Name: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Author: Karl Marx

This is an AI modernization of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte into contemporary English. The original is available from Deutsches Textarchiv (second edition, 1869). Also available as an epub.

Editor's Introduction

Karl Marx wrote this book in London in the winter of 1851–52. He was thirty-three, a German exile who had settled there in 1849 after the revolutions of 1848 failed, and he was living with his family in Soho, in poverty. On December 2, 1851, in Paris, Louis Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon and President of the French Republic, sent troops to dissolve the National Assembly and arrest its leaders. The constitution allowed him a single four-year term, which was to end in May 1852. A year after the coup he made himself Emperor Napoleon III, and he reigned until 1870.

Marx's friend Joseph Weydemeyer, who had emigrated to New York, asked him for an account of the coup. Marx sent it in weekly installments, and it appeared in May 1852 as the first issue of Weydemeyer's German-language magazine Die Revolution. Few copies reached Europe. Marx revised the text for a second edition, published in Hamburg in 1869, and Engels brought out a third in 1885, two years after Marx's death.

The book asks how a republic born in a revolution could end, less than four years later, in the dictatorship of a man widely dismissed as a mediocrity. Marx's answer is a history of the classes behind the parties. After the Paris workers' rising of June 1848 was crushed, the propertied classes ruled the republic together as the "Party of Order"; but they were divided among themselves, and their fear of the workers led them to give up, step by step, the parliament through which they ruled. Bonaparte, in Marx's account, drew his power from the army, the state machine and above all the small peasant proprietors, who had no way of speaking for themselves.

Three things will read strangely. The book assumes that its readers followed French politics day by day, so it is crowded with names, nicknames and dates used as names ("the 13th of June"). The notes say who and what each one was. Marx's tone is sarcastic from first page to last: Bonaparte is "the adventurer" and "Crapulinski," and the parliamentary leaders are actors in a farce. And the argument is his, made in the heat of events from the newspapers and reports that reached London.

This edition is translated from Marx's German of 1869, as transcribed by the Deutsches Textarchiv and checked against the pages of the printed book, and not from an English version. For that edition Marx struck out allusions he thought no longer understood and a few longer passages of the 1852 text; those passages are not restored here. Marx's preface of 1869 and Engels's of 1885 come first. Marx's own five footnotes are marked as his; all other notes are this edition's.

On the cover. Honoré Daumier, Ratapoil Spreading Propaganda (Ratapoil faisant de la propagande), lithograph from the series Actualités in Le Charivari, 1851, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: Ratapoil, Daumier's figure for the club-carrying agents of Louis Bonaparte, leans in to press a peasant to sign for the cause. The caption has him promise that if the man loves his wife, his house, his field, his heifer and his calf, he will sign without wasting a minute.

Preface to the Second Edition (1869)

My friend Joseph Weydemeyer¹, who died too soon, meant to bring out a political weekly in New York from January 1, 1852, and he asked me to write the history of the coup d'état for it. Every week until the middle of February I sent him an article under the title "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." Meanwhile Weydemeyer's original plan had fallen through. In its place, in the spring of 1852, he brought out a monthly, Die Revolution, whose second issue consists of my "Eighteenth Brumaire." A few hundred copies found their way into Germany at the time, though without ever reaching the book trade proper. I offered the distribution to a German bookseller who liked to strike extremely radical poses, and he answered in genuinely moral horror at so "untimely an imposition."²^,³^,⁴^,⁵

These details show that the present work was written under the immediate pressure of events, and that its historical material goes no further than the month of February 1852. It is coming out again now partly because the booksellers have asked for it and partly because my friends in Germany have kept after me.

Of the writings that dealt with the same subject at about the same time as mine, only two are worth mentioning: Victor Hugo's Napoléon le Petit and Proudhon's Coup d'État.⁶

Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty abuse of the coup's "responsible editor." In his account the event itself comes like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it nothing but the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of small, by crediting him with a personal power of initiative that would have no parallel in world history. Proudhon, for his part, tries to present the coup as the result of the historical development that came before it. But somewhere along the way his historical construction of the coup turns into a historical apology for the coup's hero. He thus falls into the error of our so-called objective historians. I, on the other hand, show how the class struggle in France created circumstances and conditions that allowed a mediocre and grotesque figure to play the hero's part.⁷

To rework this book would have robbed it of its particular coloring. I have therefore limited myself to correcting misprints and striking out allusions that would no longer be understood.

The closing sentence of my book, "But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme Column," has already come true.⁸

Colonel Charras opened the attack on the cult of Napoleon in his work on the campaign of 1815. Since then, and above all in the last few years, French writers have made an end of the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire and wit. Outside France this violent break with the traditional beliefs of the people, this tremendous revolution of the mind, has been little noticed and still less understood.⁹

Finally, I hope that my book will help to get rid of the schoolroom phrase about so-called Caesarism that is now current, especially in Germany. This shallow historical analogy forgets the main point: in ancient Rome the class struggle was fought out only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the merely passive pedestal for those combatants. It forgets Sismondi's weighty saying that the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. When the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggle are so completely different, the political creatures they give birth to can have no more in common than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the high priest Samuel.¹⁰

London, June 23, 1869.

Karl Marx.

Marx's note: During the American Civil War, military commander of the district of St. Louis. ↩
Joseph Weydemeyer (1818–1866) was a former Prussian artillery officer, a communist and a friend of Marx's, who emigrated to the United States in 1851. He served as an officer in the Union army during the Civil War and died in St. Louis in 1866. ↩
The coup d'état of December 2, 1851, is the subject of this book. Louis Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I and elected President of the French Republic in December 1848, used the army to dissolve the National Assembly, had its leading members arrested in their beds, put down the resistance in Paris and the provinces, and had his seizure of power approved by a vote of all adult men later that month. A year later to the day, on December 2, 1852, he made himself Emperor of the French as Napoleon III. ↩
The title points back to the first Napoleon's coup. The French Republic of the 1790s had its own calendar, counting the years from the founding of the Republic in September 1792 and naming the months after the seasons; Brumaire, the second month, is the "month of fog." On 18 Brumaire of the Year VIII, which was November 9, 1799, General Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the government of the Directory and took power as First Consul. Marx's title casts the nephew's coup as the second performance of the uncle's. ↩
Die Revolution ("The Revolution") appeared in New York in May 1852, and The Eighteenth Brumaire made up its first issue, not its second as Marx remembers here. ↩
Victor Hugo (1802–1885), the poet and novelist, had been a deputy in the Assembly and went into exile after the coup; his Napoléon le Petit ("Napoleon the Little") was published abroad in 1852. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), the French socialist writer, published The Social Revolution Demonstrated by the Coup d'État of December 2 in 1852. ↩
"Responsible editor" is Marx's German newspaper term, verantwortlicher Herausgeber: the man who answered in law for what a paper printed. ↩
The Vendôme Column in Paris was put up in 1806–1810 to celebrate Napoleon's victories, cast from the bronze of captured cannon, with a statue of him on top. In 1863 Napoleon III had the statue then standing there, which showed his uncle in his familiar greatcoat and hat, taken down and replaced by one of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor. Two years after this preface, in May 1871, the Paris Commune pulled the whole column down. ↩
Jean-Baptiste-Adolphe Charras (1810–1865), an army officer and republican deputy, was arrested in the coup and banished. His history of the Waterloo campaign of 1815 was published in exile in 1857. ↩
"Caesarism" was a word much used in the 1860s for rule by a strongman who claims to stand for the whole people above the parties, on the model of Julius Caesar; it was applied above all to Napoleon III. J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi (1773–1842) was a Swiss economist and historian. Samuel, in the Hebrew Bible, was the prophet and judge of Israel who anointed its first kings, Saul and David. ↩

Engels's Preface to the Third Edition (1885)

That a new edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire should be needed thirty-three years after it first appeared proves that the little book has lost none of its value even today.¹¹

And it was indeed a work of genius. The event had taken the whole political world by surprise, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky; some condemned it with loud cries of moral indignation, others accepted it as a rescue from the revolution and as punishment for its errors, but everyone gaped at it and nobody understood it. Hard on the heels of this event Marx stepped forward with a short, epigrammatic account that laid out the inner connection of the whole course of French history since the February days, resolved the miracle of December 2 into a natural and necessary result of that connection, and needed to give the hero of the coup no more than the contempt he so well deserved. And the picture was drawn with such a master's hand that every new revelation since has only supplied fresh proof of how faithfully it reflects reality. This outstanding grasp of living, day-to-day history, this clear insight into events at the very moment they happen, is truly without equal.

But it also called for Marx's thorough knowledge of French history. France is the country where, more than anywhere else, the historical class struggles were each time fought out to a decision, and where, therefore, the changing political forms within which they move and in which their results are summed up have taken on the sharpest outlines. The center of feudalism in the Middle Ages, and since the Renaissance the model country of a single monarchy ruling over the estates of the realm, France smashed feudalism in the great Revolution and founded the pure rule of the bourgeoisie with a classic clarity that no other European country can match. And here too the struggle of the rising proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie takes an acute form unknown elsewhere. That was why Marx not only studied France's past with special fondness, but also followed its current history in every detail and collected the material for later use, so that events never took him by surprise.¹²

But there was one further circumstance to add to all this. It was Marx who first discovered the great law of motion of history: the law that all historical struggles, whether they are fought out in the political, religious, philosophical or any other ideological field, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles between social classes; and that the existence of these classes, and so also their collisions, are in turn determined by the stage of development of their economic position, by their way of producing and by the way of exchanging that follows from it. This law, which means as much for history as the law of the transformation of energy means for natural science, gave him here too the key to the history of the Second French Republic. It was on this history that he put his law to the test, and even after thirty-three years we must still say that it has passed the test brilliantly.¹³

F. E.

I

Hegel remarks somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848–51 for the Montagne of 1793–95, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature shows up in the circumstances under which the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire is being staged!¹⁴^,¹⁵^,¹⁶

Men make their own history, but they do not make it of their own free will; not under circumstances they have picked for themselves, but under circumstances they find ready-made, given to them and handed down. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just when people seem busiest remaking themselves and the world, creating something that has never existed before, in exactly those moments of revolutionary crisis, they nervously call up the spirits of the past to help them out; they borrow the dead's names, their battle cries and their costumes, and stage the new scene of world history in this venerable disguise and with these borrowed lines. Luther dressed up as the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 played the Roman Republic one moment and the Roman Empire the next, and the revolution of 1848 couldn't think of anything better to do than parody 1789 here and the revolutionary tradition of 1793–95 there. It's like a beginner learning a new language: he keeps translating it back into his mother tongue in his head, but he has only really got the spirit of the new language, and can only say what he means in it, once he stops reaching for the old one and forgets his native tongue while he speaks.¹⁷

Look closely at these conjurings of the dead, though, and a striking difference jumps out. The heroes of the old French Revolution, Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just and Napoleon, and its parties and its crowds along with them, did the job of their time in Roman costume and with Roman slogans, and the job was to unshackle modern bourgeois society and set it on its feet. The revolutionaries smashed the feudal ground to pieces and lopped off the feudal heads that had grown on it. Napoleon created the conditions inside France under which free competition could finally develop, landed property, now parceled out into smallholdings, could be exploited, and the nation's unchained industrial productive forces could be put to work, and beyond the French borders he swept away feudal institutions wherever he had to, to give bourgeois society in France a suitable, up-to-date neighborhood on the European continent. Once the new social formation was in place, the giants from before the Flood vanished, and with them the resurrected Rome — the Brutuses, the Gracchi, the Publicolas, the tribunes, the senators and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society, in its sober reality, had bred its own true interpreters and spokesmen: the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots; its real generals sat behind the counting-house desk, and that lump of lard Louis XVIII was its political head. Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in the peaceful warfare of competition, it no longer understood that Roman ghosts had watched over its cradle. But however unheroic bourgeois society is, it took heroism to bring it into the world: self-sacrifice, terror, civil war and battles between whole nations. And its gladiators found in the stern classical traditions of the Roman Republic the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, they needed to hide from themselves how narrowly bourgeois their aims really were, and to keep their passion up at the pitch of great historical tragedy. A century earlier, at a different stage of development, Cromwell and the English people had done the same thing, borrowing the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution. Once the real goal was reached and English society had been made over in bourgeois shape, Locke pushed out Habakkuk.¹⁸^,¹⁹^,²⁰^,²¹

In those revolutions, then, raising the dead served to glorify the new struggles, not to parody the old ones; to make the task in hand look grander in the imagination, not to run away from actually doing it; to find the spirit of revolution again, not to set its ghost walking.

From 1848 to 1851 the only thing walking about was the ghost of the old revolution, from Marrast, the républicain en gants jaunes, dressed up as old Bailly, all the way down to the adventurer hiding his cheap, nasty features behind the iron death mask of Napoleon. A whole people that thinks a revolution has put it on the fast track suddenly finds itself dumped back in an epoch long dead; and in case anyone could miss the relapse, up rise the old dates, the old calendar, the old names, the old decrees that had long since become the business of antiquarians, and the old henchmen who looked as if they had rotted away long ago. The nation feels like that mad Englishman in Bedlam who thinks he's living in the time of the ancient Pharaohs and moans every day about the hard labor he has to do as a gold digger in the Ethiopian mines, walled up in this underground prison, a dim lamp strapped to his head, the slave driver behind him with a long whip, and at the exits a mob of barbarian guards who understand neither the convicts in the mines nor one another, since they have no language in common. "And all this," sighs the mad Englishman, "is demanded of me, a freeborn Briton, to make gold for the old Pharaohs." "To pay the debts of the Bonaparte family," sighs the French nation. As long as he was in his right mind, the Englishman couldn't shake his obsession with making gold. As long as they were making revolution, the French couldn't shake the memory of Napoleon, as the election of December 10 proved. They longed to get away from the dangers of revolution and back to the fleshpots of Egypt, and December 2, 1851, was the answer. What they've got isn't just a caricature of the old Napoleon; they've got the old Napoleon himself, caricatured the way he's bound to look in the middle of the nineteenth century.²²^,²³

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can't take its poetry from the past, only from the future. It can't make a start on its own work until it has shed every superstition about the past. Earlier revolutions needed their memories of world history to numb themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead to get at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase.

The February Revolution was an ambush, a surprise sprung on the old society, and the people hailed this unexpected raid as a deed of world history that opened a new age. On December 2 the February Revolution vanishes in a cardsharp's sleight of hand, and what seems to have been overthrown is no longer the monarchy; it's the liberal concessions that centuries of struggle had squeezed out of the monarchy. Instead of society winning itself a new content, the state seems simply to have gone back to its oldest form, the shamelessly simple rule of saber and cassock. That is how the coup de main of February 1848 is answered by the coup de tête of December 1851. Easy come, easy go. Still, the time in between hasn't been wasted. In the years 1848–1851 French society has caught up on the lessons and experiences that, in a regular, textbook sort of development, should have come before the February Revolution if it was to be more than a ripple on the surface; and it has done so in a crash course, the way revolutions do. Society now looks as if it has slipped back behind where it started. In fact it still has to create its revolutionary starting point: the situation, the relations, the conditions under which modern revolution becomes serious.²⁴

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, rush from success to success, each dramatic effect tops the last, people and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, and every day is a day of ecstasy; but they don't last: they soon peak, and a long hangover sets in before society learns, sober again, to make the gains of its storm and stress its own. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, keep stopping in their tracks, go back to what seems finished to start it all over again, and mock the half-measures, weaknesses and sorry failures of their first attempts with cruel thoroughness; they seem to knock their opponent down only so that he can suck new strength from the earth and rise up against them bigger than ever, and again and again they shrink back from the vague enormity of their own goals, until a situation arises that makes turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves shout:

	Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
	Here is the rose, dance here!²⁵

Anyone with half an eye, by the way, even someone who hadn't followed events in France step by step, must have sensed that the revolution was heading for a humiliation without precedent. You only had to hear the smug yapping of victory with which the gentlemen democrats congratulated one another on the blessings May 2, 1852, was going to bring. In their heads May 2, 1852, had become an obsession, a dogma, like the day of Christ's return and the start of his thousand-year kingdom in the heads of the millenarians. Weakness had taken refuge, as it always does, in believing in miracles, thought the enemy beaten once it had magicked him away in its imagination, and lost all grip on the present in idle, deedless worship of the future that awaited it and of the great deeds it had up its sleeve but didn't quite want to bring out yet. Those heroes, who try to disprove their proven incompetence by feeling sorry for one another and huddling together in a heap, had packed their bags, collected their laurel wreaths in advance, and were busy raising cash on the money market against the republics in partibus for which, modest souls that they were, they had already quietly appointed all the ministers. December 2 hit them like a bolt from the blue, and the peoples who, in times of fainthearted gloom, like to have their inner fears drowned out by whoever shouts loudest may now have learned that the days are over when the cackling of geese could save the Capitol.²⁶^,²⁷

The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue republicans and the red, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the speaker's platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the whole of literature, the big political names and the intellectual celebrities, civil law and criminal law, liberté, égalité, fraternité and May 2, 1852 — the whole lot has vanished like a magic-lantern show at the spell of a man whom not even his enemies take for a sorcerer. Universal suffrage seems to have survived just one moment longer, so that it could write its will with its own hand in front of the whole world and declare, in the name of the people itself: "Everything that exists deserves to perish."²⁸^,²⁹

It won't do to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken by surprise. A nation, like a woman, isn't forgiven the unguarded hour in which any passing adventurer could take her by force. Talk like that doesn't solve the riddle; it only rephrases it. You'd still have to explain how a nation of 36 million can be caught off guard by three swindlers and marched off into captivity without a fight.

Let's run quickly through the phases the French Revolution went through from February 24, 1848, to December 1851.

There are three main periods, plain to see: the February period; May 4, 1848, to May 29, 1849, the period of the founding of the republic, or of the Constituent National Assembly; and May 29, 1849, to December 2, 1851, the period of the constitutional republic, or of the Legislative National Assembly.³⁰

The first period, from February 24, the fall of Louis Philippe, to May 4, 1848, when the Constituent Assembly met, is the February period proper, and it can be called the prologue of the revolution. Its character was stamped on it officially: the government it threw together called itself provisional, and like the government, everything proposed, tried or proclaimed in this period called itself merely provisional. Nobody and nothing dared to claim the right to exist and to act for real. All the elements that had prepared or decided the revolution got a provisional seat in the February government: the dynastic opposition, the republican bourgeoisie, the democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie and the social-democratic workers.³¹^,³²

It couldn't have been otherwise. The February days had started out aiming at an electoral reform, one that would widen the circle of the politically privileged within the propertied class itself and overthrow the exclusive rule of the financial aristocracy. But when it came to a real fight, when the people went up onto the barricades, the National Guard stood by, the army put up no serious resistance and the monarchy ran away, the republic seemed to follow as a matter of course. Every party read it its own way. The proletariat had won it with weapons in hand, so it stamped it with its own mark and proclaimed it a social republic. That pointed to what modern revolution is generally about, and it stood in the oddest contradiction to everything that could actually be done right away with the material on hand, at the level of education the masses had reached, in the circumstances as they were. On the other hand, all the other elements that had helped make the February Revolution got their claims recognized with the lion's share of the government. In no period, therefore, do we find a more motley mix of high-flown phrases and real uncertainty and fumbling, of keener enthusiasm for the new and more thorough rule of the old routine, of more apparent harmony in society as a whole and deeper estrangement among its parts. While the Paris proletariat was still reveling in the grand prospect that had opened before it and getting lost in earnest debates about the social question, the old powers of society had regrouped, rallied, come to their senses, and found unexpected backing in the mass of the nation, the peasants and the petty bourgeois, who came rushing onto the political stage all at once as soon as the barriers of the July Monarchy fell.³³^,³⁴

The second period, from May 4, 1848, to the end of May 1849, is the period of the constitution, the founding of the bourgeois republic. Right after the February days, the dynastic opposition had been taken by surprise by the republicans, and the republicans by the socialists, but on top of that the whole of France had been taken by surprise by Paris. The National Assembly that met on May 4, 1848, came out of elections held by the whole nation, and it represented the nation. It was a living protest against the presumptions of the February days, and its job was to cut the results of the revolution back down to bourgeois size. The Paris proletariat, which saw at once what kind of Assembly this was, tried in vain a few days after it met, on May 15, to wish it out of existence by force: to dissolve it, to scatter back into its separate pieces the organized body in which the nation's reactionary spirit now stood over them. As everyone knows, the only result of May 15 was to remove Blanqui and his comrades, the real leaders of the proletarian party, from the public stage for the whole of the cycle we are looking at.³⁵

After the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, only the bourgeois republic can follow; that is, where a small section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the king's name, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the people's name. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, and there has to be an end of them. That was the Constituent National Assembly's declaration, and the Paris proletariat answered it with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of Europe's civil wars. The bourgeois republic won. On its side stood the financial aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpenproletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual bigwigs, the priests and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood nobody but itself. Over 3,000 insurgents were massacred after the victory, and 15,000 deported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat moves into the background of the revolutionary stage. It tries to push forward again every time the movement seems to be getting a fresh start, but with less and less force and smaller and smaller results. Whenever one of the social layers above it gets into a revolutionary ferment, it teams up with it, and so it shares every defeat the various parties suffer one after another. But these later blows land softer and softer, the more widely they are spread over the whole surface of society. Its more important leaders in the Assembly and in the press fall to the courts one by one, and ever shadier figures take their place at its head. Part of it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers' associations, that is, into a movement that gives up on overturning the old world with that world's own great combined resources and tries instead to win its salvation behind society's back, privately, within its own cramped conditions of existence, and so is bound to fail. It seems unable either to find its revolutionary greatness in itself again or to get new energy from its new alliances, until all the classes it fought in June lie flat on the ground beside it. But at least it goes down with the honors of a great struggle of world history. Not only France, the whole of Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the later defeats of the higher classes come so cheap that the winning side has to exaggerate them shamelessly before they count as events at all; and the further the losing party stands from the proletarian one, the more disgraceful its defeat.³⁶^,³⁷

The defeat of the June insurgents had, of course, prepared and leveled the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and built; but it had also shown that in Europe the questions at stake go beyond "republic or monarchy." It had revealed that bourgeois republic here meant the unlimited despotism of one class over the others. It had proved that in countries of old civilization, with a developed class structure, modern conditions of production and an intellectual life in which centuries of work have dissolved all traditional ideas, the republic is, in general, only the political form of bourgeois society in upheaval, and not its conservative form of life, as it is, for instance, in the United States of North America, where classes exist but haven't yet set, and in constant flux keep changing and swapping their members; where modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, make up for a relative shortage of heads and hands; and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, with a whole new world to take over, has left neither the time nor the chance to clear away the old world of ghosts.

During the June days all classes and parties had united into the Party of Order against the proletarian class, the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had "saved" society from "the enemies of society." They had handed out the watchwords of the old society, "property, family, religion, order," to their army as its password, and had cried out to the counterrevolutionary crusade: "In this sign you shall conquer!" From then on, whenever one of the many parties that had rallied under this sign against the June insurgents tries to hold the revolutionary battlefield for its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: "Property, family, religion, order." Society gets saved every time the circle of its rulers shrinks, every time a narrower interest is defended against a wider one. Every demand for the simplest bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, the most formal republicanism, the most watered-down democracy, is punished on the spot as an "attack on society" and branded as "socialism." And in the end the high priests of "religion and order" themselves get kicked off their oracle's tripods, dragged out of bed in the dead of night, stuffed into police vans, thrown into prison or sent into exile; their temple is razed, their mouths sealed, their pens broken, their law torn up, all in the name of religion, property, family and order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their own balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, the sanctity of their homes is violated, their houses are shelled for fun — in the name of property, family, religion and order. In the end the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order, and the hero Crapulinski moves into the Tuileries as "savior of society."³⁸^,³⁹^,⁴⁰

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), the German philosopher whose ideas shaped Marx's generation, makes a related point in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History: that a political revolution is accepted in people's minds once it has happened twice, as when Napoleon was defeated twice and the Bourbons were driven out twice. ↩
Marc Caussidière (1808–1861) was the Paris prefect of police after the February Revolution of 1848; Louis Blanc (1811–1882), a socialist writer, sat in the provisional government of 1848. The Montagne ("the Mountain") was the name of the radical deputies of the Convention of 1793, who sat on its highest benches; in 1848–51 the democratic and socialist left of the French assemblies took the same name. ↩
The uncle is Napoleon I; the nephew is Louis Bonaparte (1808–1873), son of Napoleon's brother Louis, King of Holland. The nephew's coup of December 2, 1851, is the "second edition" of the uncle's 18 Brumaire. ↩
Martin Luther (1483–1546) built his teaching that a person is saved by faith alone on the letters of the Apostle Paul. The French revolutionaries of the 1790s took the heroes of the Roman Republic as their models, and Napoleon's government borrowed Roman forms: first three consuls (1799–1804), then an empire with eagles on its standards. ↩
Camille Desmoulins (1760–1794), a journalist, and Louis de Saint-Just (1767–1794), Robespierre's closest ally, were revolutionaries of 1789–94; both died on the guillotine, as did Danton and Robespierre. ↩
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were tribunes of the people who pressed for land reform and were killed for it; Publius Valerius Publicola was among the first consuls of the Republic. ↩
Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) was an economist; Victor Cousin (1792–1867) and Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (1763–1845) were philosophers and politicians; Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) was a liberal writer and deputy; François Guizot (1787–1874), a historian, was the leading minister of King Louis Philippe until 1848. Louis XVIII, brother of the executed Louis XVI, was restored to the throne after Napoleon's fall and reigned from 1814 to 1824; he was famously fat. ↩
Cromwell's soldiers and preachers spoke the language of the Hebrew Bible, of which Habakkuk is one of the minor prophets. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) defended the settlement that followed the Revolution of 1688. ↩
Armand Marrast (1801–1852), editor of the republican paper Le National, became mayor of Paris and then president of the Constituent Assembly in 1848. Républicain en gants jaunes, "republican in yellow gloves," is a mocking name for a dandy among the republicans. Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–1793), an astronomer, presided over the National Assembly in 1789 and was mayor of Paris from 1789 to 1791. ↩
On December 10, 1848, Louis Bonaparte was elected President of the Republic by about 5.4 million votes, against about 1.4 million for General Cavaignac. ↩
A coup de main is a sudden surprise attack; a coup de tête is a rash, impulsive act, literally "a stroke of the head." ↩
In Aesop's fable a boaster claims he once made a tremendous jump on the island of Rhodes, and a listener answers: "Here is Rhodes, jump here," meaning prove it now. Hegel, in the preface to his Philosophy of Right (1820), plays on the Latin: the Greek rhodon means "rose" and the Latin salta can mean "dance." The giant who draws new strength from the earth is Antaeus of Greek myth, who could not be beaten while he touched the ground, his mother. ↩
The constitution of 1848 gave the President a single four-year term, with no immediate re-election (Article 45), and fixed the election of his successor for the second Sunday in May (Article 46), which in 1852 fell on May 9. The democrats expected to win then. The 1869 text prints the date as "May 2," and the translation keeps it. ↩
In partibus is short for in partibus infidelium, "in the lands of the unbelievers": the Catholic Church gave some bishops the titles of sees in lands it no longer held, so a bishop in partibus had a title and no diocese. In Roman legend the sacred geese of Juno woke the defenders of the Capitol when the Gauls tried to climb it by night, around 390 BC. ↩
The dynastic parties were the two royalist parties: the Legitimists, loyal to the elder line of the Bourbon kings overthrown in 1830, and the Orleanists, loyal to the house of Orléans, the family of Louis Philippe. The "blue" republicans were the moderates, the "red" the democrats and socialists. The heroes of Africa were the generals, among them Cavaignac, Changarnier, Lamoricière and Bedeau, who had made their names in the French conquest of Algeria. ↩
Universal suffrage here means the vote of all adult men, introduced in March 1848. The last line twists Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, who says that everything that comes into being deserves to perish; Marx turns "comes into being" into "exists." ↩
The Constituent Assembly, elected in April 1848 to write the constitution, met on May 4, 1848. The Legislative Assembly that followed it was elected on May 13, 1849, and first met on May 28, 1849, not May 29 as the 1869 text has it here and later. ↩
Louis Philippe (1773–1850), of the house of Orléans, had been King of the French since the July Revolution of 1830. He abdicated on February 24, 1848, and fled to England, where he died. The provisional government formed that day included the poet Lamartine, the radical Ledru-Rollin, the socialist Louis Blanc and a worker known as Albert. ↩
The dynastic opposition was the liberal wing of the monarchists, led by Odilon Barrot (1791–1873), which wanted a wider vote under the king rather than a republic; Barrot later became Louis Bonaparte's first prime minister. ↩
The February Revolution began when the government banned a banquet, one of a series held by the opposition to campaign for electoral reform, planned in Paris for February 22, 1848; after three days of fighting the king abdicated. The financial aristocracy, in Marx's sense, were the bankers, financiers and big investors who had dominated the July Monarchy. The National Guard was a citizens' militia of men with property. ↩
The July Monarchy was the reign of Louis Philippe (1830–1848), under which fewer than 250,000 men, those who paid enough in direct taxes, had the vote. ↩
On May 15, 1848, a crowd marching in support of Poland broke into the Assembly and declared it dissolved. Its leaders, among them Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881), a revolutionary who spent much of his life in prison, Armand Barbès, François Raspail and Albert, were arrested and later tried and imprisoned. ↩
The June insurrection (June 23–26, 1848) broke out when the government moved to close the National Workshops, public works set up in February to employ the jobless of Paris. It was crushed by the army, the Mobile Guard and the National Guard under General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac (1802–1857), to whom the Assembly gave dictatorial powers and who headed the government until December 1848. Many of those sentenced to deportation were later shipped to Algeria. ↩
The Mobile Guard was a force raised by the provisional government in February 1848 from young unemployed men of Paris. "Lumpenproletariat" is Marx's word (from German Lumpen, "rags") for the down-and-out who live outside regular work: vagrants, beggars, petty criminals and the like. The exchange banks were schemes, such as Proudhon's People's Bank of 1849, to give workers cheap or free credit and let them trade their products directly. ↩
The Party of Order was the alliance of the two royalist parties, the Legitimists and the Orleanists, with the Catholic conservatives; it won a large majority in the elections of May 1849. "In this sign you shall conquer" are the words the Emperor Constantine is said to have seen in the sky, with the sign of the cross, before his victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312. ↩
On the night of the coup, December 1–2, 1851, the police arrested leading members of the Assembly in their homes, among them Thiers and the generals Changarnier, Cavaignac, Lamoricière and Bedeau. On December 4 troops on the boulevards of Paris fired into the crowds and into the houses, killing many onlookers. ↩
Crapulinski is a penniless, dissolute Polish nobleman in Heinrich Heine's poem "Two Knights," published in 1851 (the name comes from French crapule, a debauched good-for-nothing). The Tuileries was the royal palace in Paris, into which Bonaparte moved after the coup. ↩

II

Let's pick up the thread of the story again.

From the June Days on, the history of the Constituent National Assembly is the history of how the republican wing of the bourgeoisie ruled, and how it fell apart, the faction that went by the names of tricolor republicans, pure republicans, political republicans, formalist republicans and so on.⁴¹

Under Louis Philippe's bourgeois monarchy this faction had been the official republican opposition, and so a recognized fixture of the political scene. It had its members in the Chambers and a good deal of reach in the press. Its Paris paper, the National, was thought, in its own way, every bit as respectable as the Journal des Débats. Its character fit that cozy position under the constitutional monarchy. It wasn't a wing of the bourgeoisie held together by big common interests and marked off by conditions of production of its own. It was a clique of republican-minded bourgeois, writers, lawyers, officers and officials, whose influence rested on the country's personal dislike of Louis Philippe, on memories of the old republic, on the republican faith of a handful of enthusiasts, and above all on French nationalism, whose hatred of the treaties of Vienna and of the alliance with England the clique kept forever on the boil. Much of the following the National had under Louis Philippe it owed to this hidden imperialism, which is why, later, under the republic, the same imperialism could rise up against it as a deadly rival in the person of Louis Bonaparte. Like the rest of the bourgeois opposition, it fought the financial aristocracy. Railing against the budget, which in France went hand in hand with fighting the financial aristocracy, bought popularity too cheaply, and made too good a stock of copy for puritanical editorials, for the paper to pass it up. The industrial bourgeoisie was grateful for its slavish defense of France's protective tariffs, which, mind you, it backed for patriotic rather than economic reasons; the bourgeoisie as a whole, for its spiteful denunciations of communism and socialism. Beyond that, the party of the National was purely republican; that is, it wanted bourgeois rule in a republican rather than a monarchical form, and above all it wanted the lion's share of that rule for itself. How the change was to come about, it hadn't the faintest idea. What it did see clear as day, and owned up to in public at the reform banquets of Louis Philippe's last days, was how unpopular it was with the democratic petty bourgeois, and with the revolutionary proletariat most of all. These pure republicans, being pure republicans, were already about to make do with a regency under the Duchess of Orléans when the February Revolution broke out and handed their best-known men seats in the provisional government. Naturally they had the confidence of the bourgeoisie from the start, and the majority in the Constituent National Assembly. When the Assembly met it set up an Executive Commission, and the socialist members of the provisional government were shut out of it at once. Then the party of the National used the outbreak of the June insurrection to send the Executive Commission packing as well, and with it its nearest rivals, the petty-bourgeois or democratic republicans (Ledru-Rollin and company). Cavaignac, the bourgeois republicans' general, who had commanded in the June battle, took the Executive Commission's place with a kind of dictatorial power. Marrast, once editor-in-chief of the National, became the Constituent Assembly's permanent president. The ministries, and every other post worth having, fell into the laps of the pure republicans.⁴²^,⁴³^,⁴⁴^,⁴⁵

The republican wing of the bourgeoisie, which had long thought of itself as the rightful heir of the July Monarchy, got more than it had ever dreamed of, but it came to power not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a rising mowed down with grapeshot. What it had pictured as the most revolutionary event of all turned out in real life to be the most counterrevolutionary. The fruit dropped into its lap all right, but it dropped from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life.

The bourgeois republicans had the rule to themselves only from June 24 to December 10, 1848. Their reign comes down to two things: writing a republican constitution and the state of siege in Paris.⁴⁶

At bottom the new constitution was just the Charter of 1830 in a republican edition. Under the July Monarchy only men of property could vote, a qualification so narrow that it kept even a large part of the bourgeoisie out of power, and that couldn't survive in a bourgeois republic. The February Revolution had swept it away at once and proclaimed direct universal suffrage in its place. The bourgeois republicans couldn't undo that; they had to settle for tacking on a catch: a voter had to have lived six months in the place where he voted. The old machinery of administration, local government, the courts, the army and so on stayed exactly as it was, or, where the constitution did change something, it changed the table of contents and not the contents, the name and not the thing.⁴⁷

The freedoms of 1848, that inevitable general staff, personal freedom, freedom of the press, of speech, of association, of assembly, of teaching, of religion and so on, were issued a constitutional uniform that made them invulnerable. Each of them is proclaimed the unconditional right of the French citizen, but always with the same note scribbled in the margin: the freedom is unlimited except where it is limited by "the equal rights of others and public safety," or by "laws" whose whole job is to keep the freedoms of individuals in harmony with one another and with public safety. For example: "Citizens have the right to form associations, to assemble peaceably and unarmed, to petition and to express their opinions through the press or in any other way. The enjoyment of these rights has no limit other than the equal rights of others and public safety." (Chapter II of the French constitution, Article 8.) "Teaching is free. The freedom of teaching shall be enjoyed under the conditions fixed by law and under the supreme supervision of the state." (The same, Article 9.) "The home of every citizen is inviolable except in the forms prescribed by law." (Chapter I, Article 3.) And so on, and so on. The constitution therefore keeps pointing ahead to future organic laws, which are to work out those marginal notes and regulate the enjoyment of these unlimited freedoms so that they never bump into one another or into public safety. And later the friends of Order did bring these organic laws into the world, and regulated all those freedoms so nicely that the bourgeoisie can enjoy them without ever bumping into the equal rights of the other classes. Wherever it forbids "the others" these freedoms outright, or lets them enjoy them only on terms that are so many police traps, it has always done so purely in the interest of "public safety," meaning the safety of the bourgeoisie, just as the constitution prescribes. From then on both sides could appeal to the constitution, and both had every right to: the friends of Order, who abolished every one of those freedoms, and the democrats, who demanded every one of them back. Each article of the constitution carries its own opposite inside it, its own upper and lower house: freedom in the general phrase, the abolition of freedom in the marginal note. As long as the name of freedom was respected, then, and only the actual practice of it was prevented (by legal means, of course), freedom's constitutional existence stayed whole and untouched, however thoroughly its everyday existence had been beaten to death.⁴⁸

This constitution, made inviolable by such ingenious means, had one vulnerable spot all the same, like Achilles, only it wasn't the heel; it was the head, or rather the two heads it ended in — the Legislative Assembly on one side, the President on the other. Leaf through the constitution and you'll find that the only articles that are absolute, positive, free of contradiction and impossible to twist are the ones setting out how the President stands to the Legislative Assembly. Here, you see, the bourgeois republicans were looking after their own skins. Articles 45 to 70 are worded so that the National Assembly can get rid of the President constitutionally, while the President can get rid of the National Assembly only unconstitutionally, by getting rid of the constitution itself. Here, then, the constitution practically invites someone to smash it. It doesn't just sanctify the separation of powers, as the Charter of 1830 did; it stretches it into an unbearable contradiction. Guizot called the parliamentary brawling between the legislative and the executive power the game of constitutional powers, and under the constitution of 1848 that game is played for the whole bank on every hand. On one side sit 750 representatives of the people, elected by universal suffrage and free to be re-elected, who make up a National Assembly that nobody can control, dissolve or divide, a National Assembly that has all the power there is to make laws, the last word on war, peace and trade treaties, and the sole right of amnesty, and that, since it sits without a break, never leaves the front of the stage. On the other side sits the President, with every trapping of royal power, free to appoint and fire his ministers without asking the National Assembly, every means of executive power in his hands, handing out every job and so, in France at least, deciding the livelihoods of more than 1½ million people, for that's how many depend on the 500,000 officials and the officers of every rank. He has the whole armed force behind him. He has the privilege of pardoning individual criminals, of suspending National Guards, and, with the Council of State's consent, of removing the departmental, cantonal and town councils that the citizens have elected themselves. Starting and running every treaty with foreign powers is his business alone. While the Assembly is always on the boards, out in the harsh, unflattering light of day, he lives a hidden life in the Elysian Fields, with Article 45 of the constitution before his eyes and in his heart, calling out to him every day: "Frère, il faut mourir!" Your power ends on the second Sunday of the lovely month of May in the fourth year after your election! Then the party's over, there's no second run of the show, and if you've got debts you'd better pay them off in good time out of the 600,000 francs the constitution allows you, unless you'd rather take a little walk to Clichy on the second Monday of the lovely month of May! — The constitution, having given the President the real power, then tries to make sure the National Assembly gets the moral power. Leaving aside that you can't create moral power by passing articles of law, the constitution cancels itself out here once again, by having the President elected by all Frenchmen in a direct vote. The votes of France are scattered over the Assembly's 750 members; here they are piled onto a single man. While each representative stands for this party or that, this town or that, this bridgehead or that, or merely for the need to elect some seven hundred and fiftieth somebody, with no one looking very hard at either the cause or the man, he is the Chosen One of the nation, and electing him is the great trump card the sovereign people plays once every four years. The elected Assembly is tied to the nation by a metaphysical bond; the elected President, by a personal one. The Assembly, member by member, may well display the many sides of the national spirit, but in the President that spirit is made flesh. Against the Assembly he holds a kind of divine right: he rules by the grace of the people.⁴⁹^,⁵⁰

Thetis, the sea goddess, had foretold that Achilles would die in the flower of his youth. The constitution had its weak spot, like Achilles, and like Achilles it had a feeling it would die young. The pure republicans who wrote it had only to glance down from the cloudy heaven of their ideal republic at the common world below to see the arrogance of the royalists, the Bonapartists, the democrats and the communists growing day by day, and their own discredit growing with it, the nearer they came to finishing their great legislative masterpiece; Thetis didn't need to leave the sea and tell them the secret. They tried to outwit fate with a sly constitutional dodge, Article 111, under which any proposal to revise the constitution needed at least three-quarters of the votes in three successive debates, each a full month apart, and even then only if no fewer than 500 members of the National Assembly voted. All this came to was a feeble attempt to keep a hold on power as a parliamentary minority, which in their prophetic mind's eye they already saw themselves becoming, a power that was slipping a little further through their weak fingers every day even now, while they still had the parliamentary majority and every lever of government.⁵¹

Finally, in a melodramatic article, the constitution entrusts itself "to the vigilance and the patriotism of the whole French people, and of each individual Frenchman," having already, in another article, entrusted the "vigilant" and the "patriotic" to the tender, thumbscrew attentions of the High Court, the haute cour, which it had invented specially for them.⁵²

That was the constitution of 1848, which on December 2, 1851, was not knocked over by a head but fell over at the touch of a mere hat. Granted, it was a three-cornered Napoleon hat.

While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy dreaming up this constitution, debating it and voting it through, Cavaignac, outside the Assembly, kept up the state of siege in Paris. The state of siege was the midwife that saw the Constituent Assembly through its republican labor pains. When the constitution is later done away with by bayonets, let's remember that it took bayonets to guard it in the womb, bayonets turned on the people, and bayonets to deliver it. The forefathers of the "respectable republicans" had sent their symbol, the tricolor, on a grand tour of Europe. Their heirs came up with an invention of their own, and it too found its own way across the continent, yet it kept coming home to France with fresh affection every time, until by now it has been granted citizenship in half her departments — the state of siege. A splendid invention, brought out again in every crisis the French Revolution went through. But barracks and bivouac, clamped every so often onto French society's head to squeeze its brain and keep it quiet; saber and musket, allowed every so often to judge and to govern, to act as guardian and censor, policeman and night watchman; mustache and greatcoat, trumpeted every so often as society's highest wisdom and its headmaster — weren't barracks and bivouac, saber and musket, mustache and greatcoat bound to get the idea, sooner or later, of saving society once and for all by proclaiming their own regime the supreme one, and sparing bourgeois society the bother of governing itself at all? Barracks and bivouac, saber and musket, mustache and greatcoat were all the more bound to get the idea because then they could expect to be paid better, and in cash, for their ever greater services, whereas a state of siege now and then, a rescue of society here and there on the orders of this or that bourgeois faction, left them little to show for it beyond a few dead and wounded and a few friendly bourgeois grimaces. Shouldn't the military, for once, play at state of siege in its own interest and for its own benefit, and lay siege to the bourgeois purses while it was at it? And let's not forget, just in passing, that Colonel Bernard, the same president of military commissions who under Cavaignac helped 15,000 insurgents off to deportation without trial, is at this very moment back at the head of the military commissions at work in Paris.⁵³

If the respectable, the pure republicans, with their state of siege in Paris, laid out the nursery in which the Praetorians of December 2, 1851, would grow up big and strong, they deserve some credit too: instead of laying the national feeling on thick, as under Louis Philippe, now that they had the nation's power in their hands they groveled before foreign powers, and instead of setting Italy free they let the Austrians and the Neapolitans conquer it all over again. Louis Bonaparte's election as President on December 10, 1848, put an end to Cavaignac's dictatorship and to the Constituent Assembly alike.⁵⁴

Article 44 of the constitution says: "The President of the French Republic must never have lost his status as a French citizen." The first President of the French Republic, L. N. Bonaparte, hadn't merely lost his status as a French citizen, and hadn't merely been an English special constable; he was even a naturalized Swiss.⁵⁵

I've explained elsewhere what the election of December 10 meant, and I won't go back over it here. It's enough to say that it was a reaction of the peasants, who had been made to foot the bill for the February Revolution, against the other classes of the nation: a reaction of the country against the town. It went down well in the army, which had got neither glory nor a raise out of the republicans of the National. It went down well with the big bourgeoisie, who hailed Bonaparte as a bridge back to monarchy, and with the proletarians and petty bourgeois, who hailed him as a whip for Cavaignac's back. I'll have a chance later to look more closely at where the peasants stand in the French Revolution.⁵⁶

The stretch from December 20, 1848, to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in May 1849 is the story of the bourgeois republicans' downfall. Having founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat off the field and shut the democratic petty bourgeoisie up for the time being, they themselves now get shoved aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which quite rightly seizes this republic as its own property. But this mass of the bourgeoisie was royalist. One part of it, the big landowners, had ruled under the Restoration and was therefore Legitimist. The other, the financial aristocrats and big industrialists, had ruled under the July Monarchy and was therefore Orleanist. The bigwigs of the army, the university, the church, the bar, the academy and the press were spread over both camps, if not evenly. And here, in the bourgeois republic, which bore neither the name Bourbon nor the name Orléans but the name Capital, they had found the form of state under which they could rule together. The June insurrection had already united them as the "Party of Order." The first job now was to clear out the clique of bourgeois republicans who still sat in the National Assembly's seats. Just as brutally as these pure republicans had used force against the people, just as cowardly, meek, spineless, broken and unfit to fight did they back down now that they had to stand up for their republic and their rights as lawmakers against the executive power and the royalists. I won't tell the shameful story of their break-up here. They didn't go down; they just fizzled out. Their story is played out for good, and in the period that follows they appear, inside the Assembly or outside it, only as memories, memories that seem to come back to life whenever the mere name of the republic is at stake, and whenever the revolutionary conflict threatens to sink to its lowest level. I'll note in passing that the paper that gave this party its name, the National, gets converted to socialism in the following period.⁵⁷

Before we close this period, we have to look back at the two powers that lived together in wedded bliss from December 20, 1848, until the Constituent Assembly's exit, and of which one would destroy the other on December 2, 1851. We mean Louis Bonaparte on the one hand, and on the other the party of the coalition royalists, the Party of Order, of the big bourgeoisie. As soon as he took office, Bonaparte formed a ministry of the Party of Order and put Odilon Barrot at its head, Odilon Barrot, mark you, the old leader of the most liberal faction of the parliamentary bourgeoisie. Monsieur Barrot had at last bagged the ministry whose ghost had haunted him since 1830, and the top job in it into the bargain; but he didn't get it, as he had fancied under Louis Philippe, as the boldest leader of the parliamentary opposition: he got it with orders to finish off a parliament, and as the ally of all his archenemies, the Jesuits and the Legitimists. He gets to carry the bride home at last, but only after she's been prostituted. Bonaparte himself seemed to have gone into total eclipse. That party did his acting for him.⁵⁸

At the very first cabinet meeting they decided on the expedition to Rome, which was to be carried out behind the National Assembly's back, and the money for it was to be wheedled out of the Assembly under false pretenses. It all began, then, with a swindle on the National Assembly and a secret conspiracy with the absolute monarchies abroad against the revolutionary Roman Republic. Bonaparte prepared his coup of December 2 against the royalist Legislative Assembly and its constitutional republic the same way, with the same maneuvers. Let's not forget that the party that made up Bonaparte's ministry on December 20, 1848, was the same party that made up the majority of the Legislative National Assembly on December 2, 1851.⁵⁹

Back in August the Constituent Assembly had resolved not to dissolve itself until it had drafted and passed a whole series of organic laws to complete the constitution. On January 6, 1849, the Party of Order got the deputy Rateau to propose that it forget about the organic laws and vote for its own dissolution instead. Not only the ministry, with Monsieur Odilon Barrot in the lead, but every royalist in the National Assembly now barked at it that its dissolution was needed to restore credit, to shore up order, to end this vague provisional state of affairs and set up a lasting one; that it was holding up the new government's good work and clinging to life out of sheer spite; that the country was sick of it. Bonaparte took note of every one of these tirades against the legislative power, learned them by heart, and on December 2, 1851, showed the parliamentary royalists how well he had learned from them. He threw their own catchwords back in their faces.

The Barrot ministry and the Party of Order went further. All over France they stirred up petitions to the National Assembly asking it, ever so politely, to disappear. In this way they led the people's unorganized masses into battle against the National Assembly, which was the people's own expression, organized by the constitution. They taught Bonaparte to go over the heads of parliamentary assemblies and appeal to the people. At last, on January 29, 1849, the day came when the Constituent Assembly was to vote on its own dissolution. It found its building occupied by troops; Changarnier, the Party of Order's general, who held the supreme command of both the National Guard and the regular army, put on a grand review of troops in Paris as if a battle were about to start, and the coalition royalists told the Constituent Assembly, with threats, that force would be used if it didn't go quietly. It went quietly, and merely haggled for a very short stay of execution. What was January 29 but the coup d'état of December 2, 1851, only carried out by the royalists, with Bonaparte's help, against the republican National Assembly? The gentlemen didn't notice, or didn't care to, that Bonaparte used January 29, 1849, to have some of the troops march past him in front of the Tuileries, and pounced on this very first public show of military power against parliamentary power to give a first hint of the Caligula in him. They, of course, only had eyes for their Changarnier.⁶⁰

One motive in particular drove the Party of Order to cut the Constituent Assembly's life short by force: the organic laws that were to complete the constitution, such as the education law, the law on religious worship and so on. The coalition royalists were desperate to write these laws themselves rather than leave them to the republicans, who had grown suspicious. But among these organic laws was also a law on the responsibility of the President of the Republic. In 1851 the Legislative Assembly was busy drafting just such a law when Bonaparte beat that coup to the punch with the coup of December 2. What wouldn't the coalition royalists have given, in their parliamentary winter campaign of 1851, to find the responsibility law ready and waiting, and drafted, at that, by a suspicious, hostile, republican Assembly!⁶¹

Once the Constituent Assembly had broken its last weapon with its own hands on January 29, 1849, the Barrot ministry and the friends of Order hounded it to death, did everything they could to humiliate it, and wrung out of its weakness, which by now despaired of itself, laws that cost it the last scrap of public respect. Bonaparte, wrapped up in his fixed Napoleonic idea, had the nerve to cash in on this degrading of parliamentary power in public. When, on May 8, 1849, the National Assembly passed a vote of censure on the ministry over Oudinot's occupation of Civitavecchia and ordered the Roman expedition steered back to its supposed purpose, Bonaparte published that very evening a letter to Oudinot in the Moniteur, congratulating him on his heroic deeds and already striking the pose of the army's generous protector against the pen-pushing parliamentarians. The royalists smiled. They simply took him for their dupe. And when Marrast, the president of the Constituent Assembly, thought for a moment that the Assembly was in danger and, citing the constitution, called on a colonel and his regiment to protect it, the colonel refused, pleaded military discipline, and referred Marrast to Changarnier, who sent him away with a sneer: he had no taste, he said, for baïonnettes intelligentes. In November 1851, when the coalition royalists were gearing up for the decisive fight with Bonaparte, they tried, in their notorious Quaestors' Bill, to establish the principle that the president of the National Assembly could call out the troops directly. One of their generals, Le Flô, had signed the bill. It was no use Changarnier voting for it, no use Thiers paying tribute to the far-sighted wisdom of the late Constituent Assembly. The Minister of War, Saint-Arnaud, answered him just as Changarnier had answered Marrast — and the Montagne cheered!⁶²^,⁶³^,⁶⁴

The Party of Order itself, then, back when it wasn't yet the National Assembly but only the ministry, had already branded the parliamentary regime. And now it howls when December 2, 1851, banishes that regime from France!

We wish it a pleasant journey.

The tricolor is the blue, white and red flag of the Revolution of 1789. In February 1848 the provisional government kept it and refused the workers' demand for the red flag, which became the banner of the socialists. ↩
Le National was a Paris daily founded in 1830 by Adolphe Thiers, François Mignet and Armand Carrel. Under Louis Philippe it became the paper of the moderate republicans, and its editors and their friends formed the party Marx calls the pure republicans. The Journal des Débats was the long-established paper of the liberal-conservative bourgeoisie and a pillar of Louis Philippe's government. ↩
The treaties of Vienna (1815) settled Europe after Napoleon's defeat and pushed France back to its old borders; many Frenchmen felt them as a national humiliation. Louis Philippe's governments sought a friendly understanding with Britain. ↩
Hélène, Duchess of Orléans (1814–1858), was the widow of Louis Philippe's eldest son, who had died in 1842. On February 24, 1848, the king abdicated in favor of her young son, the Count of Paris, and she brought the boy to the Chamber of Deputies to be proclaimed king with herself as regent; the crowd invaded the Chamber and the republic was proclaimed instead. ↩
The Executive Commission was the five-man government the Constituent Assembly elected in May 1848 in place of the provisional government: Arago, Garnier-Pagès, Marie, Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin. The socialists Louis Blanc and Albert were left out. It resigned on June 24, 1848, when the Assembly gave Cavaignac full powers. Alexandre Ledru-Rollin (1807–1874), a lawyer and the leader of the democratic republicans, had been minister of the interior in the provisional government; he ran for President in December 1848 and went into exile in England in 1849. ↩
Paris was put under a state of siege, that is, under military rule, on June 24, 1848, during the insurrection; it was lifted in October 1848. The constitution was adopted on November 4, 1848. ↩
The Charter of 1830 was the constitution of the July Monarchy, a revised version of the Charter that Louis XVIII had granted in 1814. The constitution of 1848 itself (Article 25) makes every Frenchman aged twenty-one a voter and sets no residence condition; the six-month rule belonged to the electoral regulations. ↩
Marx quotes Articles 8, 9 and 3 of the constitution of 1848. All three stand in Chapter II, "Rights of Citizens Guaranteed by the Constitution"; the 1869 text's "Chapter I" for Article 3 is a slip. Article 3 in fact protects the home of "every person living on French territory." The organic laws were the laws the constitution called for to put its general provisions into effect: on elections, the press, clubs, education and the like. ↩
The Elysée Palace in Paris was the President's residence from December 1848; it stands near the avenue of the Champs-Élysées, the "Elysian Fields," which in Greek myth are the home of the blessed dead. Frère, il faut mourir, "Brother, we must die," is the greeting that, by tradition, the Trappist monks exchanged. The President's salary of 600,000 francs a year was fixed by Article 62. Clichy was the debtors' prison of Paris, in the Rue de Clichy. ↩
The Council of State was a body of senior jurists and officials that advised the government on laws and administration. ↩
Article 111 of the constitution reads as Marx says, and it adds that a revision could be proposed only in the last year of an Assembly's term. ↩
Article 110 entrusts the constitution "to the guardianship and the patriotism of all Frenchmen"; Marx enlarges the wording. The High Court of Justice (Article 91) tried charges the Assembly brought against the President or the ministers, and anyone the Assembly sent before it for plots against the security of the state. In 1849 it tried the men of May 15, 1848, at Bourges, and the leaders of the democratic protest of June 13, 1849, at Versailles. ↩
The "respectable republicans," in French républicains honnêtes, was what the moderate republicans of 1848 called themselves, as against the "reds." Their forefathers are the republicans of the 1790s, whose armies carried the tricolor across Europe. Colonel Bernard presided over the military commissions that sorted the June prisoners for deportation in 1848; Marx's point is that after the coup of December 1851 he was again judging prisoners in Paris. ↩
In 1848 the Italians rose against Austrian rule in the north and the King of Sardinia went to war with Austria; the Austrians beat him at Custoza in July 1848 and took back Milan, and the King of Naples set about reconquering Sicily, which had risen against him. Cavaignac's government did not intervene. ↩
Article 44 reads as Marx quotes it. L. N. is Louis Napoleon. In April 1848, in London, Louis Bonaparte enrolled as a special constable, one of the volunteers sworn in against the great Chartist meeting of April 10. In the 1830s he had been made a citizen of the Swiss canton of Thurgau. ↩
"Elsewhere" is Marx's Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, a series of articles published in 1850. The peasants paid for the February Revolution chiefly through the provisional government's tax of 45 centimes added to every franc of direct tax, decreed in March 1848. ↩
Bonaparte took office as President on December 20, 1848. The Restoration was the rule of the restored Bourbon kings, Louis XVIII and his brother Charles X, from 1814 to the July Revolution of 1830. ↩
Barrot's ministry, formed on December 20, 1848, was made up mostly of Orleanists, and included the Legitimist and Catholic leader Count Alfred de Falloux (1811–1886) as minister of education. By "Jesuits" Marx means the Catholic clerical party. ↩
After Pope Pius IX fled Rome in November 1848, a Roman Republic was proclaimed in February 1849. In April 1849 the Assembly voted money for an expedition that the government presented as a move to protect French influence in Italy. French troops landed at Civitavecchia, the port of Rome, in late April; their first attack on Rome was beaten back on April 30, and they took the city in July 1849 and restored the Pope's rule. Austria and Naples also sent troops against the Republic. ↩
On January 29, 1849, with Paris full of troops, the Assembly voted to take up Rateau's motion; it then agreed to dissolve after new elections, which were held in May 1849. Nicolas Changarnier (1793–1877), one of the generals who had made their names in Algeria, commanded both the National Guard of Paris and the army in Paris from December 1848 until Bonaparte dismissed him in January 1851. ↩
Article 68 of the constitution made the President responsible for the acts of the government, made any attempt by him to dissolve or obstruct the Assembly high treason, and left "the other cases of responsibility" to be fixed by a law. ↩
General Nicolas Oudinot (1791–1863), son of one of Napoleon's marshals, commanded the expedition to Rome. The Moniteur (Le Moniteur universel) was the official government newspaper. ↩
Baïonnettes intelligentes, "thinking bayonets," are soldiers who weigh their orders instead of simply obeying them. ↩
The quaestors were the three deputies in charge of the Assembly's administration and security; one of them was General Adolphe Le Flô. Their bill, which would have let the Assembly's president call troops directly to its defense, was voted down about two weeks before the coup, the Montagne voting against it for fear that the royalist majority would use the troops against the republic. Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), historian and twice Louis Philippe's prime minister, was the leading Orleanist in the Assembly; after the fall of the Second Empire he became the first President of the Third Republic (1871–1873). General Jacques Leroy de Saint-Arnaud, minister of war from October 1851, was one of the chief organizers of the coup; he died in 1854 as a marshal in the Crimean War. ↩

III

The Legislative Assembly met on May 29, 1849, and was broken up by force on December 2, 1851. Those two dates bracket the whole life of the constitutional, or parliamentary, republic.

In the first French Revolution the Constitutionalists ruled, then the Girondins took over from them, and then the Jacobins took over from the Girondins. Each party leaned on the one further ahead of it. Once a party had pushed the revolution so far that it couldn't keep up, much less lead the way, its bolder ally behind it shoved it aside and sent it off to the guillotine. That revolution climbed upward.⁶⁵

The revolution of 1848 did it the other way round. The proletarian party tagged along behind the petty-bourgeois democrats, who sold it out and dropped it on April 16, again on May 15, and in the June Days. The democrats, for their part, climbed onto the shoulders of the bourgeois republicans. The bourgeois republicans had hardly got their footing up there before they shook off their tiresome comrades and climbed onto the shoulders of the Party of Order. The Party of Order shrugged, let the bourgeois republicans go tumbling, and hoisted itself onto the shoulders of the army. It still thought it was riding those shoulders when, one fine morning, it noticed that the shoulders had turned into bayonets. Every party kicks backward at whoever is pushing it forward and leans forward on whoever is pulling it back. No wonder it loses its balance in this ridiculous pose and, after making the obligatory faces, crashes to the ground in a tangle of strange somersaults. This revolution went downhill. And it was already sliding backward before the last February barricade had been cleared away and the first revolutionary government set up.⁶⁶

The period ahead of us is a gaudy jumble of screaming contradictions: constitutionalists who openly plot against the constitution, revolutionaries who freely admit to being constitutional; a National Assembly that wants to be all-powerful and never manages to be more than a parliament; a Montagne whose calling is to suffer patiently, and which parries its defeats today by prophesying its victories tomorrow; royalists who sit as the patres conscripti of the republic, and who are forced by circumstances to keep the rival royal families they're loyal to safely abroad and the republic they hate in charge at home; an executive power that draws its strength from its own weakness and its dignity from the contempt it inspires; a republic that is nothing but the combined infamy of two monarchies, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, with an imperial label slapped on — alliances whose first clause is a separation, battles whose first law is that nothing be decided, wild and pointless agitation in the name of calm, solemn sermons on calm in the name of revolution, passions without truth, truths without passion, heroes without heroic deeds, history without events. Things move along, but the only thing moving them seems to be the calendar, and they wear you out by tightening and slackening the same way over and over; conflicts seem to work themselves up to a peak every so often only to go dull and collapse without ever being settled. Everyone puts on a great show of effort, and the bourgeois shiver at the coming end of the world, while the world's saviors play out the pettiest intrigues and palace farces, so happy-go-lucky in their laisser aller that they bring to mind the days of the Fronde far more than the Day of Judgment — and the combined official brainpower of France is made a fool of by the cunning stupidity of one single man. Every time the collective will of the nation speaks through universal suffrage, it goes looking for its proper voice among the old, long-established enemies of the people's interests, until at last it finds it in the self-will of a freebooter. If any stretch of history was ever painted gray on gray, it's this one. Its people and events are Schlemihls turned inside out: shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution paralyzes the people carrying it and fills only its enemies with passion and violence. And when the "red specter," which the counterrevolutionaries are forever summoning up and casting out again, finally does show itself, it doesn't come in the anarchist's Phrygian cap. It comes in the uniform of order, in baggy red army trousers.⁶⁷^,⁶⁸

We've seen that the ministry Bonaparte installed on December 20, 1848, the day of his ascension into heaven, was a Party of Order ministry, a coalition of Legitimists and Orleanists. This Barrot-Falloux ministry had sat out the republican Constituent Assembly like a hard winter, cutting its life short by more or less violent means along the way, and it was still at the helm. Changarnier, the general of the allied royalists, still held both the command of the First Military Division and the command of the Paris National Guard in his own two hands. And the general elections had handed the Party of Order a big majority in the National Assembly. There Louis Philippe's old deputies and peers met a holy band of Legitimists, for whom a pile of the nation's ballot papers had turned into admission tickets to the political stage. The Bonapartist members were too thinly scattered to make a parliamentary party of their own; they showed up only as the mauvaise queue, the scruffy tail end, of the Party of Order. The Party of Order thus held the government, the army and the legislature, which is to say the entire power of the state, and it drew moral strength both from the general elections, which made its rule look like the will of the people, and from the victory of counterrevolution, at that very moment, all over the continent of Europe.⁶⁹

No party ever opened a campaign with more resources or under luckier stars.

The shipwrecked pure republicans found that in the Legislative Assembly they had melted down to a clique of about 50 men, led by the African generals Cavaignac, Lamoricière and Bedeau. The great opposition party, though, was the Montagne, the name the social-democratic party had taken at its parliamentary christening. It had more than 200 of the 750 votes in the National Assembly, which made it at least as strong as any one of the Party of Order's three factions taken on its own. It was outnumbered by the royalist coalition as a whole, but special circumstances seemed to make up for that. Not only had the elections in the departments shown that it had won a serious following among the country people; it counted almost all the deputies for Paris as its own, the army had made a democratic profession of faith by electing three sergeants, and the Montagne's leader, Ledru-Rollin, unlike anyone in the Party of Order, had been raised to the parliamentary nobility by five departments at once, all of which had voted for him. On May 29, 1849, then, with the royalists bound to fall out among themselves and the whole Party of Order bound to fall out with Bonaparte, the Montagne seemed to have everything going for it. Two weeks later it had lost everything, its honor included.

Before we follow the parliamentary story any further, we need a few remarks to head off the usual delusions about what this whole period was really like. As the democrats see it, the Legislative Assembly years were about the same thing as the Constituent Assembly years: a straightforward fight between republicans and royalists. They sum up the whole movement in one catchword, "reaction": the night in which all cats are gray, which lets them drone on with their night watchman's platitudes. And it's true that at first glance the Party of Order looks like a knot of royalist factions that not only plot against each other, each trying to put its own pretender on the throne and keep the other side's off, but also all gang up in shared hatred of the "republic" and shared attacks on it. Set against this royalist conspiracy, the Montagne looks like the champion of the "republic." The Party of Order seems to be forever busy with a "reaction" aimed, just as in Prussia, at the press, at the right to form associations and so on, and carried out, again just as in Prussia, by heavy-handed police meddling from the bureaucracy, the gendarmes and the public prosecutors. The "Montagne," meanwhile, is just as busy fending off these attacks and so standing up for the "eternal rights of man," as every so-called people's party has been doing, more or less, for a century and a half. But take a closer look at the situation and the parties, and that surface picture melts away, and with it the veil it draws over the class struggle and over this period's peculiar face.

As we've said, the Legitimists and the Orleanists were the two big factions of the Party of Order. What tied each of them to its pretender and kept the two apart: was it just the lily against the tricolor, the House of Bourbon against the House of Orléans, two shades of royalism, or even royalist faith at all? Under the Bourbons big landed property had ruled, with its priests and its lackeys; under the Orléans, high finance, big industry and big business, that is, capital, with its entourage of lawyers, professors and smooth talkers. The legitimate monarchy was simply the political form of the inherited rule of the lords of the land, just as the July Monarchy was the political form of the usurped rule of bourgeois upstarts. What kept the factions apart, then, was no so-called principle; it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property, the old split between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. Who would deny that old memories, personal feuds, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, likes and dislikes, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one royal house or the other as well? On top of the different forms of property, on top of the social conditions of existence, rises a whole superstructure of distinct and peculiarly shaped feelings, illusions, ways of thinking and views of life. The class as a whole creates and shapes all this out of its material foundations and the social relations that go with them. The single individual, who picks it all up through tradition and upbringing, may well imagine that these things are the real reasons for what he does and the place he starts from. While the Orleanists and the Legitimists each tried to persuade themselves and each other that it was loyalty to their two royal houses that divided them, later events showed that it was the other way round: their divided interests made it impossible for the two royal houses to unite. And just as in private life we tell the difference between what a man thinks and says about himself and what he really is and does, so in the struggles of history we have to be even more careful to tell a party's phrases and fantasies apart from what it's really made of and what it really wants, its picture of itself from the reality. The Orleanists and the Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with equal claims. If each side wanted to push through the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that meant only one thing: each of the two big interests into which the bourgeoisie splits — landed property and capital — was trying to restore its own supremacy and put the other back in its place. We say two interests of the bourgeoisie, because big landed property, for all its flirting with feudalism and its pride in its bloodlines, had been turned bourgeois through and through by the growth of modern society. The English Tories, in the same way, long imagined they were passionate about the monarchy, the church and the beauties of the good old English constitution, until the day danger came and squeezed out of them the confession that the only thing they're passionate about is ground rent.⁷⁰

The royalists in the coalition did their scheming against each other in the newspapers, at Ems, at Claremont: outside parliament, that is. Backstage they put their old Orleanist and Legitimist liveries back on and held their old jousting tournaments all over again. But out on the public stage, in their grand affairs of state, as a great parliamentary party, they brushed off their royal houses with a polite bow and put off restoring the monarchy indefinitely. They did their real business as the Party of Order, that is, under a social title rather than a political one: as defenders of the bourgeois world order, not as knights-errant rescuing wandering princesses; as the bourgeois class facing the other classes, not as royalists facing republicans. And as the Party of Order they ruled the other classes of society with fewer limits and a harder hand than they ever had under the Restoration or the July Monarchy; such rule was possible only in the form of the parliamentary republic, for only in that form could the two great divisions of the French bourgeoisie join forces and so put on the agenda the rule of their whole class instead of the regime of one privileged faction of it. If even so, as the Party of Order, they still sneered at the republic and made no secret of their distaste for it, royalist nostalgia was only part of the reason. Their instinct told them that the republic, while it completes their political rule, also digs away at its social foundations, since in a republic they have to stand face to face with the classes they keep down and wrestle with them directly, with nobody in between, with no crown to hide behind, and with no way left to keep the nation distracted with their own side quarrels, among themselves and against the king. It was a sense of weakness that made them flinch from the pure conditions of their own class rule and long for its less complete, less developed and, for that very reason, less dangerous forms. On the other hand, whenever the coalition royalists clash with the pretender standing opposite them, Bonaparte, whenever they feel their all-powerful parliament threatened by the executive power, whenever, that is, they need to show the political title to their rule, they step forward as republicans and not as royalists. That goes for everyone from the Orleanist Thiers, who warns the National Assembly that the republic is what divides them least, to the Legitimist Berryer, who on December 2, 1851, with the tricolor sash tied around him, harangues the crowd in front of the town hall of the tenth arrondissement like a tribune of the people, in the name of the republic. Mind you, the echo shouts back at him, mocking: "Henri V! Henri V!"⁷¹^,⁷²^,⁷³

Facing this bourgeois coalition stood a coalition of petty bourgeois and workers, the so-called social-democratic party. After the June Days of 1848 the petty bourgeois felt badly paid for their services: their material interests were in danger, and the democratic guarantees that were supposed to let them defend those interests were being called into question by the counterrevolution. They therefore drew closer to the workers. Their parliamentary arm, the Montagne, had been shoved aside while the bourgeois republicans held their dictatorship, but during the second half of the Constituent Assembly's life it had won back its lost popularity by fighting Bonaparte and the royalist ministers. It had struck an alliance with the socialist leaders. In February 1849 everyone made up at banquets of reconciliation. They drew up a joint program, founded joint election committees and ran joint candidates. The social demands of the proletariat had their revolutionary point snapped off and were given a democratic twist; the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie were stripped of their purely political form and had their socialist point brought to the fore. That's how Social-Democracy was born. The new Montagne that came out of this mixture had the same ingredients as the old one, apart from a few walk-on extras from the working class and a few socialist sectarians; there were just more of them. But as things developed, it had changed along with the class it stood for. What makes Social-Democracy what it is comes down to this: it wants democratic-republican institutions as a means, not of doing away with both extremes, capital and wage labor, but of softening the clash between them and turning it into harmony. Whatever measures it proposes for getting there, and however much revolutionary trimming it sews onto them, the content stays the same: changing society by democratic means, but changing it only within the limits of the petty bourgeoisie. Don't get the narrow-minded idea, though, that the petty bourgeoisie is out on principle to push through its own selfish class interest. It honestly believes that the particular conditions of its own liberation are the general conditions under which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Nor should you imagine that the democratic representatives are all shopkeepers, or all starry-eyed admirers of shopkeepers. In education and in their own circumstances they may be worlds away from them. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeois is that their minds never get past the limits that his life never gets past, so that theory drives them to the same problems and the same solutions that material interest and social position drive him to in practice. That, in general, is how the political and literary representatives of a class relate to the class they represent.

After all that, it goes without saying that when the Montagne wrestles nonstop with the Party of Order over the republic and the so-called rights of man, neither the republic nor the rights of man is what it's ultimately after. It's like an army that someone tries to disarm and that fights back: it didn't take the field merely to keep hold of its own guns.

The Party of Order provoked the Montagne the moment the National Assembly met. The bourgeoisie now felt it had to settle accounts with the democratic petty bourgeois, just as a year earlier it had realized it had to finish off the revolutionary proletariat. Only this time the enemy was placed differently: the proletarian party's strength had been in the street, the petty bourgeois' in the National Assembly itself. The trick, then, was to lure them out of the Assembly into the street and get them to wreck their own parliamentary power with their own hands, before time and opportunity could make it secure. The Montagne galloped headlong into the trap, reins flying.

The bait tossed to it was the French army's bombardment of Rome. Shelling Rome broke Article V of the constitution, which forbids the French Republic to turn its armed forces against the liberties of another people. Article IV, on top of that, forbade the executive power to declare any war without the National Assembly's consent, and the Constituent Assembly had already condemned the Roman expedition in its resolution of May 8. On these grounds, on June 11, 1849, Ledru-Rollin laid a bill of impeachment against Bonaparte and his ministers. Thiers kept stinging him like a wasp, and he got so worked up that he even threatened to defend the constitution by every means there was, weapons in hand if need be. The Montagne rose as one man and echoed the call to arms. On June 12 the National Assembly threw out the impeachment, and the Montagne walked out of parliament. Everyone knows what happened on June 13: part of the Montagne issued a proclamation declaring Bonaparte and his ministers "outside the constitution"; the democratic National Guards paraded through the streets, unarmed, and scattered the moment they bumped into Changarnier's troops; and so on and so forth. Some of the Montagne fled abroad, others were handed over to the High Court at Bourges, and a new set of parliamentary rules put the rest under the schoolmasterly eye of the President of the National Assembly. Paris was put under a state of siege again, and the democratic part of its National Guard was disbanded. That broke the Montagne's influence in parliament and the power of the petty bourgeois in Paris.⁷⁴^,⁷⁵^,⁷⁶^,⁷⁷

Lyon, where June 13 had been the signal for a bloody workers' uprising, was likewise put under a state of siege, along with the five departments around it, and they're still under it as I write.⁷⁸

The main body of the Montagne had left its own vanguard in the lurch by refusing to sign its proclamation. The press had deserted: only two newspapers dared to print the pronunciamento. The petty bourgeois let their representatives down: the National Guards stayed home, or, where they did show up, they stopped people from building barricades. The representatives had conned the petty bourgeois: all those sworn allies in the army were nowhere to be seen. Last of all, instead of drawing extra strength from the proletariat, the democratic party had infected it with its own weakness; and, as usual after the great exploits of democrats, the leaders got the satisfaction of accusing their "people" of desertion, and the people got the satisfaction of accusing its leaders of fraud.⁷⁹

Rarely has a campaign been announced with more fanfare than the Montagne's, and rarely has an event been trumpeted so far in advance, or with so much certainty, as the inevitable victory of democracy. The democrats evidently believe in the trumpets that brought down the walls of Jericho, and every time they find themselves facing the ramparts of despotism, they try the miracle again. If the Montagne wanted to win in parliament, it had no business calling people to arms. If it called them to arms in parliament, it had no business behaving parliamentarily in the street. If the peaceful demonstration was meant seriously, it was foolish not to see that it would be met with force. If it was meant as a real fight, it was an original idea to leave behind the very weapons the fight needed. But the revolutionary threats of the petty bourgeois and their democratic spokesmen are only ever meant to scare the other side. And when they've backed themselves into a dead end, when they've committed themselves so far that they actually have to make good on their threats, they do it in a halfhearted way that avoids nothing so carefully as the means to the end, and that snatches at every excuse for losing. The blaring overture that announced the battle trails off into a sheepish mutter the moment the fighting is supposed to start, the actors stop taking themselves seriously, and the whole show goes flat, like a balloon somebody poked with a pin.

No party overrates its own strength like the democratic party, and none fools itself about the situation so recklessly. Because part of the army had voted for it, the Montagne was now sure the army would mutiny for it. And over what? Over something that, from the soldiers' point of view, meant just one thing: the revolutionaries were siding with the Roman soldiers against the French soldiers. Besides, the memories of June 1848 were still too fresh for the proletariat not to loathe the National Guard, or for the chiefs of the secret societies not to distrust the democratic chiefs through and through. Only some great common interest at stake could have patched up differences like these, and a violated paragraph of the constitution, a pure abstraction, wasn't it. Hadn't the constitution been violated over and over already, by the democrats' own account? Hadn't the most popular papers branded it a counterrevolutionary botch job? But the democrat represents the petty bourgeoisie, a transitional class in which the interests of two classes blunt each other, and so he fancies himself above class conflict altogether. The democrats admit that a privileged class stands against them, but they and the whole rest of the nation around them are the people. They stand for the people's rights; what they care about is the people's interest. When a fight is coming, then, they don't need to look into the interests and positions of the different classes, and they don't need to weigh their own resources too nervously. All they have to do is give the signal, and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors. And if, when the moment comes, their interests turn out to interest nobody and their power turns out to be powerlessness, then it's the fault of wicked sophists who have split the indivisible people into hostile camps; or the army was too brutalized and too blind to see that the pure aims of democracy were its own best interest; or the whole thing came to grief over some detail of execution; or else some accident nobody could have foreseen spoiled the game this time round. Either way, the democrat walks out of the most humiliating defeat as spotless as he walked into it innocent, newly convinced that he is bound to win: not that he and his party have to give up their old position, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen until they come round to him.

We shouldn't picture the Montagne, then, thinned out, broken and humbled by the new parliamentary rules, as all that miserable. June 13 had cleared its leaders out of the way, true, but that made room for lesser lights, who were flattered by their promotion. Its powerlessness in parliament was beyond doubt, true, but that entitled its members to confine their activity to fits of moral indignation and booming speeches. The Party of Order pretended to see in them, as the last official representatives of the revolution, all the horrors of anarchy in the flesh; so much the better, since in reality they could be all the duller and meeker. As for June 13, they consoled themselves with this profound saying: Just let them dare to lay a finger on universal suffrage, just let them, and then! Then we'll show them who we are. Nous verrons, we shall see.

As for the Montagnards who fled abroad, it is enough to note here that Ledru-Rollin, having managed in barely two weeks to wreck beyond repair the mighty party he led, decided he was just the man to form a French government in partibus; that his figure, seen from far away, lifted clear of the ground where things actually happen, seemed to grow taller the lower the revolution sank and the more the official great men of official France shrank into dwarfs; that he could pose as the republican pretender for 1852; and that he sent out regular circulars to the Wallachians and other peoples, threatening the despots of the Continent with the deeds that he and his allies were going to do. Was Proudhon so very wrong when he shouted at these gentlemen, "Vous n'êtes que des blagueurs," you're nothing but a bunch of windbags?⁸⁰

On June 13 the Party of Order hadn't only broken the Montagne; it had pushed through the subordination of the constitution to the majority decisions of the National Assembly. That was its idea of a republic: the bourgeoisie ruling through parliament, with nothing to hold it back, unlike under the monarchy, where the executive could veto its laws or dissolve it. This was the parliamentary republic, as Thiers called it. But if on June 13 the bourgeoisie made itself all-powerful inside the parliament building, didn't it also leave parliament itself incurably weak against the executive power and against the people, by throwing out its most popular members? By handing deputy after deputy over to the public prosecutors without further ceremony, it scrapped its own parliamentary immunity. The humiliating rules it forced on the Montagne raise up the President of the Republic exactly as far as they push down the individual representative of the people. And by branding an insurrection in defense of the constitution as anarchy, as an attempt to overthrow society, it ruled out any appeal to insurrection for itself, should the executive power ever trample the constitution against it. And by the irony of history, the general who bombarded Rome on Bonaparte's orders, and so set off the constitutional riot of June 13, Oudinot, was the very man the Party of Order would have to offer the people on December 2, 1851, pleading and in vain, as the general of the constitution against Bonaparte. Another hero of June 13, Vieyra, was praised from the speaker's platform of the National Assembly for the brutalities he had committed in the offices of democratic newspapers, at the head of a gang of National Guards drawn from the world of high finance; and this same Vieyra was in on Bonaparte's conspiracy and did a great deal to make sure that, in its dying hour, the National Assembly got no protection at all from the National Guard.⁸¹^,⁸²

June 13 meant something else as well. The Montagne had tried to force Bonaparte's impeachment, so its defeat was a direct victory for Bonaparte, his personal triumph over his democratic enemies. The Party of Order won the battle; all Bonaparte had to do was cash in. He did. On June 14 a proclamation went up on the walls of Paris in which the President emerges from his monk-like seclusion, apparently without lifting a finger himself, reluctantly, forced out by sheer pressure of events; he plays misunderstood virtue, complains of his opponents' slanders, and while he seems to be identifying himself with the cause of order, he is really identifying the cause of order with himself. On top of that, the National Assembly had approved the expedition against Rome after the fact, but the initiative had been Bonaparte's. Having escorted the high priest Samuel back into the Vatican, he could hope to move into the Tuileries as King David. He had won over the priests.⁸³

The riot of June 13, as we've seen, came down to a peaceful march through the streets, so there were no war laurels to be won against it. All the same, in these times so short of heroes and events, the Party of Order turned this bloodless battle into a second Austerlitz. From the speaker's platform and in the press, the army was hailed as order in all its power, the masses as anarchy in all its impotence, and Changarnier as the "bulwark of society": a hoax he ended up believing himself. Quietly, though, units that looked unreliable were moved out of Paris, the regiments that had voted most democratically were packed off from France to Algeria, the troublemakers in the ranks were sent to punishment companies, and finally the press was systematically shut out of the barracks, and the barracks shut off from civilian society.⁸⁴

This brings us to the decisive turning point in the history of the French National Guard. In 1830 the Guard had decided the fall of the Restoration. Under Louis Philippe, every riot in which the National Guard sided with the troops failed. When it stood by passively during the uprising of February 1848 and gave Louis Philippe only lukewarm support, he gave himself up for lost, and lost he was. Thus the belief took root that the revolution couldn't win without the National Guard, and the army couldn't win against it; this was the army's superstitious faith in the omnipotence of the bourgeois. The June Days of 1848, when the entire National Guard joined the regular army in crushing the insurrection, had only strengthened the superstition. Once Bonaparte took office, the Guard's standing slipped somewhat through the unconstitutional joining of its command with that of the First Military Division in the person of Changarnier.

Since command of the National Guard now looked like just one more part of the army chief's job, the Guard itself now looked like a mere appendage of the regular army. On June 13 it was finally broken, and not just by being partly disbanded, though from then on that happened again and again all over France until nothing was left of it but wreckage. The demonstration of June 13 was above all a demonstration of the democratic National Guards. They had faced the army without their weapons, true, but they had faced it in their uniforms, and the uniform was exactly where the magic lay. The army now convinced itself that this uniform was a woolen rag like any other. The spell was broken. In the June Days of 1848 the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, as the National Guard, had stood shoulder to shoulder with the army against the proletariat; on June 13, 1849, the bourgeoisie had the army break up the petty-bourgeois National Guard; on December 2, 1851, the bourgeoisie's own National Guard had vanished, and when Bonaparte later signed the decree dissolving it, he was only putting the fact on record. The bourgeoisie had thus smashed its own last weapon against the army, but it had had to smash it from the moment the petty bourgeoisie no longer stood behind it as a vassal but in front of it as a rebel, just as, in general, it had to destroy every defense it had against absolutism with its own hands as soon as it had itself become absolute.⁸⁵

Meanwhile the Party of Order was celebrating the recovery of a power that had seemed lost in 1848 only to be found again in 1849 with all the old limits removed, and it celebrated with tirades against the republic and the constitution, with curses on every revolution, future, present and past, including the ones its own leaders had made, and with laws that gagged the press, stamped out the right of association and made the state of siege a permanent, built-in institution. Then the National Assembly adjourned from mid-August to mid-October, after appointing a standing commission to sit while it was away. During this vacation the Legitimists intrigued with Ems, the Orleanists with Claremont, Bonaparte by touring the provinces like a prince, and the departmental councils by debating revision of the constitution — the same goings-on that come round in every one of the National Assembly's regular vacations, and which I'll take up only when they turn into events. Here I'll only point out that the National Assembly made a political blunder when it disappeared from the stage for long stretches and left just one figure, however pathetic, visible at the head of the republic, Louis Bonaparte's, while the Party of Order, to the public's scandal, fell apart into its royalist pieces and went chasing after its rival dreams of restoration. Each time the bewildering racket of parliament went quiet during these vacations and its body dissolved back into the nation, it was plain to see that only one thing was missing to give this republic its true shape: make parliament's vacation permanent, and replace the republic's motto, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, with the unmistakable words Infanterie, Cavalerie, Artillerie!⁸⁶

In the Revolution that began in 1789, the Constitutionalists, who wanted a king bound by a written constitution, led until the monarchy fell in August 1792. The Girondins, moderate republicans named after the department of the Gironde, home of several of their leaders, led the new republic until June 1793, when the Jacobins, the radical club of Robespierre, drove them out of the Convention; many Girondin leaders went to the guillotine that October. ↩
On April 16, 1848, a march of Paris workers on its way to the provisional government at the Hôtel de Ville found the National Guard turned out against it, and the day ended with Guardsmen shouting against the communists. ↩
Patres conscripti, "conscript fathers," was the form of address for the senators of ancient Rome. The Fronde was the series of revolts by great nobles and the Paris law courts against the royal government in 1648–1653, during the boyhood of Louis XIV, remembered more for intrigue and changing sides than for anything it achieved. ↩
"Gray on gray" echoes the preface to Hegel's Philosophy of Right, where philosophy paints "its gray in gray" when a form of life has grown old. Peter Schlemihl, in Adelbert von Chamisso's tale Peter Schlemihl's Wondrous Story (1814), sells his shadow to the devil and lives on as a body without one. The red Phrygian cap was the cap of liberty worn by the revolutionaries of the 1790s; the French infantry of Marx's day wore red trousers. ↩
Falloux stayed minister of public instruction until the autumn of 1849; the education law of 1850 that bears his name widened the Church's hand in the schools. The First Military Division was the army command for Paris and the region around it. ↩
The white lily, the fleur-de-lis, was the emblem of the Bourbon kings, who flew a white flag; Louis Philippe's July Monarchy took up the revolutionary tricolor in 1830. ↩
Ems, a spa town in western Germany, was where the Legitimist pretender received his followers in 1849; Claremont, a country house in Surrey, England, was where Louis Philippe lived in exile from 1848 until his death in 1850. ↩
Pierre-Antoine Berryer (1790–1868), a lawyer, was the leading orator of the Legitimists. On December 2, 1851, some two hundred deputies who had escaped arrest met at the town hall of the tenth arrondissement (district) of Paris, voted to depose Bonaparte, and were themselves arrested by troops. The tricolor sash was the badge of a representative of the people. ↩
Henri, Count of Chambord (1820–1883), grandson of Charles X, the last Bourbon king, was the Legitimists' claimant to the throne; to them he was King Henri V. ↩
The French attacked Rome on June 3, 1849, and shelled it through June; the city gave in, and French troops marched in on July 3. ↩
Article V of the preamble to the constitution of 1848 says that the Republic "never uses its forces against the liberty of any people." The rule against war without the Assembly's consent is not in Article IV of the preamble, which proclaims liberty, equality and fraternity; it is Article 54 of the constitution proper. ↩
On June 13, 1849, the march of the democrats along the boulevards of Paris was broken up by the army; Ledru-Rollin and a group of Montagne deputies who had gathered at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, a technical school in Paris, were driven out by soldiers, and Ledru-Rollin escaped to England. The Assembly put Paris and Lyon under a state of siege. ↩
Marx writes Bourges here and again in Section IV. The High Court sat at Bourges only for the men of May 15, 1848; the deputies charged over June 13 were tried at Versailles, in October and November 1849, many of them in their absence. ↩
Lyon, France's second city and the center of its silk weaving, rose on June 15, 1849, when the news from Paris arrived; the army crushed the rising in the workers' quarter of La Croix-Rousse. ↩
Pronunciamento is the Spanish word for a declaration of revolt by army officers, a regular event in the Spanish politics of the time. ↩
In London, in 1850, Ledru-Rollin joined the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini and other exiles in a European Democratic Central Committee, which issued manifestos to the peoples of Europe. Wallachia was a principality on the lower Danube, today part of Romania. ↩
On December 2, 1851, the deputies who met at the town hall of the 10th arrondissement of Paris named Oudinot commander of the armed forces; troops arrived and arrested them all. ↩
Vieyra, a colonel, was chief of staff of the Paris National Guard in December 1851, and saw to it that the Guard was not called out against the coup. ↩
Samuel here stands for the pope, Pius IX, whose rule over Rome the French expedition restored; he returned to the city in April 1850. In the Bible, Samuel anointed David king (1 Samuel 16). ↩
At Austerlitz, on December 2, 1805, Napoleon won his most famous victory, over the armies of Austria and Russia. ↩
After the coup, by a decree of January 1852, Bonaparte dissolved the National Guard and re-formed it under the government's control. ↩
The laws included the press law of July 27, 1849, and the law of August 9, 1849, which set out how a state of siege was to be declared and what powers it gave the military. Article 32 of the constitution let the Assembly adjourn, leaving a commission of its officers and twenty-five members with power to recall it in an emergency. The departmental councils were the elected general councils of the departments. ↩

IV

In the middle of October 1849 the National Assembly came back from its holidays. On November 1 Bonaparte sprang a surprise on it: a message announcing that he had sacked the Barrot–Falloux ministry and formed a new one. No one ever threw lackeys out of service with less ceremony than Bonaparte threw out his ministers. The kicks meant for the National Assembly were taken, for the time being, by Barrot and Co.⁸⁷

The Barrot ministry, as we have seen, was made up of Legitimists and Orleanists: a ministry of the Party of Order. Bonaparte had needed it to get rid of the republican Constituent Assembly, to send the expedition against Rome and to break the democratic party. Behind this ministry he had seemed to go into eclipse, handing the reins of government to the Party of Order and putting on the humble mask worn under Louis Philippe by the legally responsible manager of a newspaper, the mask of the homme de paille, the man of straw. Now he tossed away a mask that was no longer a light veil he could hide his face behind, but an iron mask that stopped him from showing any face of his own. He had installed the Barrot ministry to blow up the republican National Assembly in the name of the Party of Order; he fired it to declare his own name independent of the Party of Order's National Assembly.⁸⁸

There was no shortage of plausible excuses for the sacking. The Barrot ministry hadn't even kept up the polite forms that would have let the President of the Republic look like a power standing beside the National Assembly. During the Assembly's recess Bonaparte had published a letter to Edgar Ney in which he seemed to frown on the Pope's illiberal behavior, just as earlier, in defiance of the Constituent Assembly, he had published a letter praising Oudinot for attacking the Roman Republic. Then, when the National Assembly came to vote the money for the Roman expedition, Victor Hugo, out of what passed for liberalism, brought that letter up. The Party of Order smothered the notion under contemptuous, disbelieving shouts, as if Bonaparte's notions could carry any political weight at all. Not one of the ministers took up the gauntlet for him. On another occasion Barrot, in his well-known hollow, solemn style, let drop from the speaker's platform some words of indignation about the "abominable intrigues" which, he said, were going on in the President's inner circle. And to crown it all, while the ministry got the National Assembly to grant the Duchess of Orléans a widow's pension, it turned down every motion to raise the President's civil list. In Bonaparte the imperial pretender and the down-at-heel soldier of fortune had grown together so completely that his one great idea, that he was called to restore the Empire, always came with its partner: that the French people were called to pay his debts.⁸⁹^,⁹⁰

The Barrot-Falloux ministry was the first and last parliamentary ministry Bonaparte ever brought to life. Its dismissal is therefore a decisive turning point. With it the Party of Order lost, never to win it back, a post it could not do without if the parliamentary regime was to stand: its grip on the handle of the executive power. You can see at once what that meant in a country like France, where the executive commands an army of more than half a million officials, and so holds a vast mass of interests and livelihoods in the most abject dependence; where the state wraps its net around the whole of bourgeois society, controlling, regulating, policing and minding it, from its broadest activities down to its smallest twitches, from its most general forms of life down to the private lives of individuals; where this parasitic body, through the most extraordinary centralization, has become all-present and all-knowing, quick and springy in its movements, with nothing to match it except the helpless dependence and loose shapelessness of the real body of society. In a country like that, a National Assembly that let go of the ministerial posts let go of all real influence, unless at the same time it simplified the administration, cut the army of officials down as far as it could, and let bourgeois society and public opinion grow organs of their own, independent of the government. But the material interest of the French bourgeoisie is woven tight into the upkeep of that vast, many-branched machine of state. That's where it parks its surplus population, and where it makes up in state salaries what it can't pocket as profits, interest, rents and fees. Its political interest, on the other hand, forced it to step up the repression day by day, and with it the means and manpower of the state, while at the same time it had to wage nonstop war on public opinion and suspiciously maim and cripple society's independent organs wherever it couldn't manage to cut them off altogether. Thus the French bourgeoisie was forced by its class position to destroy, on the one hand, the conditions of life of every parliamentary power, its own included, and on the other to make the executive power, its enemy, irresistible.

The new ministry was called the d'Hautpoul ministry. That doesn't mean General d'Hautpoul had been made prime minister. Along with Barrot, Bonaparte had done away with the post itself. True, that post had reduced the President of the Republic to the legal nobody of a constitutional king, but of a constitutional king without throne or crown, without scepter or sword, without immunity, without lifelong tenure of the highest office in the land, and, worst of all, without a civil list. The d'Hautpoul ministry had just one man with a parliamentary reputation, the Jew Fould, one of the most notorious members of high finance. He got the ministry of finance. Look up the Paris stock exchange quotations and you'll find that from November 1, 1849, on, French government bonds rise and fall as Bonapartist shares fall and rise. Having found his partner on the Bourse, Bonaparte at the same time grabbed the police, by making Carlier prefect of police of Paris.⁹¹

Still, what the change of ministry really meant would only come out as things went on. For the moment, Bonaparte had taken one step forward only to be shoved back all the more visibly. His curt message was followed by the most groveling declaration of submission to the National Assembly. Whenever his ministers timidly tried to bring in his pet whims as bills, they looked as if they were running these comic errands against their will, only because their jobs required it, and sure in advance that nothing would come of them. Whenever Bonaparte blabbed his plans behind his ministers' backs and played with his idées napoléoniennes, his own ministers disowned him from the platform of the National Assembly. His itch to usurp seemed to speak up only so that his opponents' gloating laughter would never die down. He carried on like a great man misunderstood, whom the whole world takes for a simpleton. Never did he enjoy the contempt of every class more fully than in this period. Never was the rule of the bourgeoisie more unchallenged, never did it flaunt the trappings of power more boastfully.⁹²

I don't have to write the history of its lawmaking here, which in this period comes down to two laws: the law that brings back the wine tax, and the education law that abolishes unbelief. If the French found it harder to get a drink of wine, they were served all the more generously with the water of true life. If in the wine tax law the bourgeoisie declared the old, hated French tax system sacred, with the education law it set out to preserve the old frame of mind among the masses that let them put up with it. It's startling to see the Orleanists, the liberal bourgeois, those old apostles of Voltaire and of eclectic philosophy, hand over the management of the French mind to their sworn enemies, the Jesuits. But however much Orleanists and Legitimists might part company over who should wear the crown, they understood that their joint rule demanded that they combine the means of oppression of two epochs, that the July Monarchy's tools of subjugation had to be topped up and reinforced with the Restoration's.⁹³

The peasants, cheated of all their hopes and squeezed harder than ever, by low grain prices on one side and by mounting taxes and mortgage debts on the other, began to stir in the departments. The answer was a witch hunt against the schoolmasters, who were put under the clergy, a witch hunt against the mayors, who were put under the prefects, and a system of spying that took in everybody. In Paris and the big cities, reaction at least wears the face of its age, and provokes more than it crushes. In the countryside it turns flat, mean, petty, tiresome and nagging, in a word, a gendarme. It's easy to see how three years of the gendarme's regime, blessed by the regime of the priest, were bound to demoralize immature masses.⁹⁴

However much passion and declamation the Party of Order might pour from the Assembly's platform over the minority, its speech stayed monosyllabic, like the Christian's, whose words are to be: Yea, yea; nay, nay! Monosyllabic on the platform, monosyllabic in the press. As stale as a riddle when everyone already knows the answer. Whether the matter was the right of petition or the wine tax, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or town government, protecting personal liberty or balancing the budget, the same slogan comes round every time, the theme never changes, the verdict is always ready and always reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialist, bourgeois enlightenment socialist, bourgeois financial reform socialist. It was socialist to build a railway where there was already a canal, and it was socialist to defend yourself with a stick when someone came at you with a sword.

This wasn't just a figure of speech, a fashion, a party tactic. The bourgeoisie saw, correctly, that every weapon it had forged against feudalism was turning its point against itself, that every means of education it had produced was rebelling against its own civilization, that every god it had made had deserted it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois freedoms and organs of progress were attacking and threatening its class rule at once at its social foundation and at its political peak, and so had become "socialist." In this threat and this attack it rightly found the secret of socialism, whose meaning and drift it reads better than so-called socialism can read itself; that is why so-called socialism can't understand how the bourgeoisie can stubbornly shut its door on it, whether it whimpers sentimentally about the sufferings of humanity, or preaches in Christian style the millennium and universal brotherly love, or burbles in humanist style about spirit, culture and freedom, or hatches in doctrinaire style a system for reconciling all classes and making them all prosper. What the bourgeoisie didn't grasp, though, was where this led: that its own parliamentary regime, its political rule as such, now had to fall under the same sweeping condemnation as socialist. As long as the rule of the bourgeois class hadn't been fully organized, hadn't found its pure political expression, the opposition of the other classes couldn't show itself in pure form either; and where it did show itself, it couldn't take the dangerous turn that changes every fight against the state into a fight against capital. If the bourgeoisie saw "tranquility" threatened by every sign of life in society, how could it hope to keep at society's head the regime of unrest, its own regime, the parliamentary regime, a regime that, as one of its own speakers put it, lives in struggle and by struggle? The parliamentary regime lives on discussion; how is it supposed to ban discussion? Here every interest, every social institution is turned into general ideas and argued over as ideas; how is any interest or institution supposed to rise above thought and lay down the law as an article of faith? The war of words on the platform calls up the war of the press hacks; the debating club in parliament is bound to be matched by debating clubs in the salons and the taverns; representatives who are forever appealing to public opinion give public opinion the right to speak its real mind in petitions. The parliamentary regime leaves everything to majorities; how are the great majorities outside parliament not to want a say? When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else can you expect but that the people down below will dance?

In damning as "socialist" what it once hailed as "liberal," the bourgeoisie confesses that its own interest demands that it be spared the danger of governing itself; that to bring peace and quiet to the country, its bourgeois parliament must first of all be put to sleep; that to keep its social power intact, its political power must be broken. And it confesses that the private bourgeois can go on exploiting the other classes and enjoying property, family, religion and order undisturbed only on condition that their class is condemned, along with the other classes, to the same political nothingness; that to save its purse, it must have its crown knocked off, and the sword meant to protect it must be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.

When it came to the general interests of the bourgeoisie, the National Assembly was so unproductive that, for instance, the debates on the Paris-Avignon railway, begun in the winter of 1850, were still not ready to be wrapped up on December 2, 1851. Wherever it wasn't repressing, wasn't reacting, it was struck with incurable barrenness.

While Bonaparte's ministry partly took the lead in proposing laws in the spirit of the Party of Order, and partly outdid that party in the harshness with which it carried them out, Bonaparte himself tried with childishly silly proposals to win popularity, to show that he stood against the National Assembly, and to hint at a hidden reserve that only circumstances were holding back, for now, from pouring out its secret treasures on the French people. Hence the proposal to decree the noncommissioned officers a raise of four sous a day. Hence the proposal for a bank that would lend to workers on their word of honor. Money as a present and money on tick: that was the bait he hoped would hook the masses. Handouts and loans on tick: that's the whole of the financial science of the lumpenproletariat, the high-class kind and the low-class kind alike. That was the whole of the machinery Bonaparte knew how to set in motion. Never has a pretender speculated more crudely on the crudeness of the masses.

The National Assembly flared up more than once at these obvious attempts to buy popularity at its expense, and at the growing danger that this adventurer, whipped on by his debts and held back by no reputation he'd earned, would try some desperate stroke. Relations between the Party of Order and the President had turned threatening when an unexpected event sent him running back, repentant, into its arms. We mean the by-elections of March 10, 1850. These were held to fill the seats emptied after June 13 by prison or exile. Paris elected nothing but social-democratic candidates. It even gave the most votes of all to an insurgent of June 1848, de Flotte. This was how the Paris petty bourgeoisie, allied with the proletariat, took its revenge for its defeat on June 13, 1849. It seemed to have vanished from the battlefield at the moment of danger only to march back onto it, when the chance came, with bigger forces and a bolder battle cry. One circumstance seemed to make this election victory more dangerous still: in Paris the army voted for the June insurgent against Lahitte, one of Bonaparte's ministers, and in the departments it voted largely for the Montagnards, who there too, if less decisively than in Paris, kept the upper hand over their opponents.⁹⁵

All at once Bonaparte found himself face to face with the revolution again. As on January 29, 1849, as on June 13, 1849, so on March 10, 1850, he vanished behind the Party of Order. He bowed, he made fainthearted apologies, he offered to appoint any ministry the parliamentary majority cared to order, he even pleaded with the Orleanist and Legitimist leaders, the Thiers, the Berryers, the Broglies, the Molés, in a word the so-called burgraves, to take the helm of state themselves. The Party of Order didn't know how to use this moment, which would never come again. Instead of boldly seizing the power on offer, it didn't even make Bonaparte bring back the ministry he had fired on November 1; it was content to humiliate him with its forgiveness and to add Monsieur Baroche to the d'Hautpoul ministry. As public prosecutor, this Baroche had raged before the High Court at Bourges, once against the revolutionaries of May 15 and once against the democrats of June 13, both times on the charge of an attack on the National Assembly. None of Bonaparte's ministers did more later on to drag the National Assembly through the mud, and after December 2, 1851, we meet him again as the comfortably installed, handsomely paid vice-president of the Senate. He had spat in the revolutionaries' soup so that Bonaparte could eat it.⁹⁶^,⁹⁷

The social-democratic party, for its part, seemed to be grabbing at any excuse to throw its own victory back into doubt and blunt its edge. Vidal, one of the newly elected members for Paris, had been elected at Strasbourg as well. He was talked into turning down the seat for Paris and taking the one for Strasbourg. Instead of making its victory at the polls final, and thereby forcing the Party of Order to contest it in parliament on the spot, instead of driving the enemy into a fight while the people were fired up and the army in a friendly mood, the democratic party wore Paris out all through March and April with a fresh election campaign. It let the people's roused passions wear themselves down in yet another provisional game of votes, let revolutionary energy glut itself on constitutional successes and fizzle out in petty intrigues, hollow speeches and sham moves, let the bourgeoisie rally and make its preparations, and in the end let the meaning of the March elections be watered down by a sentimental footnote, the April by-election of Eugène Sue. In a word, it made an April fool of March 10.⁹⁸

The parliamentary majority saw how weak its opponent was. Its seventeen burgraves (Bonaparte had left them to lead the attack and to take the responsibility for it) drew up a new electoral law, and the job of bringing it in went to Monsieur Faucher, who had asked for the honor. On May 8 he introduced the law, which abolished universal suffrage, required voters to have lived three years in the place where they voted, and, for workers, made proof of that residence depend on a certificate from their employers.⁹⁹

The democrats had stormed and raged like revolutionaries during the constitutional election campaign; now that it was time to prove, weapons in hand, that those election victories meant business, they turned just as constitutional, and preached order, majestic calm (calme majestueux), lawful behavior, which is to say blind submission to the will of the counterrevolution, now sprawling about as the law of the land. During the debate the Montagne put the Party of Order to shame by holding up, against its revolutionary passion, the passionless bearing of the upright citizen who keeps to the letter of the law, and by flooring it with the dreadful charge of behaving like revolutionaries. Even the newly elected deputies took pains, with their decent and sober manners, to show how wrong it was to brand them anarchists and to read their election as a victory for the revolution. On May 31 the new electoral law went through. The Montagne contented itself with slipping a protest into the President's pocket. After the electoral law came a new press law, which wiped out the revolutionary newspapers altogether. They had earned their fate. The National and La Presse, two bourgeois papers, were left standing after this flood as the revolution's outermost outposts.¹⁰⁰

We have seen how the democratic leaders did everything in March and April to tangle the people of Paris up in a sham fight, and how after May 8 they did everything to keep them out of a real one. We mustn't forget, either, that 1850 was one of the most splendid years of industrial and commercial boom, so the Paris proletariat was in full work. But the electoral law of May 31, 1850, shut it out of any share in political power; it cut away the very ground it could have fought on, and threw the workers back into the pariah's place they had held before the February Revolution. By letting themselves be led by the democrats in the face of such an event, and forgetting the revolutionary interest of their class for a moment's comfort, they gave up the honor of being a conquering power, resigned themselves to their fate, and proved that the defeat of June 1848 had knocked the fight out of them for years and that history, for the time being, would have to go on again over their heads. As for the petty-bourgeois democracy, which on June 13 had shouted, "But just let them lay a finger on universal suffrage, and then we'll see!" — it now consoled itself with the thought that the counterrevolutionary blow that had hit it was no blow, and the law of May 31 no law. On May 2, 1852, every Frenchman will turn up at the polls with a ballot in one hand and a sword in the other. With that prophecy it was quite satisfied. The army, finally, was punished by its officers for the elections of March and April 1850, just as it had been for those of May 29, 1849. This time, though, it said to itself firmly: "The revolution isn't going to con us a third time."

The law of May 31, 1850, was the bourgeoisie's coup d'état. All its conquests over the revolution so far had been merely provisional: they were up for grabs again the moment the present National Assembly left the stage. They hung on the luck of a new general election, and the history of elections since 1848 proved beyond argument that the more the bourgeoisie's actual rule grew, the more its moral hold on the masses slipped away. On March 10 universal suffrage came out directly against the rule of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage. The law of May 31 was therefore one of the necessities of the class struggle. On the other hand, the constitution required at least two million votes for the election of the President of the Republic to be valid. If no candidate reached this minimum, the National Assembly was to choose the President from among the three candidates with the most votes. When the Constituent Assembly made that law, ten million voters were on the rolls, so that, as it saw things, a fifth of the electorate was enough to make a presidential election valid. The law of May 31 struck at least three million votes off the rolls, cut the electorate to seven million, and still kept the legal minimum of two million for the presidential election. It raised the legal minimum from a fifth to nearly a third of the possible votes; that is, it did everything it could to smuggle the election of the President out of the hands of the people and into the hands of the National Assembly. With the electoral law of May 31, then, the Party of Order seemed to have made its rule doubly safe, by handing both the election of the National Assembly and the election of the President of the Republic over to the settled part of society.¹⁰¹

Bonaparte's message to the Assembly was dated October 31, 1849; the new ministry was named on November 1. ↩
Under the July Monarchy every newspaper had to name a gérant, a manager who answered in law for what the paper printed. He was often a mere figurehead, an homme de paille or "man of straw," standing in for the real editors. ↩
In a letter of August 1849 to his aide-de-camp Edgar Ney, a son of Napoleon's Marshal Ney, then serving with the French army in Rome, Bonaparte urged Pope Pius IX, whom French troops had just restored to power, to grant an amnesty and a liberal government. Victor Hugo cited the letter in the debate on the credits for the Roman expedition in October 1849. ↩
The civil list is the sum voted to a head of state for his household and his personal expenses. ↩
General Alphonse d'Hautpoul (1789–1865) was minister of war in the new government. Achille Fould (1800–1867) was a Paris banker; he became minister of finance in November 1849. Pierre Carlier was prefect of police of Paris from November 1849 until shortly before the coup of 1851. ↩
Des idées napoléoniennes, "On Napoleonic Ideas," is the title of a book Louis Bonaparte published in 1839, setting out his uncle's political program as he understood it. ↩
The tax on wine and other drinks, much hated by the people, had been voted out by the Constituent Assembly; the Legislative Assembly restored it in December 1849. "Eclectic philosophy" was the school of Victor Cousin, the official philosophy of the French universities under Louis Philippe. ↩
Each department was run by a prefect appointed from Paris. ↩
Paul de Flotte (1817–1860), a naval officer, had been arrested after fighting with the insurgents in June 1848; he later died fighting with Garibaldi in southern Italy. General Jean-Ernest de La Hitte was Bonaparte's minister of foreign affairs. ↩
Victor, duc de Broglie (1785–1870), and Louis-Mathieu, comte Molé (1781–1855), had both been prime ministers under Louis Philippe. "The burgraves" was the nickname of the Party of Order's elder leaders, taken from Victor Hugo's play Les Burgraves (1843), about aged robber knights in their castles on the Rhine. ↩
Jules Baroche (1802–1870), a lawyer, became minister of the interior in March 1850. ↩
François Vidal (1814–1872) was a socialist economist. Eugène Sue (1804–1857) was the author of popular novels of Paris life, The Mysteries of Paris above all, written with a strong feeling for the sufferings of the poor; he was elected for Paris in April 1850. Marx's German, "sie schickte den 10. März in den April," plays on the expression "to send someone into April," to make an April fool of him. ↩
The seventeen were the committee of Party of Order leaders who drafted the electoral law of May 31, 1850. Léon Faucher (1803–1854), an economist, had been minister of the interior in the Barrot ministry in 1849. ↩
The press law of July 1850 raised the security deposit newspapers had to lodge with the state and put a stamp tax on every copy. La Presse was a cheap Paris daily founded in 1836 by Émile de Girardin. ↩
Article 47 of the constitution actually names the five candidates with the most votes, not three. It also required the winner to have more than half of the votes cast as well as at least two million. ↩

V

The fight between the National Assembly and Bonaparte broke out again the moment the revolutionary crisis had been weathered and universal suffrage abolished.

The constitution had fixed Bonaparte's salary at 600,000 francs. Barely half a year after moving in, he'd managed to double it: Odilon Barrot bullied the Constituent Assembly into granting a yearly supplement of another 600,000 francs for so-called entertainment expenses. After June 13 Bonaparte had dropped hints about wanting more of the same, but this time Barrot turned a deaf ear. Now, after May 31, he jumped at the chance and had his ministers ask the National Assembly for a civil list of three million. A long life as a wandering adventurer had grown him the most sensitive feelers for the weak moments when he could squeeze money out of his bourgeois. What he practiced was plain blackmail. The National Assembly had violated the sovereignty of the people with his help and with his knowledge. Unless it opened its purse and bought his silence at three million a year, he threatened, he would denounce its crime to the court of the people. It had robbed three million Frenchmen of the vote. For every Frenchman it had taken out of circulation, he wanted one franc in good circulating coin: exactly three million francs. He, the chosen of six million, was claiming damages for the votes he had been cheated of after the fact. The Assembly's committee showed the pushy fellow the door. The Bonapartist press made threats. Could the National Assembly break with the President of the Republic at the very moment when it had broken, in principle and for good, with the mass of the nation? It did throw out the annual civil list, but it granted a one-time payment of 2,160,000 francs. That made it guilty of a double weakness: it granted the money, and in the same breath showed by its irritation that it granted it only grudgingly. We shall see later what Bonaparte needed the money for. This irritating little afterpiece followed hard on the heels of the abolition of universal suffrage, and in it Bonaparte swapped the humble posture he had struck during the crisis of March and April for open insolence toward the parliament that had usurped the people's power; after it the National Assembly adjourned for three months, from August 11 to November 11. In its place it left behind a standing commission of 18 members, with not a single Bonapartist among them, though there were a few moderate republicans. The standing commission of 1849 had been made up of nobody but men of Order and Bonapartists. Back then, though, the Party of Order was declaring itself in permanent session against the revolution; this time the parliamentary republic was declaring itself in permanent session against the President. After the law of May 31, he was the only rival the Party of Order had left to face.

When the National Assembly met again in November 1850, it looked as if the petty skirmishing it had carried on with the President until then was bound to give way to a great battle with no quarter given, a fight to the death between the two powers.

As in 1849, the Party of Order had broken up during this year's parliamentary holidays into its separate factions, each busy with its own schemes for restoring a king, schemes that the death of Louis Philippe had given fresh fuel. The Legitimist king, Henri V, had even named a regular ministry of his own, which sat in Paris and included members of the standing commission. Bonaparte, for his part, therefore had every right to go touring the French departments himself and, depending on the mood of the town he was gracing with his presence, to let his own restoration plans slip out, now more slyly, now more openly, and drum up votes for himself. On these trips, which the great official Moniteur and Bonaparte's own little private Moniteurs naturally had to celebrate as triumphal processions, he was always escorted by members of the Society of December 10.¹⁰²

This society dates from 1849. Under the pretext of founding a charity, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each run by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole outfit. Alongside broken-down rakes of doubtful income and doubtful origin, alongside the rotten and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, there were vagrants, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, runaway galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand men, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, scribblers, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars: in a word, the whole shapeless, disintegrated mass, tossed this way and that, that the French call la bohème. Out of this element, his own kind of people, Bonaparte built the core of the Society of December 10. A "benevolent society" — in the sense that all its members, like Bonaparte himself, felt the need to be benevolent to themselves at the expense of the working nation.¹⁰³^,¹⁰⁴

This Bonaparte, who sets himself up as chief of the lumpenproletariat, who finds only here, in mass form, the interests he pursues for himself, who sees in this scum, this offal, this refuse of every class the one class he can count on without reservation, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. A crafty old rake, he looks on the historical life of nations and their grand affairs of state as comedy in the crudest sense of the word: a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words and poses serve only as a mask for the shabbiest rascality. That is how it went on his march into Strasbourg, where a trained Swiss vulture stood in for the Napoleonic eagle. For his landing at Boulogne he stuffed a few London footmen into French uniforms, and they played the army. In his Society of December 10 he gathers 10,000 ragamuffins whose job is to play the people, the way Bottom the weaver plays the lion. At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself was putting on a full-scale comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without breaking a single one of the pedantic rules of French dramatic etiquette, and itself half taken in, half convinced, by the solemnity of its own grand affairs of state, the adventurer who took the comedy flatly as comedy was bound to win. Only when he has disposed of his solemn opponent, only when he begins to take his imperial role in earnest and fancies that behind the Napoleonic mask he is playing the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own outlook on the world: the clown who keeps a straight face, who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his own comedy for world history. What the National Workshops were to the socialist workers, and the Mobile Guard to the bourgeois republicans, the Society of December 10 was to Bonaparte: his own private party militia. On his tours its detachments, packed onto the railway, had to improvise an audience for him, put on a show of public enthusiasm, howl vive l'Empereur, insult the republicans and beat them up, all under police protection, of course. When he traveled back to Paris they had to form the advance guard, getting in ahead of counterdemonstrations or breaking them up. The Society of December 10 belonged to him; it was his work, his very own idea. Whatever else he lays hands on is handed to him by the force of circumstances; whatever else he does, circumstances do for him, or else he is content to copy what others have done. But Bonaparte out in front of the citizens, mouthing the official phrases of order, religion, family and property, with the secret society of the Schufterles and Spiegelbergs at his back, the society of disorder, prostitution and theft: that is Bonaparte himself as an original author, and the history of the Society of December 10 is his own history.¹⁰⁵^,¹⁰⁶^,¹⁰⁷^,¹⁰⁸

Now it had happened, by way of exception, that some representatives of the people who belonged to the Party of Order had found themselves under the cudgels of the December gang. Worse still. Yon, the police commissioner assigned to the National Assembly and charged with guarding its safety, reported to the standing commission, on the word of a certain Allais, that one section of the gang had resolved to murder General Changarnier and Dupin, the president of the National Assembly, and had already picked the men to do it. You can imagine Monsieur Dupin's fright. A parliamentary inquiry into the Society of December 10, which would mean dragging Bonaparte's secret world into the daylight, seemed impossible to avoid. Just before the National Assembly reconvened, Bonaparte prudently dissolved his society, on paper only, of course, for as late as the end of 1851 the prefect of police, Carlier, was still urging him in a long memorandum to break up the December gang for real, and getting nowhere.¹⁰⁹

The Society of December 10 was to stay Bonaparte's private army until he managed to turn the public army into a Society of December 10. He made his first try at this shortly after the National Assembly adjourned, and with the very money he had just wrung out of it. Being a fatalist, he lives in the conviction that there are certain higher powers which man, and the soldier above all, cannot resist. At the top of the list of these powers he puts cigars and champagne, cold chicken and garlic sausage. He therefore began by treating officers and sergeants in the rooms of the Elysée to cigars and champagne, cold chicken and garlic sausage. On October 3 he repeated this maneuver with the massed troops at the review of Saint-Maur, and on October 10 the same maneuver on a still grander scale at the army review at Satory. The uncle had remembered Alexander's campaigns in Asia; the nephew remembered the conquering march of Bacchus through the same land. Alexander was a demigod, to be sure, but Bacchus was a god, and the patron god of the Society of December 10 into the bargain.¹¹⁰

After the review of October 3, the standing commission summoned the minister of war, d'Hautpoul, to appear before it. He promised that breaches of discipline like that would not happen again. We know how Bonaparte kept d'Hautpoul's word on October 10. At both reviews Changarnier had been in command, as commander in chief of the army of Paris. He was at the same time a member of the standing commission, chief of the National Guard, the "savior" of January 29 and June 13, the "bulwark of society," the Party of Order's candidate for the presidency, and the man two monarchies hoped would be their Monck. He had never until now admitted that he answered to the minister of war; he had always openly mocked the republican constitution, and had treated Bonaparte with a lordly, two-edged condescension. Now he turned into a zealot for discipline against the minister of war and for the constitution against Bonaparte. On October 10 part of the cavalry raised the shout "Vive Napoléon! Vivent les saucissons!" ("Long live Napoleon, long live the sausages"), but Changarnier arranged that the infantry at least, marching past under the command of his friend Neumayer, should keep an icy silence. As punishment the minister of war, at Bonaparte's prompting, relieved General Neumayer of his post in Paris, on the pretext of making him commander in chief of the 14th and 15th military divisions; Neumayer refused the transfer and so had to resign. Changarnier, for his part, published an order of the day on November 2 that forbade the troops to indulge in political shouts or demonstrations of any kind while under arms. The Elysée's papers attacked Changarnier and the Party of Order's papers attacked Bonaparte; the standing commission met again and again in secret session, and again and again someone moved that it declare the fatherland in danger; the army seemed split into two hostile camps with two hostile general staffs, one in the Elysée, where Bonaparte lived, the other in the Tuileries, where Changarnier had his quarters. All it seemed to need was for the National Assembly to meet, and the signal for battle would sound. The French public saw this friction between Bonaparte and Changarnier much as an English journalist did, who summed it up like this: "The political housemaids of France are sweeping away the glowing lava of the revolution with old brooms, and scolding each other while they do the job."¹¹¹^,¹¹²

Meanwhile Bonaparte hurried to dismiss d'Hautpoul as minister of war, packed him off to Algiers in a tearing hurry, and appointed General Schramm minister of war in his place. On November 12 he sent the National Assembly a message of American long-windedness: crammed with details, smelling of order, hungry for reconciliation, resigned to the constitution, and dealing with everything under the sun except the burning questions of the moment. As if in passing, he let drop that under the express terms of the constitution the President alone had the army at his disposal. The message closed with these high-minded vows:¹¹³

"France wants tranquility above all else... Bound only by an oath, I shall keep within the narrow limits it has drawn for me... As for me, elected by the people and owing my power to them alone, I shall always bow to their will when it is lawfully expressed. If you resolve at this session to revise the constitution, a constituent assembly will settle the position of the executive power. If not, the people will solemnly announce their decision in 1852. But whatever the solutions of the future may be, let us come to an understanding, so that passion, surprise or violence may never decide the fate of a great nation... What claims my attention above all is not the question of who will govern France in 1852, but how to use the time at my disposal so that the interval passes without agitation or disturbance. I have opened my heart to you sincerely. You will answer my frankness with your trust, my good intentions with your cooperation, and God will do the rest."

The respectable, hypocritically moderate, virtuously commonplace language of the bourgeoisie shows its deepest meaning in the mouth of the autocrat of the Society of December 10, the picnic hero of Saint-Maur and Satory.

The burgraves of the Party of Order weren't fooled for a moment about how much trust this heart-to-heart deserved. They had long since grown blasé about oaths, they counted veterans and virtuosos of political perjury in their own ranks, and they hadn't missed the passage about the army. They noticed with annoyance that, in its long-winded list of recently passed laws, the message passed over the most important law of all, the electoral law, in pointed silence, and that if the constitution wasn't revised it left the election of the President in 1852 to the people. The electoral law was the ball and chain on the Party of Order's feet, which stopped it from walking, let alone charging! Besides, by officially dissolving the Society of December 10 and dismissing the minister of war d'Hautpoul, Bonaparte had sacrificed the scapegoats on the altar of the fatherland with his own hand and blunted the edge of the expected collision. Finally, the Party of Order itself was nervously trying to dodge, soften and cover up any decisive conflict with the executive power. Afraid of losing what they had won from the revolution, they let their rival walk off with the fruits of it. "France wants tranquility above all else." That is what the Party of Order had been shouting at the revolution since February, and that is what Bonaparte's message now shouted at the Party of Order. "France wants tranquility above all else." Bonaparte was doing things that pointed straight toward usurpation, but if the Party of Order raised an outcry over them and put a hypochondriac's reading on them, the Party of Order was the one causing "unrest." The sausages of Satory were as quiet as mice so long as nobody talked about them. "France wants tranquility above all else." What Bonaparte demanded, then, was to be left in tranquility to do as he pleased, and the parliamentary party was paralyzed by a double fear: the fear of conjuring up revolutionary unrest again, and the fear of looking like the troublemaker itself in the eyes of its own class, the bourgeoisie. Since France wanted tranquility above all else, the Party of Order didn't dare answer "war" after Bonaparte had said "peace" in his message. The public, which had been looking forward to some grand scandalous scenes when the National Assembly opened, was cheated of its fun. The opposition deputies who demanded that the minutes of the standing commission on the October events be laid before the house were voted down by the majority. On principle, the Assembly ran away from every debate that might stir things up. Its work in November and December 1850 was a bore.

Finally, toward the end of December, a guerrilla war began over particular prerogatives of parliament. Once the bourgeoisie had settled the class struggle for the time being by abolishing universal suffrage, the movement sank into the swamp of petty squabbles over the prerogatives of the two powers.

A court judgment had been obtained against Mauguin, one of the people's representatives, for debt. When the president of the court asked what to do, the minister of justice, Rouher, declared that a warrant for the debtor's arrest should be made out without further ado. Mauguin was duly thrown into the debtors' prison. The National Assembly flared up when it heard of this outrage. It not only ordered his immediate release, but had its clerk fetch him out of Clichy by force that same evening. Still, to prove its faith in the sacredness of private property, and with the idea at the back of its mind of opening a refuge for Montagnards who became a nuisance, it declared that representatives of the people could be imprisoned for debt, provided its own permission was asked first. It forgot to decree that the President could be locked up for debt as well. With that it tore away the last shred of the inviolability that had surrounded its own members.¹¹⁴

You will remember that the police commissioner Yon, on the word of a certain Allais, had denounced a section of the December gang for plotting to murder Dupin and Changarnier. At the very first sitting, with this in mind, the quaestors proposed that the Assembly set up its own parliamentary police, paid out of the National Assembly's private budget and wholly independent of the prefect of police. The minister of the interior, Baroche, had protested against this trespass on his territory. A miserable compromise was then struck: the Assembly's police commissioner was to be paid out of its private budget and appointed and dismissed by its quaestors, but only after first coming to an agreement with the minister of the interior. In the meantime the government had prosecuted Allais, and in court it was easy to present his statements as a hoax, and to let the public prosecutor cast a ridiculous light on Dupin, Changarnier, Yon and the whole National Assembly. Now, on December 29, Minister Baroche writes to Dupin demanding that Yon be dismissed. The bureau of the National Assembly decides to keep Yon in his post, but the National Assembly, scared by its own violence in the Mauguin affair, and used to taking two blows from the executive power for every one it has dared to strike, won't back its bureau. It fires Yon as a reward for his zeal in its service, and in doing so robs itself of a parliamentary prerogative it couldn't do without against a man who doesn't decide by night in order to act by day, but decides by day and acts by night.¹¹⁵

We have seen how, through November and December, the National Assembly ducked its fight with the executive power whenever a great and telling occasion turned up, and smothered it. Now we see it forced to take the fight up over the pettiest of pretexts. In the Mauguin affair it confirms, in principle, that the people's representatives may be locked up for debt, but it keeps the right to apply this only to representatives it dislikes, and it squabbles with the minister of justice over this disgraceful privilege. Instead of using the alleged murder plot to open an inquiry into the Society of December 10 and expose Bonaparte, beyond all rescue, before France and Europe, in his true shape as the chief of the Paris lumpenproletariat, it lets the clash sink to the point where all that is left at issue between it and the minister of the interior is whose job it is to appoint and dismiss a police commissioner. Throughout this whole period, then, we see the Party of Order, trapped by its own ambiguous position, letting its struggle with the executive power fizzle out and crumble into petty quarrels over jurisdiction, chicanery, legal hairsplitting and boundary disputes, and making the most absurd questions of form the whole content of its activity. It doesn't dare take up the fight at the moment when the fight means something in principle, when the executive power has really given itself away and the cause of the National Assembly would be the cause of the nation. That would mean handing the nation its marching orders, and there is nothing it fears more than a nation on the move. On such occasions, therefore, it throws out the Montagne's motions and moves on to the next business. Once the big question has been dropped, the executive power calmly waits for the moment when it can bring the quarrel back over some small, trivial matter, when it is of interest, so to speak, only to the parish pump of parliament. Then the Party of Order's pent-up fury breaks loose, then it tears the curtain away from the wings, then it denounces the President, then it declares the republic in danger; but then its high drama looks absurd as well, and the cause of the fight looks like a hypocritical pretext, or not worth fighting over at all. The parliamentary storm becomes a storm in a teacup, the struggle an intrigue, the clash a scandal. The revolutionary classes gloat over the National Assembly's humiliation, for they are just as keen on its parliamentary prerogatives as that Assembly is on public liberties; meanwhile the bourgeoisie outside parliament can't understand how the bourgeoisie inside parliament can waste its time on such petty squabbles and put the public peace at risk with such wretched rivalries with the President. It is baffled by a strategy that makes peace at the very moment the whole world expects a battle, and attacks at the very moment the whole world believes peace has been made.

On December 20 Pascal Duprat questioned the minister of the interior about the gold-bar lottery. This lottery was a "daughter of Elysium": Bonaparte and his faithful had brought it into the world, and Carlier, the prefect of police, had taken it under his official protection, although French law forbade every lottery except raffles for charity. Seven million tickets at a franc apiece, the profits supposedly meant for shipping the vagabonds of Paris off to California. On the one hand, golden dreams were to drive out the socialist dreams of the Paris proletariat, and the tempting chance of the jackpot was to drive out the doctrinaire right to work. The Paris workers, of course, didn't recognize, in the glitter of the California gold bars, the drab francs that were being coaxed out of their own pockets. But at bottom the whole thing was a plain swindle. The vagabonds who wanted to open California gold mines without taking the trouble to leave Paris were Bonaparte himself and his debt-ridden Round Table. The three million the National Assembly had granted had been squandered, and the till had to be filled again one way or another. Bonaparte had already tried, in vain, opening a national subscription to build so-called cités ouvrières, housing estates for workers, with his own name heading the list for a handsome sum. The hard-hearted bourgeois waited suspiciously for him to pay in his share, and since naturally he never did, the speculation in socialist castles in the air fell flat on its face. The gold bars pulled better. Bonaparte and his partners weren't content with pocketing part of what the seven million brought in over and above the bars to be raffled: they printed fake tickets; they issued ten, fifteen, even twenty tickets with the same number. A financial operation in the true spirit of the Society of December 10! Here the National Assembly faced not the fictitious President of the Republic but Bonaparte in the flesh. Here it could catch him red-handed, in conflict not with the constitution but with the Code pénal, the criminal code. If it moved on to the next business after Duprat's question, this was not only because Girardin's motion that it declare itself "satisfied" reminded the Party of Order of its own systematic corruption. The bourgeois, and above all the bourgeois puffed up into a statesman, makes up for his practical meanness with high-flown theory. As a statesman he becomes a higher being, like the state power that stands against him, and a higher being may only be fought in a higher, consecrated manner.¹¹⁶^,¹¹⁷^,¹¹⁸^,¹¹⁹

Bonaparte, being a bohemian, a princely lumpenproletarian, had one advantage over the scoundrelly bourgeois: he could fight dirty. Now that the Assembly itself had led him by the hand across the slippery ground of the military banquets, the reviews, the Society of December 10 and finally the Code pénal, he saw that the moment had come to switch from apparent defense to attack. Along the way the National Assembly vented its growling displeasure by handing out little defeats to the minister of justice, the minister of war, the minister of the navy and the minister of finance. They didn't bother him much. He not only stopped the ministers from resigning, and so from admitting that the executive power was subject to parliament; he could now finish what he had begun during the National Assembly's recess: prying the military power loose from parliament, the dismissal of Changarnier.

A paper of the Elysée published an order of the day supposedly issued in May to the First Military Division, and so coming from Changarnier, in which the officers were advised, in case of a rising, to give no quarter to traitors in their own ranks, to shoot them on the spot, and to refuse the National Assembly its troops if it should requisition them. On January 3, 1851, the cabinet was questioned about this order of the day. To look into the matter it asks for time to think it over: first three months, then a week, finally just twenty-four hours. The Assembly insists on an explanation at once. Changarnier rises and declares that this order of the day never existed. He adds that he will always hurry to obey the demands of the National Assembly, and that if it comes to a clash it can count on him. The Assembly greets his declaration with indescribable applause and decrees him a vote of confidence. With that it abdicates: by putting itself under the private protection of a general, it decrees its own powerlessness and the omnipotence of the army; but the general is fooling himself if he puts at its disposal, against Bonaparte, a power he holds only as a fief from that same Bonaparte, and if he expects protection in return from this parliament, from a protégé that needs protecting itself. Changarnier, though, believes in the mysterious power the bourgeoisie had endowed him with since January 29, 1849. He takes himself for a third power alongside the other two powers of the state. He shares the fate of the other heroes, or rather saints, of this epoch, whose greatness consists precisely in the high opinion their party has an interest in drumming up for them, and who shrink into everyday figures as soon as circumstances invite them to work miracles. Unbelief, in general, is the mortal enemy of these supposed heroes and real saints. Hence their dignified moral outrage at wits and scoffers with no enthusiasm in them.

That same evening the ministers were summoned to the Elysée. Bonaparte presses for Changarnier's dismissal, five ministers refuse to sign it, the Moniteur announces a ministerial crisis, and the Party of Order's press threatens to raise a parliamentary army under Changarnier's command. The Party of Order had the constitutional authority for such a step. It only had to make Changarnier President of the National Assembly and requisition whatever body of troops it liked for its own safety. It could do this all the more safely because Changarnier really was still at the head of the army and of the Paris National Guard, and was only lying in wait to be requisitioned, army and all. The Bonapartist press didn't yet even dare question the National Assembly's right to requisition troops directly, a legal scruple that, as things stood, held out no hope of success. That the army would have obeyed the National Assembly's orders is probable, considering that Bonaparte had to hunt through the whole of Paris for eight days before he finally found two generals — Baraguey d'Hilliers and Saint-Jean d'Angély — willing to countersign Changarnier's dismissal. Whether the Party of Order would have found the votes for such a resolution, in its own ranks and in parliament, is more than doubtful, considering that eight days later 286 votes broke away from it, and that the Montagne turned down a similar proposal as late as December 1851, in the last hour of decision. Still, the burgraves might perhaps even now have swept the mass of their party along to an act of heroism, the kind of heroism that consists in feeling safe behind a forest of bayonets and accepting the services of an army that has deserted to your camp. Instead, on the evening of January 6, the honorable burgraves went to the Elysée to talk Bonaparte out of dismissing Changarnier with statesmanlike turns of phrase and misgivings. When you try to persuade someone, you recognize him as master of the situation. Emboldened by this visit, Bonaparte names a new ministry on January 12, in which the leaders of the old one, Fould and Baroche, stay on. Saint-Jean d'Angély becomes minister of war, the Moniteur prints the decree dismissing Changarnier, and his command is divided between Baraguey d'Hilliers, who gets the First Military Division, and Perrot, who gets the National Guard. The bulwark of society has been sacked, and if not a tile falls off the roof over it, the prices on the stock exchange go up instead.¹²⁰^,¹²¹

By pushing away the army that offered itself in the person of Changarnier, and so handing it over to the President for good, the Party of Order declares that the bourgeoisie has lost its calling to rule. There was no longer any such thing as a parliamentary ministry. Now that the Party had lost its grip on the army and the National Guard as well, what means of force was left to it for upholding, both at once, parliament's usurped power over the people and its constitutional power against the President? None. All it had left was to appeal to principles without force, principles it had itself always treated as general rules you prescribe to other people so that you can move about all the more freely yourself. With the dismissal of Changarnier, with the military power falling into Bonaparte's lap, the first stretch of the period we are looking at comes to an end: the period of struggle between the Party of Order and the executive power. War between the two powers is now openly declared and openly waged, but only after the Party of Order has lost its weapons and its soldiers. Without a ministry, without an army, without the people, without public opinion, no longer, since its electoral law of May 31, the representative of the sovereign nation, sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans everything, the National Assembly had gradually turned into an old French parlement, which has to leave action to the government and content itself with growling remonstrances after the event.¹²²

The Party of Order greets the new ministry with a storm of indignation. General Bedeau reminds the Assembly how mild the standing commission had been during the recess, and how very considerate it was to give up publishing its minutes. Now the minister of the interior himself insists on publishing those minutes, which by now, naturally, have gone flat as stale water; they reveal no new fact and fall on a jaded public without the slightest effect. On Rémusat's motion the National Assembly withdraws into its bureaux, the sections it divided into for committee work, and appoints a "Committee on Extraordinary Measures." Paris stays all the more firmly in the rut of its everyday order because trade is booming at this moment, the factories are busy, grain prices are low, food is plentiful and the savings banks take in new deposits every day. The "extraordinary measures" that parliament had announced with so much noise fizzle out on January 18 in a vote of no confidence in the ministers, without General Changarnier so much as being mentioned. The Party of Order had to word its vote that way to make sure of the republicans' votes, since of all the ministry's measures the republicans approved of just one, the dismissal of Changarnier, while the Party of Order really couldn't find fault with the ministry's other acts, which it had dictated itself.¹²³

The vote of no confidence of January 18 was carried by 415 votes against 286. It was carried, then, only by a coalition of the out-and-out Legitimists and Orleanists with the pure republicans and the Montagne. It proved that in its conflicts with Bonaparte the Party of Order had lost not only the ministry, not only the army, but its own independent parliamentary majority too: a troop of representatives had deserted its camp, out of a fanatical love of compromise, out of fear of the fight, out of weariness, out of family feeling for the state salaries of their blood relations, out of speculation on ministerial posts falling vacant (Odilon Barrot), out of the flat egoism that always makes the ordinary bourgeois ready to sacrifice the general interest of his class to this or that private motive. The Bonapartist representatives had belonged to the Party of Order from the start only for the fight against the revolution. The head of the Catholic party, Montalembert, was already throwing his influence onto Bonaparte's side of the scales, because he had given up hope that the parliamentary party could survive. Finally, the leaders of the party, Thiers and Berryer, the Orleanist and the Legitimist, were forced to proclaim themselves republicans openly, to confess that their hearts were royalist but their heads republican, and that the parliamentary republic was the only possible form for the rule of the bourgeoisie as a whole. They were thus forced to brand the restoration schemes they went on tirelessly pursuing behind parliament's back, before the eyes of the bourgeois class itself, as an intrigue as dangerous as it was brainless.¹²⁴

The vote of no confidence of January 18 hit the ministers and not the President. But it was the President, and not the ministry, who had dismissed Changarnier. Should the Party of Order impeach Bonaparte himself? For his hankering after a restoration? That only matched their own. For his conspiring at the military reviews and in the Society of December 10? They had buried those subjects long ago under plain motions to move on to the next business. For dismissing the hero of January 29 and June 13, the man who in May 1850 had threatened to set Paris on fire at all four corners if there was a riot? Their allies, the Montagne and Cavaignac, wouldn't even let them prop up the fallen bulwark of society with an official expression of sympathy. They themselves couldn't deny that the constitution gave the President the power to dismiss a general. They raged only because he had made an unparliamentary use of his constitutional right. Hadn't they made an unconstitutional use of their parliamentary prerogative all along, above all in abolishing universal suffrage? They were reduced, then, to moving strictly within the bounds of parliament. These men had destroyed every condition of parliamentary power with their own hands, and in their struggle with the other classes they had no choice but to destroy them; yet they still took their parliamentary victories for victories, and believed they were hitting the President when they beat his ministers. For that it took a peculiar disease, the one that has been raging across the whole continent since 1848: parliamentary cretinism, which holds its victims spellbound in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rough world outside. All they did was give him the chance to humiliate the National Assembly afresh in the eyes of the nation. On January 20 the Moniteur announced that the resignation of the entire ministry had been accepted. No parliamentary party had a majority any longer, Bonaparte claimed, as the vote of January 18, that fruit of the coalition between the Montagne and the royalists, proved; and on that pretext, and to wait for a new majority to form, he named a so-called transitional ministry, not one of whose members sat in parliament: thoroughly unknown and insignificant individuals, all of them, a ministry of mere clerks and copyists. The Party of Order could now wear itself out playing games with these puppets; the executive power no longer thought it worth the trouble to be seriously represented in the National Assembly. The more his ministers were pure walk-on extras, the more visibly Bonaparte gathered the whole executive power into his own person, and the freer his hand to exploit it for his own ends.¹²⁵^,¹²⁶

The Party of Order, in coalition with the Montagne, took its revenge by throwing out the presidential grant of 1,800,000 francs, which the chief of the Society of December 10 had made his ministerial clerks bring in. This time a majority of only 102 votes decided it, so since January 18 another 27 votes had fallen away: the Party of Order was falling apart as it went. To leave nobody in doubt for a moment about what its coalition with the Montagne meant, it refused at the same time even to consider a motion, signed by 189 members of the Montagne, for a general amnesty of political offenders. It was enough for the minister of the interior, one Vaïsse, to declare that the calm was only on the surface; that in secret there was great agitation; that in secret societies were organizing everywhere; that the democratic papers were getting ready to come out again; that the reports from the departments were unfavorable; that the refugees in Geneva were running a conspiracy by way of Lyon through the whole of southern France; that France stood on the brink of an industrial and commercial crisis; that the manufacturers of Roubaix had cut working hours; that the prisoners of Belle-Île had mutinied — it was enough for a mere Vaïsse to conjure up the red specter, and the Party of Order threw out without debate a motion that was bound to win the National Assembly enormous popularity and drive Bonaparte back into its arms. Instead of letting the executive power scare it with the prospect of fresh disturbances, it ought rather to have given the class struggle a little room to play in, so as to keep the executive dependent on itself. But it didn't feel up to the job of playing with fire.¹²⁷^,¹²⁸^,¹²⁹

Meanwhile the so-called transitional ministry vegetated on until the middle of April. Bonaparte wore out the National Assembly and made fools of its members with one new ministerial combination after another. Now he seemed to want to form a republican ministry with Lamartine and Billault, now a parliamentary one with the inevitable Odilon Barrot, whose name must never be missing when a dupe is needed, now a Legitimist one with Vatimesnil and Benoist d'Azy, now an Orleanist one with Maleville. While he keeps the different factions of the Party of Order on edge against one another and frightens them all with the prospect of a republican ministry and the restoration of universal suffrage that would then be unavoidable, he convinces the bourgeoisie at the same time that his sincere efforts to form a parliamentary ministry are being wrecked by the irreconcilable royalist factions. But the bourgeoisie shouted all the louder for a "strong government," and found it all the less forgivable to leave France "without an administration," as a general commercial crisis now seemed to be on the march and was recruiting for socialism in the towns, just as the ruinously low price of grain did in the countryside. Trade grew slacker by the day, and the number of idle hands grew visibly; in Paris at least 10,000 workers were without bread, and in Rouen, Mulhouse, Lyon, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Saint-Étienne, Elbeuf and elsewhere countless factories stood still. Under these circumstances Bonaparte could venture, on April 11, to restore the ministry of January 18: Messrs. Rouher, Fould, Baroche and company, reinforced by Monsieur Léon Faucher, whom the Constituent Assembly in its last days had branded with a vote of no confidence, unanimously except for five ministers' votes, for spreading false telegraphic dispatches. The National Assembly, then, had won a victory over the ministry on January 18, and had fought Bonaparte for three months, just so that on April 11 Fould and Baroche could take the Puritan Faucher into their ministerial league as a third partner.¹³⁰^,¹³¹^,¹³²

In November 1849 Bonaparte had made do with an unparliamentary ministry, in January 1851 with an extra-parliamentary one. On April 11 he felt strong enough to form an antiparliamentary ministry, which harmoniously combined in itself the votes of no confidence of both assemblies, the Constituent and the Legislative, the republican and the royalist. This ladder of ministries was the thermometer on which parliament could read the decline of its own vital heat. By the end of April that heat had sunk so low that Persigny, at a private meeting, could invite Changarnier to come over to the President's camp. Bonaparte, Persigny assured him, regarded the influence of the National Assembly as completely wiped out, and the proclamation was already lying ready, to be published after the coup d'état he was forever intending and that, as luck would have it, had just been put off once again. Changarnier passed the death notice on to the leaders of the Party of Order, but who believes a bedbug's bite can kill? And parliament, beaten, broken up and moribund as it was, couldn't bring itself to see its duel with the grotesque chief of the Society of December 10 as anything but a duel with a bedbug. But Bonaparte answered the Party of Order as Agesilaus answered King Agis: "I seem an ant to you, but one day I shall be a lion."¹³³^,¹³⁴

Louis Philippe died at Claremont on August 26, 1850. In the summer and early autumn of 1850 Bonaparte made a series of official journeys through the provinces. ↩
The Society of December 10, named after the day of Bonaparte's election as President in 1848, was founded in 1849 as a supposed charitable society. In fact it was Bonaparte's private following, organized to cheer him in public and to rough up his opponents. ↩
The lazzaroni were the poorest street people of Naples, who lived from odd jobs and begging. La bohème, "Bohemia," was the French name for the drifting world of people with no settled place in society, from penniless artists to petty crooks. ↩
The phrase sans phrase, French for "without phrases," means plain, unvarnished, with nothing added. ↩
"Grand affairs of state" stands for Marx's German theater term Haupt- und Staatsaktionen, the name of the bombastic plays about kings, battles and court intrigues put on by the traveling German companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ↩
Louis Bonaparte twice tried to seize power before 1848. On October 30, 1836, he tried to win over the garrison of Strasbourg; on August 6, 1840, he landed at Boulogne with a small band of followers brought over from England. Both attempts collapsed within hours. After Boulogne he was sentenced to life imprisonment in the fortress of Ham, from which he escaped in 1846. The tame eagle that Marx sets at Strasbourg is usually told of the Boulogne landing. ↩
Schufterle and Spiegelberg are two of the most villainous members of the robber band in Friedrich Schiller's play The Robbers (1781). ↩
André Dupin (1783–1865), a lawyer and veteran politician, was president of the Legislative Assembly from 1849 to 1851. ↩
Saint-Maur, just east of Paris, and the plateau of Satory, near Versailles, were parade grounds where the army held its reviews. ↩
George Monck (1608–1670) was the English general who brought about the return of the Stuart king Charles II in 1660, ending the republic that followed Cromwell. The royalists of both camps, Legitimist and Orleanist, hoped Changarnier would do the same for their king. ↩
"The fatherland in danger" (la patrie en danger) echoes the emergency decree of the Legislative Assembly of July 1792, which called the nation to arms against the invading armies of Austria and Prussia. ↩
General Jean-Paul Schramm was minister of war from October 1850 to January 1851. The yearly messages of American presidents to Congress were known for their length. ↩
François Mauguin was a lawyer and a deputy of long standing. Eugène Rouher (1814–1884), a lawyer, was minister of justice for most of the years 1849 to 1851 and later one of the leading ministers of the Second Empire. ↩
The bureau was the Assembly's governing board: its president, vice-presidents and secretaries. ↩
Pascal Duprat (1815–1885) was a republican journalist and deputy. On December 20, 1850, he put a formal question (an "interpellation") to the government about the lottery. ↩
The Lottery of the Gold Bars was authorized in 1850. Its prizes were bars of gold, and its proceeds were said to be meant for sending poor Parisians as emigrants to California, where the gold rush had begun in 1848. ↩
"Daughter of Elysium" comes from the opening of Friedrich Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy" (1785): "Joy, bright spark of the gods, daughter of Elysium." Marx's joke is that the lottery was a child of the Elysée, Bonaparte's residence. ↩
Under Louis Philippe, the opposition nicknamed Guizot's loyal government majority in the Chamber of Deputies "les satisfaits," "the satisfied." A motion that the Assembly was "satisfied" with a minister's answer closed a question without further action. ↩
Changarnier kept his seat as a deputy. ↩
Achille Baraguey d'Hilliers (1795–1878) was a general and deputy of the Party of Order; he later became a marshal of France. Auguste Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'Angély (1794–1870), also a general, was minister of war for a few weeks in January 1851 and later a marshal too. Perrot was a general who now took command of the National Guard of Paris. ↩
The parlements of France before 1789 were not elected assemblies but high law courts. They registered the king's edicts and could send him "remonstrances" objecting to them, but the king could override them. ↩
Charles de Rémusat (1797–1875), a writer and a leading Orleanist, had been minister of the interior under Louis Philippe in 1840, in a ministry headed by Thiers. ↩
Charles de Montalembert (1810–1870), a writer and orator, led the Catholic party in the Assembly. He backed Bonaparte's coup at first and broke with him soon afterward. ↩
"Cretinism" was then the medical name for a condition of stunted bodily and mental growth. ↩
The "transitional ministry" Bonaparte named in January 1851 was made up of senior officials and generals, not deputies. It stayed in office until April 1851. ↩
The grant (dotation) of 1,800,000 francs was an extra allowance for the President, on top of his salary; the Assembly rejected it in February 1851. ↩
Claude-Marius Vaïsse (1799–1864), a career prefect, was minister of the interior in the transitional ministry. ↩
Roubaix, near Lille, was a center of the wool and cotton industry. Belle-Île, an island off the coast of Brittany, had a fortress prison where political prisoners were held, among them insurgents of June 1848. ↩
Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), the poet, had been foreign minister in the provisional government of 1848 and the most popular man in France that spring; he ran for President in December 1848 and won only a tiny share of the vote. Adolphe Billault (1805–1863), a lawyer and deputy of the moderate left, later served as one of Napoleon III's ministers. ↩
Antoine Lefebvre de Vatimesnil (1789–1860) had been minister of education under Charles X; Denis Benoist d'Azy (1796–1880) was a Legitimist industrialist and a vice-president of the Legislative Assembly. Léon de Maleville (1803–1879), an Orleanist, had been Bonaparte's minister of the interior for a few days in December 1848. ↩
In May 1849, on the eve of the elections to the Legislative Assembly, Faucher, then minister of the interior, telegraphed to the departments an account of a vote in the Assembly, worded to make the government's opponents look like friends of disorder. The Constituent Assembly censured him, and he resigned. In the ministry of April 1851 he took the interior again, with Rouher at justice, Fould at finance and Baroche at foreign affairs. ↩
Victor Fialin de Persigny (1808–1872) had followed Bonaparte since the 1830s and was with him in the attempts at Strasbourg in 1836 and Boulogne in 1840. After the coup he became minister of the interior. ↩
Agesilaus II was a king of Sparta in the fourth century BC, a small, lame man and a famous general. In the version of the anecdote told by the Greek writer Athenaeus, the Egyptian king Tachos mocked his small size with the proverb of the mountain that went into labor and gave birth to a mouse, and Agesilaus answered that one day he would seem a lion. ↩

VI

In its vain struggle to hold on to the army and to win back the top command of the executive power, the Party of Order had found itself reduced to making a coalition with the Montagne and the pure republicans, and that coalition proved beyond any doubt that it had lost its independent parliamentary majority. And then the mere power of the calendar, the hour hand of the clock, gave the signal on May 29 for it to fall apart completely. With May 29 the National Assembly entered the last year of its life. It now had to decide: keep the constitution as it stood, or revise it. But revising the constitution meant more than a choice between the rule of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois democracy, between democracy and proletarian anarchy, between the parliamentary republic and Bonaparte: it also meant a choice between Orléans and Bourbon! Thus the apple of discord dropped right into the middle of parliament, and around it the clash of interests that split the Party of Order into hostile factions was bound to burst into open flame. The Party of Order was a compound of unlike social substances. The revision question raised the political temperature to the point where the compound broke down again into its original elements.

The Bonapartists' interest in revision was simple. What they wanted above all was to get rid of Article 45, which barred Bonaparte from being re-elected, and to have his power extended. The republicans' position seemed no less simple. They rejected any revision whatever, seeing in it a conspiracy against the republic on every side. Since they commanded more than a quarter of the votes in the National Assembly, and the constitution required three-quarters of the votes for a legally valid decision to revise and to call a revising assembly, all they had to do was count their votes to be sure of victory. And they were sure of victory.

Against these clear positions the Party of Order found itself caught in a tangle of contradictions it couldn't undo. If it rejected revision, it put the status quo in danger: it left Bonaparte only one way out, the way of force, and on May 2, 1852, at the moment of decision, it would be handing France over to revolutionary anarchy, with a President who had lost his authority, a parliament that had long since lost its own, and a people bent on winning theirs back. If it voted for revision by the constitutional route, it knew it was voting for nothing, since the constitution guaranteed that the republicans' veto would sink it. If it declared, against the constitution, that a simple majority of votes was binding, then it could hope to master the revolution only by putting itself unconditionally at the beck and call of the executive power, and so make Bonaparte the master of the constitution, of the revision and of the Party of Order itself. A partial revision that extended the President's term would pave the way for an imperial usurpation. A general revision that cut short the life of the republic would bring the dynastic claims into an unavoidable collision, because the conditions for a Bourbon restoration and the conditions for an Orleanist restoration were not merely different, they ruled each other out.

The parliamentary republic was more than neutral ground where the two factions of the French bourgeoisie, Legitimists and Orleanists, big landed property and industry, could keep house side by side with equal rights. It was the indispensable condition of their joint rule, the only form of state in which their general class interest could bring to heel both the claims of their separate factions and all the other classes of society. As royalists they fell back into their old antagonism, into the struggle over whether land or money should be supreme, and the highest expression of that antagonism, its living personification, was their kings themselves, their dynasties. Hence the Party of Order's resistance to calling the Bourbons home.

The Orleanist deputy Creton had moved, at regular intervals in 1849, 1850 and 1851, that the decree banishing the royal families be repealed. And just as regularly the parliament put on the spectacle of an assembly of royalists stubbornly shutting the gates through which their exiled kings might come home. Richard III murdered Henry VI with the remark that he was too good for this world and belonged in heaven. These royalists declared France too wicked to have its kings back. Forced by circumstances to become republicans, they voted again and again to uphold the people's decree that had driven their kings out of France.¹³⁵^,¹³⁶

Circumstances forced the Party of Order to take up the revision of the constitution — and this revision put in question not only the republic but the joint rule of the two bourgeois factions along with it. By raising the possibility of a monarchy, it brought back to life the rivalry of the interests that each monarchy had in turn favored, the struggle for the supremacy of one faction over the other. The Party of Order's diplomats thought they could settle the fight by merging the two dynasties, by a so-called fusion of the royalist parties and their royal houses. But the real fusion of the Restoration and the July Monarchy was the parliamentary republic, in which Orleanist and Legitimist colors were washed out and the various species of bourgeois disappeared into the bourgeois pure and simple, the bourgeois genus. Now, though, the Orleanist was to become a Legitimist and the Legitimist an Orleanist. Kingship, in which their antagonism took on flesh, was to embody their unity; the expression of their exclusive factional interests was to become the expression of their common class interest; the monarchy was to do what only the abolition of two monarchies, the republic, could do and had done. This was the philosopher's stone that the doctors of the Party of Order racked their brains to produce. As if the legitimate monarchy could ever become the monarchy of the industrial bourgeois, or the citizen-kingship ever become the kingship of the hereditary landed aristocracy. As if landed property and industry could join hands as brothers under one crown, when the crown could only sit on one head, the head of the elder brother or of the younger. As if industry could ever make its peace with landed property at all, so long as landed property doesn't make up its mind to go industrial itself. If Henri V were to die tomorrow, the Count of Paris would not become king of the Legitimists on that account, unless he stopped being king of the Orleanists.¹³⁷^,¹³⁸

The philosophers of fusion, however, who grew bolder the more the revision question moved to the front of the stage, who had set up an official daily of their own, the Assemblée nationale, and who even at this moment (February 1852) are back at work, explained the whole difficulty to themselves as the reluctance and rivalry of the two dynasties. Efforts to reconcile the Orléans family with Henri V had begun after Louis Philippe's death, but like all the dynastic intrigues they had been played out only while the National Assembly was in recess, in the intermissions, behind the scenes, more a sentimental flirtation with the old superstition than a serious piece of business. Now they became grand affairs of state, put on by the Party of Order on the public stage instead of, as before, in the amateur theater. Couriers flew from Paris to Venice, from Venice to Claremont, from Claremont to Paris. The Count of Chambord issues a manifesto announcing, "with the help of all the members of his family," not his own restoration but the "national" one. The Orleanist Salvandy throws himself at the feet of Henri V. The Legitimist chiefs Berryer, Benoist d'Azy and Saint-Priest make the pilgrimage to Claremont to win the Orléans family over, but in vain. Too late the fusionists notice that the interests of the two bourgeois factions grow neither less exclusive nor more yielding when they come to a point in the form of family interests, the interests of two royal houses.¹³⁹^,¹⁴⁰

If Henri V had recognized the Count of Paris as his successor — the only success the fusion could have achieved at best — the house of Orléans would have won no claim that Henri V's childlessness had not already guaranteed it, and it would have lost every claim it had won by the July Revolution. It would have given up its original claims, all the titles it had wrung from the elder branch of the Bourbons in a struggle of nearly a hundred years; it would have traded its historic prerogative, the prerogative of modern kingship, for the prerogative of its family tree. The fusion was therefore nothing but a voluntary abdication by the house of Orléans, its resignation in favor of legitimacy, a penitent walk back out of the Protestant state church into the Catholic one. And the walk didn't even lead it back to the throne it had lost; it led to the step of the throne on which it had been born. The old Orleanist ministers Guizot, Duchâtel and the rest, who also hurried off to Claremont to put in a word for the fusion, in fact stood for nothing but the morning-after hangover from the July Revolution, despair of the citizen-kingship and of the kingship of the citizens, and the superstitious belief in legitimacy as the last amulet against anarchy. In their imagination they were go-betweens for Orléans and Bourbon; in reality they were by now nothing more than Orleanist renegades, and that is how the Prince de Joinville received them. The vigorous, fighting wing of the Orleanists, on the other hand, Thiers, Baze and company, found it all the easier to convince Louis Philippe's family that if every direct restoration of the monarchy presupposed the fusion of the two dynasties, and every such fusion presupposed the abdication of the house of Orléans, then it was entirely in keeping with the tradition of their forefathers to recognize the republic for the time being and to wait until events allowed the President's chair to be turned into a throne. Joinville's candidacy was spread as a rumor, public curiosity was kept in suspense, and a few months later, in September, after the revision had been voted down, it was proclaimed openly.¹⁴¹

The attempt at a royalist fusion of Orleanists and Legitimists, then, had not only failed: it had broken up their parliamentary fusion, the republican form they shared, and broken the Party of Order back down into its original elements. Yet the wider the rift between Claremont and Venice grew, the more surely their reconciliation fell through, and the further the Joinville agitation spread, the keener and more earnest the negotiations became between Bonaparte's minister Faucher and the Legitimists.

Nor did the Party of Order stop breaking down at its original elements. Each of the two great factions came apart again in its turn. It was as if all the old shades of opinion that had once fought and jostled each other inside each of the two circles, the Legitimist one and the Orleanist one, had thawed out again, like dried-up infusoria touched by water, as if they had found enough life again to form groups of their own and independent antagonisms. The Legitimists dreamed themselves back into the quarrels between the Tuileries and the Pavillon Marsan, between Villèle and Polignac. The Orleanists lived once more through the golden age of the jousts between Guizot, Molé, Broglie, Thiers and Odilon Barrot.¹⁴²^,¹⁴³

One part of the Party of Order was eager for revision but divided again over how far it should go: the Legitimists under Berryer and Falloux on the one hand and under La Rochejaquelein on the other, and the Orleanists who were tired of fighting, under Molé, Broglie, Montalembert and Odilon Barrot. This part came to terms with the Bonapartist deputies on the following vague and sweeping motion: "The undersigned representatives, with the aim of restoring to the nation the full exercise of its sovereignty, move that the constitution be revised." At the same time, though, they declared unanimously, through their spokesman Tocqueville, that the National Assembly had no right to propose the abolition of the republic; that right belonged only to the revising chamber. Besides, the constitution could be revised only in a "legal" way, that is, only if the three-quarters of the votes the constitution prescribed came out for revision. After six days of stormy debate, on July 19, revision was rejected, as anyone could have foreseen: 446 voted for it, but 278 against. The out-and-out Orleanists, Thiers, Changarnier and company, voted with the republicans and the Montagne.¹⁴⁴

The majority of parliament thus declared itself against the constitution, but the constitution itself declared for the minority and declared its decision binding. Yet hadn't the Party of Order subordinated the constitution to the parliamentary majority on May 31, 1850, and on June 13, 1849? Hadn't its whole policy up to now rested on subordinating the articles of the constitution to the decisions of the parliamentary majority? Hadn't it left the Old Testament superstition about the letter of the law to the democrats, and punished the democrats for it? At this moment, though, revising the constitution meant nothing other than prolonging the President's power, just as keeping the constitution meant nothing other than removing Bonaparte. Parliament had declared for him, but the constitution declared against parliament. He was acting in the spirit of parliament, then, when he tore up the constitution, and in the spirit of the constitution when he drove parliament out.

Parliament had declared the constitution, and its own rule along with it, "outside the majority"; by its vote it had abolished the constitution and prolonged the President's power, and at the same time declared that the one could not die nor the other live so long as parliament itself lived on. The feet of those who were to bury it were already at the door. While it was debating revision, Bonaparte removed General Baraguey d'Hilliers, who was showing signs of wavering, from the command of the First Military Division and appointed General Magnan in his place, the victor of Lyon, the hero of the December days, one of his own creatures, who had already more or less compromised himself on Bonaparte's behalf under Louis Philippe, at the time of the Boulogne expedition.¹⁴⁵^,¹⁴⁶

By its vote on revision the Party of Order proved that it knew neither how to rule nor how to serve, neither how to live nor how to die, neither how to bear the republic nor how to overthrow it, neither how to uphold the constitution nor how to throw it on the scrap heap, neither how to work with the President nor how to break with him. Then who was it waiting on to resolve all these contradictions? The calendar, the course of events. It stopped pretending to have any power over events. It thereby dared events to do it violence, and with them the power to which, in its fight with the people, it had handed over one attribute after another, until it stood before that power without any power of its own. To let the head of the executive power plan his battle against it undisturbed, build up his means of attack, pick his tools and fortify his positions, the Party of Order decided, right in the middle of this critical moment, to leave the stage and adjourn for three months, from August 10 to November 4.

Not only had the parliamentary party broken up into its two great factions, and not only had each of those factions broken up within itself, but the Party of Order inside parliament had fallen out with the Party of Order outside parliament. The spokesmen and the scribes of the bourgeoisie, its speakers' rostrum and its press, in a word the ideologues of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie itself, the representatives and the represented, stood facing one another as strangers and no longer understood each other.

The Legitimists in the provinces, with their limited horizon and their unlimited enthusiasm, accused their parliamentary leaders, Berryer and Falloux, of deserting to the Bonapartist camp and betraying Henri V. Their fleur-de-lis minds believed in the Fall of Man, but not in diplomacy.

Far more fateful and decisive was the break between the commercial bourgeoisie and its politicians. It reproached them, not as the Legitimists reproached theirs, for having abandoned their principles, but the other way around, for clinging to principles that had become useless.

I have already pointed out that ever since Fould entered the ministry, the part of the commercial bourgeoisie that had held the lion's share of power under Louis Philippe, the financial aristocracy, had gone over to Bonaparte. Fould represented Bonaparte's interest on the stock exchange, and at the same time he represented the stock exchange's interest with Bonaparte. The position of the financial aristocracy is best summed up by a quotation from its European mouthpiece, the London Economist. In its issue of February 1, 1851, it prints this from its Paris correspondent: "Now we have it established from every side that France wants tranquility above all else. The President declares it in his message to the Legislative Assembly; it echoes back from the nation's speaking platform; the newspapers swear to it; the pulpit proclaims it; it is proved by the sensitivity of government bonds at the slightest prospect of disturbance, and by their steadiness whenever the executive power wins."

In its issue of November 29, 1851, the Economist declares in its own name: "On every stock exchange in Europe the President is now recognized as the sentinel of order." The financial aristocracy accordingly condemned the Party of Order's parliamentary fight with the executive power as a disturbance of order, and celebrated every victory of the President over its supposed representatives as a victory for order. By the financial aristocracy we don't mean here just the big loan contractors and the speculators in government bonds, whose interest, it goes without saying, is the same as the interest of the state power. The whole modern money business, the whole banking economy, is bound up as closely as can be with public credit. Part of the banks' working capital has to be invested in government bonds that can quickly be turned into cash, and earns interest there. Their deposits, the capital put at their disposal and handed out by them to merchants and industrialists, flow in part from the dividends of people living off government bonds. If at every period the stability of the state power has meant Moses and the prophets to the whole money market and to the priests of that market, how could it be otherwise today, when every flood threatens to wash away the old state debts along with the old states?

The industrial bourgeoisie, too, in its fanaticism for order, was annoyed by the parliamentary Party of Order's squabbles with the executive power. After their vote of January 18, on the occasion of Changarnier's dismissal, Thiers, Anglès, Sainte-Beuve and others received public reprimands from their constituents, and from the industrial districts in particular, which above all lashed their coalition with the Montagne as high treason against order. If we have seen that the boastful teasing and petty intrigues that made up the Party of Order's struggle with the President deserved no better welcome, this bourgeois party, on the other hand, which demanded that its representatives let the military power slip without a fight out of its own parliament's hands into those of an adventuring pretender, wasn't even worth the intrigues squandered on its behalf. It showed that the fight to defend its public interest, its own class interest, its political power, was nothing to it but a nuisance and an annoyance, a disturbance of private business.¹⁴⁷

The bourgeois worthies of the provincial towns, the magistrates, the judges of the commercial courts and so on, almost without exception received Bonaparte everywhere on his tours in the most servile manner, even when, as at Dijon, he attacked the National Assembly, and the Party of Order in particular, without holding back.¹⁴⁸

When business was good, as it still was at the beginning of 1851, the commercial bourgeoisie raged against every parliamentary fight, for fear of putting trade in a bad temper. When business was bad, as it was steadily from the end of February 1851, it blamed the parliamentary fights for the slump and clamored for them to fall silent so that trade could find its voice again. The revision debates fell precisely in this bad time. Since this was a question of to be or not to be for the existing form of state, the bourgeoisie felt all the more entitled to demand two things of its representatives: an end to this torturing provisional state of affairs, and at the same time the preservation of the status quo. This was no contradiction. By an end to the provisional state it meant precisely its continuation, putting off the moment when a decision had to come into some hazy blue distance. The status quo could be kept in only two ways: by prolonging Bonaparte's power, or by his stepping down as the constitution required and the election of Cavaignac. One part of the bourgeoisie wanted the second solution, and could give its representatives no better advice than to keep quiet and leave the burning point alone. If their representatives didn't speak, they thought, Bonaparte wouldn't act. What they wanted was an ostrich parliament, one that would hide its head and think nobody could see it. Another part of the bourgeoisie wanted Bonaparte, since he was sitting in the President's chair anyway, left sitting in the President's chair, so that everything would stay in the same old rut. It was outraged that its parliament wouldn't just break the constitution openly and abdicate without any fuss.

The general councils of the departments, those provincial assemblies of the big bourgeoisie, met from August 25 on, while the National Assembly was in recess, and declared almost unanimously for revision, which is to say against parliament and for Bonaparte.

The bourgeoisie showed its fury at its literary representatives, its own press, even more plainly than its falling-out with its parliamentary representatives. Every time a bourgeois journalist attacked Bonaparte's appetite for usurpation, every time the press tried to defend the political rights of the bourgeoisie against the executive power, bourgeois juries came down on it with ruinous fines and shameless prison sentences, to the astonishment not only of France but of the whole of Europe.

The parliamentary Party of Order, as I have shown, had ordered itself to keep quiet by its own clamor for quiet, and had declared the political rule of the bourgeoisie incompatible with the safety and survival of the bourgeoisie, by destroying with its own hands, in the fight against the other classes of society, all the conditions of its own regime, the parliamentary regime. The mass of the bourgeoisie outside parliament, for its part, by its servility toward the President, by its abuse of parliament, by its rough handling of its own press, invited Bonaparte to suppress and destroy its speaking and writing part, its politicians and its men of letters, its platform and its press, so that it could go about its private business in confidence under the protection of a strong and unrestricted government. It declared plainly that it was longing to be rid of its own political rule so as to be rid of the troubles and dangers of ruling.

And this same bourgeois mass, which had already rebelled against a merely parliamentary and literary fight for the rule of its own class and had betrayed the leaders of that fight, now has the nerve, after the event, to accuse the proletariat of failing to rise up for it in a bloody fight, a fight to the death! This mass, which at every turn had sacrificed its general class interest, that is, its political interest, to the narrowest and dirtiest private interest, and had asked its representatives to make the same sacrifice, now whines that the proletariat sacrificed the bourgeoisie's ideal political interests to its own material ones. It strikes the pose of a beautiful soul, misunderstood by a proletariat that socialists had led astray, and deserted by it at the decisive moment. And it finds an echo all through the bourgeois world. I'm not talking here, of course, about German small-town politicians and right-thinking louts. I refer, for example, to that same Economist which on November 29, 1851, four days before the coup, was still proclaiming Bonaparte the "sentinel of order" and Thiers and Berryer "anarchists," and which by December 27, 1851, after Bonaparte had put those anarchists to rest, was already crying out about the treason that "ignorant, untrained, stupid proletarian masses" had committed "against the skill, the knowledge, the discipline, the mental influence, the intellectual resources and the moral weight of the middle and upper ranks of society." The stupid, ignorant and vulgar mass was none other than the bourgeois mass itself.¹⁴⁹

It's true that in 1851 France had been through a kind of small commercial crisis. At the end of February exports were down on 1850; in March trade suffered and the factories closed; in April the industrial departments looked as desperate as they had after the February days; in May business had still not come back to life; as late as June 28 the books of the Bank of France showed that production had stalled, with deposits swollen enormously and advances on bills of exchange shrunk by just as much; and only in the middle of October did business begin to pick up again, step by step. The French bourgeoisie blamed this slump on purely political causes: the fight between parliament and the executive power, the insecurity of a form of state that was merely provisional, the terrifying prospect of May 2, 1852. I won't deny that all these things dragged down some branches of industry in Paris and in the departments. But in any case the political situation had only a local and trifling effect. What more proof do you need than the fact that trade began to recover at the very moment when the political situation was getting worse, when the political horizon was darkening and a thunderbolt from Elysium was expected any minute, around the middle of October? The French bourgeois, whose "skill, knowledge, mental insight and intellectual resources" reach no further than his nose, could have had his nose rubbed in the cause of his commercial misery any day the Industrial Exhibition in London was open.

While the factories were closing in France, commercial bankruptcies were breaking out in England. While the industrial panic in France reached its peak in April and May, the commercial panic in England reached its peak in April and May. The English wool industry suffered as the French one did, and English silk manufacturing suffered as the French did. If the English cotton mills kept running, they no longer made the profits they had made in 1849 and 1850. The only difference was that in France the crisis was industrial and in England commercial; that in France the factories stood still, while in England they expanded, though on worse terms than in the years before; and that in France it was exports, in England imports, that took the heaviest blows. The common cause, which naturally is not to be found inside the narrow horizon of French politics, was plain to see. The years 1849 and 1850 had been years of the greatest material prosperity, and of an overproduction that only showed itself for what it was in 1851. At the start of that year the prospect of the Industrial Exhibition gave it an extra push. On top of this came some special circumstances: first the failure of the cotton crop of 1850 and 1851, then the certainty of a bigger cotton crop than anyone had expected; first the rise, then the sudden fall: in a word, the swings of cotton prices. The raw silk crop, in France at least, had come in below the average. And finally, wool manufacturing had grown so fast since 1848 that the production of wool couldn't keep up with it, and the price of raw wool shot up out of all proportion to the price of woolen goods. Here, then, in the raw materials of three world-market industries, we already have threefold material for a slump.

Leaving these special circumstances aside, the apparent crisis of 1851 was nothing other than the halt that overproduction and overspeculation make every time they go round the industrial cycle, before they gather all their strength to race feverishly through the last stretch of the circle and arrive back where they started, at the general commercial crisis. In these intervals of commercial history, commercial bankruptcies break out in England, while in France industry itself is brought to a standstill, partly forced to retreat by English competition, which just then becomes unbearable in every market, and partly, being a luxury industry, the first to be hit by every slackening of business. Besides the general crises, then, France goes through national commercial crises of its own, which are, however, shaped and decided far more by the general state of the world market than by local French influences.

It will be of some interest to set the prejudice of the French bourgeois beside the judgment of the English bourgeois. One of the biggest firms in Liverpool writes in its annual trade report for 1851: "Few years have disappointed the expectations held at their beginning more than the one just ended. Instead of the great prosperity that everyone unanimously looked forward to, it proved one of the most discouraging years in a quarter of a century. This of course applies only to the mercantile classes, and not to the manufacturing ones. And yet there were certainly grounds, at the beginning of the year, for expecting the opposite: stocks of goods were scanty, capital was plentiful, food was cheap, a rich autumn was assured; there was unbroken peace on the Continent and there were no political or financial disturbances at home; indeed, the wings of commerce were never more unfettered . . . To what is this unfavorable result to be ascribed? We believe to overtrading, in imports as well as exports. Unless our merchants set narrower limits to their own activity, nothing can keep us on the rails except a panic every three years."

Now picture the French bourgeois in the middle of this business panic, his trade-sick brain tortured, buzzed around and stunned by rumors of coups and of the restoration of universal suffrage; by the struggle between parliament and the executive power; by the Fronde-war of the Orleanists and the Legitimists; by communist conspiracies in the south of France; by alleged jacqueries in the departments of the Nièvre and the Cher; by the advertising of the various candidates for the presidency; by the quack remedies hawked in the newspapers; by the threats of the republicans to defend the constitution and universal suffrage arms in hand; by the gospels of the émigré heroes in partibus, who announced that the world would end on May 2, 1852: picture all that, and you will understand why, amid this unspeakable, deafening confusion of fusion, revision, prorogation, constitution, conspiration, coalition, emigration, usurpation and revolution, the bourgeois snorts at his parliamentary republic in a frenzy: "Rather an end with terror than terror without end!"¹⁵⁰^,¹⁵¹

Bonaparte understood this cry. His wits had been sharpened by the mounting pressure of his creditors, who saw in every sunset that brought the day of payment, May 2, 1852, a little closer a protest by the motion of the stars against their earthly bills of exchange. They had turned into regular astrologers. The National Assembly had cut off Bonaparte's hope of having his power extended by constitutional means, and the candidacy of the Prince de Joinville left no more room for hesitation.

If ever an event cast its shadow before it long before it came, it was Bonaparte's coup. As early as January 29, 1849, barely a month after his election, he had put the proposal to Changarnier. His own prime minister, Odilon Barrot, had denounced the politics of coups in veiled terms in the summer of 1849, and Thiers had denounced it openly in the winter of 1850. In May 1851 Persigny had tried once more to win Changarnier over to the coup, and the Messager de l'Assemblée had published the negotiations. At every storm in parliament the Bonapartist papers threatened a coup, and the nearer the crisis came, the louder they got. Bonaparte held orgies every night with a swell mob of both sexes, and in them, whenever the midnight hour came near and generous libations had loosened tongues and heated imaginations, the coup was fixed for the following morning. Swords were drawn, glasses clinked, the representatives went flying out of the windows, the imperial mantle fell on Bonaparte's shoulders, until the next morning chased the phantom away again and an astonished Paris learned from Vestals who kept very little under lock and key, and from indiscreet paladins, what danger it had once again escaped. In September and October the rumors of a coup d'état tumbled over one another. At the same time the shadow took on color, like a tinted daguerreotype. Look up the September and October issues of the European daily press and you will find, word for word, hints like this one: "Paris is full of rumors of a coup. The capital is to be filled with troops during the night, and the next morning is to bring decrees dissolving the National Assembly, placing the department of the Seine under a state of siege, restoring universal suffrage and appealing to the people. Bonaparte is said to be looking for ministers to carry out these illegal decrees." The dispatches that bring this news always end, ominously, with "postponed." The coup had always been Bonaparte's fixed idea. With this idea he had set foot on French soil again. It possessed him so completely that he was forever betraying it and blurting it out. He was so weak that he was just as forever giving it up again. The shadow of the coup had grown so familiar to the Parisians as a ghost that they refused to believe in it when it finally appeared in flesh and blood. What let the coup succeed, then, was neither the close-mouthed reserve of the chief of the Society of December 10 nor a surprise attack the National Assembly had never dreamed of. If it succeeded, it succeeded in spite of his indiscretion and with its foreknowledge, as the necessary and inevitable result of everything that had gone before.¹⁵²^,¹⁵³

On October 10 Bonaparte told his ministers he had decided to restore universal suffrage; on the 16th they resigned; on the 26th Paris learned that the Thorigny ministry had been formed. At the same time the prefect of police, Carlier, was replaced by Maupas, and the commander of the First Military Division, Magnan, drew the most reliable regiments together in the capital. On November 4 the National Assembly reopened its sessions. There was nothing left for it to do but cram the whole course it had been through into one short, snappy revision session, and prove that it was buried only after it had died.¹⁵⁴

The first post the Assembly had lost in its fight with the executive power was the ministry. It had to own up to that loss solemnly, by accepting the Thorigny ministry, a mere sham of a ministry, as the real thing. When Monsieur Giraud introduced himself to the standing commission in the name of the new ministers, the commission had greeted him with laughter. Such a weak ministry for measures as strong as the restoration of universal suffrage! But that was exactly the point: to get nothing done in parliament and everything done against parliament.¹⁵⁵

On the very first day of its new session the National Assembly received Bonaparte's message demanding the restoration of universal suffrage and the repeal of the law of May 31, 1850. The same day his ministers brought in a decree to that effect. The Assembly threw out the ministers' motion for urgency at once, and on November 13 it threw out the law itself, by 355 votes to 348. It thus tore up its mandate once again; it confirmed once again that it had turned itself from the freely elected representation of the people into the usurping parliament of a class; it confessed once again that it had itself cut through the muscles that joined the parliamentary head to the body of the nation.

If the executive power, with its motion to restore universal suffrage, appealed from the National Assembly to the people, the legislative power, with its Quaestors' Bill, appealed from the people to the army. The Quaestors' Bill was supposed to establish the Assembly's right to call up troops directly, to form a parliamentary army. In naming the army as umpire between itself and the people, between itself and Bonaparte, in recognizing the army as the deciding power in the state, the Assembly had to confirm, for its part, that it had long ago given up any claim to command that army. By debating its right to requisition troops, instead of requisitioning them on the spot, it gave away its doubts about its own power. By rejecting the Quaestors' Bill, it openly confessed its own impotence. The bill went down by a margin of 108 votes, so it was the Montagne that had tipped the scales. The Montagne found itself in the position of Buridan's ass, though not between two bales of hay, wondering which was the more tempting, but between two beatings, wondering which would hurt more. On one side, fear of Changarnier; on the other, fear of Bonaparte. You have to admit it wasn't a heroic position.

On November 18 an amendment was moved to the bill on municipal elections that the Party of Order itself had brought in: that one year's residence, instead of three, should be enough to give a man the vote in municipal elections. The amendment failed by a single vote, and that single vote at once turned out to have been a mistake. By splitting up into its hostile factions, the Party of Order had long since lost its own independent majority in parliament. Now it showed that there was no longer any majority in parliament at all. The National Assembly had become incapable of reaching a decision. No force of cohesion held its atomic parts together any longer; it had used up its last breath of life; it was dead.

Finally, a few days before the catastrophe, the extraparliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie was to confirm solemnly, one more time, its break with the bourgeoisie in parliament. Thiers, being a parliamentary hero, was infected more than most with the incurable disease of parliamentary cretinism, and after parliament's death he had hatched a new parliamentary intrigue with the Council of State: a law of responsibility, designed to pin the President fast inside the bounds of the constitution. On September 15, laying the foundation stone of the new market halls of Paris, Bonaparte had charmed the dames des halles, the fishwives, like a second Masaniello — admittedly, in real power one fishwife outweighed seventeen burgraves — and after the Quaestors' Bill was brought in he had fired up the lieutenants he wined and dined at the Elysée. In the same way, on November 25, he now swept along with him the industrial bourgeoisie, gathered in the Circus to receive from his hands the prize medals won at the London Industrial Exhibition. I give the telling part of his speech as the Journal des Débats reported it: "With such unhoped-for successes, I have the right to say again how great the French Republic would be if it were allowed to pursue its real interests and reform its institutions, instead of being constantly disturbed by the demagogues on the one hand and by monarchist hallucinations on the other. (Loud, stormy and repeated applause from every part of the amphitheater.) The monarchist hallucinations stand in the way of all progress and of every serious branch of industry. Instead of progress, nothing but struggle. We see men who used to be the most zealous supporters of royal authority and prerogative become partisans of a Convention merely in order to weaken the authority that sprang from universal suffrage. (Loud and repeated applause.) We see the men who suffered most from the Revolution, and lamented it most, provoke a new one, and only in order to fetter the will of the nation . . . I promise you peace and quiet for the future, etc., etc. (Bravo, bravo, a storm of bravos.)" Thus the industrial bourgeoisie claps its servile bravo to the coup of December 2, to the destruction of parliament, to the downfall of its own rule, to the dictatorship of Bonaparte. The thunder of applause on November 25 got its answer in the thunder of cannon on December 4, and the house of Monsieur Sallandrouze, who had clapped out the most bravos, had the most shells clapped into it.¹⁵⁶^,¹⁵⁷^,¹⁵⁸

When Cromwell dissolved the Long Parliament, he went alone into the middle of it and pulled out his watch, so that it should not live one minute beyond the deadline he had fixed for it, and he drove out the members one by one with cheerful, humorous insults. Napoleon, a smaller man than his model, at least went into the legislative body on 18 Brumaire and read out its death sentence to it, if in a shaky voice. The second Bonaparte, who for that matter had quite a different executive power in his hands from Cromwell's or Napoleon's, looked for his model not in the annals of world history but in the annals of the Society of December 10, in the annals of crime. He robs the Bank of France of 25 million francs, buys General Magnan for a million and the soldiers one at a time for 15 francs apiece and a tot of brandy, and meets his accomplices in secret, like a thief in the night; he has the houses of the most dangerous parliamentary leaders broken into and Cavaignac, Lamoricière, Le Flô, Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze and the rest carried off from their beds, has the main squares of Paris and the parliament building occupied by troops, and early in the morning has loud, barker's posters slapped on every wall, announcing the dissolution of the National Assembly and of the Council of State, the restoration of universal suffrage and the placing of the department of the Seine under a state of siege. In the same style, a little later, he slips a forged document into the Moniteur, according to which influential names from parliament had gathered round him in a council of state.¹⁵⁹^,¹⁶⁰

The rump parliament that met in the town hall of the 10th arrondissement, made up mainly of Legitimists and Orleanists, votes to depose Bonaparte amid repeated cries of "Long live the Republic," harangues the crowd gaping outside the building in vain, and is finally led off under an escort of African sharpshooters, first to the d'Orsay barracks, and later packed into police vans and carted off to the prisons of Mazas, Ham and Vincennes. Thus ended the Party of Order, the Legislative Assembly and the February Revolution. Before we hurry on to the end, here in brief is the outline of its history:¹⁶¹

I. First Period. From February 24 to May 4, 1848. The February period. Prologue. The universal brotherhood swindle.

II. Second Period. The period of constituting the republic, and of the Constituent National Assembly.

1) May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June Days.

2) June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. State of siege imposed on Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by the election of Bonaparte as President.

3) December 20, 1848, to May 29, 1849. Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and with the Party of Order allied to him. Death of the Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie.

III. Third Period. Period of the constitutional republic and of the Legislative National Assembly.

1) May 29, 1849, to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeois with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy.

2) June 13, 1849, to May 31, 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the Party of Order. It completes its rule by abolishing universal suffrage, but loses the parliamentary ministry.

3) May 31, 1850, to December 2, 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte.

a) May 31, 1850, to January 12, 1851. Parliament loses the supreme command of the army.

b) January 12 to April 11, 1851. It is beaten in its attempts to get hold of the administrative power again. The Party of Order loses its independent parliamentary majority. Its coalition with the republicans and the Montagne.

c) April 11, 1851, to October 9, 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion and prorogation. The Party of Order breaks up into its separate parts. The break of the bourgeois parliament and the bourgeois press with the bourgeois mass becomes settled.

d) October 9 to December 2, 1851. Open break between parliament and the executive power. Parliament performs its own death scene and goes under, left in the lurch by its own class, by the army, by all the other classes. Downfall of the parliamentary regime and of bourgeois rule. Victory of Bonaparte, parody of an imperial restoration.

Creton was an Orleanist member of the Assembly. A law of 1832 had barred the elder line of the Bourbons from France, and a decree of 1848, after the February Revolution, did the same to Louis Philippe and his family. ↩
In Shakespeare's Richard III (Act I, scene 2), Richard says of Henry VI, whom he has killed, that he was "the fitter for the King of heaven, that hath him." ↩
The "fusion" was the plan to reunite the two royal houses, the elder Bourbon line of Henri V, Count of Chambord, and the house of Orléans, so that the royalists could restore a single king. The Count of Paris (1838–1894), Louis Philippe's grandson, was the Orleanist heir. ↩
The "citizen king" was Louis Philippe, the king the bourgeoisie made in 1830. ↩
The Assemblée nationale was a Paris daily paper of the royalists who worked for the fusion. ↩
The Count of Chambord kept a residence in Venice. Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy (1795–1856) had been Louis Philippe's minister of education. Benoist d'Azy and Saint-Priest were Legitimist leaders in the Assembly. ↩
Charles Duchâtel (1803–1867) was Louis Philippe's minister of the interior. The Prince de Joinville (1818–1900), a son of Louis Philippe and a naval officer, was put forward by Orleanists as a candidate in the presidential election due in 1852. Jean-Didier Baze was an Orleanist deputy and one of the Assembly's quaestors. ↩
Infusoria are microscopic creatures of ponds and puddles; some can dry out completely and come back to life when water reaches them. ↩
Under the Restoration the Pavillon de Marsan, a wing of the Tuileries palace, was the home of the Count of Artois, the king's brother and later King Charles X, and the center of the ultra-royalists, who quarreled with the more moderate court of Louis XVIII. Joseph de Villèle (1773–1854) was the ultra-royalists' prime minister from 1822 to 1828; Jules de Polignac (1780–1847) was Charles X's last prime minister, whose decrees of July 1830 set off the July Revolution. ↩
Henri de La Rochejaquelein (1805–1867) was a Legitimist deputy who wanted the question of the monarchy put to a vote of the whole people. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), author of Democracy in America and briefly foreign minister in 1849, wrote the report of the committee on revision. ↩
"Outside the majority" plays on "outside the law," the phrase for declaring someone an outlaw. "The feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door": the apostle Peter's words to Sapphira, who falls dead on the spot (Acts 5:9). ↩
Bernard Pierre Magnan (1791–1865) put down the Lyon rising of June 1849 and in 1851 commanded the army in Paris; he led the troops in the coup of December 2 and the fighting of the days after it, and was made a marshal of France in 1852. ↩
Anglès and Sainte-Beuve were Party of Order deputies; this Sainte-Beuve was not the literary critic of the same name. ↩
In a speech at Dijon in 1851 Bonaparte complained that the Assembly had stood in the way of the measures he wanted for the people's good. ↩
The "beautiful soul" is a figure from German literature and philosophy: a soul so pure and high-minded that it keeps itself clean of the dirty business of the world. Goethe used the phrase in his novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, whose sixth book is the "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul," and Hegel mocked the type in his Phenomenology of Spirit. ↩
The original Jacquerie was the great peasant revolt of 1358 in northern France, named after "Jacques Bonhomme," the nobles' mocking name for a peasant; the word came to mean any peasant rising. ↩
"Rather an end with terror than terror without end" is a German saying, traditionally traced to the Prussian officer Ferdinand von Schill, who led his regiment out in a revolt against Napoleon in 1809. ↩
Swell mob is English in Marx's German: Victorian slang for pickpockets and swindlers who dressed and passed as gentlemen. ↩
The Vestals were the virgin priestesses of ancient Rome; Marx's Vestals are the women at Bonaparte's orgies. The paladins were the twelve knightly peers of Charlemagne. ↩
Charlemagne-Émile de Maupas, prefect of police of Paris from late October 1851, was one of the organizers of the coup. In the new cabinet Thorigny held the ministry of the interior and Saint-Arnaud the ministry of war; it was made up of men with little or no standing in parliament. ↩
Charles Giraud, a professor of law, was minister of public instruction in the new cabinet. ↩
Tommaso Aniello, called Masaniello (1620–1647), was a Neapolitan fisherman who led the revolt of Naples against Spanish rule in 1647. ↩
The National Convention was the revolutionary assembly that governed France from 1792 to 1795; it abolished the monarchy and sent Louis XVI to the guillotine. ↩
Charles Sallandrouze de Lamornaix was a Paris carpet manufacturer. ↩
Oliver Cromwell dissolved the Long Parliament, which had first met in 1640, on April 20, 1653, by which time only the remnant left after the purge of 1648, later nicknamed the Rump, still sat: he rose in the House of Commons, berated the members, and called in soldiers to clear the chamber. ↩
Napoleon's appearance before the two legislative councils took place at Saint-Cloud on the day after 18 Brumaire, November 10, 1799; he stumbled through his speeches, and soldiers then cleared the hall of the Council of Five Hundred. The council Marx means is the "consultative commission" announced after the coup to stand at Bonaparte's side; several of the men listed on it had not agreed to serve and said so publicly. ↩
Mazas was a new prison in Paris, opened in 1850. ↩

VII

The social republic first appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy, on the threshold of the February Revolution. In the June Days of 1848 it was smothered in the blood of the Paris proletariat, yet it walks the stage as a ghost through every act of the drama that follows. Next the democratic republic announces itself. It fizzles out on June 13, 1849, along with its runaway petty bourgeois, though as it flees it tosses behind it advertisements for itself that brag twice as loudly. Then the parliamentary republic, together with the bourgeoisie, takes over the whole stage and lives its life out to the full, until December 2, 1851, buries it, while the allied royalists shriek in terror: "Long live the Republic!"

The French bourgeoisie reared up against the rule of the working proletariat, and it has brought the lumpenproletariat to power instead, with the chief of the Society of December 10 at its head. The bourgeoisie kept France breathless with fear of the horrors that red anarchy had in store for it; Bonaparte cashed in that future for it in advance when, on December 4, he had the brandy-fired army of Order shoot down the distinguished citizens of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens at their own windows. The bourgeoisie made a god of the saber; the saber rules it. It wiped out the revolutionary press; its own press has been wiped out. It put public meetings under police watch; its own drawing rooms are under police watch. It disbanded the democratic National Guards; its own National Guard has been disbanded. It imposed the state of siege; the state of siege is imposed on it. It replaced juries with military commissions; its juries have been replaced with military commissions. It handed the people's schooling over to the priests; the priests now put it through a schooling of their own. It transported people without trial; it is transported without trial. It crushed every stirring of society with the power of the state; every stirring of its own society is crushed by the power of the state. Out of love for its moneybags it rebelled against its own politicians and men of letters; its politicians and men of letters have been swept aside, and its moneybags are being plundered now that their mouth has been gagged and their pen broken. Tirelessly the bourgeoisie called out to the revolution what Saint Arsenius called out to the Christians: "Fuge, tace, quiesce! Flee, be silent, keep still!" Now Bonaparte calls out to the bourgeoisie: "Fuge, tace, quiesce! Flee, be silent, keep still!"¹⁶²

The French bourgeoisie had long since solved Napoleon's dilemma: "Dans cinquante ans l'Europe sera républicaine ou cosaque," "In fifty years Europe will be republican or Cossack." It had solved it with the république cosaque, the Cossack republic. No Circe with her evil magic twisted the bourgeois republic, that work of art, into a monster. All that republic has lost is the look of respectability. Present-day France was already there, ready-made, inside the parliamentary republic. It only took a jab of the bayonet to burst the bubble, and the monster leaped out for everyone to see.¹⁶³

Why didn't the Paris proletariat rise after December 2?

Because the overthrow of the bourgeoisie had only been decreed so far; the decree had not been carried out. Any serious rising of the proletariat would have brought the bourgeoisie straight back to life, reconciled it with the army and guaranteed the workers a second June defeat.

On December 4 the bourgeois and the épicier, the grocer, egged the proletariat on to fight. That evening several legions of the National Guard promised to turn up at the scene of the fighting, armed and in uniform. What had happened was that the bourgeois and the grocer had found out that one of Bonaparte's decrees of December 2 abolished the secret ballot and ordered them to write their yes or no next to their names in the official registers. The resistance of December 4 scared Bonaparte. During the night he had posters put up on every street corner in Paris announcing that the secret ballot was restored. The bourgeois and the grocer thought they had got what they wanted. The ones who failed to show up the next morning were the grocer and the bourgeois.¹⁶⁴

In a surprise stroke during the night of December 1 to 2, Bonaparte had robbed the Paris proletariat of its leaders, the men who commanded at the barricades. An army without officers, and kept by the memories of June 1848, June 1849 and May 1850 from any wish to fight under the banner of the Montagnards, it left the rescue of the insurrectionary honor of Paris to its vanguard, the secret societies; and the bourgeoisie surrendered that honor to the soldiery so meekly that Bonaparte could later disarm the National Guard with a sneering excuse: he was afraid, he said, that the anarchists would misuse its weapons against the Guard itself!¹⁶⁵

"C'est le triomphe complet et définitif du Socialisme!" "This is the complete and final triumph of Socialism!" That is how Guizot summed up December 2. But if the fall of the parliamentary republic carries the triumph of the proletarian revolution inside it as a seed, its immediate and tangible result was the victory of Bonaparte over parliament, of the executive power over the legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of phrases. In parliament the nation raised its general will into law, which is to say that it raised the law of the ruling class into its general will. Before the executive power it gives up every will of its own and submits to the commands of an outside will, to authority. The executive power, as opposed to the legislative, stands for the nation's heteronomy, its being ruled by another, as opposed to its autonomy, its ruling itself. France, then, seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to fall back under the despotism of an individual, and under the authority of an individual with no authority at that. The struggle seems to have been settled in such a way that all classes now kneel before the rifle butt, equally powerless and equally mute.

But the revolution is thorough. It is still on its journey through purgatory. It goes about its business with method. By December 2, 1851, it had got through one half of its preparatory work; now it is getting through the other. First it brought the parliamentary power to perfection, so as to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has done that, it is perfecting the executive power: reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, setting it up opposite itself as the one target left, so that it can concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has finished this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap up from its seat and cheer: Well burrowed, old mole!¹⁶⁶

This executive power, with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, its sprawling, artificial state machinery and its army of half a million officials beside an army of another half million soldiers: this appalling parasitic body, which wraps itself around the body of French society like a net and stops up all its pores, came into being in the days of absolute monarchy, when feudalism was decaying, and it helped to hurry that decay along. The lordly privileges of the landowners and the towns turned into so many powers of the state, the feudal dignitaries into paid officials, and the motley pattern-book of clashing medieval jurisdictions into the regular plan of a state power whose work is divided up and centralized like work in a factory. The first French Revolution, whose task was to break all the separate local, territorial, municipal and provincial powers so as to create the bourgeois unity of the nation, had to carry further what the absolute monarchy had begun, centralization, and with it the reach, the powers and the number of hands of the governing power. Napoleon completed this state machinery. The legitimate monarchy and the July Monarchy added nothing to it but more division of labor, which grew just as fast as the division of labor inside bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and so new material for the state to administer. Every common interest was at once cut loose from society, set up against it as a higher, general interest, snatched away from the members of society to handle for themselves and made into an object of government business: from the bridge, the schoolhouse and the common property of a village up to the railways, the national wealth and the national university of France. Finally, in its fight against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself forced to strengthen the resources and the centralization of the governing power along with its measures of repression. Every upheaval made this machine more perfect instead of smashing it. The parties that took turns struggling for mastery treated the capture of this enormous state structure as the main prize of victory.¹⁶⁷

Yet under the absolute monarchy, during the first Revolution and under Napoleon, the bureaucracy was only the means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Under the Restoration, under Louis Philippe and under the parliamentary republic it was the instrument of the ruling class, however hard it strove for power of its own.

Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself entirely independent. The state machine has dug itself in against bourgeois society so firmly that the chief of the Society of December 10 is enough to stand at the head of it: a soldier of fortune blown in from abroad, raised on the shield like a chieftain of the old Germans by a drunken soldiery he has bought with brandy and sausages, and to whom he has to keep tossing more sausages. Hence the crestfallen despair, the sense of the most monstrous humiliation and degradation, that weighs on the breast of France and leaves her gasping for breath. It feels dishonored.¹⁶⁸

And yet the state power does not hang in midair. Bonaparte represents a class, and the most numerous class in French society at that: the smallholding peasants.

Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of big landed property and the Orléans family was the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, that is, of the mass of the French people. The peasants' chosen one is not the Bonaparte who knuckled under to the bourgeois parliament, but the Bonaparte who scattered the bourgeois parliament to the winds. For three years the towns had managed to twist the meaning of the election of December 10 and to cheat the peasants out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of December 10, 1848, was fulfilled only by the coup d'état of December 2, 1851.

The smallholding peasants form an enormous mass whose members all live in the same situation but have hardly any dealings with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into contact. Their isolation is made worse by France's poor roads and communications and by the peasants' poverty. Their field of production, the smallholding, leaves no room in its cultivation for any division of labor or any use of science, and so none for variety of development, diversity of talents or richness of social relations. Each peasant family is almost self-sufficient, produces most of what it consumes directly, and so gets its living more by exchange with nature than by dealings with society. The smallholding, the peasant and the family; next to them another smallholding, another peasant and another family. Three score of these make a village, and three score villages a department. And so the great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of like quantities, much as a sackful of potatoes makes a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their way of life, their interests and their education from those of the other classes and set them in hostile opposition to them, they form a class. Insofar as there is only a local connection among the smallholding peasants, and the sameness of their interests produces no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. They are therefore unable to assert their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a Convention. They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governing power that protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the smallholding peasants therefore finds its final expression in an executive power that subordinates society to itself.

Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants' belief in a miracle: that a man named Napoleon would bring all their glory back to them. And an individual turned up who passes himself off as that man because he bears the name Napoleon, thanks to the Code Napoléon, which decrees: "La recherche de la paternité est interdite," "Inquiry into paternity is forbidden." After twenty years of vagabond life and a string of grotesque adventures, the legend comes true and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The nephew's fixed idea came true because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French.¹⁶⁹

But, someone will object, what about the peasant risings across half of France, the army hunting the peasants down like game, the peasants jailed and transported by the thousand?

Not since Louis XIV has France seen such a persecution of the peasants "for demagogic intrigues."¹⁷⁰

But let's be clear about this. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary peasant but the conservative one; not the peasant who strains to break out of the conditions of his social existence, the smallholding, but the peasant who wants rather to make them stronger; not the country people who, by their own energy and in league with the towns, want to overthrow the old order, but on the contrary the country people who, shut in dull and stubborn inside that old order, want to see themselves and their smallholdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the peasant's enlightenment but his superstition, not his judgment but his prejudice, not his future but his past, not his modern Cévennes but his modern Vendée.¹⁷¹

Three years of harsh rule by the parliamentary republic had freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and had made them revolutionary, if only on the surface; but every time they began to move, the bourgeoisie threw them back by force. Under the parliamentary republic the modern consciousness of the French peasants wrestled with their traditional one. The process went on in the form of a never-ending fight between the schoolteachers and the priests. The bourgeoisie struck the schoolteachers down. For the first time the peasants made an effort to act independently of the government. This showed in the constant conflicts between the mayors and the prefects. The bourgeoisie removed the mayors. Finally, in various places during the period of the parliamentary republic, the peasants rose against their own offspring, the army. The bourgeoisie punished them with states of siege and executions. And this same bourgeoisie now howls about the stupidity of the masses, the vile multitude, which it says has betrayed it to Bonaparte. It was the bourgeoisie itself that forcibly strengthened the peasant class's imperialism, its worship of the Empire; it was the bourgeoisie that kept in place the conditions in which this peasant religion is born. Granted, the bourgeoisie has to fear the stupidity of the masses as long as they stay conservative, and the insight of the masses as soon as they turn revolutionary.¹⁷²

In the risings after the coup d'état, a part of the French peasants protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of December 10, 1848. The schooling they had had since 1848 had sharpened their wits. But they had signed themselves over to the underworld of history, history held them to their word, and the majority were still so caught up in the illusion that in the very reddest departments the peasant population voted openly for Bonaparte. In their view the National Assembly had kept him from getting on with things. Now he had only broken the chains that the towns had put on the will of the countryside. In places they even toyed with the grotesque notion of a Convention side by side with a Napoleon.

After the first Revolution had turned the half-serf peasants into free landowners, Napoleon secured and regulated the conditions under which they could work the soil of France that had only just fallen to them, undisturbed, and satisfy their youthful appetite for property. But what is now ruining the French peasant is his smallholding itself, the parceling out of the land, the form of property that Napoleon consolidated in France. It is exactly the material conditions that made the feudal peasant a smallholding peasant and Napoleon an emperor. Two generations have been enough to produce the unavoidable result: steadily worsening agriculture and a steadily growing burden of debt on the farmer. The "Napoleonic" form of property, which at the start of the nineteenth century was the condition for freeing and enriching the French country people, has developed in the course of this century into the law of their slavery and their pauperism. And this very law is the first of the idées napoléoniennes that the second Bonaparte has to uphold. If he shares the peasants' illusion that the cause of their ruin is to be found outside smallholding property itself, in the influence of secondary circumstances, his experiments will burst like soap bubbles against the relations of production.

The economic development of smallholding property has turned the peasants' relation to the other classes of society upside down. Under Napoleon the parceling out of the land in the countryside complemented free competition and the beginnings of large-scale industry in the towns. The peasant class was the ever-present protest against the landed aristocracy that had only just been overthrown. The roots that smallholding property put down in French soil starved feudalism of all nourishment. Its boundary stakes formed the bourgeoisie's natural fortification against any surprise attack by its old overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century the town usurer took the feudal lord's place, the mortgage took the place of the feudal obligations that went with the land, and bourgeois capital took the place of aristocratic landed property. The peasant's smallholding is now only the pretext that lets the capitalist draw profit, interest and rent from the soil, while leaving the tiller himself to work out how to scrape together his wages. The mortgage debt weighing on the soil of France lays on the French peasantry an interest charge as large as the yearly interest on the whole British national debt. In this slavery to capital, toward which its development drives it irresistibly, smallholding property has turned the mass of the French nation into troglodytes, cave dwellers. Sixteen million peasants, women and children included, live in caves, a great many of which have only one opening, others only two, and the most privileged only three. And windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the start of the century set the state to stand sentry over the newly created smallholding and manured it with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out its heart's blood and its brains and throws it into the alchemist's cauldron of capital. The Code Napoléon is now nothing but a code of distraint, of forced sales and of auctions by court order. On top of the four million (children and so on included) officially counted paupers, vagabonds, criminals and prostitutes in France come five million more who hover on the edge of existence and either live in the countryside itself or keep drifting, with their rags and their children, from the countryside into the towns and from the towns back into the countryside. The interest of the peasants is no longer in harmony with the interests of the bourgeoisie, with capital, as it was under Napoleon, but in opposition to them. Their natural ally and leader, then, is the urban proletariat, whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order. But the strong and unlimited government — and this is the second idée napoléonienne that the second Napoleon has to carry out — is called upon to defend this "material" order by force. And this ordre matériel, this "material order," is indeed the watchword in all of Bonaparte's proclamations against the rebellious peasants.¹⁷³

Besides the mortgage that capital lays on it, the smallholding is burdened with taxes. Taxes are the lifeblood of the bureaucracy, the army, the priests and the court: in a word, of the whole apparatus of the executive power. Strong government and heavy taxes are one and the same thing. By its very nature smallholding property makes the perfect base for an all-powerful bureaucracy with officials beyond counting. It creates a uniform level of conditions and of persons over the whole surface of the country. It also allows a uniform influence to be exerted on every point of this uniform mass from one supreme center. It destroys the aristocratic middle ranks between the mass of the people and the power of the state. It calls from every side for the state power to step in directly and to put its own organs in between. Finally, it produces an unemployed surplus population that finds no room either on the land or in the towns, and so it reaches for government jobs as a kind of respectable handout, and keeps pushing for new ones to be created. With the new markets he opened at bayonet point and the plunder of the Continent, Napoleon paid back the compulsory taxes with interest. Then they were a spur to the peasant's industry; now they rob his industry of its last resources and leave him no defense at all against pauperism. And an enormous bureaucracy, well braided and well fed, is the idée napoléonienne that suits the second Bonaparte best of all. How could it not, when he is forced to create, alongside the real classes of society, an artificial caste for whom the survival of his regime becomes a question of knife and fork? One of his first financial operations was to raise officials' salaries back to their old level and to create new sinecures.

Another idée napoléonienne is the rule of the priests as a means of government. But if the newly created smallholding, in harmony with society, dependent on the forces of nature and submitting to the authority that protected it from above, was naturally religious, the smallholding that is wrecked by debt, at odds with society and with authority, and driven beyond its own narrow limits, naturally turns irreligious. Heaven was a rather nice bonus on top of the narrow strip of earth just won, especially since heaven makes the weather; it becomes an insult as soon as it is forced on the peasant as a substitute for his smallholding. Then the priest appears as nothing more than the anointed bloodhound of the earthly police — another idée napoléonienne. — Next time the expedition against Rome will take place in France itself, but in the opposite sense to Monsieur de Montalembert's.¹⁷⁴

The crowning point of the idées napoléoniennes, finally, is the dominance of the army. The army was the smallholding peasants' point of honor: the peasants themselves turned into heroes, defending their new property abroad, glorifying their newly won nationhood, plundering and revolutionizing the world. The uniform was their own state costume, war was their poetry, the fatherland was the smallholding stretched and rounded off in the imagination, and patriotism was the ideal form of the sense of property. But the enemies the French peasant now has to defend his property against are not the Cossacks; they are the bailiffs and the tax collectors. The smallholding no longer lies in the so-called fatherland; it lies in the mortgage register. The army itself is no longer the flower of the peasant youth; it is the swamp flower of the peasant lumpenproletariat. It consists largely of remplaçants, substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte himself is only a remplaçant, a substitute for Napoleon. It now performs its heroic deeds hunting the peasants down like chamois and driving them like game, and on gendarme duty; and when the inner contradictions of his system chase the chief of the Society of December 10 across the French border, the army, after a few bandit raids, will reap not laurels but a thrashing.¹⁷⁵

As you see, all the idées napoléoniennes are ideas of the undeveloped smallholding in the freshness of its youth; for the smallholding that has outlived its time they are an absurdity. They are only the hallucinations of its death agony, words turned into phrases, spirits turned into ghosts. But the parody of the Empire was necessary to free the mass of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to bring out in pure form the opposition between the state power and society. As smallholding property goes on falling apart, the state structure built on it collapses. The centralization of the state that modern society needs rises only on the ruins of the military and bureaucratic government machine that was forged in the fight against feudalism.

The conditions of the French peasants unlock for us the riddle of the general elections of December 20 and 21, which led the second Bonaparte up Mount Sinai, not to receive laws but to give them.¹⁷⁶

The bourgeoisie plainly had no choice now but to choose Bonaparte. At the Council of Constance, when the puritans complained about the dissolute lives of the popes and wailed about the need to reform morals, Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly thundered at them: "Only the devil in person can still save the Catholic Church, and you ask for angels." In the same way, after the coup d'état, the French bourgeoisie cried: Only the chief of the Society of December 10 can still save bourgeois society! Only theft can still save property, perjury religion, bastardy the family, disorder order!¹⁷⁷

Bonaparte, as the executive power made independent, feels it is his mission to safeguard "bourgeois order." But the strength of this bourgeois order is the middle class. He therefore sees himself as the representative of the middle class and issues decrees to match. Yet he is only somebody because he has broken the political power of this middle class, and breaks it afresh every day. He therefore sees himself as the opponent of the middle class's political and literary power. But by protecting its material power he brings its political power back to life. The cause, therefore, has to be kept alive, while the effect has to be done away with wherever it shows itself. This can't be done without mixing up cause and effect a little now and then, since in their interaction the two lose their distinguishing marks. New decrees that blur the borderline. At the same time Bonaparte sees himself, as against the bourgeoisie, as the representative of the peasants and of the people in general, the man who wants to make the lower classes of the people happy within bourgeois society. New decrees that swindle the "true socialists" out of their statecraft in advance. But above all Bonaparte sees himself as chief of the Society of December 10, as the representative of the lumpenproletariat, to which he himself, his entourage, his government and his army belong, and whose chief concern is to do well for itself and to draw California lottery prizes from the state treasury. And he confirms himself as chief of the Society of December 10 with decrees, without decrees and in spite of decrees.¹⁷⁸

The man's contradictory task explains the contradictions of his government: the muddled groping back and forth that tries now to win over this class, now that one, now to humble it, and turns them all against him alike, a groping whose practical uncertainty makes a highly comic contrast with the commanding, categorical style of its official acts, obediently copied from the uncle.

Industry and trade, which is to say the business of the middle class, are to blossom as in a hothouse under the strong government. Railway concessions handed out by the dozen. But the Bonapartist lumpenproletariat is to get rich. Insiders in the know rig the stock exchange with the railway concessions. But no capital turns up for the railways. The Bank is obliged to lend money against railway shares. But at the same time the Bank is to be milked for private gain, and so it has to be flattered. The Bank is let off its duty to publish a weekly report. The Bank and the government sign a lion's-share contract. The people are to be given work. Public works are ordered. But public works raise the people's taxes. Hence taxes are cut by an attack on the rentiers, by converting the five percent government bonds into bonds at four and a half percent. But the middle class must get a sweetener in its turn. Then the wine tax is doubled for the people, who buy their wine en détail, by the glass, and cut in half for the middle class, who drink it en gros, by the cask. The real workers' associations are dissolved, but marvels of association are promised for the future. The peasants are to be helped. Mortgage banks, which speed up their indebtedness and the concentration of property. But these banks are to be used to squeeze money out of the confiscated estates of the House of Orléans. No capitalist will agree to this condition, which is not in the decree, and the mortgage bank stays a mere decree, and so on, and so on.¹⁷⁹

Bonaparte would like to appear as the fatherly benefactor of all classes. But he can't give to one without taking from another. Just as it was said of the Duke of Guise in the days of the Fronde that he was the most obliging man in France, because he had turned all his estates into obligations his partisans owed him, so Bonaparte would like to be the most obliging man in France and to turn all the property and all the labor of France into a personal obligation to himself. He would like to steal the whole of France so as to make a present of it to France, or rather so as to buy France back with French money, for as chief of the Society of December 10 he has to buy whatever is to belong to him. And every state institution becomes an institution for buying: the Senate, the Council of State, the Legislative Body, the Legion of Honor, the soldiers' medal, the public wash-houses, the public works, the railways, the general staff of the National Guard without any rank and file, the confiscated estates of the House of Orléans. Every place in the army and in the machinery of government becomes a means of purchase. But the most important thing in this process, in which France is robbed so that it can be handed presents, is the percentage that falls off during the turnover into the pockets of the head and the members of the Society of December 10.¹⁸⁰^,¹⁸¹

The witticism with which Countess L., Monsieur de Morny's mistress, summed up the confiscation of the Orléans estates, "C'est le premier vol de l'aigle," "It is the eagle's first flight,"¹⁸² fits every flight of this eagle, which is more of a thieving raven. He and his followers call out to one another every day what that Italian Carthusian monk said to the miser who was proudly counting up the goods he had to live on for years to come: "Tu fai conto sopra i beni, bisogna prima far il conto sopra gli anni."¹⁸³ To make sure of not miscalculating the years, they count in minutes. A crowd of fellows elbows its way into the court, into the ministries, to the head of the administration and of the army, and the best that can be said of any of them is that nobody knows where he comes from: a noisy, disreputable, plunder-hungry bohème that crawls into gold-braided coats with the same grotesque dignity as the high dignitaries of Soulouque. You can get a vivid picture of this upper layer of the Society of December 10 if you consider that Véron-Crevel¹⁸⁴ is its preacher of morals and Granier de Cassagnac its thinker. When Guizot, in the days of his ministry, used this Granier in a hole-and-corner paper against the dynastic opposition, he liked to praise him with the words: "C'est le roi des drôles," "That's the king of the buffoons." It would be wrong to think of the Regency or of Louis XV when you look at the court and the clan of Louis Bonaparte. For "France has often had a government of mistresses, but never before a government of hommes entretenus, of kept men."¹⁸⁵¹⁸⁶^,¹⁸⁷^,¹⁸⁸^,¹⁸⁹

Hounded by the contradictory demands of his position, and forced at the same time, like a conjurer, to keep the public's eyes fixed on himself as Napoleon's substitute by springing one surprise after another, which means pulling off a coup d'état en miniature every day, Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois economy into confusion; he lays hands on everything that seemed untouchable to the revolution of 1848, makes some people resigned to revolution and others hungry for it, and produces anarchy itself in the name of order, while at the same time he strips the halo off the whole state machine, profanes it, and makes it at once disgusting and ridiculous. The cult of the Holy Coat of Trier he repeats in Paris as the cult of the Napoleonic imperial mantle. But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme Column.¹⁹⁰

Arsenius was a Roman-born hermit of the Egyptian desert in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, honored as a saint. The Latin words "Flee, be silent, keep still" were, by the old story of his life, the rule a voice from heaven gave him. ↩
Napoleon is reported to have said this in his exile on St. Helena (1815–1821). ↩
Épicier, "grocer," was the standard French term of mockery for the narrow-minded shopkeeper, the philistine of the middle class. ↩
June 1848 is the June insurrection and June 1849 the fiasco of June 13. In May 1850, when the Party of Order cut back universal suffrage with the electoral law of May 31, the Montagne held the workers back and fought the law only in parliament. ↩
"Well said, old mole!" is what Hamlet calls out to his father's ghost as it moves about under the stage (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5). Hegel borrowed the old mole, burrowing unseen underground, as an image for the work of the spirit in history. ↩
The "legitimate monarchy" is the Restoration of the Bourbons (1814–1830). ↩
"To throw a sausage at the side of bacon" is a German saying for giving a small gift to win a big one. ↩
The Code Napoléon is the French civil code of 1804. Its Article 340 barred anyone from going to court to establish who a child's father was. Marx's jab rests on the gossip, widespread at the time, that Louis Bonaparte's real father was someone other than Napoleon's brother Louis, King of Holland. ↩
Armed risings against the coup broke out in December 1851 in a number of departments, most of them in the center and south of France. Tens of thousands of people were arrested afterward, and thousands were transported to Algeria. "Demagogic intrigues" was the charge on which the German governments hunted down liberal students and professors after 1819; Marx borrows the German police phrase. ↩
In the Cévennes mountains of southern France, Protestant peasants, the Camisards, rose in 1702 against the persecution of Louis XIV. In the Vendée, in western France, Catholic and royalist peasants rose in 1793 against the revolutionary Republic. ↩
"The vile multitude" (la vile multitude) was Thiers's phrase for the poor in the debate on the electoral law of May 1850, which took the vote away from them. ↩
France taxed houses by the number of their doors and windows, so the poor kept their openings to the fewest they could. ↩
Montalembert had demanded an "expedition to Rome at home," meaning a campaign by Church and state against socialism inside France, to match the expedition that had put down the Roman Republic in 1849. ↩
Under French conscription a man whose number was drawn for military service could pay a substitute, a remplaçant, to serve in his place. ↩
In the plebiscite of December 20 and 21, 1851, all adult men were asked to approve the coup and to give Bonaparte the power to draw up a new constitution; the official count was about 7.4 million yes to about 640,000 no. ↩
The Council of Constance (1414–1418) was the great church council that ended the Great Schism, when two and then three rival popes claimed the papacy. Pierre d'Ailly (1351–1420) was a French cardinal and theologian who took a leading part in it. ↩
The "true socialists" were a school of German writers of the 1840s who preached a sentimental, philosophical socialism of brotherly love; Marx and Engels mocked them in the Communist Manifesto (1848). ↩
The Bank is the Bank of France. Rentes were French government bonds, and the rentiers who held them lived on their interest; the conversion of the five percent rentes to four and a half percent was decreed in March 1852. The mortgage banks were land-credit banks set up by decree in 1852 to lend to landowners against their land. ↩
Henri, Duke of Guise (1614–1664), was a great nobleman of the years of the Fronde. ↩
The Senate and the Legislative Body were set up by Bonaparte's constitution of January 14, 1852. The military medal for soldiers was created in January 1852. ↩
Marx's note: Vol means both flight and theft. ↩
Marx's note: You are counting up your goods; you ought first to count up your years. ↩
Marx's note: In Cousine Bette, Balzac portrays the thoroughly debauched Paris philistine in Crevel, whom he modeled on Dr. Véron, the owner of the Constitutionnel. ↩
Marx's note: The words of Madame de Girardin. ↩
Charles de Morny (1811–1865), Louis Bonaparte's half-brother, was minister of the interior at the coup. He resigned in January 1852 over Bonaparte's decree of January 22, which forced the Orléans family to sell its property in France and took over the estates Louis Philippe had handed to his children in 1830. Countess L. is usually identified as the Countess Le Hon, wife of the Belgian minister in Paris. ↩
Faustin Soulouque was president of Haiti from 1847 and reigned as its emperor, Faustin I, from 1849 to 1859. ↩
Louis Véron (1798–1867), a doctor by training, had run the Paris Opéra and owned the newspaper Le Constitutionnel, which backed Bonaparte. Balzac's novel Cousine Bette appeared in 1846. Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac (1806–1880) was a journalist who wrote for Guizot's government in the 1840s and then became one of Bonaparte's leading propagandists. ↩
The Regency was the government of Philippe, Duke of Orléans, for the child king Louis XV from 1715 to 1723, remembered for its debauchery; Louis XV, who reigned until 1774, was famous for the power of his mistresses. Delphine de Girardin (1804–1855), a writer and the wife of the journalist Émile de Girardin, wrote a well-known column on Paris life. ↩
The Holy Coat of Trier is a robe kept in the cathedral of Trier, in western Germany, and venerated as the seamless garment of Christ. Its exhibition in 1844 drew enormous crowds of pilgrims. ↩

Three Books to Read Next

Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The theory Marx is applying, written four years before with Engels: history as class struggle, the bourgeoisie remaking the world, and the workers who will overthrow it. Read the Brumaire after it to watch the theory meet a coup it had not predicted.
Roman Lives by Plutarch

Marx says the French revolutionaries played their parts in Roman costume, and the nephew borrowed his uncle's. Plutarch's Caesar, Brutus and Antony are the originals: a republic undone by a popular general, the story every nineteenth-century Bonaparte was aware of.
Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke

Burke, writing in 1790, predicted that the Revolution would end in military dictatorship, and it did, twice. His book is the conservative half of the argument Marx is having with the whole of nineteenth-century France.