Karl Marx 
Affairs in France 

New-York Daily Tribune. 
Nr. 5862, 7. Februar 1860 

Affairs in France. 

From an Occasional Correspondent. 
Paris, Jan. 17, 1860. 

Louis Napoleon has been converted to Free-trade, and is aboutto inaugurate 

a new era of peace. He can hardly fail to be enrolled as a member of the 
Society of Friends, and the year 1860 will, in the annals of Europe be re- 
corded as the year I of the Millennium. This extraordinary news going the 
round of the London Press dates its origin from a letter of Louis Bonaparte 
published in the Moniteur, dated January 15, 1860, and addressed to 
Mr. Fould, Minister of State. The first effect of the letter was to send the 
Funds down at Paris and to send them up at London. 

Now, before all things, it seems necessary to scrutinize somewhat closely 
the corpus delicti-that is the Imperial letter—upon which the whole super- 
structure of the new era is, about to be reared. Louis Bonaparte informs 
Mr. Fould that "the moment has arrived for applying ourselves to the means 
of giving a greater development to the different branches of national wealth." 
The almost identical announcement appeared in the Moniteur of January, 
1852, when the Coup d'état inaugurated the era of the Crédit Mobilier, the 
Crédit Fonder, and other Crédits ambulants. And this is not all. Since that 
eventful epoch, every yearly financial bulletin issued under the auspices of 
the French autocrat has laid all its stress upon and proved by an awful array 
of official figures the circumstance that the Empire had been as good as its 
Word, and that, under its fostering sway, all the branches of national industry 
had taken an immense development. 

Thus one finds himself in a fix. Either the proclamations of the Coup d'état 
were untimely, and the financial bulletins issued after the Coup d'état were 
spurious, or the present proclamation is a mere hoax. 

Karl Marx 

At all events, this much appears incontrovertible, on the own showing of 
the new Imperial manifesto, that the economical benefits which French 
society was to derive from the resurrection of Bonapartism belong not to 
the past, but to the future tense. Let us, then, see by what new contrivance 
the happy economical change is to be brought about. 

In the first instance, Louis Bonaparte tells Mr. Fould, who must have been 
somewhat startled at the profound discovery of his master, that "our foreign 
commerce must be developed by the exchange of products," a stupendous 
truism, indeed. Foreign commerce consisting in the exchange of national 
products for foreign products, it cannot be denied that, to develop French 
foreign commerce, the exchange of French products must be developed. The 
principal result which Louis Bonaparte expects from the new development 
of French foreign commerce he is about to start, is "to spread prosperity 
among the working classes," the which, as implicitly confessed by the man 
of the Coup d'Etat, and as shown by recent French writers (see for instance, 
the works of the late Mr. Colins), have visibly decayed within the last ten 
years. Unhappily, one great fact strikes the most superficial observer. French 
foreign commerce has made immense strides from 1848 to 1860. Amounting 
in 1848 to about 875 millions francs, it has risen to more than double that 
sum in 1859. An increase of commerce by more than 100 per cent inthe short 
space of ten years, is a thing almost unprecedented. The causes that have 
brought about that increase are to be found in California, Australia, the 
United States, and so forth, but certainly not in the archives of the Tuileries. 
It appears, then, that despite the immense increase of French foreign com- 
merce within the last ten years—an increase to be traced to revolutions in 
the markets of the world quite beyond the petty control of the French 
police—the situation of the mass of the French nation has not improved. 
Consequently, there must have been at work some agency powerful enough 
to frustrate the natural results of commercial progress. If the development 
of French foreign commerce accounts for the apparent ease with which the 
second Empire has been allowed to indulge its expensive vagaries, the 
prostration of the nation, despite its doubled exports, betrays the cost at 
which that Imperial ease is purchased. If the Empire could not have subsisted 
without that development of French foreign commerce that commercial 
progress has failed with the Empire, to bear its legitimate fruits. 

The Austrian Emperor, having banished the deficit from his States by dint 
of a ukase, why should Louis Bonaparte, by dint of another ukase, not 
command the increase of French foreign commerce? Still he apprehends 
some hitch in his way. "We must first," he says, "improve our agriculture, 
and free our industry from all interior impediments which place it in a 
position of inferiority." That French agriculture is badly in want of im- 

Affairs in France 

provement, is the standing topic of French economists; but how is Louis 
Bonaparte to do the thing! In the first place, he will grant loans to agriculture 
at a moderate "interest." French agriculture is notoriously the concern of 
more than two-thirds of the French nation. Will Louis Bonaparte impose 
taxes upon the remaining third, in order to grant loans "at a moderate rate" 
to the majority of the nation? The idea is in fact too preposterous to be 
insisted upon. On the other hand, it was the confessed aim of his Crédits 
Fonciers to direct loanable capital to the land. The only thing they have 
proved efficient in is not in ameliorating agriculture, but in ruining small 
freeholds and accelerating the concentration of landed estates. After all, we 
have here again the old worn out panacea—institutions of credit. Nobody will 
deny that the second Empire marks an epoch in the development of French 
credit, but that it has overshot the mark, and that, with its own credit, its 
credit-fostering influence has gone to the wall. The only novelty seems to 
be that the semi-official credit machinery having been stretched and worked 
to its utmost, Louis Bonaparte now dreams of converting the Government 
itself into a direct loan-shop. While any such attempt must be fraught with 
immense dangers, it would as necessarily collapse as did his granaries, in- 
tended to screw up the prices of corn. Draining, irrigating, and cleaning the 

20 ground, are all very good things in their different lines, but their only possible 

effect is to multiply agricultural products. They cannot raise, and they are 
not intended to raise, the prices of those products. How then, even if Louis 
Bonaparte should find by some miraculous methods, the ways and means 
required for those ameliorations on a national scale, how are they to mend 
the depreciation of agricultural produce which the French peasant has 
labored under for these five years? But then, Louis Napoleon will set about 
a consecutive amelioration of the means of communication. The coolness 
with which this proposition is made, beats even Bonapartist impudence. 
Look only to the development of French railways since 1850. The annual 
expense for these "means of communication" amounted, from 1845 to '47, 
to about 175,000,000 of francs; from 1848 to '51, to about 125,000,000; from 
1852 to '54, to nearly 250,000,000 (double the expenditure of 1848-'51); from 
1854 to '56, to nearly 550,000,000; from 1857 to '59, to about 500,000,000. In 
1857, when the general crisis broke in upon the commercial world, the French 
Government stood aghast at the immense sums still required for the railways 
in progress or already conceded. It prohibited the railway companies from 
raising, by means of securities, debentures, etc., more than 212,500,000 h. 
francs annually, interdicted the getting up of new companies, and circum- 
scribed within fixed limits the work to be annually undertaken. And, after 
all this, Louis Bonaparte speaks as if railways, canals, and so forth, were 
now first to be invented! A forcible reduction of the canal dues, which he 

Kar Marx 

hints at, is, of course, an operation involving the breach of public contracts, 
frightening the capital embarked in those enterprises, and certainly not 
calculated to allure new capital into the same channels. Lastly, to find a 
market for agricultural products, manufacturing industry is to be stimulated. 
Yet, as we have already stated, manufacturing industry has made immense 
strides during the second Empire, but with all that, with the unprecedented 
increase of exports, with the immense development of railways and other 
means of communication, with the exaggeration of a credit system formerly 
unknown in France, French agriculture languishes, and the French peasantry 
decays. How shall we account for the strange phenomenon? The fact that 
255,000,000 of francs are added yearly to the funded debt, not to speak of 
the impost of blood for the army and the navy, offers a sufficient answer. 
The Empire itself is the great incubus whose burden grows in a greater ratio 
than the productive powers of the French nation. 

Louis Bonaparte's prescriptions for French industry, if we deduct all that 
is mere phraseology, or is still looming in the future, are simply these: 
Suppression of the duties on wool and cotton, and successive reductions on 
sugar and coffee. Now, this is all very well, but all the gullibility of English 
free-traders is required to call such measures free trade. Whoever is ac- 
quainted with political economy, knows full well that the abolition of duties 
on agricultural raw material forms a main item in the doctrine of the mer- 
cantile school of the eighteenth century. These "interior impediments" which 
weigh upon French production, are as nothing if compared with the octrois, 
dividing France into as many independent counties as there are towns, 
paralyzing the internal exchange, and barring the creation of wealth by 
crippling its consumption. Those octrois, however, have increased under the 
Imperial régime, and will continue to increase. The diminution of duties on 
wool and cotton is to be made up by suppressing the sinking fund, so that 
the last restraint upon the growth of the public debts, although merely 
nominal, will be done away with. 

On the other hand, the woods are to be cleared, the hills to be leveled, and 
the moors to be drained, by applying to those purposes the 160,000,000 of 
francs said to form the remnant disposable from the last war loans, in three 
yearly installments, which will make less than 54,000,000 of francs on an 
annual average. Why, the embankment of the Loire alone, so pompously 
announced by the Imperial Cagliostro some five years ago, and then no longer 
thought of, would absorb the whole sum in less than three months. Whatthen 
remains of the manifesto! "The inauguration of an era of peace," as if that 
era had not long since been proclaimed at Bordeaux. „L'Empire c'est la 

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