Three State Trials Against the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung"

Karl Marx
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Politisch-Ökonomische Revue.
H. 1, January 1850

1848 to 1849.

With the exception of only a few chapters, every more significant section of the revolutionary annals from 1848 to 1849 bears the heading: Defeat of the Revolution!

What succumbed in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary traditional appendages, results of social relations that had not yet sharpened into definite class antagonisms — persons, illusions, conceptions, projects, from which the revolutionary party before the February Revolution was not free, from which it could be freed not by the February victory, but only by a series of defeats.

In a word: The revolutionary advance did not forge its path in its immediate tragicomic achievements, but on the contrary in the creation of a united, powerful counter-revolution, in the creation of an adversary, by fighting whom the party of overthrow first matured into a really revolutionary party.

To demonstrate this is the task of the following pages.

I. The June Defeat of 1848.

After the July Revolution, when the liberal banker Laffitte, conducting his compère, the Duke of Orléans, in triumph to the Hôtel de Ville, let fall the words: “From now on the bankers will rule,” Laffitte had betrayed the secret of the revolution.

It was not the French bourgeoisie that ruled under Louis Philippe, but one faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed property allied with them — the so-called financial aristocracy. It sat on the throne, it dictated laws in the Chambers, it distributed the state offices from the ministry down to the tobacco bureau.

The industrial bourgeoisie proper formed part of the official opposition, i.e., it was represented in the Chambers only as a minority. Its opposition emerged all the more resolutely the more purely the exclusive rule of the financial aristocracy developed, and the more it believed its own rule over the working class to be secured after the insurrections of 1832, 1834, and 1839, which had been drowned in blood. Grandin, the manufacturer from Rouen, in the Constituent as in the Legislative National Assembly the most fanatical organ of bourgeois reaction, was in the Chamber of Deputies the most violent opponent of Guizot. Léon Faucher, later known for his impotent efforts to elevate himself to the Guizot of the French counter-revolution, in the last period of Louis Philippe waged a paper war for industry against speculation and its train-bearer, the government. Bastiat agitated in the name of Bordeaux and the whole wine-producing France against the ruling system.

The petty bourgeoisie in all its gradations, and likewise the peasant class, were completely excluded from political power. Finally, in the official opposition or entirely outside the pays légal, stood the ideological representatives and spokesmen of the above-mentioned classes, their scholars, lawyers, doctors, etc., in a word, their so-called capacities.

Through its financial distress, the July Monarchy was from the outset dependent on the high bourgeoisie, and its dependence on the high bourgeoisie became the inexhaustible source of a growing financial distress. It was impossible to subordinate the state administration to the interest of national production without establishing equilibrium in the budget, the equilibrium between state expenditures and state revenues. And how could this equilibrium be established without restricting state spending, i.e., without injuring interests that were so many supports of the ruling system, and without readjusting the distribution of taxes, i.e., without shifting a considerable part of the tax burden onto the shoulders of the high bourgeoisie itself?

The indebtedness of the state was rather the direct interest of the bourgeois faction that ruled and legislated through the Chambers. The state deficit, it was precisely the actual object of its speculation and the chief source of its enrichment. After each year a new deficit. After the lapse of four or five years a new loan. And each new loan afforded the financial aristocracy new opportunity to defraud the state, which was artificially kept on the brink of bankruptcy — it had to contract with the bankers under the most unfavourable conditions. Each new loan afforded a second opportunity to plunder the public, which invested its capital in government securities, by means of stock-exchange operations, into whose secrets the government and the Chamber majority were initiated. In general, the fluctuating state of the state credit and the possession of state secrets gave the bankers, as well as their affiliates in the Chambers and on the throne, the possibility of provoking extraordinary, sudden fluctuations in the prices of government securities, the constant result of which had to be the ruin of a mass of smaller capitalists and the fabulously rapid enrichment of the big gamblers. If the state deficit was the direct interest of the ruling bourgeois faction, it explains how the extraordinary state expenditures in the last years of Louis Philippe’s government far exceeded by more than double the extraordinary state expenditures under Napoleon, indeed reached almost annually the sum of 400 million francs, while the annual total exports of France on average rarely rose to the height of 750 million francs. The enormous sums that thus flowed through the hands of the state afforded, moreover, opportunity for fraudulent supply contracts, bribery, embezzlement, and knavery of all kinds. The defrauding of the state, as it occurred through the loans on a large scale, was repeated in detail in the public works. The relationship between Chamber and government multiplied itself as the relationship between the individual administrations and the individual contractors.

Like the state expenditures in general and the state loans, so the ruling class exploited the railway constructions. The Chambers shifted the main burdens onto the state and secured the golden fruits for the speculating financial aristocracy. One recalls the scandals in the Chamber of Deputies, when it occasionally came to light that all the members of the majority, including a part of the ministers, were involved as shareholders in the very railway constructions which they afterwards, as legislators, had carried out at the expense of the state.

The smallest financial reform, by contrast, broke down under the influence of the bankers. For example, the postal reform. Rothschild protested. Was the state allowed to curtail sources of revenue from which its ever-growing debt was to be serviced?

The July Monarchy was nothing but a joint-stock company for the exploitation of the French national wealth, whose dividends were distributed among ministers, bankers, 240,000 voters and their following. Louis Philippe was the director of this company — Robert Macaire on the throne. Trade, industry, agriculture, shipping, the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie had constantly to be endangered and prejudiced under this system. Cheap government, gouvernement à bon marché, it had inscribed on its banner in the July days.

Inasmuch as the financial aristocracy made the laws, directed the state administration, disposed of all the organised public authorities, and dominated public opinion by the facts and by the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless fraud, the same mania for enrichment not through production, but through the juggling of already existing alien wealth, repeated itself in all spheres, from the court down to the café borgne; at the very pinnacles of bourgeois society, above all, there broke out the unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites, which every moment collided with the bourgeois laws themselves, in which the wealth originating from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where enjoyment becomes crapulous, where money, filth and blood flow together. The financial aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as in its enjoyments, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat at the heights of bourgeois society.

And the non-ruling factions of the French bourgeoisie cried out: Corruption! The people cried: à bas les grands voleurs! à bas les assassins! when in 1847, on the most exalted stages of bourgeois society, the same scenes were publicly enacted which regularly lead the lumpenproletariat into the bordellos, the poorhouses and lunatic asylums, before the judge, into the bagnios, and to the scaffold. The industrial bourgeoisie saw its interests endangered, the petty bourgeoisie was morally indignant, the popular imagination was outraged, Paris was flooded with pamphlets — “la dynastie Rothschild”, “les juifs rois de l’époque” etc. — in which the rule of the financial aristocracy was denounced and branded with more or less wit.

Rien pour la gloire! Glory brings in nothing! la paix partout et toujours! War depresses the prices of the three and four per cents! the France of the stock-exchange Jews had inscribed on its banner. Its foreign policy therefore lost itself in a series of affronts to French national feeling, which was all the more violently aroused when, with the incorporation of Cracow into Austria, the plundering of Poland was completed, and Guizot actively took the side of the Holy Alliance in the Swiss Sonderbund war. The victory of the Swiss Liberals in this mock-war heightened the self-esteem of the bourgeois opposition in France, the bloody uprising of the people in Palermo acted like an electric shock on the paralysed popular masses and awoke their great revolutionary memories and passions.

The outbreak of the general discontent was finally accelerated, the ill-humour ripened into revolt by two world economic events.

The potato blight and the bad harvests of 1845 and 1846 intensified the general ferment among the people. The dearth of 1847 called forth bloody conflicts in France, as on the rest of the Continent. The struggle of the people for the first means of subsistence, over against the shameless orgies of the financial aristocracy! At Buzançais the hunger rioters executed, in Paris surfeited swindlers snatched from the courts by the royal family!

The second great economic event that accelerated the outbreak of the revolution was a general commercial and industrial crisis in England; already heralded in the autumn of 1845 by the wholesale defeat of the speculators in railway shares, held in check during 1846 by a series of incidental causes such as the impending abolition of the corn laws, it finally erupted in the autumn of 1847 in the bankruptcies of the great London colonial goods dealers, which were immediately followed by the failures of the country banks and the closing of the factories in the English industrial districts. The after-effects of this crisis on the Continent were not yet exhausted when the February Revolution broke out.

The devastation of trade and industry by the economic epidemic made the exclusive rule of the finance aristocracy still more unbearable. Throughout France the oppositional bourgeoisie called forth the banquet agitation for an electoral reform which was to win for it the majority in the Chambers and overthrow the Ministry of the Bourse. In Paris the industrial crisis had, more particularly, the further consequence of throwing a mass of manufacturers and wholesale dealers, who under the existing circumstances could no longer do business on the foreign market, onto the home market. They set up large establishments, whose competition ruined the grocers and shopkeepers en masse. Hence countless bankruptcies in that part of the Paris bourgeoisie, hence its revolutionary action in February. It is known how Guizot and the Chambers answered the reform proposals with an unequivocal challenge, how Louis Philippe resolved too late for a Barrot ministry, how it came to a hand-to-hand struggle between the people and the army, how the army was disarmed by the passive attitude of the National Guard, how the July Monarchy had to give way to a provisional government.

The provisional government that arose from the February barricades necessarily reflected in its composition the different parties among which the victory was divided. It could be nothing but a compromise between the different classes which had jointly overthrown the July throne, but whose interests stood in hostile opposition. The great majority of it consisted of representatives of the bourgeoisie. The republican petty bourgeoisie was represented by Ledru-Rollin and Flocon, the republican bourgeoisie by the people from the National, the dynastic opposition by Crémieux, Dupont de l’Eure, etc. The working class possessed only two representatives, Louis Blanc and Albert. Lamartine, finally, in the provisional government—this was at first no real interest, no definite class; this was the February Revolution itself, the common uprising with its illusions, its poetry, its imagined content and its phrases. Moreover, the spokesman of the February Revolution, by his position as well as his views, belonged to the bourgeoisie.

If Paris, as a result of political centralisation, rules France, the workers, in moments of revolutionary earthquakes, rule Paris. The first act of life of the provisional government was the attempt to withdraw from this overpowering influence by appealing from intoxicated Paris to sober France. Lamartine denied the barricade fighters the right to proclaim the Republic; only the majority of the French were entitled to do so, their vote had to be awaited, the Paris proletariat must not taint its victory by a usurpation. The bourgeoisie allows the proletariat only one usurpation—that of the struggle.

Around midday on the 25th of February the Republic was not yet proclaimed, but all the ministries had already been distributed among the bourgeois elements of the provisional government and among the generals, bankers and advocates of the National. The workers, however, were resolved this time not to tolerate any juggling away as in July 1830. They were ready to take up the struggle anew and to force the Republic by force of arms. With this message Raspail betook himself to the Hôtel de Ville. In the name of the Paris proletariat he commanded the provisional government to proclaim the Republic; if this order of the people was not carried out within two hours, he would return at the head of 200,000 men. The corpses of the fallen were scarcely cold, the barricades not yet cleared away, the workers not yet disarmed, and the only force that could be opposed to them was the National Guard. Under these circumstances the scruples of statecraft and the juristic qualms of conscience of the provisional government suddenly vanished. The two hours’ term had not elapsed before the historic giant words blazed forth from all the walls of Paris:

République française! Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité!

With the proclamation of the Republic on the basis of universal suffrage the very memory of the limited aims and motives which had driven the bourgeoisie into the February Revolution was extinguished. Instead of a few fractions of the bourgeoisie, all classes of French society were suddenly hurled into the circle of political power, forced to leave the boxes, the stalls, the gallery and to act in person upon the revolutionary stage! With the constitutional monarchy the semblance of a state power confronting bourgeois society autonomously had also vanished, and the whole series of subordinate struggles which this semblance of power provokes!

The proletariat, by dictating the Republic to the provisional government and, through the provisional government, to the whole of France, immediately stepped into the foreground as an independent party, but at the same time it challenged the whole of bourgeois France to enter the lists against it. What it conquered was the terrain for the struggle for its revolutionary emancipation, by no means this emancipation itself.

The February Republic, rather, had first of all to complete the rule of the bourgeoisie by allowing all the propertied classes, alongside the finance aristocracy, to enter the circle of political power. The majority of the great landowners, the Legitimists, were emancipated from the political nullity to which the July Monarchy had condemned them. Not for nothing had the Gazette de France campaigned together with the opposition papers, not for nothing did La Rochejaquelein take the side of the revolution at the session of the Chamber of Deputies on 24 February. Through universal suffrage the nominal owners, who form the great majority of the French, the peasants, were appointed the arbiters of France’s destiny. Finally, by striking off the crown behind which capital kept itself concealed, the February Republic allowed the rule of the bourgeoisie to emerge in its pure form.

Just as the workers had fought for the bourgeois monarchy in the July days, so they fought for the bourgeois Republic in the February days. Just as the July Monarchy was obliged to announce itself as a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions, so the February Republic was obliged as a republic surrounded by social institutions. The Paris proletariat also forced this concession.

Marche, a worker, dictated the decree by which the newly formed provisional government pledged itself to guarantee the existence of the workers by labour, to provide all citizens with work, etc. And when, a few days later, it forgot its promises and seemed to have lost sight of the proletariat, a mass of 20,000 workers marched to the Hôtel de Ville shouting: Organisation of labour! Formation of a special Ministry of Labour! Reluctantly, and after long debates, the provisional government appointed a permanent special commission charged with finding the means of improving the lot of the working classes! This commission was formed from delegates of the Paris trade corporations and presided over by Louis Blanc and Albert. The Luxembourg was assigned to it as its meeting hall. Thus the representatives of the working class were banished from the seat of the provisional government, the bourgeois part of the government retained the real state power and the reins of administration exclusively in its hands, and alongside the ministries of finance, trade, public works, alongside the Bank and the Bourse, there arose a socialist synagogue whose high priests, Louis Blanc and Albert, had the task of discovering the promised land, proclaiming the new gospel and occupying the Paris proletariat. Unlike every profane state power they had at their disposal no budget, no executive authority. With their heads they were to butt down the pillars of bourgeois society. While the Luxembourg sought the philosopher’s stone, they minted current coin at the Hôtel de Ville.

And yet, the demands of the Paris proletariat, insofar as they went beyond the bourgeois Republic, could attain no other existence than the nebulous one of the Luxembourg.

Together with the bourgeoisie the workers had made the February Revolution, alongside the bourgeoisie they sought to enforce their interests, just as they had installed a worker alongside the bourgeois majority in the provisional government itself. Organisation of labour! But wage labour is the existing, the bourgeois organisation of labour. Without it no capital, no bourgeoisie, no bourgeois society. A special Ministry of Labour! But are not the ministries of finance, trade, public works the bourgeois ministries of labour? And alongside them a proletarian Ministry of Labour—it could only be a ministry of impotence, a ministry of pious wishes, a Luxembourg Commission. Just as the workers believed they could emancipate themselves alongside the bourgeoisie, they fancied they could carry out a proletarian revolution within the national walls of France alongside the other bourgeois nations. But the relations of production of France are conditioned by her foreign trade, by her position on the world market and its laws; how could France break them without a European revolutionary war that would strike back at England, the despot of the world market?

A class in which the revolutionary interests of society are concentrated, as soon as it has risen up, finds directly in its own situation the content and the material of its revolutionary activity: enemies to strike down, measures dictated by the needs of the struggle to take; the consequences of its own deeds drive it further. It undertakes no theoretical investigations about its own task. The French working class was not on this level; it was still incapable of carrying out its own revolution.

The development of the industrial proletariat is conditioned in general by the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. Only under its rule does it gain the extensive national existence which can raise its revolution to a national one, does it itself create the modern means of production, which become just so many means of its revolutionary liberation. Their rule tears out the material roots of feudal society and levels the terrain on which alone a proletarian revolution is possible. French industry is more developed and the French bourgeoisie more revolutionarily advanced than that of the rest of the Continent. But the February Revolution, was it not directly aimed against the finance aristocracy? This fact proved that the industrial bourgeoisie did not rule France. The industrial bourgeoisie can only rule where modern industry has shaped all property relations in its own image, and industry can only gain this power where it has conquered the world market, for national boundaries do not suffice for its development. But to a great extent French industry maintains even the national market only by means of a more or less modified system of prohibition. When, therefore, at the moment of a revolution the Paris proletariat possesses an actual power and influence which spur it on to an attempt beyond its means, it is, in the rest of France, crowded together in individual scattered industrial centres, almost disappearing under an overwhelming majority of peasants and petty bourgeois. The struggle against capital in its developed modern form, at its crucial point, the struggle of the industrial wage-worker against the industrial bourgeois, is in France a partial fact, which after the February days could all the less provide the national content of the revolution, since the struggle against the subordinate modes of the exploitation of capital—of the peasant against usury and the mortgage, of the petty bourgeois against the big merchant, banker and manufacturer, in a word, against bankruptcy—was still wrapped up in the general insurrection against the finance aristocracy. Nothing is more explicable, therefore, than that the Paris proletariat sought to assert its interest alongside the bourgeois interest, instead of asserting it as the revolutionary interest of society itself, that it let the red flag fall before the tricolour. The French workers could not take a step forward, could not harm a hair of the bourgeois order, before the course of the revolution had roused the mass of the nation, peasants and petty bourgeois, standing between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, against this order, against the rule of capital, had forced them to attach themselves to the proletarians as their advance guard. Only through the tremendous defeat in June could the workers buy this victory.

To the Commission du Luxembourg, that creature of the Paris workers, remains the merit of having betrayed the secret of the revolution of the nineteenth century from a European tribune: the emancipation of the proletariat. The Moniteur blushed when it had to officially propagate the “wild ravings” that had previously lain buried in the apocryphal writings of the Socialists, and only from time to time struck upon the ear of the bourgeoisie as distant legends, half terrifying, half ludicrous. Europe started up out of its bourgeois half-slumber in astonishment. In the idea of the proletarians, therefore, who confused the finance aristocracy with the bourgeoisie in general; in the imagination of republican worthies who denied the very existence of classes or at most admitted it as a consequence of the constitutional monarchy; in the hypocritical phrases of the bourgeois factions which had previously been excluded from power, the rule of the bourgeoisie was abolished with the introduction of the Republic. All royalists at that time turned into republicans and all the millionaires of Paris into workers. The phrase which corresponded to this imaginary abolition of class relations was fraternité, universal fraternisation and brotherhood. This comfortable abstraction from class antagonisms, this sentimental reconciliation of contradictory class interests, this dreamy elevation above the class struggle, fraternité, was the real watchword of the February Revolution. The classes had been divided by a mere misunderstanding, and Lamartine baptised the provisional government on February 24: “un gouvernement qui suspende ce malentendu terrible qui existe entre les différentes classes.” The Paris proletariat revelled in this magnanimous intoxication of fraternity.

The provisional government, for its part, once forced to proclaim the Republic, did everything to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie and the provinces. The bloody horrors of the first French Republic were disavowed by the abolition of the death penalty for political offences; the press was thrown open to all opinions; the army, the courts, the administration remained, with few exceptions, in the hands of their old dignitaries; none of the great culprits of the July Monarchy was called to account. The bourgeois republicans of the National amused themselves by exchanging monarchist names and costumes for old republican ones. For them the Republic was nothing but a new ball dress for the old bourgeois society. The young Republic sought its chief merit in not frightening, in rather constantly seeming to be passive, and in winning existence and disarming resistance by the gentle compliance and unresistingness of its existence. To the privileged classes at home, to the despotic powers abroad, it was loudly proclaimed that the Republic was peaceable by nature. Live and let live was its motto. And in addition, shortly after the February Revolution, Germans, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, each people according to its immediate situation, revolted. Russia and England were—the latter itself in ferment, the other overawed—unprepared. Thus the Republic found no national enemy confronting it. Hence no great foreign entanglements which could inflame energy, accelerate the revolutionary process, push the provisional government forward or throw it overboard. The Paris proletariat, which saw in the Republic its own creation, naturally acclaimed every act of the provisional government that allowed it more easily to gain a foothold in bourgeois society. Willingly it allowed itself to be used by Caussidière for police duties to protect property in Paris, just as it allowed Louis Blanc to settle wage disputes between workers and masters. It was its point of honour to preserve the bourgeois honour of the Republic untarnished before the eyes of Europe.

The Republic encountered no resistance, either from without or from within. With that it was disarmed. Its task no longer consisted in revolutionising the world, it consisted only in adapting itself to the conditions of bourgeois society. With what fanaticism the provisional government set about this task is most eloquently attested by its financial measures.

Public credit and private credit were naturally shaken. Public credit rests on confidence that the state lets itself be exploited by the Jews of finance. But the old state had vanished, and the revolution was directed above all against the finance aristocracy. The oscillations of the latest European commercial crisis had not yet subsided. Bankruptcies still followed upon bankruptcies.

Private credit was thus paralysed, circulation obstructed, production at a standstill before the February Revolution broke out. The revolutionary crisis intensified the commercial crisis. And if private credit rests on the confidence that bourgeois production in the whole range of its relations, that the bourgeois order is untouched and untouchable, what must a revolution produce which calls into question the foundation of bourgeois production, the economic slavery of the proletariat, which sets up the Sphinx of the Luxembourg opposite the Bourse? The uprising of the proletariat is the abolition of bourgeois credit; for it is the abolition of bourgeois production and its order. Public credit and private credit are the economic thermometer by which the intensity of a revolution can be measured. In the same degree in which they fall, the glow and the fecundity of the revolution rise.

The provisional government wanted to strip the Republic of its anti-bourgeois appearance. It had therefore, above all, to try to secure the exchange-value of this new state form, its quotation on the Bourse. With the price-list of the Republic on the Bourse, private credit necessarily rose again.

To dispel even the suspicion that it willed or was unable to meet the obligations taken over from the monarchy, to make people believe in the bourgeois morality and ability to pay of the Republic, the provisional government took refuge in a boast as undignified as it was childish. Before the legal date of payment it paid the state creditors the interest on the 5%, 4½%, 4% funds. The bourgeois self-assurance, the self-esteem of the capitalists, suddenly awoke when they saw the anxious haste with which one sought to buy their confidence.

The financial embarrassment of the provisional government was naturally not reduced by a stroke of theatre which robbed it of its ready cash. The pinch could no longer be concealed, and the petty bourgeois, domestic servants, and workers had to pay the agreeable surprise that had been prepared for the state creditors.

Savings-bank books exceeding the sum of 100 francs were declared no longer exchangeable for coin. The sums deposited in the savings banks were confiscated and by decree converted into an irredeemable state debt. Thereby the already hard-pressed petty bourgeois was embittered against the Republic. Receiving state bonds in place of his savings-bank books, he was forced to go to the Bourse to sell them and thus to deliver himself directly into the hands of the Bourse Jews against whom he had made the February Revolution.

The finance aristocracy which ruled under the July Monarchy had its high church in the Bank. As the Bourse governs state credit, so the Bank governs commercial credit.

Directly threatened by the February Revolution not only in its rule but in its existence, the Bank sought from the outset to discredit the Republic by making creditlessness general. Suddenly it called in the credits of bankers, manufacturers, and merchants. This manoeuvre, by not immediately provoking a counter-revolution, necessarily rebounded on the Bank itself. The capitalists withdrew the money they had deposited in the Bank’s vaults. The holders of banknotes rushed to its counter to exchange them for gold and silver.

Without violent interference, by legal means the provisional government could have forced the Bank into bankruptcy; it needed only to remain passive and leave the Bank to its fate. The bankruptcy of the Bank — that was the deluge which in an instant would have swept from French soil the finance aristocracy, the most powerful and dangerous enemy of the Republic, the golden pedestal of the July monarchy. And once the Bank was bankrupt, the bourgeoisie itself would have had to regard it as a last, desperate attempt at rescue if the government had created a national bank and subjected the national credit to the control of the nation.

The provisional government, on the contrary, gave the Bank’s notes forced currency. It did more. It transformed all the provincial banks into branches of the Banque de France and let it cast its net over the whole of France. Later it pledged the state forests to it as security for a loan it contracted with it. Thus the February Revolution directly strengthened and enlarged the bankocracy that it was supposed to overthrow.

Meanwhile the provisional government was writhing under the nightmare of a growing deficit. In vain it begged for patriotic sacrifices. Only the workers tossed it alms. A heroic expedient had to be resorted to, the imposition of a new tax. But whom to tax? The stock-exchange wolves, the bank kings, the state creditors, the rentiers, the industrialists? That was no way to ingratiate the Republic with the bourgeoisie. That was, on the one hand, to endanger state credit and commercial credit, while on the other hand one sought to purchase it with such great sacrifices and humiliations. But someone had to fork out. Who was sacrificed to bourgeois credit? Jacques le bonhomme, the peasant.

The provisional government imposed an additional tax of 45 centimes in the franc on the four direct taxes. The government press humbugged the Paris proletariat that this tax would fall mainly on the great landed property, on the holders of the billion granted by the Restoration. In reality, however, it hit above all the peasant class, i.e. the great majority of the French people. They had to pay the costs of the February Revolution; the counter-revolution gained its main material from them. The 45 centimes tax was a vital question for the French peasant; he made it a vital question for the Republic. From this moment on, the Republic for the French peasant was the 45 centimes tax, and in the Paris proletariat he saw the spendthrift who was enjoying himself at his expense.

Whereas the Revolution of 1789 began by shaking the feudal burdens off the peasants, the Revolution of 1848 announced itself to the rural population with a new tax, in order not to endanger capital and to keep its state machine going.

Only by one means could the provisional government have removed all these difficulties and hurled the state out of its old rut — by declaring state bankruptcy. One recalls how Ledru-Rollin subsequently recited in the National Assembly his virtuous indignation at rejecting this demand which the Jew of the Bourse Fould, now French finance minister, had made of him. Fould had offered him the apple from the tree of knowledge.

By recognising the bills of exchange that the old bourgeois society had drawn on the state, the provisional government fell into its power. It had become the hard-pressed debtor of bourgeois society, instead of confronting it as a threatening creditor that had to cash in many years’ worth of revolutionary debts. It had to consolidate the tottering bourgeois conditions in order to meet obligations that can be fulfilled only within these conditions. Credit became a condition of its life, and the concessions to the proletariat, the pledges given to it, became so many fetters that had to be smashed. The emancipation of the workers — even as a phrase — became an unbearable danger for the new Republic, for it was a standing protest against the restoration of credit, which rests on the undisturbed and unclouded recognition of the existing economic class relations. It was therefore necessary to have done with the workers.

The February Revolution had thrown the army out of Paris. The National Guard, i.e. the bourgeoisie in its various gradations, constituted the sole power. Alone, however, it felt itself no match for the proletariat. Moreover, it was compelled, albeit after the most stubborn resistance and by putting a hundred different obstacles in the way, gradually and bit by bit to open its ranks and allow armed proletarians to enter them. Thus only one way out remained: to pit one part of the proletariat against the other.

For this purpose the provisional government formed 24 battalions of Mobile Guards, each a thousand strong, from young men between 15 and 20 years of age. They belonged for the most part to the lumpenproletariat, which in all large towns forms a mass strictly distinct from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living off the refuse of society, people without any definite trade, drifters, gens sans feu et sans aveu, differing according to the degree of civilisation of the nation to which they belong, but never denying their lazzaroni character; at the youthful age at which the provisional government recruited them, altogether malleable, capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted self-sacrifice, as of the basest bandit’s tricks and the most sordid corruptibility. The provisional government paid them per day 1 franc 50 centimes, i.e. it bought them. It gave them their own uniform, i.e. it outwardly distinguished them from the smock. As leaders they were assigned officers partly from the standing army, partly they themselves elected young sons of the bourgeoisie whose rodomontades about death for the fatherland and devotion to the Republic captivated them.

Thus the Paris proletariat was confronted by an army, drawn from its own midst, of 24,000 young, strong and foolhardy men. The proletariat shouted vivats to the Mobile Guard as it marched through Paris. It recognised in it its front-line fighters on the barricades. It regarded it as the proletarian guard in contrast to the bourgeois National Guard. Its error was pardonable.

Besides the Mobile Guard, the government decided to gather an industrial army of workers around itself. The minister Marie enrolled a hundred thousand workers thrown onto the street by the crisis and the revolution in so-called National Workshops. Under this resounding name there was hidden nothing other than the employment of the workers on tedious, monotonous, unproductive earthworks for a wage of 23 sous. English workhouses in the open — that and nothing more were these National Workshops. In them the provisional government believed it had formed a second proletarian army against the workers themselves. This time the bourgeoisie was mistaken in the National Workshops, just as the workers were mistaken in the Mobile Guard. It had created an army for insurrection.

But one end was achieved.

National Workshops — that was the name of the people’s workshops that Louis Blanc preached in the Luxembourg. Marie’s workshops, conceived in direct opposition to the Luxembourg, offered through the common heading the occasion for a comedy of errors worthy of the Spanish servant comedy. The provisional government itself spread the rumour behind the scenes that these National Workshops were the invention of Louis Blanc, and this seemed all the more credible as Louis Blanc, the prophet of the National Workshops, was a member of the provisional government. And in the half-naive, half-deliberate confusion of the Paris bourgeoisie, in the artfully sustained opinion of France and of Europe, those workhouses were the first realisation of socialism, which was pilloried with them.

If not by their content, by their title the National Workshops were the embodied protest of the proletariat against bourgeois industry, bourgeois credit and the bourgeois Republic. Thus the whole hatred of the bourgeoisie was heaped upon them. At the same time, it had found in them the point against which it could direct its attack as soon as it had grown strong enough to break openly with the February illusions. All the discomfort and all the ill-humour of the petty bourgeois turned simultaneously on these National Workshops, the common target. With real fury they calculated the sums that the proletarian loafers consumed, while their own situation became daily more unbearable. A state pension for sham work, that is socialism! they growled to themselves. The National Workshops, the declamations of the Luxembourg, the marches of the workers through Paris — in these they sought the cause of their misery. And no one raged more fanatically against the alleged machinations of the Communists than the petty bourgeois, who was hovering hopelessly on the brink of bankruptcy.

Thus in the impending hand-to-hand struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, all the advantages, all the decisive posts, all the middle strata of society were in the hands of the bourgeoisie at the same moment as the waves of the February Revolution surged high over the whole continent and each new mail brought a new revolutionary bulletin, now from Italy, now from Germany, now from the farthest south-east of Europe, and sustained the universal intoxication of the people, bringing it continuing testimonies of a victory it had already forfeited.

March 17 and April 16 were the first skirmishes in the great class struggle which the bourgeois republic concealed under its wings.

March 17 revealed the ambiguous situation of the proletariat, a situation which permitted no decisive act. Its demonstration originally aimed at pushing the provisional government back onto the path of the revolution, according to circumstances at bringing about the exclusion of its bourgeois members and forcing the postponement of the election day for the National Assembly and the National Guard. But on March 16 the bourgeoisie represented in the National Guard had made a demonstration hostile to the provisional government. Crying “Down with Ledru-Rollin!” they had forced their way to the Hôtel de Ville. And the people was compelled on March 17 to cry: “Long live Ledru-Rollin! Long live the provisional government!” It was compelled to side with the party of the bourgeois republic against the bourgeoisie, which appeared to be putting it in question. It strengthened the provisional government, instead of subjecting it to itself. March 17 fizzled out in a melodramatic scene, and if the Paris proletariat once more paraded its giant body on that day, the bourgeoisie inside and outside the provisional government was all the more determined to break it.

April 16 was a misunderstanding engineered by the provisional government in concert with the bourgeoisie. The workers had assembled in large numbers on the Champ de Mars and in the Hippodrome, in order to prepare their elections for the

To prepare the General Staff of the National Guard. Suddenly, the rumour spread through the whole of Paris, from one end to the other with lightning speed, that the workers, armed, had assembled on the Champ de Mars under the leadership of L. Blanc, Blanqui, Cabet and Raspail, in order to march from there on the Hôtel de Ville, overthrow the provisional government and proclaim a communist government. The general call to arms is beaten—Ledru Rollin, Marrast, Lamartine later disputed among themselves the honour of its initiative—within an hour 100,000 men stand under arms, the Hôtel de Ville is occupied at every point by National Guards,

the cry: Down with the Communists! Down with Louis Blanc, with Blanqui, with Raspail, with Cabet! thunders through the whole of Paris, and the provisional government is paid homage by a countless number of deputations, all ready to save the fatherland and society. When the workers finally appear before the Hôtel de Ville to present the provisional government with a patriotic collection that they had gathered on the Champ de Mars, they learn, to their astonishment, that bourgeois Paris, in a most cautiously arranged sham fight, has beaten their shadow. The frightful *attentat* of 16 April provided the pretext for recalling the army to Paris, the real purpose of the clumsily staged comedy—and for the reactionary federalist demonstrations in the provinces.

On 4 May the National Assembly, which had emerged from the direct general elections, assembled. Universal suffrage did not possess the magic power which the republicans of the old type had attributed to it. In the whole of France, at least in the majority of the French, they saw *citoyens* with the same interests, the same insight, etc. This was their cult of the people. Instead of their imagined people, the elections brought the real people to light, i.e., representatives of the different classes into which it breaks down. We have seen why peasants and petty bourgeoisie had to vote under the leadership of the bellicose bourgeoisie and of the great landowners eager for restoration. But if universal suffrage was not the wonder-working magic wand for which republican simpletons had taken it, it possessed the incomparably greater merit of unleashing the class struggle, of letting the various middle strata of bourgeois society rapidly live through their illusions and disappointments, of hurling all the factions of the exploiting class onto the heights of the state at one blow and thus tearing from them the deceptive mask, whereas the monarchy with its property qualification had only allowed certain factions of the bourgeoisie to compromise themselves and left the others concealed behind the scenes, surrounding them with the halo of a common opposition.

In the Constituent National Assembly, which met on 4 May, the bourgeois republicans, the republicans of the *National*, held the upper hand. Legitimists and Orleanists themselves ventured to appear at first only under the mask of bourgeois republicanism. Only in the name of the republic could the struggle against the proletariat be taken up.

The republic dates from 4 May, not from 25 February; that is, the republic recognised by the French people; it is not the republic which the Paris proletariat imposed upon the provisional government, not the republic with social institutions, not the dream-vision that hovered before the barricade fighters. The republic proclaimed by the National Assembly, the sole legitimate republic, it is the republic which is no revolutionary weapon against the bourgeois order, but rather its political reconstitution, the political reconsolidation of bourgeois society, in a word: the bourgeois republic. This assertion resounded from the tribune of the National Assembly, and found its echo throughout the entire republican and anti-republican bourgeois press.

And we have seen how the February republic really was and could be nothing other than a bourgeois republic, how, however, the provisional government, under the immediate pressure of the proletariat, was compelled to announce it as a republic with social institutions, how the Paris proletariat was still incapable of going beyond the bourgeois republic otherwise than in conception, in imagination; how it everywhere acted in its service wherever it actually came to action; how the promises made to it became an unbearable danger for the new republic; how the entire life process of the provisional government summed itself up in a continuous struggle against the demands of the proletariat.

In the National Assembly, the whole of France sat in judgment on the Paris proletariat. It immediately broke with the social illusions of the February revolution, it roundly proclaimed the bourgeois republic, nothing but the bourgeois republic. It at once excluded the representatives of the proletariat from the Executive Commission appointed by it: Louis Blanc and Albert; it rejected the proposal of a special Ministry of Labour; it received with stormy applause the declaration of the Minister Trélat: “the only question now is to bring labour back to its old conditions.”

But all that did not suffice. The February republic had been fought for by the workers with the passive support of the bourgeoisie. The proletarians rightly regarded themselves as the victors of February, and they laid down the arrogant claims of the victor. They had to be defeated in the street; it had to be shown to them that they went under as soon as they fought, not *with* the bourgeoisie, but *against* the bourgeoisie. Just as the February republic, with its socialist concessions, had required a battle of the proletariat united with the bourgeoisie against the monarchy, so a second battle was necessary to separate the republic from the socialist concessions, to work the bourgeois republic out officially as the ruling one. The bourgeoisie had to refute the demands of the proletariat with weapons in its hand. And the real birthplace of the bourgeois republic is not the February victory, it is the June defeat.

The proletariat hastened the decision when, on 15 May, it forced its way into the National Assembly, sought in vain to recapture its revolutionary influence, and only delivered its energetic leaders into the gaolers of the bourgeoisie. *Il faut en finir!* This situation must end! In this cry the National Assembly gave vent to its resolve to force the proletariat into the decisive struggle. The Executive Commission issued a series of provocative decrees, such as the prohibition of popular assemblies, etc. From the tribune of the Constituent National Assembly the workers were directly provoked, insulted, jeered at. But the real point of attack, as we have seen, was provided by the National Workshops. The Constituent Assembly imperiously pointed the Executive Commission towards them, and the Commission only waited to hear its own plan pronounced as the behest of the National Assembly.

The Executive Commission began by making it more difficult to gain entry into the National Workshops, by turning the daily wage into piece-wages, and by banishing workers not born in Paris to the Sologne, ostensibly to carry out earthworks. These earthworks were only a rhetorical formula with which their expulsion was glossed over, as the disappointed returning workers announced to their comrades. Finally, on 21 June, a decree appeared in the *Moniteur* ordering the forcible expulsion of all unmarried workers from the National Workshops or their enrolment into the army.

There remained no choice for the workers; they had to starve or strike out. They answered on 22 June with the immense insurrection in which the first great battle was fought between the two classes which split modern society. It was a struggle for the preservation or the annihilation of the bourgeois order. The veil that shrouded the republic was torn apart.

It is known how the workers, with unparalleled bravery and genius, without chiefs, without a common plan, without means, and for the most part lacking weapons, kept the army, the Mobile Guard, the Paris National Guard and the National Guard that had streamed in from the provinces in check for five days. It is known how the bourgeoisie compensated itself for the deathly fear it had endured with unheard-of brutality, and massacred over 3,000 prisoners.

So deeply were the official representatives of French democracy caught up in republican ideology that it was only some weeks later that they began to have an inkling of the meaning of the June struggle. They were as if stunned by the powder smoke in which their fantastic republic dissolved.

The immediate impression which the news of the June defeat produced upon us, the reader will allow us to describe in the words of the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung*:

“The last official remainder of the February revolution, the Executive Commission, has dissolved like a phantom before the earnestness of events. Lamartine’s flares have changed into Cavaignac’s incendiary rockets. *La fraternité*, the fraternity of the antagonistic classes, of which the one exploits the other, this fraternity proclaimed in February, written in great letters on the brow of Paris, on every prison, on every barracks—its true, unadulterated, its prosaic expression is civil war, civil war in its most frightful form, the war of labour and capital. This fraternity blazed before all the windows of Paris on the evening of 25 June, when the Paris of the bourgeoisie *illuminated*, while the Paris of the proletariat burned, bled, and breathed its last. The fraternity lasted just so long as the interest of the bourgeoisie was fraternised with the interest of the proletariat. — Pedants of the old revolutionary tradition of 1793, socialist system-mongers who begged the bourgeoisie on behalf of the people and who were allowed to hold long sermons and to compromise themselves just so long as the proletarian lion had to be lulled to sleep; republicans who wanted the whole of the old bourgeois order, minus the crowned head; dynastic oppositionists to whom chance slipped the downfall of a dynasty in place of a change of ministers; Legitimists who did not want to throw off the livery but only to alter its cut—these were the allies with which the people made its February. — The February revolution was the *beautiful* revolution, the revolution of universal sympathy, because the antagonisms which erupted in it against the monarchy slumbered side by side, undeveloped and harmonious, because the social struggle that formed its background had gained only an airy existence, the existence of the phrase, of the word. The June revolution is the *hateful* revolution, the repulsive revolution, because in place of the phrase the thing itself has stepped, because the republic uncovered the head of the monster itself

exposed, by striking off from it the sheltering and concealing crown.
— Order! was Guizot’s war-cry. Order! cried Sebastiani, the Guizotin, when Warsaw became Russian. Order! shouts Cavaignac, the brutal echo of the French National Assembly and of the republican bourgeoisie. Order! thundered his canister-shot as it tore the body of the proletariat to pieces. None of the numerous revolutions of the French bourgeoisie since 1789 had been an attack on order, for they left the rule of the class, left the slavery of the workers, left the bourgeois order intact, however often the political form of this rule and of this slavery changed. June has touched upon this order. Woe to June!

(Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 29 June 1848.)

Woe to June! the European echo resounds.

The Paris proletariat was forced into the June insurrection by the bourgeoisie. In this very fact lay its condemnation. Neither its immediate, admitted need drove it to want to fight for the forcible overthrow of the bourgeoisie, nor was it equal to that task. The *Moniteur* had to inform it officially that the time was past when the republic had felt obliged to do the honours to its illusions, and only its defeat convinced it of the truth that even the slightest improvement of its position remains a utopia within the bourgeois republic—a utopia that becomes a crime as soon as it seeks to realise itself. In place of its demands, exuberant in form, petty in content and even still bourgeois, whose concession it wanted to wring from the February republic, there appeared the bold revolutionary battle-cry: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class!

By making its own graveyard the birthplace of the bourgeois republic, the proletariat forced the latter to step forth at once in its pure form as the state whose avowed purpose is to perpetuate the rule of capital, the slavery of labour. With its gaze constantly fixed on the scar-covered, irreconcilable, invincible enemy—invincible because his existence is the condition of its own life—the rule of the bourgeoisie, freed from all fetters, had to turn immediately into bourgeois terrorism. With the proletariat temporarily removed from the scene and the bourgeois dictatorship officially recognised, the middle strata of bourgeois society, the petty bourgeoisie and the peasant class, were bound to adhere more and more closely to the proletariat, the more intolerable their situation became and the sharper grew their antagonism against the bourgeoisie. Just as they had earlier sought the cause of their misery in its rise, so now they were to find it in its defeat.

When the June insurrection raised the self-esteem of the bourgeoisie all over the Continent and let it enter openly into a compact with the feudal monarchy against the people, who was the first victim of this compact? The continental bourgeoisie itself. The June defeat prevented it from consolidating its rule and from making the people stand still, half satisfied and half vexed, on the lowest step of the bourgeois revolution.

Finally, the June defeat betrayed to the despotic powers of Europe the secret that, under all conditions, France must maintain peace abroad in order to be able to wage civil war at home. Thus the peoples who had begun the struggle for their national independence were abandoned to the superior power of Russia, Austria and Prussia, but simultaneously the fate of these national revolutions was subordinated to the fate of the proletarian revolution, robbed of their apparent autonomy, of their independence from the great social upheaval. The Hungarian shall not be free, nor the Pole, nor the Italian, so long as the worker remains a slave!

Finally, through the victories of the Holy Alliance, Europe assumed a shape that makes every new proletarian rising in France coincide directly with a world war. The new French revolution is forced to leave the national soil at once and conquer the European terrain, on which alone the social revolution of the nineteenth century can be carried out.

Thus only through the June defeat were all the conditions created within which France can seize the initiative of the European revolution. Only steeped in the blood of the June insurgents did the tricolour become the flag of the European revolution—the red flag!

And we cry: The revolution is dead!—Long live the revolution!

*Neue Rheinische Zeitung.*
*Politisch-ökonomische Revue.*
Issue 2, February 1850

II. The 13th June 1849.

The 25th February 1848 had granted France the Republic as an octroi; the 25th June pressed the revolution upon her. And revolution, after June, signified: upheaval of bourgeois society, whereas before February it had signified: upheaval of the form of the state.

The June struggle had been led by the republican fraction of the bourgeoisie; with victory, state power necessarily fell to it. The state of siege laid fettered Paris at its feet unresisting, and in the provinces a moral state of siege prevailed, the menacingly brutal victory-arrogance of the bourgeois and the unshackled property-fanaticism of the peasants. From below, therefore, no danger!

With the revolutionary force of the workers, the political influence of the democratic republicans, i.e., of the republicans in the sense of the petty bourgeoisie, represented in the Executive Commission by Ledru-Rollin, in the Constituent National Assembly by the party of the Mountain, in the press by the *Réforme*, was simultaneously broken. Together with the bourgeois republicans, they had conspired on 16th April against the proletariat, together with them they had warred against it in the June days. Thus they themselves shattered the background against which their own party stood out as a power, for the petty bourgeoisie can maintain a revolutionary posture against the bourgeoisie only so long as the proletariat stands behind it. They were dismissed. The sham alliance that had been reluctantly and treacherously entered into with them during the epoch of the Provisional Government and the Executive Commission was openly broken by the bourgeois republicans. Scorned and repulsed as allies, they sank down to subordinate satellites of the tricolour republicans, from whom they could wrest no concession but whose rule they had to support each time it—and with it the republic—seemed to be called into question by the anti-republican bourgeois fractions. These fractions, finally, the Orleanists and Legitimists, had been in the minority from the very beginning in the Constituent National Assembly. Before the June days they dared react only under the mask of bourgeois republicanism; the June victory caused the whole of bourgeois France for a moment to salute Cavaignac as its saviour, and when the anti-republican party once again regained independence shortly after the June days, the military dictatorship and the state of siege in Paris allowed it to put out its feelers only very timidly and cautiously.

Since 1830 the bourgeois-republican fraction had grouped itself, in its writers, its orators, its capacities, its ambitions, its deputies, generals, bankers and lawyers, around a Paris journal, the *National*. In the provinces it had its branch newspapers. The coterie of the *National*—that was the dynasty of the tricolour republic. It immediately took possession of all state dignities, the ministries, the prefecture of police, the post-office directorate, the prefects’ posts, the higher officers’ vacancies in the army. At the head of the executive power stood its general, Cavaignac; and its editor-in-chief, Marrast, became the permanent president of the Constituent National Assembly. In his salons as master of ceremonies he simultaneously did the honours of the honest republic.

Even revolutionary French writers have reinforced the error, out of a kind of awe before the republican tradition, as though the royalists had ruled in the Constituent National Assembly. The Constituent Assembly, on the contrary, remained, ever since the June days, the exclusive representative of bourgeois republicanism, and it brought this side to the fore all the more decisively the more the influence of the tricolour republicans collapsed outside the Assembly. When it was a matter of asserting the form of the bourgeois republic, it had at its disposal the votes of the democratic republicans; when the content was at stake, its very mode of speaking no longer distinguished it from the royalist bourgeois fractions, for the interests of the bourgeoisie, the material conditions of its class rule and class exploitation, constitute precisely the content of the bourgeois republic.

Thus it was not royalism but bourgeois republicanism that realised itself in the life and deeds of this Constituent Assembly, which in the end did not die, nor was it killed, but rotted away.

During the whole period of its rule, so long as it played the principal action on the proscenium, an uninterrupted sacrificial feast was performed in the background—the continual summary-court-martial condemnations of the captured June insurgents or their deportation without trial. The Constituent Assembly had the tact to confess that in the June insurgents it was not judging criminals but crushing enemies.

The first act of the Constituent National Assembly was the setting up of a commission of inquiry into the events of June and of 15th May and into the participation of the socialist and democratic party leaders in those days. The inquiry was directly aimed at Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin and Caussidière. The bourgeois republicans burned with impatience to rid themselves of these rivals. For carrying out their rancour they could entrust themselves to no more suitable subject than Monsieur Odilon Barrot, the former chief of the dynastic opposition, liberalism incarnate, the *nullité grave*, the thorough shallowness who not only had a dynasty to avenge, but was even to demand of the revolutionaries an accounting for a thwarted premiership. Sure guarantee of his inexorability. This Barrot was accordingly appointed president of the commission of inquiry, and he got up a complete trial of the February revolution, which may be summed up as follows: 17th March, demonstration; 16th April, plot; 15th May, attempt; 23rd June, civil war! Why did he not extend his learned and criminalistic investigations back to 24th February? The *Journal des Débats* replied: 24th February—that is the foundation of Rome. The origin of states is lost in a myth that one must believe, that one may not discuss. Louis Blanc and Caussidière were handed over to the courts. The National Assembly completed the work of its own purification which it had begun on 15th May.

The plan, conceived by the provisional government and taken up again by Goudchaux, for a taxation of capital—in the form of a mortgage tax—was rejected by the Constituent Assembly; the law that restricted the working day to ten hours, abolished.

The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850. II. The 13th of June 1849

It reintroduces imprisonment for debt, excludes from jury service the great part of the French population who can neither read nor write. Why not also from the franchise? The caution money for journals is reintroduced, the right of association restricted. —

But in their haste to restore the old guarantees to the old bourgeois relations and to efface every trace left behind by the revolutionary waves, the bourgeois republicans encountered a resistance that threatened with unexpected danger.

No one had fought more fanatically in the June days for the salvation of property and the restoration of credit than the Paris petty bourgeoisie! — Café-keepers, restaurateurs, *marchands de vin*, small traders, grocers, artisans, etc. The *boutique* had pulled itself together and marched against the barricade in order to restore the circulation that leads from the street into the *boutique*. But behind the barricade stood the customers and the debtors, in front of it the creditors of the *boutique*. And when the barricades were thrown down and the workers crushed, and the shopkeepers, drunk with victory, rushed back to their shops, they found the entrance barricaded by a saviour of property, an official agent of credit, who held out to them the threatening letters: Overdue bill! Overdue rent! Overdue promissory note! Overdue *boutique*! Overdue *boutiquier*!

‘Salvation of property!’ But the house they lived in was not their property; the shop they kept was not their property; the commodities they sold were not their property. Neither their business, nor the plate from which they ate, nor the bed in which they slept belonged to them anymore. It was precisely this property that had to be saved *from* them for the house-owner who had let the house, the banker who had discounted the bill, the capitalist who had made the cash advances, the manufacturer who had entrusted the commodities to these grocers for sale, the wholesale dealer who had advanced the raw materials to these artisans on credit. Restoration of credit! But credit, restored to strength, now proved itself a living and zealous god, driving the insolvent debtor out of his four walls, with wife and child, abandoning his sham possession to capital, and casting him into the debtors’ prison that had again raised itself threateningly over the corpses of the June insurgents.

The petty bourgeoisie realised with horror that, by striking down the workers, they had delivered themselves unresistingly into the hands of their creditors. Their bankruptcy, which had been dragging on chronically since February and had seemed to be ignored, was openly declared after June.

Their nominal property had been left unchallenged as long as it was a question of driving them onto the battlefield in the name of property. Now, after the great affair with the proletariat had been settled, the little affair with the *épicier* could likewise be settled. In Paris the mass of protested paper amounted to over 21 million francs, in the provinces over 11 million. The business occupiers of more than 7,000 Paris houses had not paid their rent since February.

If the National Assembly had instituted an inquiry into the political guilt reaching back to the limits of February, the petty bourgeoisie now demanded, for their part, an inquiry into civil debts up to 24 February. They assembled in masses in the Bourse hall and threateningly demanded, for every merchant who could prove that he had become bankrupt solely through the stoppage caused by the revolution and that his business was in good standing on 24 February, an extension of the payment term by judgment of the commercial court and the compelling of the creditor to liquidate his claim for a moderate percentage. This question was debated in the National Assembly as a legislative proposal under the form of *‘concordats à l’amiable’*. The Assembly wavered; then it suddenly learned that, at the same time, at the Porte St. Denis, thousands of women and children of the insurgents were preparing a petition for amnesty.

In the presence of the re-arisen spectre of June the petty bourgeoisie trembled, and the Assembly recovered its implacability. The *concordats à l’amiable*, the amicable settlement between creditor and debtor, were rejected in their essential points.

Thus, after the democratic representatives of the petty bourgeoisie had long been thrust back within the National Assembly by the republican representatives of the bourgeoisie, this parliamentary rupture took on its bourgeois, real economic meaning, in that the petty bourgeoisie as debtors were abandoned to the bourgeoisie as creditors. A large part of the former were completely ruined, and the rest were only allowed to carry on their business under conditions which made them the unconditional serfs of capital. On 22 August 1848 the National Assembly rejected the *concordats à l’amiable*; on 19 September 1848, in the midst of the state of siege, Prince Louis Bonaparte and the prisoner of Vincennes, the communist Raspail, were elected representatives of Paris. But the bourgeoisie elected the Jewish money-changer and Orleanist Fould. Thus, from all sides at once, open declaration of war against the Constituent National Assembly, against bourgeois republicanism, against Cavaignac.

It requires no elaboration how the mass bankruptcy of the Paris petty bourgeoisie was bound to roll its after-effects far beyond those directly hit and to shake bourgeois trade once more, while the state deficit swelled anew from the costs of the June insurrection, and state revenue sank steadily as a result of halted production, restricted consumption, and declining imports. Cavaignac and the National Assembly could resort to no other expedient than a new loan, which forced them still deeper into the yoke of the financial aristocracy.

If the petty bourgeoisie had harvested bankruptcy and judicial liquidation as the fruit of the June victory, on the other hand the janissaries of Cavaignac, the Mobile Guards, found their reward in the soft arms of the *lorettes*, and ‘the youthful saviours’ of society received homage of every kind in the salons of Marrast, the *gentilhomme* of the tricolour, who played the role of both Amphitryon and troubadour of the respectable republic. Meanwhile, this social preferment and the disproportionately higher pay of the Mobile Guards embittered the army, while at the same time all the national illusions vanished with which bourgeois republicanism, through its journal, the *National*, had succeeded in attaching a part of the army and the peasant class to itself under Louis Philippe. The mediating role that Cavaignac and the National Assembly played in northern Italy in order to betray it jointly with England to Austria – one day of rule destroyed eighteen years of opposition of the *National*. No government was less national than that of the *National*, none more dependent on England, and under Louis Philippe it had lived on the daily paraphrase of Cato’s *Carthaginem esse delendam*; none was more servile toward the Holy Alliance, and it had demanded of a Guizot the tearing up of the Vienna treaties. Historical irony made Bastide, the former editor of foreign affairs of the *National*, minister of foreign affairs of France, so that he might refute every one of his articles with every one of his dispatches.

For a moment the army and the peasant class had believed that, with the military dictatorship, war abroad and *‘gloire’* were simultaneously placed on the agenda of France. But Cavaignac was not the dictatorship of the sabre over bourgeois society; he was the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the sabre. And all they now needed from the soldier was the gendarme. Cavaignac concealed beneath the severe features of antique-republican resignation the insipid subservience to the humiliating conditions of his bourgeois office. *L’argent n’a pas de maître!* Money has no master! This old slogan of the *tiers état* he idealised, as indeed the Constituent Assembly did in general, by translating it into political language: The bourgeoisie has no king; the true form of its rule is the republic.

And to elaborate this form, to fabricate a republican constitution – therein consisted the ‘great organic work’ of the Constituent National Assembly. The rechristening of the Christian calendar into a republican one, of Saint Bartholomew into Saint Robespierre, changes wind and weather no more than this constitution changed or was intended to change bourgeois society. Where it went beyond a change of costume, it took note of existing facts. Thus it solemnly registered the fact of the republic, the fact of universal suffrage, the fact of a single sovereign National Assembly in place of the two limited constitutional chambers. Thus it registered and regulated the fact of Cavaignac’s dictatorship by replacing the stationary, irresponsible hereditary monarchy with an ambulatory, responsible elective monarchy, a four-year presidency. Thus it elevated no less to a constituent law the fact of the extraordinary power with which the National Assembly, after the terrors of 15 May and 25 June, had providently invested its President in the interest of its own safety. The remainder of the constitution was the work of terminology. The royalist labels were torn off the machinery of the old monarchy and republican labels pasted on. Marrast, former *rédacteur en chef* of the *National*, now *rédacteur en chef* of the Constitution, discharged this academic task not without talent.

The Constituent Assembly resembled that Chilean official who wanted to regulate landed property relations more firmly by a cadastral survey at the very moment when the subterranean thunder already announced the volcanic eruption that was to hurl the very ground and soil from beneath his feet. While in theory it traced out the forms in which the rule of the bourgeoisie was expressed in republican terms, in reality it maintained itself only by the abolition of all formulas, by force *sans phrase*, by the state of siege. Two days before it began its constitutional work, it proclaimed its continuance. Constitutions had formerly been made and adopted as soon as the process of social upheaval had arrived at a point of rest, the newly formed class relations had settled down, and the contending fractions of the ruling class had taken refuge in a compromise which allowed them to continue the struggle among themselves and at the same time to exclude the exhausted mass of the people from it. This constitution, on the contrary, sanctioned no social revolution; it sanctioned the momentary victory of the old society over the revolution.

In the first draft constitution, drawn up before the June days, there still figured the *‘droit au travail’*, the right to work, the first clumsy formula in which the revolutionary demands of the proletariat are summed up. It was transformed into the *droit à l’assistance*, into the right to

public assistance, and which modern state does not, in one or another form, feed its paupers? The right to labour is, in the bourgeois sense, an absurdity, a wretched, pious wish, but behind the right to labour stands the power over capital, behind the power over capital the appropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class, hence the abolition of wage labour, of capital and of their reciprocal relation. Behind the "right to labour" stood the June insurrection. The Constituent Assembly, which in fact placed the revolutionary proletariat hors la loi, outside the law, was obliged to throw its formula out of the Constitution, the law of laws, on principle, to pronounce its anathema upon the "right to labour". But it did not stop there. As Plato banished the poets from his Republic, so it banished from its own for all time – the progressive tax. And the progressive tax is not only a bourgeois measure, feasible within the existing relations of production on a larger or smaller scale; it was the sole means of binding the middle strata of bourgeois society to the "honest" republic, of reducing the state debt, of holding the anti-republican majority of the bourgeoisie in check. On the occasion of the concordats à l'amiable, the tricolor republicans had actually sacrificed the petty bourgeoisie to the big bourgeoisie.

This isolated fact they elevated to a principle by the legal interdiction of the progressive tax. They placed bourgeois reform on a level with the proletarian revolution. But what class then remained as the mainstay of their republic? The big bourgeoisie. And the mass of it was anti-republican. If it exploited the republicans of the National in order to re-fortify the old economic conditions of existence, it thought, on the other hand, of exploiting the re-fortified social conditions in order to restore the political forms corresponding to them. Already at the beginning of October, Cavaignac found himself compelled to make Dufaure and Vivien, former ministers of Louis Philippe, ministers of the Republic,

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however much the headless Puritans of his own party might grumble and bluster.

While the tricolor Constitution rejected every compromise with the petty bourgeoisie and knew of no new element of society to bind to the new state form, it hastened, on the other hand, to restore the traditional inviolability to a body in which the old state found its most dogged and fanatical defenders. It elevated the irremovability of the judges, which had been called into question by the provisional government, to a constitutive law. The one king whom it had deposed rose up by the dozen in these irremovable inquisitors of legality.

The French press has analysed the contradictions of Mr Marrast's Constitution from many sides, e.g., the co-existence of two sovereigns, the National Assembly and the President, etc., etc.

The comprehensive contradiction of this Constitution, however, consists in the following: Through universal suffrage, it places the classes whose social slavery it is to perpetuate – proletariat, peasants, petty bourgeois – in possession of political power. And from the class whose old social power it sanctions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the political guarantees of this power. It forces its political rule into democratic conditions which at every moment assist the hostile classes to victory and put the very foundations of bourgeois society in question. From the former it demands that they do not advance from the political to social emancipation; from the latter that they do not go back from the social to the political restoration.

These contradictions mattered little to the bourgeois republicans. To the same extent that they ceased to be indispensable, and they were indispensable only as the champions of the old society against the revolutionary proletariat, a few weeks after their victory they sank from a party to a coterie. And the Constitution, they treated it as a great intrigue. What was to be constituted in it was above all the rule of the coterie. The President was to be Cavaignac extended, the legislative assembly a Constituent Assembly extended. They hoped to reduce the political power of the popular masses to a sham power, and to be able to play sufficiently with this sham power itself to hang over the majority of the bourgeoisie the continuing dilemma of the June Days: realm of the National or realm of anarchy.

The work of the Constitution, begun on 4 September, was completed on 23 October. On 2 September the Constituent Assembly had decided not to dissolve until the organic laws supplementing the Constitution had been enacted. Nevertheless, it now decided to bring into life its very own

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creature, the President, as early as 10 December, long before the circle of its own activity was closed. So certain was it that it would greet in the constitutional homunculus the son of its mother. As a precaution, the arrangement had been made that if none of the candidates counted two million votes, the election would pass from the nation to the Constituent Assembly.

Vain precautions! The first day of the realisation of the Constitution was the last day of the Constituent Assembly's rule. In the depths of the ballot box lay its | death sentence. It sought the "son of its mother" and

it found the "nephew of his uncle". Saul Cavaignac got one million votes, but David Napoleon got six millions. Six times was Saul Cavaignac beaten.

10 December 1848 was the day of the peasant insurrection. Only from this day does February date for the French peasants. The symbol that expressed their entry into the revolutionary movement, clumsy-cunning, knavishly-naïve, doltish-sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, an ingeniously absurd anachronism, a world-historic Eulenspiegelei – an undecipherable hieroglyphic for the understanding of the civilised – this symbol bore unmistakably the physiognomy of the class that represents barbarism within civilisation. The Republic had announced itself to the peasant with the tax executor; he announced himself to the Republic with the Emperor. Napoleon was the only man who had exhaustively represented the interests and the imagination of the peasant class newly created in 1789. By writing his name on the frontispiece of the Republic, he declared war abroad and the assertion of his class interests at home. Napoleon, for the peasants, was not a person, but a programme. With flags, with music and song, they marched to the polling places, shouting: plus d'impôts, à bas les riches, à bas la république, vive l'Empereur. No more taxes, down with the rich, down with the Republic, long live the Emperor! Behind the Emperor was hidden the peasant war. The Republic they voted down was the Republic of the rich.

10 December was the coup d'état of the peasants, which overthrew the existing government. And from that day on, when they had taken a government from France and given one to her, their eyes were fixed unwaveringly on Paris. One moment active heroes of the revolutionary drama, they could no longer be thrust back into the passive and will-less role of the chorus.

The other classes helped to complete the peasants' electoral victory. The election of Napoleon was, for the proletariat, the ousting of Cavaignac, the overthrow | of the Constituent Assembly, the abdication of the bourgeois-

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she found the “nephew of his uncle”. Saul Cavaignac won a million votes, but David Napoleon won six million. Six times over was Saul Cavaignac beaten.
December 10, 1848, was the day of the peasant insurrection. Only from this day did February date for the French peasants. The symbol which expressed their entry into the revolutionary movement, clumsily-crafty, knavishly-naive, doltishly-sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, a cleverly stupid anachronism, a piece of world-historic buffoonery, an undecipherable hieroglyphic for the understanding of the civilised—this symbol bore unmistakably the physiognomy of the class which represents barbarism within civilization. The Republic had made itself known to them through the tax-collector; they made themselves known to the Republic through the Emperor.
Napoleon was the only man who had exhaustively represented the interests and the imagination of the peasant class newly created in 1789. By writing his name on the frontispiece of the Republic, they declared war abroad, and the enforcement of their class interests at home. For the peasants, Napoleon was not a person, but a programme. With flags, with music and song they marched to the polling place, crying: plus d’impôts, à bas les riches, à bas la république, vive l’Empereur! No more taxes, down with the rich, down with the republic, long live the Emperor! The peasant war lurked behind the Emperor. The republic they had voted down was the republic of the rich.

December 10 was the coup d’état of the peasants, which overthrew the existing government. And from that day on, when they had taken a government from France and given it another, their eyes were immovably fixed on Paris. For an instant active heroes of the revolutionary drama, they could no longer be forced back into the role of the chorus, passive and without will.

The remaining classes helped to consummate the electoral victory of the peasants. For the proletariat the election of Napoleon meant the dismissal of Cavaignac, the overthrow of the Constituent Assembly, the abdication of bourgeois republicanism, the cassation of the June victory. For the petty bourgeoisie, Napoleon was the rule of the debtor over the creditor. For the majority of the big bourgeoisie, the election of Napoleon meant the open break with the faction which it had been obliged to make use of for a moment against the revolution, but which became intolerable to it as soon as that faction sought to establish as a constitutional fixture the position the moment had thrust upon it. Napoleon in place of Cavaignac meant for them monarchy in place of the republic, the beginning of the royalist restoration, the shyly hinted Orleans, the lily hidden beneath violets. The army, finally, voted for Napoleon against the Mobile Guard, against the peace idyll, for war.

Thus it happened, as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung said, that the most simple-minded man in France acquired the most multifarious significance. Just because he was nothing, he could mean everything but himself. However different the meaning of the name Napoleon might be in the mouths of the different classes, each class wrote with this name on its ballot: Down with the party of the National, down with Cavaignac, down with the Constituent Assembly, down with the bourgeois republic! Minister Dufaure publicly declared in the Constituent Assembly: December 10 is a second February 24.

Petty bourgeoisie and proletariat had voted en bloc for Napoleon in order to vote against Cavaignac and, by combining their votes, to wrest the final decision from the Constituent Assembly. Nevertheless, the most advanced section of both classes put forward their own candidates. Napoleon was the collective name of all parties coalesced against the bourgeois republic; Ledru-Rollin and Raspail were the proper names, the former of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, the latter of the revolutionary proletariat. The votes for Raspail—the proletarians and their socialist spokesmen declared this aloud—were meant to be a mere demonstration, just so many protests against any presidency, that is, against the Constitution itself, just so many votes against Ledru-Rollin, the first act by which the proletariat departed from the democratic party as an independent political party. This party, on the other hand—the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its parliamentary representative, the Montagne—treated the candidature of Ledru-Rollin with all the seriousness with which it is in the solemn habit of duping itself. This, moreover, was its last attempt to assert itself as an independent party in opposition to the proletariat. Not only the republican bourgeois party, but also the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its Montagne were defeated on December 10.

France now possessed, alongside a Montagne, a Napoleon—proof that both were only the lifeless caricatures of the great realities whose names they bore. Louis Napoleon, with the emperor’s hat and the eagle, did not parody the old Napoleon more wretchedly than the Montagne, with its phrases borrowed from 1793 and its demagogic poses, parodied the old Montagne. Thus the traditional superstition in 1793 was stripped off together with the traditional superstition in Napoleon. The revolution could only come into its own when it had won its own, original name, and that it could do only as soon as the modern revolutionary class, the industrial proletariat, came to the fore in the revolution as the dominant force. It may be said that December 10 already dumbfounded the Montagne and caused it to question its own sanity, because it laughingly broke off the classic analogy with the old revolution by a coarse peasant joke.

On December 20 Cavaignac resigned his office and the Constituent Assembly proclaimed Louis Napoleon President of the Republic. On December 19, the last day of its sole power, it rejected the proposal for an amnesty for the June insurgents. Would it not have been to annul the June battle itself to revoke the decree of June 27 by which it had condemned 15,000 insurgents to deportation, bypassing judicial judgment?

Odilon Barrot, the last minister of Louis Philippe, became the first minister of Louis Napoleon. Just as Louis Napoleon dated his reign not from December 10, but from a senatus consultum of 1804, so he found a prime minister who dated his ministry not from December 20, but from a royal decree of February 24. As the legitimate heir of Louis Philippe, Louis Napoleon eased the change of government by retaining the old ministry, which, moreover, had had no time to wear itself out, as it had found no time to enter into life.

The heads of the royalist bourgeois factions advised him to choose thus. The head of the old dynastic opposition, who had unconsciously formed the transition to the republicans of the National, was even more suited to form the transition from the bourgeois republic to the monarchy with full consciousness.

Odilon Barrot was the head of the only old opposition party which, always vainly striving after the ministerial portfolio, had not yet worn itself out. In rapid succession the Revolution hurled all the old opposition parties to the summit of the state, so that they had to deny and repudiate their old phrases not only in deed, but in words themselves, and finally, combined in a repulsive mixture, all were hurled by the people on to the scrap heap of history. And no apostasy was spared this Barrot, this incarnation of bourgeois liberalism, who for eighteen years had hidden the vile emptiness of his spirit under the serious mien of his body. If at particular moments the stinging contrast between the thistles of the present and the laurels of the past startled him, one glance in the mirror restored to him the ministerial composure and human self-admiration. What beamed at him from the mirror was Guizot, whom he had always envied, who had always mastered him, Guizot himself, but Guizot with the Olympian forehead of Odilon. What he overlooked were the Midas ears.

The Barrot of February 24 only became manifest in the Barrot of December 20. To him, the Orleanist and Voltairian, there was added as Minister of Public Worship the Legitimist and Jesuit Falloux.

A few days later the Ministry of the Interior was handed over to Léon Faucher, the Malthusian. Law, religion, political economy! The Barrot ministry contained all this and, in addition, a union of Legitimists and Orleanists. Only the Bonapartist was lacking. Bonaparte still concealed the desire to mean Napoleon, for Soulouque did not yet play Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Immediately the party of the National was dislodged from all the higher posts in which it had nestled. The prefecture of police, the post-office directorship, the office of the procureur-général, the mayoralty of Paris, all were filled with old creatures of the monarchy. Changarnier, the Legitimist, received the combined supreme command of the National Guard of the Seine département, the Mobile Guard, and the line troops of the first military division; Bugeaud, the Orleanist, was appointed commander-in-chief of the Alpine army. This change of officials continued uninterruptedly under the Barrot government. The first act of his ministry was the restoration of the old royalist administration. In a trice the official scene was transformed—scenery, costumes, language, actors, supernumeraries, extras, prompters, the position of the parties, the motives of the drama, the content of the collision, the entire situation. Only the antediluvian Constituent Assembly was still in its place. But from the hour when the National Assembly had installed Bonaparte, Bonaparte Barrot, and Barrot Changarnier, France stepped out of the period of republican constitution-making into the period of the constituted republic. And in the constituted republic, what business had a Constituent Assembly? After the earth was created, there was nothing left for its creator but to flee to heaven. The Constituent Assembly was determined not to follow his example; the National Assembly was the last refuge of the party of the bourgeois republicans. If all the instruments of the executive power had been wrested from it, did not its constituent omnipotence remain to it? To hold fast to the sovereign post which it occupied and from there to reconquer the lost terrain—that was its first thought. The Barrot ministry superseded by a ministry of the National, and the royalist personnel would have to vacate the palaces of the administration immediately and the tricolour personnel march in triumphantly again. The National Assembly resolved the overthrow of the ministry, and the ministry itself offered an occasion for an attack such as the Constituante could not have devised more fittingly.

One recalls that Louis Bonaparte meant for the peasants: No more taxes! He had sat in the presidential chair for six days, and on the seventh

Days before, on 27 December, his ministry proposed the retention of the salt tax, whose abolition the provisional government had decreed. The salt tax shares with the wine tax the privilege of being the scapegoat of the old French financial system, especially in the eyes of the country folk. The Barrot ministry could put no more stinging epigram on its voters into the mouth of the chosen one of the peasants than the words: Restoration of the salt tax! With the salt tax, Bonaparte lost his revolutionary salt – the Napoleon of the peasant insurrection dissolved like a misty vision and nothing remained but the great unknown of the royalist bourgeois intrigue. And it was not without intention that the Barrot ministry made this act, tactlessly crude disappointment, the President’s first governmental act.

The Constituent Assembly for its part eagerly seized the double opportunity to overthrow the ministry and, vis-à-vis the chosen one of the peasants, to set itself up as the representative of the peasants’ interests. It rejected the proposal of the finance minister, reduced the salt tax to a third of its former amount, thereby increased a state deficit of 560 million by 60 million, and after this vote of no confidence calmly awaited the resignation of the ministry. So little did it grasp the new world by which it was surrounded and its own changed position. Behind the ministry stood the President and behind the President stood six million, who had just deposited as many votes of no confidence against the Constituent Assembly in the ballot box. The Constituent Assembly returned its vote of no confidence to the nation. Ridiculous exchange! It forgot that its votes had lost their forced currency. The rejection of the salt tax only ripened the decision of Bonaparte and his ministry to ‘make an end’ of the constituent assembly. That long duel began which fills the whole last life-half of the Constituent Assembly. 29 January, 21 March, 8 May are the journées, the great days of this crisis, just so many precursors of 13 June.

The French, e.g. Louis Blanc, have conceived 29 January as the emergence of a constitutional contradiction, the contradiction between a sovereign, indissoluble National Assembly arising from universal suffrage, and a President, according to the letter responsible to it, but in reality not only likewise sanctioned by universal suffrage and, moreover, uniting in his person all the votes which split and scatter among the individual members of the National Assembly a hundredfold, but also in full possession of the entire executive power, over which the National Assembly hovers as a mere moral force. This interpretation of 29 January confuses the language of the struggle on the tribune, through the press, in the clubs with its real content. Louis Bonaparte vis-à-vis the constituent National Assembly – that was not one one-sided constitutional power against the other, that was not the executive power against the legislative, that was the constituted bourgeois republic itself against the instruments of its constitution, against the ambitious intrigues and ideological demands of the revolutionary bourgeois fraction which had founded it and now found, to its astonishment, that its constituted republic looked like a restored monarchy, and now wished violently to hold fast to the constituent period with its conditions, its illusions, its language and its persons, and prevent the ripe bourgeois republic from emerging in its complete and specific form. Just as the constituent National Assembly represented Cavaignac, who had fallen back into it, so Bonaparte represented the legislative National Assembly, which had not yet severed itself from him, i.e. the National Assembly of the constituted bourgeois republic.

The election of Bonaparte could first explicate itself by replacing the one name with its many-sided meanings, by repeating itself in the election of the new National Assembly. The mandate of the old one had been quashed by 10 December. What therefore confronted each other on 29 January was not the President and the National Assembly of the same republic; it was the National Assembly of the republic in the process of becoming and the President of the republic that had become, two powers embodying entirely different periods of the life-process of the republic: the one, the small republican fraction of the bourgeoisie, which alone could proclaim the republic, wrest it from the revolutionary proletariat through street-fighting and the rule of terror, and sketch out its ideal basic features in the constitution; the other, the whole royalist mass of the bourgeoisie, which alone could rule in this constituted bourgeois republic, strip the constitution of its ideological trimmings, and realise through its legislation and its administration the indispensable conditions for the subjugation of the proletariat.

The storm that discharged itself on 29 January gathered its elements throughout the whole of January. The Constituent Assembly wanted, by its vote of no confidence, to drive the Barrot ministry to resign. The Barrot ministry, in contrast, proposed to the Constituent Assembly that it give itself a definitive vote of no confidence, resolve on its suicide, decree its own dissolution. Rateau, one of the most obscure deputies, on the order of the ministry, on 6 January moved this motion in the Constituent Assembly – the same Constituent Assembly that had already decided in August not to dissolve until it had enacted a whole series of organic laws supplementing the constitution. The ministerialist Fould declared to it straight out that its dissolution was necessary ‘for the restoration of the disturbed credit’. And was it not disturbing the credit by prolonging the provisional state and, with Barrot, calling into question Bonaparte, and with Bonaparte, the constituted republic? Barrot, the Olympian, turned into a raging Roland by the prospect of seeing the ministerial presidency, which he had finally seized and which the republicans had already once postponed for a decennium, i.e. for ten months, torn from him again after scarcely a fortnight’s enjoyment – Barrot over-tyrannised the tyrant in the face of this wretched assembly. The mildest of his words was that ‘no future is possible with it’. And in truth, it represented only the past. ‘It is incapable’, he added ironically, ‘of surrounding the republic with the institutions necessary for its consolidation.’ And in fact! With its exclusive opposition to the proletariat, its bourgeois energy was at the same time broken, and with its opposition to the royalists its republican extravagance had revived. Thus it was doubly incapable of consolidating the bourgeois republic, which it no longer understood, with the corresponding institutions.

With the Rateau motion, the ministry simultaneously conjured up a storm of petitions throughout the country, and every day from all corners of France bundles of billets doux flew about the head of the Constituent Assembly, in which it was more or less categorically requested to dissolve itself and make its will. The Constituent Assembly for its part called forth counter-petitions, in which it had itself urged to remain alive. The electoral struggle between Bonaparte and Cavaignac renewed itself as a petition struggle for and against the dissolution of the National Assembly. The petitions were to be the subsequent commentaries on 10 December. Throughout the whole of January this agitation continued.

In the conflict between the Constituent Assembly and the President, it could not go back to the general election as its origin, for one appealed from it to universal suffrage. It could not lean on any regular power, for it was a matter of the struggle against legal power. It could not overthrow the ministry through votes of no confidence, as it tried once more on 6 and 26 January, for the ministry did not ask for its confidence. Only one possibility remained to it, that of insurrection. The fighting forces of the insurrection were the republican part of the National Guard, the Mobile Guard, and the centres of the revolutionary proletariat, the clubs. The Mobile Guard, those heroes of the June days, formed in December just as much the organised fighting force of the republican bourgeois fraction, as before June the national workshops had formed the organised fighting force of the revolutionary proletariat. Just as the Executive Commission of the Constituent Assembly directed its brutal attack on the national workshops when it had to make an end of the increasingly intolerable claims of the proletariat, so the ministry of Bonaparte directed its attack on the Mobile Guard when it had to make an end of the increasingly intolerable claims of the republican bourgeois fraction. It ordered the dissolution of the Mobile Guard. One half of it was discharged and thrown onto the pavement, the other received a monarchist organisation in place of the democratic one, and its pay was reduced to the ordinary pay of the line troops. The Mobile Guard found itself in the situation of the June insurgents, and every day the daily press brought public confessions in which it confessed its guilt of June and implored the proletariat for forgiveness.

And the clubs? From the moment when the Constituent Assembly, in Barrot, called in question the President, and in the President the constituted bourgeois republic, and in the constituted bourgeois republic the bourgeois republic in general, all the constituent elements of the February republic necessarily rallied round it – all the parties that wished to overthrow the existing republic and, by a violent process of retrograde transformation, to remodel it as the republic of their class interests and principles. What had happened was made unhappened, the crystallisations of the revolutionary movement had become fluid again, the republic for which the struggle was being waged was once more the indeterminate republic of the February days, the determination of which each party reserved to itself. The parties for a moment resumed their old February positions, without sharing the illusions of February. The tricolour republicans of the National once more leaned on the democratic republicans of the Réforme and, as vanguard fighters, pushed them into the foreground of the parliamentary struggle. The democratic republicans once more leaned on the socialist republicans – on 27 January a public manifesto proclaimed their reconciliation and union – and prepared their insurrectional background in the clubs. The ministerial press justifiably treated the tricolour republicans of the National as the resurrected insurgents of June. In order to maintain themselves at the head of the bourgeois republic, they called the bourgeois republic itself into question. On

On 26 January Minister Faucher proposed a law on the right of association, the first paragraph of which read: “Clubs are prohibited.” He moved that this bill be brought up for urgent discussion. The Constituent Assembly rejected the urgency motion and on 27 January Ledru Rollin tabled a motion to impeach the ministry for violation of the constitution, signed by 230 signatures. The impeachment of the ministry at moments when such an act was the tactless revelation of the impotence of the judge, namely the majority of the Chamber, or an impotent protest of the accuser against that very majority – that was the great revolutionary trump card which the posthumous Mountain played henceforth at every high point of the crisis. Poor Mountain, crushed by the weight of its own name!

Blanqui, Barbès, Raspail, etc., had attempted to dissolve the Constituent Assembly on 15 May by forcing their way into its chamber at the head of the Paris proletariat. Barrot prepared a moral 15 May for the same Assembly by seeking to dictate its self-dissolution and close its chamber. That same Assembly had charged Barrot with the inquiry against the May defendants, and now, at a moment when he appeared before it as a royalist Blanqui, when it, vis-à-vis him, sought its allies in the clubs, among the revolutionary proletarians, in Blanqui’s party, at that moment the pitiless Barrot tortured it with the motion to withdraw the May prisoners from the jury court and hand them over to the High Court, the *haute cour*, invented by the party of the *National*. Remarkable how the goaded anxiety for a ministerial portfolio could knock out of Barrot’s head sallies worthy of Beaumarchais! The National Assembly, after long vacillation, adopted his motion. Vis-à-vis the May assailants it fell back into its normal character.

If the Constituent Assembly was driven towards insurrection in relation to the President and the ministers, the President and the ministry were driven, in relation to the Constituent Assembly, towards a coup d’état, for they possessed no legal means of dissolving it. But the Constituent Assembly was the mother of the constitution, and the constitution was the mother of the President. By a coup d’état the President tore up the constitution and extinguished his republican legal title. He was then forced to bring out the imperialist legal title; but the imperialist legal title awakened the Orleanist one, and both paled before the legitimist legal title. The downfall of the legal republic could only catapult its most extreme opposite pole upward, the legitimist monarchy, at a moment when the Orleanist party was no more than the vanquished of February and Bonaparte no more than the victor of 10 December, when both could oppose to the republican usurpation only their own likewise usurped monarchical titles. The Legitimists were conscious of the favourable moment; they conspired in broad daylight. In General Changarnier they could hope to find their Monk. The coming of the white monarchy was proclaimed just as openly in their clubs as that of the red republic was in the proletarian clubs.

By a fortunately suppressed *émeute* the ministry would have escaped all difficulties. “Legality is killing us,” cried Odilon Barrot. An *émeute* would have allowed the Constituent Assembly to be dissolved under the pretext of *salut public* and the constitution to be violated in the interest of the constitution itself. The brutal behaviour of Odilon Barrot in the National Assembly, the motion for the dissolution of the clubs, the noisy dismissal of 50 tricolor prefects and their replacement by royalists, the dissolution of the Mobile Guard, the maltreatment of its chiefs by Changarnier, the reinstatement of Lerminier, the professor already impossible under Guizot, the toleration of Legitimist braggings – these were just so many provocations of an *émeute*. But the *émeute* remained silent. It awaited its signal from the Constituent Assembly and not from the ministry.

Finally came 29 January, the day on which the decision was to be taken on Mathieu (de la Drôme)’s motion for the unconditional rejection of the Rateau proposal. Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, Mobile Guard, Mountain, clubs – everybody conspired that day, each as much against the supposed enemy as against the supposed ally. Bonaparte, mounted on horseback, reviewed part of the troops on the Place de la Concorde, Changarnier made a theatrical show with an expenditure of strategic manoeuvres, the Constituent Assembly found its chamber militarily occupied. That Assembly, the centre of all intersecting hopes, fears, expectations, fermentations, tensions, conspiracies, the lion-hearted Assembly did not waver for a moment when it drew closer than usual to the world spirit. It resembled that fighter who not only feared the use of his own weapon, but also felt obliged to leave his opponent’s weapons intact. With contempt for death it signed its own death warrant and rejected the unconditional rejection of the Rateau proposal. Even under the state of siege it set limits to a constituent activity whose necessary framework had been the state of siege of Paris. It took a revenge worthy of itself by decreeing the next day an inquiry into the terror which the ministry had caused it on 29 January. The Mountain proved its lack of revolutionary energy and political understanding by allowing itself to be used by the party of the *National* as a caller to battle in this great comedy of intrigue. The party of the *National* had made the last attempt to assert in the constituted republic the monopoly of rule which it had possessed during the period of the emergence of the bourgeois republic. It had failed.

If the January crisis revolved around the existence of the Constituent Assembly, the crisis of 21 March revolved around the existence of the constitution; there it concerned the personnel of the National party, here its ideal. It need hardly be pointed out that the honest republicans gave up the elevated feeling of their ideology more cheaply than the worldly enjoyment of governmental power.

On 21 March the order of the day of the National Assembly was Faucher’s bill against the right of association: the suppression of the clubs. Article 8 of the constitution guarantees all Frenchmen the right to associate. The prohibition of the clubs was therefore an unequivocal violation of the constitution, and the Constituent Assembly was itself to canonise the desecration of its holy writ. But the clubs were the rallying points, the seats of conspiracy of the revolutionary proletariat. The National Assembly itself had prohibited the coalition of the workers against their bourgeois. And the clubs, what were they other than a coalition of the entire working class against the entire bourgeoisie, the formation of a workers’ state against the bourgeois state? Were they not just so many constituent assemblies of the proletariat and just so many ready-to-strike army detachments of the revolt? What the constitution was above all to constitute was the rule of the bourgeoisie. The constitution could therefore obviously understand by the right of association only those associations that were in harmony with the rule of the bourgeoisie, i.e., with bourgeois order. If it expressed itself in general terms out of theoretical propriety, were not the government and the National Assembly there to interpret and apply it in the particular case? And if in the antediluvian epoch of the republic the clubs had been in fact prohibited by the state of siege, must they not be prohibited in the regulated, constituted republic by law? The tricolor republicans had nothing to oppose to this prosaic interpretation of the constitution but the high-flown phrase of the constitution. One part of them, Pagnerre, Duclerc, etc., voted for the ministry and thus secured it the majority. The other part, with the Archangel Cavaignac and the Church Father Marrast at its head, withdrew together with Ledru Rollin and the Mountain into a separate committee room – “and held council.” The National Assembly was paralysed; it no longer had a quorum. Just in time Mr Crémieux reminded them in the committee room that from there the road led direct to the street and that it was no longer February 1848 but March 1849. The party of the *National*, suddenly enlightened, returned to the chamber of the National Assembly, behind it the Mountain, once more duped, which, constantly tormented by revolutionary desires, just as constantly snatched at constitutional possibilities and still felt itself more at home behind the bourgeois republicans than before the revolutionary proletariat. Thus the comedy was played out. And the Constituent Assembly itself had decreed that the violation of the letter of the constitution was the only appropriate realisation of its spirit.

There remained only one point to settle, the relation of the constituted republic to the European revolution, its foreign policy. On 8 May 1849 unusual excitement reigned in the Constituent Assembly, whose term of life was to expire in a few days. The attack of the French army on Rome, its repulse by the Romans, its political infamy and its military disgrace, the assassination of the Roman republic by the French republic, the first Italian campaign of the second Bonaparte stood on the order of the day. The Mountain had once more played its great trump card; Ledru Rollin had laid on the President’s table the inevitable impeachment bill against the ministry and this time also against Bonaparte for violation of the constitution.

The motif of 8 May was repeated later as the motif of 13 June. Let us come to an understanding about the Roman expedition.

As early as mid-November 1848 Cavaignac had sent a war fleet to Civita Vecchia to protect the Pope, to take him on board and convey him to France. The Pope was to bless the honest republic and secure Cavaignac’s election as President. With the Pope Cavaignac wanted to hook the priests, with the priests the peasants, and with the peasants the presidency. An election advertisement in its immediate purpose, Cavaignac’s expedition was at the same time a protest and a threat against the Roman revolution. It contained in embryo the intervention of France in favour of the Pope.

This intervention for the Pope with Austria and Naples against the Roman republic was decided in the first session of Bonaparte’s ministerial council on 23 December. Falloux in the ministry, that was the Pope in Rome and in the Rome of the Pope –. Bonaparte no longer needed the Pope to become the President of the peasants, but he needed the preservation of the Pope in order to preserve the peasants of the President. Their credulity had made him President. With faith they lost their credulity, and with the Pope they lost faith. And the

The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850. II. 13 June 1849

coalesced Orleanists and Legitimists who ruled in Bonaparte’s name! Before the king could be restored, the power that sanctifies kings had to be restored. Apart from their royalism, without the old Rome, subjugated to its secular rule, no pope; without the pope, no Catholicism; without Catholicism, no French religion; and without religion, what would become of the old French society? The mortgage which the peasant holds on heavenly goods guarantees the mortgage which the bourgeois holds on peasant lands. The Roman revolution was therefore an assault on property, on the bourgeois order, as terrible as the June revolution. The re-established rule of the bourgeoisie in France demanded the restoration of papal rule in Rome. Finally, in beating the Roman revolutionaries one struck out at the allies of the French revolutionaries; and the alliance of the counter-revolutionary classes in the constituted French republic found its necessary complement in the alliance of the French republic with the Holy Alliance, with Naples and Austria. The decision of the Council of Ministers of 23 December was no secret to the Constituent Assembly. Already on 8 January Ledru-Rollin had interpellated the ministry on the subject, the ministry had denied it, and the National Assembly had passed to the order of the day. Did it trust the ministry’s words? We know that it spent the whole of January passing votes of no confidence in it. But if it was the ministry’s role to lie, it was its role to feign belief in its lie and thereby save the republican *dehors*.

Meanwhile, Piedmont had been beaten, Charles Albert had abdicated, and the Austrian army was knocking at the gates of France. Ledru-Rollin interpellated sharply. The ministry proved that in Northern Italy it had only continued Cavaignac’s policy, and Cavaignac had only continued the policy of the provisional government, i.e., Ledru-Rollin’s own. This time it even reaped a vote of confidence from the National Assembly and was authorised to temporarily occupy a suitable point in Upper Italy, so as to provide a rearward position for peaceful negotiation with Austria on the integrity of Sardinian territory and the Roman question. As is well known, the fate of Italy is decided on the battlefields of Northern Italy. With Lombardy and Piedmont, Rome would therefore have fallen, or France would have had to declare war on Austria and thereby on the European counter-revolution. Did the National Assembly suddenly take the Barrot ministry for the old Committee of Public Safety? Or itself for the Convention? Why, then, the military occupation of a point in Upper Italy? Beneath this transparent veil, the expedition against Rome was concealed.

On 14 April, 14,000 men under Oudinot sailed for Civitavecchia; on 16 April, the National Assembly granted the ministry a credit

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of 1,200,000 francs for the three-month maintenance of an intervention fleet in the Mediterranean. Thus it gave the ministry every means to intervene against Rome, while it pretended to be letting it intervene against Austria. It saw not what the ministry did, it only heard what it said. Such faith was not found in Israel; the Constituent Assembly had fallen into the position of not being allowed to know what the constituted republic had to do.

At last, on 8 May, the last scene of the comedy was played; the Constituent Assembly urged the ministry to take speedy measures to bring the Italian expedition back to its stated goal. That same evening Bonaparte published a letter in the *Moniteur*, in which he lavished the greatest praise on Oudinot. On 11 May, the National Assembly rejected the act of indictment against this same Bonaparte and his ministry. And the Montagne, which instead of tearing apart this web of deceit takes the parliamentary comedy tragically, so as itself to play the role of Fouquier-Tinville in it—did it not betray, under the borrowed lion-skin of the Conventionnel, the inborn petty-bourgeois calfskin?

The last half of the Constituent Assembly’s life is summed up thus: It admits, on 29 January, that the royalist bourgeois factions are the natural superiors of the republic it constituted; on 21 March, that the violation of the constitution is its realisation; and on 11 May, that the bombastically proclaimed passive alliance of the French republic with the struggling peoples means its active alliance with the European counter-revolution.

This miserable assembly quit the stage only after giving itself the satisfaction, just two days before the first anniversary of its birth on 4 May, of rejecting the motion for amnesty for the June insurgents. Its power shattered, mortally hated by the people, repelled, maltreated, contemptuously cast aside by the bourgeoisie whose tool it was, forced in the second half of its life-epoch to disavow the first, stripped of its republican illusions, without great creations in the past, without hope for the future, dying away piecemeal in its living body, it could only galvanise its own corpse by constantly recalling the June victory and reliving it after the fact, affirming itself through the ever-repeated condemnation of the condemned. A vampire that lived on the blood of the June insurgents!

It left behind the state deficit, enlarged by the costs of the June insurrection, by the loss of the salt tax, by the compensation it assigned to plantation owners for the abolition of Negro slavery, by the costs of the Roman expedition, by the loss of the wine

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tax, whose abolition it still decreed while lying in its last agony—a malicious old man, happy to burden his laughing heir with a compromising debt of honour.

From the beginning of March, the electoral agitation for the legislative National Assembly had begun. Two main groups confronted each other: the Party of Order and the democratic-socialist, or red, party; between them stood the Friends of the Constitution, under which name the tricolour republicans of the *National* sought to pose as a party. The Party of Order had formed immediately after the June days; only after 10 December had allowed it to cast off the coterie of the *National*, the bourgeois republicans, was the secret of its existence revealed—the coalition of Orleanists and Legitimists into one party. The bourgeois class fell into two great factions, which had alternately held the monopoly of rule—large landed property under the restored monarchy, the financial aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under the July monarchy. Bourbon was the royal name for the preponderant influence of the interests of the one faction; Orléans—the royal name for the preponderant influence of the interests of the other faction—the nameless realm of the republic was the only one in which both factions could assert the common interests of their class in equal dominion without abandoning their mutual rivalry. If the bourgeois republic could not be anything other than the completed and purely expressed rule of the entire bourgeois class, could it be anything other than the rule of the Orleanists supplemented by the Legitimists, and of the Legitimists supplemented by the Orleanists, the synthesis of the Restoration and the July Monarchy? The bourgeois republicans of the *National* did not represent any large, economically based faction of their class. Their only significance and historical title was that, under the monarchy, vis-à-vis the two bourgeois factions which understood only their own particular regimes, they had held up the general regime of the bourgeois class, the nameless realm of the republic, which they idealised and decked out with antique arabesques, but in which they above all hailed the rule of their own coterie. If the party of the *National* reeled in its own understanding when, at the pinnacle of the republic it had founded, it beheld the coalesced royalists, these royalists themselves were no less deceived about the fact of their own united rule. They did not grasp that if each of their factions, considered separately, was royalist, the product of their chemical combination had necessarily to be republican; that the white monarchy and the blue monarchy had to neutralise one another in the tricolour republic. Compelled, by the antagonism towards the

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revolutionary proletariat and the intermediate classes pressing more and more heavily around it as their centre, to muster their united strength and to preserve the organisation of this united strength, each of the factions of the Party of Order had, vis-à-vis the restorationist and overreaching ambitions of the others, to assert the common rule—i.e., the republican form of bourgeois rule. Thus we find these royalists at first believing in an immediate restoration, later preserving the republican form with foam of rage and deadly invectives against it on their lips, and finally confessing that they can only get along with one another in the republic and postponing the restoration indefinitely. The very enjoyment of united rule strengthened each of the two factions and made it still more incapable and less willing to subordinate itself to the other—i.e., to restore the monarchy.

The Party of Order directly proclaimed, in its electoral programme, the rule of the bourgeois class—i.e., the maintenance of the life-conditions of its rule: property, family, religion, order! It naturally presented its class rule and the conditions of its class rule as the rule of civilisation and as the necessary conditions of material production, as well as of the social relations of intercourse deriving from it. The Party of Order commanded immense financial resources, it organised its branches throughout France, it had all the ideologists of the old society on its payroll, it disposed of the influence of the existing governmental power, it possessed an army of unpaid vassals in the whole mass of the petty bourgeoisie and peasants, who, still standing aloof from the revolutionary movement, found the natural representatives of their own petty property and its petty prejudices in the high dignitaries of property; represented throughout the country by a host of petty kings, it could punish the rejection of its candidates as insurrection, dismiss rebel workers, recalcitrant farm-hands, servants, clerks, railway employees, scribes—all functionaries civilly subordinate to it. It could, finally, in some places maintain the illusion that the republican Constituent Assembly had prevented the Bonaparte of 10 December from revealing his miracle-working powers. We have not mentioned the Bonapartists in connection with the Party of Order. They were no serious faction of the bourgeois class, but a collection of old superstitious invalids and young faithless soldiers of fortune.—The Party of Order triumphed in the elections; it sent the great majority into the legislative assembly.

Facing the coalesced counter-revolutionary bourgeois class, the already revolutionised sections of the petty bourgeoisie and

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of the peasant class with the high dignitary of the revolutionary interests,
the revolutionary proletariat, unite. We have seen how the democratic spokesmen of the petty bourgeoisie in parliament, i.e., the Montagne, were driven by parliamentary defeats towards the socialist spokesmen
of the proletariat, and how the real petty bourgeoisie outside
parliament were driven by the concordats à l'amiable, by the brutal assertion
of bourgeois interests, by bankruptcy towards the real proletarians. On 27 January, Montagne and Socialists had celebrated their
reconciliation; at the great February banquet of 1849 they repeated
their act of union. The social and the democratic, the party of the
workers and that of the petty bourgeoisie, united to form the social-democratic
party, i.e., the red party.
Paralysed for a moment by the agony following the June days,
the French Republic had, since the lifting of the state of siege,
since 14 October, experienced a continuous series of feverish excitements.
First the struggle for the presidency, then the struggle of the president
with the Constituante, the struggle over the clubs, the trial at Bourges
— which, in contrast to the small figures of the president, the coalesced
royalists, the honest republicans, the democratic Montagne, the
socialist [33] doctrinaires of the proletariat, made its real revolutionaries appear as primeval monsters, such as only a deluge
leaves behind on the surface of society or such as can only precede
a social deluge — the election agitation, the
execution of the Bréa murderers, the continual press trials, the violent
police interventions of the government into the banquets, the
impudent royalist provocations, the exhibition of the portraits of Louis Blanc
and Caussidière in the pillory, the uninterrupted struggle between the
constituted Republic and the Constituante, which at every moment drove
the revolution back to its starting point, which at every moment
made the victor the vanquished, the vanquished the victor, and in an instant reversed the
positions of the parties and classes, their separations and alliances,
the rapid march of the European counter-revolution, the
glorious Hungarian struggle, the German risings, the Roman
expedition, the ignominious defeat of the French army before Rome
— in this whirlwind of movement, in this torment of historical unrest,
in this dramatic ebb and flow of revolutionary passions,
hopes, disappointments, the various classes of French
society had to count their epochs of development by weeks, as
they had formerly counted them by half-centuries. A significant
part of the peasants and of the provinces had been revolutionised. Not only were they
disillusioned about Napoleon, but the red party offered them, in place of the

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name, the substance, in place of the illusory tax exemption, the repayment of the milliard paid to the Legitimists, the regulation of mortgages, and the abolition of usury.

The army itself was infected by the revolutionary fever. It had voted in
Bonaparte for victory, and he gave it defeat. It had voted in
him for the little corporal behind whom the great revolutionary
commander lurks, and he gave it back the great generals behind whom the
gaiters-justice corporal hides himself. No doubt that the red party,
i.e., the coalesced democratic party, if not victory, was bound to celebrate
great triumphs; that Paris, that the army, that a large part of the
provinces would vote for it. Ledru-Rollin, the chief of the Montagne,
was elected by five departments; no chief of the party of Order carried off
such a victory, no name of the proletarian party proper.
This election reveals to us the secret of the democratic-socialist
party. If the Montagne, the parliamentary champion of the democratic
petty bourgeoisie, was, on the one hand, forced to unite with the socialist
doctrinaires of the proletariat — the proletariat, forced by the
terrible material defeat of June to raise itself up again through intellectual
victories, not yet enabled by the development of the other
classes to seize the revolutionary dictatorship, had to throw itself into the
arms of the doctrinaires of its emancipation, the founders of socialist sects —
on the other hand, the revolutionary peasants, the
army, the provinces placed themselves behind the Montagne, which thus became the master in the revolutionary
camp and, through its understanding with the Socialists,
had removed every antagonism in the revolutionary party. In the
last period of the Constituante’s life, it represented that body’s republican pathos
and had brought its sins during the provisional government,
during the Executive Commission, during the June days to be forgotten.
To the same degree that the party of the National, in keeping with its half-and-half
nature, allowed itself to be crushed by the royalist ministry, rose
the party of the Mountain, pushed aside during the omnipotence of the National, and
made itself felt as the parliamentary representative of the revolution. In
fact, the party of the National had nothing to object to the other royalist
fractions except ambitious personalities and idealistic
humbug. The party of the Mountain, on the other hand, represented a
mass hovering between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose material interests
demanded democratic institutions. In contrast to the Cavaignacs and Marrasts,
Ledru-Rollin and the Montagne therefore stood within the
truth of the revolution, and from the consciousness of this weighty situation they drew all the greater courage, the more the expression of revolutionary energy was limited to parliamentary sallies,

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the laying of charges, threats, raised voices, thunderous
speeches, and extremes that were driven no further than the phrase. The peasants
found themselves in roughly the same position as the petty bourgeoisie, they had
roughly the same social demands to make. All the middle
strata of society, in so far as they were driven into the revolutionary movement,
therefore had to find their hero in Ledru-Rollin. Ledru-Rollin
was the personage of the democratic petty bourgeoisie. Against the party
of Order, these half-conservative, half-revolutionary and wholly
utopian reformers of this order had first to be pushed to the
head.

The party of the National, “the friends of the Constitution quand même”, the
républicains purs et simples were completely defeated in the elections.
An enormous minority of them was sent into the Legislative Chamber,
their most notorious chiefs vanished from the stage,

even Marrast, the rédacteur en chef and the Orpheus of the honest
Republic.

On 28 May the Legislative Assembly convened, on 11 June
the collision of 8 May was renewed; Ledru-Rollin, in the name of the
Montagne, laid a charge against the president and the ministry,
for violation of the Constitution, for the bombardment of
Rome. On 12 June the Legislative Assembly rejected the charge,
just as the Constituent Assembly had rejected it on 11 May, but
this time the proletariat drove the Montagne into the street, yet not to
street fighting but only to a street procession. It is enough to say that
the Montagne stood at the head of this movement to know that the
movement was defeated and that June 1849 was a
caricature of June 1848, as ludicrous as it was despicable. The great
retreat of 13 June was only overshadowed by the still greater bulletin Changarnier,
the great man whom the party of Order improvised, wrote about it. Every
epoch of society needs its great men, and when it does not
find them, it invents them, as Helvetius says.

On 20 December only the one half of the constituted
bourgeois Republic, the president, still existed; on 29 May it was completed by the
other half, by the Legislative Assembly. June 1848 had
inscribed the constituting bourgeois Republic in the birth register
of history through an unspeakable battle against the proletariat; June 1849 the constituted bourgeois Republic through an
unnameable comedy with the petty bourgeoisie. June 1849 was the
Nemesis of June 1848.
In June 1849 it was not the workers who were defeated, but the petty bourgeois who were struck down,
who stood between them and the revolution. June 1849 was not the
bloody tragedy between wage labour and capital, but the

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prison-filling and lamentable spectacle between the debtor and
the creditor. The party of Order had won, it was all-powerful, it
now had to show what it was. |

Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Politisch-ökonomische Revue.
No. 3, March 1850

I1|III. Consequences of 13 June 1849.

On 20 December the Janus head of the constitutional republic had still
shown only one face, the executive face with the blurred
shallow features of L. Bonaparte; on 28 May 1849 it showed its second face,
the legislative, covered with the scars which the orgies of the Restoration
and the July Monarchy had left behind. With the Legislative National
Assembly, the appearance of the constitutional republic was complete,
i.e., of the republican state form in which the rule of the bourgeois
class is constituted, hence the joint rule of the two great
royalist fractions which form the French bourgeoisie,
of the coalesced Legitimists and Orleanists, the party of Order. Whilst
the French Republic thus fell as property to the coalition of the royalist parties,
the European coalition
of the counter-revolutionary powers simultaneously undertook a general crusade against the last
refuges of the March revolutions. Russia invaded Hungary,
Prussia marched against the army of the Reich constitution, and Oudinot bombarded Rome. The European crisis was evidently approaching a decisive
turning point, the eyes of all Europe turned towards Paris and the
eyes of all Paris towards the Legislative Assembly. On 11 June Ledru-Rollin mounted its tribune. He delivered no speech,
he formulated an indictment against the ministers, bare, unadorned, factual,
concentrated, violent.

The attack on Rome is an attack on the Constitution, the attack on
the Roman Republic an attack on the French Republic. Article V
of the Constitution reads: “The French Republic never employs its armed
forces against the liberty of any people” — and the president
employs the French army against Roman liberty. Article 54
of the Constitution forbids the executive power to declare any war
without the assent of the National Assembly. The resolution of the
Constituante of 8 May expressly commands the ministers to adapt the Roman
expedition with all haste to its original purpose, it

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Thus it just as expressly forbids them to make war on Rome — and Oudinot bombards Rome. Thus Ledru Rollin called upon the Constitution itself as a witness for the prosecution against Bonaparte and his ministers. To the royalist majority of the National Assembly he, the tribune of the Constitution, hurled the menacing declaration: “The republicans will know how to make the Constitution respected, by all means, even by force of arms!” “By force of arms!” repeated the hundredfold echo of the Montagne. The majority answered with a fearful tumult; the President of the National Assembly called Ledru Rollin to order; Ledru Rollin repeated the challenging declaration and finally laid upon the President’s table the motion for the impeachment of Bonaparte and his ministers. The National Assembly, by 361 votes to 203, decided to pass over the bombardment of Rome to the simple order of the day.

Did Ledru Rollin believe that he could strike down the National Assembly through the Constitution, and the President through the National Assembly?

The Constitution certainly forbade every attack upon the freedom of foreign peoples, but what the French army attacked in Rome was, according to the ministry, not “freedom” but the “despotism of anarchy.” Had the Montagne, in spite of all the experiences of the Constituent Assembly, still not grasped that the interpretation of the Constitution belongs not to those who made it, but only to those who accepted it? That its letter must be interpreted in its viable sense, and that the bourgeois sense is its only viable sense? That Bonaparte and the royalist majority of the National Assembly were the authentic interpreters of the Constitution, just as the priest is the authentic interpreter of the Bible and the judge the authentic interpreter of the law? Should the National Assembly, just freshly emerged from the womb of the general elections, feel itself bound by the testamentary disposition of the dead Constituent Assembly, whose living will an Odilon Barrot had broken? When Ledru Rollin invoked the decision of the Constituent Assembly of 8 May, he forgot that the same Constituent Assembly on 11 May had rejected his first motion for the impeachment of Bonaparte and the ministers, that it had acquitted the President and the ministers, that it had thus sanctioned the attack on Rome as “constitutional,” that he was merely lodging an appeal against a judgment already pronounced, that he was finally appealing from the republican Constituent Assembly to the royalist Legislative Assembly. The Constitution itself calls insurrection to its aid by summoning, in a special article, every citizen to its defence. Ledru Rollin relied on this article. But are not the public authorities at the same time organised for the defence of the Constitution, and does the violation of the Constitution not first begin at the moment when one of the constitutional public authorities rebels against the other? And the President of the Republic, the ministers of the Republic, the National Assembly of the Republic were in the most harmonious understanding.

What the Montagne attempted on 11 June was “an insurrection within the limits of pure reason,” i.e., a purely parliamentary insurrection. The majority of the Assembly was to be intimidated by the prospect of an armed rising of the popular masses, and thus to break in Bonaparte and the ministers its own power and the significance of its own election. Had not the Constituent Assembly similarly attempted to annul the election of Bonaparte when it so stubbornly insisted on the dismissal of the Barrot-Falloux ministry?

There was no lack of precedents from the time of the Convention for parliamentary insurrections which had suddenly turned the relation between majority and minority completely upside down; and why should the young Montagne not succeed in what the old one had succeeded in doing? Nor did the momentary circumstances appear unfavourable to such an undertaking. The popular agitation in Paris had reached an alarming height; the army, to judge by its election votes, did not seem well disposed towards the government; the legislative majority itself was still too young to have consolidated, and, moreover, it consisted of old gentlemen. If the Montagne succeeded in a parliamentary insurrection, the helm of state would fall to it directly. The democratic petty bourgeoisie, for its part, wished, as always, nothing more ardently than to see the fight carried out above their heads in the clouds between the departed spirits of Parliament. Finally, both of them, the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its representatives, the Montagne, would achieve their great purpose through a parliamentary insurrection: to break the power of the bourgeoisie without unleashing the proletariat, or without allowing it to appear otherwise than in perspective; the proletariat would have been used without becoming dangerous.

After the vote of the National Assembly of 11 June, a meeting took place between some members of the Montagne and delegates of the secret workers’ societies. The latter insisted on striking that very evening. The Montagne decisively rejected this plan. At no price did it want to let the leadership slip out of its hands; its allies were just as suspect to it as its opponents, and rightly so. The memory of June 1848 surged more vividly than ever through the ranks of the Paris proletariat. Nevertheless, it was chained to the alliance with the Montagne. The Montagne represented the greater part of the departments, it exaggerated its influence in the army, it disposed over the democratic section of the National Guard, it had the moral power of the boutique behind it. To begin the insurrection at this moment against its will would have meant for the proletariat—on top of that decimated by cholera, driven out of Paris in considerable masses by unemployment—to repeat uselessly the June days of 1848, without the situation that had forced that desperate struggle. The proletarian delegates did the only rational thing. They made the Montagne pledge to compromise itself, i.e., to step outside the limits of the parliamentary struggle, in the event that its act of impeachment was rejected. Throughout the whole of 13 June, the proletariat maintained the same sceptical, observant attitude and waited for a seriously engaged, irrevocable hand-to-hand fight between the democratic National Guard and the army, in order then to throw itself into the struggle and push the revolution beyond the petty-bourgeois goal set for it. In case of victory, a proletarian commune had already been formed, which was to take its place alongside the official government. The Paris workers had learned in the bloody school of June 1848.

On 12 June, Minister Lacrosse himself moved in the Legislative Assembly to proceed at once to the discussion of the act of impeachment. During the night, the government had taken all measures for defence and attack; the majority of the National Assembly was determined to drive the rebellious minority out into the street; the minority itself could no longer retreat; the die was cast; 377 votes to 8 rejected the act of impeachment; the Mountain, which had abstained from voting, rushed off, rage-filled, into the propaganda halls of the “peaceful democracy”—into the newspaper offices of the Démocratie pacifique.

Its removal from the parliamentary building broke its strength, just as the removal from the earth broke the strength of Antaeus, her giant son. Samsons in the chambers of the Legislative Assembly, they were only philistines in the chambers of the “peaceful democracy.” A long, noisy, rambling debate unfolded. The Montagne was resolved to force respect for the Constitution by all means, “only not by force of arms.” In this resolve it was supported by a manifesto and ||by| a deputation of the “Friends of the Constitution.” “Friends of the Constitution”—that is what the remnants of the coterie of the National, of the bourgeois-republican party, called themselves. While of its remaining parliamentary representatives six had voted against, all the rest in favour of the rejection of the act of impeachment, while Cavaignac placed his sword at the disposal of the party of order, the larger extra-parliamentary part of the coterie eagerly seized the opportunity to step out of its political pariah position and press itself into the ranks of the democratic party. Did they not appear as the natural shield-bearers of this party, which hid behind their shield, behind their principle, behind the Constitution?

Till daybreak the “Mountain” was in labour. It gave birth to “a proclamation to the people,” which on the morning of 13 June took a more or less shamefaced place in two socialist journals. It declared the President, the ministers, the majority of the Legislative Assembly to be “outside the Constitution” (hors de la constitution) and called upon the National Guard, the army and finally also the people to “rise.” “Long live the Constitution!” was the password it issued, a password that meant nothing other than “down with the revolution!”

The constitutional proclamation of the Mountain was answered on 13 June by a so-called peaceful demonstration of the petty bourgeoisie, i.e., a street procession from the Château d’Eau along the boulevards, 30,000 men, mostly National Guards, unarmed, mixed with members of the secret workers’ sections, rolling along to the cry: “Long live the Constitution!”—a cry emitted mechanically, ice-cold, with a bad conscience by the members of the procession themselves, thrown back ironically, instead of swelling like thunder, by the echo of the people surging on the pavements. The many-voiced song lacked the chest voice. And when the procession swayed past the meeting-place of the “Friends of the Constitution” and a hired constitutional herald appeared on the gable of the house, who sawed mightily through the air with his claqueur hat and let the catchword “Long live the Constitution!” rain down hailstorm-thick on the heads of the pilgrims from his enormous lungs, they themselves seemed for a moment overwhelmed by the comedy of the situation. It is well known how the procession, arriving at the mouth of the Rue de la Paix on the boulevards, was received by Changarnier’s dragoons and chasseurs in a thoroughly unparliamentary fashion, scattered to all sides in a flash, and threw behind it only the sparse cry “To arms!” so that the parliamentary call to arms of 11 June might be fulfilled.

The majority of the Montagne, assembled in the Rue du Hazard, took to its heels when this violent dispersal of the peaceful procession, together with dull rumours of unarmed citizens being murdered on the boulevards and the growing street tumult, seemed to herald the approach of a riot. Ledru Rollin, at the head of a small band of deputies, saved the honour of the Mountain. Under the protection of the Paris artillery, which had assembled in the Palais National, they proceeded to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, where the 5th and 6th Legions of the National Guard were supposed to arrive. But the Montagnards waited in vain for the 5th and 6th Legions; these prudent National Guards left their representatives in the

The insurrection did not even come to a blow; the Paris artillery itself prevented the people from throwing up barricades, a chaotic confusion made any decision impossible, the troops of the line advanced with levelled bayonets, a part of the representatives were taken prisoner, another part escaped. Thus ended 13 June.

If 23 June 1848 was the insurrection of the revolutionary proletariat, 13 June 1849 was the insurrection of the democratic petty bourgeois; each of these two insurrections is the classically pure expression of the class that carried it.

Only in Lyons did a stubborn, bloody conflict take place. Here, where the industrial bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat confront one another without mediation, where the workers’ movement is not, as in Paris, framed and determined by the general movement, 13 June lost its original character in the repercussion. Wherever else it struck in the provinces, it did not kindle – a cold lightning-flash. |
 13 June closes the first period of the life of the constitutional republic, which had gained its normal existence on 29 May 1849 with the assembly of the Legislative Assembly. The whole duration of this prologue is filled with the noisy struggle between the Party of Order and the Montagne, between the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, which vainly resists the consolidation of the bourgeois republic – for which it had itself ceaselessly conspired in the Provisional Government and in the Executive Commission, for which it had fought fanatically against the proletariat during the June days. 13 June breaks its resistance and makes the legislative dictatorship of the united Royalists a *fait accompli*. From that moment on the National Assembly is no more than a Committee of Public Safety of the Party of Order.

Paris had placed the President, the ministers, and the majority of the National Assembly in a “state of accusation”; they placed Paris in a “state of siege”. The Montagne had declared the majority of the Legislative Assembly “outside the Constitution”; because of violation of the Constitution, the majority delivered the Montagne to the *haute cour* and proscribed everything in it that still possessed any vitality. It was decimated down to a headless, heartless rump. The minority had gone as far as the attempt at a parliamentary insurrection; the majority raised its parliamentary despotism to a law. It decreed a new standing order that destroyed the freedom of the tribune and empowered the President of the National Assembly to punish representatives for breach of order with censure, with fines, with withdrawal of indemnity monies, with temporary expulsion, with imprisonment. Over the rump of the Montagne it hung, instead of the sword, the rod. The remainder of the Montagne deputies would have owed it to their honour to resign en masse. By such an act the dissolution of the Party of Order would have been accelerated. It would have had to disintegrate into its original elements the very moment when not even the semblance of an opposition held it together. |

[9] Simultaneously with their parliamentary power, the democratic petty bourgeois were stripped of their armed force by the dissolution of the Paris artillery and of the 8th, 9th and 12th legions of the National Guard. The legion of high finance, on the other hand, which on 13 June had stormed the printing works of Boulé and Roux, smashed the presses, devastated the offices of the republican journals and arbitrarily arrested editors, compositors, printers, forwarding clerks and errand-boys, received encouraging encouragement from the tribune of the National Assembly. Over the whole surface of France the dissolution of National Guards suspected of republicanism was repeated.

A new press law, a new law on associations, a new law on the state of siege, the prisons of Paris overfilled, the political refugees expelled, all journals going beyond the boundaries of the *National* suspended, Lyons and the five surrounding departments abandoned to the brutal chicaneries of military despotism, the public prosecutors everywhere present, the so often purged army of officials purged once more – these were the inevitable, the ever-recurring commonplaces of the victorious reaction, after the massacres and deportations of June only worth mentioning because this time they were directed not only against Paris but also against the departments, not only against the proletariat but above all against the middle classes.

The repressive laws, by which the imposition of the state of siege was made dependent on the government’s opinion, the press was gagged still more firmly and the right of association was destroyed, absorbed the entire legislative activity of the National Assembly during the months of June, July and August.

This epoch is characterised, however, not by the actual but by the principled exploitation of the victory, not by the resolutions of the National Assembly but by the reasoning advanced for these resolutions, not by the thing but by the phrase, not by the phrase but by the accent and the gesture that enliven the phrase. The recklessly impudent utterance of royalist sentiments, the contemptuously aristocratic | insult against the republic, the coquettishly frivolous blabbing of the aims of the Restoration – in a word, the braggart violation of republican decorum give this period its peculiar tone and colouring. *Long live the Constitution!* was the battle-cry of the defeated of 13 June. The victors were thus released from the hypocrisy of constitutional, i.e. republican, language. The counter-revolution subjugated Hungary, Italy, Germany, and they believed the Restoration already before the gates of France. A veritable competition broke out among the ringleaders of the Order factions to document their Royalism through the *Moniteur*, and to confess, repent and atone for their liberal sins, committed under the Monarchy, before God and man. No day passed without the February revolution being declared a public calamity from the tribune of the National Assembly, without some unremarkable legitimist provincial Junker solemnly stating that he had never recognised the Republic, without one of the cowardly deserters and traitors of the July monarchy relating belated heroic deeds whose accomplishment only the philanthropy of Louis Philippe or other misunderstandings had prevented. What was to be admired about the February days was not the magnanimity of the victorious people, but the self-sacrifice and moderation of the Royalists who had allowed it to win. One representative of the people proposed that part of the relief funds destined for the February wounded be turned over to the Municipal Guards, who alone had earned the gratitude of the fatherland on those days. Another wanted a decree to erect an equestrian statue to the Duke of Orléans on the Place du Carrousel. Thiers called the Constitution a filthy piece of paper. Orleanists appeared on the tribune one after the other to repent their conspiracy against the legitimate monarchy; Legitimists to reproach themselves for having hastened the overthrow of monarchy in general by rebelling against the illegitimate monarchy; Thiers to repent having intrigued against Molé, Molé against Guizot, Barrot against all three. The cry “Long live the social-democratic republic!” was declared unconstitutional; the cry “Long live the Republic!” was | persecuted as social-democratic. On the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, a representative declared: “I fear the invasion of the Prussians less than the entry of the revolutionary refugees into France.” To the complaints about the terrorism organised in Lyons and the neighbouring departments, Baraguay d’Hilliers answered: “I prefer the white terror to the red terror.” (*J’aime mieux la terreur blanche que la terreur rouge.*) And the Assembly broke into frenetic applause every time an epigram against the Republic, against the revolution, against the Constitution, in favour of monarchy, in favour of the Holy Alliance, fell from the lips of its orators. Every violation of the smallest republican formalities, for instance addressing the representatives as “*citoyens*”, enthused the knights of Order.

The Paris by-elections of 8 July, held under the influence of the state of siege and the abstention of a large part of the proletariat from the ballot-box, the capture of Rome by the French army, the entry of the red eminences and, in their train, the Inquisition and monkish terrorism in Rome – added new victories to the victory of June and heightened the intoxication of the Party of Order.

Finally, in mid-August, partly with the intention of attending the just-assembled departmental councils, partly weary of the months-long orgy of tendentiousness, the Royalists decreed a two-month adjournment of the National Assembly. A commission of twenty-five representatives, the cream of the Legitimists and Orleanists – a Molé, a Changarnier – were left behind with transparent irony as substitutes for the National Assembly and as guardians of the Republic. The irony was deeper than they suspected. Condemned by history to help overthrow the monarchy they loved, they were destined by it to conserve the Republic they hated.

With the adjournment of the Legislative Assembly closes the second period of the life of the constitutional republic – its royalist rowdy period.

The state of siege of Paris was lifted again, the action of the press began once more. | During the suspension of the social-democratic papers, during the period of the repressive legislation and the royalist blustering, the *Siècle*, the old literary representative of the monarchical-constitutional petty bourgeoisie, republicanised itself; the *Presse*, the old literary expression of the bourgeois reformers, democratised itself; the *National*, the old classical organ of the republican bourgeoisie, socialised itself.

The secret societies grew in extent and intensity in the same measure as the public clubs became impossible. The industrial workers’ associations, tolerated as purely commercial companies and economically null, became politically so many links binding the proletariat together. 13 June had cut off the official heads of the various semi-revolutionary parties; the remaining masses won their own head. The knights of Order had intimidated with the prophesied terrors of the red Republic; the vulgar excesses, the hyperborean atrocities of the victorious counter-revolution in Hungary, in Baden, in Rome washed the “red Republic” white. And the discontented intermediate classes of French society began to prefer the promises of the red Republic with its problematic terrors to the terrors of the red monarchy with its actual hopelessness. No socialist in France carried on more revolutionary propaganda than Haynau. *A chaque capacité selon ses oeuvres!*

Meanwhile Louis Bonaparte exploited the recess of the National Assembly to make princely journeys in the provinces, during which the hot-blooded...

The Legitimists made pilgrimages to Ems to the grandson of Saint Louis and the mass of the friends of order popular representatives intrigued in the departmental councils, which had just assembled. The object was to make them declare what the majority of the National Assembly did not yet dare to pronounce, the urgent motion for the immediate revision of the constitution. According to the Constitution, the constitution could only be revised in 1852 by a National Assembly convoked expressly for that purpose. But if the majority of the departmental councils declared themselves in this sense, must not the National Assembly sacrifice the virginity of the Constitution to the voice of France? The National Assembly entertained the same hopes of these provincial assemblies as the nuns in Voltaire’s *Henriade* entertained of the Pandours. But the Potiphars of the National Assembly, a few exceptions apart, had to deal with as many Josephs of the provinces. The enormous majority refused to understand the intrusive insinuation. The revision of the constitution was frustrated by the very instruments through which it was to be called to life, by the votes of the departmental councils. The voice of France, and specifically of bourgeois France, had spoken and had spoken against revision.

At the beginning of October the legislative National Assembly met again — *tantum mutatus ab illo*. — Its physiognomy was completely altered. The unexpected rejection of the revision on the part of the departmental councils had referred it back to the limits of the constitution and to the limits of its lifespan. The Orleanists had become suspicious because of the pilgrimages of the Legitimists to Ems, the Legitimists had taken umbrage at the negotiations of the Orleanists with London, the journals of both factions had fanned the fire and weighed up the reciprocal claims of their pretenders. Orleanists and Legitimists united grumbled over the intrigues of the Bonapartists, which came to the fore in the princely journeys, in the more or less transparent attempts at emancipation of the President, in the presumptuous language of the Bonapartist newspapers; Louis Bonaparte grumbled over a National Assembly that found only the Legitimist-Orleanist conspiracy just, over a ministry that constantly betrayed him to this National Assembly. The ministry, finally, was itself divided over the Roman policy and over the income tax proposed by the minister Passy, decried by the conservatives as socialist.

One of the first proposals of the Barrot ministry to the reassembled Legislative was a credit request of 300,000 francs for the payment of the widow’s pension of the Duchess of Orléans. The National Assembly granted it and added a sum of 7 million francs to the debt register of the French nation. While Louis Philippe was thus successfully continuing to play the role of the “*pauvre honteux*,” the shamefaced beggar, the ministry dared neither to request a salary increase for Bonaparte, nor did the Assembly seem inclined to grant it. And Louis Bonaparte, as ever, vacillated in the dilemma: *Aut Caesar aut Clichy!*

The second credit request of the minister, for 9 million francs for the costs of the Roman expedition, increased the tension between Bonaparte on the one hand and the ministers and the National Assembly on the other. Louis Bonaparte had inserted in the *Moniteur* a letter to his orderly officer Edgar Ney, in which he bound the papal government to constitutional guarantees. The Pope, for his part, had issued an address “*motu proprio*,” in which he rejected any limitation of the restored rule. Bonaparte’s letter lifted, with deliberate indiscretion, the curtain of his cabinet, in order to expose himself to the gaze of the gallery as a benevolent genius, misunderstood and fettered in his own house. It was not the first time that he had coquetted with the “furtive flutterings of a free soul.” Thiers, the rapporteur of the commission, completely ignored Bonaparte’s flutterings and contented himself with translating the papal allocution into French. Not the ministry, but Victor Hugo, sought to save the President by a motion in which the National Assembly was to express its agreement with Napoleon’s letter. “*Allons donc! Allons donc!*” Beneath this irreverently frivolous interjection the majority buried Hugo’s motion. The policy of the President? The letter of the President? The President himself? *Allons donc! Allons donc!* Who the devil takes Monsieur Bonaparte *au sérieux*? Do you believe, Monsieur Victor Hugo, that we believe that you believe in the President? *Allons donc! Allons donc!*

Finally the rupture between Bonaparte and the National Assembly was hastened by the discussion on the recall of the Orléans and Bourbons. In the absence of the ministry, the cousin of the President, the son of the ex-King of Westphalia, had put forward this motion, which aimed at nothing other than to reduce the Legitimist and Orléanist pretenders to the same level, or rather below the Bonapartist pretender, who at least *de facto* stood at the summit of the state.

Napoleon Bonaparte was irreverent enough to make the recall of the exiled royal families and the amnesty of the June insurgents elements of one and the same motion. The indignation of the majority forced him immediately to apologize for this sacrilegious chain-linking of the sacred and the accursed, of the royal races and the proletarian brood, of the fixed stars of society and its will-o’-the-wisps, and to assign to each of the two motions the rank due to it. Vigorously it rejected the recall of the royal family, and Berryer, the Demosthenes of the Legitimists, left no doubt as to the meaning of this vote. The bourgeois degradation of the pretenders, that is what is aimed at! They want to rob them of the halo, the last majesty remaining to them, the majesty of exile! What, exclaimed Berryer, would one think of the pretender who, forgetting his illustrious origin, came here to live as a simple private individual! It could not have been said more clearly to Louis Bonaparte that he had gained nothing by his presence, that if the coalesced royalists needed him here in France as a neutral man in the presidential chair, the serious crown pretenders had to remain withdrawn from profane eyes by the mists of exile.

On 1 November, Louis Bonaparte answered the legislative Assembly by a message which announced, in fairly harsh words, the dismissal of the Barrot ministry and the formation of a new ministry. The Barrot-Falloux ministry was the ministry of the royalist coalition, the d’Hautpoul ministry was the ministry of Bonaparte, the organ of the President vis-à-vis the legislative Assembly, the ministry of the clerks.

Bonaparte was no longer merely the neutral man of 10 December 1848. The possession of the executive power had grouped a number of interests around him, the struggle with anarchy forced the party of Order itself to increase his influence, and if he was no longer popular, they were unpopular. The Orleanists and Legitimists, could he not hope, through their rivalry as well as through the necessity of some monarchist restoration, to compel them to recognise the neutral pretender?

From 1 November 1849 dates the third life-period of the constitutional republic, the period that closes on 10 March 1850. Not only does the regular play of the constitutional institutions begin, so much admired by Guizot, the squabble between the executive and the legislative power. In the face of the restoration aspirations of the united Orleanists and Legitimists, Bonaparte represents the title of his actual power, the republic; in the face of Bonaparte’s restoration aspirations, the party of Order represents the title of their common rule, the republic; in the face of the Orleanists, the Legitimists represent, in the face of the Legitimists, the Orleanists represent, the *status quo*, the republic. All these factions of the party of Order, each of which has its own king and its own restoration *in petto*, reciprocally assert, against the usurpation and elevation aspirations of their rivals, the common rule of the bourgeoisie, the form in which the particular claims are neutralised and reserved — the republic.

Just as Kant makes the republic, as the only rational form of state, a postulate of practical reason, the realisation of which is never attained, but the achievement of which must always be striven for as a goal and held fast in the disposition, so these royalists make monarchy.

Thus the constitutional republic, having emerged from the hands of the bourgeois republicans as a hollow ideological formula, became in the hands of the coalesced royalists the content-rich, living form. And Thiers spoke more truly than he suspected when he said: “We, the royalists, are the true supports of the constitutional republic.”

The overthrow of the ministry of the coalition, the appearance of the ministry of the clerks has a second meaning. Its finance minister was named Fould. Fould as finance minister, that is the official abandonment of the French national wealth to the Bourse, the administration of the state’s wealth by the Bourse and in the interest of the Bourse. With the appointment of Fould, the finance aristocracy announced its restoration in the *Moniteur*. This restoration necessarily complemented the other restorations, which together form as many links in the chain of the constitutional republic.

Louis Philippe had never dared to make a real *loup-cervier* finance minister. Just as his monarchy was the ideal name for the rule of the high bourgeoisie, so in his ministries the privileged interests had to bear ideologically disinterested names. The bourgeois republic pushed everywhere into the foreground what the various monarchies, the Legitimist as well as the Orleanist, had kept hidden in the background. It terrestrialised what they had etherealised. In place of the saintly names it put the bourgeois proper names of the ruling class interests.

Our entire exposition has shown how the republic, from the first day of its existence, did not overthrow the finance aristocracy but consolidated it. But the concessions that were made to it were a fate to which one submitted without intending to bring it about. With Fould, the initiative of government fell back to the finance aristocracy.

It will be asked how the coalesced bourgeoisie could bear and tolerate the rule of finance, which under Louis Philippe rested on the exclusion or subordination of the other fractions of the bourgeoisie? The answer is simple.

First of all, the finance aristocracy itself forms a preponderantly weighty part of the royalist coalition, whose common governmental power is called republic. Are not the spokesmen and capacities of the Orleanists the old allies and accomplices of the finance aristocracy? Is not the latter itself the golden phalanx of Orleanism? As for the Legitimists, already under Louis Philippe they had practically participated in all the orgies of stock-exchange, mining, and railway speculation. In general

is the alliance of large landed property with high finance a normal fact. Proof: England, proof: even Austria.

In a country like France, where the scale of national production stands in disproportionately subordinate measure to the size of the national debt, where the state *rente* forms the most important object of speculation and the Bourse the chief market for the investment of capital that wants to valorise itself in an unproductive manner, in such a country an innumerable mass of people from all bourgeois or semi-bourgeois classes must be interested in the national debt, in the stock-exchange game, in finance. All these subordinate participants, do they not find their natural props and commanders in the fraction that represents this interest in the most colossal dimensions, on the whole and in general?

The falling of state property to high finance, by what is it conditioned? By the constantly growing indebtedness of the state. And the state’s indebtedness? By the constant preponderance of its expenditure over its revenue, a disproportion which is at once the cause and the effect of the system of state loans.

To escape this indebtedness, the state must either restrict its expenditure, i.e., simplify the governmental organism, curtail it, govern as little as possible, employ as few personnel as possible, enter into as few relations with bourgeois society as possible. This path was impossible for the party of Order, whose means of repression, whose official state interference, whose omnipresence through state organs had to increase in the same measure as its rule and the conditions of life of its class were threatened from many sides. One cannot reduce the gendarmerie in the same measure as attacks on persons and property increase.

Or the state must seek to evade the debts and produce a momentary but transient equilibrium in the budget by shifting extraordinary taxes onto the shoulders of the richest classes. In order to withdraw the national wealth from stock-exchange exploitation, should the party of Order sacrifice its own wealth on the altar of the fatherland? Pas si bête!

Thus, without a complete upheaval of the French state, no upheaval of the French state budget. With this state budget necessarily the state indebtedness, and with the state indebtedness necessarily the rule of the trade in state debts, of the state creditors, the bankers, the money dealers, the stock-exchange wolves. Only one fraction of the party of Order was directly involved in the overthrow of the financial aristocracy: the manufacturers. We are not speaking of the middle, of the smaller industrialists; we speak of the regents of the manufacturing interest who under Louis Philippe had formed the broad basis of the dynastic opposition. Their interest is undoubtedly the reduction of the costs of production, hence reduction of the taxes that enter into production, hence reduction of the state debts whose interest enters into the taxes, hence the overthrow of the financial aristocracy.

In England – and the greatest French manufacturers are petty bourgeois compared with their English rivals – we really find the manufacturers, a Cobden, a Bright, at the head of the crusade against the bank and the stock-exchange aristocracy. Why not in France? In England industry predominates, in France agriculture. In England industry needs *free trade*, in France protective tariffs, the national monopoly alongside the other monopolies. French industry does not dominate French production; the French industrialists therefore do not dominate the French bourgeoisie. In order to assert their interest against the other fractions of the bourgeoisie, they cannot, like the English, place themselves at the head of the movement and at the same time push their class interest to an extreme; they must follow in the train of the revolution and serve interests that are opposed to the collective interests of their class. In February they had mistaken their position; February taught them a lesson. And who is more directly threatened by the workers than the employer, the industrial capitalist? The manufacturer therefore necessarily became in France the most fanatical member of the party of Order. The curtailment of his profit by finance, what is that compared with the abolition of profit by the proletariat?

In France the petty bourgeois does what normally the industrial bourgeois would have to do; the worker does what normally would be the task of the petty bourgeois; and the task of the worker, who solves it? Nobody. It is not solved in France, it is proclaimed in France. It is nowhere solved within the national walls; the class war within French society turns into a world war, in which the nations confront one another. The solution begins only at the moment when, through the world war, the proletariat is driven to the head of the people that dominates the world market, to the head of England. The revolution, which finds here not its end but its organisational beginning, is no short-winded revolution. The present generation resembles the Jews whom Moses leads through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer; it must perish, to make room for the people who are equal to a new world. Let us come back to Fould.

The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850. III. Consequences of 13 June 1849

On 14 November 1849 Fould mounted the tribune of the National Assembly and set forth his financial system: apologia for the old tax system! Retention of the wine tax! Withdrawal of Passy’s income tax!

Passy, too, was no revolutionary; he was an old minister of Louis Philippe. He belonged to the Puritans of the Dufaure clique and to the most intimate confidants of Teste, the scapegoat of the July monarchy. Passy, too, had praised the old tax system, recommended the retention of the wine tax, but at the same time he had torn the veil off the state deficit. He had declared the necessity of a new tax, the income tax, if one wanted to avoid state bankruptcy. Fould, who recommended state bankruptcy to Ledru Rollin, recommended the state deficit to the Legislative. He promised savings whose secret later came to light in that, for example, expenditure fell by 60 million and the floating debt rose by 200 million – juggling tricks in the grouping of the figures, in the presentation of the accounts, all of which finally boiled down to new loans.

Under Fould, alongside the other jealous bourgeois fractions, the financial aristocracy naturally did not step forward so shamelessly corrupt as under Louis Philippe. But for one thing, the system was the same: constant increase of the debts, disguising of the deficit. And step by step the old stock-exchange swindling emerged more undisguised. Proof: the law on the Avignon railway, the mysterious fluctuations of government securities, for a moment the talk of the day in all Paris, finally the abortive speculations of Fould and Bonaparte on the elections of 10 March.

With the official restoration of the financial aristocracy, the French people would soon again face a 24 February.

The Constituent Assembly, in an attack of misanthropy against its heiress, had abolished the wine tax for the year of our Lord 1850. With the abolition of old taxes, new debts could not be paid. Creton, a cretin of the party of Order, had already before the adjournment of the Legislative Assembly moved for the retention of the wine tax. Fould took up this motion in the name of the Bonapartist ministry, and on 20 December 1849, on the anniversary of the proclamation of Bonaparte as President, the National Assembly decreed the restoration of the wine tax.

The principal speaker for this restoration was no financier, it was the Jesuit chief Montalembert. His deduction was strikingly simple: The tax, that is the mother’s breast on which the government is suckled. The government, that is the instruments of repression, that is the organs of authority, that is the army, that is the police, that is the officials, the judges, the ministers, that is the priests. The attack on the tax, that is the anarchists’ attack on the sentinels of order, who protect the material and spiritual production of bourgeois society against the incursions of the proletarian Vandals. The tax, that is the fifth god, alongside property, the family, order and religion. And the wine tax is indisputably a tax, and moreover no ordinary one, but an ancient traditional one, a monarchical-minded one, a respectable tax. *Vive l’impôt des boissons! Three cheers and one more.*

The French peasant, when he paints the devil on the wall, paints him in the shape of the tax collector. From the moment Montalembert elevated the tax to a god, the peasant became godless, an atheist and threw himself into the arms of the devil, of the Socialists. The religion of order had trifled him away, the Jesuits had trifled him away, Bonaparte had trifled him away. 20 December 1849 had irrevocably compromised 20 December 1848. The “nephew of his uncle” was not the first of his family whom the wine tax struck, this tax which, in the words of Montalembert, scents the revolutionary storm. The real, the great Napoleon declared on St. Helena that the re-introduction of the wine tax had contributed more to his downfall than anything else, by alienating the peasants of the south of France from him. Already under Louis XIV the favourite of popular hatred (see the writings of Boisguillebert and Vauban) – abolished by the first revolution, Napoleon reintroduced it in 1808 in a modified form. When the Restoration entered France, not only the Cossacks trotted ahead of it, but also the promises of the abolition of the wine tax. The *gentilhommerie* naturally did not need to keep its word to the *gens taillable à merci et miséricorde*. 1830 promised the abolition of the wine tax. It was not its manner to do what it said, and to say what it did. 1848 promised the abolition of the wine tax, as it promised everything. The Constituent Assembly finally, which promised nothing, made, as mentioned, a testamentary disposition according to which the wine tax was to disappear on 1 January 1850. And just 10 days before 1 January 1850, the Legislative reintroduced it, so that the French people constantly chased after it and, when they had thrown it out of the door, saw it come in again through the window.

The popular hatred of the wine tax is explained by the fact that it unites in itself all the odiousness of the French tax system. The manner of its collection is odious, the manner of its distribution is aristocratic, for the tax rates are the same for the commonest as for the costliest wines. It therefore increases in geometric proportion as the wealth of the consumers decreases, an inverse progression...

The wine tax. It therefore directly provokes the poisoning of the working classes as a premium on adulterated and counterfeit wines. It reduces consumption by erecting octrois at the gates of all towns with more than 4,000 inhabitants and transforming each town into a foreign country with protective tariffs against French wine. The big wine merchants, and even more the small ones, the marchands de vins, the wine sellers, whose livelihood depends directly on the consumption of wine, are just so many declared opponents of the wine tax. And finally, by reducing consumption, the wine tax cuts off the market for production. While it makes the urban workers incapable of paying for wine, it makes the wine-growers incapable of selling it. And France numbers a wine-growing population of around 12 million. One therefore understands the hatred of the people in general, and one understands especially the fanaticism of the peasants against the wine tax. Moreover, they saw in its restoration no isolated, more or less accidental event. The peasants have a particular kind of historical tradition, handed down from father to son, and in this historical school it was whispered that every government, so long as it wants to cheat the peasants, promises the abolition of the wine tax, and as soon as it has cheated the peasants, maintains the wine tax or reintroduces it. By the wine tax the peasant tests the bouquet of the government, its tendency. The restoration of the wine tax on 20 December meant: Louis Bonaparte is like the others; but he was not like the others, he was a peasant invention, and in the petitions numbering millions of signatures against the wine tax they took back the votes they had given a year earlier to “the nephew of his uncle.”

The rural population, over two-thirds of the total French population, consists for the most part of so-called free landowners. The first generation, freed gratuitously from the feudal burdens by the Revolution of 1789, had | paid no price for the land. But the

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following generations paid, in the form of the price of land, what their semi-servile forefathers had paid in the form of rent, tithes, corvées, etc. The more the population grew on the one hand, and the more the division of the land increased on the other — the dearer became the price of the parcel, for with its smallness the extent of the demand for it increased. But in the same proportion in which the price rose that the peasant paid for the parcel, whether he bought it directly or whether he allowed it to be reckoned as capital by his co-heirs, in the same proportion rose necessarily the indebtedness of the peasant, i.e., the mortgage. The title of debt encumbering the land is called a mortgage, a pledge-note on the land. As on the medieval estate privileges accumulated, so on the modern parcel mortgages accumulate. On the other hand: under the regime of parcelling, the land is for its owner a mere instrument of production. Now in the same measure as the land is divided, its fertility decreases. The application of machinery to the land, the division of labour, the great means of improving the soil, such as the laying of drainage and irrigation canals, etc., become more and more impossible, while the false costs of cultivation increase in the same proportion as the division of the instrument of production itself. All this, irrespective of whether the possessor of the parcel possesses capital or not. But the more the division increases, the more does the piece of land with its most wretched inventory constitute the entire capital of the parcel-peasant, the more does capital investment in land cease, the more do the cotters lack land, money and education to apply the advances of agronomy, the more does the cultivation of the soil retrogress. Finally, the net yield decreases in the same proportion as the gross consumption grows, as the whole family of the peasant is kept away from other occupations by its possession and yet is not enabled to live from it.

In the same measure, therefore, as the population and with it the division of the land increases, in the same measure does the instrument of production, the land, become dearer and its fertility decrease, in the same measure does agriculture decay and the peasant become indebted. And what was effect becomes in turn cause. Each generation leaves the next more deeply indebted, each new generation begins under more unfavourable and harder conditions, mortgaging begets mortgaging, and when it becomes impossible for the peasant to offer his parcel as security for new debts, i.e., to burden it with new mortgages, he falls directly prey to usury, and the usurious interest rates become all the more enormous.

Thus it came about that the French peasant, in the form of interest on the mortgages encumbering the land, in the form of interest on un-mortgaged advances from the usurer, cedes to the capitalist not only the ground-rent, not only the industrial profit, in a word not only the entire net gain, but even a part of his wages, so that he sank to the level of the Irish tenant farmer — and all under the pretext of being a private proprietor.

This process was accelerated in France by the ever-growing burden of taxation and by the court costs, prompted partly directly by the formalities with which French legislation surrounds landed property, partly by the countless conflicts of the parcels that everywhere bound and intersect one another, partly by the litigious mania of the peasants, whose enjoyment of property is limited to the fanatical assertion of the imagined property, of the right of property.

According to a statistical statement of 1840, the gross product of French land amounted to 5,237,178,000 francs. From this 3,552,000,000 francs are deducted for the costs of cultivation, inclusive of the consumption of the working men. There remains a net product of 1,685,178,000 francs, from which 550 million for mortgage interest, 100 million for judicial officials, 350 million for taxes and 107 million for registration fees, stamp duty, mortgage registration fees, etc., are to be deducted. One third of the gross product remains, 578,178,000; distributed per head of the population, | not yet 25 francs net product. In this reckoning, of course, neither the extra-mortgage usury nor the costs for lawyers, etc., are included.

One understands the situation of the French peasants when the republic had added new burdens to their old ones. One sees that their exploitation is distinguished from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat only by the form. The exploiter is the same: capital. The individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants through mortgage and usury, the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through the state tax. The peasants’ title of property is the talisman by which capital until now bewitched them, the pretext under which it stirred them up against the industrial proletariat. Only the fall of capital can make the peasant rise, only an anti-capitalist, a proletarian government can break his economic misery, his social degradation. The constitutional republic, that is the dictatorship of his united exploiters; the social-democratic, the red republic, that is the dictatorship of his allies. And the balance rises or falls according to the votes which the peasant casts into the ballot box. He himself has to decide over his fate. — Thus spoke the socialists in pamphlets, in almanacs, in calendars, in leaflets of all kinds. This language became more comprehensible to him through the counter-writings of the Party of Order, which for its part turned to him, and, by the coarse exaggeration, by the brutal conception and presentation of the intentions and ideas of the socialists, struck the true peasant tone, and over-stimulated his lust for the forbidden fruit. But the most comprehensible language was spoken by the experiences themselves which the peasant class had made of the use of the suffrage, and by the disappointments that overwhelmed it in revolutionary haste, blow upon blow. Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

The gradual revolutionary change of the peasants manifested itself in various symptoms. It showed itself already in the elections to the Legislative Assembly,

it showed itself in the state of siege of the five departments bordering Lyon, it showed itself some months after 13 June in the election | of a Montagnard in place of the former President of the chambre introuvable by the department of the Gironde, it showed itself on 20 December 1849 in the election of a Red in place of a deceased Legitimist deputy in the department of the Gard, this promised land of the Legitimists, the scene of the most frightful atrocities against the Republicans in 1794 and 1795, the central seat of the terreur blanche of 1815, where Liberals and Protestants were publicly murdered. This revolutionising of the most stationary class appears most evidently after the reintroduction of the wine tax. The government measures and laws during January and February 1850 are directed almost exclusively against the departments and the peasants. The most striking proof of their progress.

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Hautpoul’s circular, by which the gendarme was appointed inquisitor of the prefect, of the sub-prefect and above all of the mayor, by which espionage was organised down into the sly corners of the most remote village community; the law against the schoolmasters, by which they, the capacities, the spokesmen, the educators and the interpreters of the peasant class were subjected to the arbitrary power of the prefects, they, the proletarians of the learned class, were chased like hunted game from one commune into another; the draft law against the maires, by which the sword of Damocles of dismissal was suspended over their heads and they, the presidents of the peasant communes, were placed at every moment opposite the President of the Republic and the Party of Order; the ordinance which transformed the seventeen military divisions of France into four pashaliks and bestowed the barracks and the bivouac on the French as a national salon; the education law, by which the Party of Order proclaimed the unconsciousness and the forcible stultification of France as its condition of existence under the regime of universal suffrage — what were all these laws and measures? Desperate attempts to reconquer the departments and the peasants of the departments for the Party of Order.

Considered as repression, pitiful means that broke the neck of their own purpose. The great measures, like the retention of the wine tax, of the 45 centimes tax, the scornful rejection of the peasants’ petitions for the reimbursement of the milliard, etc., all these legislative thunderbolts hit the peasant class only once, on the grand scale, from the central seat; the cited laws and measures made the attack and the resistance general, the daily talk of every cottage, they inoculated every village with the revolution, they localised and rusticalised the revolution.

On the other hand, do not these proposals of Bonaparte, their adoption by the National Assembly, prove the unity of the two powers of the constitutional republic insofar as it concerns the repression of anarchy, i.e., of all classes that rebel against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie? Had Soulouque not, immediately after his brusque message, assured the Legislative of his devotion to order through the immediately subsequent message of Carlier, that dirty-common caricature of Fouché, just as Louis Bonaparte himself was the flattened caricature of Napoleon?

The Education Act shows us the alliance of the young Catholics and the old Voltaireans. The rule of the united bourgeoisie, could it be anything other than the coalesced despotism of the Jesuitical Restoration and the freethinking July Monarchy? The weapons which one bourgeois fraction had distributed among the people against the other in their mutual struggle for supremacy, had they not to be wrested back from the people, since it now confronted their united dictatorship? Nothing outraged the Paris shopkeeper more than this coquettish display of Jesuitism, not even the rejection of the concordats à l’amiable.

Meanwhile, the collisions continued between the various fractions of the party of Order, as well as between the National Assembly and Bonaparte. Little pleased was the National Assembly that Bonaparte, immediately after his coup d’état, after procuring his own Bonapartist ministry, summoned before him the newly appointed prefects, invalids of the monarchy, and made their unconstitutional agitation for his re-election as President the condition of their office; that Carlier celebrated his inauguration with the dissolution of a Legitimist club; that Bonaparte founded a journal of his own, “Le Napoléon,” which revealed the secret lusts of the President to the public, while his ministers on the stage of the Legislative had to disavow them; little pleased it was with the defiant retention of the ministry in spite of its various votes of no confidence; little with the attempt to win the favour of the non-commissioned officers by a daily allowance of four sous, and the favour of the proletariat by a plagiarism from Eugène Sue’s Mystères, through an honourable loan bank; little, finally, with the impudence with which it had the ministers move the deportation of the remaining June insurgents to Algiers, in order to foist the unpopularity en gros upon the Legislative, while the President reserved popularity en détail for himself through isolated acts of pardon. Thiers let fall threatening words about “coups d’état” and “coups de tête,” and the Legislative avenged itself on Bonaparte by rejecting every legislative proposal he put forward in his own interest, and examining every one he proposed in the common interest with noisy suspicion, to see whether, by increasing the executive power, he sought to profit the personal power of Bonaparte. In a word, it avenged itself by the conspiracy of contempt.

The party of the Legitimists, for its part, saw with vexation the more capable Orleanists once again seizing almost all posts, and centralisation growing, while it sought its salvation in principle in decentralisation. And indeed. The counter-revolution centralised by force, i.e., it prepared the mechanism of the revolution. It even centralised the gold and silver of France in the Paris Bank through the forced circulation of banknotes, and thus created the ready war treasure of the revolution.

The Orleanists, finally, saw with vexation the emerging principle of legitimacy held up against their bastard principle, and themselves at every moment slighted and maltreated as a bourgeois mésalliance by their noble spouse.

Gradually we saw the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, the middle estates in general, step alongside the proletariat, driven into open opposition to the official republic, treated as its adversaries. Revolt against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the need for a change of society, adherence to democratic-republican institutions as its organs of movement, grouping around the proletariat as the decisive revolutionary power — these are the common characteristics of the so-called party of Social Democracy, the party of the Red Republic. This party of anarchy, as its adversaries christen it, is no less a coalition of different interests than the party of Order. From the smallest reform of the old social disorder to the overthrow of the old social order, from bourgeois liberalism to revolutionary terrorism, that far apart lie the extremes which form the starting-point and the end-point of the party of anarchy.

Abolition of protective tariffs! Socialism, for it attacks the monopoly of the industrial fraction of the party of Order. Regulation of the state budget! Socialism, for it attacks the monopoly of the financial fraction of the party of Order. Free admission of foreign meat and grain! Socialism, for it attacks the monopoly of the third fraction of the party of Order, large landed property. The demands of the Free Trade party, i.e., of the most advanced English bourgeois party, appear in France as so many socialist demands. Voltaireanism! Socialism, for it attacks a fourth fraction of the party of Order, the Catholic one. Freedom of the press, right of association, universal public education — Socialism, Socialism! They attack the overall monopoly of the party of Order.

So rapidly had the course of the revolution matured conditions that the friends of reform of all shades, that the most modest demands of the middle classes were forced to group themselves around the banner of the most extreme party of overthrow, around the red flag.

However manifold the socialism of the various great sections of the party of anarchy was, according to the economic conditions and the resulting total revolutionary needs of their class or class fraction, they coincide in one point, in proclaiming themselves the means of the emancipation of the proletariat and the emancipation of the latter as their goal. Deliberate deception on the part of some, self-deception on the part of the others, who present the world transformed according to their needs as the best world for all, as the realisation of all revolutionary demands and the abolition of all revolutionary collisions.

Beneath the fairly identical general socialist phrases of the party of anarchy lies concealed the socialism of the National, the Presse and the Siècle, which more or less consistently seeks to overthrow the rule of the financial aristocracy and to free industry and trade from their previous fetters. This is the socialism of industry, of trade and of agriculture, whose rulers in the party of Order disavow these interests in so far as they no longer coincide with their private monopolies. From this bourgeois socialism, which naturally, like every variety of socialism, rallies a section of the workers and petty bourgeoisie, is distinguished the actual, the petty-bourgeois socialism, socialism par excellence. Capital hunts this class mainly as creditor, it demands credit institutions; it crushes it through competition, it demands associations supported by the state; it overwhelms it through concentration, it demands progressive taxes, restrictions on inheritance, takeover of great works by the state and other measures forcibly to check the growth of capital. Since it dreams of the peaceful implementation of its socialism — except, perhaps, a short-day second February revolution — the coming historical process naturally appears to it as the application of systems which the thinkers of society, whether in company or as individual inventors, devise or have devised. Thus they become the eclectics or adepts of the existing socialist systems, of doctrinaire socialism, which was the theoretical expression of the proletariat only so long as it had not yet developed further into free historical self-movement.

While thus utopia, doctrinaire socialism, which subordinates the total movement to one of its moments, which puts the brain-work of the individual pedant in the place of communal, social production, and above all phantasmally conjures away the revolutionary struggle of the classes with its necessities through little tricks or great sentimentalities; while this doctrinaire socialism, which at bottom only idealises present-day society, takes a shadowless picture of it and seeks to enforce its ideal against its reality; while this socialism is handed over by the proletariat to the petty bourgeoisie; while the struggle of the different socialist chiefs among themselves brings out each of the so-called systems as a pretentious insistence on one of the transition points of the social upheaval against the others — the proletariat groups itself ever more around revolutionary socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie itself has invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as necessary point of transition to the abolition of class distinctions altogether, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that arise from these social conditions.

The scope of this presentation does not permit of developing this subject further.

We have seen: as in the party of Order the financial aristocracy necessarily stepped to the fore, so in the party of anarchy the proletariat. While the various classes, united into a revolutionary league, grouped themselves around the proletariat, while the departments became ever more uncertain and the Legislative Assembly itself ever more sullen towards the pretensions of the French Soulouque, the long-postponed and delayed by-elections for the proscribed Montagnards of June 13 drew near.

The government, despised by its enemies, maltreated and daily humiliated by its pretended friends, saw only one way out of the repulsive and untenable situation — an insurrection. An insurrection in Paris would have permitted it to proclaim the state of siege over Paris and the departments and thus to command the elections. On the other hand, the friends of order, faced by a government which had won the victory over anarchy, were compelled to make concessions if they did not wish to appear themselves as anarchists.

The government set to work. At the beginning of February 1850, provocations of the people by hacking down the trees of liberty. In vain. If the trees of liberty lost their place, the government itself lost its head and recoiled, frightened, before its own provocation. The National Assembly, however, received this clumsy attempt at emancipation by Bonaparte with icy mistrust. No more successful was the removal of the immortelle wreaths from the July Column. It gave a part of the army an occasion for revolutionary demonstrations, and the National Assembly an occasion for a more or less veiled vote of no confidence in the ministry. In vain the threat of the government press with the abolition of universal suffrage, the invasion of the Cossacks. In vain d’Hautpoul’s direct challenge to the Legislative to transfer the election to the street; in vain the announcement that the government would no longer confront the National Assembly if it did not receive the demanded reward for its devotion. Bonaparte sought precisely to embroil the Parliament, to set the legislative power and the executive power at each other’s throats. Did it not seem as though the party of Order, in order to translate the denial of order inversely into the rule of order, must annihilate its own general ruler, its own legislative emanation, the National Assembly, since the executive power counted as the real power of order?

...gave rise to revolutionary demonstrations and gave the National Assembly occasion for a more or less concealed vote of no confidence in the ministry. In vain the threat of the government press with the abolition of universal suffrage, with the invasion of the Cossacks. In vain d’Hautpoul’s direct challenge, right in the middle of the Legislative Assembly, to the Left to take to the streets, and his declaration that the government was ready to receive them. Hautpoul received nothing but a call to order from the president, and the party of Order, with quiet malice, allowed a deputy of the Left to mock Bonaparte’s usurpatory ambitions. In vain, finally, the prophecy of a revolution for the 24th of February. The government brought it about that the 24th of February was ignored by the people.

The proletariat allowed itself to be provoked into no new uprising, because it was on the point of making a revolution.

Undeterred by the government’s provocations, which only increased the general irritation against the existing state of things, the election committee, entirely under the influence of the workers, put forward three candidates for Paris: Deflotte, Vidal, and Carnot. Deflotte was a June deportee, amnestied through one of Bonaparte’s popularity-grabbing caprices; he was a friend of Blanqui, he had taken part in the attempt of the 15th of May. Vidal, known as a communist writer through his book “On the Distribution of Wealth,” formerly secretary to Louis Blanc in the Luxembourg Commission; Carnot, son of the *conventionnel* who had organised the victory, the least compromised member of the National party, Minister of Public Instruction in the Provisional Government and the Executive Commission, a living protest against the education law of the Jesuits through his democratic bill on popular education. These three candidates represented the three allied classes: at their head the June insurgent, the representative of the revolutionary proletariat; next to him the doctrinaire socialist, the representative of the socialist petty bourgeoisie; finally, the third, the representative of the republican bourgeois party, whose democratic formulas, in opposition to the party of Order, had acquired a socialist meaning and had long since lost their own meaning. This was a general coalition against the bourgeoisie and the government, as in February. But this time the proletariat was the head of the revolutionary league.

In spite of all efforts, the socialist candidates won. The army itself voted for the June insurgent against its own war minister, Lahitte. The party of Order was thunderstruck. The departmental elections did not console them. They produced a majority of Montagnards.

The election of March 10, 1850! It was the retraction of June 1848. The massacrers and deporters of the June insurgents returned to the National Assembly, but bowed down, at the heels of the deportees and with the latter’s principles on their lips. It was the retraction of June 13, 1849. The Montagne, proscribed by the National Assembly, returned to the National Assembly, but as advanced trumpeters of the revolution, no longer as its commanders. It was the retraction of December 10. Napoleon had failed with his minister Lahitte. The parliamentary history of France knows only one analogous event: the failure of d’Haussez, minister of Charles X, in 1830. The election of March 10, 1850, was finally the cassation of the election of May 13, which had given the majority to the party of Order. The election of March 10 protested against the majority of May 13. March 10 was a revolution. Behind the ballot papers lie the paving stones.

“The vote of March 10 is war,” exclaimed Segur d’Aguesseau, one of the most advanced members of the party of Order.

With March 10, 1850, the constitutional republic enters a new phase, the phase of its dissolution. The different fractions of the majority are once more united among themselves and with Bonaparte; they are again the saviours of order, he again their neutral man. If they remember that they are royalists, this only happens out of despair at the possibility of the bourgeois republic; if he remembers that he is a pretender, this only happens because he despairs of remaining president.

Bonaparte answers the election of Deflotte, the June insurgent, at the command of the party of Order, by the appointment of Baroche as Minister of the Interior, Baroche, the prosecutor of Blanqui and Barbès, of Ledru-Rollin and Guinard. The Legislative Assembly answers the election of Carnot by the adoption of the education law, the election of Vidal by the suppression of the socialist press. Through the blasts of its press, the party of Order seeks to trumpet away its own fear. “The sword is sacred,” cries one of its organs, “the defenders of order must take the offensive against the red party,” another, “between socialism and society there exists a duel to the death, a restless, merciless war; in this duel of desperation one or the other must perish; if society does not destroy socialism, socialism will destroy society,” crows a third cockerel of order. Throw up the barricades of order, the barricades of religion, the barricades of the family! An end must be made of the 127,000 voters of Paris! A St. Bartholomew’s night for the socialists! And for a moment the party of Order believes in its own certainty of victory.

Most fanatically of all, their organs rage against the “shopkeepers of Paris.” The June insurgent of Paris elected as representative by the shopkeepers of Paris! that means a second June 1848 is impossible, that means a second June 13, 1849 is impossible, that means the moral influence of capital is broken, that means the bourgeois assembly now represents only the bourgeoisie, that means large property is lost, because its vassal, small property, seeks its salvation in the camp of the propertyless.

The party of Order naturally returns to its inevitable platitude. “More repression!” it cries, “tenfold repression!” but its repressive power has decreased tenfold, while the resistance has increased a hundredfold. The chief instrument of repression itself, the army, must it not be repressed? And the party of Order utters its last word: “the iron ring of a suffocating legality must be broken. The constitutional republic is impossible. We must fight with our true weapons, we have fought the revolution with its own weapons and on its own terrain since February 1848, we have accepted its institutions, the Constitution is a fortress that protects the besiegers, not the besieged! By smuggling ourselves into sacred Ilion in the belly of the Trojan horse, we have, unlike our forefathers the Grecs, not conquered the enemy city, but made ourselves prisoners.”

The foundation of the Constitution, however, is universal suffrage. The destruction of universal suffrage—that is the last word of the party of Order, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Universal suffrage gave them their due on May 4, 1848, on December 20, 1848, on May 13, 1849, on July 8, 1849. Universal suffrage gave itself its own due on March 10, 1850. The rule of the bourgeoisie as the product and result of universal suffrage, as the express act of the sovereign will of the people—that is the meaning of the bourgeois Constitution. But from the moment the content of this suffrage, of this sovereign will, is no longer the rule of the bourgeoisie, does the Constitution still have a meaning? Is it not the duty of the bourgeoisie to regulate the suffrage so that it wills what is reasonable, its own rule? Does not universal suffrage, by constantly annulling the existing state power and creating it anew out of itself, annul all stability, call every existing power into question at every moment, annihilate authority, threaten to raise even anarchy to the status of authority? After March 10, 1850, who could still doubt?

The bourgeoisie, by rejecting universal suffrage, with which it had hitherto draped itself, from which it derived its omnipotence, unblushingly confesses: “Our dictatorship has hitherto existed by the will of the people, it must now be consolidated against the will of the people.” And, consistently, it seeks its supports no longer in France, but outside, abroad, in invasion.

With invasion, a second Coblenz that has set up its seat in France itself, it arouses all national passions against itself. With the attack on universal suffrage it gives the new revolution a general pretext, and the revolution requires such a pretext. Every particular pretext would split the fractions of the revolutionary league apart and bring their differences into prominence. The general pretext stuns the semi-revolutionary classes, it allows them to delude themselves about the determinate character of the coming revolution, about the consequences of their own act. Every revolution needs a banquet question. Universal suffrage—that is the banquet question of the new revolution.

But the coalesced bourgeois factions are already condemned as they flee from the only possible form of their united power, from the mightiest and most complete form of their class rule, the constitutional republic, back to the subordinate, incomplete, weaker form of monarchy. They resemble that old man who, in order to regain his youthful strength, fetched out his childish garment and sought to squeeze his withered limbs into it. Their republic had only one merit: to be the hothouse of the revolution.

March 10, 1850 bears the inscription:
*Après moi le déluge.*