I

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidiére for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew for the Uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances attending the second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire! *

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in

* This passage reads as follows in the 1852 edition: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a great tragedy, the second as a miserable farce. Caussidiére for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848-51 for the Montagne of 1793-95, and the London constable with the first dozen indebted lieutenants that came along for the little corporal with his band of marshals! “" The eighteenth Brumaire of the idiot for the eighteenth Brumaire of the genius! And the same caricature in the circumstances attending the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire! The first time France on the verge of bankruptcy, this time Bonaparte himself on the threshold of the debtors’ prison; then the coalition of the Great Powers on France’s borders, this time the Ruge-Darasz coalition in England and the Kinkel-Brentano coalition in America; then a St. Bernard to cross, this time a company of gendarmes to be sent across the Jura; then more than a Marengo to be won, this time the Great Cross of the St. Andrew Order’ to be earned and the respect of the Berlin National-Zeitung to be lost.” — Ed.

such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new. Consideration of this world-historical necromancy reveals at once a salient difference. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society. The first ones knocked the feudal basis to pieces and mowed off the feudal heads which had grown on it. The other created inside France the conditions under which free competition could first be developed, parcelled landed property exploited and the unchained industrial productive forces of the nation employed; and beyond the French borders he -everywhere swept the feudal institutions away, so far as was necessary to furnish bourgeois society in France with a suitable up-to-date environment on the European Continent. The new social formation once established, the antediluvian Colossi disappeared and with them resurrected Romanity—the Brutuses, Gracchi, Publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality had begotten its true interpreters and mouthpieces in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots; its real commanders sat behind the counter, and the hogheaded Louis XVIII was its political chief. Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer comprehended that ghosts from the days of Rome had watched over its cradle. But unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and battles of peoples to bring it into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to maintain their passion on the high plane of great historical

tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution. When the real aim had been achieved, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.

Thus the resurrection of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in imagination, not of fleeing from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not of making its ghost walk about again.

From 1848 to 1851 only the ghost of the old revolution walked about, from Marrast, the républicain en gants jaunes,* who disguised himself as the old Bailly, down to the adventurer who hides his commonplace repulsive features under the iron death mask of Napoleon. An entire people, which had imagined that by means of a revolution it had imparted to itself an accelerated power of motion, suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct epoch and, in order that no doubt as to the relapse may be possible, the old dates arise again, the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts, which had long become a subject of antiquarian erudition, and the old myrmidons of the law, who had seemed long decayed. The nation feels like that mad Englishman in Bedlam who fancies that he lives in the times of the ancient Pharaohs and daily bemoans the hard labour that he must perform in the Ethiopian mines as a gold digger, immured in this subterranean prison, a dimly burning lamp fastened to his head, the overseer of the slaves behind him with a long whip, and at the exits a confused welter of barbarian mercenaries, who understand neither the forced labourers in the mines nor one another, since they speak no common language. “And all this is expected of me,” sighs the mad Englishman, “of me, a freeborn Briton, in order to make gold for the old Pharaohs.” “In order to pay the debts of the Bonaparte family,” sighs the French nation. The Englishman, so long as he was in his right mind, could not get rid of the fixed idea of making gold. The French, so long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid of the memory of Napoleon, as the election of December 10° proved. They hankered to return from the perils of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt,’° and December 2, 1851 was the answer. They have not only a caricature of the old Napoleon, they have the old Napoleon himself, caricatured as he must appear in the middle of the nineteenth century.

* Republican in yellow gloves.— Ed.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition about the past. Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead.* There the words went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the words.

The February revolution was a surprise attack, a taking of the old society utiawares, and the people proclaimed this unexpected coup de mainas a deed of historic importance, ushering in the new epoch. On December 2 the February revolution is conjured away by a cardsharper’s trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy but the liberal concessions that were wrung from it by centuries of struggle. Instead of society having conquered a new content for itself, it seems that the state only returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple domination of the sabre and the cowl. This is the answer to the coup de main of February 1848, given by the coup de téte” of December 1851. Easy come, easy go. Meanwhile the intervening time has not passed by unused. During the years 1848 to 1851 French society made up, and that by an abbreviated because revolutionary method, for the studies and experiences which, in a regular, so to speak, textbook course of development, would have had to precede the February revolution, if it was to be more than a ruffling of the surface. Society now seems to have fallen back behind its point of departure; it has in truth first to create for itself the revolutionary point of departure, the situation, the relations, the conditions under which alone modern revolution becomes serious.

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants, ecstasy is the everyday spirit, but they are short-lived, soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression seizes society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their

* Cf. Matthew 8: 22.— Ed. > Rash act.— Ed.

first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, and recoil again and again from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out:

Hic Rhodus, hic salta! = Here is the rose, here dance!

For the rest, every fairly competent observer, even if he had not followed the course of French development step by step, must have had a presentiment that an unheard-of fiasco was in store for the revolution. It was enough to hear the self-complacent howl of victory with which Messieurs the Democrats congratulated each other on the beneficial consequences of the second Sunday in May 1852.” In their minds the second Sunday in May 1852 had become a fixed idea, a dogma, like the day on which Christ should reappear and the millennium begin, in the minds of the Chiliasts.”” As ever, weakness had taken refuge in a belief in miracles, fancied the enemy overcome when it had only conjured him away in imagination, and lost all understanding of the present in a passive glorification of the future in store for it and of the deeds it had in petto* but which it merely did not want as yet to make public. Those heroes who seek to disprove their proven incapacity by offering each other their sympathy and getting together in a crowd had tied up their bundles, collected their laurel wreaths in advance and were just then engaged in discounting on the exchange market the republics in partibus for which they had already providently organised the government personnel with all the calm of their unassuming disposition. December 2 struck them like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, and the peoples that in periods of pusillanimous depression gladly let their inward apprehension be drowned out by the loudest bawlers will have perhaps convinced themselves that the times are past when the cackle of geese could save the Capitol.

The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa,” the

* In reserve.— Ed. In partibus infidelium—literally: in parts inhabited by infidels. The words are added to the title of Roman Catholic bishops holding purely nominal dioceses in non-Christian countries. In the figurative sense they mean: “not really existing” .— Ed.

thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, the liberté, égalite, fraternité and the second Sunday in May 1852—all has vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: “All that comes to birth is fit for overthrow, as nothing worth.” *

It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. A nation and a woman are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer that came along could violate them. The riddle is not solved by such turns of speech, but merely formulated differently. It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six million can be surprised and delivered unresisting into captivity by three swindlers.

Let us recapitulate in general outline the phases that the French Revolution went through from February 24, 1848 to December 1851.

Three main periods are unmistakable: the February period; May 4, 1848 to May 28, 1849: the period of the constitution of the republic or of the Constituent National Assembly; May 28, 1849 to December 2, 1851: the period of the constitutional republic or of the Legislative National Assembly<

The first period, from February 24, or the overthrow of Louis Philippe, to May 4, 1848, the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, the February period proper, may be described as the prologue to the revolution. Its character was officially expressed in the fact that the government improvised by it declared itself that it was provisional and, like the government, everything that was mooted, attempted or enunciated during this period proclaimed itself to be only provisional. Nothing and nobody ventured to lay claim to the right of existence and of real action. All the elements that had prepared or determined the revolution, the dynastic opposition,” the republican bourgeoisie, the democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie and the Social-Democratic workers, provisionally found their place in the February government.

* Goethe, Faust, Erster Teil, “Studierzimmer”.— Ed.

> The 1852 edition has here: “could violate and appropriate them”’.— Ed.

© Here and below in the German editions of 1852, 1869 and 1885 the date of the opening of the Legislative Assembly is given inaccurately as May 29, 1849.— Ed.

It could not be otherwise. The February days originally aimed at an electoral reform, by which the circle of the politically privileged among the possessing class itself was to be widened and the exclusive domination of the finance aristocracy overthrown. When it came to the actual conflict, however, when the people mounted the barricades, the National Guard maintained a passive attitude, the army offered no serious resistance and the monarchy ran away, the republic appeared to be a matter of course. Every party construed it 1n its own way. Having secured it arms in hand, the proletariat impressed its stamp upon it and proclaimed it to be a social republic. There was thus indicated the general content of the modern revolution, a content which* was in most singular contradiction to everything that, with the material available, with the degree of education attained by the masses, under the given circumstances and relations, could be immediately realised in practice. On the other hand, the claims of all the remaining elements that had collaborated in the February revolution were recognised by the lion’s share that they obtained in the government. In no period do we, therefore, find a more confused mixture of high-flown phrases and actual uncertainty and clumsiness, of more enthusiastic striving for innovation and more thorough domination of the old routine, of more apparent harmony of the whole of society and more profound estrangement of its elements. While the Paris proletariat still revelled in the vision of the wide prospects that had opened before it and indulged in earnest discussions on social problems, the old forces of society had grouped themselves, rallied, reflected and found unexpected support in the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty bourgeois, who all at once stormed on to the political stage, after the barriers of the July monarchy had fallen.

The second period, from May 4, 1848 to the end of May 1849, is the period of the constitution, the foundation, of the bourgeois republic. Directly after the February days not only had the dynastic opposition been surprised by the republicans and the republicans by the Socialists, but all France by Paris. The National Assembly, which met on May 4, 1848, had emerged from the national elections and represented the nation. It was a living protest against the aspirations of the February days and was to reduce the results of the revolution to the bourgeois scale. In vain the Paris proletariat, which immediately grasped the character of this

* The 1852 edition has here: “as cannot be otherwise in the prologue to a drama” .— Ed.

National Assembly, attempted on May 15, a few days after it met, forcibly to negate its existence, to dissolve it, to disintegrate again into its constituent parts the organic form in which the proletariat was threatened by the reacting spirit of the nation.” As is known, May 15 had no other result save that of removing Blanqui and his comrades, that is, the real leaders of the proletarian party,” from the public stage for the entire duration of the cycle we are considering.

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic, that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule on behalf of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the finance aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpenproletariat organised as the Mobile Guard,” the intellectuals, the clergy and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More than 3,000 insurgents were butchered after the victory, and 15,000 were deported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat recedes into the background of the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on every occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start, but with ever decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter results. As soon as one of the social strata situated above it gets into revolutionary ferment, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and so shares all the defeats that the different parties suffer, one after another. But these subsequent blows become the weaker, the greater the surface of society over which they are distributed. The more important leaders of the proletariat in the Assembly and in the press successively fall victim to the courts, and ever more equivocal figures come to head it. In part it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionising of the old world by means of the latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers

“The 1852 edition has: “the real leaders of the proletarian party, the revolutionary Communists” .— Ed.

shipwreck. It seems to be unable either to rediscover revolutionary greatness in itself or to win new energy from the connections newly entered into, until all classes with which it contended in June themselves lie prostrate beside it. But at least it succumbs with the honours of the great, world-historic struggle; not only France, but all Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the ensuing defeats of the upper classes are so cheaply bought that they require barefaced exaggeration by the victorious party to be able to pass for events at all, and become the more ignominious the further the defeated party is from the proletarian party.

The defeat of the June insurgents, to be sure, had indeed prepared and levelled the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and built up, but it had shown at the same time that in Europe the questions at issue are other than that of “republic or monarchy”. It had revealed that here bourgeois republic signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes. It had proved that in countries with an old civilisation, with a developed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form of the revolutionising of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life, as, for example, in the United States of North America, where, though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their component elements in constant flux, where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather compensate for the relative deficiency of heads and hands, and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world its own, has left neither time nor opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world.

During the June days all classes and parties had united in the Party of Order against the proletarian class as the Party of Anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from “the enemies of society’. They had given out the watch-words of the old society, ‘property, family, religion, order’, to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counter-revolutionary crusaders: “By this sign thou shalt conquer!” From this moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which had gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: “Property, family, religion, order.” Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest 1s

maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an “attempt on society” and stigmatised as “socialism”. And, finally, the high priests of “religion and order”* themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison-vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement—in the name of property, of the family, of religion and of order. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order and the hero Krapilinski” installs himself in the Tuileries as the “saviour of society’.

II

Let us pick up the threads of the development once more.

The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is the history of the domination and the disintegration of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie, of that faction which is known by the names of tricolour republicans, pure republicans, political republicans, formalist republicans, etc.

Under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe it had formed the official republican opposition and consequently a recognised component part of the political world of the day. It had its representatives in the Chambers and a considerable sphere of influence in the press. Its Paris organ, the National, was considered just as respectable in its way as the Journal des Deébats. Its character corresponded to this position under the constitutional monarchy. It was not a faction of the bourgeoisie held together by great common interests and marked off by specific conditions of production. It was a clique of republican-minded bourgeois,

? In the German original: “Religion und Ordnung”. According to the list of misprints in the 1852 edition, this should read: “Religion der Ordnung” (“religion of order”) but the correction was not introduced into the 1869 and 1885 editions.— Ed.

Krapiilinski—one of the main characters in Heine’s poem “Zwei Ritter” (Romanzero). Here Marx alludes to Louis Bonaparte.— Ed.

writers, lawyers, officers and officials that owed its influence to the personal antipathies of the country against Louis Philippe, to memories of the old republic, to the republican faith of a number of enthusiasts, above all, however, to French nationalism, whose hatred of the Vienna treaties” and of the alliance with England it always kept awake. A large part of the following that the National had under Louis Philippe was due to this concealed imperialism, which could consequently confront it later, under the republic, as a deadly rival in the person of Louis Bonaparte. It fought the finance aristocracy, as did all the rest of the bourgeois opposition. Polemics against the budget, which were closely connected in France with fighting the finance aristocracy, procured popularity too cheaply and material for puritanical leading articles* too plentifully, not to be exploited. The industrial bourgeoisie was grateful to it for its slavish defence of the French protectionist system, which it accepted, however, more on national grounds than on grounds of national economy; the bourgeoisie as a whole, for its vicious denunciation of communism and socialism. For the rest, the party of the National was purely republican, that is, it demanded a republican instead of a monarchist form of bourgeois rule and, above all, the lion’s share of this rule. On the conditions of this transformation it was by no means clear. On the other hand, what was clear as daylight to it and was_ publicly acknowledged at the reform banquets in the last days of Louis Philippe, was its unpopularity with the democratic petty bourgeois and, in particular, with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as is, indeed, the way with pure republicans, were already on the point of contenting themselves in the first instance with a regency of the Duchess of Orleans, when the February revolution broke out and assigned their best-known representatives a place in the Provisional Government. From the start, they naturally had the confidence of the bourgeoisie and a majority in the Constituent National Assembly. The socialist elements of the Provisional Government were excluded forthwith from the Executive Commission which the National Assembly formed when it met, and the party of the National took advantage of the outbreak of the June insurrection to discharge the Executive Commission also, and therewith to get rid of its closest rivals, the petty-bourgeots, or democratic, republicans (Ledru-Rollin, etc.). Cavaignac, the general of the bourgeois republican party who commanded the June massacre, took the place of the Executive Commission with

*“ Marx uses the English words “leading articles” — Ed.

a sort of dictatorial authority. Marrast, former editor-in-chief of the National, became the perpetual president of the Constituent National Assembly, and the ministries, as well as all other important posts, fell to the portion of the pure republicans.

The republican bourgeois faction, which had long regarded itself as the legitimate heir of the July monarchy, thus found its fondest hopes exceeded; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a rising laid low with grape-shot. What it had pictured to itself as the most revolutionary event occurred in reality as the most counter-revolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life.

The exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from June 24 to December 10, 1848. It is summed up in the drafting of a republican constitution and in the state of siege of Paris.

The new Constitution was at bottom only the republicanised edition of the constitutional Charter of 1830." The narrow electoral qualification of the July monarchy, which excluded even a large part of the bourgeoisie from political rule, was incompatible with the existence of the bourgeois republic. In lieu of this qualification, the February revolution had at once proclaimed direct universal suffrage. The bourgeois republicans could not undo this event. They had to content themselves with adding the limiting proviso of a six months’ residence in the constituency. The old organisation of the administration, of the municipal system, of the judicial system, of the army, etc., continued to exist inviolate, or, where the Constitution changed it, the change concerned the table of contents, not the contents; the name, not the subject matter.

The inevitable general staff of the freedoms of 1848, personal freedom, freedom of the press, of speech, of association, of assembly, of education and of religion, etc., received a constitutional uniform, which made them invulnerable. For each of these freedoms is proclaimed as the absolute right of the French citoyen, but always with the marginal note that it is unlimited so far as it is not limited by the “equal rights of others and the public safety’ or by “laws” which are intended to mediate just this harmony of individual freedoms with one another and with the public safety. For example: “Citizens have a right to associate, to meet peacefully and unarmed, to petition, and express their opinions through the press and elsewhere. The enjoyment of these rights has

no other limit, than the equal rights of others, and the public safety.” (Chapter II of the French Constitution, § 8.)—“The right of tuition is free. The freedom of tuition shall be enjoyed on the conditions fixed by law, and under the supervision of the state.” (Ibidem, § 9.)—‘“‘The home of every citizen is inviolable except in the forms prescribed by law.” (Chapter II, § 3.) Etc., etc-——The Constitution, therefore, constantly refers to future organic laws which are to implement those marginal notes and regulate the enjoyment of these unrestricted freedoms in such manner that they will conflict neither with one another nor with the public safety. And later, these organic laws were brought into being by the friends of order and all those freedoms regulated in such manner that the bourgeoisie in its enjoyment of them finds itself unhindered by the equal rights of the other classes. Where it forbids these freedoms entirely to “the others” or permits enjoyment of them under conditions that are just so many police traps, this always happens solely in the interest of “public safety’, that is, the safety of the bourgeoisie, as the Constitution prescribes. In the following period, both sides accordingly appeal with complete justice to the Constitution: the friends of order, who abrogated all these freedoms, as well as the democrats, who demanded all of them. For each paragraph of the Constitution contains its own antithesis, its own Upper and Lower House, namely, freedom in the general phrase, abrogation of freedom in the marginal note. Thus, so long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual realisation prevented, of course in a legal way, the constitutional existence of freedom remained intact, inviolate, however mortal the blows dealt to its existence in actual life.

This Constitution, made inviolable in so ingenious a manner, was nevertheless, like Achilles, vulnerable in one point, not in the heel, but in the head, or rather in the two heads in which it wound up—the Legislative Assembly, on the one hand, the President, on the other. Glance through the Constitution and you will find that only the paragraphs in which the relationship of the President to the Legislative Assembly is defined are absolute, positive, noncontradictory, incapable of distortion. For here it was a question of the bourgeois republicans safeguarding themselves. §§ 45-70 of the Constitution are so worded that the National Assembly can remove the President constitutionally, whereas the President can remove the National Assembly only unconstitutionally, only by setting aside the Constitution itself. Here, therefore, it challenges its forcible destruction. It not only sanctifies the division of powers,

like the Charter of 1830, it widens it into an intolerable contradiction. The play of the constitutional powers, as Guizot termed the parliamentary squabble between the legislative and executive power, is in the Constitution of 1848 continually played va-banque.* On one side are 750 representatives of the people, elected by universal suffrage and eligible for re-election; they form an uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, decides in the last instance on war, peace and commercial treaties, alone possesses the right of amnesty and, by its permanence, perpetually holds the front of the stage. On the other side is the President, with all the attributes of royal power, with authority to appoint and dismiss his ministers independently of the National Assembly, with all the resources of the executive power in his hands, bestowing all posts and disposing thereby in France of the livelihoods of at least a million and a half people, for so many depend on the five hundred thousand officials and officers of every rank. He has the whole of the armed forces behind him. He enjoys the privilege of pardoning individual criminals, of suspending National Guards, of discharging, with the concurrence of the Council of State, general, cantonal and’ municipal councils elected by the citizens themselves. Initiative and direction are reserved to him in all treaties with foreign countries. While the Assembly constantly performs on the boards and is exposed to daily public criticism, he leads a secluded life in the Elysian Fields,” and that with Article 45 of the Constitution before his eyes and in his heart, crying to him daily: “Frere, il faut mourir!” * Your power ceases on the second Sunday of the lovely month of May in the fourth year after your election! Then your glory is at an end, the piece is not played twice and if you have debts, see to it betimes that you pay them off with the 600,000 francs squandered on you by the Constitution, unless, perchance, you should prefer to go to Clichy** on the second Monday of the lovely month of May!— Thus, whereas the Constitution assigns actual power to the President, it seeks to secure moral power for the National Assembly. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to create a moral power by paragraphs of law, the Constitution here abrogates itself once more by having the President elected by all

* Staking one’s all.— Ed.

ay pun: Elysian Fields was a synonym of paradise in antiquity; in Paris the Champs Elysées (Elysian Fields) is the name of the avenue where Louis Bonaparte’s official residence was.— Ed.

Frenchmen through direct suffrage. While the votes of France are split up among the 750 members of the National Assembly, they are here, on the contrary, concentrated on a single individual. While each separate representative of the people represents only this or that party, this or that town, this or that bridgehead, or even only the mere necessity of electing some one of the 750, where neither the cause nor the man is closely examined, he is the elect of the nation and the act of his election is the trump that the sovereign people plays once every four years. The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation, but the elected President in a personal relation, to the nation. The National Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this national spirit finds its incarnation. As against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the people.

Thetis, the sea goddess, had prophesied to Achilles that he would die in the bloom of youth. The Constitution, which, like Achilles, had its weak spot, had also, like Achilles, its presentiment that it must go to an early death. It was sufficient for the constitution-making pure republicans to cast a glance from the lofty heaven of their ideal republic at the profane world to perceive how the arrogance of the royalists, the Bonapartists, the Democrats, the Communists as well as their own discredit grew daily in the same measure as they approached the completion of their great legislative work of art, without Thetis on this account having to leave the sea and communicate the secret to them. They sought to cheat destiny by a catch in the Constitution, through § 111 of it, according to which every motion for a revision of the Constitution must be supported by at least three-quarters of thevotes, cast in three successive debates between which an entire month must always lie, with the added proviso that no fewer than 500 members of the National Assembly vote. Thereby they merely made the impotent attempt still to exercise, when only a parliamentary minority, as which they already saw themselves prophetically in their mind’s eye, a power which at the present moment, when they commanded a parliamentary majority and all the resources of governmental authority, was slipping daily more and more from their feeble hands.

Finally the Constitution, in a melodramatic paragraph, entrusts itself “to the vigilance and the patriotism of the whole French people and every single Frenchman”, after it had previously entrusted in another paragraph the “vigilant” and “patriotic”

Frenchmen to the tender penal attentions of the High Court of Justice, the “haute cour’, invented by it for the purpose.

Such was the Constitution of 1848 which, on December 2, 1851, was not overthrown by a head, but fell down at the touch of a mere hat; this hat, to be sure, was a three-cornered Napoleonic one.

While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy devising, discussing and voting this Constitution, Cavaignac outside the Assembly maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of Paris was the midwife of the Constituent Assembly in its travail of republican creation. If the Constitution is subsequently put out of existence by bayonets, it must not be forgotten that it was likewise by bayonets, and these turned against the people, that it had to be protected in its mother’s womb, and by bayonets that it had to be brought into existence. The forefathers of the “respectable republicans” had sent their symbol, the tricolour, on a tour round Europe. They themselves in turn produced an invention that of itself made its way over the whole Continent, but returned to France with ever renewed love until it has now become naturalised in half her departments—the state of siege. A splendid invention, periodically employed in every ensuing crisis in the course of the French Revolution. But barrack and bivouac, which were thus periodically laid on French society’s head to compress its brain and render it quiet; sabre and musket, which were periodically allowed to act as judges and administrators, as guardians and censors, to play policemen and do night watchman’s duty; moustache and uniform, which were periodically trumpeted forth as the highest wisdom of society and as its rector—were not barrack and bivouac, sabre and musket, moustache and uniform finally bound to hit upon the idea of rather saving society once and for all by proclaiming their own regime as the highest and freeing civil society completely from the trouble of governing itself? Barrack and bivouac, sabre and musket, moustache and uniform were bound to hit upon this idea all the more as they might then also expect better cash payment for their higher services, whereas from the merely periodical state of siege, and the transient rescues of society at the bidding of this or that bourgeois faction, little of substance was gleaned save some killed and wounded and some friendly bourgeois grimaces. Should not the military at last one day play state of siege in their own interest and for their own benefit, and at the same time besiege the bourgeois purses? Moreover, be it noted in passing, one must not forget that Colonel Bernard, the same military commission president who

under Cavaignac had 15,000 insurgents deported without trial, is at this moment again at the head of the military commissions active in Paris.

Whereas, with the state of siege in Paris, the respectable, the pure republicans planted the nursery in which the praetorians of December 2, 1851 were to grow up, they on the other hand deserve praise for the reason that, instead of exaggerating the national sentiment as under Louis Philippe, they now, when they had command of the national power, crawled before foreign countries, and, instead of setting Italy free, let her be reconquered by Austrians and Neapolitans.* Louis Bonaparte’s election as President on December 10, 1848 put an end to the dictatorship of Cavaignac and to the Constituent Assembly.

In § 44 of the Constitution it is stated: ‘““The President of the French Republic must never have lost his status of a French citizen.” The _ first President of the French republic, L.N. Bonaparte, had not merely lost his status of a French citizen, had not only been an English special constable, he was even a naturalised Swiss.*°

I have discussed elsewhere the significance of the election of December 10. I will not revert to it here. It is sufficient to remark here that it was a reaction of the peasants, who had had to pay the costs of the February revolution, against the remaining classes of the nation, a reaction of the country against the town. It met with great approval in the army, for which the republicans of the National had provided neither glory nor additional pay, among the big bourgeoisie, who hailed Bonaparte as a bridge to the monarchy, and among the proletarians and petty bourgeois, who hailed him as a scourge for Cavaignac. I shall have an opportunity later of going more closely into the relationship of the peasants to the French Revolution.

The period from December 20, 1848° until the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, in May 1849, comprises the history of the downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the field and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the time being, they are themselves thrust aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as its property. This bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. One section of it, the big

* See present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 80-82.— Ed. The day of the expiry of Cavaignac’s powers and of Louis Bonaparte’s accession to the presidency.— Ed.

landowners, had ruled during the Restoration and was accordingly Legitimist. The other, the finance aristocracy and big industrialists, had ruled during the July monarchy and was consequently Orleanist. The high dignitaries of the army, the university, the church, the bar, the Academy and of the press were to be found on either side, though in various proportions. Here, in the bourgeois republic, which bore neither the name Bourbon nor the name Orleans, but the name Capital, they had found the form of state in which they could rule conjointly. The June insurrection had already united them in the “Party of Order’. Now it was necessary, in the first place, to remove the coterie of bourgeois republicans who still occupied the seats of the National Assembly. Just as brutal as these pure republicans had been in their misuse of physical force against the people, just as cowardly, mealy-mouthed, spiritless, broken and incapable of fighting were they now in their retreat, when it was a question of maintaining their republicanism and their legislative rights against the executive power and the royalists. I need not relate here the ignominious story of their dissolution. It was a fading-away, not a going-under. Their history has come to an end forever, and, both inside and outside the Assembly, they figure in the following period only as memories, memories that seem to regain life whenever the mere name of Republic is once more the issue and as often as the revolutionary conflict threatens to sink down to the lowest level. I may remark in passing that the journal which gave its name to this party, the National, was converted to socialism in the following period.’

Before we finish with this period we must still cast a retrospective glance at the two powers, one of which annihilated the other on December 2, 1851, whereas from December 20, 1848 until the exit of the Constituent Assembly, they had lived in conjugal relations. We mean Louis Bonaparte, on the one hand, and the party of the coalitioned royalists, the Party of Order, of the big bourgeoisie, on the other. On acceding to the presidency, Bonaparte at once formed a ministry of the Party of Order, at the head of which he placed

* Here, to avoid repetition (see below, pp. 180-81), Marx leaves out the following paragraph printed in the 1852 edition: “Hence the history of the constitution or foundation of the French Republic falls into three periods: May 4 to June 24, 1848—struggle of all classes and class adjuncts united in February under the leadership of the bourgeois republicans against the proletariat, frightful defeat of the proletariat; June 25, 1848 to December 10, 1848—rule of the bourgeois republicans, drafting of the Constitution, state of siege in Paris, Cavaignac’s dictatorship; December 20, 1848 to the end of May 1849—struggle of Bonaparte and the Party of Order against the republican Constituent Assembly, defeat of the latter, end of the bourgeois republicans.” — Ed.

Odilon Barrot, the old leader, nota bene, of the most liberal faction of the parliamentary bourgeoisie. M. Barrot had at last secured the ministerial portfolio, the spectre of which had haunted him since 1830, and what is more, the premiership in the ministry; but not, as he had imagined under Louis Philippe, as the most advanced leader of the parliamentary opposition, but with the task of putting a parliament to death, and as the confederate of all his arch-enemies, Jesuits and Legitimists. He brought the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted. Bonaparte seemed to efface himself completely. This party acted for him.

The very first meeting of the council of ministers resolved on the expedition to Rome, which, it was agreed, should be undertaken behind the back of the National Assembly and the means for which were to be wrested from it by false pretences. Thus they began by swindling the National Assembly and secretly conspiring with the absolutist powers abroad against the revolutionary Roman Republic. In the same manner and with the same manoeuvres Bonaparte prepared his coup of December 2 against the royalist Legislative Assembly and its constitutional republic. Let us not forget that the same party which formed Bonaparte’s ministry on December 20, 1848, formed the majority of the Legislative National Assembly on December 2, 1851.

In August the Constituent Assembly had decided to dissolve only after it had worked out and promulgated a whole series of organic laws that were to supplement the Constitution. On January 6, 1849, the Party of Order had a deputy named Rateau move that the Assembly should let the organic laws go and rather decide on its own dissolution. Not only the ministry, with Odilon Barrot at its head, but all the royalist members of the National Assembly bullied it, suggesting that its dissolution was necessary for the restoration of credit, for the consolidation of order, for putting an end to the indefinite provisional arrangements and for establishing a definitive state of affairs; that it hampered the efficiency of the new government and sought to prolong its existence merely out of malice; that the country was tired of it. Bonaparte took note of all this invective against the legislative power, learnt it by heart and proved to the parliamentary royalists, on December 2, 1851, that he had learnt from them. He reiterated their own catchwords against them.

The Barrot ministry and the Party of Order went further. They caused petitions to the National Assembly to be made throughout France, in which this body was kindly requested to disappear. They thus led the unorganised popular masses into the attack against the

National Assembly, the constitutionally organised expression of the people. They taught Bonaparte to appeal from parliamentary assemblies to the people. At length, on Januarv 29, 1849, the day had come on which the Constituent Assembly was to decide concerning its own dissolution. The National Assembly found the building where its sessions were held occupied by the military; Changarnier, the general of the Party of Order, in whose hands the supreme command of the National Guard and troops of the line had been united, held a great military review in Paris, as if a battle were impending, and the coalitioned royalists threateningly declared to the Constituent Assembly that force would be employed if it should prove unwilling.’ It was willing, and bargained itself only a very short deadline. What was January 29 but the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, only carried out by the royalists with Bonaparte against the republican National Assembly? The gentlemen did not notice, or did not wish to notice, that Bonaparte availed himself of January 29, 1849 to have a portion of the troops march past him in front of the Tuileries, and seized with avidity on just this first public summoning of the military power against the parliamentary power to suggest Caligula. They, to be sure, saw only their Changarnier.

A factor that particularly motivated the Party of Order in forcibly cutting short the duration of the Constituent Assembly’s life were the organic laws supplementing the Constitution, such as the education law, the law on religious worship, etc. To the coalitioned royalists it was most important that they themselves should make these laws and not let them be made by the republicans, who had grown mistrustful. Among these organic laws, however, was also a law on the responsibility of the President of the republic. In 1851 the Legislative Assembly was occupied with the drafting of just such a law, when Bonaparte anticipated this coup with the coup of December 2. What would the coalitioned royalists not have given in their parliamentary winter campaign of 1851 to have found the Responsibility Law ready to hand, and drawn up, at that, by a mistrustful, hostile, republican Assembly!

After the Constituent Assembly had itself shattered its last weapon on January 29, 1849, the Barrot ministry and the friends of order hounded it to death, left nothing undone that could humiliate it and wrested from the impotent, self-despairing Assembly laws that cost it the last remnant of respect in the eyes of the public. Bonaparte,

* The original says: “dass man Gewalt anwenden werde, wenn sie nicht willig sei” —an ironic paraphrase of a passage from Goethe’s poem “Der Erlkénig”: “Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt” (“And if you’re unwilling, I'll get you by force”’).— Ed.

occupied with his fixed Napoleonic idea, was brazen enough publicly to exploit this degradation of the parliamentary power. For when, on May 8, 1849, the National Assembly passed a vote of censure of the ministry* because of the occupation of Civitavecchia by Oudinot, and ordered it to bring back the Roman expedition to its ostensible purpose,” Bonaparte published the same evening in the Moniteur a letter to Oudinot, in which he congratulated him on his heroic exploits and, in contrast to the pen-pushing parliamentarians, already posed as the generous protector of the army. The royalists smiled at this. They regarded him simply as their dupe. Finally, when Marrast, the President of the Constituent Assembly, believed for a moment that the safety of the National Assembly was endangered and, relying on the Constitution, requisitioned a colonel and his regiment, the colonel declined, cited discipline in his support and referred Marrast to Changarnier, who scornfully refused him with the remark that he did not like batonnettes intelligentes.” In November 1851, when the coalitioned royalists wanted to begin the decisive struggle with Bonaparte, they sought to put through in their notorious Questors’ Bill the principle of the direct requisition of troops by the President of the National Assembly. One of their generals, Le FI6, had signed the Bill. In vain did Changarnier vote for it and Thiers pay homage to the far-sighted wisdom of the former Constituent Assembly. The War Minister, Saint-Arnaud, answered him as Changarnier has answered Marrast—and to the acclamation of the Montagne!

Thus the Party of Order, when it was not yet the National Assembly, when it was still only the ministry had itself stigmatised the parliamentary regime. And it makes an outcry when December 2, 1851 banished this regime from France!

We wish it a happy journey.

III

On May 28, 1849 the Legislative National Assembly met. On December 2, 1851 it was dispersed. This period covers the span of life of the constitutional or parliamentary republic.

* The resolution of the Constituent Assembly on the Roman expedition, passed on May 7, 1849, was published in Le Moniteur universel the following day.— Ed.

” Bayonets which thought.— Ed.

“Here, to avoid repetition (see below, p. 181), Marx leaves out the following paragraph printed in the 1852 edition: “It falls into three main periods: May 28, 1849 to June 13, 1849, struggle between democracy and the bourgeoisie, defeat of the

In the first French Revolution the rule of the Constitutionalists is followed by the rule of the Girondins and the rule of the Girondins by the rule of the Jacobins. Each of these parties relies on the more progressive party for support. As soon as it has brought the revolution far enough to be tinable to follow it further, still less to go ahead of it, it is thrust aside by the bolder ally that stands behind it and sent to the guillotine. The revolution thus moves along an ascending line.

It is the reverse with the revolution of 1848. The proletarian party appears as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois-democratic party. It is betrayed and dropped by the latter on April 16, May 15,” and in the June days. The democratic party, in its turn, leans on the shoulders of the bourgeois-republican party. The bourgeois republicans no sooner believe themselves well established than they shake off the troublesome comrade and support themselves on the shoulders of the Party of Order. The Party of Order hunches its shoulders, lets the bourgeois republicans tumble and throws itself on the shoulders of armed force. It fancies it is still sitting on its shoulders when, one fine morning, it perceives that the shoulders have turned into bayonets. Each party kicks back at the one behind, which presses upon it, and leans against the one in front, which pushes backwards. No wonder that in this ridiculous posture it loses its balance and, having made the inevitable grimaces, collapses with curious capers. The revolution thus moves in a descending line. It finds itself in this state of retrogressive motion before the last February barricade has been cleared away and the first revolutionary authority constituted.

The period that we have before us comprises the most motley mixture of crying contradictions: constitutionalists who conspire openly against the Constitution; revolutionists who are confessedly constitutional; a National Assembly that wants to be omnipotent and always remains parliamentary; a Montagne that finds its vocation in patience and counters its present defeats by prophesying future victories; royalists who form the patres conscripti* of the republic and are forced by the situation to keep the hostile royal houses, to which they adhere, abroad, and the republic, which they hate, in France; an

petty-bourgeois or democratic party; June 13, 1849 to May 31, 1850, parliamentary dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, i.e., of the coalitioned Orleanists and Legitimists or of the Party of Order, a dictatorship which makes itself complete by abolishing universal suffrage; May 31, 1850 to December 2, 1851, struggle between the bourgeoisie and Bonaparte, overthrow of bourgeois rule, end of the constitutional or parliamentary republic.” — Ed.

* Conscript fathers—collective designation of senators in Ancient Rome.— Ed.

executive power that finds its strength in its very weakness and its respectability in the contempt that it calls forth; a republic that is nothing but the combined infamy of two monarchies, the Restora-~ tion and the July monarchy, with an imperial label— alliances whose first proviso is separation; struggles whose first law is indecision; wild, inane agitation in the name of tranquillity; most solemn preaching of tranquillity in the name of revolution; passions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, made wearisome through constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves up to a climax only to lose their sharpness and fall away without being able to resolve themselves; pretentiously paraded exertions and philistine terror at the danger of the world coming to an end, and at the same time the pettiest intrigues and court comedies played by the world redeemers, who in their laissez-aller* remind us less of the Day of Judgment than of the times of the Fronde *!—the official collective genius of France brought to naught by the artful stupidity of a single individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks through universal suffrage, seeking its appropriate expression through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses, until at length it finds it in the self-will of a freebooter. If any section of history has been painted grey on grey,” itis this. Men and events appear as inverted Schlemihls, as shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution itself paralyses its own bearers and endows only its adversaries with passionate forcefulness. When the “red spectre”, continually conjured up and exorcised by the counterrevolutionaries,” finally appears, it appears not with the Phrygian cap of anarchy on its head, but in the uniform of order, in red breeches.

We have seen that the ministry which Bonaparte installed on December 20, 1848, on his Ascension Day,° was a ministry of the Party of Order, of the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. This Barrot-Falloux ministry had outlived the republican Constituent Assembly, whose term of life it had more or less violently cut short, and found itself still at the helm. Changarnier, the general of the allied royalists, continued to unite in his person the general command of the First Army Division and of the National Guard of

“Letting things take their course.— Ed.

>G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Vorrede— Ed.

“On that day Louis Bonaparte took up his residence at the Presidential palace in the Champs Elysées (see also footnote “b” on p. 116 of this volume).— Ed.

Paris. Finally, the general elections had secured the Party of Order a large majority in the National Assembly. Here the deputies and peers of Louis Philippe encountered a hallowed host of Legitimists, for whom many of the nation’s ballots had become transformed into admission cards to the political stage. The Bonapartist representatives of the people were too sparse to be able to form an independent parliamentary party. They appeared merely as the mauvaise queue? of the Party of Order. Thus the Party of Order was in possession of governmental power, the army and the legislative body, in short, of the whole of state power; it had been morally strengthened by the general elections, which made its rule appear as the will of the people, and by the simultaneous triumph of the counter-revolution on the whole continent of Europe.

Never did a party open its campaign with greater resources or under more favourable auspices.

The shipwrecked pure republicans found that they had melted down to a clique of about fifty men in the Legislative National Assembly, the African generals Cavaignac, Lamoriciére and Bedeau at their head. The great opposition party, however, was formed by the Montagne. The Social-Democratic party had given itself this parliamentary baptismal name. It commanded more than 200 of the 750 votes of the National Assembly and was consequently at least as powerful as any one of the three factions of the Party of Order taken by itself. Its numerical inferiority compared with the entire royalist coalition seemed compensated by special circumstances. Not only did the elections in the departments show that it had gained a considerable following among the rural population. It counted in its ranks almost all the deputies from Paris; the army had made a confession of democratic faith by the election of three noncommissioned officers,” and the leader of the Montagne, Ledru-Rollin, in contradistinction to all the representatives of the Party of Order, had been raised to the parliamentary peerage by five departments, which had pooled their votes for him. In view of the inevitable clashes of the royalists among themselves and of the whole Party of Order with Bonaparte, the Montagne thus seemed to have all the elements of success before it on May 28, 1849. A fortnight later it had lost everything, honour included.*

“ The 1852 edition further has: “They were sufficiently represented to count as figures in a general call-up against the republican armed forces.”— Ed. bp: Pitiful appendage.— Ed. “Boichot and Rattier, elected in Paris, and Commissaire, elected in Alsace.— Ed. Paraphrase of the famous dictum, “All is lost save honour”, which is ascribed to King Francis I of France.—Ed.

Before we pursue parliamentary history further, some remarks are necessary to avoid common misconceptions regarding the whole character of the epoch that lies before us. Looked at with the eyes of democrats, the period of the Legislative National Assembly is concerned with what the period of the Constituent Assembly was concerned with: the simple struggle between republicans and royalists. The movement itself, however, they sum up in the one shibboleth: “reaction” —night, in which all cats are grey and which permits them to reel off their night watchman’s commonplaces. And, to be sure, at first sight the Party of Order reveals a tangled knot of different royalist factions, which not only intrigue against each other—each seeking to elevate its own pretender to the throne and exclude the pretender of the opposing faction— but also all unite in common hatred of, and common attacks on, the “republic”. In opposition to this royalist conspiracy the Montagne, for its part, appears as the representative of the “republic”. The Party of Order appears to be perpetually engaged in a “reaction”, directed against press, association and the like, neither more nor less than in Prussia, and which, as in Prussia, is carried out in the form of brutal police intervention by the bureaucracy, the gendarmerie and the law courts. The “Montagne”, for its part, is just as continually occupied in warding off these attacks and thus defending the “eternal rights of man” as every so-called people’s party has done, more or less, for a century and a half. If one looks at the situation and the parties more closely, however, this superficial appearance, which veils the class struggle and the peculiar physiognomy of this period,’ disappears.

Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great factions of the Party of Order. Was what held these factions fast to their pretenders and kept them apart from one another nothing but lily and tricolour, House of Bourbon and House of Orleans, different shades of royalism, was it their royalist faith at all? Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under the Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their

* The 1852 edition has here: “and thus turns it into a gold-mine for pub politicians and republican stalwarts”.— Ed.

material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property, it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and _ illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who is there that denies this? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of different and distinctly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, to whom they are transmitted through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting-point of his activity. While Orleanists and Legitimists, while each faction sought to make itself and the other believe that it was loyalty to their two royal houses which separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests which forbade the unification of the two royal houses. And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with the same claims. If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split—landed property and capital—sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society. Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.’

The coalitioned royalists carried on their intrigues against one another in the press, in Ems, in Claremont,” outside parliament. Behind the scenes they donned their old Orleanist and Legitimist liveries again and once more engaged in their old tourneys. But on the public stage, in their grand performances of state,” as a great

* Cf. this volume, p. 328.— Ed.

The' Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 129

parliamentary party, they put off their respective royal houses with mere obeisances and adjourned the restoration of the monarchy ad infinitum. They did their real business as the Party of Order, that is, under a social, not under a political title; its representatives of the bourgeois world-order, not as knights of errant princesses; as the bourgeois class against other classes, not as royalists against the republicans. And as the Party of Order they exercised more unrestricted and sterner domination over the other classes of society than ever previously under the Restoration or under the July monarchy, a domination which, in general, was only possible under the form of the parliamentary republic, for only under this form could the two great divisions of the French bourgeoisie unite, and thus put the rule of their class instead of the regime of a privileged faction of it on the order of the day. If, nevertheless, they, as the Party of Order, also insulted the republic and expressed their repugnance of it, this happened not merely as a result of royalist memories. Instinct taught them that the republic, true enough, makes their political rule complete, but at the same time undermines its social foundation, since they must now confront the subjugated classes and contend against them without mediation, without the concealment afforded by the crown, without being able to divert the national interest by their subordinate struggles among themselves and with the monarchy. It was a feeling of weakness that caused them to recoil from the pure conditions of their own class rule and to yearn for the former more incomplete, more undeveloped and precisely on that account less dangerous forms of this rule. On the other hand, every time the coalitioned royalists come into conflict with the pretender that confronts them, with Bonaparte, every time they believe their parliamentary omnipotence endangered by the executive power, every time, therefore, that they must produce their political title to their rule, they come forward as republicans and not as royalists, from the Orleanist Thiers, who warns the National Assembly that the republic divides them least,’ to the Legitimist Berryer, who, on December 2, 1851, as a tribune swathed in a tricoloured sash, harangues the people assembled before the town hall of the tenth arrondissement in the name of the republic. To be sure, a mocking echo calls back to him: Henry V! Henry V!

As against the coalitioned bourgeoisie, a coalition between petty bourgeois and workers had been formed, the so-called Soczal-Democratic party. The petty bourgeois saw themselves badly re-

* Marx has in mind the speech delivered by Thiers in the Legislative Assembly on January 17, 1851.— Ed.

warded after the June days of 1848, their material interests imperilled and the democratic guarantees which were to ensure the implementation of these interests called in question by the counterrevolution. Accordingly, they came closer to the workers. On the other hand, their parliamentary representation, the Montagne, thrust aside during the dictatorship of the bourgeois republicans, had in the last half of the life of the Constituent Assembly reconquered its lost popularity through the struggle with Bonaparte and the royalist ministers. It had concluded an alliance with the socialist leaders. In February 1849, banquets celebrated the reconciliation. A joint programme was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. The revolutionary point was broken off from the social demands of the proletariat and a democratic turn given to them; the purely political form was stripped from the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their socialist point turned outward. Thus arose Social-Democracy. The new Montagne, the result of this combination, contained, apart from some working-class supernumeraries and some members of the socialist sects, the same elements as the old Montagne, only numerically stronger. However, in the course of development, it had changed with the class that it represented. The peculiar character of Social-Democracy is epitomised in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of superseding two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be embellished with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the reformation of society in a democratic way, but a reformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not form the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers * or enthusiastic supporters of shopkeepers. In their education and individual position they may be as far apart from them as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and

* Marx uses the English word.— Ed.

solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter in practice. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.

After the analysis we have given, it is obvious that if the Montagne continually contends with the Party of Order for the republic and the so-called rights of man, neither the republic nor the rights of man are its final end, any more than an army which one wants to deprive of its weapons and which resists has taken the field in order to remain in possession of its own weapons.

Immediately, as soon as the National Assembly met, the Party of Order provoked the Montagne. The bourgeoisie now felt the necessity of making an end of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, just as a year before it had realised the necessity of getting rid of the revolutionary proletariat. Only the situation of the adversary was different. The strength of the proletarian party lay in the streets, that of the petty bourgeoisie in the National Assembly itself. It was therefore a question of decoying them out of the National Assembly into the streets and causing them to smash their parliamentary power themselves, before time and circumstances could consolidate it. The Montagne galloped headlong into the trap.

The bombardment of Rome by the French troops was the bait that was thrown to it. It violated Article V of the Constitution which forbids the French Republic to employ its military forces against the freedom of another people.” In addition to this, Article 54 prohibited any declaration of war on the part of the executive power without the assent of the National Assembly, and by its resolution of May 8, the Constituent Assembly had disapproved of the Roman expedition. On these grounds Ledru-Rollin brought in a bill of impeachment against Bonaparte and his ministers on June 11, 1849. Exasperated by the wasp stings of Thiers, he actually let himself be carried away to the point of threatening that he would defend the Constitution by every means, even with arms in hand. The Montagne rose to a man and repeated this call to arms. On June 12, the National Assembly rejected the bill of impeachment, and the Montagne left the parliament. The events of June 13 are known: the proclamation issued by a section of the Montagne, declaring Bonaparte and his ministers “outside the Constitution”’*; the street procession of the democratic National Guards, who, unarmed as they were, dispersed on encountering the troops of Changarnier, etc., etc. A part of the Montagne fled abroad; another part was

* “Déclaration de la Montagne au peuple frangais. Paris, 12 juin [1849]” — Ed.

arraigned before the High Court at Bourges,” and a parliamentary regulation subjected the remainder to the schoolmasterly surveillance of the President of the National Assembly.* Paris was again declared in a state of siege and the democratic part of its National Guard dissolved. Thus the influence of the Montagne in parliament and the power of the petty bourgeois in Paris were broken.

Lyons, where June 13 had given the signal for a bloody insurrection of the workers,” was, along with the five surrounding departments, likewise declared in a state of siege, a condition that has continued up to the present moment.

The bulk of the Montagne had left its vanguard in the lurch, having refused to sign its proclamation. The press had deserted, only two journals” having dared to publish the pronunciamento. The petty bourgeois betrayed their representatives, in that the National Guards either stayed away or, where they appeared, hindered the erection of barricades. The representatives had duped the petty bourgeois, in that the alleged allies from the army were nowhere to be seen. Finally, instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness and, as is usual with the great deeds of democrats, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to charge their “people” with desertion, and the people the satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with fraud.

Seldom had an action been announced with more noise than the impending campaign of the Montagne, seldom had an event been trumpeted with greater certainty or longer in advance than the inevitable victory of democracy. Most assuredly, the democrats believe in the trumpets before whose blasts the walls of Jericho fell down.° And as often as they stand before the ramparts of despotism, they seek to imitate the miracle. If the Montagne wished to triumph in parliament, it should not have called to arms. If it called to arms in parliament, it should not have acted in parliamentary fashion in the streets. If the peaceful demonstration was meant seriously, then it was folly not to foresee that it would be given a war-like reception. If a real struggle was intended, then it was odd to lay down the weapons with which it would have to be waged. But the revolutionary threats of the petty bourgeois and their democratic representatives are mere attempts to intimidate the antagonist. And when they have run into a blind alley, when they have sufficiently compromised themselves to

* André Dupin.— Ed. La Réforme and La Démocratie pacifique— Ed. “Cf. Joshua 6:5 and 6: 20.— Ed.

make it necessary to give effect to their threats, then this is done in an ambiguous fashion that avoids nothing so much as the means to the end and tries to find excuses for succumbing. The blaring overture that announced the contest dies away in a faint grumble as soon as the struggle has to begin, the actors cease to take themselves au sérieux, and the action collapses completely, like a pricked balloon.

No party exaggerates its means more than the democratic, none deludes itself more light-mindedly over the situation. Since a section of the army had voted for it, the Montagne was now convinced that the army would revolt for it. And on what occasion? On an occasion which, from the standpoint of the troops, had no other meaning than that the revolutionists took the side of the Roman soldiers against the French soldiers. On the other hand, the recollections of June 1848 were still too fresh to allow of anything but a profound aversion on the part of the proletariat towards the National Guard and a thoroughgoing mistrust of the democratic chiefs on the part of the chiefs of the secret societies. To iron out these differences, it was necessary for great common interests to be at stake. The violation of an abstract paragraph of the Constitution could not provide these interests. Had not the Constitution been repeatedly violated, according to the assurance of the democrats themselves? Had not the most popular journals branded it as counterrevolutionary botch-work? But the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie, that is, a transition class, in which the interests of two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted, imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally. The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people’s rights; what interests them is the people’s interests. Accordingly, when a struggle is impending, they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors. Now, if in practice their interests prove to be uninteresting and their potency impotence, then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalised and blinded to comprehend that the pure aims of democracy are also the best thing for it, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoilt the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly-won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he

himself and his party have to give up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him.

Accordingly, one must not imagine the Montagne, decimated and broken though it was, and humiliated by the new parliamentary regulation, as being particularly miserable. If June 13 had removed its chiefs, it made room, on the other hand, for men of lesser calibre, whom this new position flattered. If their impotence in parliament could no longer be doubted, they were entitled now to confine their actions to outbursts of moral indignation and blustering declamation. If the Party of Order affected to see embodied in them, as the last official representatives of the revolution, all the terrors of anarchy, they could in reality be all the more insipid and modest. They consoled themselves, however, for June 13 with the profound utterance: But if they dare to attack universal suffrage, well then—then we’ll show them what we are made of! Nous verrons!*

So far as the Montagnards who fled abroad are concerned, it is sufficient to remark here that Ledru-Rollin, because in barely a fortnight he had succeeded in ruining irretrievably the powerful party at whose head he stood, now found himself called upon to form a French government in partibus; that to the extent that the level of the revolution sank and the official bigwigs of official France became more dwarf-like, his figure in the distance, removed from the scene of action, seemed to grow in stature; that he could figure as the republican pretender for 1852, and that he issued periodical circulars to the Wallachians and other peoples, in which the despots of the Continent are threatened with the deeds of himself and his confederates. Was Proudhon altogether wrong when he cried to these gentlemen: “Vous n’étes que des blagueurs’’? ‘

On June 13 the Party of Order had not only broken the Montagne, it had effected the subordination of the Constitution to the majority decisions of the National Assembly. And it understood the republic thus: that the bourgeoisie rules here in parliamentary forms, without, as in a monarchy, encountering any barrier such as the veto power of the executive or the right to dissolve parliament. This was a parliamentary republic, as Thiers termed it.4 But when on June 13 the bourgeoisie secured its omnipotence within the house of parliament, did it not afflict parliament itself, vis-a-vis the executive

“We shall see.— Ed.

Here in the sense of “abroad”. See also footnote on pp. 5, 107, 282.— Ed.

“ “You are nothing but braggarts.” From Proudhon’s letter “Aux citoyens Ledru-Rollin, Charles Delescluze, Martin Bernard, et consorts, Rédacteurs du Proscrit, a Londres” published in the newspaper Le Peuple in July 1850.— Ed.

In his speech in the Legislative Assembly on January 17, 1851.— Ed.

authority and the people, with incurable weakness by expelling its most popular part? By surrendering numerous deputies without further ado on the demand of the courts, it abolished its own parliamentary immunity. The humiliating regulations to which it subjected the Montagne exalted the President of the republic in the same measure as they degraded the individual representatives of the people. By branding an insurrection for the protection of the constitutional charter an anarchic act aiming at the subversion of society, it precluded the possibility of its appealing to insurrection should the executive authority violate the Constitution in relation to it. And by the irony of history, the general who on Bonaparte’s instructions bombarded Rome and thus provided the immediate occasion for the constitutional revolt of June 13, that very Oudinot had to be the man offered by the Party of Order imploringly and unavailingly to the people as general on behalf of the Constitution against Bonaparte on December 2, 1851. Another hero of June 13, Vieyra, who was lauded from the tribune of the National Assembly for the brutalities that he had committed in the democratic newspaper offices at the head of a gang of National Guards belonging to high finance circles—this same Vieyra had been initiated into Bonaparte’s conspiracy and played an essential part in depriving the National Assembly in the hour of its death of any protection by the National Guard.

June 13 had still another meaning. The Montagne had wanted to force the impeachment of Bonaparte. Its defeat was therefore a direct victory for Bonaparte, his personal triumph over his democratic enemies. The Party of Order gained the victory; Bonaparte had only to cash in on it. He did so. On June 14 a proclamation could be read on the walls of Paris in which the President, reluctantly, against his will, as it were, compelled by the sheer force of events, comes forth from his cloistered seclusion and, posing as misunderstood virtue, complains of the calumnies of his opponents and, while he seems to identify his person with the cause of order, rather identifies the cause of order with his person. Moreover, the National Assembly had, it is true, subsequently approved the expedition against Rome, but Bonaparte had taken the initiative in the matter. After having re-installed the High Priest Samuel in the Vatican, he could hope to enter the Tuileries as King David.* He had won the priests over to his side.

The revolt of June 13 was confined, as we have seen, to a peaceful street procession. No martial laurels were, therefore, to be won against it. Nevertheless, at a time as poor as this in heroes and events, the Party of Order transformed this bloodless battle into a second

Austerlitz.” Platform and press praised the army as the power of order, in contrast to the popular masses, representing the impotence of anarchy, and extolled Changarnier as the “bulwark of society”, a deception in which he himself finally came to believe. Surreptitiously, however, the corps that seemed doubtful were transferred from Paris, the regiments which had shown at the elections the most democratical sentiments were banished from France to Algiers, the turbulent spirits among the troops were relegated to penal detachments, and finally the isolation of the press from the barracks and of the barracks from civil society was systematically carried out.

Here we have reached the decisive turning-point in the history of the French National Guard. In 1830 it was decisive in the overthrow of the Restoration. Under Louis Philippe every rebellion in which the National Guard stood on the side of the troops miscarried. When in the February days of 1848 it evinced a passive attitude towards the insurrection and an equivocal one towards Louis Philippe, he gave himself up for lost and actually was lost. Thus the conviction took root that the revolution could not be victorious without the National Guard, nor the army against it. This was the superstition of the army in regard to civilian omnipotence. The June days of 1848, when the entire National Guard, with the troops of the line, put down the insurrection, had strengthened the superstition. After Bonaparte’s assumption of office, the position of the National Guard was to some extent weakened by the unconstitutional union, in the person of Changarnier, of the command of its forces with the command of the First Army Division.

Just as the command of the National Guard appeared here as an attribute of the military commander-in-chief, so the National Guard itself now appeared as only an appendage of the troops of the line. Finally, on June 13 its power was broken, and not only by its partial disbandment, which from this time on was periodically repeated all over France, until mere fragments of .it were left behind. The demonstration of June 13 was, above all, a demonstration of the democratic National Guards. They had not, to be sure, borne their arms, but worn their uniforms against the army; precisely in this uniform, however, lay the talisman. The army convinced itself that this uniform was a piece of woollen cloth like any other. The spell was broken. In the June days of 1848 bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie stood united as the National Guard with the army against the proletariat; on June 13, 1849 the bourgeoisie let the petty-bourgeois National Guard be dispersed by the army; on December 2, 1851 the National Guard of the bourgeoisie itself had

vanished, and Bonaparte merely registered this fact when he subsequently signed the decree for its disbandment. Thus the bourgeoisie had itself smashed its last weapon against the army, but it had to smash it the moment the petty bourgeoisie no longer stood behind it as a vassal, but before it as a rebel, as in general it was bound to destroy all its means of defence against absolutism with its own hand as soon as it had itself become absolute.

Meanwhile, the Party of Order celebrated the reconquest of a power that seemed lost in 1848 only to be found again, freed from its restraints, in 1849, celebrated by means of invectives against the republic and the Constitution, of curses on all future, present and past revolutions, including that which its own leaders had made, and in laws by which the press was muzzled, association destroyed and the state of siege regulated as an organic institution. The National Assembly then adjourned from the middle of August to the middle of October, after having appointed a permanent commission for the period of its absence. During this recess the Legitimists intrigued with Ems, the Orleanists—with Claremont, Bonaparte—by means of princely tours, and the Departmental Councils—in deliberations on a revision of the Constitution: incidents which regularly recur in the periodic recesses of the National Assembly and which I propose to discuss only when they become events. Here it may merely be remarked, in addition, that it was impolitic for the National Assembly to disappear for considerable intervals from the stage and leave only a single, albeit sorry, figure to be seen at the head of the republic, that of Louis Bonaparte, while to the scandal of the public the Party of Order fell asunder into its royalist component parts and followed its conflicting desires for Restoration. As often as the confused noise of parliament grew silent during these recesses and its body dissolved in the nation, it became unmistakably clear that only one thing was still wanting to complete the true form of this republic: to make the former’s recess permanent and replace the latter’ inscription: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité by the unambiguous words: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery!

IV

In the middle of October 1849 the National Assembly met once more. On November 1 Bonaparte surprised it with a message in which he announced the dismissal of the Barrot-Falloux ministry and the formation of a new ministry. No one has ever sacked lackeys with less ceremony than Bonaparte his ministers. The kicks that were

intended for the National Assembly were given in the meantime to Barrot and Co.

The Barrot ministry, as we have seen, had been composed of Legitimists and Orleanists, a ministry of the Party of Order. Bonaparte had needed it to dissolve the republican Constituent Assembly, to bring about the expedition against Rome and to break the democratic party. Behind this ministry he had seemingly effaced himself, surrendered governmental power into the hands of the Party of Order and donned the modest character mask that the responsible editor of a newspaper wore under Louis Philippe, the mask of the homme de paille.* He now threw off a mask which was no longer the light veil behind which he could hide his physiognomy, but an iron mask which prevented him from displaying a physiognomy of his own. He had appointed the Barrot ministry in order to blast the republican National Assembly in the name of the Party of Order; he dismissed it in order to declare his own name independent of the National Assembly of the Party of Order.

Plausible pretexts for this dismissal were not lacking. The Barrot ministry neglected even the decencies that would have let the President of the republic appear as a power side by side with the National Assembly. During the recess of the National Assembly Bonaparte published a letter to Edgar Ney 1 i. which he seemed to disapprove of the liberal attitude of the Pope,” just as in opposition to the Constituent Assembly he had published a letter in which he commended Oudinot for the attack on the Roman Republic. When the National Assembly now voted the budget for the Roman expedition, Victor Hugo, out of alleged liberalism, brought up this letter for discussion.° The Party of Order with scornfully incredulous outcries stifled the idea that Bonaparte’s ideas could have any political importance. Not one of the ministers took up the gauntlet for him. On another occasion Barrot, with his well-known hollow rhetoric, let fall from the platform words of indignation concerning the “abominable intrigues” that, according to his assertion, went on in the immediate entourage of the President. Finally, while the ministry obtained from the National Assembly a widow’s pension for the Duchess of Orleans it rejected any proposal to increase the Civil List of the President. And in Bonaparte the imperial pretender was so intimately bound up with the adventurer down on his luck that the

* Man of straw.— Ed.

° Pius IX. The 1852 and 1869 editions have “‘illiberal attitude of the Pope”; the correction was made in the 1885 edition.— Fd.

“ In his speech in the Legislative Assembly on October 19, 1849.— Ed.

one great idea, that he was called to restore the empire, was always supplemented by the other, that it was the mission of the French people to pay his debts.

The Barrot-Falloux ministry was the first and last parliamentary ministry that Bonaparte brought into being. Its dismissal forms, accordingly, a decisive turning-point. With it the Party of Order lost, never to reconquer it, an indispensable post for the maintenance of the parliamentary regime, the lever of executive power. It is immediately obvious that in a country like France, where the executive power commands an army of officials numbering more than half a million individuals and therefore constantly maintains an immense mass of interests and livelihoods in the most absolute dependence; where the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals; where through the most extraordinary centralisation this parasitic body acquires an ubiquity, an omniscience, a capacity for accelerated mobility and an elasticity which finds a counterpart only in the helpless dependence, in the loose shapelessness of the actual body politic—it is obvious that in such a country the National Assembly forfeits all real influence when it loses command of the ministerial posts, if it does not at the same time simplify the administration of the state, reduce the army of officials as far as possible and, finally, let civil society and public opinion create organs of their own, independent of the governmental power. But it is precisely with the maintenance of that extensive state machine in its numerous ramifications that the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are interwoven in the closest fashion. Here it finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, interest, rents and honorariums. On the other hand, its political interests compelled it to increase daily the repressive measures and therefore the resources and the personnel of the state power, while at the same time it had to wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion and mistrustfully mutilate, cripple, the independent organs of the social movement, where it did not succeed in amputating them entirely. Thus the French bourgeoisie was compelled by its class position to annihilate, on the one hand, the vital conditions of all parliamentary power, and therefore, likewise, of its own, and to render irresistible, on the other hand, the executive power hostile to it.

The new ministry was called the d’Hautpoul ministry. Not that General d’Hautpoul had received the rank of Prime Minister.

Rather, simultaneously with Barrot’s dismissal, Bonaparte abolished this dignity, which, true enough, condemned the President of the republic to the status of the legal nonentity of a constitutional monarch, but of a constitutional monarch without throne or crown, without sceptre or sword, without irresponsibility, without imprescriptible possession of the highest state dignity, and, worst of all, without a Civil List. The d’Hautpoul ministry contained only one man of parliamentary standing, the money-lender Fould, one of the most notorious of the high financiers. To his lot fell the ministry of finance. Look up the quotations on the Paris bourse and you will find that from November 1, 1849 onwards the French fonds* rise and fall with the rise and fall of Bonapartist stocks. While Bonaparte had thus found his ally in the bourse, he at the same time took possession of the police by appointing Carlier Police Prefect of Paris.

Only in the course of development, however, could the consequences of the change of ministers come to light. To begin with, Bonaparte had taken a step forward only to be driven backward all the more conspicuously. His brusque message was followed by the most servile declaration of allegiance to the National Assembly. As often as the ministers dared to make a diffident attempt to introduce his personal fads as legislative proposals, they themselves seemed to carry out, against their will only and compelled by their position, comical commissions of whose fruitlessness they were convinced in advance. As often as Bonaparte blurted out his intentions behind the ministers’ backs and played with his “idées napoléoniennes’ ,’°° his own ministers disavowed him from the tribune of the National Assembly. His usurpatory longings seemed to make themselves heard only in order that the malicious laughter of his opponents might not be muted. He behaved like an unrecognised genius, whom all the world takes for a simpleton. Never did he enjoy the contempt of all classes in fuller measure than during this period. Never did the bourgeoisie rule more absolutely, never did it display more ostentatiously the insignia of domination.

I have not here to write the history of its legislative activity, which is summarised during this period in two laws: in the law reestablishing the wine tax and the education law abolishing unbelief.'”! If wine drinking was made harder for the French, they were presented all the more plentifully with the water of true life. If in the law on the wine tax the bourgeoisie declared the old, hateful French tax system to be inviolable, it sought through the education law to

a ele Government securities.— Fd.

The Fighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 14]

ensure among the masses the old state of mind that put up with the tax system. One is astonished to see the Orleanists, the liberal bourgeois, these old apostles of Voltairianism and_ eclectic philosophy, entrust to their hereditary enemies, the Jesuits, the superintendence of the French mind. But although in regard to the pretenders to the throne, Orleanists and Legitimists could part company, they understood that to secure their united rule necessitated the uniting of the means of repression of two epochs, that the means of subjugation of the July monarchy had to be supplemented . and strengthened by the means of subjugation of the Restoration.

The peasants, disappointed in all their hopes, crushed more than ever by the low level of grain prices on the one hand, and by the growing burden of taxes and mortgage debts on the other, began to bestir themselves in the departments. They were answered by a drive against the schoolmasters, who were made subject to the clergy, by a drive against the maires,* who were made subject to the prefects, and by a system of espionage, to which all were made subject. In Paris and the large towns reaction itself has the physiognomy of its epoch and challenges more than it strikes down. In the countryside it becomes dull, mean, petty, tiresome and vexatious, in a word, the gendarme. One understands how three years of the regime of the gendarme, consecrated by the regime of the priest, were bound to demoralise the immature masses.

Whatever amount of passion and declamation might be employed by the Party of Order against the minority from the tribune of the National Assembly, its speech remained as monosyllabic as that of the Christians, whose words were to be: Yea, yea; nay, nay!” As monosyllabic on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal freedom or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: “Socialism!” Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway, where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons

* Mayors.— Ed. > Matthew 5 :37.— Ed.

which it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education which it had produced rebelled against its own civilisation, that all the gods which it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called civil freedoms and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become “ socialistic’. In this menace and this attack it rightly discerned the secret of socialism, whose import and tendency it judges more correctly than so-called socialism is able to judge itself; the latter can, accordingly, not comprehend why the bourgeoisie callously hardens its heart against it, whether it sentimentally bewails the sufferings of mankind, or in Christian spirit prophesies the millennium and universal brotherly love, or in humanistic style drivels on about mind, education and freedom, or in doctrinaire fashion excogitates a system for the conciliation and welfare of all classes. What the bourgeoisie did not grasp, however, was the logical conclusion that its own parliamentary regime, that its political rule in general, was now also bound to meet with the general verdict of condemnation as being socialistic. As long as the rule of the bourgeois class had not been organised completely, as long as it had not acquired its pure political expression, the antagonism of the other classes, likewise, could not appear in its pure form, and where it did appear could not take the dangerous turn that transforms every struggle against the state power into a struggle against capital. If in every stirring of life in society it saw “tranquillity” imperilled, how could it want to maintain at the head of society a regime of unrest, its own regime, the parliamentary regime, this regime that, according to the expression of one of its spokesmen, lives in struggle and by struggle? The parliamentary regime lives by discussion; how shall it forbid discussion? Every interest, every social institution, is here transformed into general ideas, debated as ideas; how shall any interest, any institution, sustain itself above thought and impose itself as an article of faith? The struggle of the orators on the platform evokes the struggle of the scribblers of the press; the debating club in parliament is necessarily supplemented by debating clubs in the salons and ale houses; the representatives, who constantly appeal to public opinion, give public opinion the right to speak its real mind in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside parliament not want to decide? When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?

Thus, by now stigmatising as ‘socialistic’ what it had previously

extolled as “liberal’, the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it should be delivered from the danger of its own rule; that, in order to restore tranquillity in the country, its bourgeois parliament must, first of all, be laid to rest; that, in order to preserve its social power intact, its political power must be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family, religion and order only on condition that their class be condemned along with the other classes to similar political nullity; that, in order to save its purse, it must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.

In the domain of the interests of the general citizenry, the National Assembly showed itself so unproductive that, for example, the discussions on the Paris-Avignon railway, which began in the winter of 1850, were still not ripe for conclusion on December 2, 1851. Wherever it did not repress, or react, it was stricken with incurable barrenness.

While Bonaparte’s ministry partly took the initiative in framing laws in the spirit of the Party of Order, and partly even outdid that party’s harshness in its execution and administration, he, on the other hand, by childishly silly proposals sought to win popularity, to bring out his opposition to the National Assembly, and to hint at a secret reserve that was only temporarily prevented by conditions from making its hidden treasures available to the French people. Such was the proposal to decree an increase in pay of four sous a day to the non-commissioned officers. Such was the proposal of an honour system lending-bank for the workers. Money as a gift and money on tick, it was with prospects such as these that he hoped to allure the masses. Donations and loans—the financial science of the Jumpenproletariat, whether of high degree or low, is restricted to this. Such were the only springs which Bonaparte knew how to set in motion. Never has a pretender speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses.

The National Assembly flared up repeatedly over these unmistakable attempts to gain popularity at its expense, over the growing danger that this adventurer, whom his debts spurred on and no established reputation held back, would venture a desperate coup. The discord between the Party of Order and the President had taken on a threatening character when an unexpected event threw him back repentant into its arms. We mean the by-elections of March 10, 1850. These elections were held for the purpose of filling the representatives’ seats that after June 13 had been rendered vacant by imprisonment or exile. Paris elected only Social-Democratic candi-

dates.* It even concentrated most of the votes on an insurgent of June 1848, on Deflotte. Thus did the Parisian petty bourgeoisie, in alliance with the proletariat, revenge itself for its defeat on June 13, 1849. It seemed to have disappeared from the battlefield at the moment of danger only to reappear there on a more propitious occasion with more numerous fighting forces and with a bolder battle cry. One circumstance seemed to heighten the peril of this election victory. The army voted in Paris for the June insurgent against La Hitte, a minister of Bonaparte’s, and in the departments largely for the Montagnards, who here, too, though indeed not so decisively as in Paris, maintained the ascendancy over their adversaries.

Bonaparte saw himself suddenly confronted with the revolution once more. As on January 29, 1849, as on June 13, 1849, so on March 10, 1850, he disappeared behind the Party of Order. He made obeisance, he pusillanimously begged pardon, he offered to appoint any ministry it pleased at the behest of the parliamentary majority, he even implored the Orleanist and Legitimist party leaders, the Thiers, the Berryers, the Broglies, the Molés, in brief, the so-called burgraves,’” to take the helm of state themselves. The Party of Order proved unable to take advantage of this opportunity that would never return. Instead of boldly possessing itself of the power offered, it did not even compel Bonaparte to reinstate the ministry dismissed on November 1; it contented itself with humiliating him by its forgiveness and adjoining M. Baroche to the d’Hautpoul ministry. As public prosecutor this Baroche had stormed and raged before the High Court at Bourges, the first time against the revolutionists of May 15,'% the second time against the democrats of June 13, both times because of an attack on the National Assembly. None of Bonaparte’s ministers subsequently contributed more to the degradation of the National Assembly, and after December 2, 1851, we meet him once more as the comfortablyinstalled and highly-paid Vice-President of the Senate. He had spat in the revolutionists’ soup in order that Bonaparte might finish them off.

The Social-Democratic party, for its part, seemed only to try to find pretexts for putting its own victory once again in doubt and for blunting its point. Vidal, one of the newly elected representatives of Paris, had been elected simultaneously in Strasbourg. He was induced to decline the election for Paris and accept it for Strasbourg. And so, instead of making its victory at the polls definitive and

“ Francois Vidal, Hippolyte Carnot and Paul Deflotte.— Ed.

thereby compelling the Party of Order at once to contest it in parliament, instead of thus forcing the adversary to fight at the moment of popular enthusiasm and a favourable mood in the army, the democratic party wearied Paris during the months of March and April with a new election campaign, let the aroused popular passions wear themselves out in this repeated provisional election game, let the revolutionary energy satiate itself with constitutional successes, dissipate itself in petty intrigues, hollow declamations and sham movements, let the bourgeoisie rally and make its preparations, and, lastly, weakened the significance of the March elections by a sentimental commentary in the April by-election, that of the election of Eugene Sue. In a word, it made an April Fool of March 10.

The parliamentary majority understood the weakness of its antagonists. Its seventeen burgraves—for Bonaparte had left to it the direction of and responsibility for the attack—drew up a new electoral law, the introduction of which was entrusted to M. Faucher, who solicited this honour for himself. On May 8 he introduced the law by which universal suffrage was to be abolished, a residence of three years in the locality of the election to be imposed as a condition on the voters and, finally, the proof of this residence made dependent in the case of workers on a certificate from their employers.

Just as the democrats had, in revolutionary fashion, agitated and raged during the constitutional election contest, so now, when it was necessary to prove the serious nature of those electoral victories arms in hand, did they in constitutional fashion preach order, majestic calm (calme majestueux), lawful action, that is to say, blind subjection to the will of the counter-revolution, which imposed itself as the law. During the debate the Mountain put the Party of Order to shame by asserting, against the latter’s revolutionary passion, the dispassionate attitude of the philistine who keeps within the law, and by striking it down with the fearful reproach that it proceeded in a revolutionary manner. Even the newly elected deputies were at pains to prove by their decorous and discreet action what a misconception it was to decry them as anarchists and construe their election as a victory for revolution. On May 31 the new electoral law went through. The Montagne contented itself with smuggling a protest into the pocket of the President. The electoral law was followed by a new press law, by which the revolutionary newspapers were entirely suppressed.’ They had deserved their fate. The National and La Presse, two bourgeois organs, were left behind after this deluge as the most advanced outposts of the revolution.

We have seen how during March and April the democratic leaders

had done everything to embroil the people of Paris in a sham fight, how after May 8 they did everything to restrain them from a real fight. In addition to this, we must not forget that the year 1850 was one of the most splendid years of industrial and commercial prosperity, and the Paris proletariat was therefore fully employed. But the election law of May 31, 1850 excluded it from any participation in political power. It cut it off from the very arena of the struggle. It threw the workers back into the position of pariahs which they had occupied before the February revolution. By letting themselves be led by the democrats in face of such an event and forgetting the revolutionary interests of their class for momentary ease and comfort, they renounced the honour of being a conquering power, surrendered to their fate, proved that the defeat of June 1848 had put them out of the fight for years and that the historical process would for the present again have to go on over their heads. As far as petty-bourgeois democracy is concerned, which on June 13 had cried: “But if once universal suffrage is attacked, then we'll show them’, it now consoled itself with the contention that the counterrevolutionary blow which had struck it was no blow and the law of May 31 no law. On the second Sunday in May 1852, every Frenchman would appear at the polling place with ballot in one hand and sword in the other. With this prophecy it rested content. Lastly, the army was disciplined by its superior officers for the elections of March and April 1850, just as it had been disciplined for those of May 28, 1849. This time, however, it said decidedly: “The revolution shall not dupe us a third time.”

The law of May 31, 1850 was the coup d’état of the bourgeoisie. All its conquests over the revolution hitherto had only a provisional character. They were endangered as soon as the existing National Assembly retired from the stage. They depended on the hazards of a new general election, and the history of elections since 1848 irrefutably proved that the bourgeoisie’s moral sway over the mass of the people was lost in the same measure as its actual domination developed. On March 10 universal suffrage declared itself directly against the domination of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage. The law of May 31 was, therefore, one of the necessities of the class struggle. On the other hand, the Constitution required a minimum of two million votes to make an election of the President of the republic valid. If none of the candidates for the presidency obtained this minimum, the National Assembly was to choose the President from among the five*

“ The original mistakenly says here: “among the three”.— Ed.

candidates to whom the largest number of votes would fall. At the time when the Constituent Assembly made this law, ten million voters were registered on the rolls. In its view, therefore, a fifth of the people entitled to vote was sufficient to make the presidential election valid. The law of May 31 struck at least three million votes off the electoral rolls, reduced the number of people entitled to vote to seven million and, nevertheless, retained the legal minimum of two million for the presidential election. It therefore raised the legal minimum from a fifth to nearly a third of the effective votes, that is, it did everything to smuggle the election of the President out of the hands of the people and into the hands of the National Assembly. Thus through the electoral law of May 31 the Party of Order seemed to have made its rule doubly secure, by surrendering the election of the National Assembly and that of the President of the republic to this stationary section of society.

Vv

As soon as the revolutionary crisis had been weathered and universal suffrage abolished, the struggle between the National Assembly and Bonaparte broke out again.

The Constitution had fixed Bonaparte’s salary at 600,000 francs. Barely six months after his installation he succeeded in increasing this sum to twice as much, for Odilon Barrot wrung from the Constituent National Assembly an extra allowance of 600,000 francs a year for so-called representation moneys. After June 13 Bonaparte had caused similar requests to be voiced, this time without eliciting response from Barrot. Now, after May 31, he at once availed himself of the favourable moment and caused his ministers to propose a Civil List of three million in the National Assembly. A long life of adventurous vagabondage had endowed him with the most developed antennae for feeling out the weak moments when he might squeeze money from his bourgeois. He practised regular chantage.’ The National Assembly had violated the sovereignty of the people with his assistance and his cognizance. He threatened to denounce its crime to the tribunal of the people unless it loosened its purse-strings and purchased his silence with three million a year. It had robbed three million Frenchmen of their franchise. He demanded, for every Frenchman out of circulation, a franc in circulation, precisely three million francs. He, the elect of six million, claimed damages

@ Blackmail.— Ed.

for the votes out of which he said he had retrospectively been cheated. The Commission of the National Assembly refused this importunate person. The Bonapartist press threatened. Could the National Assembly break with the President of the republic at a moment when it had fundamentally and definitely broken with the mass of the nation? It rejected the annual Civil List, it is true, but it granted a single extra allowance of 2,160,000 francs. It thus rendered itself guilty of the double weakness of granting the money and of showing at the same time by its vexation that it granted it unwillingly. We shall see later for what purpose Bonaparte needed the money. After this vexatious aftermath, which followed on the heels of the abolition of universal suffrage and in which Bonaparte exchanged his humble attitude during the crisis of March and April for challenging impudence to the usurpatory parliament, the National Assembly adjourned for three months, from August 11 to November 11. In its place it left behind a Permanent Commission of twenty-eight members, which contained no Bonapartists, but did contain some moderate republicans. The Permanent Commission of 1849 had included only Order men and Bonapartists. But at that time the Party of Order declared itself in permanence against the revolution. This time the parliamentary republic declared itself in permanence against the President. After the law of May 31, this was the only rival that still confronted the Party of Order.

When the National Assembly met once more in November 1850, it seemed that, instead of the petty skirmishes it had hitherto had with the President, a great and ruthless struggle, a life-and-death struggle between the two powers, had become inevitable.

As in 1849 so during this year’s parliamentary recess, the Party of Order had broken up into its individual factions, each occupied with its own restoration intrigues, reinforced by the death of Louis Philippe. The Legitimist king, Henry V, had even nominated a formal ministry which resided in Paris and in which members of the Permanent Commission held seats. Bonaparte, in his turn, was therefore entitled to make tours of the French departments and, according to the disposition of the town that he favoured with his presence, to divulge, now covertly, now more overtly, his own restoration plans and canvass votes for himself. On these processions, which the great official Moniteur and the little private Moniteurs of Bonaparte naturally had to celebrate as triumphal processions, he was constantly accompanied by persons affiliated with the Society of December 10. This society dates from the year 1849. On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat

of Paris had been organised into secret sections, each section being led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general* at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni,”’ pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus,” brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la boheme; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A “benevolent society” —in so far as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the labouring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognises in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte suns phrase“ An old crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. Thus on his expedition to Strasbourg, where a trained Swiss vulture had played the part of the Napoleonic eagle. For his irruption into Boulogne he puts some London lackeys into French uniforms. They represent the army.'”’ In his Society of December 10, he assembles 10,000 rogues who are to play the part of the people, as Nick Bottom that of the lion. At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win. Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he is the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own

* Jean Pierre Piat.— Ed. Procurers.— Ed.

“ The 1852 edition adds: “unmistakable even when he later, in the fullness of

power, paid off the debt to some of his erstwhile fellow conspirators, alongside the »» 106

revolutionaries, by having them transported to Cayenne”. — — Ed.

“ The reference is to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I, Scene 2.— Fa.

conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history. What the national ateliers' were for the socialist workers, what the Gardes mobiles were for the bourgeois republicans, the Society of December 10, the party fighting force characteristic of Bonaparte, was for him. On his journeys the detachments of this society packing the railways had to improvise a public for him, stage public enthusiasm, roar vive l’Empereur, insult and beat up republicans, of course under the protection of the police. On his return journeys to Paris they had to form the advance guard, forestall counter-demonstrations or disperse them. The Society of December 10 belonged to him, it was his work, his very own idea. Whatever else he appropriates is put into his hands by the force of circumstances; whatever else he does, the circumstances do for him or he is content to copy from the deeds of others. But Bonaparte with official phrases about order, religion, family and property in public, before the citizens, and with the secret society of the Schufterles and Spiegelbergs, the society of disorder, prostitution and theft, behind him—that is Bonaparte himself as original author, and the history of the Society of December 10 is his own history. Now it had happened by way of exception that people’s representatives belonging to the Party of Order came under the cudgels of the Decembrists. Still more. Yon, the Police Commissioner assigned to the National Assembly and charged with watching over its safety, acting on the deposition of a certain Allais, advised the Permanent Commission that a section of the Decembrists had decided to assassinate General Changarnier and Dupin, the President of the National Assembly, and had already designated the individuals who were to perpetrate the deed. One can understand the terror of M. Dupin. A parliamentary enquiry into the Society of December 10, that is, the profanation of the Bonapartist secret world, seemed inevitable. Just before the meeting of the National Assembly Bonaparte providently disbanded his society, naturally only on paper, for in a detailed memoir at the end of 1851 Police Prefect Carlier still sought in vain to move him to really break up the Decembrists.

The Society of December 10 was to remain the private army of Bonaparte until he succeeded in transforming the public army into a Society of December 10. Bonaparte made the first attempt at this shortly after the adjournment of the National Assembly, and precisely with the money just wrested from it. As a fatalist, he lives in the conviction that there are certain higher powers which man, and the soldier in particular, cannot withstand. Among these powers he counts, first and foremost, cigars and champagne, cold poultry and

garlic sausage. Accordingly, to begin with, he treats officers and . non-commissioned officers in his Elysée apartments to cigars and champagne, to cold poultry and garlic sausage. On October 3 he repeats this manoeuvre with the mass of the troops at the St. Maur review, and on October 10 the same manoeuvre on a still larger scale at the Satory army parade. The Uncle remembered the campaigns of Alexander in Asia, the Nephew the triumphal marches of Bacchus in the same land. Alexander was a demigod, to be sure, but Bacchus was a god and moreover the tutelary deity of the Society of December 10.

After the review of October 3, the Permanent Commission summoned the War Minister d’Hautpoul. He promised that these breaches of discipline should not recur. We know how on October 10 Bonaparte kept d’Hautpoul’s word. As Commander-in-Chief of the Paris army, Changarnier had commanded at both reviews. He, simultaneously a member of the Permanent Commission, chief of the National Guard, the “saviour” of January 29 and June 13, the “bulwark of society”, the candidate of the Party of Order for presidential honours, the suspected Monk of two monarchies, had hitherto never acknowledged himself as the subordinate of the War Minister, had always openly derided the republican Constitution and had pursued Bonaparte with an ambiguous lordly protection. Now he was consumed with zeal for discipline against the War Minister and for the Constitution against Bonaparte. While on October 10 a section of the cavalry raised the shout: “Vive Napoléon! Vivent les saucissons!”’, Changarnier arranged that at least the infantry marching past under the command of his friend Neumayer should preserve an icy silence. As a punishment, the War Minister relieved General Neumayer of his post in Paris at Bonaparte’s instigation, on the pretext of appointing him commanding general of the fourteenth and fifteenth army divisions. Neumayer refused this exchange of posts and so had to resign. Changarnier, for his part, published an order of the day on November 2, in which he forbade the troops to indulge in political outcries or demonstrations of any kind while under arms. The Elysée newspapers attacked Changarnier; the papers of the Party of Order attacked Bonaparte; the Permanent Commission held repeated secret sessions in which it was repeatedly proposed to declare the country in danger; the army seemed divided into two hostile camps, with two hostile general staffs, one in the Elysée where Bonaparte, the other in the Tuileries where Changarnier, lived. It seemed that only the meeting of the National Assembly was needed to give the signal for battle. The French public judged this friction between Bonaparte and Changar-

nier like that English journalist who characterised it in the following words:

“The political housemaids of France are sweeping away the glowing lava of the revolution with old brooms and wrangle with one another while they do their work.”

Meanwhile, Bonaparte hastened to remove the War Minister, d@’Hautpoul, to pack him off in all haste to Algiers and to appoint General Schramm War Minister in his place. On November 12 he sent to the National Assembly a message of American prolixity, overloaded with detail, redolent of order, desirous of reconciliation, constitutionally acquiescent, treating of all and sundry, but not of the questions brilantes* of the moment. As if in passing, he made the remarks that according to the express provisions of the Constitution the President alone could dispose of the army. The message closed with the following words of great solemnity:

“Above all things, France demands tranquillity... But bound by an oath, I shall keep within the narrow limits that it has set for me.... As far as 1 am concerned, elected by the people and owing my power to it alone, I shall always bow to its lawfully expressed will. Should you resolve at this session on a revision of the Constitution, a Constituent Assembly will regulate the position of the executive power. If not, then the people will solemnly pronounce its decision in 1852. But whatever the solutions of the future may be, let us come to an understanding, so that passion, surprise or violence may never decide the destiny of a great nation.... What occupies my attention, above all, is not who will rule France in 1852, but how to employ the time I have at my disposal so that the intervening period may pass by without agitation or disturbance. I have opened my heart to you with sincerity; you will answer my frankness with your trust, my good endeavours with your co-operation, and God will do the rest.” :

The respectable, hypocritically moderate, virtuously commonplace language of the bourgeoisie reveals its deepest meaning in the mouth of the autocrat of the Society of December 10 and the picnic hero of St. Maur and Satory.

The burgraves of the Party of Order did not delude themselves for a moment concerning the trust that this opening of the heart deserved. About oaths they had long been blasé; they numbered in their midst veterans and virtuosos of political perjury. Nor had they failed to hear the passage about the army. They observed with annoyance that in its discursive enumeration of recently enacted laws the message passed over the most important law, the electoral law, in studied silence, and moreover, in the event of there being no revision of the Constitution, left the election of the President in 1852 to the people. The electoral law was the leaden ball chained to the feet of

* Burning questions.— Ed. Le Moniteur universel, No. 317, November 13, 1850.— Ed.

the Party of Order, which prevented it from walking and so much the more from storming forward! Moreover, by the official disbandment of the Society of December 10 and the dismissal of the War Minister d’Hautpoul, Bonaparte had with his own hand sacrificed the scapegoats on the altar of the country. He had blunted the edge of the expected collision. Finally, the Party of Order itself anxiously sought to avoid, to mitigate, to gloss over any decisive conflict with the executive power. For fear of losing its conquests over the revolution, it allowed its rival to carry off the fruits thereof. “Above all things, France demands tranquillity.” This was what the Party of Order had cried to the revolution since February,* this was what Bonaparte’s message cried to the Party of Order. “Above all, France demands tranquillity.” Bonaparte committed acts that aimed at usurpation, but the Party of Order committed “unrest” if it raised a row about these acts and construed them hypochondriacally. The sausages of Satory were quiet as mice when no one spoke of them. “Above all, France demands tranquillity.”” Bonaparte demanded, therefore, that he be left in peace to do as he liked and the parliamentary party was paralysed by a double fear, by the fear of again evoking revolutionary unrest and by the fear of itself appearing as the instigator of unrest in the eyes of its own class, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie. Consequently, since France demanded tranquillity above al] things, the Party of Order dared not answer “war” after Bonaparte had talked “peace” in his message. The public, which had anticipated scenes of great scandal at the opening of the National Assembly, was cheated of its expectations. The opposition deputies, who demanded the submission of the Permanent Commission’s minutes on the October events, were outvoted by the majority. On principle, all debates that might cause excitement were eschewed. The proceedings of the National Assembly during November and December 1850 were without interest.

At last, towards the end of December, guerrilla warfare began over a number of prerogatives of parliament. The movement got bogged down in petty squabbles regarding the prerogatives of the two powers, since the bourgeoisie had done away with the class struggle for the moment by abolishing universal suffrage.

A judgment for debt had been obtained from the court against Mauguin, one of the people’s representatives. In answer to the enquiry of the President of the Court, the Minister of Justice, Rouher, declared that a warrant for the debtor’s arrest should be

* 1848.— Ea.

issued without further ado. Mauguin was thus thrown into the debtors’ jail. The National Assembly flared up when it learned of the assault. Not only did it order his immediate release, but it even had him fetched forcibly from Clichy the same evening, by its greffier.? In order, however, to confirm its faith in the sanctity of private property and with the idea at the back of its mind of opening, in case of need, an asylum for Montagnards who had become troublesome, it declared imprisonment of people’s representatives for debt permissible after previously obtaining its consent. It forgot to decree that the President might also be locked up for debt. It destroyed the last semblance of the immunity that enveloped the members of its own body.

It will be remembered that, acting on the information given by a certain Allais, Police Commissioner Yon had denounced a section of the Decembrists for planning the murder of Dupin and Changarnier. In reference to this, at the very first sitting the questors made the proposal that parliament should form a police force of its own, paid out of the private budget of the National Assembly and absolutely independent of the Prefect of Police. The Minister of the Interior, Baroche, protested against this invasion of his domain. A miserable compromise on this matter was concluded, according to which, although the police commissioner of the Assembly was to be paid out of its private budget and to be appointed and dismissed by its questors, this would only happen after previous agreement with the Minister of the Interior. Meanwhile criminal proceedings had been taken by the government against Allais, and here it was easy to represent his information as a hoax and through the mouth of the public prosecutor to cast ridicule upon Dupin, Changarnier, Yon and the whole National Assembly. Thereupon, on December 29, the Minister Baroche writes a letter to Dupin in which he demands Yon’s dismissal. The Bureau of the National Assembly decides to retain Yon in his position, but the National Assembly, alarmed by its violence in the Mauguin affair and accustomed when it has ventured a blow at the executive power to receive two blows from it in return, does not sanction this decision. It dismisses Yon as a reward for his professional zeal and robs itself of a parliamentary prerogative indispensable against a man who does not decide by night in order to execute by day, but who decides by day and executes by night.”

* Clerk.— Ed. b An allusion to the fact that Bonaparte staged his coup d’état on the night of December 1, 1851.— Ed.

We have seen how on great and striking occasions during the months of November and December the National Assembly avoided or quashed the struggle with the executive power. Now we see it compelled to take it up on the pettiest occasions. In the Mauguin affair it confirms the principle of imprisoning people’s representatives for debt, but reserves the right to have it applied only to representatives it dislikes, and wrangles over this infamous privilege with the Minister of Justice. Instead of availing itself of the alleged murder plot to decree an enquiry into the Society of December 10 and irredeemably unmask Bonaparte before France and Europe in his true character of chief of the Paris lumpenproletariat, it lets the conflict be degraded to a point where the only issue between it and the Minister of the Interior is which of them has the authority to appoint and dismiss a police commissioner. Thus, during the whole of this period, we see the Party of Order compelled by its equivocal position to dissipate and fragment its struggle with the executive power in petty jurisdictional squabbles, chicanery, legalistic hairsplitting, and delimitational disputes, and to make the most ridiculous matters of form the substance of its activity. It does not dare to take up the conflict at the moment when this has significance from the standpoint of principle, when the executive power has really exposed itself and the cause of the National Assembly would be the cause of the nation. By so doing it would give the nation its marching orders, and it fears nothing more than that the nation should move. On such occasions it accordingly rejects the motions of the Montagne and proceeds to the order of the day. The question at issue in its larger aspects having thus been dropped, the executive power calmly bides the time when it can again take up the same question on petty and insignificant occasions, when this is, so to speak, of only local parliamentary interests. Then the repressed rage of the Party of Order breaks out, then it tears away the curtain from the stage-set, then it denounces the President, then it declares the republic in danger, but then, also, its fervour appears absurd and the occasion for the struggle seems a hypocritical pretext or altogether not worth fighting about. The parliamentary storm becomes a storm in a teacup, the fight becomes an intrigue, the conflict a scandal. While the revolutionary classes gloat with malicious joy over the humiliation of the National Assembly, for they are just as enthusiastic about the parliamentary prerogatives of this Assembly as the latter is about the public liberties, the bourgeoisie outside parliament does not understand how the bourgeoisie inside parliament can waste time over such petty squabbles and imperil tranquillity by such pitiful rivalries with the President. It becomes confused by a strategy that

makes peace at the moment when all the world is expecting battles, and attacks at the moment when all the world believes peace has been made.

On December 20, Pascal Duprat interpellated the Minister of the Interior concerning the Gold Bars Lottery. This lottery was a “daughter of Elysium”.* Bonaparte with his faithful followers had brought her into the world and Police Prefect Carlier had placed her under his official protection, although French law forbids all lotteries with the exception of raffles for charitable purposes. Seven million lottery tickets at a franc apiece, the profits ostensibly to be devoted to shipping Parisian vagabonds to California. On the one hand, golden dreams were to supplant the socialist dreams of the Paris proletariat, and the seductive prospect of the first prize to replace the doctrinaire right to work. Naturally, the Paris workers did not recognise in the glitter of the California gold bars the inconspicuous francs that were enticed out of their pockets. In the main, however, the matter was nothing short of a downright swindle. The vagabonds who wanted to open California gold mines without troubling to leave Paris were Bonaparte himself and his debt-ridden cronies. The three million voted by the National Assembly had been squandered in riotous living; in one way or another the coffers had to be replenished. In vain had Bonaparte opened a national subscription for the building of so-called cités ouvriéres, and figured at the head of the list himself with a considerable sum. The hard-hearted bourgeois waited mistrustfully for him to pay up his share and since this, naturally, did not ensue, the speculation in socialist castles in the air fell straightway to the ground. The gold bars proved a better draw. Bonaparte & Co. were not content to pocket part of the excess of the seven million over the bars to be allotted in prizes; they manufactured false lottery tickets; they issued ten, fifteen and even twenty tickets with the same number—a financial operation in the spirit of the Society of December 10! Here the National Assembly was confronted not with the fictitious President of the republic, but with Bonaparte in the flesh. Here it could catch him in the act, in conflict not with the Constitution but with the Code pénal. If on Duprat’s interpellation it proceeded to the day’s agenda, this did not happen merely because Girardin’s motion that it should declare itself “satisfait” reminded the Party of Order of its own systematic corruption. The bourgeois and, above all, the bourgeois inflated into

* The phrase “Tochter aus Elysium” occurs in Schiller’s poem “An die Freude” as an epithet of joy. Marx uses it as a pun to allude to Louis Bonaparte’s official residence in the Champs Elysées.— Ed.

a statesman, supplements his practical meanness by theoretical extravagance. As a statesman he becomes, like the state power that confronts him, a higher being that can only be fought in a higher, consecrated fashion.

Bonaparte, who precisely because he was a Bohemian, a princely lumpenproletarian, had the advantage over a rascally bourgeois in that he could conduct a dirty struggle, now saw, after the Assembly had itself guided him with its own hand across the slippery ground of the military banquets, the reviews, the Society of December 10, and, finally, the Code pénal, that the moment had come when he could pass from an apparent defensive to the offensive. The minor defeats meanwhile sustained by the Minister of Justice, the Minister of War, the Minister of the Navy and the Minister of Finance,’ through which the National Assembly signified its snarling displeasure, troubled him little. He not only prevented the ministers from resigning and thus recognising the sovereignty of parliament over the executive power, but could now consummate what he had begun during the recess of the National Assembly: the severance of the military power from parliament, the removal of Changarnier.

An Elysée paper” published an order of the day alleged to have been addressed during the month of May to the First Army Division, and therefore proceeding from Changarnier, in which the officers were recommended, in the event of an insurrection, to give no quarter to the traitors in their own ranks, but to shoot them immediately and refuse the National Assembly the troops, should it requisition them. On January 3, 1851 the Cabinet was interpellated concerning this order of the day. For the investigation of this matter it requests a breathing space, first of three months, then of a week, finally of only twenty-four hours. The Assembly insists on an immediate explanation. Changarnier rises and declares that there never was such an order of the day. He adds that he will always hasten to comply with the demands of the National Assembly and that in case of a clash it can count on him. It receives his declaration with indescribable applause and passes a vote of confidence in him. It abdicates, it decrees its own impotence and the omnipotence of the army by placing itself under the private protection of a general; but the general deceives himself when he puts at its command against Bonaparte a power that he only holds as a fief from the same Bonaparte and when, in his turn, he expects to be protected by this parliament, by his own protégé in need of protection. Changarnier,

* Rouher, Schramm, Romain-Desfossés and Fould.— Ed. > La Patrie, January 2, 1851.— Ed.

158 Kar! Marx

however, believes in the mysterious power with which the bourgeoisie has endowed him since January 29, 1849. He considers himself the third power, existing side by side with both the other state powers. He shares the fate of the rest of this epoch’s heroes, or rather saints, whose greatness consists precisely in the biassed great opinion of them that their party creates in its own interests and who shrink to everyday figures as soon as circumstances call on them to perform miracles. Unbelief is, in general, the mortal enemy of these reputed heroes and real saints. Hence their dignified moral indignation at the dearth of enthusiasm displayed by wits and scoffers.

The same evening, the ministers were summoned to the Elysée; Bonaparte insists on the dismissal of Changarnier; five ministers refuse to sign it; the Moniteur announces a ministerial crisis, and the press of the Party of Order threatens to form a parliamentary army under Changarnier’s command. The Party of Order had constitutional authority to take this step. It merely had to appoint Changarnier President of the National Assembly and requisition any number of troops it pleased for its protection. It could do so all the more safely as Changarnier still actually stood at the head of the army and the Paris National Guard and was only waiting to be requisitioned together with the army. The Bonapartist press did not as yet even dare to question the right of the National Assembly directly to requisition troops, a legal scruple that in the given circumstances did not promise any success. That the army would have obeyed the orders of the National Assembly is probable when one bears in mind that Bonaparte had to search all Paris for eight days in order, finally, to find two generals— Baraguay d’Hilliers and Saint-Jean d’Angély—who declared themselves ready to countersign Changarnier’s dismissal. That the Party of Order, however, would have found in its own ranks and in parliament the necessary number of votes for such a resolution is more than doubtful, when one considers that eight days later 286 votes detached themselves from the party and that in December 1851, at the last hour for decision, the Montagne still rejected a similar proposal. Nevertheless, the burgraves might, perhaps, still have succeeded in spurring the mass of their party to a heroism that consisted in feeling themselves secure behind a forest of bayonets and accepting the services of an army that had deserted to their camp. Instead of this, on the evening of January 6, Messrs. the Burgraves betook themselves to the Elysée in 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

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 irrevocably 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 simultaneously 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, Changarnier’s dismissal is precisely the only one which the republicans approve of, while the Party of Order is in fact not in a position 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

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 intimidated 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

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 noconfidence 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 antiparliamentary 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. Changarnier 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 proletarian 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 unconditionally 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, threequarters 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.

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 antagonism 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

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 Protestant 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

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.

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 principles, 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.

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 retirement 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

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 opinionated 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, discipline, 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 itself.

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 inconsiderable. 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.

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 intolerable, 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 advertisements 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!”

Bonaparte understood this cry. His power of comprehension was sharpened by the growing turbulence of creditors who, with each sunset which brought settling day, the second Sunday in May 1852, nearer, saw a movement of the stars protesting their earthly bills of exchange. They had become veritable astrologers. The National Assembly had blighted Bonaparte’s hopes of a_ constitutional prorogation of his authority; the candidature of the Prince of Joinville forbade further vacillation.

If ever an event has, well in advance of its coming, cast its shadow before it, it was Bonaparte’s coup d’état. As early as January 29, 1849, barely a month after his election, he had made a proposal about it to Changarnier. In the summer of 1849 his own Prime Minister, Odilon Barrot, had covertly denounced the policy of coups d’état; in the winter of 1850 Thiers had openly done so. In May 1851 Persigny had sought once more to win Changarnier for the coup; the Messager de l’Assemblée had published an account of these negotiations. During every parliamentary storm, the Bonapartist journals threatened a coup d’état, and the nearer the crisis drew, the louder grew their tone. In the orgies that Bonaparte kept up every night with men and women of the swell mob,” as soon as the hour of midnight approached and rich libations had loosened tongues and fired imaginations, the coup d’état was fixed for the following morning. Swords were drawn, glasses clinked, representatives were thrown out of the window, and the imperial mantle fell upon Bonaparte’s shoulders, until the following morning banished the spook once more and astonished Paris learned, from vestals of little reticence and from indiscreet paladins, of the danger it had once again escaped. During the months of September and October

* Abroad.— Ed. Marx uses the English expression “swell mob” .— Ed.

rumours of a coup d’état followed thick and fast. Simultaneously, the shadow took on colour, like a variegated daguerreotype. Look up the September and October copies of the organs of the European daily press and you will find, word for word, intimations like the following: “Paris is full of rumours of a coup d’état. The capital is to be filled with troops during the night, and the next morning is to bring decrees which will dissolve the National Assembly, declare the department of the Seine in a state of siege, restore universal suffrage and appeal to the people. Bonaparte is said to be seeking ministers for the execution of these illegal decrees.” The reports that bring these tidings always end with the fateful word “ postponed”. The coup d’état was ever the fixed idea of Bonaparte. With this idea he had again set foot on French soil. He was so obsessed by it that he continually betrayed it and blurted it out. He was so weak that, just as continually, he gave it up again. The shadow of the coup d’état had become so familiar to the Parisians as a spectre that they were not willing to believe in it when it finally appeared in the flesh. What allowed the coup d’état to succeed was, therefore, neither the reticent reserve of the chief of the Society of December 10 nor the fact that the National Assembly was caught unawares. If it succeeded, it succeeded despite his indiscretion and with its foreknowledge, a necessary, inevitable result of antecedent development.

On October 10 Bonaparte announced to his ministers his decision to restore universal suffrage; on the 16th they handed in their resignations; on the 26th Paris learned of the formation of the Thorigny ministry. Police Prefect Carlier was simultaneously replaced by Maupas; the head of the First Army Division, Magnan, concentrated the most reliable regiments in the capital. On November 4 the National Assembly resumed its sittings. It had nothing better to do than to recapitulate in a short, succinct form the course it had gone through and to prove that it was buried only after it had died.

The first post that it forfeited in the struggle with the executive power was the ministry. It had solemnly to admit this loss by accepting at full value the Thorigny ministry, a mere sham. The Permanent Commission had received M. Giraud with laughter when he presented himself in the name of the new ministers. Such a weak ministry for such strong measures as the restoration of universal suffrage! Yet the precise object was to get nothing through in parliament, but everything against parliament.

On the very first day of its re-opening, the National Assembly received the message from Bonaparte in which he demanded the

restoration of universal suffrage and the abolition of the law of May 31, 1850. The same day his ministers introduced a decree to this effect. The National Assembly at once rejected the ministry’s motion of urgency and rejected the law itself on November 13 by 355 votes to 348. Thus, it tore up its mandate once more; it once more confirmed the fact that it had transformed itself from the freely elected representatives of the people into the usurpatory parliament of a class; it acknowledged once more that it had itself cut in two the muscles which connected the parliamentary head with the body of the nation.

If by its motion to restore universal suffrage the executive power appealed from the National Assembly to the people, the legislative power appealed by its Questors’ Bill from the people to the army. This Questors’ Bill was to establish its right of directly requisitioning troops, of forming a parliamentary army. While it thus designated the army as the arbitrator between itself and the people, between itself and Bonaparte, while it recognised the army as the decisive state power, it had to confirm, on the other hand, the fact that it had long given up its claim to dominate this power. By debating its right to requisition troops, instead of requisitioning them at once, it betrayed its doubts about its own powers. By rejecting the Questors’ Bill, it made public confession of its impotence. This bill was defeated, its proponents lacking 108 votes of a majority. The Montagne thus decided the issue. It found itself in the position of Buridan’s ass, not, indeed, between two bundles of hay with the problem of deciding which was the more attractive, but between two showers of blows with the problem of deciding which was the harder. On the one hand, there was the fear of Changarnier; on the other, the fear of Bonaparte. It must be confessed that the position was no heroic one.

On November 18 an amendment was moved to the law on municipal elections introduced by the Party of Order, to the effect that instead of three years’, one year’s domicile should suffice for municipal electors. The amendment was lost by a single vote, but this one vote immediately proved to be a mistake. By splitting up into its hostile factions, the Party of Order had long ago forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. It showed now that there was no longer any majority at all in parliament. The National Assembly had become incapable of transacting business. Its atomised constituents were no longer held together by any force of cohesion; it had drawn its last breath; it was dead.

Finally, a few days before the catastrophe, the extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie was solemnly to confirm once more its

breach with the bourgeoisie in parliament. Thiers, as a parliamentary hero infected more than the rest with the incurable disease of parliamentary cretinism, had, after the death of parliament, hatched out, together with the Council of State, a new parliamentary intrigue, a Responsibility Law by which the President was to be firmly held within the limits of the Constitution. Just as, on laying the foundation stone of the new market halls in Paris on September 15, Bonaparte, like a second Masaniello, had enchanted the dames des halles, the fishwives—to be sure, one fishwife outweighed seventeen burgraves in real power; just as after the introduction of the Questors’ Bill he enraptured the lieutenants he regaled in the Elysée, so now, on November 25, he swept off their feet the industrial bourgeoisie, which had gathered at the circus to receive at his hands prize medals for the London Industrial Exhibition. I shall give the significant portion of his speech as reported in the Journal des Deébats*:

“With such unhoped-for successes, I am justified in reiterating how great the French Republic would be if it were permitted to pursue its real interests and reform its institutions, instead of being constantly disturbed by demagogues, on the one hand, and by monarchist hallucinations, on the other. (Loud, stormy and repeated applause from every part of the amphitheatre.) The monarchist hallucinations hinder all progress and all important branches of industry. In place of progress nothing but struggle. One sees men who were formerly the most zealous supporters of the royal authority and prerogative become partisans of a Convention merely in order to weaken the authority that has sprung from universal suffrage. (Loud and repeated applause.) We see men who have suffered most from the Revolution, and have deplored it most, provoke a new one, and merely in order to fetter the nation’s will... I promise you tranquillity for the future, etc., etc. (Bravo, bravo, a storm of bravos.)”

Thus the industrial bourgeoisie applauds with servile bravos the coup d’état of December 2, the annihilation of parliament, the downfall of its own rule, the dictatorship of Bonaparte. The thunder of applause on November 25 had its answer in the thunder of cannon on December 4, and it was on the house of Monsieur Sallandrouze, who had clapped most, that they clapped most of the

bombs. . Cromwell, when he dissolved the Long Parliament, went alone into

its midst, drew out his watch in order that it should not continue to exist a minute after the time limit fixed by him, and drove out each one of the members of parliament with jovial humorous taunts. Napoleon, smaller than his prototype, at least betook himself on the eighteenth Brumaire to the legislative body and read out to it,

* For November 26, 1851.— Ed.

though in a faltering voice, its sentence of death. The second Bonaparte, who, moreover, found himself in possession of an executive power very different from that of Cromwell or Napoleon, sought his model not in the annals of world history, but in the annals of the Society of December 10, in the annals of the criminal courts. He robs the Bank of France of twenty-five million francs, buys General Magnan with a million, the soldiers with fifteen francs apiece and liquor, comes together with his accomplices secretly like a thief in the night, has the houses of the most dangerous parliamentary leaders broken into and Cavaignac, Lamoriciére, Le Fld, Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc., dragged from their beds, the key points of Paris and the parliamentary building occupied by troops, and cheapjack placards posted early in the morning on all the walls, proclaiming the dissolution of the National Assembly and the Council of State, the restoration of universal suffrage and the placing of the Seine department in a state of siege. In like manner, he inserted a little later in the Moniteur* a false document which asserted that influential parliamentarians had grouped themselves round him and formed a state consulta.

The rump parliament, assembled in the mazrie building of the tenth arrondissement and consisting mainly of Legitimists and Orleanists, votes the deposition of Bonaparte amid repeated cries of “Long live the Republic’, unavailingly harangues the gaping crowds before the building and is finally led off in the custody of African sharpshooters, first to the d’Orsay barracks, and later packed into prison vans and transported to the prisons of Mazas, Ham and Vincennes. Thus ended the Party of Order, the Legislative Assembly and the February revolution.

Before hastening to close, let us briefly summarise the latter’s history:

I. First period. From February 24 to May 4, 1848. February period. Prologue. Universal brotherhood swindle.

II. Second period. Period of ‘constituting the republic and of the Constituent National Assembly.

1. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.

2. June 25 to December 10,. 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the Constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December re by the election of Bonaparte as President.

*“ For December 3, 1851.— Ed.

3. December 20, 1848 to May 28, 1849. Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and with the Party of Order in alliance with him. End of the Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie.

III. Third period. Period of the constitutional republic and of the Legislative National Assembly.

1. May 28, 1849 to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy.

2. June 13, 1849 to May 31, 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the Party of Order. It completes its rule by abolishing universal suffrage, but loses the parliamentary ministry.

3. May 31, 1850 to December 2, 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte.

a) May 31, 1850 to January 12, 1851. Parliament loses the supreme command of the army.

b) January 12 to April 11, 1851. It is worsted in its attempts to regain the administrative power. The Party of Order loses its independent parliamentary majority. Its coalition with the republicans and the Montagne.

c) April 11, 1851 to October 9, 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion, prorogation. The Party of Order dissolves into its separate constituents. The breach of the bourgeois parliament and bourgeois press with the mass of the bourgeoisie hardens.

d) October 9 to December 2, 1851. Open breach between parliament and the executive power. Parliament performs its dying act and succumbs, left in the lurch by its own class, by the army and by all the remaining classes. End of the parliamentary regime and of bourgeois rule. Victory of Bonaparte. Empire restored as parody.

VII

On the threshold of the February revolution, the social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy. In the June days of 1848, it was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunts the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost. The democratic republic announces its arrival. On June 13, 1849 it is dissipated together with its petty bourgeois, who have taken to their heels, but in its flight it

blows its own trumpet with redoubled boastfulness. The parliamentary republic, together with the bourgeoisie, takes possession of the entire stage; it enjoys its existence to the full, but December 2, 1851 buries it to the accompaniment of the anguished cry of the coalitioned royalists: “Long live the Republic!” *

The French bourgeoisie balked at the power of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpenproletariat to power, with the chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy; Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the liquor-inspired army of order. The bourgeoisie apotheosised the sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press has been destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police supervision; its salons are under the supervision of the police. It disbanded the democratic National Guards; its own National Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It supplanted the juries by military commissions; its juries are supplanted by military commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of the priests; the priests subject it to their own education.’ It transported people without trial; it is being trans-_ ported without trial. It repressed every stirring in society by means of the state power; every stirring in its society is suppressed by the state power. Out of enthusiasm for its purse, it rebelled against its own politicians and men of letters; its politicians and men of letters are swept aside, but its purse is being plundered now that its mouth has been gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie never wearied of crying out to the revolution what Saint Arsenius cried out to the Christians: “Fuge, tace, quiesce! Flee, be silent, keep still!” Bonaparte cries to the bourgeoisie: “ Fuge, tace, quiesce! Flee, be silent, keep still!”

The French bourgeoisie had long ago found the solution to Napoleon’s dilemma: “Dans cinquante ans, l'Europe sera républicaine ou cosaque.”* It had found the solution to it in the “république cosaque’’.

* The 1852 edition has the following paragraph here: “The social and the democratic republic suffered defeats, but the parliamentary republic, the republic of the royalist bourgeoisie foundered, as did the pure republic, the republic of the bourgeois republicans.” — Ed.

b According to the list of misprints in the 1852 edition, the second part of this sentence should read as follows: “the priests subjected themselves to their own education”. However, this alteration was not reproduced in the 1869 edition.— Ed.

“ “In fifty years Europe will be republican or Cossack.” (The words are taken from the book by Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Héléne.)— Ed.

No Circe, by means of black magic, has distorted that work of art, the

bourgeois republic, into a monstrous shape. That republic has lost

nothing but the semblance of respectability.* Present-day France” was

contained in a finished state within the parliamentary republic. It only required a bayonet thrust for the abcess to burst and the monster to spring forth before our eyes.°

* In the 1852 edition this sentence reads as follows: “That republic has lost nothing but its rhetoric arabesques, its manners, in a word, the semblance of respectability.” — Ed.

> France after the coup d’état of 1851.— Ed.

© In the 1852 edition two paragraphs follow here:

“The immediate aim of the February revolution was to overthrow the Orleans dynasty and that part of the bourgeoisie which ruled under it. It was not until December 2, 1851 that this aim was achieved. Then the immense possessions of the house of Orleans, the real basis of its influence, were confiscated, and what had been expected after the February revolution came to pass after December: the imprisonment, flight, deposition, banishment, disarming and humiliation of the men who from 1830 on had wearied France with their appeals. But only part of the commercial bourgeoisie ruled under Louis Philippe. Its other factions formed a dynastic and a republican opposition or stood entirely outside the so-called legal country [Marx has legalen Landes, which is a translation of the French expression pays légal]. Only the parliamentary republic included all factions of the commercial bourgeoisie in its political sphere. Moreover, under Louis Philippe the commercial bourgeoisie excluded the landowning bourgeoisie. Only the parliamentary republic placed them side by side as possessing equal rights, wedded the July monarchy to the Legitimist monarchy and amalgamated two epochs of the rule of property into one. Under Louis Philippe the privileged part of the bourgeoisie concealed its rule beneath the crown; in the parliamentary republic the rule of the bourgeoisie—after it had united all its elements and made its empire the empire of its class—revealed itself. So the revolution had first created the form in which the rule of the bourgeois class received its broadest, most general and ultimate expression and could therefore also be overthrown, without being able to rise again.

“Only now was the sentence executed which was passed in February upon the Orleanist bourgeoisie, i.e. the most viable faction of the French bourgeoisie. Now a crushing blow was struck at its parliament, its legal courts, its commercial courts, its provincial representations, its notary’s office, its university, its tribune and its tribunals, its press and its literature, its administrative income and its court fees, its army salaries and its state pensions, in its spirit and in its body. Blanqui had made the disbanding of the bourgeois guards the first demand on the revolution, and the bourgeois guards, who in February extended their hand to the revolution in order to hinder its progress, disappeared from the scene in December. The Pantheon itself is again turned into an ordinary church. With the last form of the bourgeois regime, the spell too has been broken which transfigured its eighteenthcentury founders into saints. Therefore when on December 2 Guizot learned about the success of the coup d’état, he exclaimed: Cvest le triomphe complet et définitif du soctalisme! This is the complete and final triumph of socialism! That means: this is the final and complete collapse of the rule of the bourgeoisie.”’ — Ed.

Why did the Paris proletariat not rise in revolt after December 27°

The overthrow of the bourgeoisie had as yet been only decreed: the decree had not been carried out. Any serious insurrection of the proletariat would at once have put fresh life into the bourgeoisie, would have reconciled it with the army and ensured a second June defeat for the workers.

On December 4 the proletariat was incited by bourgeois and épicier” to fight. On the evening of that day several legions of the National Guard promised to appear, armed and uniformed, on the scene of battle. For the bourgeois and the épicier had got wind of the fact that in one of his decrees of December 2 Bonaparte abolished the secret ballot and enjoined them to record their “yes” or “no” in the official registers after their names. The resistance of December 4 intimidated Bonaparte. During the night he caused placards to be posted on al] the street corners of Paris, announcing the restoration of the secret ballot. The bourgeois and the épicier believed that they had gained their end. Those who failed to appear next morning were the bourgeois and the épicier.

By a coup de main during the night of December | to 2, Bonaparte had 10obbed the Paris proletariat of its leaders, the barricade commanders. An army without officers, averse to fighting under the banner of the Montagnards because of the memories of June 1848 and 1849 and May 1850,% it left to its vanguard, the secret societies, the task of saving the insurrectionary honour of Paris, which the bourgeoisie had so unresistingly surrendered to the soldiery that, later on, Bonaparte could sneeringly give as his motive for disarming the National Guard—his fear that its arms would be turned against itself by the anarchists!*

“Crest le triomphe complet et définitif du socialisme!” Thus Guizot characterised December 2. But if the overthrow of the parliamentary republic contains within itself the germ of the triumph of the proletarian revolution, its immediate and palpable result was the victory of Bonaparte over parliament, of the executive power over the

* In the 1852 edition this paragraph reads as follows: “Why did the proletariat not rescue the bourgeoisie? Implied in this is the question: Why did the Paris proletariat not rise in revolt after December 2?” — Ed.

Pejorative term for shopkeeper.— Fd.

“In the 1852 edition: “The bloody resistance” .— Ed.

d In the 1852 edition the beginning of this sentence reads as follows: “An army without officers, too enlightened by its memories of June 1848 and 1849 and May 1850 to fight under the banner of the Montagnards, it was therefore correctly assessing its own strength and the general situation when....” — Ed.

In the 1852 edition: “his fear, not that it would turn its arms against him, but that the anarchists would turn them against itself” — Ed.

legislative power, of force without words over the force of words.’ In parliament the nation made its general will the law, that is, it made the law of the ruling class its general will. Before the executive power it renounces all will of its own and submits to the superior command of an alien will, to authority. The executive power, in contrast to the legislative power, expresses the heteronomy of a nation, in contrast to its autonomy. France, therefore, seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to fall back beneath the despotism of an individual, and, what is more, beneath the authority of an individual without authority. The struggle seems to be settled in such a way that all classes, equally impotent and equally mute, fall on their knees before the rifle butt.

But the revolution is thorough. It is still journeying through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851 it had completed one half of its preparatory work; it is now completing the other half. First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has attained this, it perfects the executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has done this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly exclaim: Well burrowed, old mole!

This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organisation, with its extensive and artificial state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten. The seignorial privileges of the landowners and towns became transformed into so many attributes of the state power, the feudal dignitaries into paid officials and the motley pattern of conflicting medieval plenary powers into the regulated plan of a state authority whose work is divided and centralised as in a factory. The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all separate local, territorial, urban and _ provincial powers in order to create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to develop what the absolute monarchy had begun: the centralisation, but at the same time the extent, the attributes and the agents of governmental power. Napoleon perfected this state machinery. The

* The 1852 edition adds: “Thus the one power of the old state is at first only freed from its limitation, becoming an unlimited, absolute power.” — Ed. 4 A reference to Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5.— Ed.

Legitimist monarchy and the July monarchy added nothing but a greater division of labour, growing in the same measure as the division of labour within bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and, therefore, new material for state administration. Every common interest was straightway severed from society, counterposed to it as a higher, general interest, snatched from the activity of society's members themselves and made an object of government activity, whether it was a bridge, a schoolhouse and the communal property of a village community, or the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France. Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with the repressive measures, the resources and centralisation of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The . parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.

But under the absolute monarchy, during the first revolution, under Napoleon, bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Under the Restoration, under Louis Philippe, under the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class, however much it strove for power of its own.

Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent.’ As against civil society, the state machine has consolidated its position so thoroughly that the chief of the Society of December 10 suffices for its head, a casual adventurer from abroad, raised up as leader by a drunken soldiery, which he has bought with liquor and sausages, and which he must continually ply with more sausage. Hence the downcast despair, the feeling of most dreadful humiliation and degradation that oppresses the breast of France and makes her catch her breath. She feels dishonoured.”

And yet the state power is not suspended in mid air. Bonaparte

“In the 1852 edition this sentence reads thus: “Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself independent of society and subjected it.” The text went on as follows: “The independence of the executive power emerges into the open when its chief no longer requires genius, its army no longer requires glory, and its bureaucracy no longer requires moral authority in order to justify itself.” — Ed.

> The 1852 edition further has: “Just as Napoieon hardly left her any excuse for freedom, so the second Bonaparte no longer left her any excuse for servitude.” — Ed.

represents a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasantry.

Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of big landed property and just as the Orleans were the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, that is, the mass of the French people. Not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament, but the Bonaparte who dispersed the bourgeois parliament is the chosen man of the peasantry. For three years the towns had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the election of December 10 and in cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the empire. The election of December 10, 1848 has been consummated only by the coup d’état of December 2, 1851.

The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is increased by France’s bad means of communication and by the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the smallholding, admits of no division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A smallholding, a peasant and his family; alongside them another smallholding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these make up a village, and a few score of villages make up a department. In this way, the great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organisation among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and

*

188 Kart Marx

sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself.*

Historical tradition gave rise to the belief of the French peasants in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all the glory back to them. And an individual turned up who gives himself out as the man because he bears the name of Napoleon, as a result of the Code Napoléon, which lays down that la recherche de la paternité est interdite.” After a vagabondage of twenty years and after a series of grotesque adventures, the legend finds fulfilment and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the Nephew was realised, because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.

But, it may be objected, what about the peasant risings in half of France,'’ the raids on the peasants by the army, the mass incarceration and transportation of peasants?

Since Louis XIV, France has experienced no similar persecution of the peasants “for demagogic practices”.

But let there be no misunderstanding. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the smallholding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate this holding; not the country folk who, linked up with the towns, want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in stupefied seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their smallholdings saved and favoured by the ghost of the empire. It represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment, but his prejudice; not his future, but his past; not his modern Cévennes, but his modern Vendée.!9

The three years’ rigorous rule of the parliamentary republic had freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and had revolutionised them, even if only superficially; but the bourgeoisie violently repressed them whenever they set themselves in motion. Under the parliamentary republic the modern and the traditional consciousness of the French peasant contended for mastery. This progress took the form of an incessant struggle between the schoolmasters and the priests. The bourgeoisie struck down the schoolmasters. For the first time the peasants made efforts

‘

* In the 1852 edition the end of the sentence reads as follows: “...the executive power subordinating parliament and the state subordinating society to itself”.— Ed. > Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.— Ed.

to behave independently in the face of the activity of the government. This was shown in the continual conflict between the maires and the prefects. The bourgeoisie deposed the maires. Finally, during the period of the parliamentary republic, the peasants of different localities rose against their own offspring, the army. The bourgeoisie punished them with states of siege and punitive expeditions. And this same bourgeoisie now cries out about the stupidity of the masses, the vile multitude,’ that has betrayed it to Bonaparte. It has itself forcibly strengthened the imperial sentiments of the peasant class, it conserved the conditions that form the birthplace of this peasant religion. The bourgeoisie, to be sure, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses as long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary.

In the risings after the coup d’état, a part of the French peasants protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of December 10, 1848. The school they had gone through since 1848 had sharpened their wits. But they had made themselves over to the underworld of history; history held them to their word, and the majority was still so prejudiced that in precisely the reddest departments the peasant population voted openly for Bonaparte. In its view, the National Assembly had hindered his progress. He had now merely broken the fetters that the towns had imposed on the will of the countryside. In some parts the peasants even entertained the grotesque notion of a convention side by side with Napoleon.

After the first revolution had transformed the peasants from semi-villeins into freeholders, Napoleon confirmed and regulated the conditions on which they could exploit undisturbed the soil of France which had only just fallen to their lot and slake their youthful passion for property. But what is now causing the ruin of the French peasant is his smallholding itself, the division of the land, the form of property which Napoleon consolidated in France. It is precisely the material conditions which made the French feudal peasant a small-holding peasant and Napoleon an emperor. Two generations have sufficed to produce the inevitable result: progressive deterioration of agriculture, progressive indebtedness of the agriculturist. The “Napoleonic” form of property, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition for the liberation and enrichment of the French country folk, has developed in the course of this century into the law of their enslavement and pauperisation.

* An expression used by Thiers in his speech in the Legislative Assembly on May 24, 1850.— Ed.

And precisely this law is the first of the ‘‘idées napoléoniennes” which the second Bonaparte has to uphold. If he still shares with the peasants the illusion that the cause of their ruin is to be sought, not in this small-holding property itself, but outside it, in the influence of secondary circumstances, his experiments will burst like soap bubbles when they come in contact with the relations of production.*

The economic development of small-holding property has radically changed the relation of the peasants to the other classes of society. Under Napoleon, the fragmentation of the land in the countryside supplemented free competition and the beginning of big industry in the towns.” The peasant class was the ubiquitous protest against the landed aristocracy which had just been overthrown.‘ The roots that small-holding property struck in French soil deprived feudalism of all nutriment. Its landmarks formed the natural fortifications of the bourgeoisie against any coup de main on the part of its old overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century the feudal lords were replaced by urban usurers; the feudal obligation that went with the land was replaced by the mortgage; aristocratic landed property was replaced by bourgeois capital. The smallholding of the peasant is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profits, interest and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the tiller of the soil himself to see how he can extract his wages. The mortgage debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French peasantry payment of an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this enslavement by capital to which its development inevitably pushes forward, has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes? Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in hovels, a large number of which have but one opening, others only two and the most favoured only three. And windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly arisen smallholding and manured it with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out its blood and brains and throws them into the

* The 1852 edition adds: “depriving that illusion of its last hiding place and at best making the disease more acute”.— Ed.

The 1852 edition further has: “Even the advantages given to the peasant class were in the interest of the new bourgeois order. This newly created class was the all-round extension of the bourgeois regime beyond the gates of the towns, its realisation on a national scale.” — Ed.

© The 1852 edition further has: “If it was favoured most of all, it was also suited most of all as a point of attack for the restoration of feudalism.” — Ed.

In the 1852 edition: “into a nation of troglodytes” .— Ed.

alchemist’s cauldron of capital. The Code Napoléonis now nothing but a codex of distraints, forced sales and compulsory auctions. To the four million (including children, etc.) officially recognised paupers, vagabonds, criminals and prostitutes in France must be added five million who hover on the margin of existence and either have their haunts in the countryside itself or, with their rags and their children, continually desert the countryside for the towns and the towns for the countryside. The interests of the peasants, therefore, are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but in opposition’ to the interests of the bourgeoisie, to capital. Hence the peasants find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order. But strong and unlimited government—and this is the second “idée napoléonienne”, which the second Napoleon has to carry out—is called upon to defend this “material” order by force. This “ordre matériel’ also serves as the catchword in all of Bonaparte’s proclamations against the rebellious peasants. Besides the mortgage which capital imposes on it, the smallholding is burdened by taxes. Taxes are the source of life for the bureaucracy, the army, the priests and the court, in short, for the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are identical. By its very nature, small-holding property forms a suitable basis for an all-powerful and innumerable bureaucracy. It creates a uniform level of relationships and persons over the whole surface of the land. Hence it also permits of uniform action from a supreme centre on all points of this uniform mass. It annihilates the aristocratic intermediate grades between the mass of the people and the state power. On all sides, therefore, it calls forth the direct interference of this state power and the interposition of its immediate organs. Finally, it produces an unemployed surplus population for which there is no place either on the land or in the towns, and which accordingly reaches out for state offices as a sort of respectable alms, and provokes the creation of state posts.” By the new markets which he opened at the point of the bayonet, by the plundering of the Continent, Napoleon repaid the compulsory taxes

* In the 1852 edition: “in the deadliest opposition” .— Ed.

> The 1852 edition further has: “Under Napoleon this numerous government personnel was not only directly productive in that it provided for the new peasantry, by state coercion, in the form of public works, etc., what the bourgeoisie was still unable to provide with the resources of private industry. The state taxes were an essential means of coercion for maintaining exchange between town and country. Otherwise the smallholder would, in peasant self-complacency, have broken off the connection with the towns as was the case in Norway and in part of Switzerland.” — Ed.

with interest. These taxes were a spur to the industry of the peasant, whereas now they rob his industry of its last resources and complete his inability to resist pauperism. And an enormous bureaucracy, well-braided and well-fed, is the ‘“idée napoléonienne”’ which is most congenial of all to the second Bonaparte. How could it be otherwise, seeing that alongside the actual classes of society he is forced to create an artificial caste, for which the maintenance of his regime becomes a bread-and-butter question? Accordingly, one of his first financial operations was the raising of officials’ salaries to their old level and the creation of new sinecures.

Another “‘idée napoléonienne” is the domination of the priests as an instrument of government. But while in its accord with society, in its dependence on natural forces and its submission to the authority which protected it from above, the smallholding that had newly come into being was naturally religious, the smallholding that is ruined by debts, at odds with society and authority, and driven beyond its own limitations naturally becomes irreligious. Heaven was quite a pleasing accession to the narrow strip of land just won, especially as it makes the weather; it becomes an insult as soon as it is thrust forward as substitute for the smallholding. The priest then appears as only the anointed bloodhound of the earthly police—another “idée napoléonienne”.* On the next occasion, the expedition against Rome will take place in France itself, but in a sense opposite to that of M. de Montalembert.’”°

Lastly, the culminating point of the “idées napoléoniennes” is the preponderance of the army. The army was the point d’honneur of the small-holding peasants, it was they themselves transformed into heroes, defending their new possessions against the outer world, glorifying their recently won nationhood, plundering and revolutionising the world. The uniform” was their own state dress; war was their poetry; the smallholding, extended and rounded off in imagination, was their fatherland, and patriotism the ideal form of their sense of property. But the enemies against whom the French peasant has now to defend his property are not the Cossacks; they are the huissters‘ and the tax collectors. The smallholding lies no longer in the so-called fatherland, but in the register of mortgages.

* In the 1852 edition this sentence reads as follows: “The priest then appears as only the anointed bloodhound of the earthly police—another ‘idée napoléonienné — whose duty under the second Bonaparte is not, as under Napoleon, to watch the enemies of the peasant regime in the towns, but Bonaparte’s enemies in the country.” — Ed.

> In the 1852 edition: “The dazzling uniform” .— Ed.

© Bailiffs.— Ed.

The army itself is no longer the flower of the peasant youth; it is the swamp-flower of the peasant lumpenproletariat. It consists in large measure of remplacants, of substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte is himself only a remplacant, the substitute for Napoleon. It now performs its deeds of valour by hunting down the peasants like chamois, and in organised drives, by doing gendarme duty, and if the internal contradictions of his system chase the chief of the Society of December 10 over the French border, his army, after some acts of brigandage, will reap, not laurels, but thrashings.

One sees: all “idées napoléoniennes’ are ideas of the undeveloped smallholding in the freshness of its youth; for the smallholding that has outlived its day they are an absurdity. They are only the hallucinations of its death struggle, words that are transformed into phrases, spirits transformed into ghosts.* But the parody of the empire was necessary to free the mass of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between the state power and society. With the progressive undermining of small-holding property, the state structure erected upon it collapses. ‘The centralisation of the state that modern society requires arises only on the ruins of the military-bureaucratic government machinery which was forged in opposition to feudalism.”

The condition of the French peasants provides us with the answer to the riddle of the general elections of December 20 and 21, which bore the second Bonaparte up Mount Sinai, not to receive laws, but to give them.

Manifestly, the bourgeoisie had now no choice but to elect

* The 1852 edition adds: “appropriate costumes transformed into absurd fancy dress” .— Ed.

Instead of the last two sentences, the 1852 edition has: “The demolition of the state machine will not endanger centralisation. Bureaucracy is only the low and brutal form of a centralisation that is still afflicted with its opposite, with feudalism. When he is disappointed in the Napoleonic Restoration, the French peasant will part with his belief in his smallholding, the entire state edifice erected on this smallholding will fall to the ground and the proletarian revolution will obtain that chorus without which its solo becomes a swan song in all peasant countries.” — Ed.

“In the 1852 edition: “but to give and execute them”. Then follows this passage: “Of course in those fateful days the French nation committed a mortal sin against democracy, which daily prays on its knees: Holy Universal Suffrage, plead for us! The believers in Universal Suffrage are naturally unwilling to dispense with the miraculous power which has worked such great things with them, which has transformed Bonaparte II into a Napoleon, a Saul into a Paul and a Simon into a Peter. The popular spint speaks to them through the ballot box as the God of the Prophet Ezekiel spoke to the dry bones: ‘Haec dicit dominus deus ossibus suis: Ecce, ego intromittam in vos spiritum et vivetis. “Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shail live’” [Ezekiel 37 : 5].— Ed.

Bonaparte.* When the puritans at the Council of Constance’! complained of the dissolute lives of the popes and wailed about the necessity of moral reform, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly thundered at them: “Only the devil in person can still save the Catholic Church, and you ask for angels.” In like manner, after the coup d’état, the French bourgeoisie cried: Only the chief of the Society of December 10 can still save bourgeois society! Only theft can still save property; only perjury, religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order!

As the executive authority which has made itself an independent power, Bonaparte feels it to be his mission to safeguard “bourgeois order”. But the strength of this bourgeois order lies in the middle class. He looks on himself, therefore, as the representative of the middle class and issues decrees in this sense. Nevertheless, he is somebody solely due to the fact that he has broken the political power of this middle class and daily breaks it anew. Consequently, he looks on himself as the adversary of the political and literary power of the middle class. But by protecting its material power, he generates its political power” anew. The cause must accordingly be kept alive; but the effect, where it manifests itself, must be done away with. But this cannot pass off without slight confusions of cause and effect, since in their interaction both lose their distinguishing features. New decrees that obliterate the border line. As against the bourgeoisie, Bonaparte looks on himself, at the same time, as the representative of the peasants and of the people in general, who wants to make the lower classes of the people happy within the framework of bourgeois society. New decrees that cheat the “true Socialists” !*? of their statecraft in advance. But, above all, Bonaparte looks on himself as the chief of the Society of December 10, as the representative of the lumpenproletariat, to which he himself, his entourage, his government and his army belong, and whose prime consideration is to benefit itself and draw. California lottery prizes from the state treasury. And he vindicates his position as chief of the Society of December 10 with decrees, without decrees and despite decrees.

This contradictory task of the man explains the contradictions of his government, the confused, blind to-ing and fro-ing which seeks now to win, now to humiliate first one class and then another and arrays all of them uniformly against him, whose practical uncertainty forms a highly comical contrast to the imperious, categorical style of

* The 1852 edition further has: “Despotism or anarchy? Naturally it voted for despotism.” — Fd. :

> In the 1852 edition: “its public, its political power” .— Ed.

the government decrees, a style which is faithfully copied from the uncle.’

Industry and trade, hence the business affairs of the middle class, are to prosper in hothouse fashion under the strong government. The grant of innumerable railway concessions. But the Bonapartist lumpenproletariat is to enrich itself. The initiated play tripotage” on the bourse with the railway concessions. But no capital is forthcoming for the railways. Obligation of the Bank to make advances on railway shares. But, at the same time, the Bank is to be exploited for personal ends and therefore must be cajoled. Release of the Bank from the obligation to publish its report weekly. Leonine agreement of the Bank with the government. The people are to be given employment. Initiation of public works. But the public works increase the obligations of the people in respect of taxes. Hence reduction of the taxes by an onslaught on the rentiers, by conversion of the five per cent bonds to four-and-a-half per cent. But, once more, the middle class must receive a douceur.© Therefore doubling of the wine tax for the people, who buy it en détail,’ and halving of the wine tax for the middle class, who drink it en gros. Dissolution of the actual workers’ associations, but promises of miracles of association in the future. The peasants are to be helped. Mortgage banks that expedite their getting into debt and accelerate the concentration of property. But these banks are to be used to make money‘ out of the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans. No capitalist wants to agree to this condition, which is not in the decree, and the mortgage bank remains a mere decree, etc., etc.

Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one class without taking from another. Just as at the time of the Fronde it was said of the Duke of Guise that he was the most obligeant man in France because he had turned all his estates into his partisans’ obligations to him, so Bonaparte would fain be the most obligeant man in France and turn all the property, all the labour of France into a personal obligation to himself. He would like to steal the whole of France in order to be able to make a present of her to France or, rather, in order to be able to buy France anew with

* The 1852 edition further has: “So the haste and precipitateness of these contradictions is to ape the many-sided activities and promptness of the Bree yore Ed.

° Hanky- panky.— Ed. , Sop.— Ed. “ Retail.— Ed.

; © Wholesale.— Ed.

In the 1852 edition: “to make money for oneself” .— Ed.

French money, for as the chief of the Society of December 10 he must needs buy what ought to belong to him. And all the state institutions, the Senate, the Council of State, the legislative body, the Legion of Honour, the soldiers’ medals, the wash-houses, the public works, the railways, the état-major* of the National Guard excluding privates, and the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans—all become parts of the institution of purchase. Every place in the army and in the government machine becomes a means of purchase. But the most important feature of this process, whereby France is taken in order to be given back, is the percentages that find their way into the pockets of the head and the members of the Society of December 10 during the transaction. The witticism with which Countess L.,” the mistress of M. de Morny, characterised the confiscation of the Orleans estates: “C'est le premier vol* de l’aigle’ “is applicable to every flight of this eagle, which is more like a raven.'”? He himself and his adherents call out to one another daily like that Italian Carthusian admonishing the miser who, with boastful display, counted up the goods on which he could yet live for years to come: “ Tu fat conto sopra t beni, bisogna prima far il conto sopra gli anni.” ** Lest they make a mistake in the years, they count the minutes. A gang of shady characters push their way forward to the court, into the ministries, to the head of the administration and the army, a crowd of the best of whom it must be said that no one knows whence he comes, a noisy, disreputable, rapacious boheme that crawls into braided coats with the same grotesque dignity as the high dignitaries of Soulouque. One can visualise clearly this upper stratum of the Society of December 10, if one reflects that Véron-Crevel*** is its preacher of morals and Granier de Cassagnac its thinker. When Guizot, at the time of his ministry, utilised this Granier on a hole-and-corner newspaper against the dynastic opposition, he used to boast of him with the quip: “C'est le roi des dréles,” “he is the king of buffoons.” “One would do wrong to recall the Regency '™ or Louis XV in connection with Louis Bonaparte’s court and clique. For “often already, France has

* Vol means flight and theft. ** “Thou countest thy goods, thou shouldst first count thy years.” *** In his novel Cousine Bette, Balzac delineates the thoroughly dissolute Parisian philistine in Crevel, a character based on Dr. Véron, owner of the Constitutionnel.

“ General Staff.— Ed. > Lehon.— Ed. “ “It is the first flight (theft) of the eagle.” — Ed. Quoted in the article by Dupont “Chronique de I’Interieur”, Voix du Proscrit, No. 8, December 15, 1850.— Ed.

experienced a government of mistresses; but never before a government of hommes entretenus.” *?

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation and being at the same time, like a conjurer, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze fixed on himself, as Napoleon’s substitute, by springing constant surprises, that is to say, under the necessity of executing a coup d’état en miniature every day, Bonaparte throws the entire bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution, others desirous of revolution, and produces actual anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping its halo from the entire state machine, profanes it and makes it at once loathsome and ridiculous. The cult of the Holy Coat of Trier’” he duplicates in Paris with the cult of the Napoleonic imperial mantle. But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will crash from the top of the Vendéme Column.’

* The words quoted are those of Madame Girardin.

* Hommes entretenus: kept men. The 1852 edition further has: “And Cato, who took his life to be able to associate with heroes in the Elysian Fields! Poor Cato!” — Fa.