II
[Notes to the People, No. 48, March 27, 1852] Although at a first glance it might appear that in the present moment Louis Napoleon, in France, sways with undisturbed omnipotence, and that, perhaps, the only power, besides his own, is that of courtly intrigues that beset him on all sides, and plot against each other for the purpose of obtaining sole favour with, and influence over, the French autocrat; yet, in reality, things are quite different. The whole secret of Louis Napoleon's success is this, that by the traditions of his name he has been placed in a position to hold, for a moment, the balance of the contending classes of French society. For it is a fact that under the cloak of the state of siege by military despotism which now veils France, the struggle of the different classes of society is going on as fiercely as ever. That struggle, having been carried on for the last four years with powder and shot has only now taken a different form. In the same way as any protracted war will exhaust and fatigue the most powerful nation, so has the open, bloody war of the last year fatigued and momentarily exhausted the military strength of the different classes. But class-war is independent of actual warfare, and not always needs barricades and bayonets to be carried on with; class-war is inextinguishable as long as the various classes with their opposed and conflicting interests and social positions are in existence; and we have not yet heard that since the blessed advent of the mock-Napoleon, France had ceased to count among her inhabitants large landed proprietors, and agricultural labour-ers, or métayers, large money-lenders, and small mortgaged freeholders, capitalists, and working-men.
The position of the different classes in France is just this: the revolution of February had for ever upset the power of the large bankers and stockjobbers; after their downfall every other class of the populations of the towns had had their day. First, the working-men, during the days of the first revolutionary excitement,—then the petty republican shopkeepers under Ledru-Rollin,—then the republican fraction of the bourgeoisie under Cavaignac,—lastly, the united royalist middle-classes, under the late National Assembly. None of these classes had been able to hold fast the power they for a moment possessed; and latterly, among the ever reappearing divisions of the legitimist royalists, or the landed interest, and the Orleans royalists, or the moneyed interest, it appeared inevitable that power would again slip from their hands, and return to those of the working-class, who themselves might be expected to have become fitter to turn it to account. But then there was another mighty class in France, mighty, not by the large individual properties of its members, but by its numbers and its very wants. That class—the small, mortgaged freeholders, making up at least three-fifths of the French nation—was slow to act, and slow to be acted upon, as all rural populations; it stuck to its old traditions, distrusted the wisdom of the apostles of all parties from the towns, and remembering that it had been happy, free from debt, and comparatively rich in the time of the Emperor,[3] laid, by the means of universal suffrage, the executive power in the hands of his nephew. The active agitation of the democratic socialist party, and
Napoleon I.— Ed.
more still the disappointment which Louis Napoleon's measures soon prepared for them, led part of this peasant-class into the ranks of the Red party; but the mass of them stuck to their traditions, and said that if Louis Napoleon had not yet proved the Messiah he was expected to be, it was the fault of the National Assembly that gagged him. Besides the mass of the peasantry, Louis Napoleon, himself a species of lofty swell-mob's man, and surrounded by the élite of the fashionable swell mob, found support in the most degraded and dissolute portion of the population of the towns. This element of strength he united into a paid body called the "Society of the 10th of December." Thus, relying upon the peasantry for the vote; upon the mob for noisy demonstrations, upon the army, ever ready to upset a government of parliamentary talkers, pretending to speak the voice of the working-classes, he could quietly wait for the moment when the squabbles of the middle-class parliament would allow him to step in and assume a more or less absolute sway over those classes, none of which, after a four years' bloody struggle, had proved strong enough to seize upon a lasting supremacy. And this he did on the 2nd of December last.
Thus the reign of Louis Napoleon is not superseding the class-war. It merely suspends for a while the bloody outbreaks which mark from time to time the efforts of this or that class to gain or maintain political power. None of these classes were strong enough to venture at a new battle, with any chance of success. The very division of classes favoured, for the time being, Napoleon's projects. He upset the middle-class parliament, and destroyed the political power of the middle-class; might not the proletarians rejoice at this? And certainly, the proletarians could not be expected to fight for an assembly that had been their most deadly enemy! But at the same time Louis Napoleon's usurpation menaced the common fighting-ground of all classes, and the last vantage-grounds of the working-class—the Republic; why, as soon as the working-men stood up for the defence of the Republic, the middle-class joined the very man that had just ousted them in order to defeat, in the working-class, the common enemy of society. Thus it was in Paris—thus in the provinces,— and the army won an easy victory over the contending and opposing classes; and after the victory, the millions of the imperial-ist peasantry stepped in with their vote, and with the help of official falsifications, established the government of Louis Napoleon as that of the representative of almost unanimous France.
But even now, class struggles and class interests are at the bottom of every important act of Louis Napoleon's, as we shall see in our next.
Endnotes
[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.