Karl Marx

French Affairs

From the English.

["New-York Daily Tribune" No. 5862, 7 February 1860]

Paris, 17 January 1860

Louis Napoleon has been converted to free trade and is about to open a new era of peace. He will hardly fail to be admitted into the Society of Friends, and the year 1860 will go down in the annals of Europe as the first year of the millennium. This extraordinary news, making the rounds of the London press, originates from a letter of Louis Bonaparte to Minister of State Fould, published in the *Moniteur* of 15 January 1860. The first effect of the letter was a fall in government securities in Paris and a rise in the same in London.

Now, above all, it seems necessary to examine somewhat more closely the *corpus delicti*, that is to say, the imperial letter on which the whole edifice of the new era is to be erected. Louis Bonaparte informs M. Fould that “the moment has come to devise means for a further development of the various branches of the national wealth.” An almost identical announcement had appeared in the *Moniteur* of January 1852, when the *coup d’état* inaugurated the era of the *Crédit mobilier*, the *Crédit foncier* and other *Crédits ambulants*. And that is not all. Since that eventful epoch, every annual financial bulletin issued under the auspices of the French autocrat has laid particular stress on the fact, supported by a vast array of official figures, that the Empire had kept its word and that all branches of national industry had *really* developed mightily under its solicitous guidance.

Thus one finds oneself in a dilemma. Either the proclamation of the *coup d’état* came too early, and the financial bulletins issued after the *coup d’état* were false, or the present declaration is a mere fraud.

In any case, it seems undeniable, as the new imperial manifesto itself proves, that the economic advantages which French society was to obtain through the resurrection of Bonapartism do not refer to the past but to the future. Let us now consider by what new invention the happy economic change is to be brought about.

First, Bonaparte informs M. Fould, who must have been somewhat surprised by his master’s important discovery, that “our foreign trade must be developed through the exchange of products” – indeed, an astonishing truism. Since foreign trade consists in the exchange of national products for foreign products, it cannot be denied that, in order to develop French foreign trade, the exchange of French products must be developed. The principal result which Louis Bonaparte expects from the intended new development of French foreign trade is “to diffuse prosperity among the working classes,” whose condition has deteriorated markedly in the last ten years, as the man of the *coup d’état* tacitly admitted by this statement and as modern French writers have shown (for example, one need only recall the works of the late M. Colins). Unfortunately, even the most superficial observer is struck by a significant fact. French foreign trade *has* made immense progress from 1848 to 1860. Having amounted to about 875 million francs in 1848, it had risen to more than twice that sum in 1859. An increase in trade of more than 100 per cent in the short space of ten years is almost without precedent. The causes of this increase are to be found in California, Australia, the United States, etc., but certainly not in the archives of the Tuileries. Yet we see that, despite the enormous increase of French foreign trade in the last ten years – an increase attributable to fundamental upheavals on the world market, wholly beyond the petty control of the French police – the condition of the mass of the French people has not improved. Consequently, some forces must have been at work which counteracted the natural results of the increase in trade. If the development of French foreign trade palpably demonstrates how easily and comfortably the Second Empire could indulge its costly whims, the impoverishment of the nation, despite the doubled exports, reveals at whose expense this easy and comfortable imperial life was purchased. If the Empire could not exist *without* the development of French foreign trade, then this upswing in trade could not, precisely *because* of the Empire, bear the fruits to be expected.

The Austrian Emperor had eliminated the deficit of his countries by a ukase; why should not Louis Bonaparte likewise command the rise of French foreign trade by a ukase? He fears, however, an obstacle on his path.

“We must above all,” he says, “improve our agriculture and free our industry from all internal hindrances by which it is kept on a low level.”

The urgent necessity of improving French agriculture is the constant theme of French economists. But how is Louis Bonaparte to solve the problem? First, he will grant agriculture loans at moderate “interest.” French agriculture is, as is well known, the affair of more than two-thirds of the French nation. Will Louis Bonaparte impose taxes on the remaining third in order to grant loans “at a moderate rate of interest” to the majority of the nation? The idea is, in fact, too absurd to be taken seriously. Besides, it was the declared aim of his *Crédits fonciers* to furnish agriculture with loan capital. The only thing in which they have proved themselves is not the improvement of agriculture, but the ruin of small peasants and the acceleration of the concentration of landed property. Basically, we have here once again the old, worn-out universal remedy – credit institutions. No one will deny that the Second Empire is epoch-making in the development of the French credit system, but also that it overshot the mark and that, together with its own credit, its credit-promoting influence went to the devil. The only new thing now seems to be, after the semi-official credit machinery has been strained and claimed to the utmost, Louis Bonaparte’s dream of transforming the government itself into a direct loan office. Since any attempt of this kind is very dangerous, it would necessarily fail just as the attempt with the grain stores which were to drive up corn prices. Irrigation, drainage, and clearing of the soil are, in their way, very good measures, but their only possible result is the increase of agricultural products. They cannot and are not intended to raise the prices of these products. Even if Louis Bonaparte were to find, by some miraculous methods, ways and means of carrying out these improvements on a national scale, how are these measures to eliminate the depreciation of agricultural produce from which the French peasant has had to suffer in these five years? Furthermore, Louis Napoleon wants to achieve a gradual improvement in the means of communication. The coolness with which this proposal is made exceeds even Bonapartist impudence. Just consider the development of French railways since 1850. The annual expenditure on these “means of communication” amounted to approximately 175,000,000 francs from 1845 to 1847; from 1848 to 1851 about 125,000,000 francs; from 1852 to 1854 nearly 250,000,000 (double the expenditure from 1848 to 1851); from 1854 to 1856 nearly 550,000,000, from 1857 to 1859 about 500,000,000. When the general crisis broke over the commercial world in 1857, the French government was appalled at the immense sums still required for the railways under construction and for those already authorised. It prohibited the railway companies from raising more than 212,500,000 francs annually by the issue of shares, debentures, etc., forbade the formation of new companies, and set fixed limits to the extent of the annual works. And in spite of all this, Louis Bonaparte talks as if railways, canals, etc., had only now to be invented! A forced reduction of the canal dues, which he hints at, is of course an undertaking that involves the breach of state contracts, is deterrent to the capital already vested in this enterprise, and is certainly not calculated to direct new capital into the same path. Finally, in order to find a market for agricultural products, factory industry must be stimulated. However, as we have already established, factory industry has made immense progress under the Second Empire, but despite all this, despite the unprecedented growth of exports, despite the colossal development of railways and other means of communication, despite the extreme straining of a credit system previously unknown in France, agriculture is in a slump, and the French peasants are going to ruin. How are we to explain this strange phenomenon? The fact that 255,000,000 francs are added annually to the consolidated debt, not to mention the blood tax for the army and navy, gives an adequate answer to this question. The Empire itself is the great nightmare, the burden of which grows faster than the productive forces of the French nation.

Louis Bonaparte’s recipe for French industry, when we deduct all that is mere phrase or still lies in the distant future, is simply this: abolition of the duties on wool and cotton and a gradual reduction of the duties on sugar and coffee. This is all very well, but it requires all the credulity of English free traders to call such measures free trade. Anyone familiar with political economy knows very well that the abolition of duties on agricultural raw materials formed a main point in the mercantile system of the eighteenth century. These “internal hindrances” weighing upon French production are nothing compared with the *octrois* [municipal excises on consumer goods], which divide France into as many independent districts as there are towns, thereby paralysing the internal exchange of products and hindering the creation of wealth by cutting down their consumption. These *octrois*, however, have risen under the imperial regime and will continue to rise. The reduction of the duties on wool and cotton is to be compensated for by the abolition of the sinking fund, so that thereby the last restriction on the growth of the national debt is removed, if only nominally.

On the other hand, forests must be felled, ground elevations levelled, and marshes drained – and all this with the 160,000,000 francs which are said to represent the available remainder of the last war loans, to be spent in three annual instalments, which makes an annual average of less than 54,000,000 francs. But the embanking of the Loire alone, which the imperial Cagliostro so grandiloquently announced about five years ago and which was never heard of again, would swallow up the whole sum in less than three months! What remains, then, of the manifesto? “The dawn of an era of peace,” as if this era had not long ago been proclaimed in Bordeaux. *“L’Empire c’est la paix.”*