Karl Marx

Mazzini and Napoleon

Written on March 30, 1858.

From the English.

["New-York Daily Tribune" No. 5321 of May 11, 1858]

Mr. Mazzini has recently addressed a letter to the French Emperor which, in a literary respect, must occupy the first place among his writings. Only a few traces remain of that spurious pathos, that bombastic grandiloquence and diffuseness, that prophetic mysticism which are so characteristic of many of his writings and embody, in a way, the peculiar traits of that school of Italian literature of which he is the founder. An extension of his views is also perceptible. Mazzini has hitherto appeared as the head of the republican formalists in Europe. Exclusively interested in the political form of the state, they had no eye for the organisation of society upon which the political superstructure rests. Pluming themselves on a false idealism, they considered it beneath their dignity to acquaint themselves with economic facts. Nothing is easier than to be an idealist at other people’s expense. A surfeited person may easily turn up his nose at the materialism of hungry people who demand vulgar bread instead of sublime ideas. The triumvirs of the Roman Republic of 1848, who left the peasants of the Campagna in a condition of slavery far worse than that of their ancestors under the Roman emperors, were quite happy to expatiate at length on the debased spiritual condition of the countryside.

Every genuine advance in modern historiography has been brought about by descending from the political surface into the depths of social life. By exploring the different phases of the development of landed property in ancient Rome, Dureau de La Malle supplied the key to the destiny of that world-conquering city, beside which Montesquieu’s reflections on its greatness and on its decay appear almost like the declamation of a schoolboy. The venerable Lelewel, through his painstaking investigation of the economic relations that transformed the Polish peasant from a freeman into a serf, has done more to shed light on the subjugation of his homeland than a whole swarm of writers whose intellectual capital consists simply of denunciations of Russia. Nor does Mr. Mazzini now disdain to dwell upon social realities, upon the interests of the different classes, upon exports and imports, upon the prices of necessaries, upon rents and other such vulgar things; perhaps he is struck by the great, if not indeed mortal, shock which has been inflicted on the Second Empire, not by the manifestoes of the democratic committees, but by the commercial crisis which began in New York and has now seized the whole world. One can only hope that he will not stop at this point but, free from false pride, will proceed to reform his entire political catechism in the light of economic science. His letter to Louis Napoleon opens with this powerful address:

“The time when your destiny is accomplished is drawing near; the imperial tide is visibly ebbing. You feel it, too. All the measures you have initiated in France since January 14, all those diplomatic notes and invitations you have scattered to the four winds since that fateful day, betray the restlessness of terror. A feeling of the sharpest mortal agony, reminiscent of the torments of Macbeth, gnaws at your soul and reveals itself in everything you do or say. A presentiment steals over your inner being that summa dies et ineluctabile fatum <the final day and the inescapable fate (Virgil, Aeneid, Book II)> is at hand. The ‘Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King’ – the pretender, president and usurper – are judged. The spell is broken. The conscience of mankind is aroused; it stares at you implacably, it challenges you, it scrutinises your actions and demands an account of your promises. From this moment your fate is sealed. You may now live for months – years no longer.”

Having thus announced the downfall of the Second Empire, Mazzini compares the present economic condition of France with Napoleon’s glowing promises of universal prosperity:

“When you lawlessly seized power, you promised, as an atonement for its origin, to lead restless, agitated, agitation-stirring France to peace. Is imprisoning, gagging, banishing – governing? Is the gendarme a teacher? Is the spy an apostle of morality and mutual trust? You told the uneducated French peasant that with your empire a new era would dawn for him and that the burdens under which he groans would disappear, one after the other. Has even a single one disappeared? Can you show even a single improvement in his lot – has even a single element of taxation been abolished? Can you explain why the peasant is now getting himself inscribed in the Marianne? Can you deny that the absorption of the funds once destined for agriculture by the channels of industrial speculation you have opened has deprived the countryman of the possibility of obtaining advances for the purchase of tools and for the improvement of the soil? You baited the misguided working man when you declared that you would be the Empereur du peuple <Emperor of the people>, a sort of remodelled Henry IV, that you would provide him with constant work, high wages, and la poule au pot <the chicken in the pot>. Is not just now la poule au pot somewhat dear in France? Is not the rent, are not some of the most necessary things of life even dearer? You have laid out new streets – new lines of communication, designed in accordance with the strategic requirements of your policy of repression – have pulled down and rebuilt. But does the majority of the working class belong to the favoured building trade? Can you keep on turning Paris and the larger provincial cities upside down indefinitely, in order to create for the proletaire a source of work and earnings? Can you even dream of making such an artificial, temporary expedient a substitute for regular, normal progress and remunerative production? Is the demand for production now at a satisfactory level? Are not three-fifths of the joiners, carpenters and mechanics in Paris now without work? To the easily frightened, easily enchanted bourgeoisie you whispered fantastic dreams in the ear, hopes of redoubled industrial activity, of new sources of profit, of an Eldorado of buoyant exports and international trade. Where are they? Stagnation broods over the creative life of France with you, commercial orders are falling off, capital is beginning to withdraw. Like the barbarian you felled the tree to pluck the fruit. You artificially fanned a wild, immoral, promise-all-and-fulfil-nothing speculation; by means of boastfully announced, gigantic, inflated schemes you drew the savings of the small capitalists from the four corners of France to Paris and withdrew them from the only true permanent sources of national wealth – agriculture, handicrafts and industry. These savings were swallowed up, they disappeared in the hands of a few dozen great speculators; they were lavished excessively upon unproductive luxury or noiselessly and cautiously – I could name members of your family – sent to safe countries abroad. Half of these schemes have sunk into oblivion and non-existence. Some of their originators are travelling abroad as a precaution. You face a discontented bourgeoisie, all your normal resources are exhausted, you labour under the nightmare of having spent about five hundred million francs upon unproductive public works in all the larger towns of France; you have a glaring deficit of three hundred million in your last budget; the city of Paris is enormously in debt; and you can indicate no way out, unless you contract a new loan of one hundred and sixty million, and not in your own name – it would have no success – but in the name of the town council itself, and in order to meet the interest charge the barriers of the hated octroi would have to be advanced as far as the outer fortifications. The remedy will weigh heavily upon the working class and embitter the hitherto docile suburbs against you. You are at the end of your artificial contrivances; from now on everything you undertake to master the financial difficulties of your situation will mean a step in the ruinous descent. Hitherto you have lived on an unlimited series of loans and credits; but where is your guarantee for extended credit? Rome and Napoleon plundered a world; you have only France to plunder. Rome’s and Napoleon’s armies lived by conquest; yours cannot. You may dream of conquest, but you cannot and dare not embark upon it. The Roman dictators and your uncle led conquering armies; however much you may love gilded parade uniforms, I doubt your ability to lead even a few assembled battalions.”

From the material prospects of the Second Empire, Mazzini turns to its moral ones and is naturally somewhat dismayed when he sums up the proofs for the assertion that liberty does not wear a Bonapartist livery. Liberty, not only in her bodily forms but in her very soul, her intellectual life, has shrivelled under the vulgar touch of these resurrectionists of a bygone epoch. Consequently, the representatives of intellectual France, who have in no wise distinguished themselves by an excessive delicacy of political conscience and have never failed to rally round every régime, from the Regent <Philippe d’Orléans> to Robespierre, from Louis XIV to Louis-Philippe, from the First Empire to the Second Republic, have for the first time in French history fallen away en masse from an existing government.

“From Thiers to Guizot, from Cousin to Villemain, from Michelet to Jean Reynaud, intellectual France recoils from your defiling touch. Your men are Veuillot, the defender of the St. Bartholomew’s Night and the Inquisition, Granier de Cassagnac, the patron of Negro slavery, and the like. To find a man worthy of supporting your pamphlet addressed to England, you must look round for one who is an apostate from Legitimism and an apostate from Republicanism.”

Mazzini then hits upon the true significance of the events of January 14, by declaring that the projectiles which missed the Emperor pierced the Empire and laid bare the hollowness of its boastings.

Only a short while ago you boasted to Europe that you possessed the heart of France, which, tranquil, happy and unshakable, praised you as its saviour. A few months passed, the explosion in the Rue Lapelletier was heard, and now, after seven years of unlimited rule, by your wild, precipitate measures of repression, by your appeals to Europe, half threatening, half pleading, by the military fragmentation of the country carried out by you, with a swashbuckler in the Ministry of the Interior, with an overwhelming, concentrated army, after purging the national ranks of all the feared leading men, you declare that you cannot live and rule unless France is turned into a gigantic Bastille and Europe into a simple imperial police station … Yes, the Empire has proved to be a lie. You shaped it, Sire, in your own image. With the exception of Talleyrand, no man in Europe has lied more than you in the last fifty years; and that is the secret of your temporary power.

The lies of the saviour of society are then recapitulated from 1831, when he joined the insurrectionary movement of the Roman population against the Pope as “a holy cause”, down to 1851, when a few days before the coup d’état he told the army: “I shall ask nothing of you that goes beyond my right, which is recognised by the constitution”, and to 2 December itself, when the final outcome of his usurpation projects was still undecided and he proclaimed that “it was his duty to protect the Republic”. And finally Mazzini tells Napoleon bluntly that without England he would long since have been defeated by the revolution. After then refuting Napoleon’s claim that he had founded the alliance between France and England, he concludes with the words:

“Whatever the hypocritical, dissembling diplomacy may say, you, Sire, stand now alone in Europe.”