reduced to the role of a simple worker, day labourer, wage-earner, 
working for the industrial capitalist; the intervention of the 
industrial capitalist, exploiting the land like any other factory; the 
transformation of the landed proprietor from a petty sovereign into 
a vulgar usurer: these are the different relations expressed by rent. 

Rent, in the Ricardian sense, is patriarchal agriculture trans- 
formed into commercial industry, industrial capital applied to land, 
the town bourgeoisie transplanted into the country. Rent, instead of 
binding man to nature, has merely bound the exploitation of the land 
to competition. Once established as rent, landed property itself is the 
result of competition, since from that time onwards it depends on the 
market value of agricultural produce. As rent, landed property is 

4 In the 1847 edition the end of this sentence read: “elle ne saurait exister dans les 
pays ou, comme en Irlande, le revenu du propriétaire n’est qu’un prélévement sur le 
salaire” (“It cannot exist in those countries where, as in Ireland, the landowner’s 
income is a deduction from wages”). The changes were made in the copy with. 
corrections in Marx’s hand and in the one presented to N. Utina, and reproduced in 
the German edition of 1885 and the French edition of 1896.—Ed. 

> In the copy with corrections in Marx’s hand and in the one presented to N. Utina 
this paragraph has many changes, some of which are illegible. In the German 
edition of 1885 the last two sentences were omitted and instead the following sentence 
was added after the words “the industrial capitalist”: “who exploits the soil by means 
of his wage workers, and who pays to the landowner as rent only the surplus over the 
production costs, including profit on capital”. In the French edition of 1896 the two 
sentences mentioned are also omitted.— Ed. 

mobilised and becomes an article of commerce. Rent is possible only 
from the moment when the development of urban industry, and the 
social organisation resulting therefrom, force the landowner to aim 
solely at commercial profit, at the money his agricultural products 
fetch—in fact to look upon his landed property only as a machine for 
coining money. Rent has so completely divorced the landed 
proprietor from the soil, from nature, that he has no need even to 
know his estates, as is to be seen in England. As for the farmer, the 
industrial capitalist and the agricultural worker, they are no more 
bound to the land they exploit than are the employer and the worker 
in the factories to the cotton and wool they manufacture; they feel an 
attachment only for the price of their production, the monetary 
product. Hence the jeremiads of the reactionary parties, who offer 
up all their prayers for the return of feudalism, of the good old 
patriarchal life, of the simple manners and the fine virtues of our 
forefathers. The subjection of the soil to the laws which dominate all 
other industries is and always will be the subject of interested 
condolences. Thus it may be said that rent has become the motive 
power which has introduced idyll into the movement of history. 

Ricardo, after postulating bourgeois production as necessary for 
determining rent, applies the conception of rent, nevertheless, to the 
landed property of all ages and all countries. This is an error 
common to all the economists, who represent the bourgeois relations 
of production as eternal categories. 

From the providential aim of rent—which is, for M. Proudhon, the 
transformation of the colonus into a responsible worker, he passes to the 
equalised distribution of rent. 

Rent, as we have just seen, is constituted by the equal price of the 
products of lands of unequal fertility, so that a hectolitre of corn 
which has cost ten francs is sold for twenty francs if the cost of 
production rises to twenty francs upon soil of inferior quality. 

So long as necessity forces the purchase of all the agricultural 
products brought into the market, the market price is determined by 
the cost of the most expensive product. Thus it is this equalisation of 
price, resulting from competition and not from the different 
fertilities of the lands, that secures for the owner of the better soil a 
rent of ten francs for every hectolitre that his farmer sells. 

Let us suppose for a moment that the price of corn is determined 
by the labour time needed to produce it, and at once the hectolitre of 
corn obtained from the better soil will sell at ten francs, while the 
hectolitre of corn obtained on the inferior soil will cost twenty francs. 
This being admitted, the average market price will be fifteen francs, 
whereas, according to the law of competition, it is twenty francs. If 

The Poverty of Philosophy 203 

the average price were fifteen francs, there would be no occasion for 
any distribution, whether equalised or otherwise, for there would be 
no rent. Rent exists only when one can sell for twenty francs the 
hectolitre of corn which has cost the producer ten francs. M. 
Proudhon supposes equality of the market price, with unequal costs 
of production, in order to arrive at an equalised sharing out of the 
product of inequality. 

We understand such economists as Mill, Cherbuliez, Hilditch and 
others demanding that rent should be handed over to the state to 
serve in place of taxes. That is a frank expression of the hatred the 
industrial capitalist bears towards the landed proprietor, who seems 
to him a useless thing, an excrescence upon the general body of 
bourgeois production. 

But first to make the price of the hectolitre of corn twenty francs in 
order then to make a general distribution of the ten francs 
overcharge levied on the consumer, is indeed enough to make the 
social genius pursue its zigzag course mournfully—and knock its head 
against some corner. 

Rent becomes, under M. Proudhon’s pen, 

“an immense land valuation which is carried out contradictorily by the proprietors 
and the farmers ... ina higher interest, and whose ultimate result must be to equalise the 
possession of the land between the exploiters of the soil and the industrialists”. [II 271] 

For any land valuation based upon rent to be of practical value, the 
conditions of present society must not be departed from. 

Now we have shown that the rent paid by the farmer to the 
landowner expresses the rent with any exactitude only in the 
countries most advanced in industry and commerce. Moreover, this 
rent often includes interest paid to the landowner on capital 
incorporated in the land. The location of the land, the nearness of 
towns, and many other circumstances influence the farm rent and 
modify the land rent. These peremptory reasons would be enough to 
prove the inaccuracy of a land valuation based on rent. 

On the other hand, rent could not be the invariable index of the 
degree of fertility of the land, since every moment the modern 
application of chemistry is changing the nature of the soil, and 
geological knowledge is just now, in our days, beginning to 
revolutionise all the old estimates of relative fertility. It is only about 
twenty years since vast lands in the eastern counties of England 
were cleared; they had been left uncultivated due to the lack of 
proper comprehension of the relation between the humus and the 
composition of the sub-soil. 

Thus history, far from supplying, in rent, a ready-made land 
valuation, does nothing but change and turn topsy-turyy the land 
valuations already made. 

Finally, fertility is not so natural a quality as might be thought; it is 
closely bound up with the social relations of the time. A piece of land 
may be very fertile for corn growing, and yet the market price may 
induce the cultivator to turn it into an artificial pastureland and thus 
render it infertile. 

M. Proudhon has improvised his land valuation, which has not 
even the value of an ordinary land valuation, only to give substance 
to the providentially equalitarian aim of rent. 

“Rent,” continues M. Proudhon, “is the interest paid on a capital which never 
perishes, namely—land. And as the capital is capable of no increase in matter, but only 
of an indefinite improvement in its use, it comes about that while the interest or profit 
on a loan (mutuum) tends to diminish continually through abundance of capital, rent 
tends always to increase through the perfecting of industry, from which results the 
improvement in the use of the land.... Such, in its essence, is rent.” (Tome II, p. 265.) 

This time, M. Proudhon sees in rent all the characteristics of 
interest, save that it is derived from capital of a specific nature. This 
capital is land, an eternal capital, “which is capable of no increase in 
matter, but only of an indefinite improvement in its use”. In the 
progressive advance of civilisation, interest has a continual tendency 
to fall, whilst rent continually tends to rise. Interest falls because of 
the abundance of capital; rent rises owing to the improvements 
brought about in industry, which result in an ever better utilisation 
of land. 

Such, in its essence, is the opinion of M. Proudhon. 

Let us first examine how far it is true to say that rent is interest on 
capital. 

For the landed proprietor himself rent represents the interest on 
the capital that the land has cost him, or that he would draw from. it if 
he sold it. But in buying or selling land he only buys or sells rent. The 
price he pays to make himself a receiver of rent is regulated by the 
rate of interest in general and has nothing to do with the actual 
nature of rent. The interest on capital invested in land is in general 
lower than the interest on capital invested in manufacture or 
commerce. Thus, for those who make no distinction between the 
interest that the land represents to the owner and the rent itself, the 
interest on land as capital diminishes still more than does the interest 
on other capital. But it is not a question of the purchase or sale price 
of rent, of the marketable value of rent, of capitalised rent, it is a 
question of rent itself. 

The Poverty of Philosophy 205 

Farm rent can imply again, apart from rent proper, the interest on 
the capital incorporated in the land. In this instance the Jandowner 
receives this part of the farm rent, not as a landowner but 
as a Capitalist; but this is not the rent proper that we are to deal 
with. 

Land, so long as it is not exploited as a means of production, is not 
capital. Land as capital can be increased just as much as all the other 
instruments of production. Nothing is added to its matter, to use M. 
Proudhon’s language, but the lands which serve as instruments of 
production are multiplied. The very fact of applying further outlays 
of capital to land already transformed into means of production 
increases land as capital without adding anything to land as matter, 
that is, to the extent of the land. M. Proudhon’s land as matter is the 
earth in its limitation.-As for the eternity he attributes to land, we 
grant readily it has this virtue as matter. Land as capital is no more 
eternal than any other capital. 

Gold and silver, which yield interest, are just as lasting and eternal 
as land. If the price of gold and silver falls, while that of land keeps 
rising, this is certainly not because of its more or less eternal nature. 

Land as capital is fixed capital; but fixed capital gets used_up just 
as much as circulating capital. Improvements to the land need 
reproduction and upkeep; they last only for a time; and this they 
have in common with all other improvements used to transform 
matter into means of production. If land as capital were eternal, 
some lands would present a very different appearance from what 
they do today, and we should see the Roman Campagna, Sicily, 
Palestine, in all the splendour of their former prosperity. 

There are even instances when land as capital might disappear, 
even though the improvements remain incorporated in the land. 

In the first place, this occurs every time rent proper is wiped out t-y 
the competition of new and more fertile soils; secondly, the 
improvements which might have been valuable at one time cease to 
be of value the moment they become universal owing to the 
development of agronomy. 

The representative of land as capital is not the landowner, but the 
farmer. The proceeds yielded by land as capital are interest and 
industrial profit, not rent. There are lands which yield such interest 
and profit but still yield no rent. 

Briefly, land insofar as it yields interest is land capital, and as land 
capital it yields no rent, it is not landed property. Rent results from 
the social relations in which the exploitation of the land takes place. 
It cannot be a result of the more or less solid, more or less durable 
nature of the soil. Rent is a product of society and not of the soil. 

According to M. Proudhon, “improvement in the use of the 
land”—a consequence “of the perfecting of industry”’—causes the 
continual rise in rent. On the contrary, this improvement causes its 
periodical fall. 

Wherein consists, in general, any improvement, whether in 
agriculture or in manufacture? In producing more with the same 
labour; in producing as much, or even more, with less labour. 
Thanks to these improvements, the farmer is spared from using a 
greater amount of labour for a relatively smaller product. He has no 
need, therefore, to resort to inferior soils, and instalments of capital 
applied successively to the same soil remain equally productive. 
Thus, these improvements, far from continually raising rent, as M. 
Proudhon says, become on the contrary so many temporary obstacles 
preventing its rise. 

The English landowners of the seventeenth century were so well 
aware of this truth, that they opposed the progress of agriculture for 
fear of seeing their incomes diminish. (See Petty, an English 
economist of the time of Charles II.’) 

§5. STRIKES AND COMBINATIONS OF WORKERS 

“Every upward movement in wages can have no other effect than a rise in the price 
of corn, wine, etc., that is, the effect of a dearth. For what are wages? They are the cost 
price of corn, etc.; they are the integrant price of everything. We may go even further: 
wages are the proportion of the elements composing wealth and consumed 
reproductively every day by the mass of the workers. Now, to double wages ... is to 
attribute to each one of the producers a greater share than his product, which is 
contradictory, and if the rise extends only to a small number of industries, it brings 
about a genera] disturbance in exchange; in a word, a dearth.... It is impossible, I 
declare, for strikes followed by an increase in wages not to culminate in a general rise in 
prices: this is as certain as that two and two make four.” (Proudhon, tome I, pp. 110 
and 111.) 

We deny all these assertions, except that two and two make four. 

In the first place, there is no general rise in prices. If the price of 
everything doubles at the same time as wages, there is no change in 
price, the only change is in terms. 

Then again, a general rise in wages can never produce a more or 
less general rise in the price of goods. Actually, if every industry 
employed the same number of workers in relation to fixed capital] or 
to the instruments used, a general rise in wages would produce a 
general fall in profits and the current price of goods would undergo 
no alteration. 

2 W. Petty, Political Arithmetick (1676).—Ed. 

The Poverty of Philosophy 907 

But as the relation of manual labour to fixed capital is not the same 
in different industries, all the industries which employ a relatively 
greater mass of fixed capital and fewer workers, will be forced 
sooner or later to lower the price of their goods. In the opposite case, 
in which the price of their goods is not lowered, their profit will rise 
above the general rate of profits. Machines are not wage-earners. 
Therefore, the general rise in wages will affect less those industries, 
which, compared with the others, employ more machines than 
workers. But as competition always tends to level the rate of profits, 
those profits which rise above the general rate cannot but be 
transitory. Thus, apart from a few fluctuations, a general rise in 
wages will lead, not as M. Proudhon says, to a general increase in 
prices, but to a partial fall, that is a fall in the current price of the 
goods that are made chiefly with the help of machines. 

The rise and fall of profits and wages express merely the 
proportion in which capitalists and workers share in the product of a 
day’s work, without influencing in most instances the price of the 
product. But that “strikes followed by an increase in wages culminate 
in a general rise in prices, in a dearth even” —these are notions which 
can blossom only in the brain of a poet who has not been understood. 

In England, strikes have regularly given rise to the invention and 
application of new machines. Machines were, it may be said, the 
weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialised 
labour. The self-acting mule, the greatest invention of modern 
industry, put out of action the spinners who were in revolt. If 
combinations and strikes had no other effect than that of making the 
efforts of mechanical genius react against them, they would still 
exercise an immense influence on the development of industry. 

“T find,” continues M. Proudhon, “in an article published by M. Léon Faucher ... 
September 1845,° that for some time the English workers have got out of the habit of 
combination, which is assuredly a progress for which one cannot but congratulate 
them: but this improvement in the morale of the workers comes chiefly from their 
economic education. ‘It is not on the manufacturers,’ cried a spinning-mill worker at a 
Bolton meeting, ‘that wages depend. In periods of depression the masters are, so to 
speak, merely the whip with which necessity arms itself, and whether they want to or 
not, they have to deal blows. The regulative principle is the relation of supply to 
demand; and the masters have not this power’.... Well done,” cries M. Proudhon, 

“these are well-trained workers, model workers,” etc., etc. “Such poverty did not 
exist in England; it will not cross the Channel.” (Proudhon, tome I, pp. 261 and 262.) 

Of all the towns in England, Bolton is the one in which radicalism 
is the most developed. The Bolton workers are known to be the most 

* This term is given in English in the original.— Ed. 
b L. Faucher, “Les coalitions condamnées par les ouvriers anglais.” —Fd. 

revolutionary of all. At the time of the great agitation in England for 
the abolition of the Corn Laws, the English manufacturers thought 
that they could cope with the landowners only by thrusting the 
workers to the fore. But as the interests of the workers were no less 
opposed to those of the manufacturers than the interests of the 
manufacturers were to those of the landowners, it was natural that 
the manufacturers should fare badly in the workers’ meetings. What 
did the manufacturers do? To save appearances they organised 
meetings composed, to a large extent, of foremen, of the small 
number of workers who were devoted to them, and of the real friends 
of trade. When later on the genuine workers tried, as in Bolton and 
Manchester, to take part in these sham demonstrations, in order to 
protest against them, they were forbidden admittance on the ground 
that it was a ticket meeting’-—a meeting to which only persons with 
entrance cards were admitted. Yet the posters placarded on the walls 
had announced public meetings. Every time one of these meetings 
was held, the manufacturers’ newspapers gave a pompous and 
detailed account of the speeches made. It goes without saying that it 
was the foremen who made these speeches. The London papers 
reproduced them word for word. M. Proudhon has the misfortune 
to take foremen for ordinary workers, and enjoins them not to cross 
the Channel. 

If in 1844 and 1845 strikes drew less attention than before, it was 
because 1844 and 1845 were the first two years of prosperity that 
English industry had had since 1837.8’ Nevertheless none of the 
trades unions had been dissolved. 

Now let us listen to the foremen of Bolton. According to them 
manufacturers have no command over wages because they have no 
command over the price of products, and they have no command 
over the price of products because they have no command over the 
world market. For this reason they wish it to be understood that 
combinations should not be formed to extort an increase in wages 
from the masters. M. Proudhon, on the contrary, forbids combina- 
tions for fear they should be followed by a rise in wages which would 
bring with it a general dearth. We have no need to say that on one 
point there is an entente cordiale between the foremen and M. 
Proudhon: that a rise in wages is equivalent to a rise in the price of 
products. 

But is the fear of a dearth the true cause of M. Proudhon’s 
rancour? No. Quite simply he is annoyed with the Bolton foremen 

* These two words are given in English in the original.—Ed. 

The Poverrty of Philosophy 909 

because they determine value by supply and demand and hardly take 
any account of constituted value, of value which has passed into the 
state of constitution, of the constitution of value, including permanent 
exchangeability and all the other proportionalities of relations and 
relations of proportionality, with Providence at their side. 

“A workers’ strike is illegal, and it is not only the Penal Code that says so, it is the 
economic system, the necessity of the established order.... That each worker 
individually should dispose freely over his person and his hands, this can be tolerated, 

but that workers should undertake by combination to do violence to monopoly, is 
something society cannot permit.” (Tome I, pp. 334 and 335.) 

M. Proudhon wants to pass off an article of the Penal Code as a 
necessary and general result of bourgeois relations of production. 

In England combination is authorised by an Act of Parliament, 
and it is the economic system which has forced Parliament to grant 
this legal authorisation. In 1825, when, under the Minister 
Huskisson, Parliament had to modify the law in order to bring it 
more and more into line with the conditions resulting from free 
competition, it had of necessity to abolish all laws forbidding 
combinations of workers. The more modern industry and com peti- 
tion develop, the more elements there are which call forth and 
strengthen combination, and as soon as combination becomes an 
economic fact, daily gaining in solidity, it is bound before long to 
become a legal fact. 

Thus the article of the Penal Code proves at the most that modern 
industry and competition were not yet well developed under the 
Constituent Assembly and under the Empire. 

Economists and socialists* are in agreement on one point: the 
condemnation of combinations. Only they have different motives for 
their act of condemnation. 

The economists say to the workers: Do not combine. By 
combination you hinder the regular progress of industry, you 
prevent manufacturers from carrying out their orders, you disturb 
trade and you precipitate the invasion of machines which, by 
rendering your labour in part useless, force you to accept a still lower 
wage. Besides, whatever you do, your wages will always be 
determined by the relation of hands demanded to hands supplied, 
and it is an effort as ridiculous as it is dangerous for you to revolt 
against the eternal laws of political economy. 

The socialists say to the workers: Do not combine, because what 
will you gain by it anyway? A rise in wages? The economists will 

* That is, the socialists of that time: the Fourierists in France, the Owenites in 
England. F. E. [Note to the German edition, 1885.] 

prove to you quite clearly that the few ha’pence you may gain by it 
for a few moments if you succeed, will be followed by a permanent 
fall. Skilled calculators will prove to you that it would take you years 
merely to recover, through the increase in your wages, the expenses 
incurred for the organisation and upkeep of the combinations. And 
we, as socialists, tell you that, apart from the money question, you will 
continue nonetheless to be workers, and the masters will still 
continue to be the masters, just as before. So no combination! No 
politics! For is not entering into combination engaging in politics? 

The economists want the workers to remain in society as it is 
constituted and as it has been signed and sealed by them in their 
maiiuals. 

The socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the 
better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared 
for them with so much foresight. 

In spite of both of them, in spite of manuals and utopias, 
combination has not ceased for an instant to go forward and grow 
with the development and growth of modern industry. It has now 
reached such a stage, that the degree to which combination has 
developed in any country clearly marks the rank it occupies in the 
hierarchy of the world market. England, whose industry has attained 
the highest degree of development, has the biggest and best 
organised combinations. 

In England they have not stopped at partial combinations which 
have no other objective than a passing strike, and which disappear 
with it. Permanent combinations have been formed, trades unions, 
which serve as bulwarks for the workers in their struggles with the 
employers. And at the present time all these local trades unions find a 
rallying point in the National Association of United Trades, the 
central committee of which is in London, and which already 
numbers 80,000 members. The organisation of these strikes, 
combinations, and trades unions went on simultaneously with the 
political struggles of the workers, who now constitute a large political 
party, under the name of Chartists. 

The first attempts of workers to associate among themselves always 
take place in the form of combinations. 

Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people 
unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But 
the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have 
against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resis- 
tance—combination. Thus combination always has a double aim, that 
of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry 
on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of 

The Poverty of Philosophy 211 

resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at 
first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in 
their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in face of always 
united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more 
necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English 
economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of 
their wages in favour of associations, which, in the eyes of these 
economists, are established solely in favour of wages. In this 
struggle—a veritable civil war—all the elements necessary for a 
coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, 
association takes on a political character. 

Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people 
of the country into workers. The domination of capital has created 
for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is 
thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the 
struggle, of which we have pointed out only a few phases, this mass 
becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The 
interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class 
against class is a political struggle. 

In the bourgeoisie we have two phases to distinguish: that in which 
it constituted itself as a class under the regime of feudalism and 
absolute monarchy, and that in which, already constituted as a class, 
it overthrew feudalism and monarchy to make society into a 
bourgeois society. The first of these phases was the longer and 
necessitated the greater efforts. This too began by partial combina- 
tions against the feudal lords. 

Much research has been carried out to trace the different historical 
phases that the bourgeoisie has passed through, from the commune 
up to its constitution as a class. 

But when it is a question of making a precise study of strikes, 
combinations and other forms in which the proletarians carry out 
before our eyes their organisation as a class, some are seized with real 
fear and others display a transcendental disdain. 

An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded 
on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed 
class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the 
oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself it is necessary that the 
productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations 
should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the 
instruments of production, the greatest productive power! is the 
revolutionary class itself. The organisation of revolutionary elements 
as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which 
could be engendered in the bosom of the old society. 

Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a 
new class domination culminating in a new political power? No. 

The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the 
abolition of all classes, just as the condition for the emancipation of 
the third estate, of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all 
estates* and all orders. 

The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute 
for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and 
their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly 
so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of 
antagonism in civil society. 

Meanwhile the antagonism between the proletariat and the 
bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which 
carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at 
all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes 
should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against 
body, as its final denouement? 

Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. 
There is never a political movement which is not at the same time 
social. 

It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes 
and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political 
revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of 
society, the last word of social science will always be: 

“Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le néant. C’est ainsi que la question 

est invinciblement posée.” 
George Sand.* 

* Fstates here in the historical sense of the estates of feudalism, estates with 
definite and limited privileges. The revolution of the bourgeoisie abolished the estates 
and their privileges. Bourgeois society knows only classes. It was, therefore, absolutely 
in contradiction with history to describe the proletariat as the “fourth estate”.°? F. E. 
[Note to the German edition, 1885.] 

* “Combat or death, bloody struggle or extinction. Thus the question is inexorably 
put.” (George Sand, Jean Ziska. Episode de la guerre des hussites. Introduction.) — Ed. 

Frederick Engels 

THE DECLINE AND APPROACHING FALL OF GUIZOT.— 
POSITION OF THE FRENCH BOURGEOISIE 

The English stage had better give over playing The School for 
Scandal,* for, indeed, the greatest school of this sort has been set up 
in Paris, in the Chamber of Deputies. The amount of scandalous 
matter collected and brought forward there during the last four or 
five weeks, is really unprecedented in the annals of parliamentary 
discussion. You recollect the inscription Mr. Duncombe once pro- 
posed for your own glorious House of Commons, “The most degrad- 
ing and infamous proceedings take place within these walls”. Well, here is 
a match for your own set of middle-class legislators; here are 
proceedings which will put British rascality to the blush. The honour 
of Old England is saved; Mr. Roebuck is outdone by M. de Girardin; 
Sir James Graham is beaten by M. Duchatel. 

I shall not undertake to give you the whole list of scandalous 
affairs brought to the light within the last few weeks; I shall not saya 
word about the several dozen of bribery cases brought before the 
juries; not a word about M. Gudin, the ordnance officer of the King, 
who, not without some degree of cleverness, made an attempt to 
introduce the habits of the swell mob into the palace of the 
Tuileries”; I shall not give you a lengthy report of the dirty affair of 
Gen. Cubiéres, peer of France, formerly Minister of War, who, 
under pretext of bribing the ministry into granting the concession of 
allowing the formation of a mining company, cheated the said 
company out of forty shares, which he coolly put into his own pocket, 
and on account of which he is now under trial before the Chamber of 

? R. Sheridan, The School for Scandal. A comedy in five acts.— Ed. 

Peers. No; I shall give you only a few choice bits—a few samples 
taken from two or three sittings of the Deputies, which will enable 
you to judge of the rest. 

M. Emile de Girardin, deputy and editor of the daily paper La 
Presse, supporting in both characters the new party of Progressive 
Conservatives, and for a considerable time past one of the most violent 
opponents of the Ministry, whom until lately he had supported, is a 
man of great talent and activity, but without any principles. From the 
beginning of his public career he unhesitatingly employed any 
means to make himself an important public character. It was he who 
forced Armand Carrel, the celebrated editor of the National, to a 
duel, and shot him, thus delivering himself from a dangerous 
competitor. The support of such a man, proprietor of an influential 
paper, and member of the Chamber of Deputies, was of course very 
important to the government; but M. de Girardin sold his support 
(for he always sold it) at a very high price. There was a deal of busi- 
ness transacted between M. de Girardin and the Ministry, but not 
always to the complete satisfaction of both parties. In the meantime, 
M. de Girardin prepared himself for any turn which affairs might 
take. Foreseeing the probability of a rupture with the Guizot Mini- 
stry, he collected accounts of scandalous transactions, bribings, and 
traffickings, which he was in the best position to learn, and which 
were brought to him by his friends and agents in high places. The 
turn which party discussions took this session showed to him that the 
fall of Guizot and Duchatel was approaching. He was one of the 
principal actors in the formation of the new “Progressive Conserva- 
tive” party, and repeatedly threatened the government with the full 
weight of his wrath, if they persisted in their course. M. Guizot 
refused, in pretty scornful terms, any compromise with the new 
party. These detached themselves from the majority, and annoyed 
the government by their opposition. The financial and other 
discussions of the Chamber unveiled so much scandal, that 
MM. Guizot and Duchatel were obliged to throw several of their 
colleagues overboard in order to save themselves. The vacant places, 
however, were filled by such insignificant men, that no party was 
satisfied, and the Ministry were rather weakened than fortified. 
Then came Cubiéres’ affair, which elicited some doubts, even in 
the majority, as to the possibility to keep M. Guizot in office. Now, at 
last, when he saw the Ministry totally disorganised and weakened, 
now M. de Girardin thought the moment had arrived when he might 
bring forth his Pandora’s box of scandal, and achieve the ruin of a 
tottering government, by revelations fit to shake the faith even of the 
“belly” of the Chamber. 

The Decline and Approaching Fall of Guizot 215 

He commenced by accusing the Ministry of having sold a peerage 
for 80,000 francs, but of not having kept their promise, after 
pocketing the money! The House of Peers found themselves insulted 
by this assertion made in La Presse, and asked leave from the 
Deputies to bring M. de Girardin before their bar. This demand 
occasioned a discussion in the Deputies, in the course of which M. de 
Girardin fully maintained his assertion, declaring he was in 
possession of the proofs, but refusing to give any names, as he would 
not play the part of a delator. He said, however, that three times he 
had mentioned the matter privately to M. Guizot, who never denied 
the fact, and that once he spoke about it to M. Duchatel, who 
replied—“It was done during my absence, and I afterwards 
disapproved of it; it was M. Guizot who did it.” The whole of this was 
flatly denied by M. Duchatel. “Then,” said M. de Girardin, “TI will 
give you the proof that the Ministry is quite in the habit of proposing 
such transactions”; and he read a letter from General Alexander de 
Girardin (the father, I believe, of M. Emile de Girardin; the latter is 
an illegitimate child) to the King. This letter expressed General de 
G.’s gratitude for the offer of a peerage made to him, but said at the 
same time, that M. Guizot having afterwards made it a condition of 
the grant that he (General de G.) should use his influence with M. 
Emile de G. to prevent him opposing the government, General de G. 
would be no party to such a transaction, and, therefore, declined the 
peerage. “O!” said M. Duchatel, “if this is all, we will just mention 
that M. Emile de Girardin himself offered to us to cease his 
opposition if we would make him a peer, but we declined that offer.” 
Hine illae lacrimae!* But Duchatel replied not a word to the allegation 
contained in the letter. The Chamber then voted that M. Emile de G. 
should be delivered up to the peers for trial. He was tried, sustained 
the allegation, but declared, the sold peerages not having been made 
out, he could not have attacked the Chamber of Peers, but only the 
government. The peers then acquitted him. Girardin then brought 
forward another scandalous affair. There was got up last year a large 
paper, called the Epoque, which was to support the government, to 
beat all opposition papers out of the market, and to supersede the 
costly support of M. de Girardin’s Presse. The experiment signally 
failed; partly, too, through the intrigues of M. de Girardin himself, 
who has his finger in every pie of that sort. Now, M. Duchatel had 
answered, when charged with bribing the press, that the government 
had never paid any subsidies to any paper. M. de Girardin, against 
this assertion, maintained the notorious fact, that M. Duchatel, after 

4 Hence these tears. (Terence, Andria, Act I, Scene 1.)— Ed. 

a deal of begging on the part of the editors of the Epoque, had told 
them: “Well, gold and silver I have none; but what I have that will I 
give unto you”; and had given them the privilege for a third 
opera-house for Paris, which privilege the “gents” of the Epoque sold 
for 100,000 f., of which sum 60,000 f. were spent in support of the 
paper, and the remaining 40,000 f. went nobody knows where to. 
This, too, was flatly denied by M. Duchatel; but the fact is notorious. 

There were, besides, some similar transactions brought forward by 
M. de Girardin, but these samples will be quite sufficient. 

Yesterday, in the Chamber of Deputies, M. de Girardin again got 
up and read some letters, from which it appeared that M. Duchatel 
has caused the discussion in the above peerage affair to be printed at 
the public expense, and sent it to all town councils in the country; but 
that in this ministerial report neither M. de Girardin’s nor M. 
Duchatel’s speeches were correctly reported; but, on the contrary, 
both of them were arranged so as to make M. de Girardin appear as a 
ridiculous calumniator, and M. Duchatel in the light of the purest 
and most virtuous of men. As to the matter itself, he repeated all his 
assertions, and defied the government either to have them disproved 
by a parliamentary committee, or to bring him before a jury as a 
slanderer. In both cases, he said, he should be bound to give the 
names of the parties and all particulars, and thus be enabled to prove 
his accusations without placing himself in the position of a common 
informer. This excited a general storm in the Chamber. M. Duchatel 
denied; M. de Girardin re-asserted; M. Duchatel re-denied; M. de 
Girardin re-reasserted, and so on, the whole accompanied by the 
shouts and counter-shouts of the “choruses” of the Chamber. Other 
opposition members again defied the Ministry to have the matter 
looked into either by parliamentary inquiry, or by a trial. At last M. 
Duchatel said,— 

“A Parliamentary inquiry, gentlemen, would presuppose a doubt in the 
integrity of the government on the part of the majority; and, therefore, the day this 
inquiry should be granted our places would be occupied by others than us; if you have 
any doubt tell us so plainly, and we shall resign immediately.” 

“Then,” said M. de Girardin, “there remains nothing but a trial. I am ready to 
undergo it; place me before a jury, if you dare.” 

“No,” said M. Hébert, Minister of Justice, “we shall not, because the majority of 
the Chamber will judge.” 

“But,” said M. Odilon Barrot, “this is not a political question; it is a legal one, and 
such a question is not within our competence, but of that of the public courts of law. If 
M. de Girardin has calumniated the government in his paper, why do you not have 
him tried for it?” 

“We won't!” 

“Well, but there is a plain allegation against other parties, too, of trafficking in 
peerages; why not bring them up? And this affair with the Epoque and the opera 

The Decline and Approaching Fall of Guizot 217 

privilege—if you are no parties to that, as you say, why do you not bring up those who 
are parties to such villainous traffic? Here are plain incriminations, and even partial 
proofs of crimes said to have been committed; why do not the lawyers of the Crown. 
prosecute the alleged perpetrators of these crimes, as is their duty?” 

“We do not get up a prosecution,” replied M. Hébert. “because the character of 
the allegations, and the character of those who bring them forward, is not such as to 
make the truth of these allegations anything like probable to the legal advisers of the 
Crown!” 

All this was every moment interrupted by groaning, shouting, 
knocking and all sorts of noises in general. This incomparable sitting, 
which has shaken the Guizot Ministry to its very foundation, was 
concluded by a vote, which proves, that if the faith of the majority 
may be shaken, their system of voting is not! 

“The Chamber, after having heard the explanations of the Ministry, and found 
them satisfactory, passes to the order of the day!” 

What do you think of that? Which do you prefer, the ministry or 
the majority, the Deputies of France or your own Commons? M. 
Duchatel or Sir James Graham? I dare say you will find the choice a 
difficult one. There is, however, one difference betwixt them. The 
English middle classes have, up to this day, to struggle against an 
aristocracy, which, although in a state of dissolution and decomposi- 
tion, is not yet removed. The aristocracy of England always found 
some support in one fraction or the other of the middle classes 
themselves, and it was this division of the middle classes that saved 
the aristocracy from total ruin. At this moment the aristocracy is 
supported by the fund-holders, bankers, and owners of fixed 
incomes, and by a large part of the shipping trade against the 
manufacturers. The whole agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws 
proves this. The advanced fraction of the English middle classes, 
therefore (I mean the manufacturers) will yet be able to carry out 
some progressive political measures which will more and more 
decompose the aristocracy. They will even be obliged to do so; they 
must extend their markets, which they cannot do without reducing 
their prices, which reduction must be preceded by a reduced cost of 
production, which reduced cost of production is mainly obtained by 
reduced wages, for reducing which there is no safer means than 
reduced price of the necessaries of life; and, to obtain this, they have 
no other means but reducing the taxes. This is the logical chain 
which ties the manufacturers of England to the necessity of 
destroying the Established Church, and reducing, or “equitably 
adjusting”, the National Debt. Both these measures, and others in 
the same spirit, they will be forced to carry out as soon as they find, 
which they must, the market of the world insufficient to continually 

and regularly buy up their produce. Thus the English middle classes 
are, as yet, in a progressive direction; they have an aristocracy and a 
privileged clergy to overthrow; there. are certain progressive 
measures which they will be forced to carry, and which they are the 
fit and proper persons to carry. But the French middle classes are in 
a different position. There is no aristocracy of birth, nor a landed 
aristocracy, in that country. The revolution has swept it entirely 
away. Neither is there a privileged or Established Church; but on the 
contrary, both Catholic and Protestant clergy receive their salaries 
from the government, and are upon a footing of perfect equality. 
There is no important struggle possible in France between the 
fund-holders, bankers, shippers, and manufacturers, because, of all 
fractions of the middle classes the fund-holders and bankers (who, at 
the same time, are the principal shareholders in the railway, mining, 
and other companies) are decidedly the strongest fraction, and have, 
with a few interruptions only, ever since 1830, held the reins of 
government. The manufacturers, kept down by foreign competition 
in the foreign market, and threatened in their own, have no chance 
of growing to such a degree of power, that they successfully might 
struggle against the bankers and fund-holders. On the contrary, 
their chance decreases every year; their party in the Deputies, 
formerly one-half, is now not more than a third part of the Chamber. 
It results from all this that neither a single fraction, nor the whole of 
the ruling middle classes, are in a position to carry out anything like 
“progress”; that the government of the bourgeoisie is so fully 
established in France since the revolution of 1830, that the ruling 
class could do nothing but wear themselves out. This they have done. 
Instead of progressing, they were obliged to go backwards, to 
restrain the liberty of the press; to take away the right of free 
association and meeting; to make all sorts of exceptional laws in 
order to keep down the working people. And the scandalous affairs 
brought forward within the last few weeks are the evident proof that 
the ruling bourgeoisie of France are entirely worn out, totally ‘used 
up”. 

Indeed, the high bourgeoisie are in an awkward position. They had 
found, at last, in Guizot and Duchatel, the men to govern them. They 
kept them in office seven years, and sent them at every election 
larger and larger majorities. And now, when all opposing fractions 
had been reduced to the utmost impotency in the Chamber,—now 
when Guizot and Duchatel’s days of glory seemed to have arrived, at 
that very moment a mass of scandal is discovered in the doings of the 
Ministry, that makes it impossible for them to remain in office, even 
if supported unanimously by the Chambers. There can be no doubt 

The Decline and Approaching Fall of Guizot 219 

that Guizot and Duchatel will, with their colleagues, resign very 
shortly; they may drag on their ministerial existence a few weeks 
longer, but their end is drawing nigh—very nigh. And who is to 
govern after them? God knows! They may say, as Louis XV, “after 
me the deluge, ruin, and confusion”. Thiers is unable to bring 
together a majority. Molé is an old, worn-out, and insignificant man, 
who will meet all sorts of difficulties, and who, in order to secure the 
support of the majority, must commit similar scandalous actions, and 
therefore, end in the same way as Guizot. This is the principal 
difficulty. The present electors will always elect a majority like that 
now sitting; the present majority will always require a ministry like 
that of Guizot and Duchatel, committing all sorts of scandal; any 
ministry doing so will be overthrown by the mere weight of public 
opinion. This is the vicious circle in which the present system moves. 
But to go on as heretofore is impossible. What, then, is to be done? 
There is no other course but to leave this circle, to pass a measure of 
Electoral Reform; and Electoral Reform means admission of the 
smaller tradesmen to the Suffrage, and this means, in France, “the 
beginning of the end”. Rothschild and Louis Philippe know very 
well, both of them, that admission of the smaller “bourgeoisie” to the 
Suffrage means nothing but “LA REPUBLIQUE!” 

Paris, June 26th, 1847