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I
[Notes to the People, No. 43, February 21, 1852]
Ever since the 2nd of December last, the whole interest that foreign, or at least continental politics may excite, is taken up by that lucky and reckless gambler, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. "What is he doing? Will he go to war, and with whom? Will he invade England?" These questions are sure to be put wherever continental affairs are spoken of.
And certainly there is something startling in the fact of a comparatively unknown adventurer, placed by chance at the head of the executive power of a great republic, seizing, between sunset and sunrise, upon all the important posts of the capital, driving the parliament like chaff to the winds, suppressing metropolitan insurrection in two days, provincial tumults in two weeks, forcing himself, in a sham election, down the throat of the whole people, and establishing, in the same breath, a constitution which confers upon him all the powers of the state.[147] Such a thing has not occurred, such a shame has not been borne by any nation since the praetorian legions of declining Rome put up the empire to auction and sold it to the highest bidder. And the middle-class press of this country, from The Times down to The Weekly Dispatch, has never, since the days of December, allowed any occasion to pass without venting its virtuous indignation upon the military despot, the treacherous destroyer of his country's liberties, the extinguisher of the press, and so forth.
Now, with every due contempt for Louis Napoleon, we do not think it would become an organ of the working-class[3] to join in this chorus of high-sounding vituperation in which the respective
Notes to the People.— Ed.
papers of the stockjobbers, the cotton-lords, and the landed aristocracy strive to out-blackguard each other. These gentlemen might as well be remembered of the real state of the question. They have every reason to cry out, for whatever Louis Napoleon took from others, he took it not from the working-classes, but from those very classes whose interests in England the aforesaid portion of the press represents. Not that Louis Napoleon would not, quite as gladly, have robbed the working-classes of anything that might appear desirable to him, but it is a fact that in December last the French working-classes could not be robbed of anything, because everything worth taking had already been taken from them during the three years and a half of middle-class parliamentary government that had followed the great defeats of June 1848. In fact, what, on the eve of the 2nd of December, remained to be taken from them? The suffrage? They had been stripped of that by the Electoral Law of May 1850. The right of meeting? That had long been confined to the "safe" and "well-disposed" classes of society. The freedom of the press? Why, the real proletarian press had been drowned in the blood of the insurgents of the great battle of June, and that shadow of it which survived for a time, had long since disappeared under the pressure of gagging laws, revised and improved upon every succeeding session of the National Assembly. Their arms? Every pretext had been taken profit of, in order to ensure the exclusion from the National Guard of all working-men, and to confine the possession of arms to the wealthier classes of society.
Thus the working-classes had, at the moment of the late coup d'état, very little, if anything, to lose in the chapter of political privileges. But, on the other hand, the middle and capitalist classes were at that time in possession of political omnipotence. Theirs was the press, the right of meeting, the right to bear arms, the suffrage, the parliament. Legitimists and Orleanists, landholders and fundholders, after thirty years' struggle, had at last found a neutral ground in the republican form of government. And for them it was indeed a hard case to be robbed of all this, in the short space of a few hours, and to be reduced at once to the state of political nullity to which they themselves had reduced the working people. That is the reason why the English "respectable" press is so furious at Louis Napoleon's lawless indignities. As long as these indignities, either of the executive government or the parliament, were directed against the working-classes, why that, of course, was right enough, but as soon as a similar policy was extended to "the better sort of people," the "wealthy intellects of the nation," ah, that was quite different, and it behoved every lover of liberty to raise his voice in defence of "principle."
The struggle, then, on the 2nd of December lay principally between the middle-classes and Louis Napoleon, the representative of the army. That Louis Napoleon knew this, he showed by the orders given to the army during the struggle of the 4th, to fire principally upon "the gentlemen in broad-cloth." The glorious battle of the boulevards is known well enough; and a series of volleys upon closed windows and unarmed bourgeois was quite sufficient to stifle, in the middle-class of Paris, every movement of resistance.
On the other hand, the working-classes, although they could no longer be deprived of any direct political privilege, were not at all disinterested in the question. They had to lose, above all, the great chance of May 1852, when all powers of the state were to expire simultaneously, and when, for the first time since June 1848, they expected to have a fair field for a struggle; and aspiring as they were to political supremacy, they could not allow any violent change of government to occur, without being called upon to interpose between the contending parties as supreme umpires, and to impose to them their will as the law of the land. Thus, they could not let the occasion pass without showing the two opposing forces that there was a third power in the field, which, if momentarily removed from the theatre of official and parliamentary contentions, was yet ever ready to step in as soon as the scene was changed to its own sphere of action,—to the street. But then, it must not be forgotten that even in this case the proletarian party laboured under great disadvantages. If they rose against the usurper, did they not virtually defend and prepare the restoration and dictatorship of that very parliament which had proved their most relentless enemy? And if they at once declared for a revolutionary government, would they not, as was actually the case in the provinces, frighten the middle-class so much as to drive them to a union with Louis Napoleon and the army? Besides, it must be remembered that the very strength and flower of the revolutionary working-class have been either killed during the insurrection of June, or transported and imprisoned under innumerable different pretences ever since that event. And finally, there was this one fact which was alone sufficient to ensure to Napoleon the neutrality of the great majority of the working-classes: Trade was excellent, and Englishmen know it well enough, that with a fully employed and well-paid working-class, no agitation, much less a revolution, can be got up.
It is now very commonly said in this country that the French must be a set of old women or else they would not submit to such treatment. I very willingly grant that, as a nation, the French deserve, at the present moment, such adorning epithets. But we all know that the French are, in their opinions and actions, more dependent upon success than any other civilised nation. As soon as a certain turn is given to events in this country, they almost without resistance follow up that turn, until the last extreme in that direction has been reached. The defeat of June 1848 gave such a counter-revolutionary turn to France and, through her, to the whole continent. The present ascension of the Napoleonic empire is but the crowning fact of a long series of counter-revolutionary victories, that filled up the three last years; and once engaged upon the declivity, it was to be expected that France would go on falling until she reached the bottom. How near she may be to that bottom it is not easy to say; but that she is getting nearer to it very rapidly every one must see. And if the past history of France is not to be belied by future deeds of the French people, we may safely expect that the deeper the degradation, the more sudden and the more dazzling will be the result. Events, in these times of ours, are succeeding each other at a tremendously rapid rate, and what it took formerly a nation a whole century to go through, is now-a-days very easily overcome in a couple of years. The old empire lasted fourteen years; it will be exceedingly lucky for the imperial eagle if the revival, upon the most shabby scale, of this piece of performance will last out so many months. And then?
Endnotes
[146] [Editorial note 146: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[147] [Editorial note 147: text not recovered from the source scan.]
[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.