Friedrich Engels 
Real Causes why the French Proletarians 
Remained Comparatively Inactive 
in December Last 

Notes to the People. 
Nr. 43, 21. Februar 1852 

Real Causes why the French Proletarians 
Remained Comparatively Inactive 
in December Last. 

Ever since the 2nd of December last, the whole interest that foreign, or at 
least continental politics may excite, is taken up by that lucky and reckless 
gambler, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. "What is he doing? Will he go to war, 
and with whom? Will he invade England?" These questions are sure to be 
put wherever continental affairs are spoken of. 

And certainly there is something startling in the fact of a comparatively 
unknown adventurer, placed by chance at the head of the executive power 
of a great republic, seizing, between sunset and sunrise, upon all the im- 
portant posts of the capital, driving the parliament like chaff to the winds, 
suppressing metropolitan insurrection in two days, provincial tumults in two 
weeks, forcing himself, in a sham election, down the throat of the whole 
people, and establishing, in the same breath, a constitution which confers 
upon him all the powers of the State. Such a thing has not occurred, such 
a shame has not been borne by any nation since the praetorian legions of 
declining Rome put up the empire to auction and sold it to the highest bidder. 
And the middle-class press of this country, from the "Times" down to the 
"Weekly Dispatch," has never since the days of December, allowed any 
occasion to pass without venting its virtuous indignation upon the military 
despot, the treacherous destroyer of his country's liberties, the extinguisher 
of the press, and so forth. 

Now, with every due contempt for Louis Napoleon, we do not think it 
would become an organ of the working class to join in this chorus of high- 
sounding vituperation in which the respective papers of the stockjobbers, 
the cotton-lords, and the landed aristocracy strive to out-blackguard each 
other. These gentlemen might as well be remembered of the real state of the 
question. They have every reason to cry out, for whatever Louis Napoleon 
took from others, he took it not from the working-classes, but from those 
very classes whose interests in England, the aforesaid portion of the press 
represents. Not that Louis Napoleon would not, quite as gladly, have robbed 
the working-classes of anything that might appear desirable to him, but it 
is a fact that in December last the French working-classes could not be 
robbed of anything, because everything worth taking had already been taken 
from them during the three years and a half of middleclass parliamentary 
government that had followed the great defeats of June 1848. In fact, what, 
on the eve of the 2nd December, remained to be taken from them? The 
suffrage? They had been stripped of that by the Electoral Law of May 1850. 
The right of meeting? That had long been confined to the "safe" and "well- 
disposed" classes of society. The freedom of the press? Why, the real pro- 
letarian press had been drowned in the blood of the insurgents of the great 

battle of June, and that shadow of it which survived for a time, had long since 

disappeared under the pressure of gagging laws, revised and improved upon 
every succeeding session of the National Assembly. Their arms? Every 
pretext had been taken profit of, in order to ensure the exclusion from the 
National Guard of all working men, and to confine the possession of arms 
to the wealthier classes of society. 

Thus the working-classes had, at the moment of the late coup d'etat, very 
little, if anything to lose inthe chapter of political privileges. But, on the other 
hand, the middle and capitalist classes were at that time in possession of 
political omnipotence. Theirs was the press, the right of meeting, the right 
to bear arms, the suffrage, the parliament. Legitimists and Orleanists, land- 
holders and fundholders, after thirty years' struggle, had at last found a 
neutral ground in the republican form of government. And for them it was 
indeed a hard case to be robbed of all this, inthe short space of a few hours, 
and to be reduced at once to the state of political nullity to which they 
themselves had reduced the working people. That is the reason why the 
English "respectable" press is so furious at Louis Napoleon's lawless in- 
dignities. As long as these indignities, either of the executive government 
or the parliament, were directed against the working classes, why that, of 
course, was right enough; but as soon as a similar policy was extended to 
"the better sort of people," the "wealthy intellects of the nation," ah, that 
was quite different, and it behoved every lover of liberty to raise his voice 
in defence of "principle!" 

The struggle, then, on the 2nd of December lay principally between the 
middle-classes and Louis Napoleon, the representative of the army. That 
Louis Napoleon knew this, he showed by the orders given to the army during 
the struggle of the 4th, to fire principally upon "the gentlemen in broad- 
cloth." The glorious battle of the boulevards is known well enough; and a 
series of volleys upon closed windows and unarmed bourgeois was quite 
sufficient to stifle, in the middle-class of Paris, every movement of resis- 
tance. 

On the other hand, the working classes, although they could no longer be 
deprived of any direct political privilege, were not at all disinterested in the 
question. They had to lose, above all, the great chance of May 1852, when 
all powers of the state were to expire simultaneously, and when, for the first 
time since June 1848 they expected to have a fair field for a struggle; and 

aspiring as they were to political supremacy, they could not allow any violent 

change of government to occur, without being called upon to interpose 
between the contending parties as supreme umpires, and to impose to them 
their will as the law of the land. Thus, they could not let the occasion pass 
without showing the two opposing forces that there was a third power in the 
field, which, if momentarily removed from the theatre of official and parlia- 
mentary contentions, was yet ever ready to stepin as soon as the scene was 
changed to its own sphere of action, —to the street. But then, it must not be 
forgotten that even in this case the proletarian party labored under great 
disadvantages. Ifthey rose against the usurper, did they not virtually defend 
and prepare the restoration and dictatorship of that very parliament which 
had proved their most relentless enemy? And if they at once declared for 
arevolutionary government, would they not, as was actually the case in the 
provinces, frighten the middle-class so much as to drive them to aunion with 
Louis Napoleon and the army? Besides, it must be remembered that the very 
strength and flower of the revolutionary working class have been either killed 
during the insurrection of June, or transported and imprisoned under in- 
numerable different pretences ever since that event. And finally, there was 
this one fact which was alone sufficient to ensure to Napoleon the neutrality 
of the great majority of the working classes; trade was excellent, and 
Englishmen know it well enough, that with a fully employed and well-paid 
working class, no agitation, much less a revolution, can be got up. 

It is now very commonly said in this country that the French must be a 
set of old women or else they would not submit to such treatment. I very 
willingly grant that, as a nation, the French deserve, at the present moment, 

such adorning epithets. But we all know that the French are, in their opinions 
and actions, more dependent upon success than any other civilised nation. 
As soon as a certain turn is given to events in this country, they almost 
without resistance follow up that turn, until the last extreme in that direction 
has been reached. The defeat of June 1848 gave sucha counter-revolutionary 
turn to France and, through her, to the whole continent. The present ascen- 
sion of the Napoleonic empire is but the crowning fact of a long series of 
counter-revolutionary victories, that filled up the three last years; and once 
engaged upon the declivity, it was to be expected that France would go on 
falling until she reached the bottom. How near she may be to that bottom 
it is not easy to say; but that she is getting nearer to it very rapidly every 
one must see. And if the past history of France is not to be belied by future 
deeds of the French people, we may safely expect that the deeper the degra- 
dation, the more sudden and the more dazzling will be the result. Events, 
in these times of ours, are succeeding each other at a tremendously rapid 
rate, and what it took formerly a nation a whole century to go through, is 
now-a-days very easily overcome in acouple of years. The old empire lasted 
fourteen years; it will be exceedingly lucky for the imperial eagle if the 
revival, upon the most shabby scale, of this piece of performance will last 
out so many months. And then? 

Notes to the People. 
Nr. 48, 27. Marz 1852 

Although at a first glance it might appear that in the present moment Louis 
Napoleon, in France, sways with undisturbed omnipotence, and that, per- 
haps, the only power besides his own, is that of courtly intrigues that beset 
him on all sides, and plot against each other for the purpose of obtaining sole 
favor with, and influence over, the French autocrat; yet, in reality, things 
are quite different. The whole secret of Louis Napoleon's success is this, 
that by the traditions of his name he has been placed in a position to hold, 

for a moment, the balance of the contending classes of French society. For 
it is a fact that under the cloak of the state of siege by military despotism 
which now veils France, the struggle of the different classes of society is 
going on as fiercely as ever. That struggle, having been carried on for the 
last four years with powder and shot has only now taken a different form. 

In the same way as any protracted war will exhaust and fatigue the most 
powerful nation, so has the open, bloody war of the last year fatigued and 
momentarily exhausted the military strength of the different classes. But 
class-war is independent of actual warfare, and not always needs barricades 
and bayonets to be carried on with; class-war is inextinguishable as long as 
the various classes with their opposed and conflicting interests and social 
positions are in existence; and we have not yet heard that since the blessed 
advent of the mock-Napoleon, France had ceased to count among her in- 
habitants large landed proprietors, and agricultural labourers, or métayers, 
large money-lenders, and small mortgaged freeholders, capitalists, and 
working-men. 

The position of the different classes in France is just this: the revolution 
of February had for ever upset the power of the large bankers and stock- 
jobbers ; after their downfall every other class of the populations of the towns 
had had their day. First, the working-men, during the days of the first revolu- 
tionary excitement—then the petty republican shop-keepers under Ledru 
Rollin—then the republican fraction of the bourgeoisie under Cavaignac,— 
lastly, the united royalist middle-classes, under the late National Assembly. 
None of these classes had been able to hold fast the power they for a moment 
possessed; and latterly, among the ever reappearing divisions of the legitimist 
royalists, or the landed interest, and the Orleans royalists, or the moneyed 

interest, it appeared inevitable that power would again slip from their hands, 

and return to those of the working-class, who themselves might be expected 
to have become fitter to turn it to account. But then there was another mighty 
class in France, mighty, not by the large individual properties of its members, 
but by its numbers and its very wants. That class—the small, mortgaged 
freeholders, making up at least three-fifths of the French nation, was slow 
to act, and slow to be acted upon, as all rural populations; it stuck to its old 
traditions, distrusted the wisdom ofthe apostles of all parties from the towns, 
and remembering that it had been happy, free from debt, and comparatively 
rich in the time of the Emperor, laid by the means of universal suffrage, the 
Executive power in the hands of his nephew. The active agitation of the 
democratic socialist party, and more still the disappointment which Louis 
Napoleon's measures soon prepared for them, led part of this peasant-class 
into the ranks of the Red party; but the mass of them stuck to their traditions, 
and said that if Louis Napoleon had not yet proved the Messiah he was 
expected to be, it was the fault of the National Assembly that gagged him. 
Besides the mass of the peasantry, Louis Napoleon, himself a species of lofty 
swell-mob's-man, and surrounded by the élite of the fashionable swell mob, 
found support in the most degraded and dissolute portion of the population 
of the towns. This element of strength he united into a paid body called the 
"Society of the 10th of December." Thus, relying upon the peasantry for the 
vote; upon the mob for noisy demonstrations, upon the army, ever ready to 
upset a government of parliamentary talkers, pretending to speak the voice 
of the working-classes, he could quietly wait for the moment when the 
squabbles of the middle-class parliament would allow him to step in and 
assume a more or less absolute sway over those classes, none of which, after 
a four years’ bloody struggle, had proved strong enough to seize upon a 
lasting supremacy. And this he did on the 2nd of December last. 

Thus the reign of Louis Napoleon is not superseding the class-war. It 
merely suspends for a while the bloody outbreaks which mark from time to 
time the efforts of this or that class to gain or maintain political power. None 
of these classes were strong enough to venture at a new battle, with any 
chance of success. The very division of classes favored, for the time being, 
Napoleon's projects. He upset the middle-class parliament, and destroyed 
the political power of the middle-class; might not the proletarians rejoice at 
this? And certainly, the proletarians could not be expected to fight for an 
assembly that had been their most deadly enemy! But at the same time Louis 
Napoleon's usurpation menaced the common fighting-ground of all classes, 
and the last vantage-grounds of the working-class—the Republic; why, as 
soon as the working-men stood up for the defence of the Republic, the 
middle-class joined the very man that had just ousted them in order to 
defeat, in the working-class, the common enemy of society. Thus it was in 
Paris—thus in the provinces,—and the army won an easy victory over the 
contending and opposing classes; and after the victory, the millions of the 
imperialist peasantry stepped in with their vote, and with the help of official 
falsifications, established the government of Louis Napoleon as that of the 
representative of almost unanimous France. 

But even now, class struggles and class interests are at the bottom of every 
important act of Louis Napoleon's, as we shall see in our next. 

Notes to the People. 
Nr. 50, 10. April 1852 

We repeat: Louis Napoleon came to power because the open war carried 
on during the last four years between the different classes of French society 
had worn them out, had shattered their respective fighting armies, and 
because under such circumstances, for a time at least, the struggle of these 
classes can only be carried on in a peaceful and legal way, by competition, 
by trades' organizations, and by all the different means of pacific struggle 
by which the opposition of class against class has now been carried on in 
England for above a century. Under these circumstances it is in a manner 
of speaking in the interest of all contending classes that a so-called strong 
government should exist which might repress and keep down all those minor, 
local and scattered outbreaks of open hostility, which without leading to any 
result, trouble the development of the struggle in its new shape by retarding 
the recovery of strength for a new pitched battle. This circumstance may 
in some way explain the undeniable general acquiescence of the French in 
the present government. How long it may be ere both the working and the 
capitalist-classes may have regained strength and self-reliance enough to 
come out and openly claim, each for themselves, the dictatorship of France, 
of course nobody can tell; but at the rate events are going now-a-days, either 
of these classes will most likely be brought into the field unexpectedly, and 
thus the fight of class against class in the streets may be renewed long before, 
from the relative or absolute strength of the parties, such an occurence might 
seem probable. For, if the French revolutionary, that is the working-class 
party, has to wait till it is again in the same conditions of strength as in 
February 1848, it might resign itself to submissive passiveness of some ten 

years, which it certainly will not do ; and at the same time, a government like 

that of Louis Napoleon is placed in the necessity, as we shall see by and by, 
to entangle itself and France into such difficulties as ultimately must be 
solved by a great revolutionary blow. We will not speak of the chances of 
war, nor of other occurrences which may, or may not come to pass; we will 
only mention one event which is as sure to come as the sun is sure to rise 
to-morrow morning, and that is a general commercial and industrial re- 
vulsion. The bad trade and bad harvests of 1846 and 1847 made the revolution 
of 1848; and there are ten chances to one, that in 1853 trade, all over the world, 
will be far deeper uprooted and far more lastingly upset than ever it was 
before. And who is there who thinks the ship Louis Napoleon sails in, 
sea-worthy enoughto stand the gales that then must of necessity spring up? 
But let us look at the position in which the bastard-eagle found himself 
on the evening of his victory. He had for supporters the army, the clergy, 
and the peasantry. He had been opposed in his attempt by the middle-class 
(comprising the large landed proprietors), and the Socialists or revolutionary 
working-men. Once at the head of the government, he had not only to retain 
those parties that brought him there, but also to gain over, or at least to 
conciliate to the new state of things, as many as possible of those that had 
opposed him hitherto. As to the army, the clergy, the government officials 
and the members of that conspiracy of place-hunters by which he had long 
since surrounded himself, direct bribes, ready money, open plunder of the 
public resources was the only thing required; and we have seen how quick 
Louis Napoleon has been at coming down with the cash, or at finding out 
berths for his friends which gave them glorious opportunities for enriching 
themselves at once. Look at DeMorny, who went into office a beggar, 
crushed by aload of debts, and who, four weeks afterwards, walked out again 
with debts paid and what even in the neighbourhood of Belgrave Square 
would be called a handsome independence besides! But to deal with the 
peasantry, with the large landed proprietors, with the funds, monied, manu- 
factoring, shipping, trading and shopkeeping interests, and lastly with that 
most formidable question of the century, the labor-question—that was quite 
another thing. For all the silencing measures of the government notwith- 
standing, the interests of these different classes remained as opposed as ever, 
although there was no longer a press, a parliament, a meeting-platform to 
proclaim this unpleasant fact; and thus, whatever the government might try 
to do for one class, was sure to hurt the interest of another. Whatever Louis 
Napoleon might attempt, he was to be met everywhere by the question, "who 
pays the piper?"—a question which has upset more governments than all 
other questions, Militia questions, Reform questions, etc., together. And 
although Louis Napoleon has already made his predecessor Louis Philippe 
contribute a good share to pay the piper, yet the piper requires a good deal 
more. 

We shall begin, in our next, to trace the position of the different classes 
of society in France, and to inquire how far there were any means at the 
disposal of the present government to improve that position. We shall at the 
same time review what that government has attempted and will most likely 
attempt later on for this purpose, and thus we shall collect materials from 
which to draw a correct conclusion as to the position and future chances of 
the man who is now doing his best to bring into disrepute the name of 
Napoleon.