Karl Marx
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

|[i]] The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte

by
Karl Marx.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848–51 for the Montagne of 1793–95, and the London constable with the first dozen lieutenants in debt he can lay hands on for the little corporal with his round table of marshals! The Eighteenth Brumaire of the idiot for the Eighteenth Brumaire of the genius! And the same caricature in the circumstances under which the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire is put out. The first time France on the brink of bankruptcy, this time Bonaparte himself on the brink of the debtors’ gaol; then the coalition of the great powers on the frontiers—this time the coalition of Ruge-Darasz in England, of Kinkel-Brentano in America; then a St. Bernard to be crossed, this time a company of gendarmes to be sent over the Jura; then more than a Marengo to be won, this time the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Andrew to be earned and the respect of the “Berliner National-Zeitung” to be lost.

People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem to be revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789–1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793–95. In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can express himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recollection of the old and forgets his native tongue in it.

When considering those conjurings-up of the dead in world history, a salient difference reveals itself at once. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of releasing and setting up modern bourgeois society. The first ones knocked the feudal basis to pieces and mowed down the feudal heads that had grown on it. The other created within France the conditions under which alone free competition could be developed, parceled landed property exploited and the unchained industrial productive power of the nation employed, and beyond the French borders he swept away the feudal formations everywhere, so far as was necessary to furnish bourgeois society in France with an appropriate, up-to-date setting on the European continent. Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian colossi vanished and with them resurrected Romanness—the Brutuses, Gracchuses, Publicolas, the tribunes, the senators and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality had begotten its true interpreters and spokesmen in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots; its real military leaders sat behind the office desk, and the pork-head Louis XVIII was its political chief. Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in the peaceful struggle of competition, it no longer comprehended that the ghosts of the Roman period had nursed its cradle. But unheroic as bourgeois society is, yet heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and battles of nations had been needed to bring it into the world. And its gladiators found in the classically austere traditions of the Roman republic the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their passion at the height of the great historical tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution. When the real aim was reached, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.

The awakening of the dead in those revolutions served, therefore, to glorify the new struggles, not to parody the old; to exaggerate the given task in the imagination, not to flee from its solution in reality; to find the spirit of the revolution again, not to make its ghost walk again.

From 1848 to 1851 only the ghost of the old revolution walked, from Marrast, the républicain en gants jaunes, who disguised himself as the old Bailly, right down to the adventurer, who hides his trivially repulsive features under the iron death-mask of Napoleon. An entire people, which had imagined that by means of a revolution it had imparted to itself an accelerated power of motion, suddenly finds itself set back into a dead epoch, and lest there be any mistake about the relapse, the old dates rise up again, the old chronology, the old names, the old edicts, which had long since become antiquarian learning, and the old minions, who had long seemed decayed. The nation feels like that lunatic Englishman in Bedlam who imagines he is living in the time of the old Pharaohs and daily bewails the hard services he has to perform as a gold-digger in the Ethiopian mines, immured in this subterranean prison, a sparsely shining lamp fastened on his own head, behind him the slave overseer with a long whip and at the exits a medley of barbarian mercenaries who understand neither the forced labourers in the mines nor one another, because they speak no common language. “And all this is expected of me,” sighs the lunatic Englishman, “of me, a freeborn Briton, to make gold for the old Pharaohs.” “To pay the debts of the Bonaparte family,” sighs the French nation. The Englishman, as long as he was in his right mind, could not get rid of the fixed idea of making gold. The Frenchmen, as long as they were revolutionising, could not get rid of the Napoleonic memory, as the election of 10 December proved. They hankered back out of the dangers of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt, and 2 December 1851 was the answer. They have not only the caricature of the old Napoleon, they have the old Napoleon himself, caricatured as he must appear in the middle of the nineteenth century.

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

The February Revolution was a surprise, a taking by storm of the old society, and the people proclaimed this unhoped-for coup de main as a world-historical deed by which the new era was opened. On 2 December the February Revolution is spirited away by the volte-face of a false player, and what appears to be overthrown is no longer the monarchy, but the liberal concessions that were wrested from it through centuries of struggle. Instead of society having won itself a new content, it seems only that the state has returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple rule of sabre and of cowl. Thus to the coup de main of February 1848 the coup de tête of December 1851 replies. Easy come, easy go. In the meantime the interval has not passed unused. French society has, during the years 1848–1851, made up for the studies and experiences that, in a regular, school-like course of development, would have had to precede the February Revolution, if it was to be more than a shaking of the surface. Society seems now to have fallen back behind its point of departure; in truth it has first to create for itself the revolutionary point of departure, the situation, the relations, the conditions under which alone the modern revolution becomes serious.

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outbid one another; people and things seem set in fiery diamonds; ecstasy is the spirit of every day; but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long hangover seizes society before it learns soberly to appropriate the results of its period of storm and stress. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the half-heartedness, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again more gigantic against them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until the situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out:

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Hier ist die Rose, hier tanze!

Every tolerable observer, moreover, even if he had not followed the course of French development step by step, must have suspected that an unheard-of disgrace was in store for the revolution. It was enough to listen to the smug yelps of victory with which messieurs the democrats congratulated one another by turns on the merciful effects of 2 May 1852. In their heads 2 May 1852 had become a fixed idea, a dogma—like the day on which Christ was to reappear and the millennium begin, in the heads of the chiliasts. As always, weakness had taken refuge in faith in miracles, believed it had vanquished the enemy by conjuring him away in fantasy, and lost all understanding of the present in inactive glorification of the future that awaited it and of the deeds it had in petto but merely did not yet wish to bring to market. Those heroes who seek to refute their proven inability by mutually bestowing their pity and banding together into a crowd had packed their bundles, pocketed their laurels in advance, and were just then busy discounting, on the exchange, the republics in partibus for which, in all the stillness of their unassuming temperaments, they had already prudently organised the government personnel. 2 December smote them like a bolt from the blue, and the peoples who in periods of pusillanimous depression are happy to have their inner fears drowned out by the loudest screamers will perhaps have convinced themselves that the times are past when the cackling of geese could save the Capitol.

The constitution, the national assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the tribune, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the whole of literature, the political names and intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté, égalité, fraternité and 2 May 1852—all has vanished like a phantasmagoria before the exorcising formula of a man whom his enemies themselves do not pass off as a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, so that it could make its testament with its own hand before the eyes of the whole world and declare, in the name of the people itself: All that exists is worth perishing.

It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken by surprise. A nation, and a woman, are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who comes along has been able to do them violence and appropriate them. The riddle is not solved by such turns of phrase; it is only formulated differently. It would remain to explain how a nation of 36 millions can be surprised by three vulgar knights of industry and led off unresisting into captivity.

Let us recapitulate in general outline the phases the French revolution ran through from 24 February 1848 to December 1851.

Three main periods are unmistakable: the February period; 4 May 1848 to 28 May 1849, the period of the constitution of the republic or of the constituent national assembly; 28 May 1849 to 2 December 1851, the period of the constitutional republic or of the legislative national assembly.

The first period, from 24 February—the overthrow of Louis Philippe—to 4 May 1848, the meeting of the constituent assembly, the actual February period, may be called the prologue of the revolution. Its character expressed itself officially in the fact that the government it improvised declared itself to be provisional, and, like the government, everything that was urged, attempted, or enunciated during this period put itself forward as merely provisional. Nobody and nothing ventured to claim the right of existence and of real deed for itself. All the elements which had prepared or determined the revolution—dynastic opposition, republican bourgeoisie, democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie, and social-democratic working class—found their place provisionally in the February government.

It could not be otherwise. The February days originally aimed at an electoral reform that was to widen the circle of the politically privileged within the possessing class itself and to overthrow the exclusive rule of the financial aristocracy. When, however, it came to a real conflict, the people mounted the barricades, the national guard held back passively, the army offered no serious resistance, and the monarchy fled, the republic appeared to be self-evident. Each party interpreted it in its own sense. Wrested by the proletariat, arms in hand, it imprinted its stamp upon the republic and proclaimed it a social republic. Thus the general content of the modern revolution was indicated, a content which, as could not be otherwise in the prologue of the drama, stood in the strangest contradiction to everything that could immediately be set to work, with the material at hand, the stage of education attained by the mass, given the existing circumstances and relations. On the other hand, the claims of all the other elements that had co-operated in the February revolution were recognised in the lion’s share they received in the government. In no period, therefore, do we find a more motley mixture of high-flown phrases and factual uncertainty and helplessness, of more enthusiastic striving for innovation and more thorough-going domination of the old routine, of more apparent harmony of the whole of society and deeper estrangement of the elements of which it is composed. While the Paris proletariat was still revelling in the sight of the great perspective that had opened up for it and indulged in seriously meant discussions on social problems, the old powers of society had grouped themselves, gathered, deliberated, and found an unexpected support in the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty bourgeois, who all rushed at once onto the political stage after the barriers of the July monarchy had fallen.

The second period, from 4 May 1848 to the end of May 1849, is the period of the constitution, of the founding of the bourgeois republic. Immediately after the February days, not only had the dynastic opposition been surprised by the republicans, and the republicans by the socialists, but all France by Paris. The national assembly, which met on 4 May 1848, issuing from the elections of the whole nation, represented the whole nation. It was a living protest against the presumptions of the February days and was supposed to reduce the results of the revolution to the bourgeois measure. In vain the Paris proletariat, which immediately grasped the character of this national assembly, attempted, a few days after its meeting, on 15 May, violently to deny its existence, to dissolve it, to disperse again into its individual constituents the organic form in which the reacting spirit of the nation threatened it. 15 May is known to have had no other result than to remove Blanqui and his comrades, i.e., the real leaders of the proletarian party, the revolutionary communists, from the public stage for the whole duration of the cycle we are considering.

Upon the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, only the bourgeois republic can follow; that is to say, if a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled under the name of the king, now the whole of the bourgeoisie will rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian follies that must be put an end to. To this declaration of the constituent national assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the financial aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpenproletariat organised as mobile guard, the intellectual luminaries, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood no one but itself. Over 3,000 insurgents were cut down after the victory, 15,000 transported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat recedes into the background of the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on each occasion, as soon as the movement seems to take a new run, but with ever weaker expenditure of force and ever smaller result. As soon as one of the social strata lying above it gets into revolutionary ferment, it enters into an alliance with it and thus shares all the defeats which the different parties suffer one after another. But these subsequent blows become ever weaker, the more they are distributed over the whole surface of society. Its more important leaders in the assembly and in the press fall victim to the courts one after another, and ever more ambiguous figures come to the fore. In part it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations—into a movement, in other words, in which it renounces the aim of revolutionising the old world with its own large collective means, and seeks rather to accomplish its redemption behind the back of society, privately, within the narrow limits of its own conditions of existence, and therefore necessarily founders. It seems unable to rediscover revolutionary greatness in itself or to win new energy from the connections newly entered into, until all the classes against which it fought in June lie prostrate alongside it. But at least it succumbs with the honours of the great world-historic struggle; not only France, the whole of Europe trembles before the June earthquake, while the subsequent defeats of the higher classes are so cheaply bought that they require the insolent exaggeration of the victorious party to pass as events at all, and become the more ignominious the further the defeated party is removed from the proletarian one.

The defeat of the June insurgents had, it is true, prepared and levelled the terrain on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and erected; but at the same time it had shown that in Europe the question at issue is other than “republic or monarchy.” It had revealed that bourgeois republic here signifies the unrestricted despotic rule of one class over other classes. It had proved that in countries of old civilisation, with a developed order of classes, with modern conditions of production, and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved through centuries of work, the republic in general means only the revolutionary form of destruction of bourgeois society, and not its conservative form of development, as in the United States of North America, for example, where classes certainly already exist but have not yet become fixed, but are in constant flux, continually exchanging their component elements and ceding them to one another; where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, compensate rather for the relative shortage of heads and hands; and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has a new world to appropriate, has left neither time nor occasion to abolish the old spirit world.

All classes and parties had united during the June Days in the party of order against the proletarian class, as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from “the enemies of society”. They had issued the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order”, as passwords to their army and cried to the counter-revolutionary crusade: “In this sign thou shalt conquer!” From that moment, whenever any of the numerous parties that had rallied under this sign against the June insurgents try to hold the revolutionary battlefield in their own class interest, they are overthrown by the cry: “Property, family, religion, order!” Society is saved as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as an exclusive interest is asserted against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the shallowest democracy, is at once punished as an “attack upon society” and stigmatised as “socialism”. And finally, the high priests of the “religion of order” themselves are kicked off their Pythian tripods, fetched from their beds in the dead of night, put into prison vans, flung into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouth is sealed, their pen broken, their law rent asunder in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Order-fanatical bourgeois are shot down on their balconies by drunken soldiery, their domestic sanctuary is desecrated, their houses are bombarded for pastime — in the name of property, of the family, of religion and of order. The scum of bourgeois society finally forms the holy phalanx of order, and the hero Crapülinsky marches into the Tuileries as the “saviour of society”.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – II

I.

Let us pick up the thread of the development once again.

The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June Days is the history of the rule and the dissolution of the republican bourgeois fraction, that fraction known under the names of tricolour republicans, pure republicans, political republicans, formalist republicans, etc.

Under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe they had formed the official republican opposition and hence an acknowledged component of the political world of that time. They had their representatives in the chambers and a considerable sphere of influence in the press. Their Paris organ, the *National*, was considered, in its way, as respectable as the *Journal des Débats*. Their character corresponded to this position under the constitutional monarchy. It was not a fraction of the bourgeoisie held together by great common interests and delimited by specific conditions of production. It was a coterie of republican-minded bourgeois, writers, lawyers, officers and officials, whose influence rested on the personal antipathies of the country against Louis Philippe, on memories of the old Republic, on the republican faith of a number of enthusiasts, but above all on French nationalism, whose hatred of the Vienna treaties and of the alliance with England they kept constantly awake. A large part of the following which the *National* possessed under Louis Philippe it owed to this concealed imperialism, which consequently later, under the Republic, could confront it as a destructive competitor in the person of Louis Bonaparte. It fought the financial aristocracy, as did the whole of the rest of the bourgeois opposition. The polemic against the budget, which in France is closely connected with the fight against the financial aristocracy, afforded too cheap a popularity and too rich a supply of material for puritanical leading articles not to be exploited. The industrial bourgeoisie was grateful to it for its slavish defence of the French protectionist system, which it, however, adopted on grounds more national than politico-economic; the bourgeoisie as a whole was grateful for its virulent denunciations of communism and socialism. For the rest, the party of the *National* was purely republican, that is, it demanded a republican instead of a monarchical form of bourgeois rule, and above all its lion’s share of that rule. It was by no means clear about the conditions of this transformation. On the other hand, what was as clear as daylight to it, and was publicly declared at the reform banquets in the last period of Louis Philippe, was its unpopularity with the democratic petty bourgeois and, in particular, with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans – as pure republicans are wont – stood already on the point of contenting themselves for the time being with a regency of the Duchess of Orleans, when the February Revolution broke out and assigned their best-known representatives a place in the provisional government. They naturally enjoyed from the outset the confidence of the bourgeoisie and a majority in the Constituent National Assembly. From the Executive Commission, which this National Assembly formed on assembling, they immediately excluded the socialist elements of the provisional government, and the party of the *National* took advantage of the outbreak of the June insurrection to dismiss the Executive Commission as well, thereby ridding themselves of their closest rivals, the petty-bourgeois or democratic republicans (Ledru-Rollin etc.). Cavaignac, the general of the bourgeois-republican party, who commanded the June battle, stepped into the place of the Executive Commission with a sort of dictatorial power. Marrast, former editor-in-chief of the *National*, became the perpetual president of the Constituent National Assembly, and the ministries, as well as all the other important posts, fell to the pure republicans.

The republican bourgeois fraction, which had long regarded itself as the legitimate heir of the July Monarchy, thus found itself surpassed in its ideal, but it attained power, not, as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through an insurrection of the proletariat against capital, laid low with grapeshot. What it had imagined as the most revolutionary event came to pass in reality as the most counter-revolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life.

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

The new constitution was at bottom only the republicanised edition of the constitutional charter of 1830. The narrow electoral qualification of the July Monarchy, which excluded even a large part of the bourgeoisie from political rule, was incompatible with the existence of the bourgeois republic. The February Revolution had at once proclaimed direct universal suffrage in place of this qualification. The bourgeois republicans could not undo this event. They had to content themselves with adding the restrictive provision of a six months’ domicile at the polling place. The old organisation of the administration, of the municipal system, of the judiciary, of the army, etc., remained intact, or, where the constitution altered it, the change concerned the table of contents, not the content, the name, not the thing.

The inevitable general staff of the freedoms of 1848 – personal liberty, freedom of the press, of speech, of association, of assembly, of education and of religion, etc. – received a constitutional uniform that made them invulnerable. Each of these freedoms is proclaimed to be the absolute right of the French citoyen, but always accompanied by the marginal gloss to the effect that it is unlimited in so far as it is not restricted by the “equal rights of others and the public safety”, or by “laws” intended to mediate precisely this harmony of the individual freedoms with one another and with the public safety. For example: “Citizens have the right to associate, to assemble peaceably and unarmed, to petition and to express their opinions through the press or in any other way. The enjoyment of these rights has no other limit than the equal rights of others and public safety.” (Chapter II of the French Constitution, § 8.) – “Education is free. The freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the conditions fixed by law and under the supreme supervision of the state.” (Ibid., § 9.) – “The dwelling of every citizen is inviolable except in the forms prescribed by law.” (Chapter I, § 3.) And so on and so forth. – The constitution, therefore, constantly refers to future organic laws that are to put those marginal glosses into effect and to regulate the enjoyment of these unrestricted freedoms in such a way that they collide neither with one another nor with public safety. And later these organic laws were called into being by the friends of order, and all those freedoms were so regulated that the bourgeoisie, in enjoying them, finds no clash with the equal rights of the other classes. Where it forbids “the others” these freedoms entirely, or permits their enjoyment under conditions that are just so many police snares, this is always done only in the interest of “public safety”, i.e. the safety of the bourgeoisie, as the constitution prescribes. Consequently, both sides subsequently appeal to the constitution with full right: the friends of order, who abolished all those freedoms, as well as the democrats, who demanded them all back. For each paragraph of the constitution contains its own antithesis, its own Upper and Lower House, namely, in the general phrase, freedom, in the marginal gloss, the annulment of freedom. So long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual execution was prevented – by legal means, of course – the constitutional existence of freedom remained intact, untouched, no matter how much its common existence might be beaten to death.

This Constitution, made inviolable in so ingenious a manner, was, however, like Achilles, vulnerable at one point – not at the heel, but at the head, or rather at the two heads in which it culminated – the legislative assembly on the one hand, the President on the other. One has only to scan the Constitution to find that the paragraphs defining the relationship of the President to the legislative assembly are the only absolute, positive, uncontradictory, undistortable ones it contains. For here it was a question of ensuring the security of the bourgeois republicans. Sections 45–70 of the Constitution are so worded that the National Assembly can remove the President constitutionally, while the President can only remove the National Assembly unconstitutionally, only by removing the Constitution itself. Here, therefore, it challenges its own violent destruction. It does not merely sanctify the separation of powers, like the Charter of 1830, but extends it to an intolerable contradiction. The play of constitutional powers, as Guizot called the parliamentary squabble between the legislative and executive power, plays in the Constitution of 1848 constantly va banque. On the one hand, 750 representatives of the people elected by universal suffrage and re-eligible, forming an uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National Assembly enjoying legislative omnipotence, ultimately deciding war, peace and commercial treaties, alone possessing the right of amnesty, and by its permanence continually holding the foreground of the stage. On the other hand, the President, with all the attributes of royal power, still increased by his right to appoint and dismiss his ministers independently of the National Assembly, all the means of the executive power in his hands, distributing all posts and thereby deciding, in France at least, over 1½ million existences, for so many depend on the 500,000 officials and officers of all ranks – the entire armed force behind him, endowed with the privilege of pardoning individual criminals, suspending National Guards, dismissing, in agreement with the Council of State, the general, cantonal and municipal councils elected by the citizens, the initiative and direction of all treaties with foreign powers reserved to him, not constantly exposed, like the Assembly, on the boards and in the critically vulgar light of day, but leading a hidden life in the Elysian fields, and with all this having Article 45 of the Constitution before his eyes and in his heart, which daily cries out to him: “Frère, il faut mourir.” “Thy power ends on the second Sunday of the lovely month of May in the fourth year of thy election! Then the glory is at an end, the piece is not played twice, and if thou hast debts, see to it betimes that thou payest them off with the 600,000 francs thrown at thee by the Constitution, unless perchance thou preferrest to march to Clichy on the second Monday of the lovely month of May!”

While the Constitution thus vests all factual powers in the President, it seeks to secure moral power for the National Assembly. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to create a moral power by legal paragraphs, the Constitution here again cancels itself, in that it has the President elected by direct suffrage by all the French. Whereas the votes of France are split up among the 750 members of the National Assembly, they are concentrated here, on the contrary, upon the one individual. Whereas each individual representative of the people represents only this or that party, this or that town, this or that bridgehead, or even only the necessity of electing some seven hundred and fiftieth person of no matter what sort, in which neither the cause nor the man is very carefully examined, He is the Elect of the Nation, and the act of his election is the great trump card which the sovereign people plays once every four years. The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical, but the elected President in a personal, relation to the nation. The National Assembly indeed exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President the national spirit incarnates itself. He possesses a sort of divine right in relation to it; he is by the grace of the people.

Thetis, the sea goddess, had prophesied to Achilles that he would die in the bloom of youth. The Constitution, which has its weak spot, like Achilles, also had its presentiment, like Achilles, that it must depart by an early death. It sufficed for the constituting pure republicans to cast a glance from the cloud-heaven of their ideal republic into the profane world to perceive how the arrogance of the royalists, the Bonapartists, the democrats, the communists, and their own discredit daily increased in the same measure as they approached the completion of their great legislative work of art, without Thetis having to leave the sea and communicate the secret to them. They sought to outwit destiny by constitutional cunning through Section 111 of the Constitution, according to which any proposal for revision of the Constitution must be voted on in three successive debates, between which a whole month must always elapse, by at least three-quarters of the votes, it being further provided that not fewer than 500 members take part in the National Assembly. Thus they only made the impotent attempt, even as a parliamentary minority – as which they already prophetically saw themselves in their mind’s eye – to exercise a power which, at this moment when they disposed of the parliamentary majority and all the means of the governmental power, was daily slipping more and more from their weak hands.

Finally, the Constitution, in a melodramatic paragraph, entrusts itself “to the vigilance and the patriotism of the whole French people, as well as of every individual Frenchman,” after having previously, in another paragraph, entrusted the “vigilant” and “patriotic” to the tender, highly penal attention of the High Court, “haute cour,” specially invented by it.

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

While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy spinning out, discussing and voting on this Constitution, Cavaignac outside the Assembly maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of Paris was the midwife of the Constituent Assembly in its republican birth-pangs. If the Constitution was later put out of the world by bayonets, one must not forget that it was likewise by bayonets – and bayonets turned against the people, at that – protected in the womb and had to be brought into the world by bayonets. The ancestors of the “honest republicans” had their symbol, the tricolour, make the tour of Europe. They for their part also made an invention which of itself made its way across the whole continent, but returned to France with ever-renewed love, until it has now acquired citizen’s rights in half of its departments – the state of siege. An excellent invention, periodically applied in every subsequent crisis in the course of the French Revolution. But barracks and bivouac, which were thus periodically laid on the head of French society to compress its brain and reduce it to silence; sabre and musket, which were periodically made to judge and administer, to guard and censor, to discharge police duties and play night-watchman; moustache and uniform, which were periodically trumpeted forth as the highest wisdom of society and as the saviour of society – were not barracks and bivouac, sabre and musket, moustache and uniform bound finally to hit upon the idea of rather saving society once and for all, by proclaiming their own regime as supreme and freeing bourgeois society entirely from the care of governing itself? Barracks and bivouac, sabre and musket, moustache and uniform were all the more bound to hit upon this idea, as they could then expect better ready cash for their enhanced merit, whereas in the merely periodical state of siege and the temporary salvation of society at the behest of this or that bourgeois faction little solid result fell to them except a few dead and wounded and a few friendly bourgeois grimaces. Should not the military at last, in its own interest and for its own interest, play the state of siege and at the same time besiege the bourgeois bourses? By the way, it should not be forgotten, let it be noted in passing, that Colonel Bernard, the same president of the military commission who, under Cavaignac, helped to deport 15,000 insurgents without trial, is at this moment again active at the head of the military commissions operating in Paris.

While the honest, the pure republicans laid out with the state of siege in Paris the nursery in which the praetorians of 2 December 1851 were to grow up, they deserve, on the other hand, the praise that, instead of exaggerating the national sentiment as under Louis Philippe, now, when they had command of the national power, they rather renounced it and, instead of conquering Italy for themselves, let it be reconquered by Austrians and Neapolitans.

Louis Bonaparte’s election as President on 10 December 1848 put an end to the dictatorship of Cavaignac and to the Constituent Assembly.

In Section 44 of the Constitution it states: “The President of the French Republic must never have lost his quality as a French citizen.” The first President of the French Republic, L. N. Bonaparte, had not only lost his quality as a French citizen, had not only been an English special constable, he was even a naturalised Swiss.

I have developed the significance of the election of 10 December elsewhere. I shall not return to it here. Suffice it to note here that it was a reaction of the peasants, who had had to bear the costs of the February revolution, against the other classes of the nation – a reaction of the country against the town. It met with great approval in the army, to which the republicans of the “National” had brought neither glory nor extra pay, among the big bourgeoisie, who hailed Bonaparte as a bridge to monarchy, among the proletarians and petty bourgeois, who hailed him as a scourge for Cavaignac. I shall later find occasion to go into the relationship of the peasants to the French revolution in greater detail.

The epoch from 20 December 1848 to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in May 1849 comprises the history of the downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After they had founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat from the terrain and for the time being reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence, they are themselves pushed aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which rightly seizes this republic as its own property. This big bourgeoisie, however, was royalist. One part of it, the great landowners, had ruled under the Restoration and was therefore Legitimist. The other, the financial aristocracy and big industrialists, had ruled under the July monarchy and was therefore Orleanist. The great dignitaries...

The chiefs of the army, the university, the church, the bar, the academy and the press were distributed on both sides, albeit in different proportions. Here in the bourgeois republic, which bore the name neither of Bourbon nor of Orleans but the name of Capital, they had found the state form under which they could jointly rule. Already the June insurrection had united them into the “Party of Order”. Now it was a matter, first of all, of removing the coterie of bourgeois republicans who still held the seats of the National Assembly. Just as brutally as these pure republicans had asserted physical force against the people, just as craven, faint-hearted, spiritless, broken, incapable of fighting did they now retreat when it was a question of asserting their republicanism and their legislative right against the executive power and the royalists. I need not here recount the ignominious history of their dissolution. It was a passing away, not a perishing. Their history has played itself out for ever, and in the following period they figure, whether inside or outside the Assembly, only as memories, memories that seem to come alive again whenever it is again a question of the mere name of Republic and whenever the revolutionary conflict threatens to sink to the lowest level. I note in passing that the journal which gave this party its name, the National, converted to socialism in the subsequent period.

The period of the constituting or founding of the French Republic therefore fell into three epochs: 4 May to 24 June 1848, struggle of all the classes and class appendages united in February under the leadership of the bourgeois republicans against the proletariat, frightful defeat of the proletariat; 25 June 1848 to 10 December 1848, rule of the bourgeois republicans, drafting of the constitution, state of siege in Paris, dictatorship of Cavaignac; 20 December 1848 to end of May 1849, struggle of Bonaparte and the Party of Order with the republican Constituante, defeat of the latter, downfall of the bourgeois republicans.

Before we conclude with this period, we must cast a backward glance at the two powers which lived in conjugal relations from 20 December 1848 until the exit of the Constituante, one of which annihilated the other on 2 December 1851. We mean Louis Bonaparte on one side and the party of the coalesced royalists, of order, of the grand bourgeoisie on the other. On acceding to his presidency, Bonaparte at once formed a ministry of the Party of Order, at the head of which he placed Odilon Barrot, nota bene the old leader of the most liberal fraction of the parliamentary bourgeoisie. Monsieur Barrot had at last captured the ministry whose ghost had haunted him since 1830, and what is more, the presidency of that ministry; but not, as he had imagined under Louis Philippe, as the most advanced leader of the parliamentary opposition, but with the task of doing a parliament to death, and as an ally of all his arch-enemies, Jesuits and Legitimists. He finally led home the bride, but only after she had been prostituted. Bonaparte eclipsed himself seemingly completely. That party acted for him.

At the very first Cabinet council the expedition to Rome was decided upon, to be carried out behind the back of the National Assembly and for which it was agreed to wrest the means from it under a false pretext. Thus was begun with a swindle of the National Assembly and with a secret conspiracy with the absolute powers abroad against the revolutionary Roman Republic. Bonaparte prepared his coup of 2 December against the royalist legislature and its constitutional republic in the same way and by the same manoeuvres. Let us not forget that the same party which formed Bonaparte’s ministry on 20 December 1848 formed the majority of the Legislative National Assembly on 2 December 1851.

The Constituante had decided in August not to dissolve before it had drawn up and promulgated a whole series of organic laws intended to complement the constitution. The Party of Order had it proposed to her, through the representative Rateau, on 6 January 1849, to let the organic laws drop and instead to decide upon its own dissolution. Not only the ministry, with Monsieur Odilon Barrot at its head, all the royalist members of the National Assembly now shouted to her that its dissolution was necessary for the restoration of credit, for the consolidation of order, to put an end to the indefinite provisional state and to establish a definitive condition; that it hindered the productivity of the new government and merely sought to prolong its existence out of rancour; that the country was weary of it. Bonaparte took note of all these invectives against the legislative power, learned them by heart, and proved to the parliamentary royalists on 2 December 1851 that he had learned from them. He repeated their own catchwords against them.

The Barrot ministry and the Party of Order went further. They provoked petitions to the National Assembly all over France, in which it was most amiably requested to dissolve, to disappear. Thus they led the unorganised masses of the people into the fire against the National Assembly, the constitutionally organised expression of the people. They taught Bonaparte to appeal from the parliamentary assemblies to the people. At last on 29 January 1849 the day had come when the Constituante was to decide upon its own dissolution. The National Assembly found its place of session occupied by the military; Changarnier, the general of the Party of Order, in whose hands the supreme command of the National Guard and the troops of the line had been united, held a great military review in Paris, as if a battle were impending, and the coalesced royalists declared threateningly to the Constituante that force would be used if she were not willing. She was willing, and merely bargained for a very short additional lease of life. What was 29 January but the coup d’état of 2 December 1851, carried out only by Bonaparte with the royalists against the republican National Assembly? The gentlemen did not notice, or did not want to notice, that Bonaparte had already taken advantage of 29 January 1849 to have a part of the troops defile past him in front of the Tuileries, and seized eagerly on precisely this first public summoning of military power against parliamentary power in order to hint at Caligula. To be sure, they saw only their own Changarnier.

One motive that particularly induced the Party of Order forcibly to shorten the life of the Constituante was the organic laws complementing the constitution, such as the education law, the law on religion, etc. To the coalesced royalists it was a matter of the utmost importance to make these laws themselves and not to let them be made by the republicans who had become distrustful. Among these organic laws, however, there was also a law on the responsibility of the President of the Republic. In 1851 the Legislative Assembly was just then occupied with drafting such a law when Bonaparte forestalled this coup by the coup of 2 December. What would the coalesced royalists not have given in their parliamentary winter campaign of 1851 to have found the law on responsibility ready and made, and indeed drawn up by a distrustful, spiteful, republican assembly!

After the Constituante had itself broken its last weapon on 29 January 1849, the Barrot ministry and the friends of order hounded it to death, left nothing undone that could humiliate it, and wrested from its self-despairing weakness laws that caused it to lose the last remnant of respect with the public. Bonaparte, occupied with his fixed Napoleonic idea, was bold enough to exploit this degradation of the parliamentary power publicly. For when the National Assembly, on 8 May 1849, passed a vote of censure on the ministry on account of the occupation of Civitavecchia by Oudinot and ordered the Roman expedition to be brought back to its alleged purpose, Bonaparte published that very evening in the Moniteur a letter to Oudinot in which he congratulated him on his heroic deeds and, in contrast to the quill-driving parliamentarians, already postured as the magnanimous protector of the army. The royalists smiled at this. They simply considered him their dupe. Finally, when Marrast, the President of the Constituante, believed for a moment that the safety of the National Assembly was endangered and, relying on the constitution, requisitioned a colonel with his regiment, the colonel refused, referred to discipline, and directed Marrast to Changarnier, who rebuffed him scornfully with the remark that he did not like the bayonettes intelligentes. In November 1851, when the coalesced royalists wanted to begin the decisive struggle with Bonaparte, they sought in their notorious Quaestors’ bill to enforce the principle of the direct requisition of troops by the President of the National Assembly, and even to exaggerate it. One of their generals, Leflô, had signed the bill. In vain did Changarnier vote for the proposal and did Thiers pay homage to the circumspect wisdom of the former Constituante. The War Minister St. Arnaud answered him as Changarnier had answered Marrast, and—amid the cheers of the Montagne.

Thus the Party of Order itself, when it was not yet the National Assembly, when it was still only the ministry, had branded the parliamentary regime. And it cries out when 2 December 1851 banishes it from France!

We wish it a happy journey.

III.

On 28 May 1849 the Legislative National Assembly met. On 2 December 1851 it was dispersed. This period covers the life of the constitutional or parliamentary republic. It falls into three main epochs: 28 May 1849 to 13 June 1849, struggle of the democracy and the bourgeoisie, defeat of the petty-bourgeois or democratic party; — 13 June 1849 to 31 May 1850, parliamentary dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, i.e., of the coalesced Orleanists and Legitimists or the Party of Order, a dictatorship that completed itself through the abolition of universal suffrage; — 31 May 1850 to 2 December 1851, struggle between the bourgeoisie and Bonaparte, overthrow of bourgeois rule, downfall of the constitutional or parliamentary republic.

In the first French Revolution the rule of the Constitutionalists is followed by the rule of the Girondins, and the rule of the Girondins by the rule of the Jacobins. Each of these parties relies upon the more advanced party. As soon as it has conducted the revolution far enough to be no longer able to follow it, still less to lead it, it is pushed aside by the bolder ally standing behind it and sent to the guillotine. The revolution thus moves in an ascending line.

Conversely, the Revolution of 1848. The proletarian party appears as the appendage of the petty-bourgeois democratic party. It is betrayed by it and dropped on 16 April, 15 May and in the June days. The democratic party, for its part, leans on the shoulders of the bourgeois-republican party. The bourgeois-republicans can scarcely believe they are standing firm when they shake off the troublesome comrade and lean themselves on the shoulders of the Party of Order. The Party of Order shrugs its shoulders, lets the bourgeois-republicans topple, and throws itself onto the shoulders of armed force. It still believes it is sitting on its shoulders, when one fine morning it notices that the shoulders have turned into bayonets. Each party kicks out backwards at the one pressing forward, and leans forward over onto the one pressing back. No wonder that in this ludicrous posture it loses its balance, and, having pulled the inevitable faces, collapses with strange capers. The revolution thus moves in a descending line, and it finds itself in this retrogressive movement before the last February barricade is cleared away and the first revolutionary authority is constituted.

The period we have before us comprises the most motley mixture of crying contradictions: Constitutionalists who openly conspire against the Constitution, revolutionaries who are admittedly constitutional, a National Assembly that claims to be all-powerful and always remains parliamentary; a Montagne that finds its calling in forbearance and parries its present defeats by prophesying future victories; royalists who form the *patres conscripti* of the Republic, and are forced by the situation to keep the hostile royal houses to which they are attached abroad, and the Republic, which they hate, in France; an executive power that finds its strength in its very weakness and its respectability in the contempt it inspires; a Republic that is nothing but the combined infamy of two monarchies, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, with an imperialist label—alliances whose first clause is separation, struggles whose first law is indecisiveness, in the name of tranquillity wild, hollow agitation, in the name of revolution the most solemn preaching of tranquillity, passions without truth, truths without passion, heroes without heroic deeds, history without events, development whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, exhausting through the constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antitheses that periodically seem to drive themselves only to a climax in order to blunt themselves and collapse without being able to resolve themselves; pretentiously displayed exertions and bourgeois terror at the danger of the end of the world, while the world’s saviours simultaneously play out the pettiest intrigues and court comedies, which in their *laisser-aller* are more reminiscent of the times of the Fronde than of the Day of Judgment—the official collective genius of France brought to naught by the cunning stupidity of a single individual, the collective will of the nation, whenever it speaks in universal suffrage, seeking its corresponding expression in the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses, until it finally finds it in the self-will of a filibuster. If any slice of history is painted grey on grey, it is this one. Men and events appear as inverted Schlemihls, as shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution itself paralyses its own bearers and endows only its adversaries with passionate violence. When the “red spectre,” constantly awakened, conjured up and exorcised by the counter-revolutionaries, finally appears, it appears not with the anarchic Phrygian cap on its head, but in the uniform of Order, in red breeches.

We have seen: the ministry which Bonaparte installed on 20 December 1848, the day of his Ascension, was a ministry of the Party of Order, of the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. This Barrot-Falloux ministry had weathered the republican Constituent Assembly, whose term it had shortened more or less violently, and was still at the helm. Changarnier, the general of the allied royalists, continued to unite in his person the supreme command of the First Military Division and of the Paris National Guards, and the general elections, finally, had secured for the Party of Order a large majority in the National Assembly. Here the deputies and peers of Louis Philippe met with a holy phalanx of Legitimists who emerged from their hiding places after numerous ballot papers of the nation had turned for them into admission tickets to the political stage. The Bonapartist representatives of the people were too thinly sown to be able to form an independent parliamentary party. They existed in sufficient numbers to count as ciphers in a general review against the republican forces. They appeared only as the *mauvaise queue* of the Party of Order. Thus the Party of Order was in possession of the governmental authority, the army and the legislative body, in short, of the total power of the state, morally strengthened by the general elections, which made its rule appear as the will of the people, and by the simultaneous victory of the counter-revolution on the entire European continent.

Never did a party open its campaign with greater means and under more favourable auspices.

The shipwrecked pure republicans found themselves in the Legislative National Assembly reduced to a clique of about fifty men, at their head the African generals Cavaignac, Lamoricière, Bedeau. The great opposition party, however, was formed by the Montagne. This parliamentary baptismal name had been given to itself by the social-democratic party. It disposed over more than 200 of the 750 votes in the National Assembly and was therefore at least as powerful as any one of the three fractions of the Party of Order taken by itself. Its relative minority compared with the entire royalist coalition seemed compensated by special circumstances. Not only did the departmental elections show that it had won a significant following among the rural population. It counted almost all the deputies of Paris in its ranks; the army had made a democratic confession of faith by the election of three non-commissioned officers; and the leader of the Montagne, Ledru-Rollin, had, unlike all the representatives of the Party of Order, been raised to the parliamentary peerage by five departments which had combined their votes on him. The Montagne, therefore, on 29 May 1849, with the inevitable collisions of the royalists among themselves and of the whole Party of Order with Bonaparte, seemed to have all the elements of success before it. A fortnight later it had lost everything, honour included.

Before we follow the parliamentary history further, some remarks are necessary to avoid common illusions about the whole character of the epoch that lies before us. In the democratic way of seeing things, the period of the Legislative National Assembly was concerned with the same thing as the period of the Constituent Assembly: the simple struggle between republicans and royalists. The movement itself, however, they sum up in a single catchword: “reaction”—night in which all cats are grey and which allows them to reel off their night-watchman’s platitudes. And indeed, at first sight the Party of Order shows a tangle of different royalist factions, which not only intrigue against one another, each in order to raise its own pretender to the throne and to exclude the pretender of the opposing party, but also all unite in common hatred and common attacks against the “Republic”. The Montagne, for its part, appears, in contrast to this royalist conspiracy, as the representative of the “Republic”. The Party of Order appears constantly engaged in a “reaction”, which, no more and no less than in Austria, is directed against the press, association and the like, and is carried out in brutal police interventions by the bureaucracy, the gendarmerie and the parquet, as in Austria. The “Montagne”, for its part, is likewise continually occupied in parrying these attacks and thus defending the “eternal rights of man”, as every so-called people’s party has done more or less for the last century and a half. On a closer examination of the situation and the parties, however, this superficial appearance vanishes, which veils the class struggle and the peculiar physiognomy of this period, and thus turns it into a treasure-laden mine for pothouse politicians and republican-minded souls.

Legitimists and Orleanists, as we said, formed the two great fractions of the Party of Order. What held these fractions fast to their pretenders, and reciprocally kept them apart, was it anything else than the lily and the tricolour, the House of Bourbon and the House of Orléans, different shades of royalism, was it at all the confession of faith of royalism? Under the Bourbons, large landed property had ruled, with its priests and lackeys; under the Orléans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, i.e. capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the inherited rule of the lords of the soil, just as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What, therefore, kept these fractions apart, were not so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property, it was the old antithesis between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to the one or the other royal house, who denies it? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, to whom they flow through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they are the real be-

reasons for his mood and the starting point of his action. Just as the Orleanists and Legitimists each fraction sought to persuade itself and the other that attachment to their two royal houses divided them, later facts proved that their divergent interest rather prohibited the union of the two royal houses. And just as in private life we distinguish between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so still more in historical struggles must we distinguish the phrases and illusions of parties from their real organisation and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic with equal claims. If each side, against the other, sought to effect the restoration of its own royal house, that meant nothing else than that the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is divided — landed property and capital — each sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and its race pride, had been completely bourgeoisified by the development of modern society. Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic for the monarchy, the church and the beauties of the old English constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are only enthusiastic for ground-rent.

The coalitional royalists carried on their intrigues against one another in the press, in Ems, in Claremont, outside Parliament. Behind the scenes they donned their old Orleanist and Legitimist liveries again and resumed their old tournaments. But on the public stage, in their main state actions, as a great parliamentary party, they dismissed their respective royal houses with mere reverences, adjourned the restoration of the monarchy in infinitum and performed their real business as the Party of Order, that is, under a social, not a political title, | as representatives of the bourgeois world order, not as knights-errant of princesses, as the bourgeois class confronting the other classes, not as royalists confronting the republicans. And as the Party of Order they exercised a far more absolute and harsher domination over the other classes of society than ever either under the Restoration or under the July Monarchy, as was possible at all only under the form of the parliamentary republic, for only under this form could the two great divisions of the French bourgeoisie unite and place the rule of their class instead of the regime of a privileged fraction of it on the order of the day. If, nevertheless, even as the Party of Order they insult the republic and express their antipathy to it, this happens not only from royalist memories, but from the instinct that the republican form, while it completes their political rule and strips off all its alien guise, at the same time undermines its social foundation, since they must now face the subjugated classes and struggle with them without mediation, without the concealment of the crown, without the possibility of diverting the national interest by their subordinate struggles among themselves and with the monarchy. It happens from the weakness that makes them recoil before the pure conditions of their own class rule and long back to the more incomplete, less developed and precisely therefore less dangerous forms of the same. Whenever, on the contrary, the coalitional royalists come into conflict with the pretender who confronts them, with Bonaparte, whenever they believe their parliamentary omnipotence endangered by the executive power, whenever, therefore, they must bring out the political title of their rule, they appear as republicans and not as royalists, from the Orleanist Thiers, who cries out to the National Assembly that the republic least divides them, to the Legitimist Berryer, who on 2 December 1851, with the tricolour sash around his waist, harangues the people assembled before the Town Hall of the tenth arrondissement, as a tribune in the name of the republic. To be sure, the echo mockingly calls back to him: Henri V! Henri V!

In opposition to the coalitional bourgeoisie, a coalition between petty bourgeoisie and workers had formed, the so-called social-democratic party. The petty bourgeoisie saw itself poorly rewarded after the June days of 1848, its material interests endangered, and the democratic guarantees which were to secure the assertion of these interests called into question by the counter-revolution. It therefore drew closer to the workers. Its parliamentary representation on the other hand, the Mountain, pushed aside during the dictatorship of the bourgeois republicans, had reconquered its lost popularity in the last half of the life of the Constituent Assembly through the struggle with Bonaparte and the royalist ministers. It had concluded an alliance with the socialist leaders. In February 1849 reconciliation banquets had been celebrated. A joint programme was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. The revolutionary edge was broken off the social demands of the proletariat and given a democratic turn; the purely political form was stripped from the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their socialist point was turned outwards. Thus Social Democracy arose. The new Mountain, the result of this combination, contained, apart from some supernumeraries from the working class and some socialist sectarians, the same elements as the old Mountain, only numerically stronger. But in the course of development it had changed along with the class it represented. The peculiar character of Social Democracy is summed up in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as means, not to abolish two extremes, capital and wage-labour, both of them, but to attenuate their antagonism and transform it into harmony. Whatever different measures may be proposed to achieve this end, however much it may be garnished with more or less revolutionary notions, | the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society on a democratic basis, but a transformation within the limits of the petty bourgeoisie. One must not form the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie on principle wants to enforce an egoistic class interest. It believes rather that the special conditions of its liberation are the general conditions within which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are all shopkeepers or enthusiastic for shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far from them as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeois is that in their minds they do not go beyond the barriers which the latter does not go beyond in life, that they are consequently driven theoretically to the same tasks and solutions to which the latter is driven practically by material interest and social position. This is in general the relation of the political and literary representatives of a class to the class they represent.

After the foregoing exposition it goes without saying that when the Mountain wrestles continually with the Party of Order over the republic and the so-called rights of man, neither the republic nor the rights of man are its final aim, any more than an army which one wants to disarm and which puts itself on the defensive has taken the field to secure the possession of its own arms.

The Party of Order provoked the Mountain right at the assembling of the National Assembly. The bourgeoisie now felt the necessity of finishing off the democratic petty bourgeoisie, just as a year earlier it had grasped the necessity of finishing off the revolutionary proletariat. Only the situation of the adversary was different. The strength of the proletarian party lay in the streets, that of the petty bourgeoisie in the National Assembly itself. It was therefore a question of luring it out of the National Assembly into the street and making it itself smash its parliamentary power before time and opportunity could consolidate it. The Mountain dashed headlong into the trap.

The bombardment of Rome by the French troops was the bait thrown to it. It violated Article V of the Constitution, which forbids the French republic to employ its armed forces against the liberties of another people. In addition, Article IV also prohibited any declaration of war by the executive power without the assent of the National Assembly, and the Constituent Assembly by its resolution of 8 May had disapproved of the Roman expedition. On these grounds Ledru-Rollin lodged a bill of indictment against Bonaparte and his ministers on 11 June 1849 and, stung by the wasp stings of Thiers, allowed himself to be carried away into threatening to defend the Constitution by all means, even with arms in hand. The Mountain rose as one man and repeated this call to arms. On 12 June the National Assembly rejected the bill of indictment and the Mountain left the Parliament. The events of 13 June are known: the proclamation by a section of the Mountain declaring Bonaparte and his ministers “outside the Constitution”; the street procession of the democratic National Guards, who, unarmed as they were, dispersed at the encounter with the troops of Changarnier, etc., etc. A part of the Mountain fled abroad, another was committed to the High Court at Bourges, and a parliamentary regulation subjected the rest to the schoolmasterly supervision of the President of the National Assembly. Paris was again placed under a state of siege and the democratic section of its National Guard was disbanded. Thus the influence of the Mountain in Parliament and the power of the petty bourgeoisie in Paris were broken.

Lyons, where 13 June had given the signal for a bloody workers’ uprising, was likewise placed under a state of siege, together with the five surrounding departments, a condition which continues to the present moment. |

The main body of the Mountain had left its vanguard in the lurch by withholding its signatures from the proclamation. The press deserted, only two journals daring to publish the pronunciamiento. The petty bourgeoisie betrayed its representatives, the National Guards staying away or where they appeared, preventing barricade-building. The representatives had duped the petty bourgeoisie, the alleged affiliates from the army being nowhere to be seen. Finally, instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness, and, as is usual in democratic heroic deeds, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to accuse their “people” of desertion and the people the satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with swindle.

Rarely has an action been announced with greater noise than the impending campaign of the Montagne, rarely an event been trumpeted in advance with more certainty and for longer than the inevitable victory of democracy. Quite certainly: the democrats believe in the trumpets before whose blasts the walls of Jericho collapsed. And whenever they stand before the ramparts of despotism, they seek to imitate the miracle. If the Montagne wished to conquer in parliament, it ought not to have called to arms. If it called to arms in parliament, it ought not to have behaved parliamentarily in the streets. If the peaceful demonstration was seriously meant, it was foolish not to foresee that it would be received in a warlike manner. If a real struggle was intended, it was quaint to lay aside the weapons with which it would have to be fought. But the revolutionary threats of the petty bourgeoisie and their democratic representatives are mere attempts to intimidate the enemy. And when they have run themselves into a blind alley, when they have sufficiently compromised themselves to be compelled to carry out their threats, it is done in an ambiguous manner that avoids nothing more than the means to the end and seeks pretexts for succumbing. The blaring overture that announced the struggle dies away into a faint growl as soon as the struggle is to begin, the actors cease to take themselves au sérieux and the action falls flat like an air-filled balloon that is pricked with a needle.

No party exaggerates its means more than the democratic, none deludes itself more light-mindedly about the situation. Since a section of the army had voted for it, the Montagne was now convinced that the army would revolt for it. And on what occasion? On an occasion which from the standpoint of the troops had no other meaning than that the revolutionaries had taken the side of the Roman soldiers against the French soldiers. The Montagne must have known from the workers that the memories of June 1848 were still too fresh for there not to exist a deep aversion of the proletariat towards the National Guard and a thoroughgoing distrust of the leaders of the secret societies towards the democratic leaders. To balance these differences, great common interests needed to be at stake. The violation of an abstract paragraph of the constitution could not furnish that interest. Had not the constitution been repeatedly violated, according to the democrats’ own assurances? Had not the most popular journals branded it as a counter-revolutionary piece of work?

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But the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie, a transitional class in which the interests of two classes become mutually blunted, imagines himself elevated above class antagonism altogether. The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, together with the entire remaining surroundings of the nation, constitute the people. What they represent is the people’s rights; what interests them is the people’s interest. They therefore need not, when a struggle is impending, examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They need not weigh their own means over-cautiously. They merely have to give the signal for the people to fall upon the oppressors with all its inexhaustible resources. If in the execution their interests prove uninteresting and their power impotence, the fault lies either with pernicious sophists who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutish and blinded to comprehend the pure aims of democracy as its own highest good, or the whole has foundered on a detail of execution, or else an unforeseeable accident has for this time frustrated the game. In any event, the democrat emerges from the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he entered it innocently, with the newly won conviction that he must conquer, not that he himself and his party need to give up the old standpoint, but rather that conditions must ripen to meet him.

Thus one must not imagine the Montagne, decimated, broken, and humiliated by the new parliamentary regulations, as being all too unhappy. For many of them, the parliamentary allowances and the official position were a daily new source of consolation. If June 13 had eliminated the leaders, it on the other hand made their places accessible to subordinate capacities, whom this new status flattered. If their powerlessness in parliament could no longer be doubted, they were now also entitled to restrict their action to outbursts of moral indignation and blustering declamations. If the Party of Order pretended to see in them, as the last official representatives of the revolution, all the terrors of anarchy embodied, they could in reality be all the more flat and modest. As for June 13, they consoled themselves with the profound phrase: But if they dare to attack universal suffrage, ah but then! Then we will show who we are. Nous verrons.

As for the Montagnards who fled abroad, it suffices here to note that Ledru-Rollin, because he had succeeded in hopelessly ruining within barely two weeks the mighty party at whose head he stood, now found himself called upon to form a French government in partibus, that

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his figure, at a distance, removed from the soil of action, seemed to grow in stature in proportion as the level of the revolution sank and the official greats of official France became dwarfish, that he could figure as republican pretender for 1852, that he issued periodical circulars to the Wallachians and other peoples, in which the despots of the continent are threatened with the deeds of himself and his allies. Was Proudhon altogether wrong when he called out to these gentlemen: “Vous n’êtes que des blagueurs”?

On June 13 the Party of Order had not only broken the Montagne, it had also carried through the subordination of the constitution to the majority decisions of the National Assembly. And thus it understood the republic: that the bourgeoisie here rules in parliamentary forms without, as in the monarchy, encountering a barrier in the veto of the executive power or the dissolubility of parliament. That was the parliamentary republic, as Thiers called it. But if the bourgeoisie on June 13 secured its omnipotence within the parliament building, did it not strike the parliament itself with incurable weakness vis-à-vis the executive power and the people by expelling its most popular part? By abandoning numerous deputies without further ceremony to the requisitions of the public prosecutors, it abolished its own parliamentary inviolability. The humiliating regulation to which it subjected the Montagne elevated the President of the Republic to the same degree that it debased the individual representatives of the people. By condemning the insurrection for the defence of the constitutional constitution as an anarchistic act aiming at the overthrow of society, it forbade itself any appeal to insurrection as soon as the executive power should violate the constitution vis-à-vis it. The irony of history willed that the general who bombarded Rome on Bonaparte’s orders, and thus provided the immediate occasion for the constitutional émeute of June 13, that Oudinot on December 2, 1851 was by the Party of Order suppliantly and vainly to be offered to the people as the general of the constitution against Bonaparte. Another hero of June 13, Vieyra, who reaped praise from the tribune of the National Assembly for the brutalities he had perpetrated in democratic newspaper offices at the head of a gang of National Guards belonging to high finance, this same Vieyra was initiated into Bonaparte’s conspiracy, and contributed essentially to cutting off from the National Assembly in its hour of death all protection on the part of the National Guard.

June 13 had yet another meaning. The Montagne had sought to force Bonaparte’s impeachment. Its defeat was thus a direct victory for Bonaparte, his personal triumph over his democratic enemies. The Party of Order won the victory, Bonaparte had only to cash it in. He did so. On June 14 a proclamation could be read on the walls of Paris, in which the president, as it were without his own doing, reluctantly, forced by the sheer power of events to emerge from his monastic seclusion, complains as misunderstood virtue of the calumnies of his adversaries, and while he appears to identify his person with the cause of order, rather identifies the cause of order with his person. Moreover, the National Assembly had subsequently approved the expedition against Rome, but Bonaparte had taken the initiative for it. After he had brought the high priest Samuel back into the Vatican, he could hope to move back into the Tuileries as King David. He had won over the priests.

The émeute of June 13, as we have seen, confined itself to a peaceful street procession. There were thus no warlike laurels to be won against it. Nonetheless, in this time poor in heroes and events, the Party of Order transformed this battle without bloodshed into a second Austerlitz. Tribune and press praised the army as the power of order against the masses of the people as the impotence of anarchy, and Changarnier as the “bulwark of society” – a mystification to which he finally came to believe himself. Underhand, however, the corps that appeared ambiguous were removed from Paris, the regiments whose elections had turned out most democratic were banished from France to Algiers, the turbulent heads among the troops were assigned to penal companies, and finally the isolation of the press from the barracks and of the barracks from bourgeois society was systematically carried out.

We have now arrived at the decisive turning point in the history of the French National Guard. In 1830 it had decided the overthrow of the Restoration. Under Louis Philippe every émeute miscarried in which the National Guard sided with the troops. When in the February days of 1848 it showed itself passive towards the insurrection and ambiguous towards Louis Philippe, he gave himself up for lost and was lost. Thus the conviction had taken root that the revolution could not conquer without the National Guard, and the army not against it. This was the army’s superstition regarding bourgeois omnipotence. The June days of 1848, when the entire National Guard together with the line troops put down the insurrection, had reinforced this superstition. After Bonaparte’s accession to government, the position of the National Guard sank somewhat through the unconstitutional unification of its command with the command of the first military division in the person of Changarnier.

Just as the command over it now appeared as an attribute of the military supreme commander, so the Guard itself appeared henceforth only as an appendage of the line troops.

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On June 13 it was finally broken: not only through the partial dissolution of the National Guard, which from that time on was repeated periodically at all points of France and left only ruins of it behind. The demonstration of June 13 was above all a demonstration of the democratic National Guards. They had indeed not opposed their weapons to the army, but certainly their uniforms, and precisely in this uniform lay the talisman. The army convinced itself that this uniform was a woollen rag like any other. The spell was lost. In the June days of 1848 the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie as the National Guard had been united with the army against the proletariat; on June 13, 1849, the bourgeoisie had the petty-bourgeois National Guard dispersed by the army; on December 2, 1851, the National Guard of the bourgeoisie itself had disappeared, and Bonaparte merely recorded this fact when he subsequently signed its dissolution decree. Thus the bourgeoisie itself had broken its last weapon against the army, but it had to break it from the moment the petty bourgeoisie stood no longer as a vassal behind it, but as a rebel before it, just as, in general, it had to destroy all its means of defence against absolutism with its own hand as soon as it had itself become absolute.

Meanwhile, the party of Order celebrated in the National Assembly the reconquest of a power which in 1848 had only appeared lost, only to be found again in 1849 freed from its restraints, through invectives against the republic and the constitution, by cursing all future, present, and past revolutions, including those which its own leaders had made, and by laws which gagged the press, destroyed association, and regulated the state of siege as an organic institution. The National Assembly then adjourned from the middle of August to the middle of October, after having appointed a permanent commission for the period of its absence. During these recesses the Legitimists intrigued with Ems, the Orleanists with Claremont, Bonaparte through princely tours, and the departmental councils through deliberations on the revision of the constitution – incidents which recur regularly in the periodic recesses of the National Assembly and which I shall go into only when they become events. For the moment it need only be noted that the National Assembly acted unpolitically when it disappeared from the stage for long intervals and allowed only one figure, though a wretched one, to be seen at the head of the republic, that of Louis Bonaparte, while the party of Order, to the scandal of the public, fell apart into its royalist components and pursued its conflicting restoration cravings. As often as during these recesses the confusing noise of parliament fell silent and its body dissolved itself into the nation, it became unmistakably clear that only one thing was missing to perfect the true form of this republic: to make its recesses permanent and to replace its inscription: Liberté, égalité, fraternité, by the unambiguous words: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery!

In the middle of October 1849 the National Assembly met again. On November 1 Bonaparte surprised it with a message in which he announced the dismissal of the Barrot-Falloux ministry and the formation of a new ministry. Never have lackeys been hunted from service with less ceremony than Bonaparte his ministers. The kicks that were intended for the National Assembly were for the present received by Mr. Barrot and Company.

The Barrot ministry, as we have seen, was composed of Legitimists and Orleansists, a ministry of the party of Order. Bonaparte had needed it in order to dissolve the republican Constituent Assembly, to carry through the expedition against Rome, and to break the democratic party. Behind this ministry he had apparently eclipsed himself, handed over governmental power into the hands of the party of Order, and assumed the modest character mask which the responsible editors of the press in Paris wear, the mask of the homme de paille. Now he cast off a mask which was no longer the light veil behind which he could hide his physiognomy, but the iron mask which prevented him from showing a physiognomy of his own. He had installed the Barrot ministry in order to blow up the republican National Assembly in the name of the party of Order; he dismissed it in order to declare his own name independent of the National Assembly of the party of Order.

Plausible pretexts for this dismissal were not lacking. The Barrot ministry itself neglected the formalities of respect which would have allowed the President of the Republic to appear as a power alongside the National Assembly. During the recesses of the National Assembly, Bonaparte published a letter to Edgar Ney, in which he seemed to disapprove of the Pope’s liberal conduct, just as, in opposition to the Constituent Assembly, he had published a letter commending Oudinot for the attack on the Roman Republic. When the National Assembly now voted the budget for the Roman expedition, Victor Hugo, out of liberal interest, brought up that letter. The party of Order stifled the notion, as if Bonaparte’s notions could have any political weight, with contemptuous, incredulous exclamations. Not one of the ministers took up the gauntlet for him. On another occasion, Barrot, with his well-known hollow pathos, let fall words of indignation from the rostrum about the “abominable machinations” which, according to his assertion, were going on in the immediate entourage of the President. Finally, the ministry, while securing a widow’s pension for the Duchess of Orleans from the National Assembly, refused to propose an increase in the presidential civil list. And in Bonaparte the imperial pretender was so intimately fused with the down-at-heel adventurer that the one great idea, that he was called upon to restore the empire, was always supplemented by the other, that the French people was called upon to pay his debts.

The Barrot-Falloux ministry was the first and last parliamentary ministry that Bonaparte brought into being. Its dismissal therefore forms a decisive turning-point. With it, the party of Order lost, never to reconquer, an indispensable post for the maintenance of the parliamentary regime, the handle of the executive power. It is easily understood that in a country like France, where the executive power commands an army of officials of more than half a million individuals, and thus constantly keeps an enormous mass of interests and existences in the most unconditional dependence; where the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals; where this parasitic body, through the most extraordinary centralisation, acquires a ubiquity, an omniscience, a capacity for accelerated movement and an elasticity which find an analogue only in the helpless self-dependence, in the chaotic formlessness of the actual body of society; that in such a country the National Assembly, by giving up control of ministerial posts, lost every real influence unless it simultaneously simplified the state administration, reduced the army of officials as far as possible, and finally let civil society and public opinion create their own organs independent of the governmental power. But the material interest of the French bourgeoisie is most intimately interwoven precisely with the maintenance of that broad and highly ramified state machine. Here it finds places for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profits, interest, rents and honorariums. On the other hand, its political interest compelled it to increase daily the repressive measures, hence the means and the personnel of the state power, while at the same time it had to wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion and mistrustfully to persecute, mutilate, paralyse the independent organs of movement of society, where it did not succeed in amputating them completely. Thus the French bourgeoisie was forced by its class position, on the one hand, to destroy the vital conditions of all, hence also of its own parliamentary power, and on the other hand, to make the executive power hostile to it irresistible.

The new ministry was called the d’Hautpoul ministry. Not as if General d’Hautpoul had obtained the rank of president of the council. With Barrot, Bonaparte rather simultaneously abolished this dignity, which indeed condemned the President of the Republic to the legal nullity of a constitutional king, but of a constitutional king without throne and without crown, without sceptre and without sword, without irresponsibility, without the imprescriptible possession of the highest state dignity, and, what was most fatal, without a civil list. The d’Hautpoul ministry possessed only one man of parliamentary reputation, the Jew Fould, one of the most notorious members of high finance. The finance ministry fell to him. Look up the Paris stock exchange quotations and you will find that from November 1, 1849, the French funds rise and fall with the fall and rise of Bonapartist shares. While Bonaparte had thus found his affiliate on the Bourse, he at the same time seized hold of the police by appointing Carlier prefect of police of Paris.

However, the consequences of the ministerial change could only become apparent in the course of developments. At first Bonaparte had merely taken a step forward, only to be driven back all the more conspicuously. His brusque message was followed by the most servile declaration of submission to the National Assembly. As often as the ministers timidly ventured to introduce his personal crotchets as legislative proposals, they themselves seemed only reluctantly and under the compulsion of their position to carry out the comical commissions of whose unsuccessful outcome they were convinced in advance. As often as Bonaparte blabbed his intentions behind the backs of his ministers and sported his “idées napoléoniennes,” his own ministers disavowed him from the tribune of the National Assembly. His usurpatory desires seemed to become audible only so that the malicious laughter of his opponents should not die away. He conducted himself as a misunderstood genius, whom the whole world takes for a simpleton. Never did he enjoy to a fuller degree the contempt of all classes than during this period. Never did the bourgeoisie rule more unconditionally, never did it display the insignia of domination more ostentatiously.

I have not here to write the history of its legislative activity

The legislative achievements of the Party of Order during this period were summed up in two laws: the law reestablishing the wine tax, the education law abolishing unbelief. If the French found it harder to drink wine, they were all the more lavishly given the water of true life. When, in the law on the wine tax, the bourgeoisie declares the old hated French tax system inviolable, it seeks through the education law to secure the old state of mind of the masses that made them bear it. One is astonished to see the Orleanists, the liberal bourgeois, these old apostles of Voltairianism and eclectic philosophy, entrust the administration of the French mind to their hereditary enemies, the Jesuits. But Orleanists and Legitimists could diverge on the question of the pretender to the crown; they understood that their united rule commanded them to combine the means of oppression of two epochs, that the means of oppression of the July Monarchy had to be supplemented and reinforced by the means of oppression of the Restoration.

The peasants, deceived in all their hopes, crushed more than ever by the low level of grain prices on the one hand, and on the other by the growing tax burden and mortgage debt, began to stir in the departments. The answer to them was the hounding of the schoolmasters, who were handed over to the clergy, the hounding of the mayors, who were handed over to the prefects, and a system of espionage to which all were subjected. In Paris and the great towns, the reaction itself bears the physiognomy of its epoch and challenges more than it strikes down. In the countryside it becomes flat, vulgar, petty, tedious, importunate, in a word, gendarme. One understands how three years of the regime of the gendarme, blessed by the regime of the priest, must have demoralised immature masses.

However great a sum of passion and declamation the Party of Order might expend from the tribune of the National Assembly against the minority, its speech remained monosyllabic, like that of the Christian whose words are to be: Yea, yea, nay, nay! Monosyllabic from the tribune down, as in the press. Tame as a riddle whose solution is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right to petition or the wine tax, press freedom or free trade, clubs or municipal constitution, protection of personal freedom or regulation of the state budget, the watchword always recurs, the theme is always the same, the sentence is always ready and invariably reads: “Socialism”! Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialist, bourgeois enlightenment socialist, bourgeois financial reform socialist. It was socialist to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialist to defend oneself with a stick when attacked with a rapier.

This was not mere figure of speech, fashion, party tactic. The bourgeoisie had the correct insight that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilisation, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and threatened its class rule at one and the same time at the social base and at the political summit, and had therefore become “socialist”. In this threat and this attack it rightly found the secret of socialism, whose meaning and tendency it judges more correctly than so-called socialism knows how to judge itself, which therefore cannot understand how the bourgeoisie hardens its heart against it, whether it whines sentimentally over the sufferings of humanity, or Christianly proclaims the millennium and universal brotherly love, or humanistically drivels about mind, education, freedom, or doctrinarily concocts a system of mediation and the welfare of all classes. But it did not grasp the consequence that its own parliamentary regime, that its political rule in general, must now also fall under the general verdict of condemnation as socialist. As long as the rule of the bourgeois class had not been completely organised, had not achieved its pure political expression, the antagonism of the other classes could not emerge in a pure form, and where it did emerge, could not take the dangerous turn that at once puts property, religion, the family, order in question, turning every struggle against the state power into a struggle against capital. If they saw “order” endangered in every stirring of society’s life, how could they wish to maintain at the head of society the regime of unrest, their own regime, the parliamentary regime, this regime that, in the words of one of their orators, lives in struggle and through struggle? The parliamentary regime lives by discussion; how is it to forbid discussion? Every interest, every social institution is here transformed into general ideas, dealt with as ideas; how is any interest, any institution to assert itself above thought and impose itself as an article of faith? The orators’ struggle on the tribune provokes the struggle of the press scribblers; the debating club in Parliament necessarily supplements itself with debating clubs in the salons and in the taverns; the representatives, who constantly appeal to public opinion, give public opinion the right to speak its real opinion in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside Parliament not want to decide? When you play the fiddle at the summit of the state, what else can you expect than that those below will dance?

Thus, by denouncing as “socialist” what it had formerly celebrated as “liberal”, the bourgeoisie acknowledges that its own interest dictates that it be relieved of the danger of self-government, that in order to restore quiet in the country, the bourgeois Parliament must above all be brought to quiet, that in order to preserve its social power intact, its political power must be broken, that the private bourgeois can only go on exploiting the other classes and undisturbedly enjoy property, the family, religion and order on condition that their class is condemned alongside the other classes to the same political nullity, that in order to save its purse, the crown must be knocked off its head and the sword that was to protect it must at the same time be suspended over its own head as a sword of Damocles.

In the sphere of general bourgeois interests the National Assembly showed itself so unproductive that, for example, the negotiations on the Paris-Avignon Railway, begun in the winter of 1850, were still not ripe for conclusion on 2 December 1851. Where it did not suppress, it reacted, it was smitten with incurable sterility.

While Bonaparte’s ministry partly took the initiative for laws in the spirit of the Party of Order, and partly outdid them in severity in their execution and application, he sought on the other hand to win popularity through childishly silly proposals, to record his opposition to the National Assembly, and to hint at a secret ambush that was only temporarily prevented by circumstances from dispensing his hidden treasures to the French people. Thus, the proposal to decree a daily allowance of four sous for non-commissioned officers. Thus, the proposal of an honorary loan bank for the workers. Money given and money lent — that was the prospect with which he hoped to bait the masses. Giving and lending — upon that is limited the whole financial science of the lumpenproletariat, both refined and vulgar. Upon that were limited the springs that Bonaparte knew how to set in motion. Never has a pretender speculated more shallowly on the shallowness of the masses.

The National Assembly repeatedly flared up at these unmistakable attempts to win popularity at its expense, at the growing danger that this adventurer, spurred on by debts and held back by no acquired reputation, would venture a desperate stroke. The ill-humour between the Party of Order and the President had assumed a threatening character when an unexpected event threw him repentantly back into its arms. We mean the by-elections of 10 March 1850. These elections took place to fill the representative seats which had fallen vacant after 13 June through imprisonment or exile. Paris elected only Social-Democratic candidates. It even united the majority of votes on an insurgent of June 1848, on Deflotte. Thus the Paris petty bourgeoisie, allied with the proletariat, avenged itself for its defeat on 13 June 1849. In the moment of danger it seemed only to have vanished from the battlefield in order to reoccupy it at a favourable opportunity with more massive forces and a bolder watchword. One circumstance seemed to heighten the danger of this electoral victory. In Paris the army voted for the June insurgent against Lahitte, a minister of Bonaparte, and in the departments largely for the Montagnards, who here too, although not as decisively as in Paris, maintained the upper hand over their opponents.

Bonaparte suddenly saw the revolution rise up again before him. As on 29 January 1849, as on 13 June 1849, on 10 March 1850 he vanished behind the Party of Order. He bowed, he made craven apologies, he offered on the order of the parliamentary majority to appoint any cabinet they wished, he even implored the Orleanist and Legitimist party leaders, the Thierses, Berryers, Broglies, Molés, in short the so-called Burgraves, to take the helm of state in person. The Party of Order did not know how to make use of this irretrievable moment. Instead of boldly seizing the power offered, they did not even force Bonaparte to reinstate the ministry dismissed on 1 November; they contented themselves with humiliating him by their forgiveness and associating M. Baroche with the d’Hautpoul ministry. M. Baroche had raged as public prosecutor, once against the revolutionaries of 15 May, the second time against the democrats of 13 June before the High Court at Bourges, both times on charges of an attempt on the National Assembly. None of Bonaparte’s ministers later contributed more to degrading the National Assembly, and after 2 December 1851 we find him again as a well-salaried and dearly paid Vice-President of the Senate. He had spat into the soup of the revolutionaries so that Bonaparte might eat it up.

The Social-Democratic party, for its part, seemed only to grasp at pretexts to call its own victory into question again and to break off its point. Vidal, one of the newly elected Paris representatives, had simultaneously been elected in Strasbourg. He was prevailed upon to refuse the election for Paris and accept the one for Strasbourg. Thus, instead of giving their victory on the electoral battlefield a definitive character and thereby forcing the Party of Order to challenge it immediately in Parliament,

Instead of thus driving the adversary to fight at the moment of popular enthusiasm and the favourable mood of the army, the democratic party exhausted Paris during the months of March and April with a new election agitation, let the aroused popular passions wear themselves out in this repeated provisional play of voting, let the revolutionary power of action satiate itself with constitutional successes, fritter itself away in petty intrigues, hollow declamations and sham movements, allowed the bourgeoisie to gather and make its preparations, and finally let the meaning of the March elections find a sentimentally weakening commentary in the subsequent April election, in the election of Eugène Sue. In a word, it sent March 10 to April.

The parliamentary majority understood the weakness of its adversary. Its seventeen burgraves, for Bonaparte had left to it the leadership and responsibility of the attack, worked out a new electoral law, the introduction of which was entrusted to Faucher, who asked for this honour. On 8 May he brought in the law, by which universal suffrage was abolished, a three-year domicile in the place of the election was imposed on the voters as a condition, and finally the proof of this domicile for the workers was made dependent on the certificate of their employers.

As revolutionary as the democrats had excited themselves and raged during the constitutional election campaign, so constitutionally they now preached, when it was a matter of proving the seriousness of those election victories with weapons in hand, order, majestic calm (calme majestueux), legal attitude, i.e., blind submission to the will of the counter-revolution, which was spreading itself out as law. During the debate the Mountain shamed the Party of Order by asserting, against its revolutionary passionateness, the passionless attitude of the honest citizen who maintains the legal ground, and by striking it to the ground with the terrible reproach that it was proceeding in a revolutionary manner. Even the newly elected deputies endeavoured, by decorous and prudent conduct, to prove what a misjudgment it was to decry them as anarchists and to interpret their election as a victory of the revolution. On 31 May the new electoral law was passed. The Montagne contented itself with smuggling a protest into the President’s pocket. The electoral law was followed by a new press law, by which the revolutionary newspaper press was completely eliminated. It had deserved its fate. “National” and “la Presse”, two bourgeois organs, remained after this deluge as the furthest outposts of the revolution.

We have seen how the democratic leaders during March and April had done everything to involve the people of Paris in a sham fight, how after 8 May they did everything to keep it from the real fight. We must, moreover, not forget that the year 1850 was one of the most brilliant years of industrial and commercial prosperity, hence the Paris proletariat was fully employed. But the electoral law of 31 May 1850 excluded it from all participation in political power. It cut even the terrain of struggle from under its feet. It threw the workers back into the pariah position they had occupied before the February revolution. By allowing themselves to be led by the democrats in the face of such an event and forgetting the revolutionary interest of their class for a momentary well-being, they renounced the honour of being a conquering power, submitted to their fate, proved that the defeat of June 1848 had made them incapable of fighting for years and that the historical process would for the time being have to proceed over their heads again. As for the petty-bourgeois democracy, which had cried on 13 June, “But if once universal suffrage is attacked, but then!”—it now consoled itself with the fact that the counter-revolutionary blow that had struck it was no blow and the law of 31 May no law. On 2 May 1852 every Frenchman will appear on the electoral field, in one hand the ballot paper, in the other the sword. With this prophecy it satisfied itself. The army, finally, was, as for the elections of 29 May 1849, so for those of March and April 1850, disciplined by its superiors. This time, however, it said to itself decidedly: “The revolution shall not cheat us for the third time.”

The law of 31 May 1850 was the coup d’état of the bourgeoisie. All its previous conquests over the revolution had only a provisional character. They were called into question as soon as the present National Assembly left the stage. They depended on the chance of a new general election, and the history of the elections since 1848 proved irrefutably that, in the same measure as the actual rule of the bourgeoisie developed, its moral rule over the masses of the people was lost. Universal suffrage declared itself on 10 March directly against the rule of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie replied with the proscription of universal suffrage. The law of 31 May was thus one of the necessities of the class struggle. On the other hand, the constitution required, for the election of the President of the Republic to be valid, a minimum of two million votes. If none of the presidential candidates received the minimum, the National Assembly was to choose the president from among the five candidates to whom the most votes would fall. At the time when the Constituent Assembly made this law, ten million voters were inscribed on the electoral rolls. In its sense, then, one-fifth of those entitled to vote sufficed to make the presidential election valid. The law of 31 May struck at least three million votes from the lists, reduced the number of those entitled to vote to seven million and nevertheless retained the legal minimum of two million for the presidential election. It thus raised the legal minimum from one-fifth to nearly one-third of the voters capable of voting, i.e., it did everything to smuggle the presidential election out of the hands of the people into the hands of the National Assembly. Thus the Party of Order seemed, by the electoral law of 31 May, to have doubly fortified its rule, by confiding the election of the National Assembly and of the President of the Republic to the stationary part of society.

V.

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

The constitution had fixed Bonaparte’s salary at 600,000 francs. Hardly six months after his installation he succeeded in doubling this sum. Odilon Barrot had, namely, extorted from the Constituent National Assembly an annual supplementary allowance of 600,000 francs for so-called representation expenses. After 13 June Bonaparte had let similar requests be sounded, without this time finding a hearing with Barrot. Now after 31 May he immediately exploited the favourable moment and had his ministers request a civil list of three million in the National Assembly. A long adventurous vagabond life had endowed him with the most developed feelers for detecting the weak moments when he might squeeze money from the bourgeois. He practised formal blackmail. The National Assembly had violated popular sovereignty with his help and his knowledge. He threatened to denounce its crime to the people’s tribunal if it did not open its purse and purchase his silence with three million annually. It had deprived three million Frenchmen of the right to vote. He demanded for every Frenchman put out of circulation a circulating franc, exactly three million francs. He, the elect of six million, demands compensation for the votes of which he had been subsequently cheated. The commission of the National Assembly rejected the importunate man. The Bonapartist press threatened. Could the National Assembly break with the President of the Republic at a moment when it had broken in principle and definitively with the mass of the nation? It, true, rejected the annual civil list, but it granted a one-time supplement of 2,160,000 francs. It thus made itself guilty of the double weakness of granting the money and at the same time showing by its irritation that it granted it only reluctantly. We shall later see what Bonaparte used the money for. After this vexatious postlude, which followed on the heels of the abolition of universal suffrage, and in which Bonaparte exchanged his humble attitude during the crisis of March and April for a challenging insolence towards the usurpatory parliament, the National Assembly adjourned for three months, from 11 August to 11 November. It left in its place a permanent commission of 18 members, which contained no Bonapartist, but indeed some moderate republicans. The permanent commission of the year 1849 had numbered only men of the Order and Bonapartists. But at that time the Party of Order declared itself in permanence against the revolution. This time the parliamentary republic declared itself in permanence against the president. After the law of 31 May, the Party of Order had only this rival to face.

When the National Assembly met again in November 1850, instead of its former petty skirmishes with the president, a great, ruthless struggle, a struggle of the two powers for life and death seemed to have become inevitable.

As in the year 1849, the Party of Order during this year’s parliamentary recess had broken up into its separate factions, each busy with its own restoration intrigues, which had received new nourishment from the death of Louis Philippe. The Legitimist king, Henry V, had even appointed a formal ministry which resided in Paris and included members of the permanent commission. Bonaparte was therefore entitled, on his part, to make tours through the French departments and, depending on the mood of the town that he gladdened with his presence, now more covertly, now more openly to blab out his own restoration plans and to canvass votes for himself. On these journeys, which the big official Moniteur and the little private Moniteurs of Bonaparte naturally had to celebrate as triumphal processions, he was constantly accompanied by affiliates of the Society of December 10. This society dates from the year 1849. Under the pretext of founding a charitable society, the Paris lumpenproletariat had been organised into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside broken-down roués of the aristocracy with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside degenerate and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged convicts, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets,

Mountebanks, gamblers, *maquereaux*, brothel-keepers, porters, day-labourers, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, scissors-grinders, tinkers, beggars, in short, the whole undefined, disintegrated, tossed hither and thither mass which the French call *la bohème*; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the nucleus of the Society of December 10. “Benevolent Society”—insofar as all its members, like Bonaparte, felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself as chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in massive form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognises in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can rely unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte *sans phrase*, unmistakable even later when, all-powerful, he settles accounts with a part of his old fellow-conspirators, alongside the revolutionaries, by transporting them to Cayenne. Old, cunning rake, he conceives the historical life of nations and their state dramas as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve as a mask for the pettiest knavery. Thus in his expedition to Strasbourg, where a trained Swiss vulture represented the Napoleonic eagle. For his invasion of Boulogne he puts some London lackeys into French uniforms; they represent the army. In his Society of December 10 he collects 10,000 ruffians who have to represent the people, as Nick Bottom the lion. At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and half duped, half convinced of the solemnity of its own state dramas, the adventurer was bound to triumph who took the comedy plainly as comedy. Only when he has done away with his solemn opponent, when he now himself takes his imperial role seriously and imagines that with the Napoleonic mask he is representing the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own world outlook, a serious buffoon who no longer takes world history as a comedy but his comedy as world history. What the national workshops were for the socialist workers, what the gardes mobiles were for the bourgeois republicans, the Society of December 10 was for Bonaparte, the party fighting force peculiar to him. On his journeys the sections of the Society packed onto the railway had to improvise an audience for him, perform public enthusiasm, howl *Vive l’Empereur*, insult and beat up republicans, naturally under police protection. On his return journeys to Paris they had to form the vanguard, forestall counter-demonstrations or disperse them. The Society of December 10 belonged to him, it was his work, his very own idea. Whatever else he appropriates is given to him by the power of circumstances; whatever else he does, circumstances do for him or he contents himself with copying the deeds of others; but he, with the official phrases of order, religion, family, property publicly before the citizens, and behind him the secret society of rascalities and Spiegelbergs, the society of disorder, prostitution and theft, that is Bonaparte himself as original author, and the history of the Society of December 10 is his own history. It had now happened that, by way of exception, some representatives of the people belonging to the party of order fell under the cudgels of the Decembrists. More than that. Police Commissioner Yon, assigned to the National Assembly and entrusted with the guarding of its safety, informed the Permanence Commission on the testimony of a certain Alais that a section of the Decembrists had decided on the murder of General Changarnier and Dupin, the President of the National Assembly, and had already designated the individuals to carry it out. One can understand the anger of M. Dupin. A parliamentary inquiry into the Society of December 10, i.e. the profanation of Bonaparte’s secret world, seemed unavoidable. Just before the convening of the National Assembly Bonaparte, as a precaution, dissolved his society, naturally only on paper, for as late as the end of 1851 the Prefect of Police Carlier, in a detailed memorandum, vainly sought to move him to really break up the Decembrists.

The Society of December 10 was to remain Bonaparte’s private army until he succeeded in transforming the public army into a Society of December 10. Bonaparte made his first attempt to this end shortly after the adjournment of the National Assembly, and precisely with the money just wrested from it. As a fatalist, he lives in the conviction that there are certain higher powers to which man, and particularly the soldier, cannot resist. Among these powers he counts, in the first place, cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic sausage. He therefore treats, in the rooms of the Elysée, first the officers and non-commissioned officers to cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic sausage. On October 3 he repeats this manoeuvre with the masses of troops at the review of St. Maur, and on October 10 the same manoeuvre on a still larger scale at the army review of Satory. The uncle remembered the campaigns of Alexander in Asia, the nephew the conquests of Bacchus in the same country. Alexander was indeed a demigod, but Bacchus was a god, and moreover the tutelary god of the Society of December 10.

After the review of October 3 the Permanence Commission summoned the Minister of War d’Hautpoul before it. He promised that those breaches of discipline would not be repeated. We know how Bonaparte kept d’Hautpoul’s word on October 10. At both reviews Changarnier had commanded as commander-in-chief of the Army of Paris. He, at the same time a member of the Permanence Commission, chief of the National Guard, “saviour” of January 29 and June 13, “bulwark of society”, candidate of the party of order for the presidential dignity, the anticipated Monk of two monarchies, had up to now never acknowledged his subordination to the Minister of War, had always openly mocked the republican constitution, and had pursued Bonaparte with an equivocally distinguished protection. Now he was zealously advocating discipline against the Minister of War and the constitution against Bonaparte. While on October 10 a part of the cavalry let resound the cry “*Vive Napoléon! Vivent les saucissons!*”, Changarnier arranged that at least the infantry, defiling past under the command of his friend Neumeyer, observed an icy silence. As a punishment the Minister of War, at Bonaparte’s instigation, removed General Neumeyer from his post in Paris under the pretext of appointing him general-in-chief of the 14th and 15th military divisions. Neumeyer refused the exchange and had to take his discharge. Changarnier, for his part, published on November 2 an order of the day in which he forbade the troops to permit themselves any political cries or demonstrations of any kind under arms. The Elysée newspapers attacked Changarnier, the journals of the party of order attacked Bonaparte, the Permanence Commission held repeated secret sessions in which it was repeatedly proposed to declare the fatherland in danger, the army seemed divided into two hostile camps with two hostile general staffs, the one in the Elysée, where Bonaparte, the other in the Tuileries, where Changarnier resided. Only the convening of the National Assembly seemed necessary for the signal for battle to sound. The French public judged these frictions between Bonaparte and Changarnier like that English journalist who characterised them with the following words: “The political housemaids of France sweep away the glowing lava of the revolution with old brooms and squabble while doing their work.”

Meanwhile Bonaparte hastened to remove the Minister of War d’Hautpoul, to dispatch him head over heels to Algiers, and to appoint General Schramm Minister of War in his place. On November 12 he sent the National Assembly a message of American prolixity, overloaded with detail, reeking of order, thirsting for conciliation, constitutionally resigned, dealing with everything and anything except the *questions brûlantes* of the moment. As if in passing he let fall the words that according to the express provisions of the constitution the president alone disposes of the army. The message ended with the following high-pitched asseverations:

“France demands before all else tranquillity. ... Bound solely by an oath, I shall keep within the narrow limits it has drawn for me. ... As for me, elected by the people, and owing my power to it alone, I shall always submit to its legally expressed will. If at this session you decide on the revision of the constitution, a constituent assembly will regulate the position of the executive power. If not, the people will solemnly announce its decision in 1852. But whatever the solutions of the future may be, let us come to an understanding so that never does passion, surprise or violence decide the fate of a great nation. ... What above all engages my attention is not to know who is to govern France in 1852, but to use the time at my disposal so that the intervening period may pass without agitation and disturbance. I have opened my heart to you with sincerity, you will answer my frankness with your confidence, my good intentions through your cooperation, and God will do the rest.”

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

The burgraves of the party of order were not deceived for a moment as to the trust that this opening of the heart merited. They had long been blasé about oaths; they numbered among their ranks veterans, virtuosos of political perjury; they had not failed to hear the passage concerning the army. They noted with indignation that the message, in the long-winded enumeration of the laws lately issued, passed over the most important law, the electoral law, with affected silence, and instead, in the event of the non-revision of the constitution, left the election of the president in 1852 to the people. The electoral law was the leaden ball on the feet of the party of order, which prevented it from walking, let alone storming! Besides, Bonaparte by the official dissolution of the Society of December 10 and the dismissal of the Minister of War d’Hautpoul had offered up the scapegoats with his own hand on the altar of the fatherland. He had broken the point off the expected collision. Finally, the party of order itself anxiously sought to avoid, weaken, hush up any decisive conflict with the executive power. For fear of losing the conquests made over the revolution, it left its rival to enjoy the fruits of them.

"France wants above all things quiet." So cried the party of Order to the revolution since February, so cried Bonaparte's message to the party of Order. "France wants above all things quiet." Bonaparte committed acts which aimed at usurpation, but the party of Order committed the "unquiet" when it raised a clamour about these acts and interpreted them hypochondriacally. The sausages of Satory were as quiet as mice when no one talked about them. "France wants above all things quiet." Bonaparte, therefore, wanted to be left in peace, and the parliamentary party was paralysed by a twofold fear: the fear of rekindling revolutionary unquiet, and the fear itself of appearing as the disturber of the peace in the eyes of its own class, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie. Since France, then, wanted above all things quiet, the party of Order did not dare to answer "war" after Bonaparte in his message had spoken of "peace." The public, which had flattered itself with the prospect of great scandalous scenes at the opening of the National Assembly, was cheated of its expectations. The opposition deputies, who demanded the presentation of the minutes of the Permanent Commission on the October events, were outvoted by the majority. On principle, all debates that could arouse excitement were avoided. The labours of the National Assembly during November and December were of no interest.

Finally, towards the end of December the guerrilla war began around certain prerogatives of the parliament. The movement bogged down in petty chicanes over the prerogatives of the two powers, after the bourgeoisie had, for the time being, settled the class struggle by abolishing universal suffrage.

A court judgment for debt had been obtained against Mauguin, one of the people's representatives. At the request of the president of the court, the Minister of Justice, Rouher, declared that a warrant of arrest should be issued against the debtor without further ado. Mauguin was therefore thrown into the debtors' prison. The National Assembly flared up when it learned of this outrage. It not only ordered his immediate release, but even had him forcibly fetched from Clichy that same evening by its usher. In order, however, to affirm its faith in the sanctity of private property, and with the ulterior thought, in case of need, of opening an asylum for Montagnards who had become inconvenient, it declared the imprisonment for debt of people's representatives admissible after prior obtaining of its permission. It forgot to decree that the President, too, could be locked up for debt. It destroyed the last semblance of inviolability that surrounded the members of its own body.

It will be remembered that Police Commissioner Yon had denounced a section of the Decembrists, on the evidence of a certain Alais, for a plot to murder Dupin and Changarnier. Right in the first sitting the quaestors, with reference to this, proposed the formation of a separate parliamentary police, paid out of the private budget of the National Assembly and wholly independent of the Prefect of Police. The Minister of the Interior, Baroche, protested against this encroachment on his department. A wretched compromise was then concluded, according to which the police commissioner of the Assembly was to be paid out of its private budget and appointed and dismissed by its quaestors, but only after prior understanding with the Minister of the Interior. Meanwhile, Alais had been legally prosecuted by the government, and there it was easy to represent his evidence as a mystification and, through the mouth of the public prosecutor, to cast a ridiculous light on Dupin, Changarnier, Yon, and the whole National Assembly. Now, on 29 December, Minister Baroche writes a letter to Dupin demanding Yon's dismissal. The Bureau of the National Assembly resolves to keep Yon in his post, but the National Assembly, frightened by its own violence in the Mauguin affair, and accustomed, whenever it has dared a blow against the executive power, to receive two blows from it in exchange, does not sanction this resolution. It dismisses Yon as a reward for his zeal in service and robs itself of a parliamentary prerogative, indispensable against a man who does not resolve by night in order to execute by day, but resolves by day and executes by night.

We have seen how, during the months of November and December, the National Assembly avoided and suppressed the struggle with the executive power on the great, striking occasions. Now we see it forced to take it up on the pettiest occasions. In the Mauguin affair it confirms in principle the imprisonment for debt of people's representatives, but reserves to itself the right of having it applied only to representatives it dislikes, and it quarrels with the Minister of Justice over this infamous privilege. Instead of using the alleged murder plot to order an inquiry into the Society of 10 December and to expose Bonaparte hopelessly in his true shape as the head of the Paris lumpenproletariat before France and Europe, it lets the collision sink down to a point where, between itself and the Minister of the Interior, the only question at issue is to whose competence the appointment and dismissal of a police commissioner belongs. Thus we see the party of Order throughout this whole period, compelled by its ambiguous position, frittering away, crumbling its struggle against the executive power into petty jurisdictional disputes, chicaneries, quibbles, boundary quarrels with the ministers, and making the most insipid questions of form the content of its activity. It does not dare to take up the collision at the very moment when it has a significance of principle, when the executive power has really laid itself bare and the cause of the National Assembly would be the national cause. It would thereby be giving the nation marching orders, and it fears nothing more than that the nation should move. On such occasions, it therefore rejects the motions of the Montagne and proceeds to the order of the day. After the disputed question has thus been given up in its great dimensions, the executive power calmly awaits the moment when it can take it up again on pettily insignificant occasions, when, so to speak, it offers only a parliamentary local interest. Then the pent-up fury of the party of Order breaks out, then it tears the curtain from the wings, then it denounces the President, then it declares the Republic in danger, but then, too, its pathos appears insipid and the occasion of the struggle a hypocritical pretext, or in any case not worth the struggle. The parliamentary storm becomes a storm in a teacup, the struggle an intrigue, the collision a scandal. While the malicious joy of the revolutionary classes feasts on the humiliation of the National Assembly – for they are just as enthusiastic about its parliamentary prerogatives as that Assembly is about public liberties – the bourgeoisie outside Parliament does not understand how the bourgeoisie inside Parliament can waste its time in such petty bickerings and endanger peace by such wretched rivalries with the President. It is bewildered, irritated by a strategy that makes peace at the moment when everyone expects battles, and attacks at the moment when everyone believes peace has been concluded.

On 20 December Pascal Duprat interpellated the Minister of the Interior about the gold-bar lottery. This lottery was a “daughter of Elysium”; Bonaparte, together with his faithful, had brought it into the world, and Prefect of Police Carlier placed it under his official protection, although French law prohibits all lotteries with the exception of raffles for charitable purposes. Seven million tickets, one franc apiece, the proceeds ostensibly intended for shipping Paris vagabonds to California. On the one hand, golden dreams were to displace the socialist dreams of the Paris proletariat, the seductive prospect of the big prize the doctrinaire right to work. The Paris workers naturally did not recognize, in the gleam of the Californian gold bars, the inconspicuous francs that were being coaxed out of their pockets. The main thing, however, was a straightforward swindle. The vagabonds who wanted to open Californian gold mines without troubling to leave Paris were Bonaparte himself and his debt-ridden Round Table. The three millions granted by the National Assembly had been squandered; the coffers had to be filled again in one way or another. In vain had Bonaparte opened a national subscription for the erection of so-called *cités ouvrières*, placing himself at its head with a considerable sum. The hard-hearted bourgeois waited distrustfully for the payment of his share, and as this naturally did not follow, the speculation on socialist castles in the air fell flat to the ground. The gold bars drew better. Bonaparte and Co. did not content themselves with pocketing part of the surplus of the seven million over the bars to be raffled; they fabricated false tickets; they issued ten, fifteen, up to twenty tickets with the same number – a financial operation in the spirit of the Society of 10 December. Here the National Assembly had before it not the fictitious President of the Republic, but Bonaparte in flesh and blood. Here it could catch him in the act, in conflict not with the constitution but with the *Code pénal*. If it proceeded to the order of the day upon Duprat's interpellation, this was not only because Girardin's motion to declare itself *satisfait* reminded the party of Order of its own systematic corruption. The bourgeois, and above all the bourgeois inflated into a statesman, supplements his practical baseness with theoretical extravagance. As a statesman, he becomes, like the state power confronting him, a higher being that can only be combated in a higher, consecrated manner.

Bonaparte, who, precisely as a bohemian, as a princely lumpenproletarian, had the advantage over the rascally bourgeois that he could conduct the struggle in a base manner, now saw – after the Assembly itself had guided him with its own hand across the slippery ground of the military banquets, the reviews, the Society of 10 December, and finally the *Code pénal* – that the moment had come when he could pass from the apparent defensive to the offensive. The small defeats of the Minister of Justice, the Minister of War, the Minister of Marine, the Minister of Finance, which occurred incidentally and by which the National Assembly expressed its growling displeasure, troubled him but little. He not only prevented the ministers from resigning and thereby acknowledging the subordination of the executive power to the parliament. He could now accomplish what he had begun during the recess of the National Assembly: the severance of the military power from the parliament, the dismissal of Changarnier.

An Elysian paper published an order of the day which, during the month of May, had been allegedly addressed to the first military division, and therefore emanated from Changarnier, in which the officers were recommended, in the case

... an insurrection, to give no pardon to the traitors in their own ranks, to shoot them immediately and to refuse the National Assembly the troops if it should requisition them. On 3 January 1851 the cabinet was interpellated concerning this order of the day. It asked for three months to examine the matter, then a week, finally only twenty-four hours’ grace. The Assembly insisted on an immediate explanation. Changarnier rose and declared that this order of the day had never existed. He added that he would always hasten to comply with the requests of the National Assembly, and that in the event of a collision it could count on him. It received his declaration with indescribable applause and decreed him a vote of confidence. It abdicates, it decrees its own impotence and the omnipotence of the army, by placing itself under the private protection of a general; but the general deceives himself in placing at its disposal against Bonaparte a power which he holds only as a fief from that same Bonaparte, and in expecting protection on his part from this parliament, from his own protégé in need of protection. But Changarnier believes in the mysterious power with which the bourgeoisie has invested him since 29 January 1849. He believes himself to be the third power alongside the two other state powers. He shares the fate of the rest of the heroes, or rather saints, of this epoch, whose greatness consists precisely in the interested high opinion which their party creates of them, and who collapse into everyday figures as soon as circumstances invite them to perform miracles. Unbelief is in general the mortal enemy of these supposed heroes and real saints. Hence their dignified, moral indignation at the wits and scoffers deficient in enthusiasm.

That same evening the ministers were summoned to the Élysée; Bonaparte presses for the dismissal of Changarnier; five ministers refuse to sign it; the *Moniteur* announces a ministerial crisis, and the press of Order threatens the formation of a parliamentary army under Changarnier’s command. The Party of Order had the constitutional authority to take this step. It only needed to appoint Changarnier president of the National Assembly and requisition any number of troops for its security. It could do so the more safely, as Changarnier still actually stood at the head of the army and the Paris National Guard, and was only waiting to be requisitioned together with the army. The Bonapartist press did not yet even venture to call into question the right of the National Assembly to direct requisition of troops, a juridical scruple which offered no prospect of success under the given circumstances. That the army would have obeyed the order of the National Assembly is probable, considering that Bonaparte eight days have to search all Paris before finally finding two generals — Baraguay d’Hilliers and Saint-Jean d’Angely — who declared themselves ready to countersign the dismissal of Changarnier. That the Party of Order would have found the number of votes necessary for such a resolution within its own ranks and in parliament is more than doubtful, bearing in mind that eight days later 286 votes separated from it, and that the Mountain rejected a similar proposal even in December 1851, at the last hour of decision. Nevertheless, the Burggraves might perhaps even now have succeeded in sweeping the mass of their party into an act of heroism consisting in feeling themselves secure behind a forest of bayonets and accepting the services of an army that had deserted into their camp. Instead of this, the Messieurs Burggraves repaired on the evening of 6 January to the Élysée, in order to talk Bonaparte, by statesmanlike turns and scruples, into desisting from the dismissal of Changarnier. He whom one seeks to persuade, one recognises as the master of the situation. Bonaparte, rendered secure by this step, appoints a new ministry on 12 January, in which the leaders of the old one, Fould and Baroche, remain. Saint-Jean d’Angely becomes Minister of War; the *Moniteur* publishes the decree of dismissal of Changarnier; his command is divided between Baraguay d’Hilliers, who receives the first military division, and Perrot, who receives the National Guard. The bulwark of society is dismissed, and whereas no tile falls from the roof because of it, the stock exchange quotations rise instead.

By thrusting back the army which placed itself at its disposal in the person of Changarnier, and thereby irrevocably handing it over to the President, the Party of Order declares that the bourgeoisie has lost the vocation to rule. There was no longer any parliamentary ministry. Having now moreover lost the handle of the army and the National Guard, what power of force remained to it, in order simultaneously to assert the usurped power of parliament over the people and its constitutional power against the President? None. Only the appeal to forceless principles remained to it, principles which it had itself always interpreted merely as general rules that one prescribes to third parties in order to be able to move all the more freely oneself. With the dismissal of Changarnier, with the passing of the military power into Bonaparte’s hands, the first section of the period we are considering comes to a close, the period of struggle between the Party of Order and the executive power. The war between the two powers is now openly declared, openly waged, but only after the Party of Order has lost both arms and soldiers. Without a ministry, without an army, without a people, without public opinion, no longer the representative of the sovereign nation since its electoral law of 31 May, without eyes, without ears, without teeth, without everything, the National Assembly had gradually transformed itself into an old French parliament that had to leave action to the government and content itself with grumbling remonstrances *post festum*.

The Party of Order receives the new ministry with a storm of indignation. General Bedeau recalls to mind the mildness of the Permanent Commission during the recess and the excessive consideration with which it had waived the publication of its minutes. The Minister of the Interior now himself insists on the publication of these minutes, which by then had naturally become as flat as stale water, disclose no new facts, and fall on the blasé public without the slightest effect. On Rémusat’s proposal, the National Assembly withdraws into its bureaux and appoints a “Committee of Extraordinary Measures”. Paris departs from the track of its everyday order all the less, since trade at this moment is prospering, manufactories are at work, corn prices are low, foodstuffs overflow, and the savings banks daily receive new deposits. The “extraordinary measures” which parliament so noisily announced fizzle out on 18 January into a vote of no confidence in the ministers, without General Changarnier’s even being mentioned. The Party of Order was forced to couch its vote in this form in order to secure the votes of the republicans, since of all the ministry’s measures the latter approve only the dismissal of Changarnier, whereas the Party of Order is in fact unable to censure the other ministerial acts, which it had itself dictated.

The vote of no confidence of 18 January was decided by 415 to 286 votes. It was therefore carried only by a coalition of the out-and-out legitimists and Orleanists with the pure republicans and the Mountain. It thus proved that the Party of Order had lost not only the ministry, not only the army, but also, in its conflicts with Bonaparte, its independent parliamentary majority; that a troop of representatives had deserted from its camp, from a fanaticism of conciliation, from fear of struggle, from lassitude, from family consideration for state salaries held by blood relations, from speculation in ministerial posts falling vacant (Odilon Barrot), from that flat egoism which always impels the average bourgeois to sacrifice the general interest of his class to this or that private motive. The Bonapartist representatives from the outset adhered to the Party of Order only in the struggle against the revolution. The head of the Catholic party, Montalembert, already at that time threw his influence into the scale for Bonaparte, since he despaired of the viability of the parliamentary party. Finally, the leaders of this party, Thiers and Berryer — the Orleanist and the legitimist — were compelled to proclaim themselves openly as republicans, to confess that their heart might be royalist but their head republican, that the parliamentary republic was the sole possible form for the rule of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Thus they were compelled to brand the restoration plans, which they continued untiringly to pursue behind the back of parliament, before the eyes of the bourgeois class itself, as an intrigue as dangerous as it was brainless.

The vote of no confidence of 18 January hit the ministers, not the President. But it was the President who had dismissed Changarnier, not the ministers. Was the Party of Order to impeach Bonaparte himself? For his restorationist desires? These merely supplemented its own. For his conspiracy in the military reviews and the Society of 10 December? These themes it had long ago buried under simple motions to proceed to the order of the day. For the dismissal of the hero of 29 January and 13 June, the man who in May 1850 threatened, in the event of a riot, to set Paris on fire at all four corners? Their allies of the Mountain and Cavaignac did not even allow them to erect the fallen bulwark of society by means of an official expression of condolence. They themselves could not dispute the President’s constitutional authority to dismiss a general. They stormed only because he made an unparliamentary use of his constitutional right. Had they not themselves constantly made an unconstitutional use of their parliamentary prerogative, notably in the abolition of universal suffrage? They were therefore driven to move exclusively within parliamentary bounds. And that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged across the whole continent — parliamentary cretinism, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the harsh external world —, it required this parliamentary cretinism for them, who had destroyed with their own hands, and in their struggle with the other classes must destroy, all the conditions of parliamentary power, to continue to regard their parliamentary victories as victories and to imagine that they struck the President by beating his ministers. They only gave him the opportunity to humiliate the National Assembly anew in the eyes of the nation. On 20 January the *Moniteur* announced that the resignation of the entire ministry had been accepted. On the pretext that no parliamentary party any longer possessed a majority, as the vote of 18 January, that fruit of the coalition between the Mountain and the royalists, proved, and in order to await the formation of a new majority, Bonaparte appointed a so-called transitional ministry, no member of which belonged to parliament, all utterly unknown and insignificant individuals, a ministry of mere clerks.

Clerks and Scribes. The Party of Order could now wear itself out in playing with these puppets; the executive power no longer thought it worthwhile to be seriously represented in the National Assembly. Bonaparte concentrated the whole executive power all the more visibly in his own person; the more his ministers were mere supernumeraries, the freer scope he had to exploit it for his own purposes.

The Party of Order, in coalition with the Montagne, revenged itself by rejecting the presidential grant of 1,800,000 francs, which the head of the Society of December 10 had compelled his ministerial clerks to propose. This time a majority of only 102 votes decided; thus, since January 28, another 27 votes had fallen away; the dissolution of the Party of Order was proceeding. Lest anyone should for a moment be mistaken as to the meaning of its coalition with the Montagne, it simultaneously disdained even to consider a motion, signed by 189 members of the Montagne, for a general amnesty for political offenders. It sufficed that the Minister of the Interior, a certain Vaissé, declared that the calm was only apparent, that in secret great agitation reigned, that ubiquitous societies were organising themselves in secret, that the democratic newspapers were making preparations to reappear, that the reports from the departments were unfavourable, that the refugees from Geneva were directing a conspiracy from Lyons through the whole of Southern France, that France stood on the brink of an industrial and commercial crisis, that the manufacturers of Roubaix had reduced working hours, that the prisoners of Belle Isle had mutinied—it sufficed that even a mere Vaissé conjured up the red spectre for the Party of Order to reject without discussion a motion that would have won the National Assembly immense popularity and thrown Bonaparte back into its arms. Instead of allowing itself to be intimidated by the executive power through the prospect of new disorders, it ought rather to have granted a little leeway to the class struggle, in order to keep the executive dependent on itself. But it did not feel equal to the task of playing with fire.

Meanwhile, the so-called transitional ministry vegetated on until mid-April. Bonaparte wearied and mocked the National Assembly with constantly new ministerial combinations. At one moment he seemed to want to form a republican ministry with Lamartine and Billault, at another a parliamentary one with the inevitable Odilon Barrot, whose name must never be absent when a dupe is needed, | then a legitimist one with Vatimesnil and Benoist d’Azy, then an Orleanist one with Maleville. While he thus kept the different fractions of the Party of Order in suspense against one another and alarmed them all with the prospect of a republican ministry and the then inevitable restoration

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of universal suffrage, he simultaneously produced in the bourgeoisie the conviction that his sincere efforts to form a parliamentary ministry foundered on the irreconcilability of the royalist factions. But the bourgeoisie cried out all the louder for a “strong government”, and found it all the more unpardonable to leave France “without an administration”, the more a general commercial crisis now seemed approaching and canvassed for socialism in the cities, as did the ruinously low price of corn in the countryside. Trade became daily slacker, the idle hands increased visibly, in Paris at least 10,000 workers were without bread, in Rouen, Mulhouse, Lyons, Roubaix, Tourcoing, St. Etienne, Elbeuf, etc., countless factories stood idle. Under these circumstances Bonaparte could venture on April 11 to restore the ministry of January 18. Messieurs Rouher, Fould, Baroche, etc., strengthened by M. Léon Faucher, whom the Assembly during the last days of the Constituent Assembly had branded unanimously—with the exception of five ministerial votes—with a vote of no confidence for disseminating false telegraphic dispatches. Thus the National Assembly had gained a victory over the ministry on January 18, had fought with Bonaparte for three months, so that on April 11 Fould and Baroche could receive the Puritan Faucher as the third in their ministerial alliance.

In November 1849 Bonaparte had contented himself with an unparliamentary ministry, in January 1851 with an extra-parliamentary one; on April 11 he felt strong enough to form an anti-parliamentary ministry, which harmoniously united in itself the votes of no confidence of both Assemblies, the Constituent and the Legislative, the republican and the royalist. This graduated scale of ministries was the thermometer by which the parliament could measure the decline of its own vital warmth. By the end of April this had sunk so low that Persigny, in a personal interview, could invite Changarnier to go over to the camp of the President. Bonaparte, he assured him, considered the influence of the National Assembly to be completely annihilated, and the proclamation was already prepared that was to be published after the constantly intended but again casually postponed coup d’état. Changarnier communicated this death notice to the leaders of the Party of Order, but who believes that the bite of bugs is fatal? And the parliament, beaten, dissolved, mortally weary as it was, could not prevail upon itself to see in its duel with the grotesque chief of the Society of December 10 anything other than a duel with a bug. But Bonaparte answered the Party of Order as Agesilaus answered King Agis: “I seem to you an ant, but I shall one day be a lion.”

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VI.

The coalition with the Montagne and the pure republicans, to which the Party of Order saw itself condemned in its vain efforts to maintain possession of the military power and to reconquer the supreme direction of the executive power, proved incontestably that it had forfeited its independent parliamentary majority. The mere power of the calendar, the hour hand, gave on May 28 the signal for its complete dissolution. With May 28 began the last year of life of the National Assembly. It had now to decide | for the unchanged continuance or for the revision of the constitution. But revision of the constitution meant not only: rule of the bourgeoisie or petty-bourgeois democracy, democracy or proletarian anarchy, parliamentary republic or Bonaparte; it meant at the same time: Orleans or Bourbon! Thus there fell into the midst of the parliament the apple of discord, at which the conflict of interests that divided the Party of Order into hostile factions was bound to flare up openly.

The Party of Order was a combination of heterogeneous social substances. The question of revision generated a political temperature in which the product had to decompose again into its original constituents.

The interest of the Bonapartists in the revision was simple. For them it was above all a matter of abolishing Article 45, which forbade Bonaparte’s re-election and the prorogation of his power. No less simple seemed the position of the republicans. They unconditionally rejected any revision, seeing in it a universal conspiracy against the republic. Since they disposed of more than a quarter of the votes in the National Assembly, and constitutionally three-quarters of the votes were required for a valid resolution of revision and for the convocation of a revising assembly, they had only to count their votes to be sure of victory. And they were sure of victory.

Faced with these clear positions, the Party of Order found itself in inextricable contradictions. If it rejected revision, it endangered the status quo, by leaving Bonaparte only one way out, that of force, by delivering France on May 2, 1852, at the moment of decision, to the revolutionary anarchy, with a President who had lost his authority, with a parliament that had long since ceased to possess it, and with a people that it intended to reconquer. If it voted for constitutional revision, it knew that it voted in vain and would constitutionally founder on the veto of the republicans. If, unconstitutionally, it declared a simple majority of votes binding, then it could hope to control the revolution only if it unconditionally submitted itself to the

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authority of the executive power; then it made Bonaparte master of the constitution, of the revision, and of itself. A merely partial revision, prolonging the power of the President, paved the way for imperialist usurpation. A general revision, shortening the existence of the republic, brought the dynastic claims into unavoidable conflict, for the conditions for a Bourbon restoration and the conditions for an Orleanist restoration were not only different, they mutually excluded each other.

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

The Orleanist and people’s representative Creton had in 1849, 1850 and 1851 periodically introduced a motion to repeal the decree of banishment against the royal families. The parliament offered just as periodically the spectacle of an assembly of royalists who stubbornly barred the gates through which their banished kings might return. Richard III murdered Henry VI with the remark that he was too good for this world and belonged in heaven. They declared France too bad to possess its kings again. Compelled by the force of circumstances, they had become republicans | and repeatedly sanctioned the popular decree that drove their kings out of France.

The revision of the constitution—and circumstances compelled them to take it into consideration—simultaneously put in question, along with the republic, the common rule of the two bourgeois fractions, and revived, with the possibility of the monarchy, the rivalry of the interests which they had alternately represented with predilection, the struggle for the supremacy of one fraction over the other. The diplomats of the Party of Order believed they could settle the struggle by a fusion of the two dynasties, by a so-called fusion of the royalist parties and their royal houses. The actual fusion of the Restoration and the July Monarchy was the parliamentary republic, in which Orleanist and Legitimist colours were extinguished and the bourgeois species in the bourgeois

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simply disappeared in the bourgeois species. Now, however, the Orleanist was to become Legitimist, the Legitimist Orleanist. The kingship in which their antagonism was personified was to embody their unity, the expression of their exclusive factional interests was to become the expression of their common class interest, the monarchy was to achieve what only the abolition of two monarchies, the republic, could achieve and had achieved. This was the philosopher’s stone on whose production the doctors of the party of Order racked their brains. As though the legitimate monarchy could ever become the monarchy of the industrial bourgeoisie, or the bourgeois kingship ever become the kingship of the hereditary landed aristocracy. As though landed property and industry could fraternise under one crown, where the crown could only fall on one head, on the head of the elder brother or the younger. As though industry could ever come to terms with landed property so long as landed property does not resolve to become industrial itself. If Henri V died tomorrow, the Count of Paris would not thereby become the king of the Legitimists, unless he ceased to be the king of the Orleanists. The philosophers of the fusion, however, who spread themselves to the extent that the revision question came to the fore, who had created an official daily organ for themselves in the *Assemblée nationale*, who are even at this moment (February 1852) again at work, declared that the whole difficulty arose from the reluctance and the rivalry of the two dynasties. The attempts to reconcile the Orléans family with Henri V, begun after the death of Louis Philippe, but, like all dynastic intrigues, pursued only during the recesses of the National Assembly, in the intervals between acts, behind the scenes, more a sentimental flirtation with the old superstition than a seriously intended enterprise, now became state actions of prime importance and were performed by the party of Order on the public stage instead of, as before, on the amateur theatre. The couriers flew from Paris to Venice, from Venice to Claremont, from Claremont to Paris. The Count of Chambord issues a manifesto in which he, “with the assistance of all the members of his family”, announces not his own but the “national” restoration. The Orleanist Salvandy throws himself at Henri V’s feet. The Legitimist chieftains Berryer, Benoit d’Azy, Saint-Priest journey to Claremont to persuade the Orléans, but in vain. The fusionists perceive too late that the interests of the two bourgeois fractions neither lose in exclusiveness nor gain in pliancy when they sharpen themselves in the form of family interests, the interests of two royal houses. If Henri V recognised the Count of Paris as his successor—the sole success which the fusion could at best achieve—the House of Orléans gained no claim that the childlessness of Henri V had not already secured to them, but it lost all the claims it had conquered through the July Revolution. It renounced its original claims, all the titles it had wrested from the elder branch of the Bourbons in a struggle lasting more than a hundred years, it exchanged its historical prerogatives, the prerogatives of modern kingship, for the prerogatives of its family tree. The fusion, then, was nothing but a voluntary abdication of the House of Orléans, its Legitimist resignation, its repentant retreat from the Protestant state church into the Catholic. A retreat, moreover, that brought it not back onto the throne which it had lost, but onto the step of the throne on which it had been born. The old Orleanist ministers Guizot, Duchâtel, etc., who also hurried to Claremont to advocate the fusion, in fact represented only the hangover after the July Revolution, the despair over the bourgeois kingship and the kingship of the bourgeois, the superstition in legitimacy as the last amulet against anarchy. In their imagination mediators between Orléans and Bourbon, they were in reality only renegade Orleanists, and as such they were received by the Prince de Joinville. The vigorous, warlike section of the Orleanists, on the other hand, Thiers, Baze, etc., all the more easily convinced the family of Louis Philippe that, whereas any immediately monarchical restoration presupposed the fusion of the two dynasties, and any such fusion presupposed the abdication of the House of Orléans, it was on the contrary entirely in keeping with the tradition of their ancestors to acknowledge the republic for the time being and to wait until events permitted the conversion of the presidential chair into a throne. Joinville’s candidacy was spread as a rumour, public curiosity was kept in suspense, and some months later, after the rejection of the revision, it was publicly proclaimed in September.

The attempt at a royalist fusion between Orleanists and Legitimists had thus not only failed, it had shattered their parliamentary fusion, their republican common form, and decomposed the party of Order again into its original components; but the more the estrangement between Claremont and Venice grew, the more their reconciliation broke down, the more the Joinville agitation spread, the more eagerly and seriously were the negotiations conducted between Faucher, Bonaparte’s minister, and the Legitimists.

The dissolution of the party of Order did not stop at its original elements. Each of the two great factions decomposed in turn anew. It was as if all the old nuances, which within each of the two circles, whether the Legitimist or the Orleanist, had formerly fought and crowded against one another, had thawed again, like desiccated infusoria on contact with water, as if they had regained sufficient vitality to form their own groups and independent antagonisms. The Legitimists dreamt themselves back into the disputes between the Tuileries and the Pavillon Marsan, between Villèle and Polignac. The Orleanists lived again through the golden age of the tournaments between Guizot, Molé, Broglie, Thiers and Odilon Barrot.

The section of the party of Order that was eager for revision, but divided again over the limits of revision, composed of the Legitimists under Berryer and Falloux on the one hand, under La Rochejaquelein on the other, and the battle-weary Orleanists under Molé, Broglie, Montalembert and Odilon Barrot, came to an agreement with the Bonapartist representatives on the following vague and broadly worded motion: “The undersigned representatives, with the aim of restoring to the nation the full exercise of its sovereignty, move that the Constitution be revised.” At the same time, however, they declare unanimously through their rapporteur Tocqueville that the National Assembly has no right to move for the abolition of the republic, this right belonging only to the revision chamber. Moreover, the Constitution could only be revised in a “legal” manner, that is, only if the constitutionally prescribed three-quarters of the vote decide in favour of revision. After six days of stormy debate, on 19 July, the revision was, as was to be foreseen, rejected. Four hundred and forty-six voted for it, but 278 against. The resolute Orleanists Thiers, Changarnier, etc., voted with the republicans and the Montagne.

The majority of the parliament thus declared against the constitution, but this constitution itself declared for the minority, and that its decision was binding. But had not the party of Order on 31 May 1850, on 13 June 1849, subordinated the constitution to the parliamentary majority? Did not its whole previous policy rest on the subordination of the constitutional paragraphs to the parliamentary majority decisions? Had it not left the Old Testament superstition about the letter of the law to the democrats, and punished the democrats for it? At this moment, however, revision of the constitution meant nothing other than continuance of the presidential power, just as continuance of the constitution meant nothing other than Bonaparte’s deposition. The parliament had declared for him, but the constitution declared against the parliament. He therefore acted in the sense of the parliament when he tore up the constitution, and he acted in the sense of the constitution when he scattered the parliament.

The parliament had declared the constitution and with it its own rule “outside the majority”; by its resolution it had suspended the constitution and prolonged the presidential power, and at the same time declared that neither the one could die nor the other live as long as it itself continued to exist. The feet of those who were to bury it stood already at the door. While it debated the revision, Bonaparte removed General Baraguay d’Hilliers, who showed himself undecided, from the command of the first military division and appointed in his place General Magnan, the victor of Lyon, the hero of the December days, one of his creatures, who had already compromised himself more or less in his favour under Louis Philippe on the occasion of the Boulogne expedition.

The party of Order proved by its resolution on the revision that it understood neither how to rule nor to serve, neither to live nor to die, neither to endure the republic nor to overthrow it, neither to maintain the constitution nor to throw it overboard, neither to cooperate with the president nor to break with him. From whom, then, did it expect the solution of all contradictions? From the calendar, from the course of events. It ceased to arrogate to itself power over events. It therefore challenged events to do violence to it, and thereby to the power to which in the struggle against the people it had ceded one attribute after another, until it stood powerless opposite that power itself. In order that the head of the executive power might the more undisturbed elaborate the plan of battle against it, strengthen his means of attack, select his instruments, fortify his positions, it resolved, in the midst of this critical moment, to quit the stage and to adjourn for three months, from 10 August to 4 November.

The parliamentary party was not only split into its two great factions, each of these factions was not only dissolved within itself, but the party of Order in parliament had fallen out with the party of Order outside parliament. The spokesmen and scribes of the bourgeoisie, its tribune and its press, in short the ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie itself, the representatives and the represented, stood estranged opposite one another and no longer understood each other.

The Legitimists in the provinces, with their limited horizon and their unlimited enthusiasm, accused their parliamentary leaders, Berryer and Falloux, of desertion into the Bonapartist camp and of defection from Henri V. Their fleur-de-lis mind believed in the Fall of Man, but not in diplomacy.

Far more momentous and decisive was the rupture of the commercial bourgeoisie with its politicians. It reproached them, not like the Legitimists reproached theirs, with having fallen away from the principle, but on the contrary, with clinging to principles that had become useless.

I have already earlier indicated that since Fould’s entry into the

The ministry proved that the section of the commercial bourgeoisie which had possessed the lion’s share of Louis Philippe’s rule, namely the finance aristocracy, had become Bonapartist. Fould represented not only Bonaparte’s interest on the Bourse, he at the same time represented the interest of the Bourse with Bonaparte. The position of the finance aristocracy is most strikingly depicted by a quotation from their European organ, the London Economist. In its issue of 1 February 1851 it writes from Paris: “Now we have established from all sides that France asks for tranquillity above all. The President declares it in his message to the Legislative Assembly, it is repeated as an echo from the national tribune, it is asseverated by the newspapers, it is proclaimed from the pulpit, it is proved by the sensitivity of state securities at the slightest prospect of disturbance, by their firmness whenever the executive power triumphs.”

In its issue of 29 November 1851 the Economist declares in its own name: “On all the bourses of Europe the President is now recognized as the sentinel of order.” The finance aristocracy therefore condemned the parliamentary struggle of the party of Order with the executive power as a disturbance of order, and celebrated every victory of the President over its alleged representatives as a victory of order. By finance aristocracy one must here understand not only the great state creditors and speculators in state securities, of whom it is at once obvious that their interest coincides with the interest of the state power. The whole of modern money dealing, the whole of banking, is most intimately interwoven with the public credit. A part of their business capital is necessarily invested in rapidly convertible state securities and yields interest. Their deposits, the capital placed at their disposal and distributed by them among merchants and industrialists, flow to a large extent from the dividends of state rentiers. The entire money market and the priests of this money market, if in every epoch the stability of the state power signifies Moses and the prophets for them – how much more so today, when every deluge threatens to sweep away the old states along with the old state debts?

The industrial bourgeoisie too, in its fanaticism for order, was irritated by the bickerings of the parliamentary party of Order with the executive power. After their vote of 18 January, on the occasion of Changarnier’s dismissal, Thiers, Angle, Sainte-Beuve, etc., received public rebukes from their constituents, precisely from the industrial districts, in which their coalition with the Montagne in particular was castigated as high treason against order. If we have seen that the boastful gibes, the petty intrigues in which the struggle

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of the party of Order with the President manifested itself, deserved no better reception, on the other hand this bourgeois party, which demanded of its representatives that they should allow the military power to pass from the hands of its own parliament into those of an adventurer pretender without resistance, was not even worthy of the intrigues that were wasted in its interest. It proved that the struggle to uphold its public interest, its own class interest, its political power, merely inconvenienced and vexed it as a disturbance of private business.

The bourgeois notabilities of the departmental towns, the magistrates, commercial judges, etc., welcomed Bonaparte everywhere on his tours, with scarcely an exception, in the most servile manner, even when in Dijon he attacked the National Assembly, and the party of Order in particular, without reserve.

If trade was good, as it still was at the beginning of 1851, the commercial bourgeoisie raged against every parliamentary struggle, so that trade should not lose its good humour. If trade was bad, as it continued to be from the end of February 1851, it denounced the parliamentary struggles as the cause of the stagnation | and clamoured for their cessation, so that trade might become loud again. The revision debates fell precisely into this bad period. Since the question here was the to be or not to be of the existing state form, the bourgeoisie felt all the more justified in demanding from its representatives the end of this torturing provisional regime and at the same time the maintenance of the status quo. There was no contradiction in this. By the end of the provisional regime it understood precisely its prolongation, the postponement into a dim distance of the moment when a decision would have to be taken. The status quo could be maintained only in two ways: extension of Bonaparte’s power, or his constitutional resignation and the election of Cavaignac. One part of the bourgeoisie wished for the latter solution and could give its representatives no better advice than to keep quiet, to leave the burning point untouched. If their representatives did not speak, it thought, Bonaparte would not act. It wished for an ostrich parliament that would hide its head in order to remain unseen. Another part of the bourgeoisie wished to leave Bonaparte, once he was sitting in the presidential chair, sitting in the presidential chair, so that everything might stay in the old groove. It was outraged that its parliament did not openly break the constitution and abdicate without ceremony.

The general councils of the departments, these provincial representations of the big bourgeoisie, which sat from 25 August, during the recess of the National Assembly, declared themselves almost unanimously for revision, i.e. against the parliament and for Bonaparte.

Still more unambiguously than in the break with its parliamentary re-

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presentatives, the bourgeoisie manifested its rage against its literary representatives, against its own press. The sentences to ruinous fines and shameless terms of imprisonment by the bourgeois juries for every attack of the bourgeois journalists on Bonaparte’s usurpatory aspirations, for every attempt of the press to defend the political rights of the bourgeoisie against the executive power, astonished not only France but all of Europe.

If the parliamentary party of Order, as I have shown, by its cry for tranquillity referred itself to tranquillity, if it declared the political rule of the bourgeoisie to be incompatible with the security and the existence of the bourgeoisie, by destroying with its own hands, in the struggle against the other classes of society, all the conditions of its own regime, the parliamentary regime, the extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, by its servility towards the President, by its vilification of the parliament, by the brutal maltreatment of its own press, called on Bonaparte to suppress and annihilate its speaking and writing part, its politicians and its men of letters, its tribune and its press, so that it might then confidently pursue its private business under the protection of a strong and unrestricted government. It unambiguously declared that it longed to get rid of its own political rule, in order to get rid of the toils and dangers of rule.

And this wretched, cowardly thing, which already bristles at the merely parliamentary and literary struggle for the rule of its own class and has betrayed the leaders of this struggle, now dares after the event to accuse the proletariat of not having risen for it in a bloody struggle, a struggle for life or death! It which at every moment sacrificed its general class interest, i.e. its political interest, to the most narrow-minded and filthiest private interest and expected a similar sacrifice from its representatives, now laments that the proletariat has sacrificed its ideal political interests to its material interests. It poses as a fine soul, misunderstood and abandoned at the decisive moment by the proletariat, which has been led astray by socialists and has become egoistic. And it finds a universal echo in the bourgeois | world. I am of course not speaking here of German petty politicians and sentiment-mongers. I refer, for example, to the same Economist, which on 29 November 1851, i.e. four days before the coup d’état, still declared Bonaparte the “sentinel of order”, but Thiers and Berryer “anarchists”, and on 27 December 1851, after Bonaparte had brought those anarchists to rest, already cries out about the treason which “the ignorant, uneducated, stupid pro-

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letarian masses have committed against the skill, knowledge, discipline, spiritual influence, intellectual resources and moral weight of the middle and upper ranks of society”. The stupid, ignorant and common mass was none other than the bourgeois mass itself.

France had indeed gone through a kind of minor trade crisis in 1851. At the end of February there was a decline in exports compared with 1850; in March trade suffered and factories closed; in April the condition of the industrial departments appeared as desperate as after the February days; in May business had still not revived; on 28 June the portfolio of the Bank of France, by a tremendous increase of deposits and an equally great decrease of advances on bills, still showed the standstill of production; and only in mid-October did a progressive improvement of business set in again. The French bourgeoisie explained this trade stagnation by purely political reasons, by the struggle between parliament and the executive power, by the uncertainty of a merely provisional state form, by the alarming prospect of 2 May 1852. I will not deny that all these circumstances depressed some branches of industry in Paris and in the departments. In any case, however, this effect of the political conditions was only local and insignificant. Is any further proof required than that trade improved precisely at the moment when the political situation deteriorated, when the political horizon darkened and every moment a bolt from the Élysée was expected – around the middle of October? The French bourgeois, whose “skill, knowledge, spiritual insight and intellectual resources” reach no further than his nose, could, during the whole duration of the Industrial Exhibition in London, incidentally stumble with his nose upon the cause of his commercial misery. While in France factories closed down, in England commercial bankruptcies broke out. While the industrial panic reached its peak in France in April and May, the commercial panic reached its peak in England in April and May. Like the French wool industry, the English wool industry suffered; like the French, the English silk manufacture. If the English cotton mills continued to work, it was no longer with the same profit as in 1849 and 1850. The only difference was that the crisis was industrial in France and commercial in England; that while in France the factories shut down, in England they expanded, but under more unfavourable conditions than in the preceding years; that in France the export, in England the import suffered the heaviest blows. The common cause, which is naturally not to be sought within the bounds of the French political horizon,

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was obvious. The years 1849 and 1850 were years of the greatest material prosperity and of an overproduction that only emerged as such in 1851. It was further stimulated at the beginning of this year by the prospect of the Industrial Exhibition. As special circumstances were added: first, the failure of the cotton crop of 1850 and 1851, then the certainty of a larger cotton crop than expected, first the rise, then the sudden fall, in short, the fluctuations of cotton prices. The raw silk harvest, at least in France, had fallen below the average yield. Woollen manufacture, finally, had expanded so much since 1848 that wool production could not keep up with it and the price of raw wool rose in great disproportion to the price of woollen manufactures. Here, then, in the raw material of three world-market industries, we have already threefold material for a trade stagnation. Apart from these special circumstances, the apparent crisis of the year 1851 was nothing but the halt which overproduction and overspeculation invariably make in describing the industrial cycle, before they gather together all their last efforts to dash feverishly through the final phase of the cycle and arrive back at their starting point, the general commercial crisis. In such intervals of commercial history, commercial bankruptcies break out in England, while in France industry itself is brought to a standstill, partly forced to retreat by the competition of the English on all markets, which at that moment becomes intolerable, and partly attacked, as a luxury industry, by every business stoppage. Thus France, in addition to the general crises, goes through its own national commercial crises, which are nevertheless determined and conditioned far more by the general state of the world market than by French local influences.

It will not be without interest to contrast the prejudice of the French bourgeois with the judgement of the English bourgeois. One of the largest Liverpool houses writes in its annual commercial report for 1851: “Few years have more disappointed the anticipations entertained at their commencement than the one just closed; instead of the great prosperity that was unanimously expected, it proved to be one of the most discouraging years for a quarter of a century. This applies, of course, only to the mercantile, not to the industrial classes. And yet there were certainly reasons at the beginning of the year for drawing the opposite conclusion: stocks of produce were scanty, capital abundant, food cheap, a plentiful autumn was assured; unbroken peace on the continent and no political or financial disturbances at home; indeed, the wings of commerce were never more unfettered. ... To what is this unfavourable result to be ascribed? We believe to overtrading in both imports and exports. Unless our merchants themselves place narrower limits on their activity, nothing but a panic every three years can keep us on the rails.”

Now imagine the French bourgeois, how, in the midst of this business panic, his trade-crazed brain is tortured, buzzed about, dazed by rumours of coups d'état and the restoration of universal suffrage, by the struggle between parliament and the executive power, by the Fronde war of the Orleanists and Legitimists, by communist conspiracies in the south of France, by alleged jacqueries in the départements of Nièvre and Cher, by the self-advertisements of the various presidential candidates, by the mercenary solutions of the journals, by the threats of the republicans to maintain the constitution and universal suffrage with weapons in hand, by the gospels of the emigrant heroes in partibus, who announced the end of the world for 2 May 1852, and one understands that the bourgeois, in this unspeakable, noisy confusion of fusion, revision, prorogation, constitution, conspiracy, coalition, emigration, usurpation and revolution, crazed, snorts out at his parliamentary republic: “Better an end with terror than a terror without end!”

Bonaparte understood this cry. His comprehension was sharpened by the growing importunity of creditors, who saw in every sunset that brought the day of maturity, 2 May 1852, nearer, a protest of the movement of the stars against their earthly bills. They had become veritable astrologers. The National Assembly had cut off Bonaparte's hope of a constitutional prorogation of his power; the candidature of the Prince of Joinville permitted no further vacillation.

If ever an event cast its shadow before it long before its coming, it was Bonaparte's coup d'état. As early as 29 January 1849, barely a month after his election, he had proposed it to Changarnier. His own prime minister, Odilon Barrot, had covertly denounced the policy of coups d'état in the summer of 1849, and Thiers openly in the winter of 1850. Persigny had again sought to win Changarnier for the coup in May 1851; the Messager de l'Assemblée had published this negotiation; the Bonapartist journals threatened a coup d'état at every parliamentary storm, and the nearer the crisis drew, the louder their tone became. In the orgies that Bonaparte celebrated every night with the male and female swell mob, every time the midnight hour approached and copious libations had loosened tongues and heated phantasies, the coup d'état was decided on for the following morning. Swords were drawn, glasses clinked, the representatives were thrown out of the window, the imperial mantle fell on Bonaparte's shoulders, until the next morning once again drove away the spectre and astonished Paris learned from vestals of little reticence and indiscreet paladins of the danger it had once again escaped. In the months of September and October, rumours of a coup d'état followed one another thick and fast. At the same time the shadow took on colour, like a variegated daguerreotype. Look up the monthly issues of the organs of the European daily press for September and October and you will find hints such as the following word for word: “Rumours of a coup d'état fill Paris. The capital is said to be filled with troops during the night and the next morning to bring decrees dissolving the National Assembly, placing the département of the Seine in a state of siege, restoring universal suffrage, and appealing to the people. Bonaparte is said to be looking for ministers to execute these illegal decrees.” The correspondences that bring these reports always end with the monosyllabic “postponed”. The coup d'état was always the fixed idea of Bonaparte. With this idea he had again set foot on French soil. It possessed him so completely that he constantly betrayed it and blabbed it out. He was so weak that he just as constantly abandoned it again. The shadow of the coup d'état had become so familiar to the Parisians as a spectre that they could not believe in it when it finally appeared in flesh and blood. It was therefore neither the reserved reticence of the chief of the Society of 10 December, nor an unforeseen surprise on the part of the National Assembly, that made the coup d'état succeed. If it succeeded, it succeeded despite his indiscretion and with its foreknowledge, a necessary, inevitable result of the preceding development.

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

The first post it had lost in the struggle with the executive power was the ministry. It had to solemnly admit this loss by accepting the Thorigny ministry, a mere sham ministry, as full. The Permanent Committee had received M. Giraud with laughter when he introduced himself in the name of the new ministers. Such a weak ministry for such strong measures as the restoration of universal suffrage! But the point was precisely to push nothing through in parliament, everything against parliament.

On the very first day of its reopening, the National Assembly received Bonaparte's message, in which he demanded the restoration of universal suffrage and the abolition of the law of 31 May 1850. On the same day his ministers introduced a decree to this effect. The Assembly immediately rejected the motion of urgency moved by the ministers, and on 13 November rejected the law itself by 355 votes to 348. Thus it tore up its mandate once again; it confirmed once again that it had transformed itself from the freely elected representation of the people into the usurpatory parliament of a class; it acknowledged once again that it had itself cut in two the muscles that connected the parliamentary head to the body of the nation.

If the executive power, by its motion for the restoration of universal suffrage, appealed from the National Assembly to the people, the legislative power, by its quaestors' bill, appealed from the people to the army. This quaestors' bill was to establish its right to direct requisition of troops, to the formation of a parliamentary army. Thus, by appointing the army as arbitrator between itself and the people, between itself and Bonaparte, by recognising the army as the supreme state power, it necessarily acknowledged that it had long given up the claim to rule over it. By debating the right of requisition instead of requisitioning troops at once, it betrayed its doubt in its own power. By rejecting the quaestors' bill, it openly confessed its impotence. This bill fell through with a minority of 108 votes; the Montagne had thus thrown the decisive weight. It found itself in the position of Buridan's ass, not indeed between two sacks of hay, compelled to decide which was the more attractive, but between two beatings, compelled to decide which was the harder. On one side, the fear of Changarnier; on the other, the fear of Bonaparte. It must be admitted that the situation was not heroic.

On 18 November, an amendment was moved to the law on municipal elections introduced by the Party of Order itself, to the effect that one year's residence should suffice for municipal electors instead of three years. The amendment was lost by a single vote, but this one vote immediately proved to be a mistake. The Party of Order, by splitting up into its hostile factions, had long lost its independent parliamentary majority. It now showed that there was no longer any majority at all in parliament. The National Assembly had become incapable of passing resolutions. Its atomistic components were no longer held together by any cohesive force; it had spent its last breath of life, it was dead.

The extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie was finally to solemnly confirm its breach with the bourgeoisie in parliament once again a few days before the catastrophe. Thiers, as a parliamentary hero, pre-eminently infected with the incurable disease of parliamentary cretinism, had hatched a new parliamentary intrigue together with the Council of State after the death of parliament—a responsibility law, which was supposed to confine the president within the bounds of the constitution. Just as Bonaparte, on 15 September, at the laying of the foundation stone of the new market halls of Paris, had bewitched the dames des halles, the fishwives, as a second Masaniello—admittedly, one fishwife weighed as heavily in real power as 17 burgraves—as, after presenting the Quaestors’ Bill, he had inspired the lieutenants entertained at the Élysée, so now, on 25 November, he swept along with him the industrial bourgeoisie, assembled in the Circus to receive from his hand prize medals for the London Industrial Exhibition. I give the characteristic part of his speech from the Journal des Débats: “With such unexpected successes I am entitled to repeat how great the French Republic would be if it were permitted to pursue its real interests and reform its institutions, instead of being constantly disturbed on the one hand by demagogues, on the other by monarchical hallucinations. (Loud, stormy, and repeated applause from every part of the amphitheatre.) The monarchical hallucinations hinder all progress and all serious industrial branches. Instead of progress, nothing but struggle. We see men who were formerly the most zealous supporters of royal authority and prerogatives become partisans of a Convention, solely in order to weaken the authority that has sprung from universal suffrage. (Loud and repeated applause.) | We see men who have suffered most from the Revolution, and who most lamented it, provoke a new one, only to fetter the will of the nation. . . . I promise you tranquillity for the future, etc. etc. (Bravo, bravo, stormy bravo.)”

Thus the industrial bourgeoisie applauds with its servile bravo the coup d’état of 2 December, the destruction of parliament, the downfall of its own rule, the dictatorship of Bonaparte. The thunder of applause of 25 November received its answer in the thunder of cannon of 3 to 6 December, and the house of M. Sallandrouze, who had clapped the loudest bravoes, was shattered by the most bombs.

Cromwell, when he dissolved the Long Parliament, went alone into its midst, drew out his watch so that it should not continue to exist a minute beyond the time limit set by him, and chased out each individual member of Parliament with cheerful, humorous insults. Napoleon, lesser than his model, on the 18th Brumaire at least proceeded to the legislative body and, though with a choked voice, read out to it its death sentence. The second Bonaparte, who moreover found himself in possession of a quite different executive power than Cromwell and Napoleon, sought his model not in the annals of world history, but in the annals of the Society of 10 December, in the annals of criminal justice. He robs the Bank of France of 25 million francs, buys General Magnan with a million, the soldiers piece by piece with 15 francs and brandy, meets secretly at night, like a thief, with his accomplices, has the houses of the most dangerous parliamentary leaders broken into and Cavaignac, Lamoricière, Leflô, Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc. carried away from their beds, has the principal squares of Paris and the parliament building occupied by troops, and early in the morning has bombastic placards posted on all walls announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly and the Council of State, the restoration of universal suffrage, and the placing of the Department of the Seine under a state of siege. Shortly afterwards he inserts a false document in the Moniteur, according to which influential parliamentary names had grouped around him in a state consulta.

The Rump Parliament, assembled in the mairie of the 10th arrondissement, consisting mainly of Legitimists and Orleanists, resolves under repeated shouts of “Long live the Republic!” the deposition of Bonaparte, harangues in vain the gaping crowd in front of the building, and is finally dragged, escorted by African sharpshooters, first to the barracks of Orsay, later packed into prison vans and transported to the prisons of Mazas, Ham and Vincennes. Thus ended the Party of Order, the Legislative Assembly and the February Revolution. Before we hasten to the end, briefly the schema of its history:

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

II. Second Period. Period of the constitution of the republic and of the constituent National Assembly.

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

2) 25 June to 10 December 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of the state of siege over Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on 10 December by the election of Bonaparte as president.

3) 20 December 1848 to 28 May 1849. Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and the Party of Order united with him. Downfall of the Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie.

III. Third Period. Period of the constitutional republic and of the legislative National Assembly.

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

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

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

a) 31 May 1850 to 12 January 1851. The parliament loses the supreme command over the army.

b) 12 January to 11 April 1851. It succumbs in the attempts to seize the administrative power again. The Party of Order loses its independent parliamentary majority. Coalition with the republicans and the Montagne.

c) 11 April 1851 to 9 October 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion, prorogation. The Party of Order dissolves into its individual components. The breach between the bourgeois parliament and the bourgeois press and the mass of the bourgeoisie consolidates.

d) 9 October to 2 December 1851. Open breach between parliament and the executive power. It performs its dying act and succumbs, abandoned by its own class, by the army, by all other classes. Downfall of the parliamentary regime and of bourgeois rule. Victory of Bonaparte. Imperialist restoration parody.

VII.

The social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy on the threshold of the February Revolution. In the June days of 1848 it was stifled in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but throughout the subsequent acts of the drama it goes about as a spectre. The democratic republic announced itself. It fizzles out on 13 June 1849 with its runaway petty bourgeois, but in fleeing it hurls behind it doubly boastful advertisements. The parliamentary republic together with the bourgeoisie seizes the entire stage, it lives itself out in the full breadth of its existence, but 2 December 1851 buries it to the anguished cry of the coalition royalists: “Long live the Republic!”

The social and the democratic republic have suffered defeats, but the parliamentary republic, the republic of the royalist bourgeoisie, has gone under, just as the pure republic, the republic of the bourgeois republicans, has gone under.

The French bourgeoisie balked against the rule of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpenproletariat to power, at its head the chief of the Society of 10 December. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy; Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on 3 and 4 December, he had the respectable citizens of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down from their windows by the brandy-enthused army of order. It apotheosised the sabre; the sabre rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It placed popular assemblies under police surveillance; its salons stand under police surveillance. It dissolved the democratic national guards; its own national guard is dissolved. It imposed the state of siege; the state of siege is imposed on it. It replaced juries by military commissions; its juries are replaced by military commissions. It subjected public education to the priests; the priests subjected it to their own education. It transported without trial; it is transported without trial. It suppressed every stirring of society by the state power; every stirring of its society is suppressed by the state power. Out of enthusiasm for its moneybags, it rebelled against its own politicians and literati; its politicians and literati are swept aside, but its moneybag is plundered after its mouth has been gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie ceaselessly cried out to the revolution, as St. Arsenius to the Christians: “Fuge, Tace, Quiesce! Flee, be silent, keep still!” Bonaparte cries to the bourgeoisie: “Fuge, Tace, Quiesce! Flee, be silent, keep still!”

The French bourgeoisie had long ago solved Napoleon’s dilemma: “Dans cinquante ans l’Europe sera républicaine ou cosaque.” It had solved it in the “république cosaque”. No Circe has distorted the work of art of the bourgeois republic into a monstrosity by evil magic. That republic lost nothing but its rhetorical arabesques, the forms of decency, in a word, the semblance of respectability. Present-day France was already contained, finished, in the parliamentary republic. It only needed a bayonet thrust to make the bubble burst and the monster leap to the eye.

The immediate aim of the February Revolution was to overthrow the Orleans dynasty and the section of the bourgeoisie that ruled under it. Only on 2 December 1851 was this aim achieved. Now the colossal estates of the House of Orleans, the real basis of its influence, were confiscated, and what had been expected after the February Revolution,

After December came imprisonment, flight, deposition, banishment, disarmament, mockery of the men who since 1830 had wearied France with their fame. Under Louis Philippe, however, only a part of the commercial bourgeoisie ruled. The other fractions of the same formed a dynastic and a republican opposition, or stood entirely outside the so-called legal country. It was the parliamentary republic alone that took all fractions of the commercial bourgeoisie into its state sphere. Under Louis Philippe, the commercial bourgeoisie additionally excluded the landowning bourgeoisie. It was the parliamentary republic alone that placed them on an equal footing side by side, wedded the July Monarchy to the legitimate monarchy, and fused two epochs of property rule into one. Under Louis Philippe the favoured part of the bourgeoisie concealed its rule beneath the crown; in the parliamentary republic the rule of the bourgeoisie, having united all its elements and extended its realm to the realm of its class, showed its head naked. Thus the revolution itself first had to create the form in which the rule of the bourgeois class gained its broadest, most general and final expression, so that it could now also be overthrown without being able to rise again.

Only now was the sentence pronounced in February executed upon the Orleanist bourgeoisie, i.e. the most viable fraction of the French bourgeoisie. Now it was struck down in its parliament, its bar of advocates, its commercial courts, its provincial representations, its notariat, its university, its tribune and its tribunals, its press and its literature, its administrative revenues and its court fees, its army pay and its state pensions, its spirit and its body. Blanqui had demanded the dissolution of the bourgeois guards as the first demand addressed to the revolution, and the bourgeois guards, who in February had lent the revolution a hand in order to keep it from walking, vanished from the stage in December. The Panthéon itself is transformed back into an ordinary church. With the last form of the bourgeois regime, the spell that had transfigured its initiators of the eighteenth century into saints is also broken. When Guizot learned of the success of the coup d’état of 2 December, he therefore cried: *C’est le triomphe complet et définitif du Socialisme!* That is the complete and definitive triumph of socialism! That is to say: the definitive and complete overthrow of bourgeois rule.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte – VII

Why did the proletariat not save the bourgeoisie? This resolves into the question: Why did the Paris proletariat not rise after 2 December?

The overthrow of the bourgeoisie had as yet only been decreed; the decree was not carried out. Any genuinely revolutionary rising by the proletariat would instantly have revived it, reconciled it with the army, and secured the workers a second June defeat.

On 4 December the proletariat was goaded into struggle by bourgeois and shopkeeper. On the evening of that day several legions of the National Guard promised to appear, armed and uniformed, on the field of battle. For bourgeois and shopkeeper had got wind of the fact that Bonaparte, in one of his decrees of 2 December, abolished the secret ballot and ordered them to enter their Yes or No behind their names in the official registers. The bloody resistance of 4 December frightened Bonaparte. During the night he had placards posted on every street corner in Paris announcing the restoration of the secret ballot. Bourgeois and shopkeeper believed they had achieved their purpose. Those who failed to appear the next morning were shopkeeper and bourgeois.

The Paris proletariat, robbed moreover by a surprise blow of Bonaparte’s during the night of 1 to 2 December of its leaders, the barricade chiefs, an army without officers, too enlightened by its memories of June 1848 and 1849 and of May 1850 to fight under the banner of the Montagnards, accordingly, with a correct appreciation of its own forces and of the general situation, left it to its vanguard, the secret societies, to save the insurrectionary honour of Paris, which the bourgeois so unresistingly abandoned to the soldiery that Bonaparte could later disarm the National Guard with the mocking motive: not that he feared they might misuse their arms against him, but that the anarchists might misuse these arms against themselves.

“*C’est le triomphe complet et définitif du Socialisme!*” Thus did Guizot characterise 2 December. But if the overthrow of the parliamentary republic contains within itself, in embryo, the triumph of the proletarian revolution, its immediate, tangible result was the victory of Bonaparte over parliament, of the executive power over the legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of phrases. In parliament the nation raised its general will to the law, i.e. raised the law of the ruling class to its general will. Before the executive power it abdicates all will of its own and submits to the foreign power of command, to authority. The executive power, in contrast to the legislative, expresses the heteronomy of the nation in contrast to its autonomy. France therefore seems merely to have escaped the despotism of a class to fall back beneath the despotism of an individual, and indeed beneath the authority of an individual without authority. The struggle seems thus settled, in that all classes kneel down, equally impotent and equally silent, before the rifle butt.

But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still journeying through purgatory. It accomplishes its business with method. By 2 December 1851 it had completed one half of its preparatory work; it now completes the other. First it perfected the parliamentary power in order to be able to overthrow it. Now, having achieved this, it perfects the executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, confronts itself with it as the sole object, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction upon it. And when it has accomplished this second half of its preliminary work, all Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well grubbed, old mole!

This executive power, with its monstrous bureaucratic and military organisation, with its far-ranging and artificial state machinery, an army of officials half a million strong alongside an army of another half a million, this frightful parasitic body, which coils itself round the body of French society like a net and stops up all its pores, emerged in the period of absolute monarchy, at the decay of the feudal system, which it helped accelerate. The manorial privileges of the landed proprietors and towns transformed themselves into just so many attributes of the state power, the feudal dignitaries into paid officials and the motley sample-card of conflicting medieval plenitudes of power into the regulated plan of a state power whose work is factory-divided and centralised. The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all local, territorial, urban and provincial particular powers in order to create the bourgeois unity of the nation, was bound to develop what the absolute monarchy had begun, centralisation, but at the same time the scope, the attributes and the henchmen of governmental power. Napoleon completed this state machinery. The legitimate monarchy and the July Monarchy added nothing but a greater division of labour, growing to the same extent as the division of labour within bourgeois society created new groups of interests, hence new material for the state administration. Every common interest was at once torn away from society, counterposed to it as a higher, general interest, wrested from the self-activity of the members of society and turned into a subject of governmental activity, from the bridge, the schoolhouse and the communal property of a village community up to the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France. Finally, the parliamentary republic, in its struggle with the revolution, saw itself compelled to strengthen, by means of repressive measures, the means and the centralisation of governmental power. All upheavals perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties that alternated in contending for rule regarded the seizure of this monstrous state edifice as the chief booty of the victor.

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

Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself independent of society and subjugated it. The independence of the executive power emerges openly when its chief no longer needs genius, its army no longer needs glory, and its bureaucracy no longer needs moral authority to justify itself. The state machine has so fortified itself vis-à-vis bourgeois society that at its head merely the chief of the 10 December Society suffices, a knight of fortune run in from abroad, raised on the shield by a drunken soldiery which he has bought with brandy and sausages, and for which he must constantly throw sausages afresh. Hence the downcast despair, the feeling of the most monstrous humiliation, degradation, that constricts the breast of France and makes her breath catch. She feels herself as if dishonoured. While Napoleon barely left her a pretext for liberty, the second Bonaparte leaves her no pretext any longer for bondage.

And yet the state power does not hover in the air. Bonaparte represents a class, and indeed the most numerous class of French society, the parcel peasants.

As the Bourbons were the dynasty of large landed property, as the Orleans were the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, i.e. of the French masses of the people. Not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament, but the Bonaparte who chased the bourgeois parliament asunder is the chosen one of the peasants. For three years the towns had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the election of 10 December and in cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of 10 December 1848 was first fulfilled by the coup d’état of 2 December 1851.

The small-holding peasants form a huge mass, whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another, instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by the poor French means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, allows of no division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science, hence no multiplicity of development, no diversity of talents, no wealth of social relations. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces the greater part of its own consumption, and thus gains its means of subsistence more through exchange with nature than through intercourse with society. The small holding, the peasant and his family; next to it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A score of them makes a village, and a score of villages makes a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as a sack of potatoes forms a potato sack. In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes and place them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local connection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests creates no community, no national bond and no political organisation among them, they do not form a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants therefore finds its final expression in the subordination of parliament to the executive power, of society to the state.

Through historical tradition the belief had arisen among the French peasants that a man named Napoleon would bring them all glories back again. And an individual turned up who passed himself off as that man because he bears the name of Napoleon, as a result of the Code Napoléon, which commands: “Toute recherche de la paternité est interdite.” After twenty years of vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures, the legend is fulfilled and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realised because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French.

But, I shall be told, the peasant insurrections in half of France, the army’s man-hunts against the peasants, the mass imprisonments and transportation of the peasants?

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

But let us be clear about this. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary but the conservative peasant, not the peasant who strives beyond his social condition of existence, the small holding, but the peasant who wants rather to consolidate it, not the country people who, through their own energy and in alliance with the towns, seek to overthrow the old order, but, on the contrary, those who, dully enclosed within this old order, want to see themselves rescued and favoured together with their small holding by the ghost of the empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant, not his judgment but his prejudice, not his future but his past, not his modern Cévennes but his modern Vendée.

The three-year harsh rule of the parliamentary republic had freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and, even if only superficially, had revolutionised them; but the bourgeoisie violently threw them back each time they stirred. Under the parliamentary republic the modern and the traditional consciousness of the French peasants wrestled with one another. The process went on in the form of an incessant struggle between the schoolmasters and the priests. The bourgeoisie struck down the schoolmasters. The peasants made efforts for the first time to adopt an independent attitude towards the government’s activity. This appeared in the continued conflict between the maires and the prefects. The bourgeoisie dismissed the maires. Finally, during the period of the parliamentary republic, the peasants of various parts of France rose up against their own progeny, the army. The bourgeoisie punished them with states of siege and executions. And this same bourgeoisie now shouts about the stupidity of the masses, the vile multitude, who have betrayed it to Bonaparte. It itself violently entrenched the imperialism of the peasant class, it held fast the conditions that form the birthplace of this peasant religion. To be sure, the bourgeoisie must fear the stupidity of the masses as long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they become revolutionary.

In the risings after the coup d’état, a part of the French peasants protested, weapons in hand, against their own vote of 10 December 1848. The school since 1848 had sharpened their wits. But they had committed themselves to the underworld of history, history held them to their word, and the majority was still so bemused that precisely in the reddest departments the peasant population voted publicly for Bonaparte. The National Assembly, in their view, had prevented him from marching. He had now merely broken the fetter that the towns had placed on the will of the countryside. In places they even entertained the grotesque notion: alongside a Napoleon, a Convention.

After the first revolution had transformed the semi-serf peasants into free landowners, Napoleon consolidated and regulated the conditions under which they could undisturbed exploit the soil of France, which had just fallen to them, and sate their youthful lust for property. But what is now ruining the French peasant is his small holding itself, the division of the land, the form of property which Napoleon consolidated in France. It is precisely the material conditions that turned the French feudal peasant into a small-holding peasant and Napoleon into Emperor. Two generations have sufficed to produce its inevitable result: progressive deterioration of agriculture, progressive indebtedness of the cultivator. The “Napoleonic” form of property, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition for the liberation and enrichment of the French country people, has developed in the course of this century into the law of their slavery and their pauperism. And it is precisely this law that is the first of the “idées napoléoniennes” which the second Bonaparte has to uphold. If he still shares with the peasants the illusion that the cause of their ruin is to be sought not in the small-holding property itself but outside it, in the influence of secondary circumstances, his experiments will be shattered like soap bubbles against the relations of production, cutting off that illusion’s last refuge and, at best, making the disease more acute.

The economic development of small-holding property has fundamentally reversed the relationship of the peasants to the other classes of society. Under Napoleon, the parcelling out of the land in the countryside complemented free competition and the incipient large-scale industry in the towns. Even the favouring of the peasant class lay in the interest of the new bourgeois order. This newly created class was the all-round extension of the bourgeois regime beyond the gates of the towns, its application on a national scale. This class was the ubiquitous protest against the landed aristocracy that had just been overthrown. If it was favoured above all, it also offered above all the point of attack for the restoration of the feudal lords. The roots that small-holding property struck in the French soil deprived feudalism of all nourishment. Its boundary markers formed the natural fortification of the bourgeoisie against any coup de main by its old overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century the feudal lord was replaced by the town usurer, the feudal obligation attached to the land by the mortgage, aristocratic landed property by bourgeois capital. The peasant’s small holding is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profit, interest and rent from the soil, while leaving the cultivator to see how he can work out his own wage. The mortgage debt weighing on the French soil imposes on the French peasantry an interest burden as great as the annual interest of the entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this slavery to capital to which its development inevitably drives it, has transformed the mass of the French nation into a nation of troglodytes. Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in holes, a great many of which have but one opening, some two, and the most favoured only three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state as a sentry before the newly arisen small holding and manured it with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks its heart’s blood and brain marrow and throws it into the alchemist’s cauldron of capital. The Code Napoléon is now only the code of execution, distraint and forced sale. To the four million (including children, etc.) official paupers, vagabonds, criminals and prostitutes that France counts, must be added five million who hover on the edge of existence and either dwell in the countryside itself or constantly desert from the countryside to the towns and from the towns to the countryside with their rags and their children. The interest of the peasants, therefore, is no longer in harmony, as under Napoleon, but in the most deadly opposition to the interests of the bourgeoisie, to capital. They therefore find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order. But strong and unlimited government – and this is the second “idée napoléonienne” which the second Napoleon has to carry out – is called upon to defend this “material” order by force. This “ordre matériel” is the watchword in all Bonaparte’s proclamations against the rebellious peasants.

Besides the mortgage, which capital imposes on it, the small holding is weighed down by taxes. Tax is the life source of the bureaucracy, the army, the priests and the court, in short, of the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and strong taxes are identical. Small-holding property is by its nature suited to serve as the foundation of an all-powerful and countless bureaucracy. It creates a uniform level of

relations and of persons over the entire surface of the country. It thus also permits uniform action upon all points of this uniform mass from a supreme centre. It destroys the aristocratic intermediate gradations between the mass of the people and the state power. Hence it calls forth on all sides the direct intervention of this state power and the interposition of its immediate organs. It finally produces an unemployed surplus population that finds no place either on the land or in the towns, and which therefore reaches out for the state offices as a kind of respectable alms, and provokes the creation of state posts. Under Napoleon this numerous government personnel was not only directly productive, in that it carried out for the newly arisen peasantry, by means of state corvées, etc., under the form of public works what the bourgeoisie could not yet accomplish by way of private industry. The state tax was a necessary coercive means to maintain the exchange between town and country. The small-holding peasant would otherwise, out of peasant self-sufficiency, have broken off all connection with the towns, as in Norway and in a part of Switzerland. And Napoleon, through the new markets he opened with the bayonet and the plundering of the Continent, repaid the compulsory tax with interest. It was a spur to the peasant’s industry, whereas now it deprives his industry of its last resources and completes his defencelessness against pauperism. And an enormous bureaucracy, well gallooned and well fed, is the “idée napoléonienne” most congenial of all to the second Bonaparte. How should it not be, since he is forced to create, alongside the actual classes of society, an artificial caste for which the maintenance of his regime becomes a question of knife and fork. One of his first financial operations was therefore the raising of officials’ salaries back to their old level and the creation of new sinecures.

Another “idée napoléonienne” is the rule of the priests as an instrument of government. But whereas the newly arisen small holding, in its harmony with society, its dependence on the forces of nature and its submission to the authority that protected it from above, was naturally religious, the small holding, shattered by debt, at odds with society and authority and driven beyond its own narrowness, becomes naturally irreligious. Heaven had been a very fine complement to the narrow strip of earth just won, especially as it makes the weather; it becomes an insult the moment it is forced upon man as a substitute for the small holding. The priest then appears only as the anointed bloodhound of the earthly police – another “idée napoléonienne” – who under the second Bonaparte does not, as under Napoleon, have the calling to watch the enemies of the peasant regime in the towns, but Bonaparte’s enemies in the countryside. The expedition against Rome will next time take place in France itself, but in the reverse sense from that of M. de Montalembert.

The culmination point of the “idées napoléoniennes” is, finally, the preponderance of the army. The army was the *point d’honneur* of the small-holding peasants, it turned them into heroes, defending the newly won possession abroad, glorifying their freshly won nationality, plundering and revolutionising the world. The brilliant uniform was their own state costume, war their poetry, the small holding, extended and rounded off in the imagination, the fatherland, and patriotism the ideal form of the sense of property. But the enemies against whom the French peasant now has to defend his property are not the Cossacks; they are the bailiffs and tax-collectors. The small holding no longer lies in the so-called fatherland, but in the mortgage register. The army itself is no longer the flower of the peasant youth, it is the swamp flower of the peasant lumpenproletariat. It consists for the most part of *remplaçants*, of substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte himself is only a remplaçant, the substitute for Napoleon. Its heroic deeds are now performed in the battues and hare-drives against the peasants, in the service of the gendarmerie, and if the internal contradictions of his system drive the chief of the Society of December 10 across the French frontier, his army will, after a few bandit-strokes, reap not laurels but cudgels.

One can see: all “idées napoléoniennes” are ideas of the undeveloped, youthfully fresh small holding; they are an absurdity for the moribund small holding. They are merely the hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, spirits into ghosts, sensible costumes into tasteless theatrical trappings. But the parody of imperialism was necessary in order to free the mass of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out the opposition between state power and society in its purity. The shattering of the state machine will not endanger centralisation. Bureaucracy is only the low and brutal form of a centralisation that is still afflicted with its opposite, feudalism. With its despair of the Napoleonic restoration, the French peasant parts with its faith in its small holding, the whole state edifice erected upon this small holding collapses, and the proletarian revolution obtains the chorus without which its solo song becomes a death lay in every peasant nation.

The conditions of the French peasantry reveal to us the riddle of the general elections of 20 and 21 December, which led the second Bonaparte to Mount Sinai, not to receive laws but to give them and to execute them. Certainly the French nation committed in those fateful days a mortal sin against democracy, which lies on its knees and prays daily: Holy universal suffrage, pray for us! The believers in universal suffrage naturally do not want to renounce the miraculous power that has performed such great things on their very persons, that has turned a Bonaparte II into a Napoleon, a Saul into a Paul, a Simon into a Peter. The spirit of the people speaks to them through the ballot-box, as the God of the prophet Ezekiel spoke to the dry bones: “Haec dicit dominus deus ossibus suis: Ecce, ego intromittam in vos Spiritum et vivetis.” “Thus saith the Lord God unto his bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live!”

The bourgeoisie obviously had no other choice than to elect Bonaparte. Despotism or anarchy. It naturally voted for despotism. When the Puritans at the Council of Constance complained of the vicious life of the popes and lamented the necessity of moral reform, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly thundered at them: “Only the devil in person can save the Catholic Church, and you demand angels.” So the French bourgeoisie cried after the coup d’état: Only the Chief of the Society of December 10 can save bourgeois society! Only theft can save property, perjury religion, bastardy the family, disorder order!

Bonaparte, as the executive power made independent, feels it his calling to safeguard “bourgeois order”. But the strength of this bourgeois order is the middle class. He therefore knows himself to be the representative of the middle class and issues decrees in this sense. However, he is something only because he has broken the political power of this middle class and daily breaks it anew. He therefore knows himself to be the adversary of the political and literary power of the middle class. But by protecting its material power he regenerates its public, its political power. The cause must therefore be kept alive, but the effect, wherever it manifests itself, must be done away with. But this cannot happen without small confusions of cause and effect, since in their interaction both lose their distinctive marks. New decrees, which blur the boundary line. Bonaparte knows himself at the same time, against the bourgeoisie, as the representative of the peasants and of the people in general, who wants to make the lower classes of the people happy within bourgeois society. New decrees, which cheat the “true Socialists” in advance of their governmental wisdom. But above all, Bonaparte knows himself as the chief of the Society of December 10, as the representative of the lumpenproletariat, to which he himself, his entourage, his government and his army belong, and for which the main thing is to benefit itself and to draw Californian lottery prizes out of the state treasury. And he confirms himself as chief of the Society of December 10 with decrees, without decrees and in spite of decrees.

This contradictory task of the man explains the contradictions of his government, the muddled groping about that seeks now to win over, now to humiliate now this class, now that, and brings all of them equally against him, whose practical uncertainty forms a highly comical contrast to the imperious, categorical style of the governmental acts, servilely copied from the uncle. Thus the haste and precipitation in these contradictions is meant to ape the all-round activity and resourcefulness of the Emperor.

Industry and trade, that is, the affairs of the middle class, are to blossom in hothouse fashion under the strong government. Grant of a mass of railway concessions. But the Bonapartist lumpenproletariat is to enrich itself. Jobbery with the railway concessions on the Bourse by those already in the know. But no capital shows itself for the railways. Obligation of the bank to advance money on railway shares. But at the same time the bank is to be personally exploited and therefore cajoled. Release of the bank from the obligation to publish its report weekly. Leonine treaty of the bank with the government. The people are to be given employment. Orders for public works. But the public works raise the people’s tax obligations. Hence reduction of taxes by an attack on the rentiers, by conversion of the five per cent rentes into four-and-a-half per cent. But the middle class must once again receive a douceur. Hence doubling of the wine tax for the people, who buy it en détail, and reduction by half for the middle class, who drink it en gros. Dissolution of the actual workers’ associations, but promise of future association miracles. The peasants are to be helped. Mortgage banks, which accelerate their indebtedness and the concentration of property. But these banks are to be used to squeeze out money for personal use from the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans. No capitalist wants to agree to this condition, which does not appear in the decree, and the mortgage bank remains a mere decree, etc., etc.

Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he can give to no one without taking from another. Just as at the time of the Fronde it was said of the Duke of Guise that he was the most obligeant man in France because he had turned all his estates into obligations of his partisans towards him, so Bonaparte would like to be the most obligeant man of France and turn all property, all labour of France into a personal obligation towards himself. He would like to

To steal from France in order to give to France, or rather to be able to buy France back with French money – for as head of the Society of December 10, he must buy what is to belong to him. All state institutions, the Senate, the Council of State, the legislative body, the Legion of Honour, the soldiers’ medal, the public washhouses, the state buildings, the railways, the état major of the National Guard without privates, the confiscated estates of the House of Orléans, all become institutions of purchase. Every post in the army and the government machine becomes a means of purchase. The most important thing in this process, where France is taken in order to be given, is the percentages that fall to the head and the members of the Society of December 10 during the transaction. The witticism with which Countess L., the mistress of M. de Morny, characterised the confiscation of the Orléans estates: ‘C’est le premier vol de l’aigle’*, applies to every flight of this eagle, who is more a raven. He himself and his followers daily call to one another, like that Italian Carthusian to the miser who boastfully enumerated the possessions he still had to live on for years: ‘Tu fai conto sopra i beni, bisogna prima far il conto sopra gli anni.’** So as not to miscalculate the years, they count in minutes. At the court, in the ministries, at the head of the administration and the army, a crowd of fellows pushes forward, of the best of whom one can say that one does not know whence he comes – a noisy, disreputable, plunder-loving bohème, which crawls into gold-braided coats with the same grotesque dignity as Soulouque’s high dignitaries. One can visualise this upper stratum of the Society of December 10 if one considers that Véron-Crevel* is its preacher of morals and Granier de Cassagnac its thinker. In the time of his ministry, when Guizot used this Granier in a corner-sheet against the dynastic opposition, he was accustomed to praise him with the phrase: ‘C’est le roi des drôles’, ‘that is the king of clowns’. One would be wrong to be reminded, with the court and the clan of Louis Bonaparte, of the Regency or Louis XV. For ‘France has often experienced a government of mistresses, but never yet a government of hommes entretenus’.† And Cato, who gave himself death in order to converse with heroes in the Elysian fields! Poor Cato!

* Vol means flight and theft.

** You count up your goods; you should first count up your years.

* In La Cousine Bette, Balzac portrays in Crevel, whom he modelled on Dr. Véron, the proprietor of the Constitutionnel, the fundamentally dissolute Parisian philistine.

† Words of Mme Girardin.

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and at the same time, like a conjurer, obliged to keep the public’s eyes fixed on himself as Napoleon’s substitute by constant surprises, that is, to execute a coup d’état in miniature every day, Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, touches everything that the revolution of 1848 seemed to have made untouchable, makes some patient for revolution and others eager for revolution, and produces anarchy itself in the name of order, while at the same time he strips the entire state machine of its halo, profanes it, and makes it at once nauseating and ridiculous. The cult of the Holy Coat at Trier he reproduces in Paris in the cult of the Napoleonic imperial mantle. But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the height of the Vendôme Column.