securing their
united rule necessitated the uniting of the means of repression of two
epochs, that the means of subjugation of the July Monarchy had to be
supplemented and strengthened by the means of subjugation of the
Restoration.

The peasants, disappointed in all their hopes, crushed more than ever
by the low level of grain prices on the one hand, and by the growing
burden of taxes and mortgage debts on the other, began to bestir
themselves in the departments. They were answered by a drive against
the schoolmasters, who were made subject to the clergy, by a drive
against the mayors, made subject to the prefects, and by a system of
espionage to which all were made subject. In Paris and the large towns
reaction itself has the physiognomy of its epoch and challenges more
than it strikes down. In the countryside it becomes dull, coarse,
petty, tiresome, and vexatious, in a word, the gendarme. One
comprehends how three years of the regime of the gendarme, consecrated
by the regime of the priest, were bound to demoralize immature masses.

Whatever amount of passion and declamation might be employed by the
party of Order against the minority from the tribune of the National
Assembly, its speech remained as monosyllabic as that of the
Christians, whose words were to be: Yea, yea; nay, nay! As monosyllabic
on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known
in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the
tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the
municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the
state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always
the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!"
Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois
enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It
was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and
it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked
with a rapier.

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The
bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it
had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that
all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own
civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it.
It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of
progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation
and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become
"socialistic." In this menace and this attack it rightly discerned the
secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly
than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself; the latter can,
accordingly, not comprehend why the bourgeoisie callously hardens its
heart against it, whether it sentimentally bewails the sufferings of
mankind, or in Christian spirit prophesies the millennium and universal
brotherly love, or in humanistic style twaddles about mind, education,
and freedom, or in doctrinaire fashion invents a system for the
conciliation and welfare of all classes. What the bourgeoisie did not
grasp, however, was the logical conclusion that its own parliamentary
regime, its political rule in general, was now also bound to meet with
the general verdict of condemnation as being socialistic. As long as
the rule of the bourgeois class had not been completely organized, as
long as it had not acquired its pure political expression, the
antagonism of the other classes likewise could not appear in its pure
form, and where it did appear could not take the dangerous turn that
transforms every struggle against the state power into a struggle
against capital. If in every stirring of life in society it saw
"tranquillity" imperiled, how could it want to maintain at the head of
society a regime of unrest, its own regime, the parliamentary regime,
this regime that, according to the expression of one of its spokesmen,
lives in struggle and by struggle? The parliamentary regime lives by
discussion, how shall it forbid discussion? Every interest, every
social institution, is here transformed into general ideas, debated as
ideas; how shall any interest, any institution, sustain itself above
thought and impose itself as an article of faith? The struggle of the
orators on the platform evokes the struggle of the scribblers of the
press; the debating club in parliament is necessarily supplemented by
debating clubs in the salons and the bistros; the representatives, who
constantly appeal to public opinion, give public opinion the right to
speak its real mind in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves
everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great
majorities outside parliament not want to decide? When you play the
fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that
those down below dance?

Thus by now stigmatizing as "socialistic" what it had previously
extolled as "liberal," the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests
dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule;
that to restore tranquillity in the country its bourgeois parliament
must, first of all, be given its quietus; that to preserve its social
power intact its political power must be broken; that the individual
bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy
undisturbed property, family, religion, and order only on condition
that their class be condemned along with the other classes to like
political nullity; that in order to save its purse it must forfeit the
crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be
hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.

In the domain of the interests of the general citizenry, the National
Assembly showed itself so unproductive that, for example, the
discussions on the Paris-Avignon railway, which began in the winter of
1850, were still not ripe for conclusion on December 2, 1851. Where it
did not repress or pursue a reactionary course it was stricken with
incurable barrenness.

While Bonaparte's ministry partly took the initiative in framing laws
in the spirit of the party of Order, and partly even outdid that
party's harshness in their execution and administration, he, on the
other hand, sought by childishly silly proposals to win popularity, to
bring out his opposition to the National Assembly, and to hint at a
secret reserve that was only temporarily prevented by conditions from
making its hidden treasures available to the French people. Such was
the proposal to decree an increase in pay of four sous a day to the
noncommissioned officers. Such was the proposal of an honor-system loan
bank for the workers. Money as a gift and money as a loan, it was with
prospects such as these that he hoped to lure the masses. Donations and
loans — the financial science of the lumpen proletariat, whether of
high degree or low, is restricted to this. Such were the only springs
Bonaparte knew how to set in action. Never has a pretender speculated
more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses.

The National Assembly flared up repeatedly over these unmistakable
attempts to gain popularity at its expense, over the growing danger
that this adventurer, whom his debts spurred on and no established
reputation held back, would venture a desperate coup. The discord
between the party of Order and the President had taken on a threatening
character when an unexpected event threw him back repentant into its
arms. We mean the by-elections of March 10, 1850. These elections were
held for the purpose of filling the representatives' seats that after
June 13 had been rendered vacant by imprisonment or exile. Paris
elected only social-democratic candidates. It even concentrated most of
the votes on an insurgent of June, 1848, on De Flotte. Thus did the
Parisian petty bourgeoisie, in alliance with the proletariat, revenge
itself for its defeat on June 13, 1849. It seemed to have disappeared
from the battlefield at the moment of danger only to reappear there on
a more propitious occasion with more numerous fighting forces and with
a bolder battle cry. One circumstance seemed to heighten the peril of
this election victory. The army voted in Paris for the June insurgent
against La Hitte, a minister of Bonaparte's, and in the departments
largely for the Montagnards, who here too, though indeed not so
decisively as in Paris, maintained the ascendancy over their
adversaries.

Bonaparte saw himself suddenly confronted with revolution once more. As
on January 29, 1849, as on June 13, 1849, so on March 10, 1850, he
disappeared behind the party of Order. He made obeisance, he
pusillanimously begged pardon, he offered to appoint any ministry it
pleased at the behest of the parliamentary majority, he even implored
the Orleanist and Legitimist party leaders, the Thiers, the Berryers,
the Broglies, the Moles, in brief, the so-called burgraves,[102] to take
the helm of state themselves. The party of Order proved unable to take
advantage of this opportunity that would never return. Instead of
boldly possessing itself of the power offered, it did not even compel
Bonaparte to reinstate the ministry dismissed on November 1; it
contented itself with humiliating him by its forgiveness and adjoining
M. Baroche to the Hautpoul Ministry. As public prosecutor this Baroche
had stormed and raged before the High Court at Bourges, the first time
against the revolutionists of May 15,[103] the second time against the
democrats of June 13, both times because of an attempt on the life of
the National Assembly. None of Bonaparte's ministers subsequently
contributed more to the degradation of the National Assembly, and after
December 2, 1851, we meet him once more as the comfortably installed
and highly paid vice president of the Senate. He had spat in the
revolutionists' soup in order that Bonaparte might eat it up.

The social-democratic party, for its part, seemed only to look for
pretexts to put its own victory once again in doubt and to blunt its
point. Vidal, one of the newly elected representatives of Paris, had
been elected simultaneously in Strasbourg. He was induced to decline
the election for Paris and accept it for Strasbourg. And so, instead of
making its victory at the polls conclusive and thereby compelling the
party of Order to contest it in parliament at once, instead of thus
forcing the adversary to fight at the moment of popular enthusiasm and
favorable mood in the army, the democratic party wearied Paris during
the months of March and April with a new election campaign, let the
aroused popular passions wear themselves out in this repeated
provisional election game, let the revolutionary energy satiate itself
with constitutional successes, dissipate itself in petty intrigues,
hollow declamations, and sham movements, let the bourgeoisie rally and
make its preparations, and, lastly, weakened the significance of the
March elections by a sentimental commentary in the April by-election,
the election of Eugene Sue. In a word, it made an April Fool of March
10.

The parliamentary majority understood the weakness of its antagonist.
Its seventeen burgraves — for Bonaparte had left to it the direction
of and responsibility for the attack — drew up a new electoral law,
the introduction of which was entrusted to M. Faucher, who solicited
this honor for himself. On May 8 he introduced the law by which
universal suffrage was to be abolished, a residence of three years in
the locality of the election to be imposed as a condition on the
electors, and finally, the proof of this residence made dependent in
the case of workers on a certificate from their employers.

Just as the democrats had, in revolutionary fashion, raged and agitated
during the constitutional election contest, so now, when it was
requisite to prove the serious nature of that victory arms in hand, did
they in constitutional fashion preach order, calme majestueux, lawful
action, that is to say, blind subjection to the will of the
counterrevolution, which imposed itself as the law. During the debate
the "Mountain" put the party of Order to shame by asserting, against the
latter's revolutionary passion, the dispassionate attitude of the
philistine who keeps within the law, and by felling that party to earth
with the fearful reproach that it was proceeding in a revolutionary
manner. Even the newly elected deputies were at pains to prove by their
decorous and discreet action what a misconception it was to decry them
as anarchists and construe their election as a victory for revolution.
On May 31 the new electoral law went through. The Montagne contented
itself with smuggling a protest into the President's pocket. The
electoral law was followed by a new press law, by which the
revolutionary newspaper press was entirely suppressed.[104] It had deserved
its fate. The National and La Presse, two bourgeois organs, were left
after this deluge as the most advanced outposts of the revolution.

We have seen how during March and April the democratic leaders had done
everything to embroil the people of Paris in a sham fight, how after
May 8 they did everything to restrain them from a real fight. In
addition to this, we must not forget that the year 1850 was one of the
most splendid years of industrial and commercial prosperity, and the
Paris proletariat was therefore fully employed. But the election law of
May 31, 1850, excluded it from any participation in political power. It
cut the proletariat off from the very arena of the struggle. It threw
the workers back into the position of pariahs which they had occupied
before the February Revolution. By letting themselves be led by the
democrats in the face of such an event and forgetting the revolutionary
interests of their class for momentary case and comfort, they renounced
the honor of being a conquering power, surrendered to their fate,
proved that the defeat of June, 1848, had put them out of the fight for
years and that the historical process would for the present again have
to go on over their heads. As for the petty-bourgeois democracy, which
on June 13 had cried, "But if once universal suffrage is attacked, then
we'll show them," it now consoled itself with the contention that the
counterrevolutionary blow which had struck it was no blow and the law
of May 31 no law. On the second Sunday in May, 1852, every Frenchman
would appear at the polling place with ballot in one hand and sword in
the other. With this prophecy it rested content. Lastly, the army was
disciplined by its superior officers for the elections of March and
April, 1850, just as it had been disciplined for those of May 28, 1849.
This time, however, it said decidedly: "The revolution shall not dupe
us a third time."

The law of May 31, 1850, was the coup d'etat of the bourgeoisie. All
its conquests over the revolution hitherto had only a provisional
character and were endangered as soon as the existing National Assembly
retired from the stage. They depended on the hazards of a new general
election, and the history of elections since 1848 irrefutably proved
that the bourgeoisie's moral sway over the mass of the people was lost
in the same measure as its actual domination developed. On March 10
universal suffrage declared itself directly against the domination of
the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal
suffrage. The law of May 31 was therefore one of the necessities of the
class struggle. On the other hand, the constitution required a minimum
of two million votes to make an election of the President of the
Republic valid. If none of the candidates for the presidency received
this minimum, the National Assembly was to choose the President from
among the three candidates to whom the largest number of votes would
fall. At the time when the Constituent Assembly made this law, ten
million electors were registered on the rolls of voters. In its view,
therefore, a fifth of the people entitled to vote was sufficient to
make the presidential election valid. The law of May 31 struck at least
three million votes off the electoral rolls, reduced the number of
people entitled to vote to seven million, and nevertheless retained the
legal minimum of two million for the presidential election. It
therefore raised the legal minimum from a fifth to nearly a third of
the effective votes; that is, it did everything to smuggle the election
of the President out of the hands of the people and into the hands of
the National Assembly. Thus through the electoral law of May 31 the
party of Order seemed to have made its rule doubly secure, by
surrendering the election of the National Assembly and that of the
President of the Republic to the stationary section of society.

## V

As soon as the revolutionary crisis had been weathered and
universal suffrage abolished, the struggle between the National Assembly and
Bonaparte broke out again.

The constitution had fixed Bonaparte's salary at 600,000 francs. Barely six
months after his installation he succeeded in increasing this sum to twice as
much, for Odilon Barrot wrung from the Constituent National Assembly an extra
allowance of 600,000 francs a year for so-called representation moneys. After
June 13 Bonaparte had caused similar requests to be voiced, this time without
eliciting response from Barrot. Now, after May 31, he at once availed himself
of the favorable moment and had his ministers propose a Civil List of three
millions in the National Assembly. A long life of adventurous vagabondage had
endowed him with the most developed antennae for feeling out the weak moments
when he might squeeze money from his bourgeois. He practiced chantage
[blackmail] regularly. The National Assembly had
violated the sovereignty of the people with his assistance and his cognizance.
He threatened to denounce its crime to the tribunal of the people unless it
loosened its purse strings and purchased his silence with three million a year.
It had robbed three million Frenchmen of their franchise. He demanded, for
every Frenchman out of circulation, a franc in circulation, precisely three
million francs. He, the elect of six millions, claimed damages for the votes
which he said he had retrospectively been cheated out of. The Commission of the
National Assembly refused the importunate man. The Bonapartist press
threatened. Could the National Assembly break with the President of the
Republic at a moment when in principle it had definitely broken with the mass
of the nation? It rejected the annual Civil List, it is true, but it granted,
for this once, an extra allowance of 2,160,000 francs. It thus rendered itself
guilty of the double weakness of granting the money and of showing at the same
time by its vexation that it granted it unwillingly. We shall see later for
what purpose Bonaparte needed the money. After this vexatious aftermath, which
followed on the heels of the abolition of universal suffrage and in which
Bonaparte exchanged his humble attitude during the crisis of March and April
for challenging impudence to the usurpatory parliament, the National Assembly
adjourned for three months, from August 11 to November 11. In its place it left
behind a Permanent Commission of twenty-eight members, which contained no
Bonapartists but did contain some moderate republicans. The Permanent
Commission of 1849 had included only Order men and Bonapartists. But at that
time the party of Order declared itself permanently against the revolution.
This time the parliamentary republic declared itself permanently against the
President. After the law of May 31, this was the only rival that still
confronted the party of Order.

When the National Assembly met once more in November, 1850, it seemed that,
instead of the petty skirmishes it had hitherto had with the President, a great
and ruthless struggle, a life-and-death struggle between the two powers, had
become inevitable.

As in 1849 so during this year's parliamentary recess — the party of
Order had broken up into its separate factions, each occupied with its own
restoration intrigues, which had obtained fresh nutriment through the death of
Louis Philippe. The Legitimist king, Henry V, had even nominated a formal
ministry which resided in Paris and in which members of the Permanent
Commission held seats. Bonaparte, in his turn, was therefore entitled to make
tours of the French departments, and according to the disposition of the town
he favored with his presence, now more or less covertly, now more or less
overtly, to divulge his own restoration plans and canvass votes for himself. On
these processions, which the great official Moniteur and the little private
Moniteurs of Bonaparte naturally had to celebrate as triumphal processions, he
was constantly accompanied by persons affiliated with the Society of December
10. This society dates from the year 1849. On the pretext of founding a
benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into
secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist
general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of
subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots
of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds,
escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni,[105] pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers,
maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers,
porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars
— in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and
thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element
Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A "benevolent society"
- insofar as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting
themselves at the expense of the laboring nation. This Bonaparte, who
constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone
rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who
recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which
he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte
sans phrase. An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical
life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most
vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures
merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. Thus his expedition to Strasbourg,
where the trained Swiss vulture played the part of the Napoleonic eagle. For
his irruption into Boulogne he puts some London lackeys into French uniforms.
They represent the army.[107] In his Society of December 10 he
assembles ten thousand rascals who are to play the part of the people as Nick
Bottom [A character in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's
Dream. - Ed.] that of the lion. At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself
played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world,
without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette,
and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own
performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was
bound to win. Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself
now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he
is the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own conception of the
world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but
his comedy for world history. What the national ateliers[108] were for the socialist
workers, what the Gardes mobile were for the bourgeois republicans,
the Society of December 10 was for Bonaparte, the party fighting force peculiar
to him. On his journeys the detachments of this society packing the railways
had to improvise a public for him, stage popular enthusiasm, roar Vive
l'Empereur, insult and thrash republicans, under police protection, of
course. On his return journeys to Paris they had to form the advance guard,
forestall counter-demonstrations or disperse them. The Society of December 10
belonged to him, it was his work, his very own idea. Whatever else he
appropriates is put into his hands by the force of circumstances; whatever else
he does, the circumstances do for him or he is content to copy from the deeds
of others. But Bonaparte with official phrases about order, religion, family,
and property in public, before the citizens, and with the secret society of the
Schufterles and Spiegelbergs[108a], the society of disorder, prostitution,
and theft, behind him — that is Bonaparte himself as the original author,
and the history of the Society of December 10 is his own history.

Now it had happened by way of exception that people's representatives
belonging to the party of Order came under the cudgels of the Decembrists.
Still more. Yon, the police commissioner assigned to the National Assembly and
charged with watching over its safety, acting on the deposition of a certain
Allais, advised the Permanent Commission that a section of the Decembrists had
decided to assassinate General Changarnier and Dupin, the President of the
National Assembly, and had already designated the individuals who were to
perpetrate the deed. One comprehends the terror of M. Dupin. A parliamentary
inquiry into the Society of December 10 — that is, the profanation of the
Bonapartist secret world — seemed inevitable. Just before the meeting of
the National Assembly Bonaparte providently disbanded his society, naturally
only on paper, for in a detailed memoir at the end of 1851 Police Prefect
Carlier still sought in vain to move him to really break up the Decembrists.

The Society of December 10 was to remain the private army of Bonaparte until
he succeeded in transforming the public army into a Society of December 10.
Bonaparte made the first attempt at this shortly after the adjournment of the
National Assembly, and precisely with the money just wrested from it. As a
fatalist, he lives in the conviction that there are certain higher powers which
man, and the soldier in particular, cannot withstand. Among these powers he
counts, first and foremost, cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic
sausage. Accordingly, to begin with, he treats officers and non-commissioned
officers in his Elysée apartments to cigars and champagne, cold poultry and
garlic sausage. On October 3 he repeats this maneuver with the mass of the
troops at the St. Maur review, and on October 10 the same maneuver on a still
larger scale at the Satory army parade. The uncle remembered the campaigns of
Alexander in Asia, the nephew the triumphal marches of Bacchus in the same
land. Alexander was a demigod, to be sure, but Bacchus was a god and moreover
the tutelary deity of the Society of December 10.

After the review of October 3, the Permanent Commission summoned War
Minister Hautpoul. He promised that these breaches of discipline would not
recur. We know how on October 10 Bonaparte kept Hautpoul's word. As commander
in chief of the Paris army, Changarnier had commanded at both reviews. At once
a member of the Permanent Commission, chief of the National Guard, the "savior"
of January 29 and June 13, the "bulwark of society," the candidate of the party
of Order for presidential honors, the suspected monk of two monarchies, he had
hitherto never acknowledged himself as the subordinate of the War Minister, had
always openly derided the republican constitution, and had pursued Bonaparte
with an ambiguous lordly protection. Now he was consumed with zeal for
discipline against the War Minister and for the constitution against Bonaparte.
While on October 10 a section of the cavalry raised the shout: "Vive
Napoléon! Vivent les saucissons!" [Hurrah for
Napoléon! Hurrah for the sausages!] Changarnier arranged that at least
the infantry marching past under the command of his friend Neumayer should
preserve an icy silence. As a punishment, the War Minister relieved General
Neumayer of his post in Paris at Bonaparte's instigation, on the pretext of
appointing him commanding general of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth divisions.
Neumayer refused this exchange of posts and so had to resign. Changarnier, for
his part, published an order of the day on November 2 in which he forbade the
troops to indulge in political outcries or demonstrations of any kind while
under arms. The Elysee newspapers attacked Changarnier; the papers of the party
of Order attacked Bonaparte; the Permanent Commission held repeated secret
sessions in which it was repeatedly proposed to declare the country in danger;
the army seemed divided into two hostile camps, with two hostile general
staffs, one in the Elysée, where Bonaparte resided, the other in the Tuileries,
the quarters of Changarnier. It seemed that only the meeting of the National
Assembly was needed to give the signal for battle. The French public judged
this friction between Bonaparte and Changarnier like the English journalist who
characterized it in these words:

"The political housemaids of France are sweeping away the
glowing lava of the revolution with old brooms and wrangle with one another
while they do their work."

Meanwhile, Bonaparte hastened to remove the War Minister Hautpoul, to pack
him off in all haste to Algiers, and to appoint General Schramm War Minister in
his place. On November 12 he sent to the National Assembly a message of
American prolixity, overloaded with detail, redolent of order, desirous of
reconciliation, constitutionally acquiescent, treating of all and sundry, but
not of the questions brûlantes [burning
questions] of the moment. As if in passing, he made the remark that
according to the express provisions of the constitution the President alone
could dispose of the army. The message closed with the following words of great
solemnity:

"Above all things, France demands tranquillity.... But
bound by an oath, I shall keep within the narrow limits that it has set for
me.... As far as I am concerned, elected by the people and owing my power
to it alone, I shall always bow to its lawfully expressed will. Should you
resolve at this session on a revision of the constitution, a Constituent
Assembly will regulate the position of the executive power. If not, then the
people will solemnly pronounce its decision in 1852. But whatever the solutions
of the future may be, let us come to an understanding, so that passion,
surprise, or violence may never decide the destiny of a great nation.... What
occupies my attention, above all, is not who will rule France in 1852, but how
to employ the time which remains at my disposal so that the intervening period
may pass by without agitation or disturbance. I have opened my heart to you
with sincerity; you will answer my frankness with your trust, my good endeavors
with your cooperation, and God will do the rest."

The respectable, hypocritically moderate, virtuously commonplace language of
the bourgeoisie reveals its deepest meaning in the mouth of the autocrat of the
Society of December 10 and the picnic hero of St. Maur and Satory.

The burgraves of the party of Order did not delude themselves for a moment
concerning the trust that this opening of the heart deserved. About oaths they
had long been blasé they numbered in their midst veterans and virtuosos of
political perjury. Nor had they failed to hear the passage about the army. They
observed with annoyance that in its discursive enumeration of lately enacted
laws the message passed over the most important law, the electoral law, in
studied silence, and moreover, in the event of there being no revision of the
constitution, left the election of the President in 1852 to the people. The
electoral law was the lead ball chained to the feet of the party of Order,
which prevented it from walking and so much the more from storming forward!
Moreover, by the official disbandment of the Society of December 10 and the
dismissal of War Minister Hautpoul, Bonaparte had with his own hand sacrificed
the scapegoats on the altar of the country. He had blunted the edge of the
expected collision. Finally, the party of Order itself anxiously sought to
avoid, to mitigate, to gloss over any decisive conflict with the executive
power. For fear of losing their conquests over the revolution, they allowed
their rival to carry off the fruits thereof. "Above all things, France demands
tranquillity." This was what the party of Order had cried to the revolution
since February [1848], this was what Bonaparte's message cried to the party of
Order. "Above all things, France demands tranquillity." Bonaparte committed
acts that aimed at usurpation, but the party of Order committed "unrest" if it
raised a row about these acts and construed them hypochondriacally. The
sausages of Satory were quiet as mice when no one spoke of them. "Above all
things, France demands tranquillity." Bonaparte demanded, therefore, that he be
left in peace to do as he liked and the parliamentary party was paralyzed by a
double fear, the fear of again evoking revolutionary unrest and the fear of
itself appearing as the instigator of unrest in the eyes of its own class, in
the eyes of the bourgeoisie. Consequently, since France demanded tranquillity
above all things, the party of Order dared not answer "war" after Bonaparte had
talked "peace" in his message. The public, which had anticipated scenes of
great scandal at the opening of the National Assembly, was cheated of its
expectations. The opposition deputies, who demanded the submission of the
Permanent Commission's minutes on the October events, were out-voted by the
majority. On principle, all debates that might cause excitement were eschewed.
The proceedings of the National Assembly during November and December, 1850,
were without interest.

At last, toward the end of December, guerrilla warfare began over a number
of prerogatives of parliament. The movement got bogged down in petty squabbles
about the prerogatives of the two powers, since the bourgeoisie had done away
with the class struggle for the moment by abolishing universal suffrage.

A judgment for debt had been obtained from the court against Mauguin, one of
the people's representatives. In answer to the inquiry of the president of the
court, the Minister of Justice, Rouher, declared that a capias should be
issued against the debtor without further ado. Mauguin was thus thrown into
debtors' prison. The National Assembly flared up when it learned of the
assault. Not only did it order his immediate release, but it even had him
fetched forcibly from Clichy the same evening, by its clerk. In order, however,
to confirm its faith in the sanctity of private property and with the idea at
the back of its mind of opening, in case of need, a place of safekeeping for
Montagnards who had become troublesome, it declared imprisonment of people's
representatives for debt permissible when its consent had been previously
obtained. It forgot to decree that the President might also be locked up for
debt. It destroyed the last semblance of the immunity that enveloped the
members of its own body.

It will be remembered that, acting on the information given by a certain
Allais, Police Commissioner Yon had denounced a section of the Decembrists for
planning the murders of Dupin and Changarnier. In reference to this, at the
very first session the quaestors made the proposal that parliament should form
a police force of its own, paid out of the private budget of the National
Assembly and absolutely independent of the police prefect. The Minister of the
Interior, Baroche, protested against this invasion of his domain. A miserable
compromise on this matter was concluded, according to which, true, the police
commissioner of the Assembly was to be paid out of its private budget and to be
appointed and dismissed by its quaestors, but only after previous agreement
with the Minister of the Interior. Meanwhile the government had started
criminal proceedings against Alais, and here it was easy to represent his
information as a hoax and through the mouth of the public prosecutor to cast
ridicule upon Dupin, Changarnier, Yon, and the whole National Assembly.
Thereupon, on December 29, Minister Baroche writes a letter to Dupin in which
he demands Yon's dismissal. The bureau of the Assembly, alarmed by its violence
in the Mauguin affair and accustomed when it has ventured a blow at the
executive power to receive two blows from it in return, does not sanction this
decision. It dismisses Yon as a reward for his official zeal and robs itself of
a parliamentary prerogative indispensable against a man who does not decide by
night in order to execute by day, but decides by day and executes by night.

We have seen how on great and striking occasions during the months of
November and December the National Assembly avoided or quashed the struggle
with the executive power. Now we see it compelled to take up the struggle on
the pettiest occasions. In the Mauguin affair it confirms the principle of
imprisoning people's representatives for debt, but reserves the right to have
it applied only to representatives obnoxious to itself and wrangles over this
infamous privilege with the Minister of Justice. Instead of availing itself of
the alleged murder plot to decree an inquiry into the Society of December 10
and irredeemably unmasking Bonaparte before France and Europe in his true
character of chief of the Paris lumpen proletariat, it lets the conflict be
degraded to a point where the only issue between it and the Minister of the
Interior is which of them has the authority to appoint and dismiss a police
commissioner. Thus during the whole of this period we see the party of Order
compelled by its equivocal position to dissipate and disintegrate its struggle
with the executive power in petty jurisdictional squabbles, pettifoggery,
legalistic hairsplitting, and delimitational disputes, and to make the most
ridiculous matters of form the substance of its activity. It does not dare take
up the conflict at the moment when this has significance from the standpoint of
principle, when the executive power has really exposed itself and the cause of
the National Assembly would be the cause of the nation. By so doing it would
give the nation its marching orders, and it fears nothing more than that the
nation should move. On such occasions it accordingly rejects the motions of the
Montagne and proceeds to the order of the day. The question at issue in its
large aspects having thus been dropped, the executive power calmly waits for
the time when it can again take up the same question on petty and insignificant
occasions, when this is, so to speak, of only local parliamentary interest.
Then the repressed rage of the party of Order breaks out, then it tears the
curtain away from the coulisses, then it denounces the President, then it
declares the republic in danger, but then, also, its fervor appears absurd and
the occasion for the struggle seems a hypocritical pretext or altogether not
worth fighting about. The parliamentary storm becomes a storm in a teacup, the
fight becomes an intrigue, the conflict a scandal. While the revolutionary
classes gloat with malicious joy over the humiliation of the National Assembly,
for they are just as enthusiastic about the parliamentary prerogatives of this
Assembly as the latter is about the public liberties, the bourgeoisie outside
parliament does not understand how the bourgeoisie inside parliament can waste
time over such petty squabbles and imperil tranquillity by such pitiful
rivalries with the President. It becomes confused by a strategy that makes
peace at the moment when all the world is expecting battles, and attacks at the
moment when all the world believes peace has been made.

On December 20 Pascal Duprat interpellated the Minister of the Interior
concerning the Gold Bars Lottery. This lottery was a "daughter of Elysium."
Bonaparte with his faithful followers had brought her into the world and Police
Prefect Carlier had placed her under his official protection, although French
law forbids all lotteries except raffles for charitable purposes. Seven million
lottery tickets at a franc-a-piece, the profits ostensibly to be devoted to
shipping Parisian vagabonds to California. On the one hand, golden dreams were
to supplant the socialist dreams of the Paris proletariat, the seductive
prospect of the first prize the doctrinaire right to work. Naturally the Paris
workers did not recognize in the glitter of the California gold bars the
inconspicuous francs that were enticed out of their pockets. In the main,
however, the matter was nothing short of a downright swindle. The vagabonds who
wanted to open California gold mines without troubling to leave Paris were
Bonaparte himself and his debt-ridden Round Table. The three millions voted by
the National Assembly had been squandered in riotous living; in one way or
another coffers had to be replenished. In vain had Bonaparte opened a national
subscription for the building of so-called cites ouvrieres [workers' cities], and headed the list himself with a
considerable sum. The hard-hearted bourgeois waited mistrustfully for him to
pay up his share, and since this naturally did not ensue, the speculation in
socialist castles in the air immediately fell to the ground. The gold bars
proved a better draw. Bonaparte & Co. were not content to pocket part of
the excess of the seven millions over the bars to be allotted in prizes; they
manufactured false lottery tickets; they issued ten, fifteen, and even twenty
tickets with the same number — a financial operation in the spirit of the
Society of December 10! Here the National Assembly was confronted not with the
fictitious President of the Republic but with Bonaparte in the flesh. Here it
could catch him in the act, in conflict not with the constitution but with the
Code penal. If after Duprat's interpellation it proceeded to the order
of the day, this did not happen merely because Girardin's motion that it should
declare itself "satisfied" reminded the party of Order of its own systematic
corruption. The bourgeois, and above all the bourgeois inflated into a
statesman, supplements his practical meanness by theoretical extravagance. As a
statesman he becomes, like the state power that confronts him, a higher being
that can be fought only in a higher, consecrated fashion.

Bonaparte, who precisely because he was a bohemian, a princely lumpen
proletarian, had the advantage over a rascally bourgeois in that he could
conduct the struggle meanly, now saw, after the Assembly guided him with its
own hand across the slippery ground of the military banquets, the reviews, the
Society of December 10, and finally the Code penal, that the moment had come
when he could pass from an apparent defensive to the offensive. The minor
defeats meanwhile sustained by the Minister of Justice, the Minister of War,
the Minister of the Navy, and the Minister of Finance, through which the
National Assembly signified its snarling displeasure, troubled him little. He
not only prevented the ministers from resigning and thus recognizing the
sovereignty of parliament over the executive power, but could now consummate
what he had begun during the recess of the National Assembly: the severance of
the military power from parliament, the removal of Changarnier.

An Elysée paper published an order of the day alleged to have been addressed
during the month of May to the First Army Division, and therefore proceeding
from Changarnier, in which the officers were urged, in the event of an
insurrection, to give no quarter to the traitors in their own ranks, but to
shoot them immediately, and to refuse troops to the National Assembly if it
should requisition them. On January 3, 1851, the cabinet was interpellated
concerning this order of the day. For the investigation of this matter it
requests a breathing space, first of three months, then of a week, finally of
only twenty-four hours. The Assembly insists on an immediate explanation.
Changarnier rises and declares that there never was such an order of the day.
He adds that he will always hasten to comply with the demands of the National
Assembly and that in case of a clash it can count on him. It receives his
declaration with indescribable applause and passes a vote of confidence in him.
It abdicates, it decrees its own impotence and the omnipotence of the army by
placing itself under the private protection of a general; but the general
deceives himself when he puts at its command against Bonaparte a power that he
holds only as a fief from the same Bonaparte, and when, in his turn, he expects
to be protected by this parliament, his own protègé in need of protection.
Changarnier, however, believes in the mysterious power with which the
bourgeoisie has endowed him since January 29, 1849. He considers himself the
third power, existing side by side with both the other state powers. He shares
the fate of the rest of this epoch's heroes, or rather saints, whose greatness
consists precisely in the biased great opinion of them that their party creates
in its own interests and who shrink to everyday figures as soon as
circumstances call on them to perform miracles. Unbelief is, in general, the
mortal enemy of these reputed heroes who are really saints. Hence their
majestically moral indignation at the dearth of enthusiasm displayed by wits
and scoffers.

That same evening the ministers were summoned to the Elysée. Bonaparte
insists on the dismissal of Changarnier; five ministers refuse to sign; the
Moniteur announces a ministerial crisis, and the press of the party of Order
threatens to form a parliamentary army under Changarnier's command. The party
of Order had constitutional authority to take this step. It merely had to
appoint Changarnier president of the National Assembly and requisition any
number of troops it pleased for its protection. It could do so all the more
safely as Changarnier still actually stood at the head of the army and the
Paris National Guard and was only waiting to be requisitioned together with the
army. The Bonapartist press did not as yet even dare to question the right of
the National Assembly to requisition troops directly, a legal scruple that in
the given circumstances did not look promising. That the army would have obeyed
the order of the National Assembly is probable when one bears in mind that
Bonaparte had to search all Paris for eight days in order, finally, to find two
generals — Baraguay d'Hilliers and Saint-Jean d'Angely — who
declared themselves ready to countersign Changarnier's dismissal. That the
party of Order, however, would have found in its own ranks and in parliament
the necessary number of votes for such a resolution is more than doubtful, when
one considers that eight days later two hundred and eighty-six votes detached
themselves from the party and that in December, 1851, at the last hour of
decision, the Montagne still rejected a similar proposal. Nevertheless, the
burgraves might, perhaps, still have succeeded in spurring the mass of their
party to a heroism that consisted in feeling themselves secure behind a forest
of bayonets and accepting the services of an army that had deserted to their
camp. Instead of this, on the evening of January 6, Messrs. the Burgraves
betook themselves to the Elysée to make Bonaparte desist from dismissing
Changarnier by using statesmanlike phrases and urging considerations of state.
Whomever one seeks to persuade, one acknowledges as master of the situation. On
January 12, Bonaparte, assured by this step, appoints a new ministry in which
the leaders of the old ministry, Fould and Baroche, remain. Saint-Jean D'Angely
becomes War Minister, the Moniteur publishes the decree dismissing Changarnier,
and his command is divided between Baraguay d'Hilliers, who receives the First
Army Division, and Perrot, who receives the National Guard. The bulwark of
society has been discharged, and while this does not cause any tiles to fall
from the roofs, quotations on the Bourse are, on the other hand, going up.

By repulsing the army, which places itself in the person of Changarnier at
its disposal, and so surrendering the army irrevocably to the President, the
party of Order declares that the bourgeoisie has forfeited its vocation to
rule. A parliamentary ministry no longer existed. Having now indeed lost its
grip on the army and the National Guard, what forcible means remained to it
with which simultaneously to maintain the usurped authority of parliament over
the people and its constitutional authority against the President? None. Only
the appeal to impotent principles remained to it now, to principles that it had
itself always interpreted merely as general rules, which one prescribes for
others in order to be able to move all the more freely oneself. The dismissal
of Changarnier and the falling of the military power into Bonaparte's hands
closes the first part of the period we are considering, the period of struggle
between the party of Order and the executive power. War between the two powers
has now been openly declared, is openly waged, but only after the party of
Order has lost both arms and soldiers. Without the ministry, without the army,
without the people, without public opinion, after its electoral law of May 31
no longer the representative of the sovereign nation, sans eyes, sans ears,
sans teeth, sans everything, the National Assembly had undergone a gradual
transformation into an ancient French parliament[109] that has to leave action to the
government and content itself with growling remonstrances post festum
[belatedly].

The party of Order receives the new ministry with a storm of indignation.
General Bedeau recalls to mind the mildness of the Permanent Commission during
the recess, and the excessive consideration it showed by waiving the
publication of its minutes. The Minister of the Interior himself now insists on
the publication of these minutes, which by this time have naturally become as
dull as ditch water, disclose no fresh facts, and have not the slightest effect
on the blasé public. Upon Remusat's proposal the National Assembly retires into
its office and appoints a "Committee for Extraordinary Measures." Paris departs
the less from the rut of its everyday routine because at this moment trade is
prosperous, factories are busy, corn prices low, foodstuffs overflowing, and
the savings banks receiving fresh deposits daily. The "extraordinary measures"
that parliament has announced with so much noise fizzle out on January 18 in a
no-confidence vote against the ministry without General Changarnier ever being
mentioned. The party of Order was forced to frame its motion in this way to
secure the votes of the republicans, since of all the ministry's measures,
Changarnier's dismissal was precisely the only one the republicans approved of,
while the party of Order was in fact not in a position to Censure the other
ministerial acts, which it had itself dictated.

The no-confidence vote of January 18 was passed by four hundred and fifteen
votes to two hundred and eighty-six. Thus, it was carried only by a coalition
of the extreme Legitimists and Orleanists with the pure republicans and the
Montagne. Thus it proved that the party of Order had lost in conflicts with
Bonaparte not only the ministry, not only the army, but also its independent
parliamentary majority; that a squad of representatives had deserted its camp,
out of fanaticism for conciliation, out of fear of the struggle, out of
lassitude, out of family regard for the state salaries so near and dear to
them, out of speculation about ministerial posts becoming vacant (Odilon
Barrot), out of sheer egoism, which makes the ordinary bourgeois always
inclined to sacrifice the general interest of his class for this or that
private motive. From the first, the Bonapartist representatives adhered to the
party of Order only in the struggle against revolution. The leader of the
Catholic party, Montalembert, had already at that time thrown his influence
into the Bonapartist scale, since he despaired of the parliamentary party's
prospects of life. Lastly, the leaders of this party, Thiers and Berryer, the
Orleanist and the Legitimist, were compelled openly to proclaim themselves
republicans, to confess that their hearts were royalist but their heads
republican, that the parliamentary republic was the sole possible form for the
rule of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Thus they were compelled, before the eyes
of the bourgeois class itself, to stigmatize the restoration plans, which they
continued indefatigably to pursue behind parliament's back, as an intrigue as
dangerous as it was brainless.

The no-confidence vote of January 18 hit the ministers and not the
President. But it was not the ministry, it was the President who had dismissed
Changarnier. Should the party of Order impeach Bonaparte himself? Because of
his restoration desires? The latter merely supplemented their own. Because of
his conspiracy in connection with the military reviews and the Society of
December 10? They had buried these themes long since under routine orders of
the day. Because of the dismissal of the hero of January 29 and June 13, the
man who in May, 1850, threatened to set fire to all four corners of Paris in
the event of a rising? Their allies of the Montagne and Cavaignac did not even
allow them to raise the fallen bulwark of society by means of an official
attestation of sympathy. They themselves could not deny the President the
constitutional authority to dismiss a general. They only raged because he made
an unparliamentary use of his constitutional right. Had they not continually
made an unconstitutional use of their parliamentary prerogative, particularly
in regard to the abolition of universal suffrage? They were therefore reduced
to moving within strictly parliamentary limits. And it took that peculiar
malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, parliamentary
cretinism, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and
robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external
world — it took this parliamentary cretinism for those who had destroyed
all the conditions of parliamentary power with their own hands, and were bound
to destroy them in their struggle with the other classes, still to regard their
parliamentary victories as victories and to believe they hit the President by
striking at his ministers. They merely gave him the opportunity to humiliate
the National Assembly afresh in the eyes of the nation. On January 20 the
Moniteur announced that the resignation of the entire ministry had been
accepted. On the pretext that no parliamentary party any longer had a majority
— as the vote of January 18, this fruit of the coalition between Montagne
and royalists, proved — and pending the formation of a new ministry, of
which not one member was an Assembly representative, all being absolutely
unknown and insignificant individuals; a ministry of mere clerks and copyists.
The party of Order could now work to exhaustion playing with these marionettes;
the executive power no longer thought it worth while to be seriously
represented in the National Assembly. The more his ministers were pure dummies,
the more obviously Bonaparte concentrated the whole executive power in his own
person and the more scope he had to exploit it for his own ends.

In coalition with the Montagne, the party of Order revenged itself by
rejecting the grant to the President of 1,800,000 francs which the chief of the
Society of December 10 had compelled his ministerial clerks to propose. This
time a majority of only a hundred and two votes decided the matter; thus
twenty-seven fresh votes had fallen away since January 18; the dissolution of
the party of Order was progressing. At the same time, so there might not for a
moment be any mistake about the meaning of its coalition with the Montagne, it
scorned even to consider a proposal signed by a hundred and eighty-nine members
of the Montagne calling for a general amnesty of political offenders. It
sufficed for the Minister of the Interior, a certain Vaisse, to declare that
the tranquillity was only apparent, that in secret great agitation prevailed,
that in secret ubiquitous societies were being organized, the democratic papers
were preparing to come out again, the reports from the departments were
unfavorable, the Geneva refugees were directing a conspiracy spreading by way
of Lyon all over the South of France, France was on the verge of an industrial
and commercial crisis, the manufacturers of Roubaix had reduced working hours,
the prisoners of Belle Isle[110] were in revolt — it sufficed for
even a mere Vaisse to conjure up the red specter and the party of Order
rejected without discussion a motion that would certainly have won the National
Assembly immense popularity and thrown Bonaparte back into its arms. Instead of
letting itself be intimidated by the executive power with the prospect of fresh
disturbances, it ought rather to have allowed the class struggle a little elbow
room, so as to keep the executive power dependent on it. But it did not feel
equal to the task of playing with fire.

Meanwhile the so-called transition ministry continued to vegetate until the
middle of April. Bonaparte wearied and befooled the National Assembly with
continual new ministerial combinations. Now he seemed to want to form a
republican ministry with Lamartine and Billault, now a parliamentary one with
the inevitable Odilon Barrot, whose name is never missing when a dupe is
necessary, then a Legitimist ministry with Vatimesnil and Benoit d'Azy, and
then again an Orleanist one with Maleville. While he thus kept the different
factions of the party of Order in tension against one another, and alarmed them
as a whole by the prospect of a republican ministry and the consequent
inevitable restoration of universal suffrage, he at the same time engendered in
the bourgeoisie the conviction that his honest efforts to form a parliamentary
ministry were being frustrated by the irreconcilability of the royalist
factions. The bourgeoisie, however, cried out all the louder for a "strong
government"; it found it all the more unpardonable to leave France "without
administration," the more a general commercial crisis seemed now to be
approaching, and won recruits for socialism in the towns just as the ruinously
low price of corn did in the countryside. Trade daily became slacker, the
number of unemployed increased perceptibly; ten thousand workers, at least,
were breadless in Paris, innumerable factories stood idle in Rouen, Mulhouse,
Lyon, Roubaix, Tourcoing, St. Ettienne, Elbeuf, etc. Under these circumstances
Bonaparte could venture, on April 11, to restore the ministry of January 18:
Messrs. Rouher, Fould, Baroche, etc., reinforced by M. Leon Faucher, whom the
Constituent Assembly during its last days had, with the exception of five votes
cast by ministers, unanimously stigmatized by a vote of no confidence for
sending out false telegrams. The National Assembly had therefore gained a
victory over the ministry on January 18, had struggled with Bonaparte for three
months, only to have Fould and Baroche on April 11 admit the puritan Faucher as
a third party into their ministerial alliance.

In November, 1849, Bonaparte had contented himself with an unparliamentary
ministry, in January, 1851, with an extra-parliamentary one, and on April 11 he
felt strong enough to form an anti-parliamentary ministry, which harmoniously
combined in itself the no-confidence votes of both Assemblies, the Constituent
and the Legislative, the republican and the royalist. This gradation of
ministries was the thermometer with which parliament could measure the decrease
of its own vital heat. By the end of April the latter had fallen so low that
Persigny, in a personal interview, could urge Changarnier to go over to the
camp of the President. Bonaparte, he assured him, regarded the influence of the
National Assembly as completely destroyed, and the proclamation was already
prepared that was to be published after the coup d'etat, which was kept
steadily in view but was by chance again postponed. Changarnier informed the
leaders of the party of Order of the obituary notice, but who believes that
bedbug bites are fatal? And parliament, stricken, disintegrated, and
death-tainted as it was, could not prevail upon itself to see in its duel with
the grotesque chief of the Society of December 10 anything but a duel with a
bedbug. But Bonaparte answered the party of Order as Agesilaus did King Agis:
“I seem to thee an ant, but one day I shall be a lion.” [111] [Paraphrase of a story by the Greek writer Athenaeus

(ca. second century AD) in his book, Deipnosophistae. - Ed.]

## VI

The coalition with the Montagne and the pure republicans, to
which the party of Order saw itself condemned in its unavailing efforts to
maintain possession of the military power and to reconquer supreme control of
the executive power, proved incontrovertibly that it had forfeited its
independent parliamentary majority. On May 28 the mere power of the calendar,
of the hour hand of the clock, gave the signal for its complete disintegration.
With May 28, the last year of the life of the National Assembly began. It now
had to decide for continuing the constitution unaltered or for revising it. But
revision of the constitution — that implied not only rule of the
bourgeoisie or of the petty-bourgeois democracy, democracy or proletarian
anarchy, parliamentary republic or Bonaparte, it implied at the same time
Orleans or Bourbon! Thus fell in the midst of parliament the apple of discord
that was bound to inflame openly the conflict of interests which split the
party of Order into hostile factions. The party of Order was a combination of
heterogeneous social substances. The question of revision generated a political
temperature at which the product again decomposed into its original components.

The Bonapartists' interest in a revision was simple. For them it was above
all a question of abolishing Article 45, which forbade Bonaparte's reelection
and the prolongation of his authority. No less simple appeared the position of
the republicans. They unconditionally rejected any revision; they saw in it a
universal conspiracy against the republic. Since they commanded more than a
quarter of the votes in the National Assembly, and according to the
constitution three-quarters of the votes were required for a resolution for
revision to be legally valid and for the convocation of a revising Assembly,
they needed only to count their votes to be sure of victory. And they were sure
of victory.

As against these clear positions, the party of Order found itself
inextricably caught in contradictions. If it should reject revision, it would
imperil the status quo, since it would leave Bonaparte only one way out, that
of force; and since on the second Sunday in May, 1852, at the decisive moment,
it would be surrendering France to revolutionary anarchy, with a President who
had lost his authority, with a parliament which for a long time had not
possessed it, and with a people that meant to reconquer it. If it voted for
constitutional revision, it knew that it voted in vain and would be bound to
fail constitutionally because of the republicans' veto. If it
unconstitutionally declared a simple majority vote to be binding, it could hope
to dominate the revolution only if it subordinated itself unconditionally to
the sovereignty of the executive power; then it would make Bonaparte master of
the constitution, of its revision, and of the party itself. A partial revision,
which would prolong the authority of the President, would pave the way for
imperial usurpation. A general revision, which would shorten the existence of
the republic, would bring the dynastic claims into unavoidable conflict, for
the conditions of a Bourbon and an Orleanist restoration were not only
different, they were mutually exclusive.

The parliamentary republic was more than the neutral territory on which the
two factions of the French bourgeoisie, Legitimists and Orleanists, large
landed property and industry, could dwell side by side with equality of rights.
It was the unavoidable condition of their common rule, the sole form of state
in which their general class interest subjected to itself at the same time both
the claims of their particular factions and all the remaining classes of
society. As royalists they fell back into their old antagonism, into the
struggle for the supremacy of landed property or of money, and the highest
expression of this antagonism, its personification, was their kings themselves,
their dynasties. Hence the resistance of the party of Order to the recall of
the Bourbons.

The Orleanist and people's representative Creton had in 1849, 1850, and 1851
periodically introduced a motion for the revocation of the decree exiling the
royal families. Just as regularly, parliament presented the spectacle of an
Assembly of royalists that obdurately barred the gates through which their
exiled kings might return home. Richard III murdered Henry VI, remarking that
he was too good for this world and belonged in heaven. The royalists declared
France too bad to possess her kings again. Constrained by force of
circumstances, they had become republicans and repeatedly sanctioned the
popular decision that banished their kings from France.

A revision of the constitution — and circumstances compelled taking
that into consideration — called in question, along with the republic,
the common rule of the two bourgeois factions, and revived, with the
possibility of a monarchy, the rivalry of the interests which the monarchy had
predominantly represented by turns, the struggle for the supremacy of one
faction over the other. The diplomats of the party of Order believed they could
settle the struggle by an amalgamation of the two dynasties, by a so-called
fusion of the royalist parties and their royal houses. The real fusion of the
Restoration and the July Monarchy was the parliamentary republic, in which
Orleanist and Legitimist colors were obliterated and the various species of
bourgeois disappeared into the bourgeois as such, the bourgeois genus. Now,
however, Orleanist was to become Legitimist and Legitimist Orleanist. Royalty,
in which their antagonism was personified, was to embody their unity, the
expression of their exclusive factional interests was to become the expression
of their common class interest, the monarchy was to do what only the abolition
of two monarchies, the republic, could do and had done. This was the
philosopher's stone, to produce which the doctors of the party of Order racked
their brains. As if the Legitimist monarchy could ever become the monarchy of
the industrial bourgeois or the bourgeois monarchy ever become the monarchy of
the hereditary landed aristocracy. As if landed property and industry could
fraternize under one crown, when the crown could descend to only one head, the
head of the elder brother or of the younger. As if industry could come to terms
with landed property at all, so long as landed property itself does not decide
to become industrial. If Henry V should die tomorrow, the Count of Paris would
not on that account become the king of the Legitimists unless he ceased to be
the king of the Orleanists. The philosophers of fusion, however, who became
more vociferous in proportion as the question of revision came to the fore, who
had provided themselves with an official daily organ in the Assemblee
Nationale, and who are again at work even at this very moment (February,
1852), considered the whole difficulty to be due to the opposition and rivalry
of the two dynasties. The attempts to reconcile the Orleans family with Henry
V, begun since the death of Louis Philippe, but, like the dynastic intrigues
generally, played at only while the National Assembly was in recess, during the
entr'actes, behind the scenes — sentimental coquetry with the old
superstition rather than seriously meant business — now became grand
performances of state, enacted by the party of Order on the public stage,
instead of in amateur theatricals as before. The couriers sped from Paris to
Venice, from Venice to Claremont,[112] from Claremont to Paris. The Count of
Chambord issues a manifesto in which "with the help of all the members of his
family" he announces not his, but the "national" restoration. The Orleanist
Salvandy throws himself at the feet of Henry V. The Legitimist chiefs, Berryer,
Benoit d'Azy, Saint-Priest, travel to Claremont to persuade the Orleans set,
but in vain. The fusionists perceive too late that the interests of the two
bourgeois factions neither lose exclusiveness nor gain pliancy when they become
accentuated in the form of family interests, the interests of two royal houses.
If Henry V were to recognize the Count of Paris as his heir - the sole success
that the fusion could achieve at best — the House of Orleans would not
win any claim that the childlessness of Henry V had not already secured to it,
but it would lose all the claims it had gained through the July Revolution. It
would waive its original claims, all the titles it had wrested from the older
branch of the Bourbons in almost a hundred years of struggle; it would barter
away its historical prerogative, the prerogative of the modern kingdom, for the
prerogative of its genealogical tree. The fusion, therefore, would be nothing
but a voluntary abdication of the House of Orleans, its resignation to
Legitimacy, repentant withdrawal from the Protestant state church into the
Catholic. A withdrawal, moreover, that would not even bring it to the throne it
had lost, but to the steps of the throne where it had been born. The old
Orleanist ministers, Guizot, Duchatel, etc., who likewise hastened to Claremont
to advocate the fusion, in fact represented merely the Katzenjammer over the
July Revolution, the despair about the bourgeois kingdom and the kingliness of
the bourgeois, the superstitious belief in Legitimacy as the last charm against
anarchy. Imagining themselves mediators between Orleans and Bourbons, they were
in reality merely Orleanist renegades, and the Prince of Joinville received
them as such. On the other hand, the viable, bellicose section of the
Orleanists, Thiers, Baze, etc., convinced Louis Philippe's family all the more
easily that if any directly monarchist restoration presupposed the fusion of
the two dynasties, and if any such fusion presupposed abdication of the House
of Orleans, it was, on the contrary, wholly in accord with the tradition of
their forefathers to recognize the republic for the moment and wait until
events permitted the conversion of the presidential chair into a throne. Rumors
of Joinville's candidature were circulated, public curiosity was kept in
suspense, and a few months later, in September, after the rejection of
revision, his candidature was publicly proclaimed.

The attempt at a royalist fusion of Orleanists with Legitimists had thus not
only failed; it had destroyed their parliamentary fusion, their common
republican form, and had broken up the party of Order into its original
component parts; but the more the estrangement between Claremont and Venice
grew, the more their settlement collapsed and the Joinville agitation gained
ground, so much the more eager and earnest became the negotiations between
Bonaparte's minister Faucher and the Legitimists.

The disintegration of the party of Order did not stop at its original
elements. Each of the two great factions, in its turn, decomposed all over
again. It was as if all the old shadings that had formerly fought and jostled
one another within each of the two circles, whether Legitimist or Orleanist,
had thawed out again like dry Infusoria on contact with water, as if they had
acquired anew sufficient vital energy to form groups of their own and
independent antagonisms. The Legitimists dreamed they were back among the
controversies between the Tuileries and the Pavillon Marsan, between Villèle
and Polignac.[113] The
Orleanists relived the golden days of the tourney between Guizot, Mole,
Broglie, Thiers, and Odilon Barrot.

The section of the party of Order that was eager for revision, but was
divided again on the limits to revisions — a section composed of the
Legitimists led by Berryer and Falloux, on the one hand, and by La
Rochejaquelein, on the other, and of the conflict-weary Orleanists led by Mole,
Broglie, Montalembert and Odilon Barrot — agreed with the Bonapartist
representatives on the following indefinite and broadly framed motion: "With
the object of restoring to the nation the full exercise of its sovereignty, the
undersigned representatives move that the constitution be revised."

At the same time, however, they unanimously declared through their reporter
Tocqueville that the National Assembly had no right to move the abolition of
the republic, that this right was vested solely in the Revising Chamber.
For the rest, the constitution might be revised only in a "legal"
manner, hence only if the constitutionally prescribed three-quarters of
the number of votes were cast in favor of revision. On July 19, after six days
of stormy debate, revision was rejected, as was to be anticipated. Four hundred
and forty-six votes were cast for it, but two hundred and seventy-eight
against. The extreme Orleanists, Thiers, Changarnier, etc., voted with the
republicans and the Montagne.

Thus the majority of parliament declared against the constitution, but this
constitution itself declared for the minority and that its vote was binding.
But had not the party of Order subordinated the constitution to the
parliamentary majority on May 31, 1850, and on June 13, 1849? Up to now, was
not its whole policy based on the subordination of the paragraphs of the
constitution to the decisions of the parliamentary majority? Had it not left to
the democrats the antediluvian superstitious belief in the letter of the law,
and castigated the democrats for it? At the present moment, however, revision
of the constitution meant nothing but continuation of the presidential
authority, just as continuation of the constitution meant nothing but
Bonaparte's deposition. Parliament had declared for him, but the constitution
declared against parliament. He therefore acted in the sense of parliament when
he tore up the constitution and acted in the sense of the constitution when he
adjourned parliament.

Parliament had declared the constitution and, with the latter, its own rule
to be "beyond the majority"; by its vote it had abolished the constitution and
prolonged the term of presidential power, while declaring at the same time that
neither could the one die nor the other live so long as the Assembly itself
continued to exist. Those who were to bury it were standing at the door. While
it debated on revision, Bonaparte removed General Baraguay d'Hilliers, who had
proved irresolute, from the command of the First Army Division and appointed in
his place General Magnan, the victor of Lyons,[114] the hero of the December days, one of his
creatures, who under Louis Philippe had already more or less compromised
himself in Bonaparte's favor on the occasion of the Boulogne expedition.

The party of Order proved by its decision on revision that it knew neither
how to rule nor how to serve; neither how to live nor how to die; neither how
to suffer the republic nor how to overthrow it; neither how to uphold the
constitution nor how to throw it overboard; neither how to cooperate with the
President nor how to break with him. To whom, then, did it look for the
solution of all the contradictions? To the calendar, to the course of events.
It ceased to presume to sway them. It therefore challenged events to assume
sway over it, and thereby challenged the power to which, in the struggle
against the people, it had surrendered one attribute after another until it
stood impotent before this power. In order that the head of the executive power
might be able the more undisturbedly to draw up his plan of campaign against
it, strengthen his means of attack, select his tools, and fortify his
positions, it resolved precisely at this critical moment to retire from the
stage and adjourn for three months, from August 10 to November 4.

The parliamentary party was not only dissolved into its two great factions,
each of these factions was not only split up within itself, but the party of
Order in parliament had fallen out with the party of Order outside parliament.
The spokesmen and scribes of the bourgeoisie, its platform and its press
— in short, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie
itself, the representatives and the represented — faced one another in
estrangement and no longer understood one another.

The Legitimists in the provinces, with their limited horizon and unlimited
enthusiasm, accused their parliamentary leaders, Berryer and Falloux, of
deserting to the Bonapartist camp and of defection from Henry V. Their
fleur-de-lis minds believed in the fall of man, but not in diplomacy.

Far more fateful and decisive was the breach of the commercial bourgeoisie
with its politicians. It reproached them not as the Legitimists reproached
theirs, with having abandoned their principles, but on the contrary, with
clinging to principles that had become useless.

I have indicated above that since Fould's entry into the ministry the
section of the commercial bourgeoisie which had held the lion's share of power
under Louis Philippe, namely, the aristocracy of finance, had become
Bonapartist. Fould not only represented Bonaparte's interests in the Bourse, he
represented at the same time the interests of the Bourse before Bonaparte. The
position of the aristocracy of finance is most strikingly depicted in a passage
from its European organ, the London Economist. In the issue of February
1, 1851, its Paris correspondent writes:

"Now we have it stated from numerous quarters that above all
things France demands tranquillity. The President declares it in his message to
the Legislative Assembly; it is echoed from the tribune; it is asserted in the
journals; it is announced from the pulpit, it is demonstrated by the
sensitiveness of the public funds at the least prospect of disturbance, and
their firmness the instant it is made manifest that the executive is
victorious."

In its issue of November 29, 1851, the Economist declares in its own
name:

"The President is the guardian of order, and is now
recognized as such on every stock exchange of Europe."

The aristocracy of finance, therefore, condemned the parliamentary struggle
of the party of Order with the executive power as a disturbance of order, and
celebrated every victory of the President over its ostensible representatives
as a victory of order. By the aristocracy of finance must here be understood
not merely the great loan promoters and speculators in public funds, in regard
to whom it is immediately obvious that their interests coincide with the
interests of the state power. All modern finance, the whole of the banking
business, is interwoven in the closest fashion with public credit. A part of
their business capital is necessarily invested and put out at interest in
quickly convertible public funds. Their deposits, the capital placed at their
disposal and distributed by them among merchants and industrialists, are partly
derived from the dividends of holders of government securities. If in every
epoch the stability of the state power signified Moses and the prophets to the
entire money market and to the priests of this money market, why not all the
more so today, when every deluge threatens to sweep away the old states, and
the old state debts with them?

The industrial bourgeoisie too, in its fanaticism for order, was angered by
the squabbles of the parliamentary party of Order with the executive power.
After their vote of January 18 on the occasion of Changarnier's dismissal,
Thiers, Angles, Sainte-Beuve, etc., received from their constituents, in
precisely the industrial districts, public reproofs in which their coalition
with the Montagne was especially scourged as high treason to order. If, as we
have seen, the boastful taunts, the petty intrigues which marked the struggle
of the party of Order with the President merited no better reception, then on
the other hand this bourgeois party, which required its representatives to
allow the military power to pass from its own parliament to an adventurous
pretender without offering resistance, was not even worth the intrigues that
were squandered in its interests. It proved that the struggle to maintain its
public interests, its own class interests, its political power, only troubled
and upset it, as it disturbed private business.

With barely an exception the bourgeois dignitaries of the departmental
towns, the municipal authorities, the judges of the commercial courts, etc.,
everywhere received Bonaparte on his tours in the most servile manner, even
when, as in Dijon, he made an unrestrained attack on the National Assembly, and
especially on the party of Order.

When trade was good, as it still was at the beginning of 1851, the
commercial bourgeoisie raged against any parliamentary struggle, lest trade be
put out of humor. When trade was bad, as it continually was from the end of
February, 1851, the commercial bourgeoisie accused the parliamentary struggles
of being the cause of stagnation and cried out for them to stop so that trade
could start again. The revision debates came on just in this bad period. Since
the question here was whether the existing form of state was to be or not to
be, the bourgeoisie felt all the more justified in demanding from its
representatives the ending of this torturous provisional arrangement and at the
same time the maintenance of the status quo. There was no contradiction in
this. By the end of the provisional arrangement it understood precisely its
continuation, the postponement to a distant future of the moment when a
decision had to be reached. The status quo could be maintained in only two
ways: prolongation of Bonaparte's authority or his constitutional retirement
and the election of Cavaignac. A section of the bourgeoisie desired the latter
solution and knew no better advice to give its representatives than to keep
silent and leave the burning question untouched. They were of the opinion that
if their representatives did not speak, Bonaparte would not act. They wanted an
ostrich parliament that would hide its head in order to remain unseen. Another
section of the bourgeoisie desired, because Bonaparte was already in the
presidential chair, to leave him sitting in it, so that everything could remain
in the same old rut. They were indignant because their parliament did not
openly infringe the constitution and abdicate without ceremony.

The Department Councils, those provincial representative bodies of the big
bourgeoisie, which met from August 25 on during the recess of the National
Assembly, declared almost unanimously for revision, and thus against parliament
and in favor of Bonaparte.

Still more unequivocally than in its falling out with its parliamentary
representatives, the bourgeoisie displayed its wrath against its literary
representatives, its own press. The sentences to ruinous fines and shameless
terms of imprisonment, on the verdicts of bourgeois juries, for every attack of
bourgeois journalists on Bonaparte's usurpationist desires, for every attempt
of the press to defend the political rights of the bourgeoisie against the
executive power, astonished not merely France, but all Europe.

While the parliamentary party of Order, by its clamor for tranquillity, as I
have shown, committed itself to quiescence, while it declared the political
rule of the bourgeoisie to be incompatible with the safety and existence of the
bourgeoisie — by destroying with its own hands, in the struggle against
the other classes of society, all the conditions for its own regime, the
parliamentary regime — the extraparliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie, on
the other hand, by its servility toward the President, by its vilification of
parliament, by its brutal maltreatment of its own press, invited Bonaparte to
suppress and annihilate its speaking and writing section, its politicians and
its literati, its platform and its press, so it would then be able to pursue
its private affairs with full confidence in the protection of a strong and
unrestricted government. It declared unequivocally that it longed to get rid of
its own political rule in order to get rid of the troubles and dangers of
ruling.

And this extraparliamentary bourgeoisie, which had already rebelled against
the purely parliamentary and literary struggle for the rule of its own class,
and had betrayed the leaders of this struggle, now dares after the event to
indict the proletariat for not having risen in a bloody struggle, a
life-and-death struggle on its behalf! This bourgeoisie, which every moment
sacrificed its general class interests, that is, its political interests, to
the narrowest and most sordid private interests, and demanded a similar
sacrifice from its representatives, now moans that the proletariat has
sacrificed its ideal political interests to its material interests. It poses as
a lovely creature that has been misunderstood and deserted in the decisive hour
by the proletariat, misled by socialists. And it finds a general echo in the
bourgeois world. Naturally, I do not speak here of German shyster politicians
and riff-raff of the same persuasion. I refer, for example, to the already
quoted Economist, which as late as November 29, 1851, that is, four days prior
to the coup d'etat, declared Bonaparte to be the "guardian of order" but Thiers
and Berryer to be "anarchists," and on December 27, 1851, after Bonaparte had
quieted these "anarchists," is already vociferous about the treason to "the
skill, knowledge, discipline, spiritual insight, intellectual resources, and
moral weight of the middle and upper ranks" committed by the masses of
"ignorant, untrained, and stupid proletaires." The stupid, ignorant, and vulgar
mass was none other than the bourgeois mass itself.

In the year 1851, France, to be sure, had passed through a kind of minor
trade crisis. The end of February showed a decline in exports compared with
1850; in March trade suffered and factories closed down; in April the position
of the industrial departments appeared as desperate as after the February days;
in May business had still not revived; as late as June 28 the holdings of the
Bank of France showed, by the enormous growth of deposits and the equally great
decrease in advances on bills of exchange, that production was at a standstill,
and it was not until the middle of October that a progressive improvement of
business again set in. The French bourgeoisie attributed this trade stagnation
to purely political causes, to the struggle between parliament and the
executive power, to the precariousness of a merely provisional form of state,
to the terrifying prospect of the second Sunday in May of 1852. I will not deny
that all these circumstances had a depressing effect on some branches of
industry in Paris and the departments. But in any case the influence of
political conditions was only local and inconsiderable. Does this require
further proof than the fact that the improvement of trade set in toward the
middle of October, at the very moment when the political situation grew worse,
the political horizon darkened, and a thunderbolt from Elysium was expected at
any moment? For the rest, the French bourgeois, whose "skill, knowledge,
spiritual insight, and intellectual resources" reach no further than his nose,
could throughout the period of the Industrial Exhibition in London[115] have found the cause of
his commercial misery right under his nose. While in France factories were
closed down, in England commercial bankruptcies broke out. While in April and
May the industrial panic reached a climax in France, in April and May the
commercial panic reached a climax in England. Like the French woolen industry,
the English woolen industry suffered, and as French silk manufacture, so did
English silk manufacture. True, the English cotton mills continued working, but
no longer at the same profits as in 1849 and 1850. The only difference was that
the crisis in France was industrial, in England commercial; that while in
France the factories stood idle, in England they extended operations, but under
less favorable conditions than in preceding years; that in France it was
exports, in England imports which were hardest hit. The common cause, which is
naturally not to be sought within the bounds of the French political horizon,
was obvious. The years 1849 and 1850 were years of the greatest material
prosperity and of an overproduction that appeared as such only in 1851. At the
beginning of this year it was given a further special impetus by the prospect
of the Industrial Exhibition. In addition there were the following special
circumstances: first, the partial failure of the cotton crop in 1850 and 1851,
then the certainty of a bigger cotton crop than had been expected; first the
rise, then the sudden fall — in short, the fluctuations in the price of
cotton. The crop of raw silk, in France at least, had turned out to be even
below the average yield. Woolen manufacture, finally, had expanded so much
since 1848 that the production of wool could not keep pace with it and the
price of raw wool rose out of all proportion to the price of woolen
manufactures. Here, then, in the raw material of three industries for the world
market, we already have three-fold material for a stagnation in trade. Apart
from these special circumstances, the apparent crisis of 1851 was nothing else
but the halt which overproduction and overspeculation invariably make in
completing the industrial cycle, before they summon all their strength in order
to rush feverishly through the final phase of this cycle and arrive once more
at their starting point, the general trade crisis. During such intervals in the
history of trade, commercial bankruptcies break out in England, while in France
industry itself is reduced to idleness, partly forced into retreat by the
competition, just then becoming intolerable, of the English in all markets, and
partly singled out for attack as a luxury industry by every business
stagnation. Thus besides the general crisis France goes through national trade
crises of her own, which are nevertheless determined and conditioned far more
by the general state of the world market than by French local influences. It
will not be without interest to contrast the judgment of the English bourgeois
with the prejudice of the French bourgeois. In its annual trade report for
1851, one of the largest Liverpool houses writes:

"Few years have more thoroughly belied the anticipations
formed at their commencement than the one just closed; instead of the great
prosperity which was almost unanimously looked for it has proved one of the
most discouraging that has been seen for the last quarter of a century —
this, of course, refers to the mercantile, not to the manufacturing classes.
And yet there certainly were grounds for anticipating the reverse at the
beginning of the year — stocks of produce were moderate, money was
abundant, and food was cheap, a plentiful harvest well secured, unbroken peace
on the Continent, and no political or fiscal disturbances at home; indeed, the
wings of commerce were never more unfettered.... To what source, then, is this
disastrous result to be attributed? We believe to overtrading in both imports
and exports. Unless our merchants will put more stringent limits to their
freedom of action, nothing but a triennial panic can keep us in check."

Now picture to yourself the French bourgeois, how in the throes of this
business panic his trade-crazy brain is tortured, set in a whirl, and stunned
by rumors of coups d'etat and the restoration of universal suffrage, by the
struggle between parliament and the executive power, by the Fronde war between
Orleanists and Legitimists, by the communist conspiracies in the south of
France, by alleged Jacqueries in the departments of Nievre and Cher, by the
advertisements of the different candidates for the presidency, by the cheapjack
solutions offered by the journals, by the threats of the republicans to uphold
the constitution and universal suffrage by force of arms, by the
gospel-preaching emigre heroes in partibus, who announced that the
world would come to an end on the second Sunday in May, 1852 — think of
all this and you will comprehend why in this unspeakable, deafening chaos of
fusion, revision, prorogation, constitution, conspiration, coalition,
emigration, usurpation, and revolution, the bourgeois madly snorts at his
parliamentary republic:

"Rather an end with terror than terror without end!"

Bonaparte understood this cry. His power of comprehension was sharpened by
the growing turbulence of creditors, who with each sunset which brought
settling day, the second Sunday in May, 1852, nearer, saw a movement of the
stars protesting their earthly bills of exchange. They had become veritable
astrologers. The National Assembly had blighted Bonaparte's hopes of a
constitutional prolongation of his authority; the candidature of the Prince of
Joinville forbade further vacillation.

If ever an event has, well in advance of its coming, cast its shadow before,
it was Bonaparte's coup d'etat. As early as January 29, 1849, barely a month
after his election, he had made a proposal about it to Changarnier. In the
summer of 1849 his own Prime Minister, Odilon Barrot, had covertly denounced
the policy of coups d'etat; in the winter of 1850 Thiers had openly done so. In
May, 1851, Persigny had sought once more to win Changarnier for the coup; the
Messager de l'Assemblee had published an account of these
negotiations. During every parliamentary storm the Bonapartist journals
threatened a coup d'etat, and the nearer the crisis drew, the louder their tone
became. In the orgies that Bonaparte kept up every night with men and women of
the "swell mob," as soon as the hour of midnight approached and copious
potations had loosened tongues and fired imaginations, the coup d'etat was
fixed for the following morning. Swords were drawn, glasses clinked, the
representatives were thrown out the window, the imperial mantle fell upon
Bonaparte's shoulders, until the following morning banished the ghost once more
and astonished Paris learned, from vestals of little reticence and from
indiscreet paladins, of the danger it had once again escaped. During the months
of September and October rumors of a coup d'etat followed fast, one after the
other. Simultaneously the shadow took on color, like a variegated
daguerreotype. Look up the September and October copies of the organs of the
European daily press and you will find, word for word, intimations like the
following: "Paris is full of rumors of a coup d'etat. The capital is to be
filled with troops during the night, and the next morning is to bring decrees
which will dissolve the National Assembly, declare the Department of the Seine
in a state of siege, restore universal suffrage, and appeal to the people.
Bonaparte is said to be seeking ministers for the execution of these illegal
decrees." The dispatches that bring these tidings always end with the fateful
word "postponed." The coup d'etat was ever the fixed idea of Bonaparte. With
this idea he had again set foot on French soil. He was so obsessed by it that
he continually betrayed it and blurted it out. He was so weak that, just as
continually, he gave it up again. The shadow of the coup d'etat had become so
familiar to the Parisians as a specter that they were not willing to believe in
it when it finally appeared in the flesh. What allowed the coup d'etat to
succeed was therefore neither the reticent reserve of the chief of the Society
of December 10 nor the fact that the National Assembly was caught unawares. If
it succeeded, it succeeded despite its indiscretion and with its foreknowledge,
a necessary, inevitable result of antecedent developments.

On October 10 Bonaparte announced to his ministers his decision to restore
universal suffrage; on the sixteenth they handed in their resignations; on the
twenty-sixth Paris learned of the formation of the Thorigny Ministry. Police
Prefect Carlier was simultaneously replaced by Maupas; the head of the First
Military Division, Magnan, concentrated the most reliable regiments in the
capital. On November 4 the National Assembly resumed its sessions. It had
nothing better to do than to recapitulate in a short, succinct form the course
it had gone through and to prove that it was buried only after it had died.

The first post it forfeited in the struggle with the executive power was the
ministry. It had solemnly to admit this loss by accepting at full value the
Thorigny Ministry, a mere shadow cabinet. The Permanent Commission had received
M. Giraud with laughter when he presented himself in the name of the new
ministers. Such a weak ministry for such strong measures as the restoration of
universal suffrage! Yet the precise object was to get nothing through in
parliament, but everything against parliament.

On the very first day of its reopening, the National Assembly received the
message from Bonaparte in which he demanded the restoration of universal
suffrage and the abolition of the law of May 31, 1850. The same day his
ministers introduced a decree to this effect. The National Assembly at once
rejected the ministry's motion of urgency and rejected the law itself on
November 13 by three hundred and fifty-five votes to three hundred and
forty-eight. Thus, it tore up its mandate once more; it once more confirmed the
fact that it had transformed itself from the freely elected representatives of
the people into the usurpatory parliament of a class; it acknowledged once more
that it had itself cut in two the muscles which connected the parliamentary
head with the body of the nation.

If by its motion to restore universal suffrage the executive power appealed
from the National Assembly to the people, the legislative power appealed by its
Quaestors' Bill from the people to the army. This Quaestors' Bill was to
establish its right of directly requisitioning troops, of forming a
parliamentary army. While it thus designated the army as the arbitrator between
itself and the people, between itself and Bonaparte, while it recognized the
army as the decisive state power, it had to confirm, on the other hand, the
fact that it had long given up its claim to dominate this power. By debating
its right to requisition troops, instead of requisitioning them at once, it
betrayed its doubts about its own powers. By rejecting the Quaestors' Bill, it
made public confession of its impotence. This bill was defeated, its proponents
lacking a hundred and eight votes of a majority. The Montagne thus decided the
issue. It found itself in the position of Buridan's ass — not, indeed,
between two bundles of hay with the problem of deciding which was the more
attractive, but between two showers of blows with the problem of deciding which
was the harder. On the one hand, there was the fear of Changarnier; on the
other, the fear of Bonaparte. It must be confessed that the position was not a
heroic one.

On November 18 an amendment was moved to the law on municipal elections
introduced by the party of Order, to the effect that instead of three years',
one year's domicile should suffice for municipal electors. The amendment was
lost by a single vote, but this one vote immediately proved to be a mistake. By
splitting up into its hostile factions, the party of Order had long ago
forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. It showed now that there was
no longer any majority at all in parliament. The National Assembly had become
incapable of transacting business. Its atomic constituents were no longer held
together by any force of cohesion; it had drawn its last breath; it was dead.

Finally, a few days before the catastrophe, the extra-parliamentary mass of
the bourgeoisie was solemnly to confirm once more its breach with the
bourgeoisie in parliament. Thiers, as a parliamentary hero infected more than
the rest with the incurable disease of parliamentary cretinism, had, after the
death of parliament, hatched out, together with the Council of State, a new
parliamentary intrigue, a Responsibility Law by which the President was to be
firmly held within the limits of the constitution. Just as, on laying the
foundation stone of the new market halls in Paris on September 15, Bonaparte,
like a second Masaniello, had enchanted the dames des balles, the
fishwives - to be sure, one fishwife outweighed seventeen burgraves in real
power - just as after the introduction of the Quaestors' Bill he enraptured the
lieutenants whom he regaled in the Elysee, so now, on November 25, he swept off
their feet the industrial bourgeoisie, which had gathered at the circus to
receive at his hands prize medals for the London Industrial Exhibition.

I shall give the significant portion of his speech as reported in the
Journal des Débats:

"'With such unhoped-for successes, I am justified in
reiterating how great the French Republic would be if it were permitted to
pursue its real interests and reform its institutions, instead of being
constantly disturbed by demagogues, on the one hand, and by monarchist
hallucinations, on the other.' (Loud, stormy and repeated applause from every
part of the amphitheater.) 'The monarchist hallucinations hinder all progress
and all important branches of industry. In place of progress nothing but
struggle. One sees men who were formerly the most zealous supporters of the
royal authority and prerogative become partisans of a Convention merely in
order to weaken the authority that has sprung from universal suffrage.' (Loud
and repeated applause.) 'We see men who have suffered most from the Revolution,
and have deplored it most, provoke a new one, and merely in order to fetter the
nation's will.... I promise you tranquillity for the future,' etc., etc.
(Bravo, bravo, a storm of bravos.) "

Thus the industrial bourgeoisie applauds with servile bravos the coup d'etat
of December 2, the annihilation of parliament, the downfall of its own rule,
the dictatorship of Bonaparte. The thunder of applause on November 25 had its
answer in the thunder of cannon on December 4,[116] and it was on the house of Monsieur
Sallandrouze, who had clapped most, that they clapped most of the bombs.

Cromwell, when he dissolved the Long Parliament,
went alone into its midst, took out his watch so that it should not continue to
exist a minute after the time limit he had fixed, and drove out each one of the
members of Parliament with hilariously humorous taunts. Napoleon, smaller than
his prototype, at least betook himself on the eighteenth Brumaire to the
legislative body and read out to it, though in a faltering voice, its sentence
of death. The second Bonaparte, who, moreover, found himself in possession of
an executive power very different from that of Cromwell or Napoleon, sought his
model not in the annals of world history but in the annals of the Society of
December 10, in the annals of the criminal courts. He robs the Bank of France
of twenty-five million francs, buys General Magnan with a million, the soldiers
with fifteen francs apiece and liquor, comes together with his accomplices
secretly like a thief in the night, has the houses of the most dangerous
parliamentary leaders broken into, and Cavaignac, Lamoricière, Le Flô,
Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc., dragged from their beds and put in
prison, the chief squares of Paris and the parliamentary building occupied by
troops, and cheapjack placards posted early in the morning on all the walls,
proclaiming the dissolution of the National Assembly and the Council of State,
the restoration of universal suffrage, and the placing of the Seine Department
in a state of siege. In like manner he inserted a little later in the Moniteur
a false document which asserted that influential parliamentarians had grouped
themselves around him and formed a state consulta.

The rump parliament, assembled in the mairie building of the Tenth
Arrondissement and consisting mainly of Legitimists and Orleanists, votes the
deposition of Bonaparte amid repeated cries of "Long live the Republic,"
unfailingly harangues the gaping crowds before the building, and is finally led
off in the custody of African sharpshooters, first to the d'Orsay barracks, and
later packed into prison vans and transported to the prisons of Mazas, Ham, and
Vincennes. Thus ended the party of Order, the Legislative Assembly, and the
February Revolution.

Before hastening to close, let us briefly summarize the latter's history:

1. First
period. From February 24 to May 4, 1848. February period.
Prologue. Universal-brotherhood swindle.

2. Second
period. Period of constituting the republic and of the
Constituent National Assembly.

a. May 4 to June 25,
1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the
proletariat in the June days.

b. June 25 to
December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans.
Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The
bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by the election of Bonaparte as
President.

c. December 20,
1848, to May 28, 1849. Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with
Bonaparte and with the party of Order in alliance with him. Passing of the
Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie.

3. Third
period. Period of the constitutional republic and of the
Legislative National Assembly.

a. May 28, 1849, to
June 13, 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie
and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy.

b. June 13, 1849, to
May 31, 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of Order. It
completes its rule by abolishing universal suffrage, but loses the
parliamentary ministry.

c. May 31, 1850, to
December 2, 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and
Bonaparte.

(1) May 31, 1850, to
January 12, 1851. The Assembly loses the supreme command of the army.

(2) January 12 to April
11, 1851. It is worsted in its attempts to regain the administrative power.
The party of Order loses its independent parliamentary majority. It forms a
coalition with the republicans and the Montagne.

(3) April 11, 1851, to
October 9, 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion, prorogation. The party of
Order decomposes into its separate constituents. The breach between the
bourgeois parliament and press and the mass of the bourgeoisie becomes
definite.

(4) October 9 to December
2, 1851. Open breach between parliament and the executive power. The
Assembly performs its dying act and succumbs, left in the lurch by its own
class, by the army, and by all the remaining classes. Passing of the
parliamentary regime and of bourgeois rule. Victory of Bonaparte. Parody of
restoration of empire.

## VII

The social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy, on the
threshold of the February Revolution. In the June days of 1848, it was
drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunts the
subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost. The democratic republic
announces its appearance. It is dissipated on June 13, 1849, together
with its deserting petty bourgeois, but in its flight it redoubles its
boastfulness. The parliamentary republic together with the bourgeoisie
takes possession of the entire state; it enjoys its existence to the
full, but December 2, 1851, buries it to the accompaniment of the
anguished cry of the coalesced royalists: “Long live the Republic!”

The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working
proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat to domination, with
the Chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie
kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy –
Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the
eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des
Italiens shot down at their windows by the drunken army of law and
order. The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it. It
destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It
placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are
placed under police supervision. It disbanded the democratic National
Guard, its own National Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of
siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It supplanted the juries by
military commissions; its juries are supplanted by military
commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of the priests;
the priests subject it to their own education. It jailed people without
trial, it is being jailed without trial. It suppressed every stirring
in society by means of state power; every stirring in its society is
suppressed by means of state power. Out of enthusiasm for its moneybags
it rebelled against its own politicians and literary men; its
politicians and literary men are swept aside, but its moneybag is being
plundered now that its mouth has been gagged and its pen broken. The
bourgeoisie never tired of crying out to the revolution what St.
Arsenius cried out to the Christians: “Fuge, tace, quiesce!”
[“Flee, be silent, keep still!”]
Bonaparte cries to the bourgeoisie: “Fuge, tace, quiesce!"

The French bourgeoisie had long ago found the solution to Napoleon’s
dilemma: “In fifty years Europe will be republican or Cossack.” It
solved it in the “Cossack republic.” No Circe using black magic has
distorted that work of art, the bourgeois republic, into a monstrous
shape. That republic has lost nothing but the semblance of
respectability. Present-day France was already contained in the
parliamentary republic. It required only a bayonet thrust for the
bubble to burst and the monster to leap forth before our eyes.

Why did the Paris proletariat not rise in revolt after December 2?

The overthrow of the bourgeoisie had as yet been only decreed; the
decree was not carried out. Any serious insurrection of the proletariat
would at once have put new life into the bourgeoisie, reconciled it
with the army, and insured a second June defeat for the workers.

On December 4 the proletariat was incited by bourgeois and shopkeeper
to fight. On the evening of that day several legions of the National
Guard promised to appear, armed and uniformed, on the scene of battle.
For the bourgeois and the shopkeeper had learned that in one of his
decrees of December 2 Bonaparte had abolished the secret ballot and had
ordered them to put a “yes” or “no” after their names on the official
registers. The resistance of December 4 intimidated Bonaparte. During
the night he had placards posted on all the street corners of Paris
announcing the restoration of the secret ballot. The bourgeois and the
shopkeeper believed they had gained their objective. Those who failed
to appear next morning were the bourgeois and the shopkeeper.

By a coup de main the night of December 1-2 Bonaparte had robbed the
Paris proletariat of its leaders, the barricade commanders. An army
without officers, averse to fighting under the banner of the
Montagnards because of the memories of June, 1848 and 1849, and May,
1850, it left to its vanguard, the secret societies, the task of saving
the insurrectionary honor of Paris, which the bourgeoisie had
surrendered to the military so unresistingly that, subsequently,
Bonaparte could disarm the National Guard with the sneering motive of
his fear that its weapons would be turned against it by the anarchists!

"This is the complete and final triumph of socialism!” Thus Guizot
characterized December 2. But if the overthrow of the parliamentary
republic contains within itself the germ of the triumph of the
proletarian revolution, its immediate and obvious result was
Bonaparte’s victory over parliament, of the executive power over the
legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of phrases.
In parliament the nation made its general will the law; that is, it
made the law of the ruling class its general will. It renounces all
will of its own before the executive power and submits itself to the
superior command of an alien, of authority. The executive power, in
contrast to the legislative one, expresses the heteronomy of a nation
in contrast to its autonomy. France therefore seems to have escaped the
despotism of a class only to fall back under the despotism of an
individual, and what is more, under the authority of an individual
without authority. The struggle seems to be settled in such a way that
all classes, equally powerless and equally mute, fall on their knees
before the rifle butt.

But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through
purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851, it had
completed half of its preparatory work; now it is completing the other
half. It first completed the parliamentary power in order to be able to
overthrow it. Now that it has achieved this, it completes the executive
power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up
against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its
forces of destruction against it. And when it has accomplished this
second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and
exult: Well burrowed, old mole!
[paraphrase from Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5: “Well said, old mole!”, also cited by Hegel in his Philosophy of History]

The executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military
organization, with its wide-ranging and ingenious state machinery, with
a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of
another half million – this terrifying parasitic body which enmeshes the
body of French society and chokes all its pores sprang up in the time
of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system which it
had helped to hasten. The seignorial privileges of the landowners and
towns became transformed into so many attributes of the state power,
the feudal dignitaries into paid officials, and the motley patterns of
conflicting medieval plenary powers into the regulated plan of a state
authority whose work is divided and centralized as in a factory.

The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all separate
local, territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order to create the
civil unity of the nation, was bound to develop what the monarchy had
begun, centralization, but at the same time the limits, the attributes,
and the agents of the governmental power. Napoleon completed this
state machinery. The Legitimate Monarchy and the July Monarchy added
nothing to it but a greater division of labor, increasing at the same
rate as the division of labor inside the bourgeois society created new
groups of interests, and therefore new material for the state
administration. Every common interest was immediately severed from the
society, countered by a higher, general interest, snatched from the
activities of society’s members themselves and made an object of
government activity – from a bridge, a schoolhouse, and the communal
property of a village community, to the railroads, the national wealth,
and the national University of France. Finally the parliamentary
republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself
compelled to strengthen the means and the centralization of
governmental power with repressive measures. All revolutions perfected
this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which alternately
contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state
structure as the chief spoils of the victor.

But under the absolute monarchy, during the first Revolution, and under
Napoleon the bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the class rule
of the bourgeoisie. Under the Restoration, under Louis Philippe, under
the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class,
however much it strove for power of its own.

Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself
completely independent. The state machinery has so strengthened itself
vis-à-vis civil society that the Chief of the Society of December 10
suffices for its head – an adventurer dropped in from abroad, raised
on the shoulders of a drunken soldiery which he bought with whisky and
sausages and to which he has to keep throwing more sausages. Hence the
low-spirited despair, the feeling of monstrous humiliation and
degradation that oppresses the breast of France and makes her gasp. She
feels dishonored.

And yet the state power is not suspended in the air. Bonaparte
represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at
that, the small-holding peasants.

Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed property and
the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of
the peasants, that is, the French masses. The chosen of the peasantry
is not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament but the
Bonaparte who dismissed the bourgeois parliament. For three years the
towns had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the December 10
election and in cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the
Empire. The election of December 10, 1848, has been consummated only by
the coup d’état of December 2, 1851.

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in
similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with
each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another
instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is
furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of
the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no
division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and
therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent,
no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is
almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs,
and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with
nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant
and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and
another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few
score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the
French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous
magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar
as millions of families live under conditions of existence that
separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from
those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the
latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local
interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of
their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political
organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are
therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own
name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot
represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative
must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over
them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the
other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The
political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its
final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to
itself.

Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the
miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them.
And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he
bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which
decrees: “Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.” After a twenty-year
vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is
consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea
of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of
the most numerous class of the French people.

But, it may be objected, what about the peasant uprisings in half of
France,[117] the raids of the army on the peasants, the mass incarceration
and transportation of the peasants?

Since Louis XIV, France has experienced no similar persecution of the
peasants “on account of demagogic agitation.” [118]

But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the
revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who
strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small
holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the
countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old
order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in
solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their
small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It
represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant;
not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not
his modern Cevennes [A peasant uprising in the Cevennes mountains in 1702-1705] but his modern Vendée.[119] [A peasant-backed uprising against the French Revolution in the French province of Vendée, in 1793]

The three years’ stern rule of the parliamentary republic freed a part
of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and revolutionized
them, even though superficially; but the bourgeoisie violently repulsed
them as often as they set themselves in motion. Under the parliamentary
republic the modern and the traditional consciousness of the French
peasant contended for mastery. The process took the form of an
incessant struggle between the schoolmasters and the priests. The
bourgeoisie struck down the schoolmasters. The peasants for the first
time made efforts to behave independently vis-à-vis the government.
This was shown in the continual conflict between the mayors and the
prefects. The bourgeoisie deposed the mayors. Finally, during the
period of the parliamentary republic, the peasants of different
localities rose against their own offspring, the army. The bourgeoisie
punished these peasants with sieges and executions. And this same
bourgeoisie now cries out against the stupidity of the masses, the vile
multitude that betrayed it to Bonaparte. The bourgeoisie itself has
violently strengthened the imperialism of the peasant class; it has
preserved the conditions that form the birthplaces of this species of
peasant religion. The bourgeoisie, in truth, is bound to fear the
stupidity of the masses so long as they remain conservative, and the
insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary.

In the uprisings after the coup d’état, a part of the French peasants
protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of December 10, 1848.
The school they had gone to since 1848 had sharpened their wits. But
they had inscribed themselves in the historical underworld; history
held them to their word, and the majority was still so implicated that
precisely in the reddest departments the peasant population voted
openly for Bonaparte. In their view, the National Assembly had hindered
his progress. He has now merely broken the fetters that the towns had
imposed on the will of the countryside. In some parts the peasants even
entertained the grotesque notion of a convention with Napoleon.

After the first Revolution had transformed the semi-feudal peasants
into freeholders, Napoleon confirmed and regulated the conditions in
which they could exploit undisturbed the soil of France which they had
only just acquired, and could slake their youthful passion for
property. But what is now ruining the French peasant is his small
holding itself, the division of the land and the soil, the property
form which Napoleon consolidated in France. It is exactly these
material conditions which made the feudal peasant a small-holding
peasant and Napoleon an emperor. Two generations sufficed to produce
the unavoidable result: progressive deterioration of agriculture and
progressive indebtedness of the agriculturist. The “Napoleonic”
property form, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the
condition of the emancipation and enrichment of the French countryfolk,
has developed in the course of this century into the law of their
enslavement and their pauperism. And just this law is the first of the
“Napoleonic ideas” which the second Bonaparte has to uphold. If he
still shares with the peasants the illusion that the cause of their
ruin is to be sought not in the small holdings themselves but outside
them – in the influence of secondary circumstances – his experiments
will shatter like soap bubbles when they come in contact with the
relations of production.

The economic development of small-holding property has radically
changed the peasants’ relations with the other social classes. Under
Napoleon the fragmentation of the land in the countryside supplemented
free competition and the beginning of big industry in the towns. The
peasant class was the ubiquitous protest against the recently
overthrown landed aristocracy. The roots that small-holding property
struck in French soil deprived feudalism of all nourishment. The
landmarks of this property formed the natural fortification of the
bourgeoisie against any surprise attack by its old overlords. But in
the course of the nineteenth century the urban usurer replaced the
feudal one, the mortgage replaced the feudal obligation, bourgeois
capital replaced aristocratic landed property. The peasant’s small
holding is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw
profits, interest, and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the
agriculturist himself to see to it how he can extract his wages. The
mortgage debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French
peasantry an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the
entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this
enslavement by capital toward which its development pushes it
unavoidably, has transformed the mass of the French nation into
troglodytes. Sixteen million peasants (including women and children)
dwell in caves, a large number of which have but one opening, others
only two and the most favored only three. Windows are to a house what
the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the
beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly
emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a
vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts
them into the alchemist’s caldron of capital. The Code Napoléon is now
nothing but the codex of distraints, of forced sales and compulsory
auctions. To the four million (including children, etc.) officially
recognized paupers, vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes in France
must be added another five million who hover on the margin of existence
and either have their haunts in the countryside itself or, with their
rags and their children, continually desert the countryside for the
towns and the towns for the countryside. Therefore the interests of the
peasants are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but are now
in opposition to bourgeois interests, to capital. Hence they find their
natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task it is to
overthrow the bourgeois order. But “strong and unlimited government” -
and this is the second “Napoleonic idea” that the second Napoleon has
to carry out – is called upon to defend this “material order” by
force. This “material order” also serves, in all Bonaparte’s
proclamations, as the slogan against the rebellious peasants.

In addition to the mortgage which capital imposes on it, the small
holding is burdened by taxes. Taxes are the life source of the
bureaucracy, the army, the priests, and the court – in short, of the
entire apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy
taxes are identical. By its very nature, small-holding property forms
a basis for an all-powerful and numberless bureaucracy. It creates a
uniform level of personal and economic relationships over the whole
extent of the country. Hence it also permits uniform action from a
supreme center on all points of this uniform mass. It destroys the
aristocratic intermediate steps between the mass of the people and the
power of the state. On all sides, therefore, it calls forth the direct
intrusion of this state power and the interposition of its immediate
organs. Finally, it produces an unemployed surplus population which can
find no place either on the land or in the towns and which perforce
reaches out for state offices as a sort of respectable alms, and
provokes the creation of additional state positions. By the new markets
which he opened with bayonets, and by the plundering of the Continent,
Napoleon repaid the compulsory taxes with interest. These taxes were a
spur to the industry of the peasant, whereas now they rob his industry
of its last resources and complete his defenselessness against
pauperism. An enormous bureaucracy, well gallooned and well fed, is the
“Napoleonic idea” which is most congenial to the second Bonaparte. How
could it be otherwise, considering that alongside the actual classes of
society, he is forced to create an artificial caste for which the
maintenance of his regime becomes a bread-and-butter question? Hence
one of his first financial operations was the raising of officials’
salaries to their old level and the creation of new sinecures.

Another “idée napoléonienne"
[Napoleonic idea] is the domination of the priests as an
instrument of government. But while at the time of their emergence the
small-holding owners, in their accord with society, in their dependence
on natural forces and submission to the authority which protected them
from above, were naturally religious, now that they are ruined by
debts, at odds with society and authority, and driven beyond their own
limitations, they have become naturally irreligious.

Heaven was quite a pleasing addition to the narrow strip of land just
won, especially as it makes the weather; it becomes an insult as soon
as it is thrust forward as a substitute for the small holding. The
priest then appears as only the anointed bloodhound of the earthly
police – another “idée napoléonienne.” The expedition against Rome will
take place in France itself next time, but in a sense opposite from
that of M. de Montalembert.[120]

Finally, the culminating “idée napoléonienne” is the ascendancy of the
army. The army was the “point d’ honneur” of the small-holding peasants,
it was they themselves transformed into heroes, defending their new
possessions against the outer world, glorifying their recently won
nationhood, plundering and revolutionizing the world. The uniform was
their own state costume; war was their poetry; the small holding,
enlarged and rounded off in imagination, was their fatherland, and
patriotism the ideal form of the sense of property. But the enemies
whom the French peasant now has to defend his property against are not
the Cossacks; they are the huissiers
[bailiffs] and the tax collectors.
The small holding no longer lies in the so-called fatherland but in the
registry of mortgages. The army itself is no longer the flower of the
peasant youth; it is the swamp flower of the peasant lumpen
proletariat. It consists largely of replacements, of substitutes, just
as the second Bonaparte is himself only a replacement, the substitute
for Napoleon. It now performs its deeds of valor by hounding the
peasants in masses like chamois, by doing gendarme duty; and if the
natural contradictions of his system chase the Chief of the Society of
December 10 across the French border, his army, after some acts of
brigandage, will reap, not laurels, but thrashings.

It is clear: All “idée napoléonienne” are ideas of the undeveloped small
holding in the freshness of its youth; they are a contradiction to the
outlived holdings. They are only the hallucinations of its death
struggle, words transformed into phrases, spirits transformed into
ghosts. But the parody of imperialism was necessary to free the mass of
the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure
form the opposition between state power and society. With the
progressive deterioration of small-holding property, the state
structure erected upon it collapses. The centralization of the state
that modern society requires arises only on the ruins of the
military-bureaucratic government machinery which was forged in
opposition to feudalism.

The condition of the French peasants provides us with the answer to the
riddle of the general elections of December 20 and 21, which bore the
second Bonaparte up Mount Sinai, not to receive laws but to give them.

Obviously the bourgeoisie now had no choice but to elect Bonaparte.
When the Puritans of the Council of Constance
[1414-18][121] complained of
the dissolute lives of the popes and wailed about the necessity for
moral reform, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly thundered at them: “Only the
devil in person can still save the Catholic Church, and you ask for
angels.” Similarly, after the coup d’état the French bourgeoisie cried
out: Only the Chief of the Society of December 10 can still save
bourgeois society! Only theft can still save property; only perjury,
religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order!

As the executive authority which has made itself independent, Bonaparte
feels it to be his task to safeguard “bourgeois order.” But the
strength of this bourgeois order lies in the middle class. He poses,
therefore, as the representative of the middle class and issues decrees
in this sense. Nevertheless, he is somebody solely because he has
broken the power of that middle class, and keeps on breaking it daily.
He poses, therefore, as the opponent of the political and literary
power of the middle class. But by protecting its material power he
revives its political power. Thus the cause must be kept alive, but
the effect, where it manifests itself, must be done away with. But this
cannot happen without small confusions of cause and effect, since in
their interaction both lose their distinguishing marks. New decrees
obliterate the border line. Bonaparte knows how to pose at the same
time as the representative of the peasants and of the people in
general, as a man who wants to make the lower classes happy within the
framework of bourgeois society. New decrees cheat the “true socialists”
of their governmental skill in advance. But above all, Bonaparte knows
how to pose as the Chief of the Society of December 10, as the
representative of the lumpen proletariat to which he himself, his
entourage, his government, and his army belong, and whose main object
is to benefit itself and draw California lottery prizes from the state
treasury. And he confirms himself as Chief of the Society of December
10 with decrees, without decrees, and despite decrees.

This contradictory task of the man explains the contradictions of his
government, the confused groping which tries now to win, now to
humiliate, first one class and then another, and uniformly arrays all
of them against him; whose uncertainty in practice forms a highly
comical contrast to the imperious, categorical style of the government
decrees, a style slavishly copied from the uncle.

Industry and commerce, hence the business affairs of the middle class,
are to prosper in hothouse fashion under the strong government: the
grant of innumerable railroad concessions. But the Bonapartist lumpen
proletariat is to enrich itself: those in the know play tripotage
[underhand dealings]
on the Exchange with the railroad concessions. But
no capital is forthcoming for the railroads: obligation of the Bank to
make advances on railroad shares. But at the same time the Bank is to
be exploited for personal gain and therefore must be cajoled: release
the Bank from the obligation to publish its report weekly; leonine
[from Aesop’s fable about the lion who made a contract in which one
partner got all the profits and the other all the disadvantages] agreement of the Bank with the government. The people are to be
given employment: initiation of public works. But the public works
increase the people’s tax obligations: hence reduction of taxes by an
attack on the rentiers, by conversion of the 5-percent bonds into 4½-percent.
But the middle class must again receive a sweetening:
hence a doubling of the wine tax for the people, who buy wine retail,
and a halving of the wine tax for the middle class, which drinks it
wholesale; dissolution of the actual workers’ associations, but
promises of miraculous future associations. The peasants are to be
helped: mortgage banks which hasten their indebtedness and accelerate
the concentration of property. But these banks are to be used to make
money out of the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans; no
capitalist wants to agree to this condition, which is not in the
decree, and the mortgage bank remains a mere decree, etc., etc.

Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all
classes. But he cannot give to one without taking from another. Just as
it was said of the Duke de Guise in the time of the Fronde that he was
the most obliging man in France because he gave all his estates to his
followers, with feudal obligations to him, so Bonaparte would like to
be the most obliging man in France and turn all the property and all
the labor of France into a personal obligation to himself. He would
like to steal all of France in order to make a present of it to France,
or rather in order to buy France anew with French money, for as the
Chief of the Society of December 10 he must buy what ought to belong to
him. And to the Institution of Purchase belong all the state
institutions, the Senate, the Council of State, the Assembly, the
Legion of Honor, the military medals, the public laundries, the public
works, the railroads, the general staff, the officers of the National
Guard, the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans. The means of
purchase is obtained by selling every place in the army and the
government machinery. But the most important feature of this process,
by which France is taken in order to give to her, are the percentages
that find their way into the pockets of the head and the members of the
Society of December 10 during the turnover. The witticism with which
Countess L., the mistress of M. de Morny, characterized the
confiscation of the Orleans estates – “It is the first vol [the word means both “flight” and “theft"] of the eagle” – is applicable to
every flight of this eagle, who is more like a raven.[123] He and his
follower; call out to one another like that Italian Carthusian
admonishing the miser who ostentatiously counted the goods on which he
could still live for years: “Tu fai conto sopra i beni, bisogna prima
far il conto sopra gli anni” [Thou countest thy goods, thou shouldst
first count thy years]. In order not to make a mistake in the years,
they count the minutes. At the court, in the ministries, at the head of
the administration and the army, a gang of blokes of whom the best that
can be said is that one does not know whence they come – these noisy,
disreputable, rapacious bohemians who crawl into gallooned coats with
the same grotesque dignity as the high dignitaries of Soulouque –
elbow their way forward. One can visualize clearly this upper stratum
of the Society of December 10 if one reflects that Veron-Crevel [A
dissolute philistine character in Balzac’s novel Cousin Bette]
is its preacher of morals and Granier de Cassagnac its thinker. When
Guizot, at the time of his ministry, turned this Granier of an obscure
newspaper into a dynastic opponent, he used to boast of him with the
quip: “C’est le roi des droles”
[He is the king of buffoons]. It
would be wrong to recall either the Regency[124] or Louis XV in connection
with Louis Bonaparte’s court and clique. For “often before France has
experienced a government of mistresses, but never before a government
of kept men.” [Quoted from Mme. de Girardin.]

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the
same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public
gaze on himself, as Napoleon’s successor, by springing constant
surprises – that is to say, under the necessity of arranging a coup
d’état in miniature every day – Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois
economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to
the Revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution and makes
others lust for it, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at
the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo,
profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous. The cult
of the Holy Tunic of Trier[125] [A Catholic relic, allegedly taken from
Christ when he was dying, preserved in the cathedral of Marx’s native
city] he duplicates in Paris in the cult of the Napoleonic
imperial mantle. But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the
shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come
crashing down from the top of the Vendôme Column.[126]