III
occupied with his fixed Napoleonic idea,[87] was brazen enough publicly to exploit this degradation of the parliamentary power. For when, on May 8, 1849, the National Assembly passed a vote of censure of the ministry[3] because of the occupation of Civitavecchia by Oudinot, and ordered it to bring back the Roman expedition to its ostensible purpose,[88] Bonaparte published the same evening in the
Moniteur a letter to Oudinot, in which he congratulated him on his heroic exploits and, in contrast to the pen-pushing parliamentarians, already posed as the generous protector of the army. The royalists smiled at this. They regarded him simply as their dupe. Finally, when Marrast, the President of the Constituent Assembly, believed for a moment that the safety of the National Assembly was endangered and, relying on the Constitution, requisitioned a colonel and his regiment, the colonel declined, cited discipline in his support and referred Marrast to Changarnier, who scornfully refused him with the remark that he did not like baïonnettes intelligentes} In November 1851, when the coalitioned royalists wanted to begin the decisive struggle with Bonaparte, they sought to put through in their notorious Questors' Bill the principle of the direct requisition of troops by the President of the National Assembly.[89] One of their generals, Le Flô, had signed the Bill. In vain did Changarnier vote for it and Thiers pay homage to the far-sighted wisdom of the former Constituent Assembly. The War Minister, Saint-Arnaud, answered him as Changarnier has answered Marrast—and to the acclamation of the Montagne!
Thus the Party of Order, when it was not yet the National Assembly, when it was still only the ministry had itself stigmatised the parliamentary regime. And it makes an outcry when December 2, 1851 banished this regime from France!
We wish it a happy journey.
in
On May 28, 1849 the Legislative National Assembly met. On December 2, 1851 it was dispersed. This period covers the span of life of the constitutional or parliamentary republic.0
The resolution of the Constituent Assembly on the Roman expedition, passed on May 7, 1849, was published in Le Moniteur universel the following day.— Ed.
Bayonets which thought.— Ed. Here, to avoid repetition (see below, p. 181), Marx leaves out the following paragraph printed in the 1852 edition: "It falls into three main periods: May 28, 1849 to June 13, 1849, struggle between democracy and the bourgeoisie, defeat of the In the first French Revolution the rule of the Constitutionalists is followed by the rule of the Girondins and the rule of the Girondinsby the rule of the Jacobins. Each of these parties relies on the more progressive party for support. As soon as it has brought the revolution far enough to be unable to follow it further, still less to go ahead of it, it is thrust aside by the bolder ally that stands behind it and sent to the guillotine. The revolution thus moves along an ascending line.
It is the reverse with the revolution of 1848. The proletarian party appears as an appendage of the petty-bourgeois-democratic party. It is betrayed and dropped by the latter on April 16, May 15,[90] and in the June days. The democratic party, in its turn, leans on the shoulders of the bourgeois-republican party. The bourgeois republicans no sooner believe themselves well established than they shake off the troublesome comrade and support themselves on the shoulders of the Party of Order. The Party of Order hunches its shoulders, lets the bourgeois republicans tumble and throws itself on the shoulders of armed force. It fancies it is still sitting on its shoulders when, one fine morning, it perceives that the shoulders have turned into bayonets. Each party kicks back at the one behind, which presses upon it, and leans against the one in front, which pushes backwards. No wonder that in this ridiculous posture it loses its balance and, having made the inevitable grimaces, collapses with curious capers. The revolution thus moves in a descending line. It finds itself in this state of retrogressive motion before the last February barricade has been cleared away and the first revolutionary authority constituted.
The period that we have before us comprises the most motley mixture of crying contradictions: constitutionalists who conspire openly against the Constitution; revolutionists who are confessedly constitutional; a National Assembly that wants to be omnipotent and always remains parliamentary; a Montagne that finds its vocation in patience and counters its present defeats by prophesying future victories; royalists who form the patres conscripti* of the republic and are forced by the situation to keep the hostile royal houses, to which they adhere, abroad, and the republic, which they hate, in France; an
petty-bourgeois or democratic party; June 13, 1849 to May 31, 1850, parliamentary dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, i.e., of the coalitioned Orleanists and Legitimists or of the Party of Order, a dictatorship which makes itself complete by abolishing universal suffrage; May 31, 1850 to December 2, 1851, struggle between the bourgeoisie and Bonaparte, overthrow of bourgeois rule, end of the constitutional or parliamentary republic. " — Ed.
Conscript fathers—collective designation of senators in Ancient Rome.— Ed.
executive power that finds its strength in its very weakness and its respectability in the contempt that it calls forth; a republic that is nothing but the combined infamy of two monarchies, the Restoration and the July monarchy, with an imperial label—alliances whose first proviso is separation; struggles whose first law is indecision; wild, inane agitation in the name of tranquillity; most solemn preaching of tranquillity in the name of revolution; passions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, made wearisome through constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations; antagonisms that periodically seem to work themselves up to a climax only to lose their sharpness and fall away without being able to resolve themselves; pretentiously paraded exertions and philistine terror at the danger of the world coming to an end, and at the same time the pettiest intrigues and court comedies played by the world redeemers, who in their laissez-allera
remind us less of the Day of Judgment than of the times of the Fronde[91]—the official collective genius of France brought to naught by the artful stupidity of a single individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks through universal suffrage, seeking its appropriate expression through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses, until at length it finds it in the self-will of a freebooter. If any section of history has been painted grey on grey,b
it is this. Men and events appear as inverted Schlemihls, as shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution itself paralyses its own bearers and endows only its adversaries with passionate f orcef ulness. When the "red spectre", continually conjured up and exorcised by the counter-revolutionaries,[92] finally appears, it appears not with the Phrygian cap of anarchy on its head, but in the uniform of order, in red breeches.
We have seen that the ministry which Bonaparte installed on December 20, 1848, on his Ascension Day,c was a ministry of the Party of Order, of the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. This Barrot-Falloux ministry had outlived the republican Constituent Assembly, whose term of life it had more or less violently cut short, and found itself still at the helm. Changarnier, the general of the allied royalists, continued to unite in his person the general command of the First Army Division and of the National Guard of Paris. Finally, the general elections had secured the Party of Order a large majority in the National Assembly. Here the deputies and peers of Louis Philippe encountered a hallowed host of Legitimists, for whom many of the nation's ballots had become transformed into admission cards to the political stage. The Bonapartist representatives of the people were too sparse to be able to form an independent parliamentary party.[3] They appeared merely as the mauvaise queueb
of the Party of Order. Thus the Party of Order was in possession of governmental power, the army and the legislative body, in short, of the whole of state power; it had been morally strengthened by the general elections, which made its rule appear as the will of the people, and by the simultaneous triumph of the counter-revolution on the whole continent of Europe.
Never did a party open its campaign with greater resources or under more favourable auspices.
The shipwrecked pure republicans found that they had melted down to a clique of about fifty men in the Legislative National Assembly, the African generals Cavaignac, Lamoricière and Bedeau at their head. The great opposition party, however, was formed by the Montagne. The Social-Democratic party had given itself this parliamentary baptismal name. It commanded more than 200 of the 750 votes of the National Assembly and was consequently at least as powerful as any one of the three factions of the Party of Order taken by itself. Its numerical inferiority compared with the entire royalist coalition seemed compensated by special circumstances. Not only did the elections in the departments show that it had gained a considerable following among the rural population. It counted in its ranks almost all the deputies from Paris; the army had made a confession of democratic faith by the election of three non-commissioned officers,0 and the leader of the Montagne, Ledru-Rollin, in contradistinction to all the representatives of the Party of Order, had been raised to the parliamentary peerage by five departments, which had pooled their votes for him. In view of the inevitable clashes of the royalists among themselves and of the whole Party of Order with Bonaparte, the Montagne thus seemed to have all the elements of success before it on May 28, 1849. A fortnight later it had lost everything, honour included.a
The 1852 edition further has: "They were sufficiently represented to count as figures in a general call-up against the republican armed forces."—Ed Before we pursue parliamentary history further, some remarks are necessary to avoid common misconceptions regarding the whole character of the epoch that lies before us. Looked at with the eyes of democrats, the period of the Legislative National Assembly is concerned with what the period of the Constituent Assembly was concerned with: the simple struggle between republicans and royalists. The movement itself, however, they sum up in the one shibboleth: "reaction"—night, in which all cats are grey and which permits them to reel off their night watchman's commonplaces. And, to be sure, at first sight the Party of Order reveals a tangled knot of different royalist factions, which not only intrigue against each other—each seeking to elevate its own pretender to the throne and exclude the pretender of the opposing faction—but also all unite in common hatred of, and common attacks on, the "republic". In opposition to this royalist conspiracy the Montagne, for its part, appears as the representative of the "republic". The Party of Order appears to be perpetually engaged in a "reaction", directed against press, association and the like, neither more nor less than in Prussia, and which, as in Prussia, is carried out in the form of brutal police intervention by the bureaucracy, the gendarmerie and the law courts. The "Montagne", for its part, is just as continually occupied in warding off these attacks and thus defending the "eternal rights of man" as every so-called people's party has done, more or less, for a century and a half. If one looks at the situation and the parties more closely, however, this superficial appearance, which veils the class struggle and the peculiar physiognomy of this period,[a] disappears.
Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great factions of the Party of Order. Was what held these factions fast to their pretenders and kept them apart from one another nothing but lily and tricolour, House of Bourbon and House of Orleans, different shades of royalism, was it their royalist faith at all? Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under the Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property, it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who is there that denies this? Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of different and distinctly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, to whom they are transmitted through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting-point of his activity. While Orleanists and Legitimists, while each faction sought to make itself and the other believe that it was loyalty to their two royal houses which separated them, facts later proved that it was rather their divided interests which forbade the unification of the two royal houses. And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with the same claims. If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split—landed property and capital—sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. We speak of two interests of the bourgeoisie, for large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the development of modern society. Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent*
The coalitioned royalists carried on their intrigues against one another in the press, in Ems, in Claremont,[93] outside parliament. Behind the scenes they donned their old Orleanist and Legitimist liveries again and once more engaged in their old tourneys. But on the public stage, in their grand performances of state,[94] as a great parliamentary party, they put off their respective royal houses with mere obeisances and adjourned the restoration of the monarchy ad infinitum. They did their real business as the Party of Order, that is, under a social, not under a political title; its representatives of the bourgeois world-order, not as knights of errant princesses; as the bourgeois class against other classes, not as royalists against the republicans. And as the Party of Order they exercised more unrestricted and sterner domination over the other classes of society than ever previously under the Restoration or under the July monarchy, a domination which, in general, was only possible under the form of the parliamentary republic, for only under this form could the two great divisions of the French bourgeoisie unite, and thus put the rule of their class instead of the regime of a privileged faction of it on the order of the day. If, nevertheless, they, as the Party of Order, also insulted the republic and expressed their repugnance of it, this happened not merely as a result of royalist memories. Instinct taught them that the republic, true enough, makes their political rule complete, but at the same time undermines its social foundation, since they must now confront the subjugated classes and contend against them without mediation, without the concealment afforded by the crown, without being able to divert the national interest by their subordinate struggles among themselves and with the monarchy. It was a feeling of weakness that caused them to recoil from the pure conditions of their own class rule and to yearn for the former more incomplete, more undeveloped and precisely on that account less dangerous forms of this rule. On the other hand, every time the coalitioned royalists come into conflict with the pretender that confronts them, with Bonaparte, every time they believe their parliamentary omnipotence endangered by the executive power, every time, therefore, that they must produce their political title to their rule, they come forward as republicans and not as royalists, from the Orleanist Thiers, who warns the National Assembly that the republic divides them least,[3] to the Legitimist Berryer, who, on December 2, 1851, as a tribune swathed in a tricoloured sash, harangues the people assembled before the town hall of the tenth arrondissement in the name of the republic. To be sure, a mocking echo calls back to him: Henry V! Henry V!
As against the coalitioned bourgeoisie, a coalition between petty bourgeois and workers had been formed, the so-called Social-Democratic party. The petty bourgeois saw themselves badly rewarded after the June days of 1848, their material interests imperilled and the democratic guarantees which were to ensure the implementation of these interests called in question by the counter-revolution. Accordingly, they came closer to the workers. On the other hand, their parliamentary representation, the Montagne, thrust aside during the dictatorship of the bourgeois republicans, had in the last half of the life of the Constituent Assembly reconquered its lost popularity through the struggle with Bonaparte and the royalist ministers. It had concluded an alliance with the socialist leaders. In February 1849, banquets celebrated the reconciliation. A joint programme was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. The revolutionary point was broken off from the social demands of the proletariat and a democratic turn given to them; the purely political form was stripped from the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their socialist point turned outward. Thus arose Social-Democracy. The new Montagne, the result of this combination, contained, apart from some working-class supernumeraries and some members of the socialist sects, the same elements as the old Montagne, only numerically stronger. However, in the course of development, it had changed with the class that it represented. The peculiar character of Social-Democracy is epitomised in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of superseding two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be embellished with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the reformation of society in a democratic way, but a reformation within the bounds di the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not form the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers[3] or enthusiastic supporters of shopkeepers. In their education and individual position they may be as far apart from them as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter in practice. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.
After the analysis we have given, it is obvious that if the Montagne continually contends with the Party of Order for the republic and the so-called rights of man, neither the republic nor the rights of man are its final end, any more than an army which one wants to deprive of its weapons and which resists has taken the field in order to remain in possession of its own weapons.
Immediately, as soon as the National Assembly met, the Party of Order provoked the Montagne. The bourgeoisie now felt the necessity of making an end of the democratic petty bourgeoisie,just as a year before it had realised the necessity of getting rid of the revolutionary proletariat. Only the situation of the adversary was different. The strength of the proletarian party lay in the streets, that of the petty bourgeoisie in the National Assembly itself. It was therefore a question of decoying them out of the National Assembly into the streets and causing them to smash their parliamentary power themselves, before time and circumstances could consolidate it. The Montagne galloped headlong into the trap.
The bombardment of Rome by the French troops was the bait that was thrown to it. It violated Article V of the Constitution which forbids the French Republic to employ its military forces against the freedom of another people.[95] In addition to this, Article 54 prohibited any declaration of war on the part of the executive power without the assent of the National Assembly, and by its resolution of May 8, the Constituent Assembly had disapproved of the Roman expedition. On these grounds Ledru-Rollin brought in a bill of impeachment against Bonaparte and his ministers on June 11, 1849. Exasperated by the wasp stings of Thiers, he actually let himself be carried away to the point of threatening that he would defend the Constitution by every means, even with arms in hand. The Montagne rose to a man and repeated this call to arms. On June 12, the National Assembly rejected the bill of impeachment, and the Montagne left the parliament. The events of June 13 are known: the proclamation issued by a section of the Montagne, declaring Bonaparte and his ministers "outside the Constitution"[3]; the street procession of the democratic National Guards, who, unarmed as they were, dispersed on encountering the troops of Changarnier, etc., etc. A part of the Montagne fled abroad; another part was arraigned before the High Court at Bourges,[96] and a parliamentary regulation subjected the remainder to the schoolmasterly surveil-lance of the President of the National Assembly.* Paris was again declared in a state of siege and the democratic part of its National Guard dissolved. Thus the influence of the Montagne in parliament and the power of the petty bourgeois in Paris were broken.
Lyons, where June 13 had given the signal for a bloody insurrection of the workers,[97] was, along with the five surrounding departments, likewise declared in a state of siege, a condition that has continued up to the present moment.
The bulk of the Montagne had left its vanguard in the lurch, having refused to sign its proclamation. The press had deserted, only two journals [a] having dared to publish the pronunciamento. The petty bourgeois betrayed their representatives, in that the National Guards either stayed away or, where they appeared, hindered the erection of barricades. The representatives had duped the petty bourgeois, in that the alleged allies from the army were nowhere to be seen. Finally, instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness and, as is usual with the great deeds of democrats, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to charge their "people" with desertion, and the people the satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with fraud.
Seldom had an action been announced with more noise than the impending campaign of the Montagne, seldom had an event been trumpeted with greater certainty or longer in advance than the inevitable victory of democracy. Most assuredly, the democrats believe in the trumpets before whose blasts the walls of Jericho fell down.[c] And as often as they stand before the ramparts of despotism, they seek to imitate the miracle. If the Montagne wished to triumph in parliament, it should not have called to arms. If it called to arms in parliament, it should not have acted in parliamentary fashion in the streets. If the peaceful demonstration was meant seriously, then it was folly not to foresee that it would be given a war-like reception. If a real struggle was intended, then it was odd to lay down the weapons with which it would have to be waged. But the revolutionary threats of the petty bourgeois and their democratic representatives are mere attempts to intimidate the antagonist. And when they have run into a blind alley, when they have sufficiently compromised themselves to make it necessary to give effect to their threats, then this is done in an ambiguous fashion that avoids nothing so much as the means to the end and tries to find excuses for succumbing. The blaring overture that announced the contest dies away in a faint grumble as soon as the struggle has to begin, the actors cease to take themselves au sérieux, and the action collapses completely, like a pricked balloon. No party exaggerates its means more than the democratic, none deludes itself more light-mindedly over the situation. Since a section of the army had voted for it, the Montagne was now convinced that the army would revolt for it. And on what occasion? On an occasion which, from the standpoint of the troops, had no other meaning than that the revolutionists took the side of the Roman soldiers against the French soldiers. On the other hand, the recollections of June 1848 were still too fresh to allow of anything but a profound aversion on the part of the proletariat towards the National Guard and a thoroughgoing mistrust of the democratic chiefs on the part of the chiefs of the secret societies. To iron out these differences, it was necessary for great common interests to be at stake. The violation of an abstract paragraph of the Constitution could not provide these interests. Had not the Constitution been repeatedly violated, according to the assurance of the democrats themselves? Had not the most popular journals branded it as counter-revolutionary botch-work? But the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie, that is, a transition class, in which the interests of two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted, imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally. The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people's rights; what interests them is the people's interests. Accordingly, when a struggle is impending, they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors. Now, if in practice their interests prove to be uninterest-ing and their potency impotence, then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalised and blinded to comprehend that the pure aims of democracy are also the best thing for it, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoilt the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly-won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him.
Accordingly, one must not imagine the Montagne, decimated and broken though it was, and humiliated by the new parliamentary regulation, as being particularly miserable. If June 13 had removed its chiefs, it made room, on the other hand, for men of lesser calibre, whom this new position flattered. If their impotence in parliament could no longer be doubted, they were entitled now to confine their actions to outbursts of moral indignation and blustering declamation. If the Party of Order affected to see embodied in them, as the last official representatives of the revolution, all the terrors of anarchy, they could in reality be all the more insipid and modest. They consoled themselves, however, for June 13 with the profound utterance: But if they dare to attack universal suffrage, well then—then we'll show them what we are made of! Nous verrons![3]
So far as the Montagnards who fled abroad are concerned, it is sufficient to remark here that Ledru-Rollin, because in barely a fortnight he had succeeded in ruining irretrievably the powerful party at whose head he stood, now found himself called upon to form a French government in partibush; that to the extent that the level of the revolution sank and the official bigwigs of official France became more dwarf-like, his figure in the distance, removed from the scene of action, seemed to grow in stature; that he could figure as the republican pretender for 1852, and that he issued periodical circulars to the Wallachians and other peoples, in which the despots of the Continent are threatened with the deeds of himself and his confederates. Was Proudhon altogether wrong when he cried to these gentlemen: " Vous n'êtes que des blagueurs"?c
On June 13 the Party of Order had not only broken the Montagne, it had effected the subordination of the Constitution to the majority decisions of the National Assembly. And it understood the republic thus: that the bourgeoisie rules here in parliamentary forms, without, as in a monarchy, encountering any barrier such as the veto power of the executive or the right to dissolve parliament. This was a parliamentary republic, as Thiers termed it.d But when on June 13 the bourgeoisie secured its omnipotence within the house of parliament, did it not afflict parliament itself, vis-à-vis the executive authority and the people, with incurable weakness by expelling its most popular part? By surrendering numerous deputies without further ado on the demand of the courts, it abolished its own parliamentary immunity. The humiliating regulations to which it subjected the Montagne exalted the President of the republic in the same measure as they degraded the individual representatives of the people. By branding an insurrection for the protection of the constitutional charter an anarchic act aiming at the subversion of society, it precluded the possibility of its appealing to insurrection should the executive authority violate the Constitution in relation to it. And by the irony of history, the general who on Bonaparte's instructions bombarded Rome and thus provided the immediate occasion for the constitutional revolt of June 13, that very Oudinot had to be the man offered by the Party of Order imploringly and unavailingly to the people as general on behalf of the Constitution against Bonaparte on December 2, 1851. Another hero of June 13, Vieyra, who was lauded from the tribune of the National Assembly for the brutalities that he had committed in the democratic newspaper offices at the head of a gang of National Guards belonging to high finance circles—this same Vieyra had been initiated into Bonaparte's conspiracy and played an essential part in depriving the National Assembly in the hour of its death of any protection by the National Guard.
June 13 had still another meaning. The Montagne had wanted to force the impeachment of Bonaparte. Its defeat was therefore a direct victory for Bonaparte, his personal triumph over his democratic enemies. The Party of Order gained the victory; Bonaparte had only to cash in on it. He did so. On June 14 a proclamation could be read on the walls of Paris in which the President, reluctantly, against his will, as it were, compelled by the sheer force of events, comes forth from his cloistered seclusion and, posing as misunderstood virtue, complains of the calumnies of his opponents and, while he seems to identify his person with the cause of order, rather identifies the cause of order with his person. Moreover, the National Assembly had, it is true, subsequently approved the expedition against Rome, but Bonaparte had taken the initiative in the matter. After having re-installed the High Priest Samuel in the Vatican, he could hope to enter the Tuileries as King David.[98] He had won the priests over to his side.
The revolt of June 13 was confined, as we have seen, to a peaceful street procession. No martial laurels were, therefore, to be won against it. Nevertheless, at a time as poor as this in heroes and events, the Party of Order transformed this bloodless battle into a second Austerlitz." Platform and press praised the army as the power of order, in contrast to the popular masses, representing the impotence of anarchy, and extolled Changarnier as the "bulwark of society", a deception in which he himself finally came to believe. Surreptitious-ly, however, the corps that seemed doubtful were transferred from Paris, the regiments which had shown at the elections the most democratical sentiments were banished from France to Algiers, the turbulent spirits among the troops were relegated to penal detachments, and finally the isolation of the press from the barracks and of the barracks from civil society was systematically carried out.
Here we have reached the decisive turning-point in the history of the French National Guard. In 1830 it was decisive in the overthrow of the Restoration. Under Louis Philippe every rebellion in which the National Guard stood on the side oi the troops miscarried. When in the February days of 1848 it evinced a passive attitude towards the insurrection and an equivocal one towards Louis Philippe, he gave himself up for lost and actually was lost. Thus the conviction took root that the revolution could not be victorious without the National Guard, nor the army against it. This was the superstition of the army in regard to civilian omnipotence. The June days of 1848, when the entire National Guard, with the troops of the line, put down the insurrection, had strengthened the superstition. After Bonaparte's assumption of office, the position of the National Guard was to some extent weakened by the unconstitutional union, in the person of Changarnier, of the command of its forces with the command of the First Army Division.
Just as the command of the National Guard appeared here as an attribute of the military commander-in-chief, so the National Guard itself now appeared as only an appendage of the troops of the line. Finally, on June 13 its power was broken, and not only by its partial disbandment, which from this time on was periodically repeated all over France, until mere fragments of it were left behind. The demonstration of June 13 was, above all, a demonstration of the democratic National Guards. They had not, to be sure, borne their arms, but worn their uniforms against the army; precisely in this uniform, however, lay the talisman. The army convinced itself that this uniform was a piece of woollen cloth like any other. The spell was broken. In the June days of 1848 bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie stood united as the National Guard with the army against the proletariat; on June 13, 1849 the bourgeoisie let the petty-bourgeois National Guard be dispersed by the army; on December 2, 1851 the National Guard of the bourgeoisie itself had vanished, and Bonaparte merely registered this fact when he subsequently signed the decree for its disbandment. Thus the bourgeoisie had itself smashed its last weapon against the army, but it had to smash it the moment the petty bourgeoisie no longer stood behind it as a vassal, but before it as a rebel, as in general it was bound to destroy all its means of defence against absolutism with its own hand as soon as it had itself become absolute.
Meanwhile, the Party of Order celebrated the reconquest of a power that seemed lost in 1848 only to be found again, freed from its restraints, in 1849, celebrated by means of invectives against the republic and the Constitution, of curses on all future, present and past revolutions, including that which its own leaders had made, and in laws by which the press was muzzled, association destroyed and the state of siege regulated as an organic institution. The National Assembly then adjourned from the middle of August to the middle of October, after having appointed a permanent commission for the period of its absence. During this recess the Legitimists intrigued with Ems, the Orleanists—with Claremont, Bonaparte—by means of princely tours, and the Departmental Councils—in deliberations on a revision of the Constitution: incidents which regularly recur in the periodic recesses of the National Assembly and which I propose to discuss only when they become events. Here it may merely be remarked, in addition, that it was impolitic for the National Assembly to disappear for considerable intervals from the stage and leave only a single, albeit sorry, figure to be seen at the head of the republic, that of Louis Bonaparte, while to the scandal of the public the Party of Order fell asunder into its royalist component parts and followed its conflicting desires for Restoration. As often as the confused noise of parliament grew silent during these recesses and its body dissolved in the nation, it became unmistakably clear that only one thing was still wanting to complete the true form of this republic: to make the former's recess permanent and replace the latter's inscription: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité by the unambiguous words: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery!
Endnotes
[87] An ironical allusion to Louis Bonaparte's book Des Idées napoléoniennes, which he wrote in England and published in Paris and Brussels in 1839.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[90] The French Government managed to get allocations from the Constituent Assembly for the dispatch to Italy of an expeditionary corps under General Oudinot in April 1849 on the pretext of defending Piedmont in its struggle against Austria, and of protecting the Roman Republic. The true aim of the expedition was intervention against the Roman Republic and restoration of the Pope's temporal power. (On this subject see also Marx's The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 91-94).
[91] [Editorial note 91: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[92] The ruling Bonapartist circles and the counter-revolutionary press, preparing the coup d'état of December 2, 1851, did everything they could to scare all timid and law-abiding citizens by the prospect of anarchy, revolutionary plots, a new Jacquerie and encroachments on property during the presidential elections scheduled for May 1852. A special role in this campaign was played by the pamphlet Le spectre rouge de 1852 (Brussels, 1851) by A. Romieu, a former prefect of police.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[93] 95 96 97 98 Ems—a health resort in Germany where a Legitimist conference was held in August 1849; it was attended by the Count de Chambord, pretender to the French throne under the name of Henry V. Claremont—a house near London, residence of Louis Philippe after his flight from France.
[94] Marx uses the term "Haupt- und Staatsaktionen" ("principal and spectacular actions"), which has several meanings. In the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century, it denoted plays performed by German touring companies. The plays, which were rather formless, presented tragic historical events in a bombastic and at the same time coarse and farcical way. Secondly, this term can denote major political events. It was used in this sense by a trend in German historical science known as "objective historiography". Leopold Ranke was one of its chief representatives. He regarded Haupt- und Staatsaktionen as the main subject-matter of history.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[95] The expeditionary corps under General Oudinot, sent to Italy by decision of President Louis Bonaparte and the French Government, was driven back from Rome by the troops of the Roman Republic on April 30, 1849. But, in violation of the terms of the armistice signed by the French, Oudinot launched a new offensive on June 3. Throughout the siege of Rome until the fall of the Republic on July 3, 1849 the city was repeatedly subjected to heavy bombardment. Article V belongs to the introductory part of the French Constitution of 1848; the articles of the main part of the Constitution are numbered in Arabic numerals.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[96] On August 10, 1849 the Legislative Assembly adopted a law under which "instigators and supporters of the conspiracy and the attempt of June 13" were liable to trial by the High Court. Thirty-four deputies of the Montagne (Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Félix Pyat and Victor Considérant among them) were deprived of their mandates and put on trial (those who had emigrated were tried by default). On June 13 the editorial offices of democratic and socialist newspapers were raided and many of these papers were banned.
[97] The events in Paris sparked off an armed uprising of Lyons workers arrd artisans on June 15, 1849. The insurgents occupied the Croix-Rousse district and erected barricades there, but were overcome by troops after several hours of stubborn fighting.
[3] Serfdom was abolished in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine annexed to France during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, as were the privileges of the nobility and the clergy, and the church estates.
[98] An ironical allusion to the plans of Louis Napoleon, who expected to receive the French Crown from the hands of Pius IX, whose temporal power he helped restore. According to the Bible, David was anointed king by the prophet Samuel in oppositon to the Hebrew king Saul (1 Samuel 16 : 13).