Thomas Carlyle is the only English writer on whom German literature has exercised a direct and particularly significant influence. Courtesy at the very least demands that a German should not let his writings pass without notice.
The latest publication by Guizot (No. 2 of the N. Rh. Z.a) has shown us that the intellectual powers of the bourgeoisie are in a process of decline. In the present two pamphlets by Carlyle we witness the decline of literary genius in historical struggles which have reached a point of crisis and against which it attempts to assert its unrecognised, direct, prophetic inspirations.
To Thomas Carlyle belongs the credit of having taken the literary field against the bourgeoisie at a time when its views, tastes and ideas held the whole of official English literature totally in thrall, and in a manner which is at times even revolutionary. For example, in his history of the French Revolution, in his apology for Cromwell, in the pamphlet on Chartism and in Past and Present)* But in all these writings the critique of the present is closely bound up with a strangely unhistorical apotheosis of the Middle Ages, which is a frequent characteristic of other English revolutionaries too, for instance Cobbett and a section of the Chartists. Whilst he at least admires in the past the classical periods of a specific stage of society, the present drives him to despair and he shudders at the thought of the future. Where he recognises the revolution, or indeed apotheo-sises it, in his eyes it becomes concentrated in a single individual, a Cromwell or a Danton. He pays them the same hero-worship that he preached in his Lectures on Heroes and Hero-Worship* as the only refuge from a present pregnant with despair, as a new religion.
Carlyle's style is at one with his ideas. It is a direct violent reaction against the modern bourgeois English Pecksniffery, whose enervated affectedness, circumspect verbosity and vague, sentimentally moral tediousness has spread from the original inventors, the educated Cockneys, to the whole of English literature. In comparison, Carlyle treated the English language as though it were completely raw material which he had to cast utterly afresh. Obsolete expressions and words were sought out again and new ones invented, in the German manner and especially in the manner of Jean Paul. The new style was often in bad taste and hugely pretentious, but frequently brilliant and always original. In this respect too the Latter-Day Pamphlets represent a remarkable step backwards.
It is, incidentally, characteristic that out of the whole of German literature the mind that had the greatest influence on Carlyle was not Hegel but the literary apothecary Jean Paul.
In the cult of genius, which Carlyle shares with Strauss, the genius has got lost in the present pamphlets. The cult remains.
The Present Time begins with the statement that the present is the child of the past and the parent of the future, but quite apart from that is a new era.
The first manifestation of this new era is a reforming Pope. Gospel in hand, Pius IX set out to promulgate from the Vatican "the Law of Veracity" to Christendom.
"More than three hundred years ago, the throne of St. Peter received peremptory judicial notice [...] authentic order, registered in Heaven's chancery and since legible in the hearts of all brave men, to take itself away,— to begone, and let us have no more to do with it and its delusions and impious deliriums; — and it has been sitting every day since [...] at its own peril [...], and will have to pay exact damages yet for every day it has so sat. Law of veracity? What this Popedom had to do by the law of veracity, was to give up its own foul galvanic life, an offence to gods and men; honestly to die; and get itself buried! Far from this was the thing the poor Pope undertook [...];—and yet on the whole it was essentially this too. Reforming Pope? [...] Turgot and Necker were nothing to this. God is great; and when a scandal is to end, brings some devoted man to take charge of it in hope, not in despair!" (P. 3.)
With his manifestos of reform the Pope had aroused questions, "mothers of the whirlwinds, conflagrations, earthquakes.... Questions which all official men wished, and mostly hoped, to postpone till Doomsday. Doomsday itself had come; that was the terrible truth". (P. 4.)
The law of veracity was proclaimed. The Sicilians
"were the first people that set about applying this new [...] rule sanctioned by the holy Father; [...] We do not by the law of veracity belong to Naples and these Neapolitan Officials; we will, by favour of Heaven and the Pope, be free of these".
Hence the Sicilian Revolution. The French people, which considers itself as a kind of "Messiah people", as "the chosen soldiers of liberty", feared that the poor, despised Sicilians might take this trade(1) out of their hands — February Revolution. [Pp. 4-5.]
"As if by sympathetic subterranean electricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable; and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and on the whole humiliating years the European world ever saw.... Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, 'Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!'—and, what was peculiar and heard of in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, 'We are poor histrios, we sure enough;—do you need heroes? Don't kill us; we couldn't help it!'—Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon.... That, I repeat, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Playactors. [...] They fled precipitately, some of them with what we may call an exquisite ignominy,— in terror of the treadmill or worse. And everywhere the people, or the populace, take their own government upon themselves; and open 'kinglessness', what we call anarchy,—how happy if it be anarchy plus a street-constable!—is everywhere the order of the day. Such was the history, from Baltic to Mediterranean, in Italy, France, Prussia, Austria, from end to end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. [...] And so, then, there remained no King in Europe; no King except the Public Haranguer, haranguing on barrelhead, in leading article; or assembling with his like in the National Parliament. And for about four months all France, and to a great degree all Europe, rough-ridden by every species of delirium [...] was a weltering mob, presided over by M. de Lamartine at the Hôtel-de-Ville [....] A sorrowful spectacle to men of reflection, during the time he lasted, that poor M. de Lamartine; with nothing in him but melodious wind and soft sowder [....] Sad enough: the most eloquent latest impersonation of Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself, and declare persuasively that it is Cosmos! However, you have but to wait a little, in such cases; all balloons [...] must give up their gas in the pressure of things, and are collapsed in a repulsively flabby manner before long." (Pp. 6-8.)
Who was it that kindled this universal revolution, the fuel for which was of course at hand?
"Students, young men of letters, advocates, newspaper writers, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes [...]. Never till now did young men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs. A changed time since the word Senior (Seigneur, or Elder) was first devised to signify lord or superior;—as in all languages of men we find it.... Looking more closely [...] you will find that the old has ceased to be venerable, and has begun to be contemptible; a foolish boy still, a boy without the graces, generosities and opulent strength of young boys [...]. This mad state of matters will of course before long allay itself, as it has everywhere begun to do; the ordinary necessities of men's daily existence cannot comport with it, and these, whatever else is cast aside, will go their way. Some remounting [...] of the old machine, under new colours and altered forms, will probably ensue soon in most countries: the old histrionic Kings will be admitted back under conditions, under Constitutions, with national Parliaments, or the like fashionable adjuncts; and everywhere the old daily life will try to begin again. But there is now no hope that such arrangements can be permanent [...]. In such baleful oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations, must European Society continue swaying; now disastrously tumbling, then painfully readjusting itself, at ever shorter intervals,—till once the new rock-basis does come to light, and the weltering deluges of mutiny, and of need to mutiny, abate again!" (Pp. 8-10.)
So much for history, which even in this form offers the old world little comfort. Now for the moral.
"For universal Democracy, whatever we may think of it, is the inevitable fact of the days in which we live." (P. 10.)
What is democracy? It must have a meaning, or it would not exist. It is all a matter, then, of finding the true meaning of democracy. If we succeed in this, we can deal with it; if not, we are lost. The February Revolution was "a universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it". (P. 14.) Counterfeit and falsities, "shams", "delusions", "phantasms",(2) instead of real relationships and things, names that have lost all meaning, in a word, lying instead of truth has held sway in modern times. Individual and social divorce from these falsities and phantoms, that is the task of reform, and the necessity of putting an end to all sham and deceit is not to be gainsaid.
"Yet strange to many a man it may seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial,—what you in your iconoclast humour call shams,—all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting-on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams?" (P. 15.)
Now will democracy accomplish this necessary reform, this liberation from shams?
"Democracy, when it is organised by means of universal suffrage will itself accomplish the salutary universal change from Delusive to Real, from false to true, and make a new blessed world by and by?" (P. 17.)
Carlyle denies this. Indeed, he sees in general in democracy and in universal suffrage only a contagion of all nations by the superstitious English belief in the infallibility of parliamentary government. The crew of the ship that had lost its course round Cape Horn and, instead of keeping watch on wind and weather and using the sextant, voted on the course to be set, declaring the decision of the majority to be infallible — that is the universal suffrage that lays claim to steering the state. As for every individual, so for society it is just a matter of discovering the true regulations of the Universe, the everlasting laws of nature relative to the task in hand at each moment, and acting accordingly. Whoever reveals these eternal laws to us, him shall we follow, "were it the Russian Autocrat or Chartist Parliament, the Archbishop of Canterbury or Grand Lama". But how do we discover these eternal, divine precepts? At all events universal suffrage, which gives each man a ballot paper and counts heads, is the worst method of doing so. The Universe is of a very exclusive nature and has ever disclosed its secrets but to a few elect, a small minority of wise and noble-minded alone. That is why no nation was ever able to exist on the basis of democracy. The Greeks and Romans? We all know today that theirs were no democracies, that slavery was the basis of their states. It is quite superfluous to speak of the various French Republics. And the Model Republic of North America? It cannot yet even be said of the Americans that they form a nation or a state. The American population lives without a government; what is there constituted is anarchy plus a street-constable. What makes this condition possible is the great area of yet unbroken land and the respect brought over from England for the constable's baton. As the population grows, that too comes to an end.
controlling the ignorant is not entrusted to the Noblest, with his select series of Nobler Ones, has the Kingdom of God, or corresponds to the eternal laws of nature.
Now we are also apprised of the secret, the origin and the necessity of modern democracy. It consists simply in the fact that the sham-noblea has been raised up and consecrated by tradition or newly invented delusions.
And who is to discover the true precious stone with all its setting of smaller human jewels and pearls? Certainly not universal suffrage, for only the noble can discern the noble. And so Carlyle affirms that England still possesses many such nobles and "kings", and on p. 38 he summons them to him.
We see the "noble" Carlyle proceed from a thoroughly pantheistic mode of thinking. The whole process of history is determined not by the development of the living masses themselves, naturally dependent on specific but in turn historically created changing conditions, it is determined by an eternal law of nature, unalterable for all time, from which it departs today and to which it returns tomorrow, and on the correct apprehension of which everything depends. This correct apprehension of the eternal law of nature is the eternal truth, everything else is false. With this mode of thinking, the real class conflicts, for all their variety at various periods, are completely resolved into the one great and eternal conflict, between those who have fathomed the eternal law of nature and act in keeping with it, the wise and the noble, and those who misunderstand it, distort it and work against it, the fools and the rogues. The historically produced distinction between classes thus becomes a natural distinction which itself must be acknowledged and revered as a part of the eternal law of nature, by bowing to nature's noble and wise: the cult of genius. The whole conception of the process of historical development is reduced to the shallow triviality of the lore of the Illuminati and the Freemasons of the previous century, to the simple morality we find in the Magic Flute23i and to an infinitely depraved and trivialised form of Saint-Simonism. And there of course we have the old question of who then should in fact rule, which is discussed at great length and with self-important shallowness and is finally answered to the effect that the noble, wise and knowledgeable should rule, which leads quite naturally to the conclusion that there would have to be a large amount, a very large amount of governing, and there could never be too much governing, for after all governing is the constant revelation and assertion of the law of nature vis-à-vis the masses. But how are the noble and the wise to be discovered? They are not revealed by any celestial miracle; they have to be looked for. And here the historical class distinctions which have been made into purely natural distinctions once more rear their heads. The noble man is noble because he is wise and knowledgeable. He will therefore have to be sought among the classes which have the monopoly of education — among the privileged classes, and it will be the same classes who will have to seek him out in their midst and to judge his claims to the rank of a noble and wise man. In so doing the privileged classes automatically become, if not precisely the noble and wise class, at least the "articulate" class; the oppressed classes are of course the "silent, inarticulate' and class rule is thereby sanctioned anew. All this highly indignant bluster turns out to be a thinly disguised acceptance of existing class rule whose sole grumble and complaint is that the bourgeoisie does not assign a position at the top of society to its unrecognised geniuses, and for highly practical reasons does not accede to the starry-eyed drivellings of these gentlemen. Carlyle incidentally provides us with striking examples of the way in which here too pompous cant becomes its opposite and the noble, knowledgeable and wise man is transformed in practice into a base, ignorant and foolish man.
Since for him everything depends on strong government, he turns upon the cry for liberation and emancipation with extreme indignation:
"Let us all be free of one another [...]. Free without bond or connexion except that of cash payment; fair day's wages for the fair day's work; determined by voluntary contract, and law of supply and demand: this is thought to be the true solution of all difficulties and injustices that have occurred between man and man. To rectify the relation that exists between two men, is there no method, then, but that of ending it?" (P. 29.)
This complete dissolution of all bonds, all relationships between men naturally reaches its climax in anarchy, the law of lawlessness, the condition in which the bond of bonds, the government, is completely cut to pieces. And this is what people in England and on the Continent alike are striving towards, yes, even in "staid Germany".
Carlyle blusters on like this for several pages, lumping together Red Republic, fraternité, Louis Blanc, etc., in a most disconcerting way with free trade,(3) the abolition of the duty on corn, etc. (Cf. pp. 29-42.) The destruction of the remnants of feudalism which are still preserved by tradition, the reduction of the state to what is unavoidably necessary and absolutely cheapest, the complete realisation of free competition by the bourgeoisie, are thus mixed up together and identified by Carlyle with the elimination of these same bourgeois relations, with the abolition of the conflict between capital and wage labour, with the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. Brilliant return to the "Night of the Absolute" in which all cats are grey! Deep knowledge of the "knowledgeable man" who does not know the first thing about what is happening around him! Strange perspicacity which believes that with the abolition of feudalism or free competition, all relations between men are abolished! Unfathomable fathoming of the "eternal law of nature", seriously believing that no more children will be born from the moment that the parents cease to go to the Mairie* first to "bind" themselves in matrimony!
After this edifying example of a wisdom amounting to unmiti-gated ignorance, Carlyle goes on to demonstrate to us how high-principled nobility of character at once turns into undisguised baseness as soon as it descends from its heaven of sententious verbiage to the world of real relations.
"In all European countries, especially in England, one class of Captains and commanders of men, recognisable as the beginning of a new, real and not imaginary Aristocracy, has already in some measure developed itself: the Captains of Industry;—happily the class who above all [...] are wanted in this time. [...] And surely, on the other hand, there is no lack of men needing to be commanded: the sad class of brother-men whom we have described as 'Hodge's emancipated horses', reduced to roving famine, this too has in all countries developed itself and, in fatal geometrical progression, is ever more developing itself, with a rapidity which alarms everyone. On this ground [...] it may be truly said, the Organisation of Labour [...] is the universal vital Problem of the world." (Pp. 42, 43.)
Carlyle having thus vented all his virtuous fury time and time again in the first forty pages against selfishness, free competition, the abolition of the feudal bonds between man and man, supply and demand, laissez-faire,[234] cotton-spinning, cash payment, etc., etc., we now suddenly find that the main exponents of all these shams, the industrial bourgeoisie, are not merely counted among the celebrated heroes and geniuses but even comprise the most indispensable part of these heroes, that the trump card in all his attacks on bourgeois relations and ideas is the apotheosis of bourgeois individuals. It appears yet odder that Carlyle, having discovered the commanders and the commanded of labour, in other words, a certain organisation of labour, nevertheless declares this organisation to be a great problem requiring solution. But one should not be deceived. It is not a question of the organisation of those workers who have been regimented, but of the organisation of those who are unregimented and captainless, and this Carlyle has reserved for himself. At the end of his pamphlet we suddenly see him in the role of the British Prime Minister in partions* summoning together the three million Irish and other beggars, the able-bodied lackalls, nomadic or stationary, and the general assembly of British paupers, outside the workhouseb
and inside the workhouse,b and "haranguing" them in a speech in which he first repeats to the lackalls everything that he has previously confided to the reader and then addresses the select company as follows:
"Vagrant Lackalls and Good-for-nothings, foolish most of you, criminal many of you, miserable all; the sight of you fills me with astonishment and despair. [...] Here are some three millions of you [...]: so many of you fallen sheer over into the abysses of open Beggary; and,fearful to think, every new unit tHat falls is loading so much more the chain that drags the others over. On the edge of the precipice hang uncounted millions; increasing, I am told, at the rate of 1,200 a-day [...] falling, falling one after the other; and the chain is getting ever heavier [...] and who ät last will stand? What to do with you?... The others that still stand have their own difficulties, I can tell you!—But you, by imperfect energy and redundant appetite, by doing too litde work and drinking too much beer, you [...] have proved that you cannot do it! [...] Know that, whoever may be 'sons of freedom', you for your part are not and cannot be such. Not 'free' you, ... you palpably are fallen captive ... you are of the nature of slaves, or if you prefer the word, of nomadic [...] and vagabond servants that can find no master.... Not as glorious unfortunate sons of freedom, but as recognised captives, as unfortunate fallen brothers requiring that I should command them, and if need were, control and compel them, can there henceforth be a relation between us.... Before Heaven and Earth, and God the Maker of us all, I declare it is a scandal to see such a life kept in you, by the sweat and heart's blood of your brothers; and that, if we cannot mend it, death were preferable!... Enlist in my Irish, my Scotch and English 'Regiments of the New Era'... ye poor wandering banditti; obey, work, suffer, abstain, as all of us have had to do.... Industrial Colonels, Workmasters, Taskmasters, Life-commanders, equitable as Rhadamanthus and inflexible as he: such [...] you do need; and such, you being once put under law as soldiers are, will be discoverable for you.... To each of you I will then say: Here is work for you; strike into it with manlike, soldierlike obedience and heartiness, according to the methods I here dictate,—wages follow for you without difficulty.... Refuse, shirk the heavy labour, disobey the rules,— I will admonish and endeavour to incite you; if in vain, I will flog you; if still in vain, I will at last shoot you." (Pp. 46-55.)
The "New Era", in which genius rules, is thus distinguished from the old era principally by the fact that the whip imagines it possesses genius. The genius Carlyle is distinguished from just any prison.
Outside the sphere of reality. The words are part of the expression in partions infidelium, meaning literally "in the realm of infidels". It was added to the titles of Catholic bishops appointed to purely nominal dioceses in non-Christian countries.— Ed.
Cerberus or poor-law beadle by his virtuous indignation and the moral consciousness of flaying the paupers[3] only in order to raise them to h is level. We here observe the high-principled genius in his world-redeeming anger fantastically justifying and exaggerating the infamies of the bourgeoisie. If the English bourgeoisie equated paupers[3] with criminals in order to create a deterrent to pauperism and brought into being the Poor Law of 1834,[235] Carlyle accuses the paupers[3] of high treason because pauperism generates pauperism. Just as previously the ruling class that had arisen in the course of history, the industrial bourgeoisie, was privy to genius simply by virtue of ruling, so now any oppressed class, the more deeply it is oppressed, the more is it excluded from genius and the more is it exposed to the raging fury of our unrecognised reformer. So it is here with the paupers.[3] But his morally noble wrath reaches its highest peak with regard to those who are absolutely vile and ignoble, the "scoundrels", i.e. criminals. He treats of these in the pamphlet on Model Prisons.
This pamphlet is distinguished from the first only by a fury much greater, yet all the cheaper for being directed against those officially expelled from established society, against people behind bars; a fury which sheds even that little shame which the ordinary bourgeois still for decency's sake display. Just as in the first pamphlet Carlyle erects a complete hierarchy of Nobles and seeks out the Noblest of the Noble, so here he arranges an equally complete hierarchy of scoundrels and villains and exerts himself in hunting down the worst of the bad, the supreme scoundrel in England, for the exquisite pleasure of hanging him. Assuming he were to catch him and hang him; then another will be our Worst and must be hanged in turn, and then another again, until the turn of the Noble and then the More Noble is reached and finally no one is left but Carlyle, the Noblest, who as persecutor of scoundrels is at once the murderer of the Noble and has murdered what is noble even in the scoundrels; the Noblest of the Noble, who is suddenly transformed into the Vilest of Scoundrels and as such must hang himself. With that, all questions concerning government, state, the organisation of labour, and the hierarchy of the Noble would be resolved and the eternal law of nature realised at last.
II. Les Conspirateurs, par A. Chenu, ex-capitaine des gardes du citoyen Caussidière. Les sociétés secrètes; la préfecture de police sous Caussidière; les corps-francs. La naissance de la République en février 1848, par Lucien de la Hodde
PARIS, 1850[236]
Nothing is more to be desired than that the people who were at the head of the active party, whether before the revolution in the secret societies or the press, or afterwards in official positions, should at long last be portrayed in the stark colours of a Rembrandt, in the full flush of life. Hitherto these personalities have never been depicted as they really were, but only in their official guise, with buskins on their feet and halos around their heads. All verisimilitude is lost in these idealised, Raphaelesque pictures.
It is true that the two present publications dispense with the buskins and halos in which the "great men" of the February Revolution hitherto appeared. They penetrate the private lives of these people, they show them to us in informal attire, surrounded by all their multifarious subordinates. But they are for all that no less far removed from being a real, faithful representation of persons and events. Of their authors, the one is a self-confessed long-time mouchard* of Louis Philippe, and the other a veteran conspirator by profession whose relations with the police are similarly very ambiguous and of whose powers of comprehension we have an early indication in the fact that he claims to have seen "that splendid chain of the Alps whose silver peaks dazzle the eye" between Rheinfelden and Basle, and "the Rhenish Alps whose distant peaks are lost on the horizon" between Kehl and Karlsruhe. From such people, especially when in addition they are writing to justify themselves, we can of course only expect a more or less exaggerated chronique scandaleuse oi the February Revolution.
M. de la Hodde, in his pamphlet, attempts to portray himself after the manner of the spy in Cooper's novel.(1) He has, he claims, earned society's gratitude by paralysing the secret societies for eight years. But Cooper's spy is a very far cry from M. de la Hodde. M. de la Hodde, who worked on Le Charivari, was a member of the Central Committee of the Société des nouvelles saisons from 1839,[237] was co-editor of La Réforme from its foundation and at the same time a paid spy of the Prefect of Police, Delessert, is compromised by no one more than by Chenu. His publication is a direct response to Chenu's revelations, but it takes very good care not to say even a syllable in reply to Chenu's allegations concerning de la Hodde himself. That part of Chenu's memoirs at least is therefore authentic.
"On one of my nocturnal excursions," recounts Chenu, "I noticed de la Hodde walking up and down the quai Voltaire.... It was raining in torrents, a circumstance which set me thinking. Was this dear fellow de la Hodde also helping himself from the cash-box of the secret funds, by any chance? But I remembered his songs, his magnificent stanzas about Ireland and Poland, and particularly the violent articles he wrote for the journal La Réforme " (whereas M. de la Hodde tries to make out he tamed La Réforme). " 'Good evening, de la Hodde, what on earth are you up to here at this hour and in this fearful weather?'—'I am waiting for a rascal who owes me some money, and as he passes this way every evening at this time, he is going to pay me, or else'—and he struck the parapet of the embankment violently with his stick."
De la Hodde attempts to get rid of him and walks towards the Pont du Carrousel. Chenu departs in the opposite direction, but only to conceal himself under the arcades of the Institut. De la Hodde soon comes back, looks round carefully in all directions and once more walks back and forth.
"A quarter of an hour later I noticed the carriage with two little green lamps which my ex-agent had described to me" (a former spy who had revealed a large number of police secrets and identification signs to Chenu in prison). "It stopped at the corner of the rue des Vieux Augustins. A man got out; de la Hodde went straight up to him; they talked for a moment, and I saw de la Hodde make a movement as though putting money into his pocket.—After this incident I made every effort to have de la Hodde excluded from our meetings and above all to prevent Albert falling into some trap, for he was the cornerstone of our edifice [...]. Some days later La Réforme rejected an article by de la Hodde. This wounded his vanity as a writer. I advised him to avenge himself by founding another journal. He followed this advice and with Pilhes and Dupoty he even published the prospectus of a paper, Le Peuple, and during that time we were almost completely rid of him." (Chenu, pp. 46-48 [p. 55].)
As we see, this spy à la Cooper turns out to be a political prostitute of the vilest kind who hangs about in the street in the rain for the payment of his cadeau* by the first officier de paix(2) who happens to come along. We see furthermore that it was not de la Hodde, as he would have us believe, but Albert who was at the head of the secret societies. This follows from Chenu's whole account. The mouchard
"in the interests of order" is here suddenly transformed into the offended writer who is angry that the articles of the Charivari correspondent are not accepted without question by La Réforme, and who therefore breaks with La Réforme, a real party organ in which he was able to be of some use to the police, to found a new paper in which at best he was able to satisfy his vanity as a writer. Just as prostitutes make use of sentiment of a kind, so this mouchard sought to make use of his literary pretensions in order to escape from his dirty role. Hatred for La Réforme, which pervades his whole pamphlet, is resolved into the most trivial writer's vindictiveness. In the end we see that during the most important period of the secret societies, shortly before the February Revolution, de la Hodde was being increasingly forced out of them; and this explains why they, according to his account, quite contrary to Chenu, declined more and more in this period.
We now come to the scene in which Chenu describes the exposure of de la Hodde's treacheries after the February Revolution. The
Réforme party had assembled with Albert in the Luxembourg at Caussidière's invitation. Monnier, Sobrier, Grandménil, de la
Hodde, Chenu, etc., were present. Caussidière opened the meeting and then said:
"'There is a traitor among us. We shall form a secret tribunal to try him.'— Grandménil, as the oldest of those present, was appointed chairman, and Ti-phaine secretary. 'Citizens,' continued Caussidière as public prosecutor, 'for a long time we have been accusing honest patriots. We were far from suspecting what a serpent had slipped in among us. Today I have discovered the real traitor: it is Lucien de la Hodde!'—The latter, who hitherto had sat quite unperturbed, leapt up at so direct an accusation. He made a move towards the door. Caussidière closed it quickly, drew a pistol and shouted: 'One move and I'll blow your brains out!'—De la Hodde passionately protested his innocence. 'Very well,' said Caussidière. 'Here is a file containing eighteen hundred reports to the Prefect of Police'... and he gave each of us the reports specially concerning him. De la Hodde obstinately denied that these reports, signed Pierre, originated with him until Caussidière read out the letter published in his memoirs, in which de la Hodde offered his services to the Prefect of Police and which he had signed with his real name. From then on the wretched man stopped denying and tried to excuse himself on the grounds of poverty which had given him the fatal idea of throwing himself into the arms of the police. Caussidière held out to him the pistol, the last means of escape left to him. De la Hodde then pleaded with his judges and whimperingly begged for mercy, but they remained inflexible. Bocquet, one of those present, whose patience was exhausted, seized the pistol and offered it to him three times with the words: 'Allons* blow your brains out, you coward, or I'll kill you myself!'—Albert snatched it out of his hand, saying, 'But just think, a pistol-shot here in the Luxembourg would bring everybody running here!'—'That's true,' cried Bocquet, 'we need poison.' 'Poison?' said Caussidière. 'I brought poison with me — of every kind.' He took a glass, filled it with water, which he sugared, then poured in a white powder and offered it to de la Hodde, who recoiled in horror: 'You want to kill me then?'—'Yes we do,' said Bocquet, 'drink.'—De la Hodde was fearful to look at. His features were ashen, and his very curly, well-kempt hair stood on end on his head. His face was bathed in sweat. He implored, he wept: 'I don't want to die!' But Bocquet, inflexible, still held out the glass to him. 'Allons, drink,' said Caussidière, 'it will be all over before you know what has happened.'—'No, no, I will not drink.' And in his deranged state of mind he added with a terrible gesture: 'Oh, I shall have my revenge for all these torments!'
"When it was seen that no appeal to his point d'honneur had any effect, de la Hodde was finally pardoned on Albert's intercession, and was taken to the Conciergerie prison." (Chenu, pp. .134-36 [pp. 147-50].)
The self-styled spy à la Cooper becomes increasingly pathetic. We see him here in all his ignominy, only able to stand up to his opponents by cowardice. What we reproach him for is not that he did not shoot himself but that he did not shoot the first comer amongst his opponents. He seeks to justify himself after the event by means of a pamphlet in which he attempts to represent the whole revolution as a mere escroquerie.0 The title of this pamphlet ought to be: The Disillusioned Policeman. It demonstrates that a true revolution is the exact opposite of the ideas of a mouchard, who like the "men of action" sees in every revolution the work of a small coterie. Whilst all movements which were to a greater or lesser extent arbitrarily provoked by coteries did not go beyond mere insurgency, it is clear from de la Hodde's account itself that on the one hand the official republicans at the beginning of the February days still despaired of achieving the republic, and that on the other hand the bourgeoisie was obliged to help achieve the republic without wanting it, and thus that the February Republic was brought about by the force of circumstances driving the proletarian masses, who were outside any coterie, out into the streets and keeping the majority of the bourgeoisie at home or forcing them into common action with the proletarians.—What de la Hodde reveals apart from that is scanty indeed and amounts to no more than the most banal gossip. Only one scene is of interest: the meeting of the official democrats on the evening of February 21 on the premises of La Réforme, at which the leaders declared themselves firmly opposed to an attack by force.
The content of their speeches testifies by and large to what was for that date still a correct understanding of the situation. They are ridiculous only because of their pompous style and the later claims of the same people to have consciously and deliberately worked towards the revolution from the start. And the worst thing, incidentally, that de la Hodde can say of them is that they tolerated him for so long in their midst.
Let us turn to Chenu. Who is M. Chenu? He is a veteran conspirator, took part in every insurgency since 1832 and is well known to the police. Conscripted for military service, he soon deserted and remained undiscovered in Paris, despite his repeated participation in conspiracies and the 1839 revolt.[238] In 1844 he reported to his regiment, and strangely enough, despite his well-known record, he was spared a court-martial by the divisional general. And that was not all: he did not serve his full time with the regiment but was allowed to return to Paris. In 1847 he was implicated in the incendiary bomb conspiracy[239]; he escaped an attempted arrest, but for all that remained in Paris, although he had been sentenced to four years in contumaciam.(3) Only when his fellow-conspirators accused him of being in league with the police did he go to Holland, whence he returned on February 21, 1848. After the February Revolution he became a captain in Caussidière's guards. Caussidière soon suspected him (a suspicion having a high degree of probability) of being in league with Marrast's special police and dispatched him without much resistance to Belgium and later to Germany. M. Chenu submitted willingly enough to successive enrolments in the Belgian, German and Polish volunteer corps. And all this at a time when Caussidière's power was already beginning to totter and although Chenu claims to have had complete control over him; thus he maintains he forced Caussidière by means of a threatening letter to free him immediately when he had once beert arrested. So much for our author's character and credibility.
The quantities of make-up and patchouli beneath which prostitutes attempt to smother the less attractive aspects of their physical being have their literary counterpart in the bel esprit with which de la Hodde perfumes his pamphlet. The literary qualities of Chenu's book on the other hand frequently remind one of Gil Blas(4) by their naivety and the vivacity of their presentation. Just as in the most varied adventures Gil Bias always remains a servant and judges everything by a servant's standards, so Chenu always remains, from the 1832 revolt up to his dismissal from the prefecture, the same low-ranking conspirator, whose own particular form of narrow-mindedness can incidentally be very clearly distinguished from the dull ruminations of the literary "faiseur" apportioned to him by the Elysée. It is clear that there can be no question of any understanding of the revolutionary movement in Chenu's case either. For this reason the only chapters in his book which are of any interest are those in which he describes things more or less uninhibitedly from his own observation: the Conspirators and Caussidière the Hero.
The propensity of the Latin peoples to conspiracy and the part which conspiracies have played in modern Spanish, Italian and French history are well known. After the defeat of the Spanish and Italian conspirators at the beginning of the twenties, Lyons and especially Paris became the centres of revolutionary clubs. It is a well-known fact that the liberal bourgeoisie headed the conspiracies against the Restoration up to 1830. After the July Revolution the republican bourgeoisie took their place; the proletariat, trained in conspiracy even under the Restoration, began to dominate to the extent that the republican bourgeoisie were deterred from conspiring by the unsuccessful street battles. The Société des saisons, through which Barbes and Blanqui organised the 1839 revolt, was already exclusively proletarian, and so were the Nouvelles saisons, formed after the defeat, whose leader was Albert and in which Chenu, de la Hodde, Caussidière, etc., participated. Through its leaders the conspiracy was constantly in contact with the petty-bourgeois elements represented by La Réforme, but always kept itself strictly independent. These conspiracies never of course embraced the broad mass of the Paris proletariat. They were restricted to a comparatively small, continually fluctuating number of members which consisted partly of unchanging, veteran conspirators, regularly bequeathed by each secret society to its successor, and partly of newly recruited workers.
Of these veteran conspirators, Chenu describes virtually none but the class to which he himself belongs: the professional conspirators. With the development of proletarian conspiracies the need arose for a division of labour; the members were divided into occasional conspirators, conspirateurs d'occasion, i. e. workers who engaged in conspiracy alongside their other employment, merely attending meetings and holding themselves in readiness to appear at the place of assembly at the leaders' command, and professional conspirators who devoted their whole energy to the conspiracy and had their living from it. They formed the intermediate stratum between the workers and the leaders, and frequently even infiltrated the latter.
The social situation of this class determines its whole character from the very outset. Proletarian conspiracy naturally affords them only very limited and uncertain means of subsistence. They are therefore constantly obliged to dip into the cash-boxes of the conspiracy. A number of them also come into direct conflict with civil society as such and appear before the police courts with a greater or lesser degree of dignity. Their precarious livelihood, dependent in individual cases more on chance than on their activity, their irregular lives whose only fixed ports-of-call are the taverns of the marchands de vin[3]—the places of rendezvous of the conspirators— their inevitable acquaintance with all kinds of dubious people, place them in that social category which in Paris is known as la bohème. These democratic bohemians of proletarian origin — there are also democratic bohemians of bourgeois origin, democratic loafers and
piliers d'estaminet(5)—are therefore either workers who have given up their work and have as a consequence become dissolute, or characters who have emerged from the lumpenproletariat and bring all the dissolute habits of that class with them into their new way of life. One can understand how in these circumstances a few repris de justice(6) are to be found implicated in practically every conspiracy trial.
The whole way of life of these professional conspirators has a most decidedly bohemian character. Recruiting sergeants for the conspiracy, they go from marchand de vin to marchand de vin, feeling the pulse of the workers, seeking out their men, cajoling them into the conspiracy and getting either the society's treasury or their new friends to foot the bill for the litres inevitably consumed in the process. Indeed it is really the marchand de vin who provides a roof over their heads. It is with him that the conspirator spends most of his time; it is here he has his rendezvous with his colleagues, with the members of his section and with prospective recruits; it is here, finally, that the secret meetings of sections (groups) and section leaders take place. The conspirator, highly sanguine in character anyway like all Parisian proletarians, soon develops into an absolute bambocheur(7) in this continual tavern atmosphere. The sinister conspirator, who in secret session exhibits a Spartan self-discipline, suddenly thaws and is transformed into a tavern regular whom everybody knows and who really understands how to enjoy his wine and women. This conviviality is further intensified by the constant dangers the conspirator is exposed to; at any moment he may be called to the barricades, where he may be killed; at every turn the police set snares for him which may deliver him to prison or even to the galleys. Such dangers constitute the real spice of the trade; the greater the insecurity, the more the conspirator hastens to seize the pleasures of the moment. At the same time familiarity with danger makes him utterly indifferent to life and liberty. He is as at home in prison as in the wine-shop. He is ready for the call to action any day. The desperate recklessness which is exhibited in every insurrection in Paris is introduced precisely by these veteran professional conspirators, the hommes de coups de main.[3] They are the ones who throw up and command the first barricades, who organise resistance, lead the looting of arms-shops and the seizure of arms and ammunition from houses, and in the midst of the uprising carry out those daring raids which so often throw the government party into confusion. In a word, they are the officers of the insurrection.
It need scarcely be added that these conspirators do not confine themselves to the general organising of the revolutionary proletariat. It is precisely their business to anticipate the process of revolutionary development, to bring it artificially to crisis-point, to launch a revolution on the spur of the moment, without the conditions for a revolution. For them the only condition for revolution is the adequate preparation of their conspiracy. They are the alchemists of the revolution and are characterised by exactly the same chaotic thinking and blinkered obsessions as the alchemists of old. They leap at inventions which are supposed to work revolutionary miracles: incendiary bombs, destructive devices of magic effect, revolts which are expected to be all the more miraculous and astonishing in effect as their basis is less rational. Occupied with such scheming, they have no other purpose than the most immediate one of overthrowing the existing government and have the profoundest contempt for the more theoretical enlightenment of the proletariat about their class interests. Hence their plebeian rather than proletarian irritation at the habits noirs,(8) people of a greater or lesser degree of education who represent that aspect of the movement, from whom, however, they can never make themselves quite independent, since they are the official representatives of the party. The habits noirs also serve at times as their source of money. It goes without saying that the conspirators are obliged to follow willy-nilly the development of the revolutionary party.
The chief characteristic of the conspirators' way of life is their battle with the police, to whom they have precisely the same relationship as thieves and prostitutes. The police tolerate the conspiracies, and not just as a necessary evil: they tolerate them as centres which they can keep under easy observation and where the most violent revolutionary elements in society meet, as the forges of revolt, which in France has become a tool of government quite as necessary as the police themselves, and finally as a recruiting place for their own political mouchards. Just as the most serviceable rogue-catchers, the Vidocqs and their cronies, are taken from the class of greater and lesser rascals, thieves, escrocs* and fraudulent bankrupts, and often revert to their old trade, in precisely the same way the humbler political policemen are recruited from among the professional conspirators. The conspirators are constandy in touch with the police, they come into conflict with them all the time; they hunt the mouchards, just as the mouchards hunt them. Spying is one of their main occupations. It is no wonder therefore that the short step from being a conspirator by trade to being a paid police spy is so frequently made, facilitated as it is by poverty and prison, by threats and promises. Hence the web of limidess suspicion within the conspiracies, which completely blinds their members and makes them see mouchards in their best people and their most trustworthy people in the real mouchards. That these spies recruited from among the conspirators mostly allow themselves to become involved with the police in the honest belief that they will be able to outwit them, that they succeed in playing a double role for a while, until they succumb more and more to the consequences of their first step, and that the police are often really outwitted by them, is self-evident. Whether, incidentally, such a conspirator succumbs to the snares of the police depends entirely on the coincidence of circumstances and rather on a quantitative than a qualitative difference in strength of character.
These are the conspirators whom Chenu parades before us, often in a most lively manner, and whose characters he sometimes eagerly and sometimes reluctantly describes. He himself, incidentally, is the epitome of the conspirator by trade, right down to his somewhat ambiguous connections with Delessert's and Marrast's police.
To the extent that the Paris proletariat came to the fore itself as a party, these conspirators lost some of their dominant influence, they were dispersed and they encountered dangerous competition in proletarian secret societies, whose purpose was not immediate insurrection but the organisation and development of the proletariat. Even the 1839 revolt was decidedly proletarian and communist. But afterwards the divisions occurred which the veteran conspirators bemoan so much; divisions which had their origin in the workers' need to clarify their class interests and which found expression partly in the earlier conspiracies themselves and partly in new propagandist associations. The communist agitation which Cabet began so forcefully soon after 1839 and the controversies which arose within the Communist Party soon had the conspirators out of their depth. Both Chenu and de la Hodde admit that at the time of the February Revolution the Communists were by far the strongest party group among the revolutionary proletariat. The conspirators, if they were not to lose their influence on the workers and thus their importance as a counterbalance to the habits noirs,
were obliged to go along with this trend and adopt socialist or communist ideas. Thus there arose even before the February Revolution that conflict between the workers' conspiracies, represented by Albert, and the Réforme people, the same conflict which was reproduced shortly afterwards in the Provisional Government. We would of course never dream of confusing Albert with these conspirators. It is clear from both works that Albert knew how to assert his own independent position above them, his tools, and he certainly does not belong to that category of people who practised conspiracy to earn their daily bread.
The 1847 bomb affair, a matter in which direct police action was greater than in any previous case, finally scattered the most obstinate and contrary-minded of the veteran conspirators and drove their former sections into the proletarian movement proper.
These professional conspirators, the most violent people in their sections and the détenus politiques* of proletarian origin, mostly veteran conspirators themselves, we find again as Montagnards in the Prefecture of Police after the February Revolution. The conspirators however form the core of the whole company. It is understandable that these people, suddenly armed and herded together here, mostly on quite familiar terms with their prefects and their officers, could not fail to form a somewhat turbulent corps. Just as the Montagne in the National Assembly was a parody of the original Montagne and by its impotence proved in the most striking manner that the old revolutionary traditions of 1793 no longer suffice today, so the Montagnards in the Prefecture of Police, the new version of the original sansculottes, proved that in the modern revolution this section of the proletariat is also insufficient and that only the proletariat as a whole can carry the revolution through.
Chenu describes the sansculotte life-style of this honourable company in the Prefecture in a most lively manner. These comic scenes, in which M. Chenu was obviously an active participant, are sometimes rather wild, but very understandable in view of the character of the old conspiratorial bambocheurs, and form a necessary and even a healthy contrast to the orgies of the bourgeoisie in the last years of Louis Philippe.
We will quote just one example from the account of how they established themselves in the Prefecture.
"When the day broke, I saw the group leaders arrive one after the other with their men, but for the most part unarmed [...]. I drew Caussidière's attention to this. 'I'll get arms for them,' he said. 'Look for a suitable place to quarter them in the Prefecture.' I carried out this order at once and sent them to occupy that former police guardroom where I had once been so vilely treated myself. A moment later I saw them come running back. 'Where are you going?' I asked them. 'The guardroom is occupied by a crowd of policemen,' Devaisse replied to me; 'they are fast asleep and we're looking for something to waken them with and throw them out.'—They now armed themselves with whatever came to hand, ramrods, sabre-sheaths, straps folded double and broom-sticks. Then my lads, who had all had greater or lesser reason to complain of the insolence and brutality of the sleepers, fell on them with fists flying and for over half an hour taught them such a harsh lesson that some of them took a considerable time to recover. At their cries of terror I dashed up, and I only managed with difficulty to open the door which the Montagnards wisely kept locked on the inside. It was a sight for sore eyes to see the policemen dashing half-undressed into the courtyard. They jumped down the stairs in one bound, and it was lucky for them they knew every nook and cranny in the Prefecture and were able to escape from the sight of their enemies hard on their heels. Once masters of the place whose garrison they had just relieved with such courtesy, our Montagnards decked themselves out triumphantly in what the vanquished had left behind, and for a long time they were to be seen walking up and down the courtyard of the Prefecture, swords by their sides, coats over their shoulders and their heads resplendent in the three-cornered hats once so feared by the majority of them." (Pp. 83-85 [pp. 95-96].)
Now we have made the acquaintance of the Montagnards, let us turn to their leader, the hero of the Chenu saga, Caussidière. Chenu parades him all the more frequently before us as the whole book is actually directed against him.
The main accusations levelled against Caussidière relate to his moral life-style, his cavalier dealings in bills of exchange and other modest attempts to rustle up money such as any spirited Parisian
commis voyageur in debt may and does resort to. Indeed, it is only the amount of capital which determines whether the cases of fraud, profiteering, swindling and stock-exchange speculation on which the whole of commerce is based, impinge to any degree on the Code pénal. With regard to stock-exchange coups and the Chinese fraud which are especially typical of French commerce, it is worth referring for instance to Fourier's spicy descriptions in the Quatre mouvements, the Fausse industrie, the Traité de l'unité universelle and his posthum-ous works.[240] M. Chenu does not even try to prove that Caussidière
exploited his position as Prefect of Police for his own ends. Indeed a party can congratulate itself if its victorious opponents can do nothing more than expose such pathetic instances of commercial immorality. What a contrast between the petty dabblings of the
commis voyageur Caussidière and the grandiose scandals of the bourgeoisie in 1847! The only reason for the whole attack is that Caussidière belonged to the Réforme party, which sought to conceal its lack of revolutionary energy and understanding behind protestations of republican virtue and an attitude of sombre gravity.
Caussidière is the only entertaining figure amongst the leaders of the February Revolution. In his capacity as loustic* to the revolution, he was a most appropriate leader for the veteran professional conspirators. Sensual and endowed with a sense of humour, a regular of long standing in cafés and taverns of the most varied kind, happy to live and let live, but at the same time a brave soldier, concealing beneath broad-shouldered bonhomie and lack of inhibi-tion great cunning, astute thought and acute observation, he possessed a certain revolutionary tact and revolutionary energy. At that time, Caussidière was a genuine plebeian who hated the bourgeoisie instinctively and shared all the plebeian passions to a high degree. Scarcely was he established in the Prefecture when he was already conspiring against the National, but without in so doing neglecting his predecessor's cuisine or cellar. He immediately organised a military force for himself, secured himself a newspaper, launched clubs, gave people parts to play and generally acted from the first moment with great self-confidence. In twenty-four hours the Prefecture was transformed into a fortress from which he could defy his enemies. But all his schemes either remained mere plans or amounted in practice to no more than plebeian pranks leading to nothing. When the conflicts became more acute, he shared the fate of his party, which remained indecisively in the middle between the National people and the proletarian revolutionaries such as Blanqui. His Montagnards split; the old bambocheurs grew too big for him and were no longer to be restrained, whilst the revolutionary section went over to Blanqui. Caussidière himself became increasingly bourgeois in his official position as Prefect and representative; on May 15[241] he kept prudently in the background and excused himself in the Chamber in an irresponsible manner; on June 23 he deserted the insurrection at the crucial moment. As a reward he was naturally removed from the Prefecture and shortly afterwards sent into exile.
We now go on to some of the most significant passages from Chenu and de la Hodde concerning Caussidière.
Scarcely was de la Hodde established on the evening of February 24 as General Secretary to the Prefecture under Caussidière when the latter said to him:
" 'I need reliable people here. The administrative side of things will always take care of itself more or less; for the time being I have kept on the old officials; as soon as the patriots have been trained, we shall send them packing. That is a secondary matter. What we must do is to make the Prefecture the stronghold of the revolution; give our men instructions to that effect; bring them all here. Once we have a thousand trusty comrades here, we shall have the whip hand. Ledru-Rollin, Flocon, Albert and I understand each other, and I hope everything will turn out all right. The National is for the high jump. And after that we shall republicanise the country all right, whether it likes it or not.'
"Thereupon Garnier-Pagès, the Mayor of Paris, under whose command the National had placed the police, arrived on a visit and suggested to Caussidière he might prefer to take over command of the castle at Compiègne instead of the unpleasant post at the Prefecture. Caussidière replied in that thin high-pitched voice of his which contrasted so strangely with his broad shoulders: 'Go to Compiègne? Out of the question. I am needed here. I have got several hundred merry lads down there doing a splendid job; I am expecting twice as many again. If you at the Hôtel de Ville haven't enough good will or courage, I'll be able to help you.... Ha, ha, la révolution fera son petit bonhomme de chemin, il le faudra bien\'(9)—'The revolution? But it's over!'—'Pshaw, it's not even started yet!'—The poor Mayor stood there looking like an utter ninny." (De la Hodde, p 72 [pp. 103-05].)
Amongst the most amusing scenes described by Chenu is the reception of the police officers and officiers de paix by the new Prefect, who was in the middle of a meal when they were announced.
" 'Let them wait,' said Caussidière, 'the Prefect is working.' He went on working for a good half-hour more and then set the scene for the reception of the police officers who were meanwhile lined up on the great staircase. Caussidière sat down majestically in his armchair, his great sabre at his side; two wild, bloodthirsty-looking Montagnards were guarding the door, arms ordered and pipes in their mouths. Two captains with drawn sabres stood at each side of his desk. Then there were all the section leaders and the republicans who formed his general staff, grouped around the room, all of them armed with great sabres and cavalry pistols, muskets and shot-guns. Everyone was smoking and the cloud of smoke filling the room made their faces seem even more sombre and gave the scene a really frightening aspect. In the centre a space had remained clear for the police officers. Each man put on his hat and Caussidière gave the order for them to be brought in. The poor police officers wanted nothing better, for they were exposed to the vulgarity and threats of the Montagnards, who would have liked to fricassee them in every sauce known to man. 'You gang of blackguards,' they bellowed, 'now it's our turn to have got you! You won't get out of here, you'll be flayed alive!...' As they entered the Prefect's office they felt they were exchanging Scylla for Charybdis. The first to set foot on the threshold seemed to hesitate a moment. He was uncertain whether to advance or retreat, so menacing were all the eyes fixed upon him. At last he ventured a step forward and bowed, another step and bowed more deeply, another step again and bowed even more deeply still. Each made his entry with deep bows in the direction of the awful Prefect, who received all these marks of respect coldly and in silence, his hand resting on the hilt of his sabre. The police officers took in this extraordinary scene with eyes like sauoers. Some of them, beside themselves with fear and no doubt wanting to curry favour with us, found the tableau imposing and majestic.—'Silence!' commanded a Montagnard in sepulchral tones.—When they had all come in, Caussidière, who had neither spoken nor moved until that moment, broke the silence and said in his most fearful voice:
" 'A week ago you scarcely expected to find me here in this position, surrounded by trusty friends. So they are your masters today, these cardboard republicans, as you once called them! You tremble before those whom you subjected to the most ignoble treatment. You, Vassal, were the vilest seide(10) of the fallen government, the most violent persecutor of the republicans, and now you have fallen into the hands of your most implacable enemies, for there is not one present here who escaped your persecutions. If I listened to the just demands that are put to me, I would take reprisals. I prefer to forget. Return to your posts again, all of you; but if I ever hear that you have lent a hand to any reactionary trickery, I shall crush you like vermin. Go!'
"The police officers had been through every gradation of terror, and happy to escape with a dressing-down from the Prefect, they went off in good spirits. The Montagnards who were waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs escorted them to the end of the rue de Jérusalem with a hubbub of catcalls and jeers. Scarcely had'the last of them disappeared when we burst out into a tremendous fit of laughter. Caussidière was beaming and laughed more than anyone at the magnificent prank he had just played on his police officers. " (Chenu, pp. 87-90 [pp. 99-102].)
After March 17, in which Caussidière played a big part, he said to Chenu:
" 'I can raise up the masses and set them against the bourgeoisie whenever I like.' " (Chenu, p. 140 [p. 154].)
Caussidière never actually went .further with his opponents than playing at giving them a fright.
Finally, concerning Caussidière's relations with the Montagnards, Chenu says:
"When I mentioned to Caussidière the excesses his men were indulging in, he sighed, but his hands were tied. The majority of them had lived his life with him, he had shared their joys and sorrows; several had done him good turns. If he was unable to restrain them, it was a consequence of his own past." (P. 97 [pp. 109-10].)
We would remind our readers that both these books were written at the time of the campaign for elections of March 10.[242] Their effect is clear from the election result — the brilliant victory of the reds.
i n
Endnotes
[231] On the reviews written by Marx and Engels for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue see Note 182. These reviews have never been published in English except for excerpts from the review of the pamphlets written by Chenu and de la Hodde, which appeared in: Karl Marx, On Revolution, edited and translated by S. K. Padover, New York, 1971. Excerpts from the review of Emile Girardin's book were quoted in an article by M.Beer, "Further Selections from the Literary Remains of Karl Marx", in Labour Monthly, London, 1923, Vol. 5, No. 2.
[232] In their review of Thomas Carlyle's pamphlets, The Present Time and Model Prisons, the authors continue their critical analysis of Carlyle's sociological and historical conception which Marx and, particularly, Engels (see present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 444-68) began in their earlier works. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, they criticised "feudal socialism" (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 507-08), of which Carlyle was an exponent. Their criticism became more intense as Carlyle moved to the right after the revolution of 1848-49. During the lifetime of Marx and Engels the review was reprinted unsigned in Der Volksstaat, Leipzig, 1871, Nos. 93 and 94, November 18 and 22. In quotations from Carlyle's pamphlets, the authors of the review do not always follow Carlyle's italics; they silently omit some paragraphs, change punctuation and introduce their own italics. In the given publication, in places where part of the text was left out, the editors have introduced marks of omission.
[234] Laissez-faire, laissez-aller—the formula of economists who advocated Free Trade and non-intervention by the state in economic relations.
[235] See Note 75.
[236] This review, slightly abridged, was reprinted during Engels' lifetime in the theoretical organ of the German Social-Democratic Party, Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1886, 4. Jg., H. 12. While preparing the given publication, the editors checked quotations from Chenu and de la Hodde according to the 1850 edition of the pamphlets. The authors of the review may have used a different edition published in the same year, hence the different page numbers. In the text, the pages given by the review's authors are followed by those of the edition used by the editors of the present publication, which are given in square brackets.
[237] The secret Société des nouvelles saisons came into being soon after the rout (in U of the Société des saisons led by Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbes, and was virtually its successor. Workers formed the main body of the society, which also included students. Its members adhered to revolutionary Babouvism and were strongly influenced by the Utopian communist ideas of Théodore Dézamy.
[238] See Note 64.
[239] An allusion to attempts by a small group of conspirators, members of secret revolutionary societies, to commit terrorist acts using home-made incendiary bombs. Police agents were also involved in the venture, giving regularly information about the conspirators' movements. This enabled the police to arrest all those involved. Their trial in 1847 revealed that police agents had succeeded in infiltrating deeply into secret societies.
[240] Among Fourier's posthumous works there is the unfinished manuscript Des trois unités externes which deals partially with the problems of trade. It was published in 1845 in the journal La Phalange. Lengthy passages from this work were translated by Engels into German and published in 1846 in the Deutsches Bürgerbuch (see present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 613-44).
[241] See Note 45.
[242] On the by-elections to the Legislative Assembly (March 10, 1850) see this volume, pp. 129-31.
[3] In May 1849, when the counter-revolution was on the upsurge, the Prussian Government issued an order expelling Marx and the other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from Prussia. This measure, prepared well in advance, was applied when the main uprisings in the Rhine Province had been virtually suppressed. On his return to Cologne in April 1848, Marx applied for Prussian citizenship which he had been forced to renounce in 1845 when he was living in Belgium as an emigrant. Despite the Cologne Magistrate's favourable reply to his application, however, the Cologne royal district authorities and the Minister of the Interior refused to grant it, and Marx remained a "foreigner", who could at any moment be accused of abusing hospitality and expelled. The royal district authorities' note to this effect followed on May 11, 1849, and on May 16 Marx was given 24 hours to leave Prussia. Weerth and Dronke, who did not enjoy Prussian citizenship either, received similar orders. Legal proceedings were instituted against Engels for his part in the Elberfeld uprising. The last issue, No. 301, of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared on May 19, 1849.