The June Revolution

** The Paris workers have been crushed by superior force, they have
No. 29, 29 June 1848
Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
not succumbed to it. They are beaten, but their adversaries are vanquished.
The momentary triumph of brutal force is purchased with the
destruction of all the illusions and fancies of the February Revolution, with the dissolution of the whole old-republican party, with the
splitting of the French nation into two nations, the nation of
owners and the nation of workers. The tricolour republic now bears only
one colour, the colour of the defeated, the colour of blood. It has
become a red republic.
No republican reputation, whether of the National or of the
Réforme, on the people’s side! Without other leaders, without other means than
the insurrection itself, it resisted the united bourgeoisie and soldiery longer
than ever any French dynasty, furnished with the whole military
apparatus, resisted a fraction of the bourgeoisie united with the people. So that the last illusion of the people might vanish, so that
the break with the past might be complete, the usual poetic appurtenance of the French émeute, the enthusiastic
bourgeois youth, the pupils of the école polytechnique, the three-cornered
hats, had to take the side of the suppressors. The pupils of the medical faculty had to deny the wounded plebeians the aid of
science. Science does not exist for the plebeian
who committed the unspeakable, the unsayable crime of daring once
to stake his own existence, instead of staking it for Louis Philippe
or for Monsieur Marrast.
The last official remnant of the February Revolution, the executive commission, has dissolved like a phantom before the gravity of events.
Lamartine’s flares have been transformed into Cavaignac’s
incendiary rockets.
La Fraternité, the brotherhood of the opposing classes,
of which the one exploits the other, this fraternité, proclaimed in February, inscribed in large letters upon the brow of Paris, upon
every prison, upon every barracks – its true, unadulterated, its prosaic expression, is – civil war, civil war in its
most terrible form, the war of labour and of capital. This
brotherhood flamed before all the windows of Paris on the evening of
25 June, when the Paris of the bourgeoisie illuminated, while the Paris of the
proletariat burned, bled, groaned.
The brotherhood lasted exactly as long as the interest of the bourgeoisie was fraternally linked with the interest of the proletariat. Pedants of the
old revolutionary tradition of 1793, socialist systematisers, who begged the bourgeoisie on the people’s behalf and who were permitted
to hold long sermons and to compromise themselves for so long
as the proletarian lion needed to be lulled to sleep; republicans
who demanded the whole old bourgeois order minus the crowned
head; dynastic oppositionists to whom chance palmed off
the overthrow of a dynasty in place of a change of ministry; legitimists who wished to throw off not the livery, but only to alter its cut – these were the allies with whom the people made its
February. What it instinctively hated in Louis Philippe was not
Louis Philippe, but the crowned rule of one class, capital on the throne. But, always magnanimous, it imagined it had
destroyed its enemy after it had overthrown the enemy of its enemies, the
common enemy.
The February Revolution was the beautiful revolution, the revolution of
universal sympathy, because the antagonisms which erupted in it against the monarchy slumbered peacefully side by side, undeveloped,
because the social struggle which formed its background had won only an airy
existence, the existence of the phrase, of the word. The June Revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution, because
the phrase has been replaced by the thing, because the republic laid bare
the head of the monster itself by knocking off the shielding and concealing crown.
Order! was the battle-cry of Guizot! Order! cried Sébastiani, the
Guizotin, when Warsaw became Russian. Order! cries Cavaignac, the
brutal echo of the French National Assembly and of the republican bourgeoisie.
Order! thundered his canister-shot as it tore open the body of the
proletariat.
None of the innumerable revolutions of the French bourgeoisie since
1789 was an attempt upon order, for it allowed the rule of the
class, it allowed the slavery of the workers, it allowed the bourgeois order
to persist, however often the political form of this rule and of this
slavery might change. June has laid hands on this order. Woe unto
June!
Under the provisional government it was seemly, and more than that, it
was a necessity that the magnanimous workers – who, as was printed in thousands of official placards: “placed three months of misery at the disposal of the Republic” – be preached to; it was simultaneously policy and sentimental enthusiasm
to preach to them that the February Revolution had been made in their own
interest and that in the February Revolution the interests of the workers above all
were at stake. Since the opening of the National Assembly – things became prosaic. It was only a matter now of leading
labour back to its old conditions, as Minister Trélat put it.
And so the workers had fought in February in order to be thrown into an
industrial crisis.
The business of the National Assembly consists in making February
unhappen – at least for the workers – and flinging them back into the old
relations. But even this did not happen, because it is as little in the
power of an assembly as of a king to call to an
industrial crisis of a universal character: halt, this far and no further! The
National Assembly, in its brutal eagerness to be done with the vexatious
February phrases, did not even take the measures that were possible on the ground of the old relations. The Paris workers between the ages of 17 and 25
it presses into the army or flings onto the pavement; the foreign workers it banishes from Paris to the Sologne, without even paying them the
monies belonging to their pass; to the grown Parisians it provisionally assures a bread of charity in militarily organised workshops,
on the condition that they take part in no popular assembly,
i.e., on the condition that they cease to be republicans.
Neither the sentimental rhetoric after February sufficed,
nor the brutal legislation after 15 May. The matter had to be decided factually, practically. Have you made the February Revolution for yourselves,
you scoundrels, or for us? The bourgeoisie posed the question in such a way that it had to
be answered in June – with canister-shot and barricades.
And yet, as a people’s representative said on 25 June, the
whole National Assembly is struck by stupor. It is stunned as question
and answer drown the pavement of Paris in blood; stunned, some because
their illusions dissolve in the gunsmoke, the others because they cannot
conceive how the people dares to represent its own very own interests independently. Russian money, English money, the Bonapartist
eagle, the lily, amulets of every kind must mediate this strange event to their understanding. Both parts of the Assembly, however, feel
that a measureless abyss separates them from the people. Neither dares to
rise up for the people.
As soon as the stupor passes, frenzy breaks out, and the majority is right
to hiss at those miserable utopians and hypocrites who commit
the anachronism of still mouthing the phrase fraternité, brotherhood.
For the point was precisely the abolition of this
phrase and of the illusions that its ambiguous womb conceals. When La Rochejaquelein, the legitimist, the chivalric enthusiast, inveighed against the infamy
with which one exclaims Vae victis! Woe to the defeated! the
majority of the Assembly breaks into St. Vitus’s dance, as though stung by the tarantula. It shouts woe! upon the workers, to conceal that
no one else is the “defeated” but itself. Either it must
now perish, or the republic. And therefore it howls convulsively: Vive
la République! Long live the republic!
Should this deep abyss that has opened before us lead the democrats astray, should it make us imagine that struggles over the form of the state
are empty, illusory, null and void?
Only weak, cowardly minds can pose the question. The collisions
which arise from the conditions of bourgeois society
themselves, they must be fought out, they cannot be fantasised away. The best form of state is that in which the social
antagonisms are not blurred, are not forcibly fettered – hence only artificially, hence only in appearance. The best form of state is that in which they
enter into free struggle and thereby to their resolution.
We shall be asked whether we have no tear, no sigh, no word
for the victims who fell before the fury of the people, for the National Guard, the Mobile Guard, the Republican Guard, the regular troops?
The state will care for their widows and orphans, decrees will
glorify them, solemn funeral processions will consign their remains to the earth, the official press will declare them immortal, the European
reaction will pay them homage from East to West.
But the plebeians, torn by hunger, reviled by the press,
abandoned by the doctors, scolded as thieves, incendiaries, galley-slaves by the respectable, their wives and children plunged into still more boundless
misery, their best survivors deported overseas – to wind
the laurel wreath around their menacingly sombre brows, that is the privilege,
that is the right of the democratic press.