order to make Bonaparte desist from dismissing Changarnier by 
using statesmanlike phrases and urging considerations of state. 
Whomever one seeks to persuade, one acknowledges as master of the 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparté 159 

situation. On January 12 Bonaparte, assured by this step, appoints a 
new ministry in which the leaders of the old ministry, Fould and 
Baroche, remain. Saint-Jean d’Angély becomes War Minister, the 
Moniteur publishes the decree dismissing Changarnier, and _ his 
command is divided between Baraguay d’Hilliers, who receives the 
First Army Division, and Perrot, who receives the National Guard. 
The bulwark of society has been dismissed, and while this does not 
cause any tiles to fall from the roofs, quotations on the bourse are, on 
the other hand, going up. 

By repulsing the army, which places itself in the person of 
Changarnier at its disposal, and so surrendering the army irrevoca- 
bly to the President, the Party of Order declares that the bourgeoisie 
has forfeited its vocation to rule. A parliamentary ministry no longer 
existed. Having now indeed lost its grip on the army and National 
Guard, what effective means remained to it with which simulta- 
neously to maintain the usurped power of parliament over the 
people and its constitutional power against the President? None. 
Only the appeal to powerless principles, to principles that it had itself 
always interpreted merely as general rules, which one prescribes for 
others in order to be able to move all the more freely oneself. The 
dismissal of Changarnier and the falling of the military power into 
Bonaparte’s hands closes the first part of the period we are 
considering, the period of struggle between the Party of Order and 
the executive power. War between the two powers has now been 
openly declared, is openly waged, but only after the Party of Order 
has lost both arms and soldiers. Without the ministry, without the 
army, without the people, without public opinion, after its Electoral 
Law of May 31 no longer the representative of the sovereign nation, 
sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans everything,’ the National 
Assembly had undergone a gradual transformation into an ancient 
French Parliament' that has to leave action to the government and 
content itself with growling remonstrances post festum 

The Party of Order receives the new ministry with a storm of 
indignation. General Bedeau recalls to mind the mildness of the 
Permanent Commission during the recess, and the excessive 
consideration it had shown by waiving the publication of its minutes. 
The Minister of the Interior now himself insists on the publication 
of these minutes, which by this time have naturally become as dull as 

* Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act Il, Scene 7.— Ed. 
> After the feast, that is, belatedly. — Ed. 
© Baroche.— Ed. 

ditch-water, disclose no fresh facts and have not the slightest effect 
on the blasé public. Upon Rémusat’s proposal the National Assembly 
retires into its offices and appoints a “Committee for Extraordinary 
Measures”. Paris departs the less from the rut of its everyday 
routine, since at this moment trade is prosperous, manufactories are 
busy, corn prices low, foodstuffs overflowing and the savings banks 
receive fresh deposits daily. The “extraordinary measures’ that 
parliament has announced with so much noise fizzle out on January 
18 in a no-confidence vote against the ministers without General 
Changarnier even being mentioned. The Party of Order had been 
forced to frame its motion in this way in order to secure the votes 
of the republicans, as of all the measures of the ministry, Chan- 
garnier’s dismissal is precisely the only one which the republicans 
approve of, while the Party of Order is in fact not in a posi- 
tion to censure the other ministerial acts, which it had itself 
dictated. 

The no-confidence vote of January 18 was passed by 415 votes to 
286. Thus, it was carried only by a coalition of the extreme Legitimists 
and Orleanists with the pure republicans and the Montagne. Thus it 
proved that the Party of Order had lost in conflicts with Bonaparte 
not only the ministry, not only the army, but also its independent 
parliamentary majority, that a squad of representatives had deserted 
from its camp, out of fanaticism for conciliation, out of fear of the 
struggle, out of lassitude, out of family regard for the state salaries of 
their kinsmen, out of speculation on ministerial posts becoming 
vacant (Odilon Barrot), out of sheer egoism, which makes the 
ordinary bourgeois always inclined to sacrifice the general interest of 
his class for this or that private motive. From the first, the 
Bonapartist representatives adhered to the Party of Order only in 
the struggle against the revolution. The leader of the Catholic party, 
Montalembert, had already at that time thrown his influence into the 
Bonapartist scale, since he despaired of the parliamentary party’s 
prospects of life. Lastly, the leaders of this party, Thiers and Berryer, 
the Orleanist and the Legitimist, were compelled openly to proclaim 
themselves republicans, to confess that their hearts were royalist but 
their heads republican, that the parliamentary republic was the sole 
possible form for the rule of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Thus they 
were compelled, before the eyes of the bourgeois class itself, to 
stigmatise the restoration plans, which they continued indefatigably 
to pursue behind parliament’s back, as an intrigue as dangerous as it 
was foolish. 

The no-confidence vote of January 18 hit the ministers and not the 
President. But it was not the ministry, it was the President who had 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 161 

dismissed Changarnier. Should the Party of Order impeach 
Bonaparte himself? On account of his restoration desires? The latter 
merely supplemented their own. On account of his conspiracy in 
connection with the military reviews and the Society of December 
10? They had buried these themes long since under simple orders of 
the day. On account of the dismissal of the hero of January 29 and 
June 13, the man who in May 1850 threatened to set fire to all four 
corners of Paris in the event of a rising? Their allies of the Montagne 
and Cavaignac did not even allow them to raise the fallen bulwark of 
society by means of an official declaration of sympathy. They 
themselves could not deny the President the constitutional authority 
to dismiss a general. They only raged because he made an 
unparliamentary use of his constitutional right. Had they not 
continually made an unconstitutional use of their parliamentary 
prerogative, particularly in regard to the abolition of universal 
suffrage? They were therefore reduced to moving within strictly 
parliamentary limits. And it took that peculiar malady which since 
1848 has raged all over the Continent, parliamentary cretinism, which 
holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of 
all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external 
world—it took this parliamentary cretinism for those who had 
destroyed all the conditions of parliamentary power with their own 
hands, and were bound to destroy them in their struggle with the 
other classes, still to regard their parliamentary victories as victories 
and to believe they hit the President by striking at his ministers. They 
merely gave him the opportunity to humiliate the National Assembly 
afresh in the eyes of the nation. On January 20 the Moniteur 
announced that the resignation of the entire ministry had been 
accepted. On the pretext that no parliamentary party any longer had 
a majority, as the vote of January 18, this fruit of the coalition 
between Montagne and royalists, proved, and pending the formation 
of a new majority, Bonaparte appointed a so-called transition 
ministry, not one member of which was a member of parliament, all 
being absolutely unknown and insignificant individuals, a ministry of 
mere clerks and copyists. The Party of Order could now work to 
exhaustion playing with these marionettes; the executive power no 
longer thought it worth while to be seriously represented in the 
National Assembly. The more his ministers were pure dummies, the 
more manifestly Bonaparte concentrated the whole executive power 
in his own person and the more scope he had to exploit it for his own 
ends. 

In coalition with the Montagne, the Party of Order revenged itself 
by rejecting the grant to the President of 1,800,000 francs, which the 

chief of the Society of December 10 had compelled his ministerial 
clerks to propose. This time a majority of only 102 votes decided the 
matter; thus 27 fresh votes had fallen away since January 18; the 
dissolution of the Party of Order was making progress. At the same 
time, in order that there might not for a moment be any mistake 
about the meaning of its coalition with the Montagne, it scorned even 
to consider a proposal signed by 189 members of the Montagne 
calling for a general amnesty of political offenders. It sufficed for the 
Minister of the Interior, a certain Vaisse, to declare that the 
tranquillity was only apparent, that in secret great agitation 
prevailed, that in secret ubiquitous societies were being organised, 
the democratic papers were preparing to come out again, the reports 
from the departments were unfavourable, the Geneva refugees were 
directing a conspiracy spreading by way of Lyons over all Southern 
France, France was on the verge of an industrial and commercial 
crisis, the manufacturers of Roubaix had reduced working hours, 
that the prisoners of Belle Isle '!° were in revolt —it sufficed for even 
a mere Vaisse to conjure up the red spectre, and the Party of Order 
rejected without discussion a motion that would certainly have 
won the National Assembly immense popularity and thrown 
Bonaparte back into its arms. Instead of letting itself be in- 
timidated by the executive power with the prospect of fresh 
disturbances, it ought rather to have allowed the class struggle a 
little elbow-room, so as to keep the executive power dependent 
on itself. But it did not feel equal to the task of playing with 
fire. 

Meanwhile, the so-called transition ministry continued to vegetate 
until the middle of April. Bonaparte wearied and befuddled the 
National Assembly with continual new ministerial combinations. 
Now he seemed to want to form a republican ministry with 
Lamartine and Billault, now a parliamentary one with the inevitable 
Odilon Barrot, whose name may never be missing when a dupe is 
necessary, then a Legitimist ministry with Vatimesnil and Benoist 
d’Azy, and then again an Orleanist one with Maleville. While he thus 
kept the different factions of the Party of Order in tension against 
one another and alarmed them as a whole by the prospect of a 
republican ministry and the consequent inevitable restoration of 
universal suffrage, he at the same time engendered in the 
bourgeoisie the conviction that his honest efforts to form a 
parliamentary ministry were being frustrated by the irreconcilability 
of the royalist factions. The bourgeoisie, however, cried out all the 
louder for a “strong government”; it found it all the more 
unpardonable to leave France “without administration” the more a 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 163 

general commercial crisis seemed now to be approaching and won 
recruits for socialism in the towns, just as the ruinously low price of 
corn did in the countryside. Trade became daily slacker, the 
unemployed hands increased perceptibly, ten thousand workers, at 
least, were breadless in Paris, innumerable factories stood idle in 
Rouen, Mulhouse, Lyons, Roubaix, Tourcoing, St. Etienne, Elbeuf, 
etc. Under these circumstances Bonaparte could venture, on April 
11, to restore the ministry of January 18: Messrs. Rouher, Fould, 
Baroche, etc., reinforced by M. Léon Faucher, whom the Constituent 
Assembly during its last days had, with the exception of five votes 
cast by ministers, unanimously stigmatised by a vote of no- 
confidence for sending out false telegrams. The National Assembly 
had therefore gained a victory over the ministry on January 18, had 
struggled with Bonaparte for three months, only to have Fould and 
Baroche on April 11 admit the puritan Faucher as a third member 
into their ministerial alliance.* 

In November 1849 Bonaparte had contented himself with an 
unparliamentary ministry, in January 1851 with an extra-parliamentary 
one, and on April 11 he felt strong enough to form an anti- 
parliamentary ministry, which harmoniously combined in itself the 
no-confidence votes of both Assemblies, the Constituent and the 
Legislative, the republican and the royalist. This gradation of 
ministries was the thermometer with which parliament could 
measure the decrease of its own vital heat. By the end of April the 
latter had fallen so low that Persigny, in a personal interview, could 
urge Changarnier to go over to the camp of the President. 
Bonaparte, he assured him, regarded the influence of the National 
Assembly as completely destroyed, and the proclamation was already 
prepared that was to be published after the coup d’état, which was 
kept steadily in view but was by chance again postponed. Changar- 
nier informed the leaders of the Party of Order of the obituary 
notice, but who believes that bedbug bites are fatal? And parliament, 
stricken, disintegrated and putrescent as it was, could not prevail 
upon itself to see in its duel with the grotesque chief of the Society of 
December 10 anything but a duel with a bedbug. But Bonaparte 
answered the Party of Order as Agesilaus did King Agis: “I seem to 
you an ant, but one day I shall be a lion.” 

* An ironic paraphrase of the expression “in eurem Bunde der dritte” (‘the third 
member in your alliance”) from Schiller’s poem “Die Birgschaft”.— Ed. 

VI 

The coalition with the Montagne and the pure republicans, to 
which the Party of Order saw itself condemned in its unavailing 
efforts to maintain possession of the military power and to reconquer 
supreme control of the executive power, proved incontrovertibly 
that it had forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. On May 
28 the mere power of the calendar, of the hour hand of the clock, 
gave the signal for its complete disintegration. With May 28 the last 
year of the life of the National Assembly began. It had now to decide 
for continuing the Constitution unaltered or for revising it. But 
revision of the Constitution, that implied not only rule of the 
bourgeoisie or of petty-bourgeois democracy," democracy or pro- 
letarian anarchy, parliamentary republic or Bonaparte, it implied at 
the same time Orleans or Bourbon! Thus fell in the midst of 
parliament the apple of discord that was bound to inflame openly the 
conflict of interests which split the Party of Order into hostile 
factions. The Party of Order was a combination of heterogeneous 
social substances. The question of revision generated a_ political 
temperature at which the product again decomposed into its original 
constituents. 

The interest of the Bonapartists in a revision was simple. For them 
it was above all a question of abolishing Article 45, which forbade 
Bonaparte’s re-election and the prorogation of his authority. No less 
simple appeared the position of the republicans. They uncondition- 
ally rejected any revision; they saw in it a universal conspiracy against 
the republic. Since they commanded more than a quarter of the votes in 
the National Assembly and, according to the Constitution, three- 
quarters of the votes were required for a resolution for revision to be 
legally valid and for the convocation of a revising Assembly, they 
only needed to count their votes to be sure of victory. And they were 
sure of victory. 

As against these clear positions, the Party of Order found itself 
caught in inextricable contradictions. If it should reject revision, it 
would imperil the status quo, since it would leave Bonaparte only one 
way out, that of force, and since on the second Sunday in May 1852, 
at the decisive moment, it would be surrendering France to 
revolutionary anarchy, with a President who had lost his authority, 
with a parliament which for a long time had not possessed it and with 
a people that meant to reconquer it. If it voted for constitutional 

* According to the list of misprints in the 1852 edition, this passage should read: 
“rule of the bourgeoisie or petty-bourgeois democracy”; however, Marx did not 
reproduce this alteration in the 1869 edition.— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 165 

revision, it knew that it voted in vain and would be bound to fail 
constitutionally because of the veto of the republicans. If it 
unconstitutionally declared a simple majority vote to be binding, 
then it could hope to dominate the revolution only if it subordinated 
itself unconditionally to the sovereignty of the executive power, then 
it would make Bonaparte master of the Constitution, of its revision 
and of itself. A merely partial revision which would prolong the 
authority of the President would pave the way for imperial 
usurpation. A general revision which would shorten the existence of 
the republic would bring the dynastic claims into unavoidable 
conflict, for the conditions of a Bourbon and the conditions of an 
Orleanist restoration were not only different, they were mutually 
exclusive. 

The parliamentary republic was more than the neutral territory on 
which the two factions of the French bourgeoisie, Legitimists and 
Orleanists, large landed property and industry, could dwell side by 
side with equality of rights. It was the unavoidable condition of their 
common rule, the sole form of state in which their general class 
interest subjected to itself at the same time both the claims of their 
particular factions and all the remaining classes of society. As 
royalists they fell back into their old antagonism, into the struggle for 
the supremacy. of landed property or of money, and the highest 
expression of this antagonism, its personification, was their kings 
themselves, their dynasties. Hence the resistance of the Party of 
Order to the recall of the Bourbons. . 

The Orleanist and people’s representative Creton had in 1849, 
1850 and 1851 periodically introduced a motion for the revocation 
of the decree exiling the royal families. Parliament, also periodically, 
presented the spectacle of an Assembly of royalists that obdurately 
barred the gates through which their exiled kings might return 
home. Richard III had murdered Henry VI, remarking that he was 
too good for this world and belonged in heaven.* The royalists 
declared France too bad to possess her kings again. Constrained by 
force of circumstances, they had become republicans and repeatedly 
sanctioned the popular decision that banished their kings from 
France. 

A revision of the Constitution—and circumstances compelled 
taking it into consideration—called in question, along with the 
republic, the common rule of the two bourgeois factions, and 
revived, with the possibility of a monarchy, the rivalry of the interests 
which it had predominantly represented by turns, the struggle for 

* Shakespeare, Richard III, Act I, Scene 2.— Ed. 

7—-2076 

the supremacy of one faction over the other. The diplomats of the 
Party of Order believed they could settle the struggle by an 
amalgamation of the two dynasties, by a so-called fuston of the 
royalist parties and their royal houses. The real fusion of the 
Restoration and the July monarchy was the parliamentary republic, 
in which Orleanist and Legitimist colours were obliterated and the 
various species of bourgeois disappeared in the bourgeois as such, in 
the bourgeois genus. Now, however, Orleanist was to become 
Legitimist and Legitimist Orleanist. Royalty, in which their antago- 
nism was personified, was to embody their unity; the expression of 
their exclusive factional interests was to become the expression of 
their common class interest; the monarchy was to do what only the 
abolition of two monarchies, the republic, could do and had done. 
This was the philosopher’s stone, to produce which the doctors of the 
Party of Order racked their brains. As if the Legitimist monarchy 
could ever become the monarchy of the industrial bourgeois or the 
bourgeois monarchy ever become the monarchy of the hereditary 
landed aristocracy. As if landed property and industry could 
fraternise under one crown, when the crown could only descend to 
one head, the head of the elder brother or of the younger. As if 
industry could come to terms with landed property at all, so long as 
landed property does not decide itself to become industrial. If 
Henry V should die tomorrow, the Count of Paris would not on that 
account become the king of the Legitimists unless he ceased to be the 
king of the Orleanists. The philosophers of fusion, however, who 
became more vociferous in proportion as the question of revision 
came to the fore, who had provided themselves with an official daily 
organ in the Assemblée nationale and who are again at work even at 
this very moment (February 1852), considered the whole difficulty to 
be due to the opposition and rivalry of the two dynasties. The 
attempts to reconcile the Orleans family with Henry V, begun since 
the death of Louis Philippe, but, like the dynastic intrigues generally, 
played at only while the National Assembly was in recess, during the 
enir’actes, behind the scenes, more sentimental coquetry with the old 
superstition than seriously meant business, now became grand 
performances of state, enacted by the Party of Order on the public 
stage, instead of in amateur theatricals, as hitherto. The couriers 
sped from Paris to Venice, from Venice to Claremont,'’? from 
Claremont to Paris. The Count of Chambord issues a manifesto in 
which “with the help of all the members of his family” he announces 
not his, but the “national” restoration. The Orleanist Salvandy 
throws himself at the feet of Henry V. The Legitimist chiefs, 
Berryer, Benoist d’Azy, Saint-Priest, travel to Claremont in order to 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 167 

persuade the Orleans set, but in vain. The fusionists perceive too late 
that the interests of the two bourgeois factions neither lose 
exclusiveness nor gain pliancy when they culminate in the form of 
family interests, the interests of two royal houses. If Henry V were to 
recognise the Count of Paris as his successor—the sole success that 
the fusion could achieve at best—the House of Orleans would not 
win any claim that the childlessness of Henry V had not already 
secured to it, but it would lose all claims that it had gained through 
the July revolution. It would waive its original claims, all the titles 
that it had wrested from the older branch of the Bourbons in almost — 
a hundred years of struggle; it would barter away its historical 
prerogative, the prerogative of the modern kingdom, for the 
prerogative of its genealogical tree. The fusion, therefore, would be 
nothing but a voluntary abdication of the House of Orleans, its 
resignation to Legitimacy, a repentant withdrawal from the Protes- 
tant state church into the Catholic. A withdrawal, moreover, that 
would not even bring it to the throne which it had lost, but to the 
throne’s steps, on which it had been born. The old Orleanist 
ministers, Guizot, Duchatel, etc., who likewise hastened to Claremont 
to announce the fusion, in fact represented merely the hangover 
from the July revolution, the despair felt in regard to the bourgeois 
monarchy and the monarchism of the bourgeois, the superstitious 
belief in Legitimacy as the last charm against anarchy. Imagining 
themselves mediators between Orleans and Bourbon, they were in 
reality merely Orleanist renegades, and the Prince of Joinville 
received them as such. On the other hand, the viable, bellicose 
section of the Orleanists, Thiers, Baze, etc., convinced Louis 
Philippe’s family all the more easily that if any directly monarchist 
restoration presupposed the fusion of the two dynasties and if any 
such fusion presupposed abdication of the House of Orleans, it was, 
on the contrary, wholly in accord with the tradition of their 
forefathers to recognise the republic for the moment and wait until 
events permitted the conversion of the presidential chair into a 
_ throne. Rumours of Joinville’s candidature were circulated, public 
curiosity was kept in suspense and, a few months later, in September, 
after the rejection of revision, his candidature was _ publicly 
proclaimed. 

The attempt at a royalist fusion of Orleanists with Legitimists had 
thus not only failed; it had destroyed their parliamentary fusion, their 
common republican form, and had broken up the Party of Order 
into its original component parts; but the more the estrangement 
between Claremont and Venice grew, the more their setthement 
broke down and the Joinville agitation gained ground, so much the 

7* 

more eager and earnest became the negotiations between 
Bonaparte’s minister Faucher and the Legitimists. 

The disintegration of the Party of Order did not stop at its original 
elements. Each of the two great factions, in its turn, underwent 
decomposition anew. It was as if all the old nuances that had 
formerly fought and jostled one another within each of the two 
circles, whether Legitimist or Orleanist, had thawed out again like 
dry infusoria on contact with water, as if they had acquired anew 
sufficient vital energy to form groups of their own and independent 
antagonisms. The Legitimists dreamed that they were back among 
the controversies between the Tuileries and the Pavillon Marsan, 
between Villéle and Polignac.’'* The Orleanists relived the golden 
days of the tourneys between Guizot, Molé, Broghe, Thiers and 
Odilon Barrot. 

That part of the Party of Order which was eager for revision, but 
was divided again on the limits to revision, a section composed of the 
Legitimists led by Berryer and Falloux, on the one hand, and by La 
Rochejaquelein, on the other, and of the conflict-weary Orleanists 
led by Molé, Broglie, Montalembert and Odilon Barrot, agreed with 
the Bonapartist representatives on the following indefinite and 
broadly framed motion: 

“With the object of restoring to the nation the full exercise of its sovereignty, the 
undersigned representatives move that the Constitution be revised.”* 

At the same time, however, they unanimously declared through 
their reporter Tocqueville that the National Assembly had not the 
right to move the abolition of the republic, that this right was vested 
‘solely in the Revising Chamber. For the rest, the Constitution might 
be revised only in a “legal” manner, hence only if the constitutionally 
prescribed three-quarters of the number of votes were cast in favour 
of revision. On July 19, after six days of stormy debate, revision was 
rejected, as was to be anticipated. Four hundred and forty-six votes 
were cast for it, but two hundred and seventy-eight against. The 
extreme Orleanists, Thiers, Changarnier, etc., voted with the 
republicans and the Montagne. 

Thus the majority of parliament declared against the Constitution, 
but this Constitution itself declared for the minority and that its vote 
was binding. But had not the Party of Order subordinated the 
Constitution to the parliamentary majority on May 31, 1850, and on 
June 13, 1849? Up to now, was not its whole policy based on the 

* The motion was tabled at the sitting of the Legislative Assembly on June 2, 1851. 
See Le Moniteur universel, No. 154, June 3, 1851.— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 169 

subordination of the paragraphs of the Constitution to the decisions 
of the parliamentary majority? Had it not left to the democrats the 
Old Testament-style superstitious belief in the letter of the Jaw, and 
castigated the democrats for it? At the present moment, however, 
revision of the Constitution meant nothing but continuation of the 
presidential] authority, just as continuation of the Constitution meant 
nothing but Bonaparte’s deposition. Parliament had declared for 
him, but the Constitution declared against parliament. He therefore 
acted in the sense of parliament when he tore up the Constitution, 
and he acted in the sense of the Constitution when he dispersed 
parliament. 

Parliament had declared the Constitution and, with the latter, its 
own rule to be “beyond the majority”; by its vote it had abolished the 
Constitution and prorogued the presidential power, while declaring 
at the same time that neither can the one die nor the other live so 
long as it itself continues to exist. Those who were to bury it were 
standing at the door. While it debated on revision, Bonaparte 
removed General Baraguay d’Hilliers, who had proved irresolute, 
from the command of the First Army Division and appointed in his 
place General Magnan, the victor of Lyons,'’* the hero of the 
December days, one of his creatures, who under Louis Philippe had 
already compromised himself more or less in Bonaparte’s favour on 
the occasion of the Boulogne expedition. 

The Party of Order proved by its decision on revision that it knew 
neither how to rule nor how to serve; neither how to live nor how to 
die; neither how to endure the republic nor how to overthrow it; 
neither how to uphold the Constitution nor how to throw it 
overboard; neither how to co-operate with the President nor how to 
break with him. To whom, then, did it look for the solution of all the 
contradictions? To the calendar, to the course of events. It ceased to 
presume to sway the events. It therefore challenged the events to 
assume sway over it, and thereby challenged the power to which in 
the struggle against the people it had surrendered one attribute after 
another until it itself stood impotent before this power. In order 
that the head of the executive power might be able the 
more undisturbedly to draw up his plan of campaign against it, 
strengthen his means of attack, select his tools and fortify his 
positions, it resolved precisely at this critical moment to retire from 
the stage and adjourn for three months, from August 10 to 
November 4. 

The parliamentary party was not only dissolved into its two great 
factions, each of these factions was not only split within itself, but the 
Party of Order in parliament had fallen out with the Party of Order 

outside parliament. The spokesmen and scribes of the bourgeoisie, its 
platform and its press, in short, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie and 
the bourgeoisie itself, the representatives and the represented, were 
alienated from one another and no longer understood each 
other. 

The Legitimists in the provinces, with their limited horizon and 
their unlimited enthusiasm, accused their parliamentary leaders, 
Berryer and Falloux, of deserting to the Bonapartist camp and of 
defection from Henry V. Their minds, pure as the fleur-de-lis,’ 
believed in the fall of man, but not in diplomacy. 

Far more fateful and decisive was the breach of the commercial 
bourgeoisie with its politicians. It reproached them, not as the 
Legitimists reproached theirs, with having abandoned their princi- 
ples, but, on the contrary, with clinging to principles that had 
become useless. 

I have already indicated above that since Fould’s entry into the 
ministry the section of the commercial bourgeoisie which had held 
the lion’s share of power under Louis Philippe, namely, the finance 
aristocracy, had become Bonapartist. Fould represented not only 
Bonaparte’s interests in the bourse, he represented at the same time 
the interests of the bourse before Bonaparte. The position of the 
finance aristocracy is most strikingly depicted in a passage from its 
European organ, the London Economist. In its issue of February 1, 
1851, its Paris correspondent writes: 

“Now we have it stated from numerous quarters that above all things France 
demands tranquillity. The President declares it in his message to the Legislative 
Assembly °; it is echoed from the tribune; it is asserted in the journals; it is announced 
from the pulpit; it 1s demonstrated by the sensitiveness of the public funds at the least prospect 

of disturbance, and their firmness the instant it is made manifest that the executive is 
victorious.” 

In its issue of November 29, 1851, The Economist declares in its 
own name: 

“The President is the guardian of order, and is now recognised as such on every Stock 
Exchange of Europe.” 

The finance aristocracy, therefore, condemned the parliamentary 
struggle of the Party of Order with the executive power as a 
disturbance of order, and celebrated every victory of the President over 
its ostensible representatives as a victory of order. By finance 
aristocracy must here be understood not merely the great loan 

“ The emblem of the Bourbon dynasty.— Ed. 
> The message of November 12, 1850 (see this volume, p. 152).— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 17] 

promoters and speculators in public funds, in regard to whom it is 
immediately obvious that their interests coincide with the interests of 
the state power. All modern finance, the whole of the banking 
business, is interwoven in the closest fashion with public credit. A 
part of their business capital is necessarily invested and put out at 
interest in quickly convertible public funds. Their deposits, the 
capital placed at their disposal and distributed by them among 
merchants and.industrialists, are partly derived from the dividends 
of holders of government securities. If in every epoch the stability of 
the state power was like Moses and the prophets to the entire money 
market and to the priests of this money market, why not all the more 
so today, when every deluge threatens to sweep away the old states, 
and the old state debts with them? 

The industrial bourgeoisie, too, in its fanaticism for order, was 
angered by the squabbles of the parliamentary Party of Order with 
the executive power. After their vote of January 18 on the occasion 
of Changarnier’s dismissal, Thiers, Anglas, Sainte-Beuve, etc., 
received from their constituents, precisely in the industrial districts, 
public reproofs in which their coalition with the Montagne was 
specifically scourged as high treason to order. If, as we have seen, the 
boastful taunts, the petty intrigues which marked the struggle of the 
Party of Order with the President merited no better reception, then, 
on the other hand, this bourgeois party, which. required its 
representatives to allow the military power to pass from its own 
parliament to an adventurous pretender without offering resistance, 
was not even worth the intrigues that were squandered in its 
interests. It proved that the struggle to maintain its public interests, 
its own class interests, its political power, only troubled and upset it, as it 
was a disturbance of private business. 

With barely an exception, the bourgeois dignitaries of the 
departmental towns, the municipal authorities, the judges of the 
Commercial Courts, etc., everywhere received Bonaparte on his 
tours in the most servile manner, even when, as in Dijon, he made an 
unrestrained attack on the National Assembly, and especially on the 
Party of Order.* 

When trade was good, as it still was at the beginning of 1851, the 
commercial bourgeoisie raged against any parliamentary struggle, 
lest trade be put out of humour. When trade was bad, as it 
continually was from the end of February 1851, the commercial 

* L.-N. Bonaparte, “Réponse [au discours du maire de Dijon au banquet offert 
par la ville 4 M. le Président de Ja République, le 1 juin 1851], Le Moniteur unwversel, 
No. 154, June 3, 1851.— Ed. 

E72 Karl Marx 

bourgeoisie accused the parliamentary struggles of being the cause 
of stagnation and cried out for them to stop in order that trade might 
start again. The revision debates came precisely in this bad period. 
Since the question here was whether the existing form of state was to 
be or not to be, the bourgeoisie felt itself all the more justified in 
demanding from its representatives the ending of this torturous 
provisional arrangement and at the same time the maintenance of 
the status quo. There was no contradiction in this. By the end of the 
provisional arrangement it understood precisely its continuation, the 
postponement to a distant future of the moment when a decision had 
to be reached. The status quo could be maintained in only two ways: 
prolongation of Bonaparte’s authority or his constitutional retire- 
ment and the election of Cavaignac. A section of the bourgeoisie 
desired the latter solution and knew no better advice to give its 
representatives than to keep silent and leave the burning question 
untouched. They were of the opinion that if their representatives did 
not speak, Bonaparte would not act. They wanted an ostrich 
parliament that would hide its head in order to remain unseen. 
Another section of the bourgeoisie desired, because Bonaparte was 
already in the presidential chair, to leave him sitting in it, so that 
everything might remain in the same old rut. They were indignant 
because their parliament did not openly infringe the Constitution 
and abdicate without ceremony. 

The General Councils of the departments, those provincial 
representative bodies of the big bourgeoisie, which met from August 
25 on during the recess of the National Assembly, declared almost 
unanimously for revision, and thus against parliament and in favour 
of Bonaparte. 

Sull more unequivocally than in falling out with its parliamentary 
representatives did the bourgeoisie display its wrath against its literary 
representatives, its own press. The sentences of ruinous fines and 
shameless terms of imprisonment, on the verdicts of bourgeois 
juries, for every attack by bourgeois journalists on Bonaparte’s 
usurpationist desires, for every attempt by the press to defend the 
political rights of the bourgeoisie against the executive power, 
astonished not merely France, but all Europe. 

While the parliamentary Party of Order, by its clamour for 
tranquillity, as I have shown, committed itself to quiescence, while it 
declared the political rule of the bourgeoisie to be incompatible with 
the safety and existence of the bourgeoisie, by destroying with its 
own hands in the struggle against the other classes of society all the 
conditions for its own regime, the parliamentary regime, the 
extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, by its 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 173 

servility towards the President, by its vilification of parliament, by its 
brutal maltreatment of its own press, invited Bonaparte to suppress 
and annihilate its speaking and writing section, its politicians and its 
literati, its platform and its press, in order that it might then be able 
to pursue its private affairs with full confidence in the protection of a 
strong and unrestricted government. It declared unequivocally that 
it longed to get rid of its own political rule in order to get rid of 
the troubles and dangers of ruling. 

And this extra-parliamentary bourgeoisie,” which had already 
rebelled against the purely parliamentary and literary struggle for 
the rule of its own class and betrayed the leaders of this struggle, now 
dares after the event to indict the proletariat for not having risen ina 
bloody struggle, a life-and-death struggle on its behalf! This 
bourgeoisie, which every moment sacrificed its general class 
interests, that is, its political interests, to the narrowest and most 
sordid private interests, and demanded a similar sacrifice from its 
representatives, now moans that the proletariat has sacrificed its [the 
bourgeoisie’s] ideal political interests to its (the proletariat’s}] material 
interests. It poses as a lovely being that has been misunderstood and 
deserted in the decisive hour by the proletariat misled by socialists. 
And it finds a general echo in the bourgeois world. Naturally, I do 
not speak here of hole-and-corner German politicians and opinion- 
ated boobies. I refer, for example, to the already quoted Economist, 
which as late as November 29, 1851, that is, four days prior to the 
coup d’état, had declared Bonaparte to be the “guardian of order”, 
but the Thiers and Berryers to be “anarchists”, and on December 
27, 1851, after Bonaparte had quieted these anarchists, is already 
vociferous concerning the treason to “the skill, knowledge, dis- 
cipline, mental influence, intellectual resources and moral weight 
of the middle and upper ranks” committed by the masses of 
“ignorant, untrained, and stupid proletaires”. The stupid, ignorant 
and vulgar mass was none other than the bourgeois mass it- 
self. 

In the year 1851, France had admittedly passed through a kind of 
minor trade crisis. The end of February showed a decline in exports 
compared with 1850; in March trade suffered and factories closed 
down; in April the position of the industrial departments appeared 
as desperate as after the February days; in May business had still not 
revived; as late as June 28 the holdings of the Bank of France 
showed, by the enormous growth of deposits and the equally great 

“The 1852 edition has: “And this miserable, cowardly extra-parliamentary 
bourgeoisie,...””— Ed. 

decrease in advances on bills of exchange, that production was at a 
standstill, and it was not until the middle of October that a 
progressive improvement of business again set in. The French 
bourgeoisie attributed this trade stagnation to purely political causes, 
to the struggle between parliament and the executive power, to the 
precariousness of a merely provisional form of state, to the terrifying 
prospect of the second Sunday in May 1852. I will not deny that all 
these circumstances had a depressing effect on some branches of 
industry in Paris and the departments. But in every case this 
influence of the political conditions was only local and inconsider- 
able. Does this require further proof than the fact that the 
improvement of trade set in towards the middle of October, at the 
very moment when the political situation grew worse, the political 
horizon darkened and a thunderbolt from Elysium* was expected at 
any moment? For the rest, the French bourgeois, whose “skill, 
knowledge, spiritual insight and intellectual resources” reach no 
further than his nose, could throughout the period of the Great 
Exhibition in London! have found the cause of his commercial 
misery right under his nose. While in France factories were closed 
down, in England commercial bankruptcies broke out. While in 
April and May the industrial panic reached a climax in France, in 
April and May the commercial panic reached a climax in England. 
The French woollen industry suffered alongside the English, and the 
French silk manufacture with the English too. True, the English 
cotton mills continued working, but no longer at the same profits as 
in 1849 and 1850. The only difference was that the crisis in France 
was industrial, in England commercial; that while in France the 
factories stood idle, in England they extended operations, but under 
less favourable conditions than in preceding years; that in France it 
was exports, in England imports which were hardest hit. The 
common cause, which is naturally not to be sought within the bounds 
of the French political horizon, was obvious. The years 1849 and 
1850 were years of the greatest material prosperity and of an 
over-production that appeared as such only in 1851. At the 
beginning of this year it was given a further special impetus by the 
prospect of the Great Exhibition. In addition there were the 
following special circumstances: first, the partial failure of the cotton 
crop in 1850 and 1851, then the certainty of a bigger cotton crop 
than had been expected; first the rise, then the sudden fall, in short, 
the fluctuations in the price of cotton. The crop of raw silk, in France 

* A pun: Elysium here means both the skies and the Presidential palace in the 
Champs Elysées.— Ed. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 175 

at least, had turned out to be even below the average yield. Woollen | 
manufacture, finally, had expanded so much since 1848 that the | 
production of wool could not keep pace with it and the price of raw 
wool rose out of all proportion to the price of woollen manufactures. 
Here, then, in the raw material of three industries producing for the 
world market, we have already threefold material for a stagnation in 
trade. Apart from these special circumstances, the apparent crisis of 
1851 was nothing else but the halt which over-production and 
over-speculation invariably make in describing the industrial cycle, 
before they summon all their strength in order to rush feverishly 
through the final phase of this cycle and arrive once more at their 
starting-point, the general trade crisis. During such intervals in the 
history of trade commercial bankruptcies break out in England, 
while in France industry itself is reduced to idleness, being partly 
forced into retreat by the competition, just then becoming intolera- 
ble, of the English in all markets, and being partly singled out for 
attack as a luxury industry by every business stagnation. Thus, 
besides the general crises, France goes through national trade crises 
of her own, which are nevertheless determined and conditioned far 
more by the general state of the world market than by French local 
influences. It will not be without interest to contrast the judgment of 
the English bourgeois with the prejudice of the French bourgeois. In 
its annual trade report for 1851, one of the largest Liverpool houses 
writes: 

“Few years have more thoroughly belied the anticipations formed at their 
commencement than the one just closed; instead of the great prosperity which was 
almost unanimously looked for it has proved one of the most discouraging that has 
been seen for the last quarter of a century—this, of course, refers to the mercantile, 
not to the manufacturing classes. And yet there certainly were grounds for 
anticipating the reverse at the beginning of the year—stocks of produce were 
moderate, money was abundant, and food was cheap, a plentiful harvest well secured, 
unbroken peace on the Continent, and no political or fiscal disturbances at home; 
indeed, the wings of commerce were never more unfettered.... To what source, then, 
is this:disastrous result to be attributed? We believe to over-trading both in imports 

and exports. Unless our merchants will put more stringent limits to their freedom 
of action, nothing but a triennial panic can keep us in check.”* 

Now picture to yourself the French bourgeois, how in the throes of 
this business panic his trade-crazy brain is tortured, set in a whirl 
and stunned by rumours of coups d’état and the restoration of 
universal suffrage, by the struggle between parliament and the 
executive power, by the Fronde between Orleanists and Legitimists, 

* “The Spirit of the Annual Trade Circulars. The Year That Is Past”, The 
Economist, No. 437, January 10, 1852.— Ed. 

by the communist conspiracies in the south of France,, by alleged 
Jacqueries in the departments of Niévre and Cher, by the advertise- 
ments of the different candidates for the presidency, by the 
cheapjack slogans of the journals, by the threats of the republicans to 
uphold the Constitution and universal suffrage by force of arms, by 
the gospels of the émigré heroes in partibus,* who announced that the 
world would come to an end on the second Sunday in May 
1852—think of all this and you. will understand why in this 
unspeakable, deafening chaos of fusion, revision, prorogation, 
constitution, conspiration, coalition, emigration, usurpation and 
revolution, the bourgeois madly snorts at his parliamentary republic: 
“Rather an end with terror than terror without end!”