On May 29, 1849, the legislative National Assembly convened. On
December 2, 1851, it was broken up. This period embraces the term of
life of the _Constitutional_ or _Parliamentary Republic_.
In the first French revolution, upon the reign of the
_Constitutionalists_ succeeds that of the _Girondins_; and upon the
reign of the _Girondins_ follows that of the _Jacobins_. Each of these
parties in succession rests upon its more advanced element. So soon as
it has carried the revolution far enough not to be able to keep pace
with, much less march ahead of it, it is shoved aside by its more
daring allies, who stand behind it, and it is sent to the
guillotine. Thus the revolution moves along an upward line.
Just the reverse in 1848. The proletarian party appears as an
appendage to the small traders’ or democratic party; it is betrayed by
the latter and allowed to fall on April 16, May 15, and in the June
days. In its turn, the democratic party leans upon the shoulders of
the bourgeois republicans; barely do the bourgeois republicans believe
themselves firmly in power, than they shake off these troublesome
associates for the purpose of themselves leaning upon the shoulders of
the party of Order. The party of Order draws in its shoulders, lets
the bourgeois republicans tumble down heels over head, and throws
itself upon the shoulders of the armed power. Finally, still of the
mind that it is sustained by the shoulders of the armed power, the
party of Order notices one fine morning that these shoulders have
turned into bayonets. Each party kicks backward at those that are
pushing forward, and leans forward upon those that are crowding
backward; no wonder that, in this ludicrous posture, each loses its
balance, and, after having cut the unavoidable grimaces, breaks down
amid singular somersaults. Accordingly, the revolution moves along a
downward line. It finds itself in this retreating motion before the
last February-barricade is cleared away, and the first governmental
authority of the revolution has been constituted.
The period we now have before us embraces the motliest jumble of
crying contradictions: constitutionalists, who openly conspire against
the Constitution; revolutionists, who admittedly are constitutional; a
National Assembly that wishes to be omnipotent yet remains
parliamentary; a Mountain, that finds its occupation in submission,
and that parries its present defeats with prophecies of future
victories; royalists, who constitute the “_patres conscripti_” of the
republic, and are compelled by the situation to uphold abroad the
hostile monarchic houses, whose adherents they are, while in France
they support the republic that they hate; an Executive power that
finds its strength in its very weakness, and its dignity in the
contempt that it inspires; a republic, that is nothing else than the
combined infamy of two monarchies—the Restoration and the July
Monarchy—with an imperial label; unions, whose first clause is
disunion; struggles, whose first law is indecision; in the name of
peace, barren and hollow agitation; in the name of the revolution,
solemn sermonizings on peace; passions without truth; truths without
passion; heroes without heroism; history without events; development,
whose only moving force seems to be the calendar, and tiresome by the
constant reiteration of the same tensions and relaxes; contrasts, that
seem to intensify themselves periodically, only in order to wear
themselves off and collapse without a solution; pretentious efforts
made for show, and bourgeois frights at the danger of the destruction
of the world, simultaneous with the carrying on of the pettiest
intrigues and the performance of court comedies by the world’s
saviours, who, in their “laisser aller,” recall the Day of Judgment
not so much as the days of the Fronde; the official collective genius
of France brought to shame by the artful stupidity of a single
individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks
through the general suffrage, seeking its true expression in the
prescriptive enemies of the public interests until it finally finds it
in the arbitrary will of a filibuster. If ever a slice from history is
drawn black upon black, it is this. Men and events appear as reversed
“Schlemihls,”[7] as shadows, the bodies of which have been lost. The
revolution itself paralyzes its own apostles, and equips only its
adversaries with passionate violence. When the “Red Spectre,”
constantly conjured up and exorcised by the counter-revolutionists
finally does appear, it does not appear with the Anarchist Phrygian
cap on its head, but in the uniform of Order, in the _Red Breeches of
the French Soldier_.
We saw that the Ministry, which Bonaparte installed on December 20,
1849, the day of his “Ascension,” was a ministry of the party of
Order, of the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. The Barrot-Falloux
Ministry had weathered the republican constitutive convention, whose
term of life it had shortened with more or less violence, and found
itself still at the helm. Changarnier, the General of the allied
royalists, continued to unite in his person the command-in-chief of
the First Military Division and of the Parisian National
Guard. Finally, the general elections had secured the large majority
in the National Assembly to the party of Order. Here the Deputies and
Peers of Louis Phillipe met a saintly crowd of Legitimists, for whose
benefit numerous ballots of the nation had been converted into
admission tickets to the political stage. The Bonapartist
representatives were too thinly sowed to be able to build an
independent parliamentary party. They appeared only as “mauvaise
queue”[8] played upon the party of Order. Thus the party of Order was
in possession of the Government, of the Army, and of the legislative
body, in short, of the total power of the State, morally strengthened
by the general elections, that caused their sovereignty to appear as
the will of the people, and by the simultaneous victory of the
counter-revolution on the whole continent of Europe.
Never did party open its campaign with larger means at its disposal
and under more favorable auspices.
The shipwrecked pure republicans found themselves in the legislative
National Assembly melted down to a clique of fifty men, with the
African Generals Cavaignac, Lamorcière and Bedeau at its head. The
great _Opposition_ party was, however, formed by the Mountain. This
parliamentary baptismal name was given to itself by the _Social
Democratic party_. It disposed of more than two hundred votes out of
the seven hundred and fifty in the National Assembly, and, hence, was
at least just as powerful as any one of the three factions of the
party of Order. Its relative minority to the total royalist coalition
seemed counterbalanced by special circumstances. Not only did the
Departmental election returns show that it had gained a considerable
following among the rural population, but, furthermore, it numbered
almost all the Paris Deputies in its camp; the Army had, by the
election of three under-officers, made a confession of democratic
faith; and the leader of the Mountain, Ledru-Rollin, had, in contrast
to all the representatives of the party of Order, been raised to the
rank of the “parliamentary nobility” by five Departments, who combined
their suffrages upon him. Accordingly, in view of the inevitable
collisions of the royalists among themselves, on the one hand, and of
the whole party of Order with Bonaparte, on the other, the Mountain
seemed on May 29, 1849, to have before it all the elements of
success. A fortnight later, it had lost everything, its honor
included.
Before we follow this parliamentary history any further, a few
observations are necessary, in order to avoid certain common
deceptions concerning the whole character of the epoch that lies
before us. According to the view of the democrats, the issue, during
the period of the legislative National Assembly, was, the same as
during the period of the constitutive assembly, simply the struggle
between republicans and royalists; the movement itself was summed up
by them in the catch-word _Reaction_—night, in which all cats are
grey, and allows them to drawl out their drowsy commonplaces. Indeed,
at first sight, the party of _Order_ presents the appearance of a
tangle of royalist factions, that, not only intrigue against each
other, each aiming to raise its own Pretender to the throne, and
exclude the Pretender of the opposite party, but also are all united
in a common hatred for and common attacks against the “Republic.” On
its side, the _Mountain_ appears, in counter-distinction to the
royalist conspiracy, as the representative of the “Republic.” The
party of _Order_ seems constantly engaged in a “Reaction,” which,
neither more nor less than in Prussia, is directed against the press,
the right of association and the like, and is enforced by brutal
police interventions on the part of the bureaucracy, the police and
the public prosecutor—just as in Prussia; the _Mountain_, on the
contrary, is engaged with equal assiduity in parrying these attacks,
and thus in defending the “eternal rights of man”—as every so-called
people’s party has more or less done for the last hundred and fifty
years. At a closer inspection, however, of the situation and of the
parties, this superficial appearance, which veils the _Class
Struggle_, together with the peculiar physiognomy of this period,
vanishes wholly.
Legitimists and Orleanists constituted, as said before, the two large
factions of the party of Order. What held these two factions to their
respective Pretenders, and inversely kept them apart from each other,
what else was it but the lily and the tricolor, the House of Bourbon
and the House of Orleans, different shades of royalty? Under the
Bourbons, _Large Landed Property_ ruled together with its parsons and
lackeys; under the Orleanist, it was the high finance, large industry,
large commerce, _i.e._, _Capital_, with its retinue of lawyers,
professors and orators. The Legitimate kingdom was but the political
expression for the hereditary rule of the landlords, as the July
monarchy was but the political expression for the usurped rule of the
bourgeois upstarts. What, accordingly, kept these two factions apart
was no so-called set of principles, it was their material conditions
for life—two different sorts of property—; it was the old antagonism
of the City and the Country, the rivalry between Capital and Landed
property. That simultaneously old recollections; personal animosities,
fears and hopes; prejudices and illusions; sympathies and antipathies;
convictions, faith and principles bound these factions to one House or
the other, who denies it? Upon the several forms of property, upon the
social conditions of existence, a whole superstructure is reared of
various and peculiarly shaped feelings, illusions, habits of thought
and conceptions of life. The whole class produces and shapes these out
of its material foundation and out of the corresponding social
conditions. The individual unit to whom they flow through tradition
and education, may fancy that they constitute the true reasons for and
premises of his conduct. Although Orleanists and Legitimists, each of
these factions, sought to make itself and the other believe that what
kept the two apart was the attachment of each to its respective royal
House; nevertheless, facts proved later that it rather was their
divided interest that forbade the union of the two royal Houses. As,
in private life, the distinction is made between what a man thinks of
himself and says, and that which he really is and does, so, all the
more, must the phrases and notions of parties in historic struggles be
distinguished from their real organism, and their real interests,
their notions and their reality. Orleanists and Legitimists found
themselves in the republic beside each other with equal claims. Each
side wishing, in opposition to the other, to carry out the restoration
of its own royal House, meant nothing else than that each of the two
great _Interests_ into which the bourgeoisie is divided—Land and
Capital—sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordinacy of the
other. We speak of two bourgeois interests because large landed
property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has become
completely bourgeois through the development of modern society. Thus
did the Tories of England long fancy that they were enthusiastic for
the Kingdom, the Church and the beauties of the old English
Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the admission
that their enthusiasm was only for _Ground-Rent_.
The coalized royalists carried on their intrigues against each other
in the press, in Ems, in Clarmont—outside of the parliament. Behind
the scenes, they don again their old Orleanist and Legitimist
liveries, and conduct their old tourneys; on the public stage,
however, in their public acts, as a great parliamentary party, they
dispose of their respective royal Houses with mere courtesies, adjourn
“in infinitum” the restoration of the monarchy. Their real business is
transacted as _Party of Order_, _i.e._, under a _Social_, not a
_Political_ title; as representatives of the bourgeois social system;
not as knights of traveling princesses, but as the bourgeois class
against the other classes; not as royalists against
republicans. Indeed, as party of Order they exercised a more unlimited
and harder dominion over the other classes of society than ever before
either under the restoration or the July monarchy—a thing possible
only under the form of a parliamentary republic, because under this
form alone could the two large divisions of the French bourgeoisie be
united; in other words, only under this form could they place on the
order of business the sovereignty of their class, in lieu of the
régime of a privileged faction of the same. If, this notwithstanding,
they are seen as the party of Order to insult the republic and express
their antipathy for it, it happened not out of royalist traditions
only: Instinct taught them that while, indeed, the republic completes
their authority, it at the same time undermined their social
foundation, in that, without intermediary, without the mask of the
crown, without being able to turn aside the national interest by means
of its subordinate struggles among its own conflicting elements and
with the crown, the republic is compelled to stand up sharp against
the subjugated classes, and wrestle with them. It was a sense of
weakness that caused them to recoil before the unqualified demands of
their own class rule, and to retreat to the less complete, less
developed, and, for that very reason, less dangerous forms of the
same. As often, on the contrary, as the allied royalists come into
conflict with the Pretender who stands before them—with Bonaparte—as
often as they believe their parliamentary omnipotence to be endangered
by the Executive, in other words, as often as they must trot out the
political title of their authority, they step up as _Republicans_, not
as _Royalists_—and this is done from the Orleanist Thiers, who warns
the National Assembly that the republic divides them least, down to
Legitimist Berryer, who, on December 2, 1851, the scarf of the
tricolor around him, harangues the people assembled before the Mayor’s
building of the Tenth Arrondissement, as a tribune in the name of the
Republic; the echo, however, derisively answering back to him: “Henry
V.! Henry V.!”[9]
However, against the allied bourgeois, a coalition was made between
the small traders and the workingmen—the so-called _Social Democratic_
party. The small traders found themselves ill rewarded after the June
days of 1848; they saw their material interests endangered, and the
democratic guarantees, that were to uphold their interests, made
doubtful. Hence, they drew closer to the workingmen. On the other
hand, their parliamentary representatives—the _Mountain_—, after being
shoved aside during the dictatorship of the bourgeois republicans,
had, during the last half of the term of the constitutive convention,
regained their lost popularity through the struggle with Bonaparte and
the royalist ministers. They had made an alliance with the Socialist
leaders. During February, 1849, reconciliation banquets were held. A
common program was drafted, joint election committees were empaneled,
and fusion candidates were set up. The revolutionary point was thereby
broken off from the social demands of the proletariat, and a
democratic turn given to them; while, from the democratic claims of
the small traders’ class, the mere political form was rubbed off and
the Socialist point was pushed forward. Thus came the _Social
Democracy_ about. The new _Mountain_, the result of this combination,
contained, with the exception of some figures from the working class
and some Socialist sectarians, the identical elements of the old
Mountain, only numerically stronger. In the course of events it had,
however, changed, together with the class that it represented. The
peculiar character of the Social Democracy is summed up in this: that
democratic-republican institutions are demanded as the means, not to
remove the two extremes—Capital and Wage-slavery—, but in order to
weaken their antagonism and transform them into a harmonious
whole. However different the methods may be that are proposed for the
accomplishment of this object, however much the object itself may be
festooned with more or less revolutionary fancies, the substance
remains the same. This substance is the transformation of society upon
democratic lines, but a transformation within the boundaries of the
small traders’ class. No one must run away with the narrow notion that
the small traders’ class means on principle to enforce a selfish class
interest. It believes rather that the special conditions for its own
emancipation are the general conditions under which alone modern
society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Likewise must we
avoid running away with the notion that the Democratic Representatives
are all “shopkeepers,” or enthuse for these. They may—by education and
individual standing—be as distant from them as heaven is from
earth. That which makes them representatives of the small traders’
class is that they do not intellectually leap the bounds which that
class itself does not leap in practical life; that, consequently, they
are theoretically driven to the same problems and solutions, to which
material interests and social standing practically drive the
latter. Such, in fact, is at all times the relation of the “political”
and the “literary” representatives of a class to the class they
represent.
After the foregoing explanations, it goes without saying that, while
the Mountain is constantly wrestling for the republic and the
so-called “rights of man,” neither the republic nor the “rights of
man” is its real goal, as little as an army, whose weapons it is
sought to deprive it of and that defends itself, steps on the field of
battle simply in order to remain in possession of its implements of
warfare.
The party of Order provoked the Mountain immediately upon the
convening of the assembly. The bourgeoisie now felt the necessity of
disposing of the democratic small traders’ class, just as a year
before it had understood the necessity of putting an end to the
revolutionary proletariat.
But the position of the foe had changed. The strength of the
proletarian party was on the streets; that of the small traders’ class
was in the National Assembly itself. The point was, accordingly, to
wheedle them out of the National Assembly into the street, and to have
them break their parliamentary power themselves, before time and
opportunity could consolidate them. The Mountain jumped with loose
reins into the trap.
The bombardment of Rome by the French troops was the bait thrown at
the Mountain. It violated Article V. of the Constitution, which
forbade the French republic to use its forces against the liberties of
other nations; besides, Article IV. forbade all declaration of war by
the Executive without the consent of the National Assembly;
furthermore, the constitutive assembly had censured the Roman
expedition by its resolution of May 8. Upon these grounds,
Ledru-Rollin submitted on June 11, 1849, a motion impeaching Bonaparte
and his Ministers. Instigated by the wasp-stings of Thiers, he even
allowed himself to be carried away to the point of threatening to
defend the Constitution by all means, even arms in hand. The Mountain
rose as one man, and repeated the challenge. On June 12, the National
Assembly rejected the notion to impeach, and the Mountain left the
parliament. The events of June 13 are known: the proclamation by a
part of the Mountain pronouncing Napoleon and his Ministers “outside
the pale of the Constitution”; the street parades of the democratic
National Guards, who, unarmed as they were, flew apart at contact with
the troops of Changarnier; etc., etc. Part of the Mountain fled
abroad, another part was assigned to the High Court of Bourges, and a
parliamentary regulation placed the rest under the school-master
supervision of the President of the National Assembly. Paris was again
put under a state of siege; and the democratic portion of the National
Guards was disbanded. Thus the influence of the Mountain in parliament
was broken, together with the power of the small traders’ class in
Paris.
Lyons, where the 13th of June had given the signal to a bloody labor
uprising, was, together with the five surrounding Departments,
likewise pronounced in state of siege, a condition that continues down
to this moment.[10]
The bulk of the Mountain had left its vanguard in the lurch by
refusing their signatures to the proclamation; the press had deserted:
only two papers dared to publish the pronunciamento; the small traders
had betrayed their Representatives: the National Guards stayed away,
or, where they did turn up, hindered the raising of barricades; the
Representatives had duped the small traders: nowhere were the alleged
affiliated members from the Army to be seen; finally, instead of
gathering strength from them, the democratic party had infected the
proletariat with its own weakness, and, as usual with democratic
feats, the leaders had the satisfaction of charging “their people”
with desertion, and the people had the satisfaction of charging their
leaders with fraud.
Seldom was an act announced with greater noise than the campaign
contemplated by the Mountain; seldom was an event trumpeted ahead with
more certainty and longer beforehand than the “inevitable victory of
the democracy.” This is evident: the democrats believe in the
trombones before whose blasts the walls of Jericho fall together; as
often as they stand before the walls of despotism, they seek to
imitate the miracle. If the Mountain wished to win in parliament, it
should not appeal to arms; if it called to arms in parliament, it
should not conduct itself parliamentarily on the street; if the
friendly demonstration was meant seriously, it was silly not to
foresee that it would meet with a warlike reception; if it was
intended for actual war, it was rather original to lay aside the
weapons with which war had to be conducted. But the revolutionary
threats of the middle class and of their democratic representatives
are mere attempts to frighten an adversary; when they have run
themselves into a blind alley, when they have sufficiently compromised
themselves and are compelled to execute their threats, the thing is
done in a hesitating manner that avoids nothing so much as the means
to the end, and catches at pretexts to succumb. The bray of the
overture, that announces the fray, is lost in a timid growl so soon as
this is to start; the actors cease to take themselves seriously, and
the performance falls flat like an inflated balloon that is pricked
with a needle.
No party exaggerates to itself the means at its disposal more than the
democratic, none deceives itself with greater heedlessness on the
situation. A part of the Army voted for it, thereupon the Mountain is
of the opinion that the Army would revolt in its favor. And by what
occasion? By an occasion, that, from the standpoint of the troops,
meant nothing else than that the revolutionary soldiers should take
the part of the soldiers of Rome against French soldiers. On the other
hand, the memory of June, 1848, was still too fresh not to keep alive
a deep aversion on the part of the proletariat towards the National
Guard, and a strong feeling of mistrust on the part of the leaders of
the secret societies for the democratic leaders. In order to balance
these differences, great common interests at stake were needed. The
violation of an abstract constitutional paragraph could not supply
such interests. Had not the constitution been repeatedly violated,
according to the assurances of the democrats themselves? Had not the
most popular papers branded them as a counter-revolutionary artifice?
But the democrat—by reason of his representing the middle class, that
is to say, a _Transition Class_, in which the interests of two other
classes are mutually dulled—, imagines himself above all class
contrast. The democrats grant that opposed to them stands a privileged
class, but they, together with the whole remaining mass of the nation,
constitute the “PEOPLE.” What they represent is the “people’s rights”;
their interests are the “people’s interests.” Hence, they do not
consider that, at an impending struggle, they need to examine the
interests and attitude of the different classes. They need not too
seriously weigh their own means. All they have to do is to give the
signal in order to have the “people” fall upon the “oppressors” with
all its inexhaustible resources. If, thereupon, in the execution,
their interests turn out to be uninteresting, and their power to be
impotence, it is ascribed either to depraved sophists, who split up
the “undivisible people” into several hostile camps; or to the army
being too far brutalized and blinded to appreciate the pure aims of
the democracy as its own best; or to some detail in the execution that
wrecks the whole plan; or, finally, to an unforeseen accident that
spoiled the game this time. At all events, the democrat comes out of
the disgraceful defeat as immaculate as he went innocently into it,
and with the refreshed conviction that he must win; not that he
himself and his party must give up their old standpoint, but that, on
the contrary, conditions must come to his aid.
For all this, one must not picture to himself the decimated, broken,
and, by the new parliamentary regulation, humbled Mountain altogether
too unhappy. If June 13 removed its leaders, it, on the other hand,
made room for new ones of inferior capacity, who are flattered by
their new position. If their impotence in parliament could no longer
be doubted, they were now justified to limit their activity to
outbursts of moral indignation. If the party of Order pretended to see
in them, as the last official representatives of the revolution, all
the horrors of anarchy incarnated, they were free to appear all the
more flat and modest in reality. Over June 13 they consoled themselves
with the profound expression: “If they but dare to assail universal
suffrage... then... then we will show who we are!” Nous verrons.[11]
As to the “Mountaineers,” who had fled abroad, it suffices here to say
that Ledru-Rollin—he having accomplished the feat of hopelessly
ruining, in barely a fortnight, the powerful party at whose head he
stood—, found himself called upon to build up a French government “in
partibus;” that his figure, at a distance, removed from the field of
action, seemed to gain in size in the measure that the level of the
revolution sank and the official prominences of official France became
more and more dwarfish; that he could figure as republican Pretender
for 1852, and periodically issued to the Wallachians and other peoples
circulars in which “despot of the continent” is threatened with the
feats that he and his allies had in contemplation. Was Proudhon wholly
wrong when he cried out to these gentlemen: “Vous n’êtes que des
blaqueurs”?[12]
The party of Order had, on June 13, not only broken up the Mountain,
it had also established the _Subordination of the Constitution to the
Majority Decisions of the National Assembly_. So, indeed, did the
republic understand it, to-wit, that the bourgeois ruled here in
parliamentary form, without, as in the monarchy, finding a check in
the veto of the Executive power, or the liability of parliament to
dissolution. It was a “parliamentary republic,” as Thiers styled
it. But if, on June 13, the bourgeoisie secured its omnipotence within
the parliament building, did it not also strike the parliament itself,
as against the Executive and the people, with incurable weakness by
excluding its most popular part? By giving up numerous Deputies,
without further ceremony to the mercies of the public prosecutor, it
abolished its own parliamentary inviolability. The humiliating
regulation, that it subjected the Mountain to, raised the President of
the republic in the same measure that it lowered the individual
Representatives of the people. By branding an insurrection in defense
of the Constitution as anarchy, and as a deed looking to the overthrow
of society, it interdicted to itself all appeal to insurrection
whenever the Executive should violate the Constitution against
it. And, indeed, the irony of history wills it that the very General,
who by order of Bonaparte bombarded Rome, and thus gave the immediate
occasion to the constitutional riot of June 13, that _Oudinot_, on
December 2, 1851, is the one imploringly and vainly to be offered to
the people by the party of Order as the General of the
Constitution. Another hero of June 13, Vieyra, who earned praise from
the tribune of the National Assembly for the brutalities that he had
committed in the democratic newspaper offices at the head of a gang of
National Guards in the hire of the high finance—this identical Vieyra
was initiated in the conspiracy of Bonaparte, and contributed
materially in cutting off all protection that could come to the
National Assembly, in the hour of its agony, from the side of the
National Guard.
June 13 had still another meaning. The Mountain had wanted to place
Bonaparte under charges. Their defeat was, accordingly, a direct
victory of Bonaparte; it was his personal triumph over his democratic
enemies. The party of Order fought for the victory, Bonaparte needed
only to pocket it. He did so. On June 14, a proclamation was to be
read on the walls of Paris wherein the President, as it were, without
his connivance, against his will, driven by the mere force of
circumstances, steps forward from his cloisterly seclusion like
misjudged virtue, complains of the calumnies of his antagonists, and,
while seeming to identify his own person with the cause of order,
rather identifies the cause of order with his own person. Besides
this, the National Assembly had subsequently approved the expedition
against Rome; Bonaparte, however, had taken the initiative in the
affair. After he had led the High Priest Samuel back into the Vatican,
he could hope as King David to occupy the Tuileries. He had won the
parson-interests over to himself.
The riot of June 13 limited itself, as we have seen, to a peaceful
street procession. There were, consequently, no laurels to be won from
it. Nevertheless, in these days, poor in heroes and events, the party
of Order converted this bloodless battle into a second
Austerlitz. Tribune and press lauded the army as the power of order
against the popular multitude, and the impotence of anarchy; and
Changarnier as the “bulwark of society”—a mystification that he
finally believed in himself. Underhand, however, the corps that seemed
doubtful were removed from Paris; the regiments whose suffrage had
turned out most democratic were banished from France to Algiers; the
restless heads among the troops were consigned to penal quarters;
finally, the shutting out of the press from the barracks, and of the
barracks from contact with the citizens was systematically carried
out.
We stand here at the critical turning point in the history of the
French National Guard. In 1830, it had decided the downfall of the
restoration. Under Louis Philippe, every riot failed, at which the
National Guard stood on the side of the troops. When, in the February
days of 1848, it showed itself passive against the uprising and
doubtful toward Louis Philippe himself, he gave himself up for
lost. Thus the conviction cast root that a revolution could not win
without, nor the Army against, the National Guard. This was the
superstitious faith of the Army in bourgeois omnipotence. The June
days of 1848, when the whole National Guard, jointly with the regular
troops, threw down the insurrection, had confirmed the
superstition. After the inauguration of Bonaparte’s administration,
the position of the National Guard sank somewhat through the
unconstitutional joining of their command with the command of the
First Military Division in the person of Changarnier.
As the command of the National Guard appeared here merely an attribute
of the military commander-in-chief, so did the Guard itself appear
only as an appendage of the regular troops. Finally, on June 13, the
National Guard was broken up, not through its partial dissolution
only, that from that date forward was periodically repeated at all
points of France, leaving only wrecks of its former self behind. The
demonstration of June 13 was, above all, a demonstration of the
National Guards. True, they had not carried their arms, but they had
carried their uniforms against the Army—and the talisman lay just in
these uniforms. The Army then learned that this uniform was but a
woolen rag, like any other. The spell was broken. In the June days of
1848, bourgeoisie and small traders were united as National Guard with
the Army against the proletariat; on June 13, 1849, the bourgeoisie
had the small-traders’ National Guard broken up; on December 2, 1851,
the National Guard of the bourgeoisie itself vanished, and Bonaparte
attested the fact when he subsequently signed the decree for its
disbandment. Thus the bourgeoisie had itself broken its last weapon
against the army, from the moment when the small traders’ class no
longer stood as a vassal behind, but as a rebel before it; indeed, it
was bound to do so, as it was bound to destroy with its own hand all
its means of defence against absolutism, so soon as itself was
absolute.
In the meantime, the party of Order celebrated the recovery of a power
that seemed lost in 1848 only in order that, freed from its trammels
in 1849, it be found again through invectives against the republic and
the Constitution; through the malediction of all future, present and
past revolutions, that one included which its own leaders had made;
and, finally, in laws by which the press was gagged, the right of
association destroyed, and the stage of siege regulated as an organic
institution. The National Assembly then adjourned from the middle of
August to the middle of October, after it had appointed a Permanent
Committee for the period of its absence. During these vacations, the
Legitimists intrigued with Ems; the Orleanists with Claremont;
Bonaparte through princely excursions; the Departmental Councilmen in
conferences over the revision of the Constitution;— occurrences, all
of which recurred regularly at the periodical vacations of the
National Assembly, and upon which I shall not enter until they have
matured into events. Be it here only observed that the National
Assembly was impolitic in vanishing from the stage for long intervals,
and leaving in view, at the head of the republic, only one, however
sorry, figure—Louis Bonaparte’s—, while, to the public scandal, the
party of Order broke up into its own royalist component parts, that
pursued their conflicting aspirations after the restoration. As often
as, during these vacations, the confusing noise of the parliament was
hushed, and its body was dissolved in the nation, it was unmistakably
shown that only one thing was still wanting to complete the true
figure of the republic: to make the vacation of the National Assembly
permanent, and substitute its inscription—“Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity”—by the unequivocal words, “Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery!”