(The continuation of the three foregoing chapters is contained in 
the Revue in the fifth and sixth double issue of the Neue Rhetnische 
Zeitung, the last to appear.* Here, after the great commercial crisis 
that broke out in England in 1847 had first been described and the 
coming to a head of the political complications on the European 
Continent in the revolutions of February and March 1848 had been 
explained by its reactions there, it was shown how the prosperity of 
trade and industry that again set in during the course of 1848 and 
increased still further in 1849 paralysed the revolutionary upsurge 
and made possible the simultaneous victories of reaction. It went on 
to say, with special reference to France:)? 

~The same symptoms have shown themselves in France since 1849, 
and particularly since the beginning of 1850. The Parisian industries 
are abundantly employed and the cotton factories of Rouen and 
Mulhouse are also doing pretty well, although here, as in England, 
the high prices of the raw material have exercised a retarding 
influence. The development of prosperity in France was, in addition, 
especially promoted by the comprehensive tariff reform in Spain 
and by the reduction of the duties on various luxury articles in 
Mexico; the export of French commodities to both markets has 
considerably increased. The growth of capital in France led to a 
series of speculations, for which the large-scale exploitation of the 
Californian gold-mines served as a pretext.'*’ A swarm of companies 
has sprung up, the low denomination of whose shares and whose 
socialist-coloured prospectuses appeal directly to the purses of the 

petty bourgeois and the workers, but which one and all result in that 
sheer swindling which is characteristic of the French and Chinese 
alone. One of these companies is even patronised directly by the 
government. The import duties in France during the first nine 
months of 1848 amounted to 63,000,000 francs, of 1849 to 
95,000,000 francs and of 1850 to 93,000,000 francs. ‘Moreover, in 
the month of September 1850, they again rose by more than a 
million compared with the same month of 1849. Exports also rose in 
1849, and still more in 1850. 

The most striking proof of restored prosperity is the bank’s 
reintroduction of specie payment by the law of August 6, 1850. On 
March 15, 1848, the bank had been authorised to suspend specie | 
payment. Its note circulation, including the provincial banks, 
amounted at that time to 373,000,000 francs (£14,920,000). On 
November 2, 1849, this circulation amounted to 482,000,000 francs, 
or £19,280,000, an increase of £4,360,000, and on September 2, 
1850, to 496,000,000 francs, or £19,840,000, an increase of about 
_ £5,000,000. This was not accompanied by any devaluation of the 
notes; on the contrary, the increased circulation of the notes was 
accompanied by the steadily increasing accumulation of gold and 
silver in the vaults of the bank, so that in the summer of 1850 its 
metallic reserve amounted to about £14,000,000, an unprecedented 
sum in France. That the bank was thus placed in a position to 
increase its circulation and therewith its active capital by 123,000,000 
francs, or £5,000,000, is striking proof of the correctness of our 
assertion in an earlier issue’ that the finance aristocracy has not only 
not been overthrown by the revolution, but has even been 
strengthened. This result becomes still more evident from the 
following survey of French bank legislation during the last few years. 
On June 10, 1847, the bank was authorised to issue notes of 200 
francs; hitherto the smallest denomination had been 500 francs. A 
decree of March 15, 1848, declared the notes of the Bank of France 
legal tender and relieved the bank of the obligation of redeeming 
them in specie. Its note issue was limited to 350,000,000 francs. It 
was simultaneously authorised to issue notes of 100 francs. A decree 
of April 27 prescribed the merging of the departmental banks in the 
Bank of France; another decree, of May 2, 1848, increased the 
latter’s note issue to 452,000,000 francs. A decree of December 22, 
1849, raised the maximum of the note issue to 525,000,000 francs. 
Finally, the law of August 6, 1850, re-established the exchangeability 
of notes for specie. These facts, the continual increase in the 

circulation, the concentration of the whole of French credit in the 
hands of the bank and the accumulation of all French gold and silver 
in the bank’s vaults, led M. Proudhon to the conclusion that the bank 
must now shed its old snakeskin and metamorphose itself into a 
Proudhonist people’s bank.'?? He did not even need to know the 
history of the restriction on the English bank from 1797-1819’; he 
only needed to direct his glance across the Channel to see that this 
fact, for him unprecedented in the history of bourgeois society, was 
nothing more than a very normal bourgeois event, which now only 
occurred in France for the first time. One sees that the allegedly 
revolutionary theoreticians who, after the Provisional Government, 
talked big in Paris, were just as ignorant of the nature and the results 
of the measures taken as the gentlemen of the Provisional Gov- 
ernment themselves. 

In spite of the industrial and commercial prosperity that France 
momentarily enjoys, the mass of the people, the twenty-five million 
peasants, suffer from a great depression. The good harvests of the 
last few years have forced the prices of corn in France much lower 
even than in England, and the position of the peasants under 
such circumstances, in debt, sucked dry by usury and crushed by 
taxes, must be anything but splendid. The history of the last three 
years has, however, provided sufficient proof that this class 
of the population is absolutely incapable of any revolutionary ini- 
tiative. 

Just as the period of crisis occurs later on the Continent than in 
England, so does that of prosperity. The original process always 
takes place in England; it is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos. 
On the Continent, the different phases of the cycle through which 
bourgeois society is ever speeding anew occur in secondary and 
tertiary form. First, the Continent exported incomparably more to 
England than to any other country. This export to England, 
however, in turn depends on the position of England, particularly 
with regard to the overseas market. Then England exports to the 
overseas lands incomparably more than the entire Continent, so that 
the quantity of Continental exports to these lands is always 
dependent on England’s overseas exports at the time. While, 
therefore, the crises first produce revolutions on the Continent, the 
foundation for these is, nevertheless, always laid in England. Violent 
outbreaks must naturally occur rather in the extremities of the 
bourgeois body than in its heart, since the possibility of adjustment is 
greater here than there. On the other hand, the degree to which 
Continental revolutions react on England is at the same time the 
barometer which indicates how far these revolutions really call in 

question the bourgeois conditions of life, or how far they only hit 
their political formations. 

With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of 
bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within 
bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. 
Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these 
factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of 
production, come in collision with each other. The various quarrels in 
which the representatives of the individual factions of the Continen- 
tal party of Order now indulge and mutually compromise them- 
selves, far from providing the occasion for new revolutions are, on 
the contrary, possible only because the basis of the relationships is 
momentarily so secure and, what the reaction does not know, so 
bourgeois. All reactionary attempts to hold up bourgeois development 
will rebound off it just as certainly as al] mora] indignation and all 
enthusiastic proclamations of the democrats. A new revolution is 
possible only in consequence of a new crisis. It is, however, just as certain as 
this crisis." 

Let us now turn to France. | 

The victory that the people, in conjunction with the petty 
bourgeois, had won in the elections of March 10 was annulled by it 
itself when it provoked the new election of April 28. Vidal was 
elected not only in Paris, but also in the Lower Rhine. The Paris 
Committee, in which the Montagne and the petty bourgeoisie were 
strongly represented,induced him to accept for the Lower Rhine. 
The victory of March 10 ceased to be a decisive one; the date of the 
decision was once more postponed; the tension of the people 
was relaxed; it became accustomed to legal triumphs instead of 
revolutionary ones. The revolutionary meaning of March 10, the 
rehabilitation of the June insurrection, was finally completely 
annihilated by the candidature of Eugéne Sue, the sentimental 
petty-bourgeois social-fantasist, which the proletariat could at best 
accept as a joke to amuse the grisettes. As against this well-meaning 
candidature, the party of Order, emboldened by the vacillating 
policy of its opponents, put up a candidate who was to represent the 
June victory. This comic candidate was the Spartan pater familias 
Leclerc,'* from whose person, however, the heroic armour was torn 
piece by piece by the press, and who experienced a crushing defeat 
in the election. The new election victory on April 28 put the 
Montagne and the petty bourgeoisie in high feather. They already 

exulted in the thought of being able to arrive at the goal of their 
wishes in a purely legal way and without again pushing the 
proletariat into the foreground through a new revolution; they 
reckoned positively on bringing M. Ledru-Rollin into the presiden- 
tial chair and a majority of Montagnards into the Assembly through 
universal suffrage in the new elections of 1852. The party of Order, 
rendered perfectly certain, by the prospective elections, by Sue’s 
candidature and by the mood of the Montagne and the petty 
bourgeoisie, that the latter were resolved to remain quiet no matter 
what happened, answered the two election victories with an election 
law which abolished universal suffrage. 

The government took good care not to make this legislative 
proposal on its own responsibility. It made an apparent concession to 
the majority by entrusting the drafting of the bill to the high 
dignitaries of this majority, to the seventeen burgraves.'” Thus, it 
was not the government that proposed the repeal of universal 
suffrage to the Assembly; the majority of the Assembly proposed it 
to itself. 

On May 8, the project was brought into the Chamber. The entire 
social-democratic press rose as one man in order to preach to the 
people dignified composure, calme majestueux,* passivity and trust in 
its representatives. Every article of these journals was a confession 
that a revolution would, above all, annihilate the so-called revolu- 
tionary press and that, therefore, it was now a question of its 
self-preservation. The allegedly revolutionary press betrayed its 
whole secret. It signed its own death warrant. 

On May 21, the Montagne put the preliminary question to debate 
and moved the rejection of the whole project on the ground that it 
violated the constitution. The party of Order answered that the 
constitution would be violated if it were necessary; there was, 
however, no need for this at present, because the constitution was 
capable of every interpretation, and because the majority alone was 
competent to decide on the correct interpretation. To the unbridled, 
savage attacks of Thiers and Montalembert the Montagne opposed a 
decorous and refined humanism. It took its stand on the ground of 
law; the party of Order referred it to the ground on which the law 
grows, to bourgeois property. The Montagne whimpered: Did they 
really want, then, to conjure up revolutions by main force? The party 
of Order replied: One should await them. 

On May 22, the preliminary question was settled by 462 votes to 
227. The same men who had proved with such solemn profundity 
that the National Assembly and every individual deputy would be 
renouncing his mandate if he renounced the people, his mandator, 
stuck to their seats and now suddenly sought to let the country 
act, through petitions at that, instead of acting themselves; and still 
sat there unmoved when, on May 31, the law went through in 
splendid fashion.’ They sought to revenge themselves by a protest 
in which they recorded their innocence of the rape of the 
constitution, a protest which they did not even submit openly, but 
smuggled into the President’s* pocket behind his back. 

An army of 150,000 men in Paris, the long deferment of the 
decision, the appeasing attitude of the press, the pusillanimity of the 
Montagne and of the newly elected representatives, the majestic calm 
of the petty bourgeois, but, above all, the commercial and industrial 
prosperity, prevented any attempt at revolution on the part of the 
proletariat. 

Universal suffrage had fulfilled its mission. The majority of the 
people had passed through the school of development, which is all 
that universal suffrage can serve for in a revolutionary period. It had 
to be set aside by a revolution or by the reaction. 

The Montagne developed a still greater display of energy on an 
occasion that arose soon afterwards. From the tribune War Minister 
d’Hautpoul had termed the February Revolution a baneful catas- 
trophe.” The orators of the Montagne, who, as always, distinguished 
themselves by their morally indignant bluster, were not allowed by 
the President, Dupin, to speak. Girardin proposed to the Montagne 
that it should walk out at once en masse. Result: the Montagne 
remained seated, but Girardin was cast out from its midst as 
unworthy. 

The election law still needed one thing to complete it, a new press 
law. This was not long in coming. A proposal of the government, 
made many times more drastic by amendments of the party of 
Order, increased the caution money, put an extra stamp on 
feuilleton novels (answer to the election of Eugéne Sue), taxed all 
publications appearing weekly or monthly up to a certain number of 
sheets and finally provided that every article of a journal must bear 
the signature of the author. The provisions concerning the caution 
money killed the so-called revolutionary press; the people regarded 
its extinction as satisfaction for the abolition of universal suffrage. 

However, neither the tendency nor the effect of the new law 
extended only to this section of the press. As long as the newspaper 
press was anonymous, it appeared as the organ of a numberless and 
nameless public opinion; it was the third power in the state. Through 
the signature of every article, a newspaper became a mere collection 
of literary contributions from more or less known individuals. Every 
article sank to the level of an advertisement. Hitherto the news- 
papers had circulated as the paper money of public opinion; now 
they were resolved into more or less bad solo bills, whose worth 
and circulation depended on the credit not only of the drawer but 
also of the endorser. The press of the party of Order had agitated 
not only for the repeal of universal suffrage but also for the most 
extreme measures against the bad press. However, in its sinister 
anonymity even the good press was irksome to the party of Order 
and still more to its individual provincial representatives. As for 
itself, it demanded only the paid writer, with name, address and 
description. In vain the good press bemoaned the ingratitude with 
which its services were rewarded. The law went through; the 
specification of the names of authors hit it hardest of all. The names 
of republican journalists were pretty well known; but the respectable 
firms of the Journal des Débats, the Assemblée nationale, the Con- 
stitutionnel, etc., etc., cut a sorry figure in their high protestations of 
state wisdom, when the mysterious company all at once disintegrated 
into purchasable penny-a-liners* of long practice, who had defended 
all possible causes for cash, like Granier de Cassagnac, or into old 
milksops who called themselves statesmen, like Capefigue, or into 
coquettish fops, like M. Lemoinne of the Débats. 

In the debate on the press law the Montagne had already sunk to 
such a level of moral degeneracy that it had to confine itself to 
applauding the brilliant trades of an old notability of Louis 
Philippe’s time, M. Victor Hugo. 

With the election law and the press law the revolutionary and 
democratic party exits from the official stage. Before their departure 
home, shortly after the end of the session, the two factions of the 
Montagne, the socialist democrats and the democratic Socialists, 
issued two manifestos, two testimonia paupertatis, in which they 
proved that while power and success were never on their side, they 
nonetheless had ever been on the side of eternal justice and all the 
other eternal truths.” 

Let us now consider the party of Order. The Neue Rheinische 
Zeitung had said (Heft 3, p. 16): “As against the hankering for 
restoration on the part of the united Orleanists and Legitimists, 
Bonaparte defends his title to his actual power, the republic; as 
against the hankering for restoration on the part of Bonaparte, the 
party of Order defends its title to its common rule, the republic. As 
against the Orleanists, the Legitimists, and as against the Legitimists, 
the Orleanists, defend the status quo, the republic. All these factions 
of the party of Order, each of which has its own king and its 
own restoration in petto, mutually enforce, as against their rivals’ 
hankering for usurpation and revolt, the common rule of the 
bourgeoisie, the form in which the special claims remain neutralised 
and reserved —the republic.... And Thiers spoke more truly than he 
suspected when he said: ‘We, the royalists, are the true pillars of the 
constitutional republic.’”’? 

This comedy of the républicains malgré eux, the antipathy to the 
status quo and the constant consolidation of it; the incessant friction 
between Bonaparte and the National Assembly; the ever renewed 
threat of the party of Order to split into its separate component 
parts, and the ever repeated conjugation of its factions; the attempt 
of each faction to transform each victory over the common foe into a 
defeat for its temporary allies; the mutual petty jealousy, chicanery, 
harassment, the tireless drawing of swords that ever and again ends 
with a baiser-Lamourette'?’— this whole unedifying comedy of errors 
never developed more classically than during the last six months. 

The party of Order regarded the election law at the same time as a 
victory over Bonaparte. Had not the government abdicated when it 
handed over the editing of and responsibility for its own proposal to 
the Commission of Seventeen? And did not the chief strength of 
Bonaparte as against the Assembly lie in the fact that he was the 
chosen of six millions? — Bonaparte, on his part, treated the election 
law as a concession to the Assembly, with which he claimed to have 
purchased harmony between the legislative and executive powers. As 
reward, the vulgar adventurer demanded an increase of three 
millions in his civil list. Dared the National Assembly enter into a 
conflict with the executive at a moment when it had excommunicated 
the great majority of Frenchmen? It was roused to anger; it ap- 
peared to want to go to extremes; its Commission rejected the 
motion; the Bonapartist press threatened, and referred to the 

disinherited people, deprived of its franchise; numerous noisy | 
attempts at an arrangement took place, and the Assembly finally 
gave way in fact, but at the same time revenged itself in principle. 
Instead of increasing the civil list in principle by three millions per 
annum, it granted him an accommodation of 2,160,000 francs. Not 
satisfied with this, it made even this concession only after it had been 
supported by Changarnier, the general of the party of Order and the 
protector thrust upon Bonaparte. Therefore it really granted the 
two millions not to Bonaparte, but to Changarnier. 

This sop, thrown to him de mauvaise grace,? was accepted by 
Bonaparte quite in the spirit of the donor. The Bonapartist press 
blustered anew against the National Assembly. When, now in the 
debate on the press law, the amendment was passed on the signing 
of names, which, in turn, was directed especially against the less 
important papers, the representatives of the private interests of 
Bonaparte, the principal Bonapartist paper, the Pouvoir, published 
an open and vehement attack on the National Assembly. The 
ministers had to disavow the paper before the Assembly; the 
managing editor of the Pouvoir was summoned before the bar of the 
National Assembly and sentenced to pay the highest fine, 5,000 
francs.° Next day, the Pouvoir published a still more insolent article 
against the Assembly, and, as the government’s revenge, the public 
prosecutor promptly prosecuted a number of Legitimist journals for 
violating the constitution. 

Finally there came the question of proroguing the Chamber. 
Bonaparte desired this in order to be able to operate unhindered by 
the Assembly. The party of Order desired it, partly for the purpose 
of carrying on its factional intrigues, partly for the pursuit of the 
private interests of the individual deputies. Both needed it in order 
to consolidate and push further the victories of reaction in the 
provinces. The Assembly therefore adjourned from August 11 until 
November 11. Since, however, Bonaparte in no way concealed that 
his only concern was to get rid of the irksome surveillance of the 
National Assembly, the Assembly imprinted on the vote of cen- 
fidence itself the stamp of want of confidence in the President. 
All Bonapartists were kept off the permanent commission of 
twenty-eight members, who stayed on during the recess as guardians 
of the virtue of the republic.!”° In their stead, even some republicans 
of the Siécle and the National were elected to it, in order to prove to 

the President the attachment of the majority to the constitutional 
republic. 

Shortly before and, esac. immediately after the prorogation 
of the Chamber, the two big factions of the party of Order, the 
Orleanists and the Legitimists, appeared to want to be reconciled, 
and this by a fusion of the two royal houses under whose flags they 
were fighting. The papers were full of reconciliation proposals that 
were Said to have been discussed at the sickbed of Louis Philippe at 
St. Leonards, when the death of Louis Philippe suddenly simpli- 
fied the situation. Louis Philippe was the usurper; Henry V, the 
dispossessed; the Count of Paris,* on the other hand, owing to the 
childlessness of Henry V, his lawful heir to the throne. Every pretext 
for objecting to a fusion of the two dynastic interests was now 
removed. But now, precisely, the two factions of the bourgeoisie first 
discovered that it was not zeal for a definite royal house that divided 
them, but that it was rather their divided class interests that kept the 
two dynasties apart. The Legitimists, who had made a pilgrimage to 
the residence of Henry V at Wiesbaden just as their competitors had 
to St. Leonards, received there the news of Louis Philippe’s death. 
Forthwith they formed a ministry in partibus infidelium,” which 
consisted mostly of members of that commission of guardians of the 
virtue of the republic' and which on the occasion of a squabble 
in the bosom of the party came out with the most outspoken 
proclamation of- right by the grace of God. The Orleanists rejoiced 
over the compromising scandal that this manifesto” called forth in 
the press, and did not conceal for a moment their open enmity to the 
Legitimists. 

During the adjournment of the National Assembly, the Councils 
of the Departments met. The majority of them declared for a more 
or less qualified revision of the constitution, that is, they declared for 
a not definitely specified monarchist restoration, for a “solution”, and 
confessed at the same time that they were too incompetent and too 
cqwardly to find this solution. The Bonapartist faction at once 
construed this desire for revision in the sense of a prolongation of 
Bonaparte’s presidency. 

The constitutional solution, the retirement of Bonaparte in May 
1852, the simultaneous election of a new President by all the electors 
of the country, the revision of the constitution by a Chamber of 

Revision in the first months of the new presidency, is utterly 
inadmissible for the ruling class. The day of the new presidential 
election would be the day of rendezvous for all the hostile parties, the 
Legitimists, the Orleanists, the bourgeois republicans, the rev- 
olutionists. It would have to come to a violent decision between the 
different factions. Even if the party of Order should succeed in 
uniting round the candidature of a neutral person outside the 
dynastic families, he would still be opposed by Bonaparte. In its 
struggle with the people, the party of Order is compelled constantly 
to increase the power of the executive. Every increase of the 
executive’s power increases the power of its bearer, Bonaparte. In 
the same measure, therefore, as the party of Order strengthens its 
joint might, it strengthens the fighting resources of Bonaparte’s 
dynastic pretensions, it strengthens his chance of frustrating a 
constitutional solution by force on the day of the decision. He will 
then have, as against the party of Order, no more scruples about the 
one pillar of the constitution than that party had, as against the 
people, about the other pillar in the matter of the election law. He 
would, seemingly even against the Assembly, appeal to universal 
suffrage. In a word, the constitutional solution questions the entire 
political status quo and behind the jeopardising of the status quo the 
bourgeois sees chaos, anarchy, civil war. He sees his purchases and 
sales, his promissory notes, his marriages, his agreements, duly 
acknowledged before a notary, his mortgages, his ground rents, 
house rents, profits, all his contracts and sources of income called in 
question on the first Sunday in May 1852,'*' and he cannot expose 
himself to this risk. Behind the jeopardising of the political status quo 
lurks the danger of the collapse of the entire bourgeois society. The 
only possible solution in the sense of the bourgeoisie is the 
postponement of the solution. It can save the constitutional republic 
only by a violation of the constitution, by the prolongation of the 
power of the President. This is also the last word of the press of 
Order, after the protracted and profound debates on the “solutions” 
in which it indulged after the session of the general councils. The 
high and mighty party of Order thus finds itself, to its shame, 
compelled to take seriously the ridiculous, commonplace and, to it, 
odious person of the pseudo-Bonaparte. 

This dirty figure likewise deceived himself concerning the causes 
that clothed him more and more with the character of the in- 
dispensable man. While his party had sufficient insight to ascribe 
the growing importance of Bonaparte to circumstances, he believed 
that he owed it solely to the magic power of his name and his 
continual caricaturing of Napoleon. He became more enterprising 

every day. To offset the pilgrimages to St. Leonards and Wiesbaden, 
he made his round trips through France. The Bonapartists had so 
little faith in the magic effect of his personality that they sent with 
him everywhere as claqueurs people from the Society of December 
10,!*? that organisation of the Paris lumpenproletariat, packed en masse 
into railway trains and post-chaises. They put speeches into the 
mouth of their marionette which, according to the reception in the 
different towns, proclaimed republican resignation or perennial 
tenacity as the keynote of the President’s policy. In spite of all 
manoeuvres these journeys were anything but triumphal proces- 
sions. 

When Bonaparte believed he had thus enthused the people, he set 
out to win the army. He caused great reviews to be held on the plain 
of Satory, near Versailles, at which he sought to buy the soldiers with 
garlic sausages, champagne and cigars. Whereas the genuine 
Napoleon, amid the hardships of his campaigns of conquest, knew 
how to cheer up his weary soldiers with outbursts of patriarchal 
familiarity, the pseudo-Napoleon believed it was in gratitude that the 
troops shouted: Vive Napoléon, vive le saucisson! that is, hurrah for 
the sausage [ Wurst], hurrah for the buffoon [Hanswurst]! 

These reviews led to the outbreak of the long suppressed dis- 
sension between Bonaparte and his War Minister d’Hautpoul, on 
the one hand, and Changarnier, on the other. In Changarnier, the 
party of Order had found its real neutral man, in whose case there 
could be no question of his own dynastic claims. It had designated 
him Bonaparte’s successor. In addition, Changarnier had become 
the great general of the party of Order through his conduct on 
January 29 and June 13, 1849, the modern Alexander, whose brutal 
intervention had, in the eyes of the timid bourgeois, cut the Gordian 
knot of the revolution. At bottom just as ridiculous as Bonaparte, he 
had thus become a power in the very cheapest manner and was set 
up by the National Assembly to watch the President. He himself 
played the coquette, e.g., in the matter of the salary grant, with 
the protection that he gave Bonaparte, and rose up ever more 
overpoweringly against him and the ministers. When, on the 
occasion of the election law, an insurrection was expected, he 
forbade his officers to take any orders whatever from the War 
Minister or the President. The press was also instrumental in 
magnifying the figure of Changarnier. With the complete absence of 
great personalities, the party of Order naturally found itself 
compelled to endow a single individual with the strength lacking in 
its class as a whole and so puff up this individual to a prodigy. Thus 
arose the myth of Changarnier, the “bulwark of society’. The arrogant 

charlatanry, the secretive air of importance with which Changarnier 
condescended to carry the world on his shoulders, forms the most 
ridiculous contrast to the events during and after the Satory review, 
which irrefutably proved that it needed only a stroke of the pen by 
Bonaparte, the infinitely little, to bring this fantastic offspring of 
bourgeois fear, the colossus Changarnier, back to the dimensions of 
mediocrity, and transform him, society’s heroic saviour, into a 
pensioned-off general. 

Bonaparte had for some time been revenging himself on 
Changarnier by provoking the War Minister to disputes in matters of 
discipline with the irksome protector. The last review of Satory 
finally brought the old animosity to a climax. The constitutional 
indignation of Changarnier knew no bounds when he saw the 
cavalry regiments file past with the unconstitutional cry: Vive 
l’Empereur! In order to forestall any unpleasant debate on this cry in 
the coming session of the Chamber, Bonaparte removed the War 
Minister d’Hautpoul by appointing him Governor of Algiers. In his 
place he put a reliable old general of the time of the empire,* one 
who was fully a match for Changarnier in brutality. But so that the 
dismissal of d’Hautpoul might not appear as a concession to 
Changarnier, he simultaneously transferred General Neumayer, the 
right hand of the great saviour of society, from Paris to Nantes. It 
had been Neumayer who at the last review had induced the whole of 
the infantry to file past the successor of Napoleon in icy silence. 
Changarnier, himself hit in the person of Neumayer, protested and 
threatened. To no purpose. After two days’ negotiations, the decree 
transferring Neumayer appeared in the Moniteur,” and there was 
nothing left for the hero of order but to submit to discipline or 
resign. 

Bonaparte’s struggle with Changarnier is the continuation of his 
struggle with the party of Order. The re-opening of the Nation- 
al Assembly on November 11 will, therefore, take place under 
threatening auspices. It will be a storm in a teacup. In essence the old 
game must go on. Meanwhile the majority of the party of Order will, 
despite the clamour of the sticklers for principle of its different 
factions, be compelled to prolong the power of the President. 
Similarly, Bonaparte, already humbled by lack of money, will, despite 
all preliminary protestations, accept this prolongation of power from 
the hands of the National Assembly as simply delegated to him. Thus 

the solution is postponed; the status quo continued; one faction of 
the party of Order compromised, weakened, made impossible by the 
other; the repression of the common enemy, the mass of the nation, 
extended and exhausted, until the economic relations themselves 
have again reached the point of development where a new explosion 
blows into the air all these squabbling parties with their constitutional 
republic. 

For the peace of mind of the bourgeois it must be said, however, 
that the scandal between Bonaparte and the party of Order has the 
result of ruining a multitude of small capitalists on the Bourse and 
putting their assets into the pockets of the big wolves of the Bourse.