The strife immediately broke out again between the National Assembly
and Bonaparte, so soon as the revolutionary crisis was weathered, and
universal suffrage was abolished.
The Constitution had fixed the salary of Bonaparte at 600,000
francs. Barely half a year after his installation, he succeeded in
raising this sum to its double: Odillon Barrot had wrung from the
constitutive assembly a yearly allowance of 600,000 francs for
so-called representation expenses. After June 13, Bonaparte hinted at
similar solicitations, to which, however, Barrot then turned a deaf
ear. Now, after May 31, he forthwith utilized the favorable moment,
and caused his ministers to move a civil list of three millions in the
National Assembly. A long adventurous, vagabond career had gifted him
with the best developed antennae for feeling out the weak moments when
he could venture upon squeezing money from his bourgeois. He carried
on regular blackmail. The National Assembly had maimed the sovereignty
of the people with his aid and his knowledge: he now threatened to
denounce its crime to the tribunal of the people, if it did not pull
out its purse and buy his silence with three millions annually. It had
robbed three million Frenchmen of the suffrage: for every Frenchman
thrown “out of circulation,” he demanded a franc “in circulation.” He,
the elect of six million, demanded indemnity for the votes he had been
subsequently cheated of. The Committee of the National Assembly turned
the importunate fellow away. The Bonapartist press threatened: Could
the National Assembly break with the President of the republic at a
time when it had broken definitely and on principle with the mass of
the nation? It rejected the annual civil list, but granted, for this
once, an allowance of 2,160,000 francs. Thus it made itself guilty of
the double weakness of granting the money, and, at the same time,
showing by its anger that it did so only unwillingly. We shall
presently see to what use Bonaparte put the money. After this
aggravating after-play, that followed upon the heels of the abolition
of universal suffrage, and in which Bonaparte exchanged his humble
attitude of the days of the crisis of March and April for one of
defiant impudence towards the usurping parliament, the National
Assembly adjourned for three months, from August 11, to November
11. It left behind in its place a Permanent Committee of 18 members
that contained no Bonapartist, but did contain a few moderate
republicans. The Permanent Committee of the year 1849 had numbered
only men of order and Bonapartists. At that time, however, the party
of Order declared itself in permanence against the revolution; now the
parliamentary republic declared itself in permanence against the
President. After the law of May 31, only this rival still confronted
the party of Order.
When the National Assembly reconvened in November, 1850, instead of
its former petty skirmishes with the President, a great headlong
struggle, a struggle for life between the two powers, seemed to have
become inevitable.
As in the year 1849, the party of Order had, during this year’s
vacation, dissolved into its two separate factions, each occupied with
its own restoration intrigues, which had received new impetus from the
death of Louis Philippe. The Legitimist King, Henry V, had even
appointed a regular Ministry, that resided in Paris, and in which sat
members of the Permanent Committee. Hence, Bonaparte was, on his part,
justified in making tours through the French Departments,
and—according to the disposition of the towns that he happened to be
gladdening with his presence—some times covertly, other times more
openly blabbing out his own restoration plans, and gaining votes for
himself. On these excursions, which the large official “Moniteur” and
the small private “Moniteurs” of Bonaparte were, of course, bound to
celebrate as triumphal marches, he was constantly accompanied by
affiliated members of the “Society of December 10.” This society dated
from the year 1849. Under the pretext of founding a benevolent
association, the slum-proletariat of Paris was organized into secret
sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist
General at the head of all. Along with ruined roués of questionable
means of support and questionable antecedents, along with the foul and
adventures-seeking dregs of the bourgeoisie, there were vagabonds,
dismissed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves,
sharpers, jugglers, lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand
performers, gamblers, procurers, keepers of disorderly houses,
porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, scissors grinders,
tinkers, beggars—in short, that whole undefined, dissolute,
kicked-about mass that the Frenchmen style “la Bohéme.” With this
kindred element, Bonaparte formed the stock of the “Society of
December 10,” a “benevolent association” in so far as, like Bonaparte
himself, all its members felt the need of being benevolent to
themselves at the expense of the toiling nation. The Bonaparte, who
here constitutes himself _Chief of the Slum-Proletariat_; who only
here finds again in plenteous form the interests which he personally
pursues; who, in this refuse, offal and wreck of all classes,
recognizes the only class upon which he can depend
unconditionally;—this is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte without
qualification. An old and crafty roué, he looks upon the historic life
of nations, upon their great and public acts, as comedies in the
ordinary sense, as a carnival, where the great costumes, words and
postures serve only as masks for the pettiest chicaneries. So, on the
occasion of his expedition against Strassburg when a trained Swiss
vulture impersonated the Napoleonic eagle; so, again, on the occasion
of his raid upon Boulogne, when he struck a few London lackeys into
French uniform: they impersonated the army;[15] and so now, in his
“Society of December 10,” he collects 10,000 loafers who are to
impersonate the people as Snug the Joiner does the lion. At a period
when the bourgeoisie itself is playing the sheerest comedy, but in the
most solemn manner in the world, without doing violence to any of the
pedantic requirements of French dramatic etiquette, and is itself
partly deceived by, partly convinced of, the solemnity of its own
public acts, the adventurer, who took the comedy for simple comedy,
was bound to win. Only after he has removed his solemn opponent, when
he himself takes seriously his own role of emperor, and, with the
Napoleonic mask on, imagines he impersonates the real Napoleon, only
then does he become the victim of his own peculiar conception of
history—the serious clown, who no longer takes history for a comedy,
but a comedy for history. What the national work-shops were to the
socialist workingmen, what the “Gardes mobiles” were to the bourgeois
republicans, that was to Bonaparte the “Society of December 10,”—a
force for partisan warfare peculiar to himself. On his journeys, the
divisions of the Society, packed away on the railroads, improvised an
audience for him, performed public enthusiasm, shouted “vive
l’Empereur,” insulted and clubbed the republicans,—all, of course,
under the protection of the police. On his return stages to Paris,
this rabble constituted his vanguard, it forestalled or dispersed
counter-demonstrations. The “Society of December 10” belonged to him,
it was his own handiwork, his own thought. Whatever else he
appropriates, the power of circumstances places in his hands; whatever
else he does, either circumstances do for him, or he is content to
copy from the deeds of others; but he, posing before the citizens with
the official phrases about “Order,” “Religion,” “Family,” “Property,”
and, behind him, the secret society of skipjacks and picaroons, the
society of disorder, of prostitution, and of theft,—that is Bonaparte
himself as the original author; and the history of the “Society of
December 10” is his own history. Now, then, it happened that
Representatives belonging to the party of order occasionally got under
the clubs of the Decembrists. Nay, more. Police Commissioner Yon, who
had been assigned to the National Assembly, and was charged with the
guardianship of its safety, reported to the Permanent Committee upon
the testimony of one Alais, that a Section of the Decembrists had
decided on the murder of General Changarnier and of Dupin, the
President of the National Assembly, and had already settled upon the
men to execute the decree. One can imagine the fright of Mr. Dupin. A
parliamentary inquest over the “Society of December 10,” i.e., the
profanation of the Bonapartist secret world, now seemed
inevitable. Just before the reconvening of the National Assembly,
Bonaparte circumspectly dissolved his Society, of course, on paper
only. As late as the end of 1851, Police Prefect Carlier vainly
sought, in an exhaustive memorial, to move him to the real dissolution
of the Decembrists.
The “Society of December 10” was to remain the private army of
Bonaparte until he should have succeeded in converting the public Army
into a “Society of December 10.” Bonaparte made the first attempt in
this direction shortly after the adjournment of the National Assembly,
and he did so with the money which he had just wrung from it. As a
fatalist, he lives devoted to the conviction that there are certain
Higher Powers, whom man, particularly the soldier, cannot
resist. First among these Powers he numbers cigars and champagne, cold
poultry and garlic-sausage. Accordingly, in the apartments of the
Elysée, he treated first the officers and under-officers to cigars and
champagne, to cold poultry and garlic-sausage. On October 3, he
repeats this manoeuvre with the rank and file of the troops by the
review of St. Maur; and, on October 10, the same manoeuvre again, upon
a larger scale, at the army parade of Satory. The Uncle bore in
remembrance the campaigns of Alexander in Asia; the Nephew bore in
remembrance the triumphal marches of Bacchus in the same
country. Alexander was, indeed, a demigod; but Bacchus was a
full-fledged god, and the patron deity, at that, of the “Society of
December 10.”
After the review of October 3, the Permanent Committee summoned the
Minister of War, d’Hautpoul, before it. He promised that such breaches
of discipline should not recur. We have seen how, on October 10th,
Bonaparte kept d’Hautpoul’s word. At both reviews Changarnier had
commanded as Commander-in-chief of the Army of Paris. He, at once
member of the Permanent Committee, Chief of the National Guard, the
“Savior” of January 29, and June 13, the “Bulwark of Society,”
candidate of the Party of Order for the office of President, the
suspected Monk of two monarchies,—he had never acknowledged his
subordination to the Minister of War, had ever openly scoffed at the
republican Constitution, and had pursued Bonaparte with a protection
that was ambiguously distinguished. Now he became zealous for the
discipline in opposition to Bonaparte. While, on October 10, a part of
the cavalry cried: “Vive Napoléon! Vivent les saucissons;”[16]
Changarnier saw to it that at least the infantry, which filed by under
the command of his friend Neumeyer, should observe an icy silence. In
punishment, the Minister of War, at the instigation of Bonaparte,
deposed General Neumeyer from his post in Paris, under the pretext of
providing for him as Commander-in-chief of the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Military Divisions. Neumeyer declined the exchange, and had,
in consequence, to give his resignation. On his part, Changarnier
published on November 2, an order, wherein he forbade the troops to
indulge, while under arms, in any sort of political cries or
demonstrations. The papers devoted to the Elysée interests attacked
Changarnier; the papers of the party of Order attacked Bonaparte; the
Permanent Committee held frequent secret sessions, at which it was
repeatedly proposed to declare the fatherland in danger; the Army
seemed divided into two hostile camps, with two hostile staffs; one at
the Elysée, where Bonaparte, the other at the Tuileries, where
Changarnier resided. All that seemed wanting for the signal of battle
to sound was the convening of the National Assembly. The French public
looked upon the friction between Bonaparte and Changarnier in the
light of the English journalist, who characterized it in these words:
“The political servant girls of France are mopping away the glowing
lava of the revolution with old mops, and they scold each other while
doing their work.”
Meanwhile Bonaparte hastened to depose the Minister of War,
d’Hautpoul; to expedite him heels over head to Algiers; and to appoint
in his place General Schramm as Minister of War. On November 12, he
sent to the National Assembly a message of American excursiveness,
overloaded with details, redolent of order, athirst for conciliation,
resignful to the Constitution, dealing with all and everything, only
not with the burning questions of the moment. As if in passing he
dropped the words that according to the express provisions of the
Constitution, the President alone disposes over the Army. The message
closed with the following high-sounding protestations:
“France demands, above all things, peace... Alone bound by an oath, I
shall keep myself within the narrow bounds marked out by it to
me... As to me, elected by the people, and owing my power to it alone,
I shall always submit to its lawfully expressed will. Should you at
this session decide upon the revision of the Constitution, a
Constitutional Convention will regulate the position of the Executive
power. If you do not, then, the people will, in 1852, solemnly
announce its decision. But, whatever the solution may be that the
future has in store, let us arrive at an understanding to the end that
never may passion, surprise or violence decide over the fate of a
great nation... That which, above all, bespeaks my attention is, not
who will, in 1852, rule over France, but to so devote the time at my
disposal that the interval may pass by without agitation and
disturbance. I have straightforwardly opened my heart to you, you will
answer my frankness with your confidence, my good efforts with your
co-operation. God will do the rest.”
The honnête, hypocritically temperate, commonplace-virtuous language
of the bourgeoisie reveals its deep meaning in the mouth of the
self-appointed ruler of the “Society of December 10,” and of the
picnic-hero of St. Maur and Satory.
The burgraves of the party of Order did not for a moment deceive
themselves on the confidence that this unbosoming deserved. They were
long blase on oaths; they numbered among themselves veterans and
virtuosi of perjury. The passage about the army did not, however,
escape them. They observed with annoyance that the message, despite
its prolix enumeration of the lately enacted laws, passed, with
affected silence, over the most important of all, the election law,
and, moreover, in case no revision of the Constitution was held, left
the choice of the President, in 1852, with the people. The election
law was the ball-and-chain to the feet of the party of Order, that
hindered them from walking, and now assuredly from
storming. Furthermore, by the official disbandment of the “Society of
December 10,” and the dismissal of the Minister of War, d’Hautpoul,
Bonaparte had, with his own hands, sacrificed the scapegoats on the
altar of the fatherland. He had turned off the expected
collision. Finally, the party of Order itself anxiously sought to
avoid every decisive conflict with the Executive, to weaken and to
blur it over. Fearing to lose its conquests over the revolution, it
let its rival gather the fruits thereof. “France demands, above all
things, peace,”—with this language had the party of Order been
apostrophizing the revolution, since February; with this language did
Bonaparte’s message now apostrophize the party of Order: “France
demands, above all things, peace.” Bonaparte committed acts that aimed
at usurpation, but the party of Order committed a “disturbance of the
peace,” if it raised the hue and cry, and explained them
hypochrondriacally. The sausages of Satory were mouse-still when
nobody talked about them;—“France demands, above all things, peace.”
Accordingly, Bonaparte demanded that he be let alone; and the
parliamentary party was lamed with a double fear: the fear of
re-conjuring up the revolutionary disturbance of the peace, and the
fear of itself appearing as the disturber of the peace in the eyes of
its own class, of the bourgeoisie. Seeing that, above all things,
France demanded peace, the party of Order did not dare, after
Bonaparte had said “peace” in his message, to answer “war.” The
public, who had promised to itself the pleasure of seeing great scenes
of scandal at the opening of the National Assembly, was cheated out of
its expectations. The opposition deputies, who demanded the submission
of the minutes of the Permanent Committee over the October
occurrences, were outvoted. All debate that might excite was fled from
on principle. The labors of the National Assembly during November and
December, 1850, were without interest.
Finally, toward the end of December, began a guerilla warfare about
certain prerogatives of the parliament. The movement sank into the
mire of petty chicaneries on the prerogative of the two powers, since,
with the abolition of universal suffrage, the bourgeoisie had done
away with the class struggle.
A judgment for debt had been secured against Mauguin, one of the
Representatives. Upon inquiry by the President of the Court, the
Minister of Justice, Rouher, declared that an order of arrest should
be made out without delay. Mauguin was, accordingly, cast into the
debtors’ prison. The National Assembly bristled up when it heard of
the “attentat.” It not only ordered his immediate release, but had him
forcibly taken out of Clichy the same evening by its own greffier. In
order, nevertheless, to shield its belief in the “sacredness of
private property,” and also with the ulterior thought of opening, in
case of need, an asylum for troublesome Mountainers, it declared the
imprisonment of a Representative for debt to be permissible upon its
previous consent. It forgot to decree that the President also could be
locked up for debt. By its act, it wiped out the last semblance of
inviolability that surrounded the members of its own body.
It will be remembered that, upon the testimony of one Allais, Police
Commissioner Yon had charged a Section of Decembrists with a plan to
murder Dupin and Changarnier. With an eye upon that, the questors
proposed at the very first session, that the parliament organize a
police force of its own, paid for out of the private budget of the
National Assembly itself, and wholly independent of the Police
Prefects. The Minister of the Interior, Baroche, protested against
this trespass on his preserves. A miserable compromise followed,
according to which the Police Commissioner of the Assembly was to be
paid out of its own private budget and was to be subject to the
appointment and dismissal of its own questors, but only upon previous
agreement with the Minister of the Interior. In the meantime Allais
had been prosecuted by the Government. It was an easy thing, in Court,
to present his testimony in the light of a mystification, and, through
the mouth of the Public Prosecutor, to throw Dupin, Changarnier, Yon,
together with the whole National Assembly, into a ridiculous
light. Thereupon, on December 29, Minister Baroche writes a letter to
Dupin, in which he demands the dismissal of Yon. The Committee of the
National Assembly decides to keep Yon in office; nevertheless, the
National Assembly, frightened by its own violence in the affair of
Mauguin, and accustomed, every time it has shied a blow at the
Executive, to receive back from it two in exchange, does not sanction
this decision. It dismisses Yon in reward for his zeal in office, and
robs itself of a parliamentary prerogative, indispensable against a
person who does not decide by night to execute by day, but decides by
day and executes by night.
We have seen how, during the months of November and December, under
great and severe provocations, the National Assembly evaded and
refused the combat with the Executive power. Now we see it compelled
to accept it on the smallest occasions. In the affair of Mauguin, it
confirms in principle the liability of a Representative to
imprisonment for debt, but to itself reserves the power of allowing
the principle to be applied only to the Representatives whom it
dislikes,—and for this infamous privilege we see it wrangling with the
Minister of Justice. Instead of utilizing the alleged murder plan to
the end of fastening an inquest upon the “Society of December 10,” and
of exposing Bonaparte beyond redemption before France and Europe in
his true figure, as the head of the slum-proletariat of Paris, it
allows the collision to sink to a point where the only issue between
itself and the Minister of the Interior is, Who has jurisdiction over
the appointment and dismissal of a Police Commissioner? Thus we see
the party of Order, during this whole period, compelled by its
ambiguous position to wear out and fritter away its conflict with the
Executive power in small quarrels about jurisdiction, in chicaneries,
in pettifogging, in boundary disputes, and to turn the stalest
questions of form into the very substance of its activity. It dares
not accept the collision at the moment when it involves a principle,
when the Executive power has really given itself a blank, and when the
cause of the National Assembly would be the cause of the nation. It
would thereby have issued to the nation an order of march; and it
feared nothing so much as that the nation should move. Hence, on these
occasions, it rejects the motions of the Mountain, and proceeds to the
order of the day. After the issue has in this way lost all magnitude,
the Executive power quietly awaits the moment when it can take it up
again upon small and insignificant occasions; when, so to say, the
issue offers only a parliamentary local interest. Then does the
repressed valor of the party of Order break forth, then it tears away
the curtain from the scene, then it denounces the President, then it
declares the republic to be in danger,--but then all its pathos
appears stale, and the occasion for the quarrel a hypocritical
pretext, or not at all worth the effort. The parliamentary tempest
becomes a tempest in a tea-pot, the struggle an intrigue, the
collision a scandal. While the revolutionary classes gloat with
sardonic laughter over the humiliation of the National Assembly—they,
of course, being as enthusiastic for the prerogatives of the
parliament as that body is for public freedom—the bourgeoisie, outside
of the parliament, does not understand how the bourgeoisie, inside of
the parliament, can squander its time with such petty bickerings, and
can endanger peace by such wretched rivalries with the President. It
is puzzled at a strategy that makes peace the very moment everybody
expects battles, and that attacks the very moment everybody believes
peace has been concluded.
On December 20, Pascal Duprat interpellated the Minister of the
Interior on the “Goldbar Lottery.” This lottery was a “Daughter from
Elysium”; Bonaparte, together with his faithful, had given her birth;
and Police Prefect Carlier had placed her under his official
protection, although the French law forbade all lotteries, with the
exception of raffles for benevolent purposes. Seven million tickets, a
franc a piece, and the profit ostensibly destined to the shipping of
Parisian vagabonds to California. Golden dreams were to displace the
Socialist dreams of the Parisian proletariat; the tempting prospect of
a prize was to displace the doctrinal right to labor. Of course, the
workingmen of Paris did not recognize in the lustre of the California
gold bars the lack-lustre francs that had been wheedled out of their
pockets. In the main, however, the scheme was an unmitigated
swindle. The vagabonds, who meant to open California gold mines
without taking the pains to leave Paris, were Bonaparte himself and
his Round Table of desperate insolvents. The three millions granted by
the National Assembly were rioted away; the Treasury had to be
refilled somehow or another. In vain did Bonaparte open a national
subscription, at the head of which he himself figured with a large
sum, for the establishment of so-called “cités ouvrières.”[17] The
hard-hearted bourgeois waited, distrustful, for the payment of his own
shares; and, as this, of course, never took place, the speculation in
Socialist castles in the air fell flat. The gold bars drew
better. Bonaparte and his associates did not content themselves with
putting into their own pockets part of the surplus of the seven
millions over and above the bars that were to be drawn; they
manufactured false tickets; they sold, of Number 10 alone, fifteen to
twenty lots—a financial operation fully in the spirit of the “Society
of December 10”! The National Assembly did not here have before it the
fictitious President of the Republic, but Bonaparte himself in flesh
and blood. Here it could catch him in the act, not in conflict with
the Constitution, but with the penal code. When, upon Duprat’s
interpellation, the National Assembly went over to the order of the
day, this did not happen simply because Girardin’s motion to declare
itself “satisfied” reminded the party of Order of its own systematic
corruption: the bourgeois, above all the bourgeois who has been
inflated into a statesman, supplements his practical meanness with
theoretical pompousness. As statesman, he becomes, like the Government
facing him, a superior being, who can be fought only in a higher, more
exalted manner.
Bonaparte—who, for the very reason of his being a “bohemian,” a
princely slum-proletarian, had over the scampish bourgeois the
advantage that he could carry on the fight after the Assembly itself
had carried him with its own hands over the slippery ground of the
military banquets, of the reviews, of the “Society of December 10,”
and, finally, of the penal code—now saw that the moment had arrived
when he could move from the seemingly defensive to the offensive. He
was but little troubled by the intermediate and trifling defeats of
the Minister of Justice, of the Minister of War, of the Minister of
the Navy, of the Minister of Finance, whereby the National Assembly
indicated its growling displeasure. Not only did he prevent the
Ministers from resigning, and thus recognizing the subordination of
the executive power to the Parliament; he could now accomplish what
during the vacation of the National Assembly he had commenced, the
separation of the military power from the Assembly—the deposition of
Changarnier.
An Elysée paper published an order, issued during the month of May,
ostensibly to the First Military Division, and, hence, proceeding from
Changarnier, wherein the officers were recommended, in case of an
uprising, to give no quarter to the traitors in their own ranks, to
shoot them down on the spot, and to refuse troops to the National
Assembly, should it make a requisition for such. On January 3, 1851,
the Cabinet was interpellated on this order. The Cabinet demands for
the examination of the affair at first three months, then one week,
finally only twenty-four hours’ time. The Assembly orders an immediate
explanation. Changarnier rises and declares that this order never
existed; he adds that he would ever hasten to respond to the calls of
the National Assembly, and that, in case of a collision, they could
count upon him. The Assembly receives his utterances with
inexpressible applause, and decrees a vote of confidence to him. It
thereby resigns its own powers; it decrees its own impotence and the
omnipotence of the Army by committing itself to the private protection
of a general. But the general, in turn, deceives himself when he
places at the Assembly’s disposal and against Bonaparte a power that
he holds only as a fief from that same Bonaparte, and when, on his
part, he expects protection from this Parliament, from his protegé,
itself needful of protection. But Changarnier has faith in the
mysterious power with which since January, 1849, he had been clad by
the bourgeoisie. He takes himself for the Third Power, standing beside
the other Powers of Government. He shares the faith of all the other
heroes, or rather saints, of this epoch, whose greatness consists but
in the interested good opinion that their own party holds of them, and
who shrink into every-day figures so soon as circumstances invite them
to perform miracles. Infidelity is, indeed, the deadly enemy of these
supposed heroes and real saints. Hence their virtuously proud
indignation at the unenthusiastic wits and scoffers.
That same evening the Ministers were summoned to the Elysée; Bonaparte
presses the removal of Changarnier; five Ministers refuse to sign the
order; the “Moniteur” announces a Ministerial crisis; and the party of
Order threatens the formation of a Parliamentary army under the
command of Changarnier. The party of Order had the constitutional
power hereto. It needed only to elect Changarnier President of the
National Assembly in order to make a requisition for whatever military
forces it needed for its own safety. It could do this all the more
safely, seeing that Changarnier still stood at the head of the Army
and of the Parisian National Guard, and only lay in wait to be
summoned, together with the Army. The Bonapartist press did not even
dare to question the right of the National Assembly to issue a direct
requisition for troops;—a legal scruple, that, under the given
circumstances, did not promise success. That the Army would have
obeyed the orders of the National Assembly is probable, when it is
considered that Bonaparte had to look eight days all over Paris to
find two generals—Baraguay d’Hilliers and St. Jean d’Angley—who
declared themselves ready to countersign the order cashiering
Changarnier. That, however, the party of Order would have found in its
own ranks and in the parliament the requisite vote for such a decision
is more than doubtful, when it is considered that, eight days later,
286 votes pulled away from it, and that, as late as December, 1851, at
the last decisive hour, the Mountain rejected a similar
proposition. Nevertheless, the burgraves might still have succeeded in
driving the mass of their party to an act of heroism, consisting in
feeling safe behind a forest of bayonets, and in accepting the
services of the Army, which found itself deserted in its camp. Instead
of this, the Messieurs Burgraves betook themselves to the Elysée on
the evening of January 6, with the view of inducing Bonaparte, by
means of politic words and considerations, to drop the removal of
Changarnier. Him whom we must convince we recognize as the master of
the situation. Bonaparte, made to feel secure by this step, appoints
on January 12 a new Ministry, in which the leaders of the old, Fould
and Baroche, are retained. St. Jean d’Angley becomes Minister of War;
the “Moniteur” announces the decree cashiering Changarnier; his
command is divided up between Baraguay d’Hilliers, who receives the
First Division, and Perrot, who is placed over the National Guard. The
“Bulwark of Society” is turned down; and, although no dog barks over
the event, in the Bourses the stock quotations rise.
By repelling the Army, that, in Changarnier’s person, put itself at
its disposal, and thus irrevocably stood up against the President, the
party of Order declares that the bourgeoisie has lost its vocation to
reign. Already there was no parliamentary Ministry. By losing,
furthermore, the handle to the Army and to the National Guard, what
instrument of force was there left to the National Assembly in order
to maintain both the usurped power of the parliament over the people,
and its constitutional power over the President? None. All that was
left to it was the appeal to peaceful principles, that itself had
always explained as “general rules” merely, to be prescribed to third
parties, and only in order to enable itself to move all the more
freely. With the removal of Changarnier, with the transfer of the
military power to Bonaparte, closes the first part of the period that
we are considering, the period of the struggle between the party of
Order and the Executive power. The war between the two powers is now
openly declared; it is conducted openly; but only after the party of
Order has lost both arms and soldiers. Without a Ministry, without any
army, without a people, without the support of public opinion; since
its election law of May 31, no longer the representative of the
sovereign nation; sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans everything,
the National Assembly had gradually converted itself into a French
Parliament of olden days, that must leave all action to the
Government, and content itself with growling remonstrances “post
festum.”[18]
The party of Order receives the new Ministry with a storm of
indignation. General Bedeau calls to mind the mildness of the
Permanent Committee during the vacation, and the excessive prudence
with which it had renounced the privilege of disclosing its
minutes. Now, the Minister of the Interior himself insists upon the
disclosure of these minutes, that have now, of course, become dull as
stagnant waters, reveal no new facts, and fall without making the
slightest effect upon the blasé public. Upon Remusat’s proposition,
the National Assembly retreats into its Committees, and appoints a
“Committee on Extraordinary Measures.” Paris steps all the less out of
the ruts of its daily routine, seeing that business is prosperous at
the time, the manufactories busy, the prices of cereals low,
provisions abundant, the savings banks receiving daily new
deposits. The “extraordinary measures,” that the parliament so noisily
announced, fizzle out on January 18 in a vote of lack of confidence
against the Ministry, without General Changarnier’s name being even
mentioned. The party of Order was forced to frame its motion in that
way so as to secure the votes of the republicans, because, of all the
acts of the Ministry, Changarnier’s dismissal only was the very one
they approved, while the party of Order cannot, in fact, condemn the
other Ministerial acts which it had itself dictated.
The January 18 vote of lack of confidence was decided by 415 ayes
against 286 nays. It was, accordingly, put through by a coalition of
the uncompromising Legitimists and Orleanists with the pure
republicans and the Mountain. Thus it revealed the fact that, in its
conflicts with Bonaparte, the party of Order had lost, not only the
Ministry, not only the Army, but also its independent parliamentary
majority; that a troop of Representatives had deserted its camp out of
a fanatic zeal for harmony, out of fear of fight, out of lassitude,
out of family considerations for the salaries of relatives in office,
out of speculations on vacancies in the Ministry (Odillon Barrot), or
out of that unmitigated selfishness that causes the average bourgeois
to be ever inclined to sacrifice the interests of his class to this or
that private motive. The Bonapartist Representatives belonged from the
start to the party of Order only in the struggle against the
revolution. The leader of the Catholic party, Montalembert, already
then threw his influence in the scale of Bonaparte, since he despaired
of the vitality of the parliamentary party. Finally, the leaders of
this party itself, Thiers and Berryer—the Orleanist and the
Legitimist—were compelled to proclaim themselves openly as
republicans; to admit that their heart favored royalty, but their head
the republic; that their parliamentary republic was the only possible
form for the rule of the bourgeoisie. Thus were they compelled to
brand, before the eyes of the bourgeois class itself, as an
intrigue—as dangerous as it was senseless—the restoration plans, which
they continued to pursue indefatigably behind the back of the
parliament.
The January 18 vote of lack of confidence struck the Ministers, not
the President. But it was not the Ministry, it was the President who
had deposed Changarnier. Should the party of Order place Bonaparte
himself under charges? On account of his restoration hankering? These
only supplemented their own. On account of his conspiracy at the
military reviews and of the “Society of December 10”? They had long
since buried these subjects under simple orders of business. On
account of the discharge of the hero of January 29 and June 13, of the
man who, in May, 1850, threatened, in case of riot, to set Paris on
fire at all its four corners? Their allies of the Mountain and
Cavaignac did not even allow them to console the fallen “Bulwark of
Society” with an official testimony of their sympathy. They themselves
could not deny the constitutional right of the President to remove a
General. They stormed only because he made an unparliamentary use of
his constitutional right. Had they not themselves constantly made an
unconstitutional use of their parliamentary prerogative, notably by
the abolition of universal suffrage? Consequently they were reminded
to move exclusively within parliamentary bounds. Indeed, it required
that peculiar disease, a disease that, since 1848, has raged over the
whole continent, “Parliamentary Idiocy,”—that fetters those whom it
infects to an imaginary world, and robs them of all sense, all
remembrance, all understanding of the rude outside world;—it required
this “Parliamentary Idiocy” in order that the party of Order, which
had, with its own hands, destroyed all the conditions for
parliamentary power, and, in its struggle with the other classes, was
obliged to destroy them, still should consider its parliamentary
victories as victories, and imagine it hit the President by striking
his Ministers. They only afforded him an opportunity to humble the
National Assembly anew in the eyes of the nation. On January 20, the
“Moniteur” announced that the dismissal of the whole Ministry was
accepted. Under the pretext that none of the parliamentary parties had
any longer the majority—as proved by the January 18 vote, that fruit
of the coalition between Mountain and royalists—, and, in order to
await the re-formation of a majority, Bonaparte appointed a so-called
transition Ministry, of whom no member belonged to the
parliament—altogether wholly unknown and insignificant individuals; a
Ministry of mere clerks and secretaries. The party of Order could now
wear itself out in the game with these puppets; the Executive power no
longer considered it worth the while to be seriously represented in
the National Assembly. By this act Bonaparte concentrated the whole
executive power all the more securely in his own person; he had all
the freer elbow-room to exploit the same to his own ends, the more his
Ministers became mere supernumeraries.
The party of Order, now allied with the Mountain, revenged itself by
rejecting the Presidential endowment project of 1,800,000 francs,
which the chief of the “Society of December 10” had compelled his
Ministerial clerks to present to the Assembly. This time a majority of
only 102 votes carried the day; accordingly, since January 18, 27 more
votes had fallen off; the dissolution of the party of Order was making
progress. Lest any one might for a moment be deceived touching the
meaning of its coalition with the Mountain, the party of Order
simultaneously scorned even to consider a motion, signed by 189
members of the Mountain, for a general amnesty to political
criminals. It was enough that the Minister of the Interior, one
Baissé, declared that the national tranquility was only in appearance,
in secret there reigned deep agitation, in secret, ubiquitous
societies were organized, the democratic papers were preparing to
re-appear, the reports from the Departments were unfavorable, the
fugitives of Geneva conducted a conspiracy via Lyons through the whole
of southern France, France stood on the verge of an industrial and
commercial crisis, the manufacturers of Roubaix were working shorter
hours, the prisoners of Belle Isle had mutinied;—it was enough that
even a mere Baissé should conjure up the “Red Spectre” for the party
of Order to reject without discussion a motion that would have gained
for the National Assembly a tremendous popularity, and thrown
Bonaparte back into its arms. Instead of allowing itself to be
intimidated by the Executive power with the perspective of fresh
disturbances, the party of Order should rather have allowed a little
elbow-room to the class struggle, in order to secure the dependence of
the Executive upon itself. But it did not feel itself equal to the
task of playing with fire.
Meanwhile, the so-called transition Ministry vegetated along until the
middle of April. Bonaparte tired out and fooled the National Assembly
with constantly new Ministerial combinations. Now he seemed to intend
constructing a republican Ministry with Lamartine and Billault; then,
a parliamentary one with the inevitable Odillon Barrot, whose name
must never be absent when a dupe is needed; then again, a Legitimist,
with Batismenil and Benoist d’Azy; and yet again, an Orleansist, with
Malleville. While thus throwing the several factions of the party of
Order into strained relations with one another, and alarming them all
with the prospect of a republican Ministry, together with the
there-upon inevitable restoration of universal suffrage, Bonaparte
simultaneously raises in the bourgeoisie the conviction that his
sincere efforts for a parliamentary Ministry are wrecked upon the
irreconcilable antagonism of the royalist factions. All the while the
bourgeoisie was clamoring louder and louder for a “strong Government,”
and was finding it less and less pardonable to leave France “without
an administration,” in proportion as a general commercial crisis
seemed to be under way and making recruits for Socialism in the
cities, as did the ruinously low price of grain in the rural
districts. Trade became daily duller; the unemployed hands increased
perceptibly; in Paris, at least 10,000 workingmen were without bread;
in Rouen, Muehlhausen, Lyons, Roubaix, Tourcoign, St. Etienne, Elbeuf,
etc., numerous factories stood idle. Under these circumstances
Bonaparte could venture to restore, on April 11, the Ministry of
January 18; Messieurs Rouher, Fould, Baroche, etc., reinforced by
Mr. Léon Faucher, whom the constitutive assembly had, during its last
days, unanimously, with the exception of five Ministerial votes,
branded with a vote of censure for circulating false telegraphic
dispatches. Accordingly, the National Assembly had won a victory on
January 18 over the Ministry, it had, for the period of three months,
been battling with Bonaparte, and all this merely to the end that, on
April 11, Fould and Baroche should be able to take up the Puritan
Faucher as third in their ministerial league.
In November, 1849, Bonaparte had satisfied himself with an
_Unparliamentary_, in January, 1851, with an _Extra-Parliamentary_, on
April 11, he felt strong enough to form an _Anti-Parliamentary_
Ministry, that harmoniously combined within itself the votes of lack
of confidence of both assemblies—the constitutive and the legislative,
the republican and the royalist. This ministerial progression was a
thermometer by which the parliament could measure the ebbing
temperature of its own life. This had sunk so low by the end of April
that, at a personal interview, Persigny could invite Changarnier to go
over to the camp of the President. Bonaparte, he assured Changarnier,
considered the influence of the National Assembly to be wholly
annihilated, and already the proclamation was ready, that was to be
published after the steadily contemplated, but again accidentally
postponed “coup d’état.” Changarnier communicated this announcement of
its death to the leaders of the party of Order; but who was there to
believe a bed-bug bite could kill? The parliament, however beaten,
however dissolved, however death-tainted it was, could not persuade
itself to see, in the duel with the grotesque chief of the “Society of
December 10,” anything but a duel with a bed-bug. But Bonaparte
answered the party of Order as Agesilaus did King Agis: “I seem to you
an ant; but shall one day be a lion.”