THE ENGLISH ALLIANCE

Paris, April 22, 1858

The Anglo-French alliance has taken a new turn since Dr. Bernard’s acquittal***° and the public enthusiasm that cheered it. In
the first instance, being shrewd enough to understand that the
“heart of England” spoke not “in the starched compliments with
which the municipality of Dover overwhelmed the frank nature of
the Duke of Malakoff”, but rather “in the infamous huzzas raised
by the people in the Court of Old Bailey,” the Univers proclaimed
England not only a “den of assassins,” but a people of assassins,
juries and judges included.” The original proposition of the
colonels**’ is thus affirmed on a broader basis. At the heels of the
Univers, in steps the Constitutionnel with an article appearing at the
head of its columns, and signed by M. Renée,‘ the son-in-law of
Mr. Macquard, who in his turn is the known amanuensis,
confidant, and factotum of Bonaparte. If the Univers had taken
up the colonels’ definition of the English people, while enlarging
its meaning, the Constitutionnel repeats their menaces, only that it
tries to back the exasperation of the barracks by the alleged
indignation of the “towns and rural districts.” Affecting that tone
of wounded moral sensibility so peculiar to the meretricious
literature of the second Empire, it exclaims:

“We will not dwell at any length on such an acquittal, which throws an
unheard-of scandal on public morality; for what man of honor in France or
England could entertain a doubt of Bernard’s guilt? We will only inform those of

a “Trial and acquittal of Simon Bernard...”, The Times, No. 22971, April 19,
1858.— Ed. :

¢ Am. Renée, “L’acquittement de Bernard a causé...”, Le Constitutionnel, No. 111,
April 21, 1858.— Ed.

516 Karl ‘Marx

our neighbors who desire the muintenance of good relations between the two countries,
that if, by misfortune, the address pronounced by Bernard’s counsel—that address
which was allowed to teem with calumny and insult against the Emperor, against
the nation which elected him, against the army, and against our institutions— was
circulated in the towns, barracks, and rural districts of France” (a curious position
this, of the barracks, between the towns and rural! districts!) ‘it would be difficult for
Government, with the best intention, to stay the consequences of public indignation.”

So far so good. On the mere chance whether or not Mr. James’s
speech,* advertised by the Constitutionnel itself,” be or be not
circulated in France, it will then depend whether or not France
shall rush upon England. But after this quasi-declaration of war,
there follows, a day later, a curious and startling winding-up in the
Patrie. The French invasion is to be averted, but only by a new
turn to be given to the Anglo-French alliance. Bernard’s acquittal
has revealed the rising power of anarchy in British society. Lord
Derby is to save society in England in the same way as Bonaparte
has saved it in France. Such is the upshot of the alliance, and such
is its conditio sine qua non. The Earl of Derby, it is added, is a
“man of immense talent, and of almost royal alliances,” and
consequently the man to save society in England!* The English
daily papers cling to the weakness, tergiversation, and infirmity of
purpose, betrayed in this alternation of rage, menace and sophism.
The Paris correspondent of The Daily News imagines hiniself to
have solved the riddle of these dissolving views exhibited in the
Univers, the Constitutionnel, and the Patrie, by dwelling upon the
well-known fact that Bonaparte has a double set of advisers—the
drunken revelers of the evening, and the sober counselors of the
morning. He smells in the articles of the Univers and the
Constitutionnel the fumes of Chateau Maryaux and cigars, and in
the article of the Patrie the showers of the cold water bath. But
the same double set acted during Bonaparte’s duel with the
French Republic. The one, after January, 1849, threatened, in its
litte evening journals, with a coup d’état, while the other, in the
heavy columns of the Moniteur, gave them the lie direct. Still it was
not in the “starched” articles of the Moniteur, but in the drunken
“huzzas” of the Pouvoir, that the shadow of coming events was
traced. We are, however, far from believing that Bonaparte ts

4 FE. James’ speech at the court hearing of S. Bernard’s case on April 16, 1858,
The Times, No. 22970, April 17, 1853.— Ed.

b “Affaire Simon Bernard.—Complicité dans lattentat du 14 janvier”, Le
Constitutionnel, No. 108, April 18, 1858.— Ed.

© Indispensable condition.— Ed.

4 The Times, No. 22975, April 23, 1858, “France”.— Ed.

The English Alliance 517

possessed of the means of successfully crossing the “broad ditch.” *
The comical lucubrations in that line, which The N. Y. Herald had
taken upon itself to publish, are sure to raise a smile on the lips
even of mere tyros in military science. But we are decidedly of
opinion that Bonaparte, a civilian, it ought never to be forgotten,
at the head of a military Government, has, in the Patrie, put the
last and the only possible interpretation on the Anglo-French
alliance which will satisfy his “colonels.” He finds himself in a
situation at once the most grotesque and the most dangerous. To
impose upon foreign Governments, he must clap on the sword. To
soothe the sword-bearers, and prevent them from taking his
rhodomontades in real good earnest, he must recur to such
impossible fictiones juris as that the Anglo-French alliance means
the saving of society in England in the approved Bonapartist
fashion. Of course, facts must clash with his doctrines, and the
upshot, if his reign is not, as we are inclined to think, cut short by
raised, in mad-brain adventures in some expédition de Boulogne**
on an enlarged scale. The Emperor will subside into the
adventurer, as the adventurer has been converted into the
Emperor. |

In the mean time, while the Patrie has spoken the last word
Bonaparte can utter as to the meaning of the Anglo-French
alliance, it is worth the while to direct attention to the manner in
which this alliance is now spoken of among the governing classes
of England. In this respect an article of The London Economist,
entitled “The French Alliance, its character, its value and its price,’
claims peculiar notice. It is written with studied pedantry, such as
fits the position of an ex-Secretary of the Treasury under
Palmerston’s Administration, and an expounder of the economical
views of English capitalists. Mr. Wilson sets out with the thesis that
“the thing gained may not be exactly the thing bargained for.”
“Scarcely,” he says, “any estimate of the value of a real alliance
between France and England can be too high;” but then there
exist different sorts of alliances, real ones and artificial ones,
genuine alliances and alliances of a hot-house growth, “natural”
ones and “governmental” ones, “governmental” alliances and
“personal” alliances. In the first place, The Economist gives full
swing to his “imagination;” and it may be remarked with respect
to The Economist, what has been said with respect to lawyers, that

4 The Channel.— Ed.

518 ; Karl Marx

the more prosaic the man the more tricks imagination is able to
play with him. He can scarcely trust his
“imagination to dwell on the influence which a real alliance between the two

great peoples which stand at the head of modern civilization would exercise on the
destinies of Europe and the fortune and felicity of all other lands.”

Still he is forced to admit that, although he hopes and believes
the two nations to be “ripening” for a genuine alliance, they “are
not ripe for it yet.” If, then, England and France are not yet ripe
for a genuine, national alliance, the question will naturally arise, of
what sort is the present Anglo-French alliance?

“Our alliance of late,’ confesses the ex-member of the Palmerston Administration and the oracle of English capitalists, “has been to a great extent, we admit,
unavoidably with the Government rather than with the nation—with the Emperor
rather than the Empire—with Louis Bonaparte rather than with France; and
further, in the value we have set upon the alliance and the price we have paid for
it, we have somewhat lost sight of this material and weighty fact.”

Bonaparte, of course, is the chosen of the French nation, and all
that bosh, but, unfortunately,

“he represents only the numerical and not the intellectual majority of the
French people. By mischance, it so happens that the classes which stand aloof from
him comprise precisely those parties whose opinions on nearly all the great
questions of civilization, are analogous to our own.”

Having thus in most cautious and civil language, and in
circumlocutory sentences which we will not discomfort the reader
with, laid down the axiom that the present so-called Anglo-French
alliance is rather governmental than national, The Economist goes
the length of confessing that it is more personal even than purely
governmental.

“Louis Napoleon,” he says, “has hinted more plainly than became the head of a
great nation that he was our especial friend in France—that he, rather than his
people, desired and sustained the English alliance; and it may be that we have
acquiesced in this view of the matter more readily and fully than was perfectly
prudent and sincere.” #

Take it all in all, the Anglo-French alliance is a spurious,
adulterated article—an alliance with Louis Bonaparte, but not an
alliance with France. The question, therefore, naturally arises,
whether that spurious article was worth the price paid for it? Here
The Economist beats his own bosom and cries, in the name of the
English governing classes, Pater, peccavi! In the first place,

* Here and below The Economist, No. 764, April 17, 1858.— Ed.
b “Father, I have sinned”, Luke 15:18.— Ed.

The English Alliance 519

England is a constitutional country, while Bonaparte is an
autocrat.

“We owed to ourselves that our frank and loyal courtesy toward the de facto
sovereign of France should be allowed to ripen and to warm into cordial and
affectionate admiration only as far and as fast as his policy turned out such as we
could honestly and righteously approve.”

Instead of applying thus a sliding scale to their Bonapartism, the
English people, a constitutional people,

“have lavished on an Emperor who had destroyed the constitutional liberties of
his. subjects, attentions such as were never before bestowed on a constitutional king
who had granted and respected them. And when he was angry and irritated, we
have stooped to soothe him by language of fulsome adulation which sounded
marvelous from English lips. Our proceedings and our language have alienated all
those sections of the French people in whose eyes Louis Napoleon is either a
usurper or a military despot. It has especially irritated and disgusted the
Parliamentary party in France, whether “Republican or Orleanist.”

The Economist discovers at last that this prostration before a
lucky usurper was far from ‘prudent.

“It is impossible,” he says, “to believe that the existing régime in France can be
the permanent one under which that energetic and restless nation will consent to
live.... Is it wise, therefore, so to ally ourselves with a passing phase of government in
France as to excite the enmity of its future and more permanent development?”

Moreover, the English alliance was more necessary to Bonaparte
than his alliance to England. In 1852, he was an adventurer—a
successful one, but still an adventurer.

“He was not recognized in Europe; it was questionable whether he would be
recognized. But England promptly and unhesitatingly accepted him; acknowledged
his title deeds at once; admitted him to the circle of royal exclusiveness, and gave
him thus currency among the courts of Europe.” “Nay, more, by the exchange of
visits and cordial coalitions, our Court allowed acquaintanceship to ripen into
intimacy.... Those enterprising moneyed and commercial classes, by whom it was
especially important to him to be supported, saw at once how vast was the strength
he gained by the closeness and cordiality of the alliance with England.”

That alliance was necessary for him, and he “would have bought
it at almost any price.” Did the English Government prove their
commercial acumen and wonted sharpness in fixing that price?
They asked no price at all; they insisted upon. no condition
whatever; but, like Oriental satraps, crawled in the dust while
handing to him the gift of the alliance. No infamy on his part was
colossal enough to make them halt for one moment in their race
“of thriftless generosity,” as The Economist calls it—of reckless
flunkeyism, as we should call it.

“It would be hard to prove,” confesses the English sinner, “that of all his
various measures for discountenancing Protestantism, for repressing thought, for
destroying municipal action, for reducing Senates and Chambers to a mockery, we
have manifested our dissatisfaction with a single one by even so much as a passing
coolness or a casual frown.” “Whatever he has done, whomsoever he has
proscribed, how many journals he has seized or repressed, whatever the flimsy
pretexts on which he has dismissed honorable and eminent professors from their
posts—our language has still been the same; he has still been this great man, this
wise and sagacious statesman, this eminent and firm ruler.”

Not .only have the English thus fostered, supported and
promoted his abominable domestic policy, but, as The Economist
avows, allowed him to hamper, modify, emasculate and degrade
their foreign policy.

bd

“Yo continue longer in such a false position,” concludes The Economist, “may
redound neither to our honor nor to our profit, nor to the benefit of the
commonwealth of nations.”

Compare this declaration with that of the Patrie, and there can
remain no doubt that the Anglo-French alliance is gone, and with
it the only international prop of the second Empire.