Let us resume the thread of events.
The history of the Constitutional National Assembly from the June days
on, is the history of the supremacy and dissolution of the republican
bourgeois party, the party which is known under the several names of
“Tricolor Republican,” “True Republican,” “Political Republican,”
“Formal Republican,” etc., etc.
Under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, this party had
constituted the Official Republican Opposition, and consequently had
been a recognized element in the then political world. It had its
representatives in the Chambers, and commanded considerable influence
in the press. Its Parisian organ, the “National,” passed, in its way,
for as respectable a paper as the “Journal des Debats.” This position
in the constitutional monarchy corresponded to its character. The
party was not a fraction of the bourgeoisie, held together by great
and common interests, and marked by special business requirements. It
was a coterie of bourgeois with republican ideas—writers, lawyers,
officers and civil employees, whose influence rested upon the personal
antipathies of the country for Louis Philippe, upon reminiscences of
the old Republic, upon the republican faith of a number of
enthusiasts, and, above all, upon the spirit of French patriotism,
whose hatred of the treaties of Vienna and of the alliance with
England kept them perpetually on the alert. The “National” owed a
large portion of its following under Louis Philippe to this covert
imperialism, that, later, under the republic, could stand up against
it as a deadly competitor in the person of Louis Bonaparte. The paper
fought the aristocracy of finance just the same as did the rest of the
bourgeois opposition. The polemic against the budget, which, in
France, was closely connected with the opposition to the aristocracy
of finance, furnished too cheap a popularity and too rich a material
for Puritanical leading articles, not to be exploited. The industrial
bourgeoisie was thankful to it for its servile defence of the French
tariff system, which, however, the paper had taken up more out of
patriotic than economic reasons; the whole bourgeois class was
thankful to it for its vicious denunciations of Communism and
Socialism. For the rest, the party of the “National” was _purely
republican_, i.e., it demanded a republican instead of a monarchic
form of bourgeois government; above all, it demanded for the
bourgeoisie the lion’s share of the government. As to how this
transformation was to be accomplished, the party was far from being
clear. What, however, was clear as day to it and was openly declared
at the reform banquets during the last days of Louis Philippe’s reign,
was its unpopularity with the democratic middle class, especially with
the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as pure
republicans go, were at first on the very point of contenting
themselves with the regency of the Duchess of Orleans, when the
February revolution broke out, and when it gave their best known
representatives a place in the provisional government. Of course, they
enjoyed from the start the confidence of the bourgeoisie and of the
majority of the Constitutional National Assembly. The Socialist
elements of the Provisional Government were promptly excluded from the
Executive Committee which the Assembly had elected upon its convening,
and the party of the “National” subsequently utilized the outbreak of
the June insurrection to dismiss this Executive Committee also, and
thus rid itself of its nearest rivals—the _small traders’ class_ or
_democratic republicans_ (Ledru-Rollin, etc.). Cavaignac, the General
of the bourgeois republican party, who commanded at the battle of
June, stepped into the place of the Executive Committee with a sort of
dictatorial power. Marrast, former editor-in-chief of the “National”,
became permanent President of the Constitutional National Assembly,
and the Secretaryship of State, together with all the other important
posts, devolved upon the pure republicans.
The republican bourgeois party, which since long had looked upon
itself as the legitimate heir of the July monarchy, thus found itself
surpassed in its own ideal; but it came into power, not as it had
dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the
bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a
grape-shot-and-canistered mutiny of the proletariat against
Capital. That which it imagined to be the _most revolutionary_, came
about as the _most counter-revolutionary_ event. The fruit fell into
its lap, but it fell from the Tree of Knowledge, not from the Tree of
Life.
The exclusive power of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from June
24 to the 10th of December, 1848. It is summed up in the _framing of a
republican constitution_ and in _the state of siege of Paris_.
The new Constitution was in substance only a republicanized edition of
the constitutional charter of 1830. The limited suffrage of the July
monarchy, which excluded even a large portion of the bourgeoisie from
political power, was irreconcilable with the existence of the
bourgeois republic. The February revolution had forthwith proclaimed
direct and universal suffrage in the place of the old law. The
bourgeois republicans could not annul this act. They had to content
themselves with tacking to it the limitation of a six months’
residence. The old organization of the administrative law, of
municipal government, of court procedures, of the army, etc., remained
untouched, or, where the constitution did change them, the change
affected their index, not their subject; their name, not their
substance.
The inevitable “General Staff” of the “freedoms” of 1848—personal
freedom, freedom of the press, of speech, of association and of
assemblage, freedom of instruction, of religion, etc.—received a
constitutional uniform that rendered them invulnerable. Each of these
freedoms is proclaimed the absolute right of the French citizen, but
always with the gloss that it is unlimited in so far only as it be not
curtailed by the “equal rights of others,” and by the “public safety,”
or by the “laws,” which are intended to effect this harmony. For
instance:
“Citizens have the right of association, of peaceful and unarmed
assemblage, of petitioning, and of expressing their opinions through
the press or otherwise. _The enjoyment of these rights has no
limitation other than the equal rights of others and the public
safety_.” (Chap. II. of the French Constitution, Section 8.)
“Education is free. The freedom of education shall be _enjoyed_ under
the conditions provided by law, and under the supervision of the
State.” (Section 9.)
“The domicile of the citizen is inviolable, except under the forms
prescribed by law.” (Chap. I., Section 3), etc., etc.
The Constitution, it will be noticed, constantly alludes to future
organic laws, that are to carry out the glosses, and are intended to
regulate the enjoyment of these unabridged freedoms, to the end that
they collide neither with one another nor with the public
safety. Later on, the organic laws are called into existence by the
“Friends of Order,” and all the above named freedoms are so regulated
that, in their enjoyment, the bourgeoisie encounter no opposition from
the like rights of the other classes. Wherever the bourgeoisie wholly
interdicted these rights to “others,” or allowed them their enjoyment
under conditions that were but so many police snares, it was always
done only in the interest of the “public safety,” i.e., of the
bourgeoisie, as required by the Constitution.
Hence it comes that both sides—the “Friends of Order,” who abolished
all those freedoms, as well as the democrats, who had demanded them
all—appeal with full right to the Constitution: Each paragraph of the
Constitution contains its own antithesis, its own Upper and Lower
House—freedom as a generalization, the abolition of freedom as a
specification. Accordingly, so long as the _name_ of freedom was
respected, and only its real enforcement was prevented—in a legal way,
of course—the constitutional existence of freedom remained uninjured,
untouched, however completely its _common_ existence might be
extinguished.
This Constitution, so ingeniously made invulnerable, was, however,
like Achilles, vulnerable at one point: not in its heel, but in its
head, or rather, in the two heads into which it ran out—the
Legislative Assembly, on the one hand, and the President on the
other. Run through the Constitution and it will be found that only
those paragraphs wherein the relation of the President to the
Legislative Assembly is defined, are absolute, positive,
uncontradictory, undistortable. Here the bourgeois republicans were
concerned in securing their own position. Articles 45-70 of the
Constitution are so framed that the National Assembly can
constitutionally remove the President, but the President can set aside
the National Assembly only unconstitutionally, he can set it aside
only by setting aside the Constitution itself. Accordingly, by these
provisions, the National Assembly challenges its own violent
destruction. It not only consecrates, like the charter of 1830, the
division of powers, but it extends this feature to an unbearably
contradictory extreme. The “play of constitutional powers,” as Guizot
styled the clapper-clawings between the legislative and the executive
powers, plays permanent “vabanque” in the Constitution of 1848. On the
one side, 750 representatives of the people, elected and qualified for
re-election by universal suffrage, who constitute an uncontrollable,
indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National Assembly that
enjoys legislative omnipotence, that decides in the last instance over
war, peace and commercial treaties, that alone has the power to grant
amnesties, and that, through its perpetuity, continually maintains the
foreground on the stage; on the other, a President, clad with all the
attributes of royalty, with the right to appoint and remove his
ministers independently from the national assembly, holding in his
hands all the means of executive power, the dispenser of all posts,
and thereby the arbiter of at least one and a half million existences
in France, so many being dependent upon the 500,000 civil employees
and upon the officers of all grades. He has the whole armed power
behind him. He enjoys the privilege of granting pardons to individual
criminals; suspending the National Guards; of removing with the
consent of the Council of State the general, cantonal and municipal
Councilmen, elected by the citizens themselves. The initiative and
direction of all negotiations with foreign countries are reserved to
him. While the Assembly itself is constantly acting upon the stage,
and is exposed to the critically vulgar light of day, he leads a
hidden life in the Elysian fields, only with Article 45 of the
Constitution before his eyes and in his heart daily calling out to
him, “_Frère, il faut mourir!_[4] Your power expires on the second
Sunday of the beautiful month of May, in the fourth year after your
election! The glory is then at an end; the play is not performed
twice; and, if you have any debts, see to it betimes that you pay them
off with the 600,000 francs that the Constitution has set aside for
you, unless, perchance, you should prefer traveling to Clichy[5] on
the second Monday of the beautiful month of May.”
While the Constitution thus clothes the President with actual power,
it seeks to secure the moral power to the National Assembly. Apart
from the circumstance that it is impossible to create a moral power
through legislative paragraphs, the Constitution again neutralizes
itself in that it causes the President to be chosen by all the
Frenchmen through direct suffrage. While the votes of France are
splintered to pieces upon the 750 members of the National Assembly,
they are here, on the contrary, concentrated upon _one_
individual. While each separate Representative represents only this or
that party, this or that city, this or that dunghill, or possibly only
the necessity of electing some one Seven-hundred-and-fiftieth or
other, with whom neither the issue nor the man is closely considered,
that _one_, the President, on the contrary, is the elect of the
nation, and the act of his election is the trump card, that the
sovereign people plays out once every four years. The elected National
Assembly stands in a metaphysical, but the elected President in a
personal, relation to the nation. True enough, the National Assembly
presents in its several Representatives the various sides of the
national spirit, but, in the President, this spirit is incarnated. As
against the National Assembly, the President possesses a sort of
divine right, he is by the grace of the people.
Thetis, the sea-goddess, had prophesied to Achilles that he would die
in the bloom of youth. The Constitution, which had its weak spot, like
Achilles, had also, like Achilles, the presentiment that it would
depart by premature death. It was enough for the pure republicans,
engaged at the work of framing a constitution, to cast a glance from
the misty heights of their ideal republic down upon the profane world
in order to realize how the arrogance of the royalists, of the
Bonapartists, of the democrats, of the Communists, rose daily,
together with their own discredit, and in the same measure as they
approached the completion of their legislative work of art, without
Thetis having for this purpose to leave the sea and impart the secret
to them. They sought to outwit fate by means of constitutional
artifice, through Section 111 of the Constitution, according to which
every motion to revise the Constitution had to be discussed three
successive times, between each of which a full month was to elapse,
and required at least a three-fourths majority, with the additional
proviso that not less than 500 members of the National Assembly
voted. They thereby only made the impotent attempt, still to exercise
as a parliamentary minority, to which in their mind’s eye they
prophetically saw themselves reduced, a power, that, at this very
time, when they still disposed over the parliamentary majority and
over all the machinery of government, was daily slipping from their
weak hands.
Finally, the Constitution entrusts itself for safe keeping, in a
melodramatic paragraph, “to the watchfulness and patriotism of the
whole French people, and of each individual Frenchman,” after having
just before, in another paragraph, entrusted the “watchful” and the
“patriotic” themselves to the tender, inquisitorial attention of the
High Court, instituted by itself.
That was the Constitution of 1848, which, on the 2d of December, 1851,
was not overthrown by one head, but tumbled down at the touch of a
mere hat; though, true enough, that hat was a three-cornered Napoleon
hat.
While the bourgeois republicans were engaged in the Assembly with the
work of splicing this Constitution, of discussing and voting,
Cavaignac, on the outside, maintained the state of siege of Paris. The
state of siege of Paris was the midwife of the constitutional
assembly, during its republican pains of travail. When the
constitution is later on swept off the earth by the bayonet, it should
not be forgotten that it was by the bayonet, likewise—and the bayonet
turned against the people, at that—that it had to be protected in its
mother’s womb, and that by the bayonet it had to be planted on
earth. The ancestors of these “honest republicans” had caused their
symbol, the tricolor, to make the tour of Europe. These, in their turn
also made a discovery, which all of itself, found its way over the
whole continent, but, with ever renewed love, came back to France,
until, by this time, it had acquired the right of citizenship in
one-half of her Departments—the _state of siege_. A wondrous discovery
this was, periodically applied at each succeeding crisis in the course
of the French revolution. But the barrack and the bivouac, thus
periodically laid on the head of French society, to compress her brain
and reduce her to quiet; the sabre and the musket, periodically made
to perform the functions of judges and of administrators, of guardians
and of censors, of police officers and of watchmen; the military
moustache and the soldier’s jacket, periodically heralded as the
highest wisdom and guiding stars of society;—were not all of these,
the barrack and the bivouac, the sabre and the musket, the moustache
and the soldier’s jacket bound, in the end, to hit upon the idea that
they might as well save society once for all, by proclaiming their own
régime as supreme, and relieve bourgeois society wholly of the care of
ruling itself? The barrack and the bivouac, the sabre and the musket,
the moustache and the soldier’s jacket were all the more bound to hit
upon this idea, seeing that they could then also expect better cash
payment for their increased deserts, while at the merely periodic
states of siege and the transitory savings of society at the behest of
this or that bourgeois faction, very little solid matter fell to them
except some dead and wounded, besides some friendly bourgeois
grimaces. Should not the military, finally, in and for its own
interest, play the game of “state of siege,” and simultaneously
besiege the bourgeois exchanges? Moreover, it must not be forgotten,
and be it observed in passing, that Col. Bernard, the same President
of the Military Committee, who, under Cavaignac, helped to deport
15,000 insurgents without trial, moves at this period again at the
head of the Military Committees now active in Paris.
Although the honest, the pure republicans built with the state of
siege the nursery in which the Praetorian guards of December 2, 1851,
were to be reared, they, on the other hand, deserve praise in that,
instead of exaggerating the feeling of patriotism, as under Louis
Philippe, now they themselves are in command of the national power,
they crawl before foreign powers; instead of making Italy free, they
allow her to be reconquered by Austrians and Neapolitans. The election
of Louis Bonaparte for President on December 10, 1848, put an end to
the dictatorship of Cavaignac and to the constitutional assembly.
In Article 44 of the Constitution it is said: “The President of the
French Republic must never have lost his quality of French citizen.”
The first President of the French Republic, L. N. Bonaparte, had not
only lost his quality of French citizen, had not only been an English
special constable, but was even a naturalized Swiss citizen.
In the previous chapter I have explained the meaning of the election
of December 10. I shall not here return to it. Suffice it here to say
that it was a _reaction of the farmers’ class_, who had been expected
to pay the costs of the February revolution, against the other classes
of the nation: it was a _reaction of the country against the city_. It
met with great favor among the soldiers, to whom the republicans of
the “National” had brought neither fame nor funds; among the great
bourgeoisie, who hailed Bonaparte as a bridge to the monarchy; and
among the proletarians and small traders, who hailed him as a scourge
to Cavaignac. I shall later have occasion to enter closer into the
relation of the farmers to the French revolution.
The epoch between December 20, 1848, and the dissolution of the
constitutional assembly in May, 1849, embraces the history of the
downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After they had founded a
republic for the bourgeoisie, had driven the revolutionary proletariat
from the field, and had meanwhile silenced the democratic middle
class, they are themselves shoved aside by the mass of the
bourgeoisie, who justly appropriate this republic as their
property. This bourgeois mass was _Royalist_, however. A part thereof,
the large landed proprietors, had ruled under the restoration, hence,
was _Legitimist_; the other part, the aristocrats of finance and the
large industrial capitalists, had ruled under the July monarchy,
hence, was _Orleanist_. The high functionaries of the Army, of the
University, of the Church, in the civil service, of the Academy and of
the press, divided themselves on both sides, although in unequal
parts. Here, in the bourgeois republic, that bore neither the name of
_Bourbon_, nor of _Orleans_, but the name of _Capital_, they had found
the form of government under which they could all rule in
common. Already the June insurrection had united them all into a
“Party of Order.” The next thing to do was to remove the bourgeois
republicans who still held the seats in the National Assembly. As
brutally as these pure republicans had abused their own physical power
against the people, so cowardly, low-spirited, disheartened, broken,
powerless did they yield, now when the issue was the maintenance of
their own republicanism and their own legislative rights against the
Executive power and the royalists. I need not here narrate the
shameful history of their dissolution. It was not a downfall, it was
extinction. Their history is at an end for all time. In the period
that follows, they figure, whether within or without the Assembly,
only as memories—memories that seem again to come to life so soon as
the question is again only about the word “Republic,” and as often as
the revolutionary conflict threatens to sink down to the lowest
level. In passing, I might observe that the journal which gave to this
party its name, the “National,” goes over to Socialism during the
following period.
Before we close this period, we must cast a look back upon the two
powers, one of which destroys the other on December 2, 1851, while,
from December 20, 1848, down to the departure of the constitutional
assembly, they live in marital relations. We mean Louis Bonaparte, on
the one hand, on the other, the party of the allied royalists, of
Order, and of the large bourgeoisie.
At the inauguration of his presidency, Bonaparte forthwith framed a
ministry out of the party of Order, at whose head he placed Odillon
Barrot, be it noted, the old leader of the liberal wing of the
parliamentary bourgeoisie. Mr. Barrot had finally hunted down a seat
in the ministry, the spook of which had been pursuing him since 1830;
and, what is more, he had the chairmanship in this ministry, although
not, as he had imagined under Louis Philippe, the promoted leader of
the parliamentary opposition, but with the commission to kill a
parliament, and, moreover, as an ally of all his arch enemies, the
Jesuits and the Legitimists. Finally he leads the bride home, but only
after she has been prostituted. As to Bonaparte, he seemed to eclipse
himself completely. The party of Order acted for him.
Immediately at the first session of the ministry the expedition to
Rome was decided upon, which it was there agreed, was to be carried
out behind the back of the National Assembly, and the funds for which,
it was equally agreed, were to be wrung from the Assembly under false
pretences. Thus the start was made with a swindle on the National
Assembly, together with a secret conspiracy with the absolute foreign
powers against the revolutionary Roman republic. In the same way, and
with a similar maneuver, did Bonaparte prepare his stroke of December
2 against the royalist legislature and its constitutional
republic. Let it not be forgotten that the same party, which, on
December 20, 1848, constituted Bonaparte’s ministry, constituted also,
on December 2, 1851, the majority of the legislative National
Assembly.
In August, the constitutive assembly decided not to dissolve until it
had prepared and promulgated a whole series of organic laws, intended
to supplement the Constitution. The party of Order proposed to the
assembly, through Representative Rateau, on January 6, 1849, to let
the organic laws go, and rather to order its own dissolution. Not the
ministry alone, with Mr. Odillon Barrot at its head, but all the
royalist members of the National Assembly were also at this time
hectoring to it that its dissolution was necessary for the restoration
of the public credit, for the consolidation of order, to put an end to
the existing uncertain and provisional, and establish a definite state
of things; they claimed that its continued existence hindered the
effectiveness of the new Government, that it sought to prolong its
life out of pure malice, and that the country was tired of
it. Bonaparte took notice of all these invectives hurled at the
legislative power, he learned them by heart, and, on December 21,
1851, he showed the parliamentary royalists that he had learned from
them. He repeated their own slogans against themselves.
The Barrot ministry and the party of Order went further. They called
all over France for petitions to the National Assembly in which that
body was politely requested to disappear. Thus they led the people’s
unorganic masses to the fray against the National Assembly, i.e.,
against the constitutionally organized expression of the people
itself. They taught Bonaparte to appeal from the parliamentary body to
the people. Finally, on January 29, 1849, the day arrived when the
constitutional assembly was to decide about its own dissolution. On
that day the body found its building occupied by the military;
Changarnier, the General of the party of Order, in whose hands was
joined the supreme command of both the National Guards and the
regulars, held that day a great military review, as though a battle
were imminent; and the coalized royalists declared threateningly to
the constitutional assembly that force would be applied if it did not
act willingly. It was willing, and chaffered only for a very short
respite. What else was the 29th of January, 1849, than the “coup
d’état” of December 2, 1851, only executed by the royalists with
Napoleon’s aid against the republican National Assembly? These
gentlemen did not notice, or did not want to notice, that Napoleon
utilized the 29th of January, 1849, to cause a part of the troops to
file before him in front of the Tuileries, and that he seized with
avidity this very first open exercise of the military against the
parliamentary power in order to hint at Caligula. The allied royalists
saw only their own Changarnier.
Another reason that particularly moved the party of Order forcibly to
shorten the term of the constitutional assembly were the organic laws,
the laws that were to supplement the Constitution, as, for instance,
the laws on education, on religion, etc. The allied royalists had
every interest in framing these laws themselves, and not allowing them
to be framed by the already suspicious republicans. Among these
organic laws, there was, however, one on the responsibility of the
President of the republic. In 1851 the Legislature was just engaged in
framing such a law when Bonaparte forestalled that political stroke by
his own of December 2. What all would not the coalized royalists have
given in their winter parliamentary campaign of 1851, had they but
found this “Responsibility law” ready made, and framed at that, by the
suspicious, the vicious republican Assembly!
After, on January 29, 1849, the constitutive assembly had itself
broken its last weapon, the Barrot ministry and the “Friends of Order”
harrassed it to death, left nothing undone to humilitate it, and wrung
from its weakness, despairing of itself, laws that cost it the last
vestige of respect with the public. Bonaparte, occupied with his own
fixed Napoleonic idea, was audacious enough openly to exploit this
degradation of the parliamentary power: When the National Assembly, on
May 8, 1849, passed a vote of censure upon the Ministry on account of
the occupation of Civita-Vecchia by Oudinot, and ordered that the
Roman expedition be brought back to its alleged purpose, Bonaparte
published that same evening in the “Moniteur” a letter to Oudinot, in
which he congratulated him on his heroic feats, and already, in
contrast with the quill-pushing parliamentarians, posed as the
generous protector of the Army. The royalists smiled at this. They
took him simply for their dupe. Finally, as Marrast, the President of
the constitutional assembly, believed on a certain occasion the safety
of the body to be in danger, and, resting on the Constitution, made a
requisition upon a Colonel, together with his regiment, the Colonel
refused obedience, took refuge behind the “discipline,” and referred
Marrast to Changarnier, who scornfully sent him off with the remark
that he did not like “_bayonettes intelligentes_.”[6] In November,
1851, as the coalized royalists wanted to begin the decisive struggle
with Bonaparte, they sought, by means of their notorious “Questors
Bill,” to enforce the principle of the right of the President of the
National Assembly to issue direct requisitions for troops. One of
their Generals, Leflo, supported the motion. In vain did Changarnier
vote for it, or did Thiers render homage to the cautious wisdom of the
late constitutional assembly. The Minister of War, St. Arnaud,
answered him as Changarnier had answered Marrast—and he did so amidst
the plaudits of the Mountain.
Thus did the party of Order itself, when as yet it was not the
National Assembly, when as yet it was only a Ministry, brand the
parliamentary regime. And yet this party objects vociferously when the
2d of December, 1851, banishes that regime from France!
We wish it a happy journey.