The coalition with the Mountain and the pure republicans, to which the
party of Order found itself condemned in its fruitless efforts to keep
possession of the military and to reconquer supreme control over the
Executive power, proved conclusively that it had forfeited its
independent parliamentary majority. The calendar and clock merely
gave, on May 29, the signal for its complete dissolution. With May 29
commenced the last year of the life of the National Assembly. It now
had to decide for the unchanged continuance or the revision of the
Constitution. But a revision of the Constitution meant not only the
definitive supremacy of either the bourgeoisie or the small traders’
democracy, of either democracy or proletarian anarchy, of either a
parliamentary republic or Bonaparte, it meant also either Orleans or
Bourbon! Thus fell into the very midst of the parliament the apple of
discord, around which the conflict of interests, that cut up the party
of Order into hostile factions, was to kindle into an open
conflagration. The party of Order was a combination of heterogeneous
social substances. The question of revision raised a political
temperature, in which the product was reduced to its original
components.
The interest of the Bonapartists in the revision was simple: they were
above all concerned in the abolition of Article 45, which forbade
Bonaparte’s re-election and the prolongation of his term. Not less
simple seemed to be the position of the republicans; they rejected all
revision, seeing in that only a general conspiracy against the
republic; as they disposed over more than one-fourth of the votes in
the National Assembly, and, according to the Constitution, a
three-fourths majority was requisite to revise and to call a revisory
convention, they needed only to count their own votes to be certain of
victory. Indeed, they were certain of it.
Over and against these clear-cut positions, the party of Order found
itself tangled in inextricable contradictions. If it voted against the
revision, it endangered the “status quo,” by leaving to Bonaparte only
one expedient—that of violence and handing France over, on May 2,
1852, at the very time of election, a prey to revolutionary anarchy,
with a President whose authority was at an end, with a parliament that
the party had long ceased to own, and with a people that it meant to
re-conquer. If it voted constitutionally for a revision, it knew that
it voted in vain, and would constitutionally have to go under before
the veto of the republicans. If, unconstitutionally, it pronounced a
simple majority binding, it could hope to control the revolution only
in case it surrendered unconditionally to the domination of the
Executive power: it then made Bonaparte master of the Constitution, of
the revision and of itself. A merely partial revision, prolonging the
term of the President, opened the way to imperial usurpation; a
general revision, shortening the existence of the republic, threw the
dynastic claims into an inevitable conflict: the conditions for a
Bourbon and those for an Orleanist restoration were not only
different, they mutually excluded each other.
The parliamentary republic was more than a neutral ground on which the
two factions of the French bourgeoisie—Legitimists and Orleanists,
large landed property and manufacture—could lodge together with equal
rights. It was the indispensable condition for their common reign, the
only form of government in which their common class interest could
dominate both the claims of their separate factions and all the other
classes of society. As royalists, they relapsed into their old
antagonism: into the struggle for the overlordship of either landed
property or of money; and the highest expression of this antagonism,
its personification, were the two kings themselves, their
dynasties. Hence the resistance of the party of Order to the recall of
the Bourbons.
The Orleanist Representative Creton moved periodically in 1849, 1850
and 1851 the repeal of the decree of banishment against the royal
families; as periodically did the parliament present the spectacle of
an Assembly of royalists who stubbornly shut to their banished kings
the door through which they could return home. Richard III. murdered
Henry VI, with the remark that he was too good for this world, and
belonged in heaven. They declared France too bad to have her kings
back again. Forced by the power of circumstances, they had become
republicans, and repeatedly sanctioned the popular mandate that exiled
their kings from France.
The revision of the Constitution, and circumstances compelled its
consideration, at once made uncertain not only the republic itself,
but also the joint reign of the two bourgeois factions; and it
revived, with the possibility of the monarchy, both the rivalry of
interests which these two factions had alternately allowed to
preponderate, and the struggle for the supremacy of the one over the
other. The diplomats of the party of Order believed they could allay
the struggle by a combination of the two dynasties through a so-called
fusion of the royalist parties and their respective royal houses. The
true fusion of the restoration and the July monarchy was, however, the
parliamentary republic, in which the Orleanist and Legitimist colors
were dissolved, and the bourgeois species vanished in the plain
bourgeois, in the bourgeois genus. Now, however, the plan was to turn
the Orleanist Legitimist and the Legitimist Orleanist. The kingship,
in which their antagonism was personified, was to incarnate their
unity; the expression of their exclusive faction interests was to
become the expression of their common class interest; the monarchy was
to accomplish what only the abolition of two monarchies—the
republic—could and did accomplish. This was the philosopher’s stone,
for the finding of which the doctors of the party of Order were
breaking their heads. As though the Legitimate monarchy ever could be
the monarchy of the industrial bourgeoisie, or the bourgeois monarchy
the monarchy of the hereditary landed aristocracy! As though landed
property and industry could fraternize under one crown, where the
crown could fall only upon one head, the head of the older or the
younger brother! As though industry could at all deal upon a footing
of equality with landed property, so long as landed property did not
decide itself to become industrial. If Henry V. were to die tomorrow,
the Count of Paris would not, therefore, become the king of the
Legitimists, unless he ceased to be the King of the
Orleanists. Nevertheless, the fusion philosophers, who became louder
in the measure that the question of revision stepped to the fore, who
had provided themselves with a daily organ in the “Assemblée
Nationale,” who, even at this very moment (February, 1852) are again
at work, explained the whole difficulty by the opposition and
rivalries of the two dynasties. The attempts to reconcile the family
of Orleans with Henry V., begun since the death of Louis Philippe,
but, as all these dynastic intrigues carried on only during the
vacation of the National Assembly, between acts, behind the scenes,
more as a sentimental coquetry with the old superstition than as a
serious affair, were now raised by the party of Order to the dignity
of a great State question, and were conducted upon the public stage,
instead of, as heretofore, in the amateurs’ theater. Couriers flew
from Paris to Venice, from Venice to Claremont, from Claremont to
Paris. The Duke of Chambord issues a manifesto in which he announces,
not his own, but the “national” restoration, “with the aid of all the
members of his family.” The Orleanist Salvandy throws himself at the
feet of Henry V. The Legitimist leaders Berryer, Benoit d’Azy,
St. Priest travel to Claremont, to persuade the Orleans; but in
vain. The fusionists learn too late that the interests of the two
bourgeois factions neither lose in exclusiveness nor gain in pliancy
where they sharpen to a point in the form of family interests, of the
interests of the two royal houses. When Henry V. recognized the Count
of Paris as his successor—the only success that the fusion could at
best score—the house of Orleans acquired no claim that the
childlessness of Henry V. had not already secured to it; but, on the
other hand, it lost all the claims that it had conquered by the July
revolution. It renounced its original claims, all the title, that,
during a struggle nearly one hundred years long, it had wrested from
the older branch of the Bourbons; it bartered away its historic
prerogative, the prerogative of its family-tree. Fusion, accordingly,
amounted to nothing else than the resignation of the house of Orleans,
its Legitimist resignation, a repentful return from the Protestant
State Church into the Catholic;—a return, at that, that did not even
place it on the throne that it had lost, but on the steps of the
throne on which it was born. The old Orleanist Ministers Guizot,
Duchatel, etc., who likewise hastened to Claremont, to advocate the
fusion, represented in fact only the nervous reaction of the July
monarchy; despair, both in the citizen kingdom and the kingdom of
citizens; the superstitious belief in legitimacy as the last amulet
against anarchy. Mediators, in their imagination, between Orleans and
Bourbon, they were in reality but apostate Orleanists, and as such
were they received by the Prince of Joinville. The virile, bellicose
part of the Orleanists, on the contrary—Thiers, Baze, etc.—, persuaded
the family of Louis Philippe all the easier that, seeing every plan
for the immediate restoration of the monarchy presupposed the fusion
of the two dynasties, and every plan for fusion the resignation of the
house of Orleans, it corresponded, on the contrary, wholly with the
tradition of its ancestors to recognize the republic for the time
being, and to wait until circumstances permitted the conversion of the
Presidential chair into a throne. Joinville’s candidacy was set afloat
as a rumor, public curiosity was held in suspense, and a few months
later, after the revision was rejected, openly proclaimed in
September.
Accordingly, the essay of a royalist fusion between Orleanists and
Legitimists did not miscarry only, it broke up their parliamentary
fusion, the republican form that they had adopted in common, and it
decomposed the party of Order into its original components. But the
wider the breach became between Venice and Claremont, the further they
drifted away from each other, and the greater the progress made by the
Joinville agitation, all the more active and earnest became the
negotiations between Faucher, the Minister of Bonaparte, and the
Legitimists.
The dissolution of the party of Order went beyond its original
elements. Each of the two large factions fell in turn into new
fragments. It was as if all the old political shades, that formerly
fought and crowded one another within each of the two circles—be it
that of the Legitimists or that of the Orleanists—, had been thawed
out like dried infusoria by contact with water; as if they had
recovered enough vitality to build their own groups and assert their
own antagonisms. The Legitimists dreamed they were back amidst the
quarrels between the Tuileries and the pavilion Marsan, between
Villèle and Polignac; the Orleanists lived anew through the golden
period of the tourneys between Guizot, Molé, Broglie, Thiers, and
Odillon Barrot.
That portion of the party of Order—eager for a revision of the
Constitution but disagreed upon the extent of revision—made up of the
Legitimists under Berryer and Falloux and of those under Laroche
Jacquelein, together with the tired-out Orleanists under Molé,
Broglie, Montalembert and Odillon Barrot, united with the Bonapartist
Representatives in the following indefinite and loosely drawn motion:
“The undersigned Representatives, with the end in view of restoring to
the nation the full exercise of her sovereignty, move that the
Constitution be revised.”
At the same time, however, they unanimously declared through their
spokesman, Tocqueville, that the National Assembly had not the right
to move the abolition of the republic, that right being vested only in
a Constitutional Convention. For the rest, the Constitution could be
revised only in a “legal” way, that is to say, only in case a
three-fourths majority decided in favor of revision, as prescribed by
the Constitution. After a six days’ stormy debate, the revision was
rejected on July 19, as was to be foreseen. In its favor 446 votes
were cast, against it 278. The resolute Orleanists, Thiers,
Changarnier, etc., voted with the republicans and the Mountain.
Thus the majority of the parliament pronounced itself against the
Constitution, while the Constitution itself pronounced itself for the
minority, and its decision binding. But had not the party of Order on
May 31, 1850, had it not on June 13, 1849, subordinated the
Constitution to the parliamentary majority? Did not the whole republic
they had been hitherto having rest upon the subordination of the
Constitutional clauses to the majority decisions of the parliament?
Had they not left to the democrats the Old Testament superstitious
belief in the letter of the law, and had they not chastised the
democrats therefor? At this moment, however, revision meant nothing
else than the continuance of the Presidential power, as the
continuance of the Constitution meant nothing else than the deposition
of Bonaparte. The parliament had pronounced itself for him, but the
Constitution pronounced itself against the parliament. Accordingly, he
acted both in the sense of the parliament when he tore up the
Constitution, and in the sense of the Constitution when he chased away
the parliament.
The parliament pronounced the Constitution, and, thereby, also, its
own reign, “outside of the pale of the majority”; by its decision, it
repealed the Constitution, and continued the Presidential power, and
it at once declared that neither could the one live nor the other die
so long as itself existed. The feet of those who were to bury it stood
at the door. While it was debating the subject of revision, Bonaparte
removed General Baraguay d’Hilliers, who showed himself irresolute,
from the command of the First Military Division, and appointed in his
place General Magnan, the conqueror of Lyon, the hero of the December
days, one of his own creatures, who, already under Louis Philippe, on
the occasion of the Boulogne expedition, had somewhat compromised
himself in his favor.
By its decision on the revision, the party of Order proved that it
knew neither how to rule nor how to obey; neither how to live nor how
to die; neither how to bear with the republic nor how to overthrow it;
neither how to maintain the Constitution nor how to throw it
overboard; neither how to co-operate with the President nor how to
break with him. From what quarter did it then, look to for the
solution of all the existing perplexities? From the calendar, from the
course of events. It ceased to assume the control of events. It,
accordingly, invited events to don its authority and also the power to
which in its struggle with the people, it had yielded one attribute
after another until it finally stood powerless before the same. To the
end that the Executive be able all the more freely to formulate his
plan of campaign against it, strengthen his means of attack, choose
his tools, fortify his positions, the party of Order decided, in the
very midst of this critical moment, to step off the stage, and adjourn
for three months, from August 10 to November 4.
Not only was the parliamentary party dissolved into its two great
factions, not only was each of these dissolved within itself, but the
party of Order, inside of the parliament, was at odds with the party
of Order, outside of the parliament. The learned speakers and writers
of the bourgeoisie, their tribunes and their press, in short, the
ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie itself, the
representatives and the represented, stood estranged from, and no
longer understood one another.
The Legitimists in the provinces, with their cramped horizon and their
boundless enthusiasm, charged their parliamentary leaders Berryer and
Falloux with desertion to the Bonapartist camp, and with apostacy from
Henry V. Their lily-mind[19] believed in the fall of man, but not in
diplomacy.
More fatal and completer, though different, was the breach between the
commercial bourgeoisie and its politicians. It twitted them, not as
the Legitimists did theirs, with having apostatized from their
principle, but, on the contrary, with adhering to principles that had
become useless.
I have already indicated that, since the entry of Fould in the
Ministry, that portion of the commercial bourgeoisie that had enjoyed
the lion’s share in Louis Philippe’s reign, to-wit, the aristocracy of
finance, had become Bonapartist. Fould not only represented
Bonaparte’s interests at the Bourse, he represented also the interests
of the Bourse with Bonaparte. A passage from the London “Economist,”
the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, described most
strikingly the attitude of this class. In its issue of February 1,
1851, its Paris correspondent writes: “Now we have it stated from
numerous quarters that France wishes above all things for repose. The
President declares it in his message to the Legislative Assembly; it
is echoed from the tribune; it is asserted in the journals; it is
announced from the pulpit; it is demonstrated by the sensitiveness of
the public funds at the least prospect of disturbance, and their
firmness the instant it is made manifest that the Executive is far
superior in wisdom and power to the factious ex-officials of all
former governments.”
In its issue of November 29, 1851, the “Economist” declares
editorially: “The President is now recognized as the guardian of order
on every Stock Exchange of Europe.” Accordingly, the _Aristocracy of
Finance_ condemned the parliamentary strife of the party of Order with
the Executive as a “disturbance of order,” and hailed every victory of
the President over its reputed representatives as a “victory of
order.” Under “aristocracy of finance” must not, however, be
understood merely the large bond negotiators and speculators in
government securities, of whom it may be readily understood that their
interests and the interests of the Government coincide. The whole
modern money trade, the whole banking industry, is most intimately
interwoven with the public credit. Part of their business capital
requires to be invested in interest-bearing government securities that
are promptly convertible into money; their deposits, _i.e._, the
capital placed at their disposal and by them distributed among
merchants and industrial establishments, flow partly out of the
dividends on government securities. The whole money market, together
with the priests of this market, is part and parcel of this
“aristocracy of finance” at every epoch when the stability of the
government is to them synonymous with “Moses and his prophets.” This
is so even before things have reached the present stage when every
deluge threatens to carry away the old governments themselves.
But the _Industrial Bourgeoisie_ also, in its fanaticism for order,
was annoyed at the quarrels of the Parliamentary party of Order with
the Executive. Thiers, Anglas, Sainte Beuve, etc., received, after
their vote of January 18, on the occasion of the discharge of
Changarnier, public reprimands from their constituencies, located in
the industrial districts, branding their coalition with the Mountain
as an act of high treason to the cause of order. Although, true
enough, the boastful, vexatious and petty intrigues, through which the
struggle of the party of Order with the President manifested itself,
deserved no better reception, yet notwithstanding, this bourgeois
party, that expects of its representatives to allow the military power
to pass without resistance out of the hands of their own Parliament
into those of an adventurous Pretender, is not worth even the
intrigues that were wasted in its behalf. It showed that the struggle
for the maintenance of their public interests, of their class
interests, of their political power only incommoded and displeased
them, as a disturbance of their private business.
The bourgeois dignitaries of the provincial towns, the magistrates,
commercial judges, etc., with hardly any exception, received Bonaparte
everywhere on his excursions in the most servile manner, even when, as
in Dijon, he attacked the National Assembly and especially the party
of Order without reserve.
Business being brisk, as still at the beginning of 1851, the
commercial bourgeoisie stormed against every Parliamentary strife,
lest business be put out of temper. Business being dull, as from the
end of February, 1851, on, the bourgeoisie accused the Parliamentary
strifes as the cause of the stand-still, and clamored for quiet in
order that business may revive. The debates on revision fell just in
the bad times. Seeing the question now was the to be or not to be of
the existing form of government, the bourgeoisie felt itself all the
more justified in demanding of its Representatives that they put an
end to this tormenting provisional status, and preserve the “status
quo.” This was no contradiction. By putting an end to the provisional
status, it understood its continuance, the indefinite putting off of
the moment when a final decision had to be arrived at. The “status
quo” could be preserved in only one of two ways: either by the
prolongation of Bonaparte’s term of office or by his constitutional
withdrawal and the election of Cavaignac. A part of the bourgeoisie
preferred the latter solution, and knew no better advice to give their
Representatives than to be silent, to avoid the burning point. If
their Representatives did not speak, so argued they, Bonaparte would
not act. They desired an ostrich Parliament that would hide its head,
in order not to be seen. Another part of the bourgeoisie preferred
that Bonaparte, being once in the Presidential chair, be left in the
Presidential chair, in order that everything might continue to run in
the old ruts. They felt indignant that their Parliament did not openly
break the Constitution and resign without further ado.
The General Councils of the Departments, these provisional
representative bodies of the large bourgeoisie, who had adjourned
during the vacation of the National Assembly since August 25,
pronounced almost unanimously for revision, that is to say, against
the Parliament and for Bonaparte.
Still more unequivocally than in its falling out with its
Parliamentary Representatives, did the bourgeoisie exhibit its wrath
at its literary Representatives, its own press. The verdicts of the
bourgeois juries, inflicting excessive fines and shameless sentences
of imprisonment for every attack of the bourgeois press upon the
usurping aspirations of Bonaparte, for every attempt of the press to
defend the political rights of the bourgeoisie against the Executive
power, threw, not France alone, but all Europe into amazement.
While on the one hand, as I have indicated, the Parliamentary party of
Order ordered itself to keep the peace by screaming for peace; and
while it pronounced the political rule of the bourgeoisie
irreconcilable with the safety and the existence of the bourgeoisie,
by destroying with its own hands in its struggle with the other
classes of society all the conditions for its own, the Parliamentary
régime; on the other hand, the mass of the bourgeoisie, outside of the
Parliament, urged Bonaparte—by its servility towards the President, by
its insults to the Parliament, by the brutal treatment of its own
press—to suppress and annihilate its speaking and writing organs, its
politicians and its literati, its orators’ tribune and its press, to
the end that, under the protection of a strong and unhampered
Government, it might ply its own private pursuits in safety. It
declared unmistakably that it longed to be rid of its own political
rule, in order to escape the troubles and dangers of ruling.
And this bourgeoisie, that had rebelled against even the Parliamentary
and literary contest for the supremacy of its own class, that had
betrayed its leaders in this contest, it now has the effrontery to
blame the proletariat for not having risen in its defence in a bloody
struggle, in a struggle for life! Those bourgeois, who at every turn
sacrificed their common class interests to narrow and dirty private
interests, and who demanded a similar sacrifice from their own
Representatives, now whine that the proletariat has sacrificed their
ideal-political to its own material interests! This bourgeois class
now strikes the attitude of a pure soul, misunderstood and abandoned,
at a critical moment, by the proletariat, that has been misled by the
Socialists. And its cry finds a general echo in the bourgeois
world. Of course, I do not refer to German cross-road politicians and
kindred blockheads. I refer, for instance, to the “Economist,” which,
as late as November 29, 1851, that is to say, four days before the
“coup d’état” pronounced Bonaparte the “Guardian of Order” and Thiers
and Berryer “Anarchists,” and as early as December 27, 1851, after
Bonaparte had silenced those very Anarchists, cries out about the
treason committed by “the ignorant, untrained and stupid proletaires
against the skill, knowledge, discipline, mental influence,
intellectual resources and moral weight of the middle and upper
ranks.” The stupid, ignorant and contemptible mass was none other than
the bourgeoisie itself.
France had, indeed, experienced a sort of commercial crisis in
1851. At the end of February, there was a falling off of exports as
compared with 1850; in March, business languished and factories shut
down; in April, the condition of the industrial departments seemed as
desperate as after the February days; in May, business did not yet
pick up; as late as June 28, the reports of the Bank of France
revealed through a tremendous increase of deposits and an equal
decrease of loans on exchange notes, the standstill of production; not
until the middle of October did a steady improvement of business set
in. The French bourgeoisie accounted for this stagnation of business
with purely political reasons; it imputed the dull times to the strife
between the Parliament and the Executive power, to the uncertainty of
a provisional form of government, to the alarming prospects of May 2,
1852. I shall not deny that all these causes did depress some branches
of industry in Paris and in the Departments. At any rate, this effect
of political circumstances was only local and trifling. Is there any
other proof needed than that the improvement in business set in at the
very time when the political situation was growing worse, when the
political horizon was growing darker, and when at every moment a
stroke of lightning was expected out of the Elysée—in the middle of
October? The French bourgeois, whose “skill, knowledge, mental
influence and intellectual resources,” reach no further than his nose,
could, moreover, during the whole period of the Industrial Exposition
in London, have struck with his nose the cause of his own business
misery. At the same time that, in France, the factories were being
closed, commercial failures broke out in England. While the industrial
panic reached its height during April and May in France, in England
the commercial panic reached its height in April and May. The same as
the French, the English woolen industries suffered, and, as the
French, so did the English silk manufacture. Though the English cotton
factories went on working, it, nevertheless, was not with the same old
profit of 1849 and 1850. The only difference was this: that in France,
the crisis was an industrial, in England it was a commercial one; that
while in France the factories stood still, they spread themselves in
England, but under less favorable circumstances than they had done the
years just previous; that, in France, the export, in England, the
import trade suffered the heaviest blows. The common cause, which, as
a matter of fact, is not to be looked for within the bounds of the
French political horizon, was obvious. The years 1849 and 1850 were
years of the greatest material prosperity, and of an overproduction
that did not manifest itself until 1851. This was especially promoted
at the beginning of 1851 by the prospect of the Industrial Exposition;
and, as special causes, there were added, first, the failure of the
cotton crop of 1850 and 1851; second, the certainty of a larger cotton
crop than was expected; first, the rise, then the sudden drop; in
short, the oscillations of the cotton market. The crop of raw silk in
France had been below the average. Finally, the manufacture of woolen
goods had received such an increment since 1849, that the production
of wool could not keep step with it, and the price of the raw material
rose greatly out of proportion to the price of the manufactured
goods. Accordingly, we have here in the raw material of three staple
articles a threefold material for a commercial crisis. Apart from
these special circumstances, the seeming crisis of the year 1851 was,
after all, nothing but the halt that overproduction and
overspeculation make regularly in the course of the industrial cycle,
before pulling all their forces together in order to rush feverishly
over the last stretch, and arrive again at their point of
departure—the _General Commercial Crisis_. At such intervals in the
history of trade, commercial failures break out in England, while, in
France, industry itself is stopped, partly because it is compelled to
retreat through the competition of the English, that, at such times
becomes resistless in all markets, and partly because, as an industry
of luxuries, it is affected with preference by every stoppage of
trade. Thus, besides the general crisis, France experiences her own
national crises, which, however, are determined by and conditioned
upon the general state of the world’s market much more than by local
French influences. It will not be devoid of interest to contrast the
prejudgment of the French bourgeois with the judgment of the English
bourgeois. One of the largest Liverpool firms writes in its yearly
report of trade for 1851: “Few years have more completely disappointed
the expectations entertained at their beginning than the year that has
just passed; instead of the great prosperity, that was unanimously
looked forward to, it proved itself one of the most discouraging years
during the last quarter of a century. This applies, of course, only to
the mercantile, not to the industrial classes. And yet, surely there
were grounds at the beginning of the year from which to draw a
contrary conclusion; the stock of products was scanty, capital was
abundant, provisions cheap, a rich autumn was assured, there was
uninterrupted peace on the continent and no political and financial
disturbances at home; indeed, never were the wings of trade more
unshackled... What is this unfavorable result to be ascribed to? We
believe to excessive trade in imports as well as exports. If our
merchants do not themselves rein in their activity, nothing can keep
us going, except a panic every three years.”
Imagine now the French bourgeois, in the midst of this business panic,
having his trade-sick brain tortured, buzzed at and deafened with
rumors of a “coup d’état” and the restoration of universal suffrage;
with the struggle between the Legislature and the Executive; with the
Fronde warfare between Orleanists and Legitimists; with communistic
conspiracies in southern France; with alleged Jacqueries[20] in the
Departments of Nièvre and Cher; with the advertisements of the several
candidates for President; with “social solutions” huckstered about by
the journals; with the threats of the republicans to uphold, arms in
hand, the Constitution and universal suffrage; with the gospels,
according to the emigrant heroes “in partibus,” who announced the
destruction of the world for May 2,—imagine that, and one can
understand how the bourgeois, in this unspeakable and noisy confusion
of fusion, revision, prorogation, constitution, conspiracy, coalition,
emigration, usurpation and revolution, blurts out at his parliamentary
republic: _“Rather an End With Fright, Than a Fright Without End.”_
Bonaparte understood this cry. His perspicacity was sharpened by the
growing anxiety of the creditors’ class, who, with every sunset, that
brought nearer the day of payment, the 2d of May, 1852, saw in the
motion of the stars a protest against their earthly drafts. They had
become regular astrologers. The National Assembly had cut off
Bonaparte’s hope of a constitutional prolongation of his term; the
candidature of the Prince of Joinville tolerated no further
vacillation.
If ever an event cast its shadow before it long before its occurrence,
it was Bonaparte’s “coup d’état.” Already on January 29, 1849, barely
a month after his election, he had made to Changarnier a proposition
to that effect. His own Prime Minister, Odillon Barrot, had covertly,
in 1849, and Thiers openly, in the winter of 1850, revealed the scheme
of the “coup d’état.” In May, 1851, Persigny had again sought to win
Changarnier over to the “coup,” and the “Messager de l’Assemblée”
newspaper had published this conversation. At every parliamentary
storm, the Bonapartist papers threatened a “coup,” and the nearer the
crisis approached, all the louder grew their tone. At the orgies, that
Bonaparte celebrated every night with a swell mob of males and
females, every time the hour of midnight drew nigh and plenteous
libations had loosened the tongues and heated the minds of the
revelers, the “coup” was resolved upon for the next morning. Swords
were then drawn, glasses clinked, the Representatives were thrown out
at the windows, the imperial mantle fell upon the shoulders of
Bonaparte, until the next morning again drove away the spook, and
astonished Paris learned, from not very reserved Vestals and
indiscreet Paladins, the danger it had once more escaped. During the
months of September and October, the rumors of a “coup d’état” tumbled
close upon one another’s heels. At the same time the shadow gathered
color, like a confused daguerreotype. Follow the issues of the
European daily press for the months of September and October, and
items like this will be found literally:
“Rumors of a ‘coup’ fill Paris. The capital, it is said, is to be
filled with troops by night, and the next morning decrees are to be
issued dissolving the National Assembly, placing the Department of the
Seine in state of siege, restoring universal suffrage, and appealing
to the people. Bonaparte is rumored to be looking for Ministers to
execute these illegal decrees.”
The newspaper correspondence that brought this news always close
ominously with “postponed.” The “coup” was ever the fixed idea of
Bonaparte. With this idea he had stepped again upon French soil. It
had such full possession of him that he was constantly betraying and
blabbing it out. He was so weak that he was as constantly giving it up
again. The shadow of the “coup” had become so familiar a spectre to
the Parisians, that they refused to believe it when it finally did
appear in flesh and blood. Consequently, it was neither the reticent
backwardness of the chief of the “Society of December 10,” nor an
unthought of surprise of the National Assembly that caused the success
of the “coup.” When it succeeded, it did so despite his indiscretion
and with its anticipation—a necessary, unavoidable result of the
development that had preceded.
On October 10, Bonaparte announced to his Ministers his decision to
restore universal suffrage; on the 16th day they handed in their
resignations; on the 26th Paris learned of the formation of the
Thorigny Ministry. The Prefect of Police, Carlier, was simultaneously
replaced by Maupas; and the chief of the First Military Division
Magnan, concentrated the most reliable regiments in the capital. On
November 4, the National Assembly re-opened its sessions. There was
nothing left for it to do but to repeat, in short recapitulation, the
course it had traversed, and to prove that it had been buried only
after it had expired.
The first post that it had forfeited in the struggle with the
Executive was the Ministry. It had solemnly to admit this loss by
accepting as genuine the Thorigny Ministry, which was but a
pretence. The permanent Committee had received Mr. Giraud with
laughter when he introduced himself in the name of the new
Ministers. So weak a Ministry for so strong a measure as the
restoration of universal suffrage! The question, however, then was to
do nothing _in_, everything _against_ the parliament.
On the very day of its re-opening, the National Assembly received the
message from Bonaparte demanding the restoration of universal suffrage
and the repeal of the law of May 31, 1850. On the same day, his
Ministers introduced a decree to that effect. The Assembly promptly
rejected the motion of urgency made by the Ministers, but repealed the
law itself, on November 13, by a vote of 355 against 348. Thus it once
more tore to pieces its own mandate, once more certified to the fact
that it had transformed itself from a freely chosen representative
body of the nation into the usurpatory parliament of a class; it once
more admitted that it had itself severed the muscles that connected
the parliamentary head with the body of the nation.
While the Executive power appealed from the National Assembly to the
people by its motion for the restoration of universal suffrage, the
Legislative power appealed from the people to the Army by its
“Quæstors’ Bill.” This bill was to establish its right to immediate
requisitions for troops, to build up a parliamentary army. By thus
appointing the Army umpire between itself and the people, between
itself and Bonaparte; by thus recognizing the Army as the decisive
power in the State, the National Assembly was constrained to admit
that it had long given up all claim to supremacy. By debating the
right to make requisitions for troops, instead of forthwith collecting
them, it betrayed its own doubts touching its own power. By
subsequently rejecting the “Quæstors’ Bill,” it publicly confessed its
impotence. This bill fell through with a minority of 108 votes; the
Mountain had, accordingly, thrown the casting vote. It now found
itself in the predicament of Buridan’s donkey, not, indeed, between
two sacks of hay, forced to decide which of the two was the more
attractive, but between two showers of blows, forced to decide which
of the two was the harder; fear of Changarnier, on one side, fear of
Bonaparte, on the other. It must be admitted the position was not a
heroic one.
On November 18, an amendment was moved to the Act, passed by the party
of Order, on municipal elections to the effect that, instead of three
years, a domicile of one year should suffice. The amendment was lost
by a single vote—but this vote, it soon transpired, was a
mistake. Owing to the divisions within its own hostile factions, the
party of Order had long since forfeited its independent parliamentary
majority. It was now plain that there was no longer any majority in
the parliament. The National Assembly had become impotent even to
decide. Its atomic parts were no longer held together by any cohesive
power; it had expended its last breath, it was dead.
Finally, the mass of the bourgeoisie outside of the parliament was
once more solemnly to confirm its rupture with the bourgeoisie inside
of the parliament a few days before the catastrophe. Thiers, as a
parliamentary hero conspicuously smitten by that incurable
disease—Parliamentary Idiocy—, had hatched out jointly with the
Council of State, after the death of the parliament, a new
parliamentary intrigue in the shape of a “Responsibility Law,” that
was intended to lock up the President within the walls of the
Constitution. The same as, on September 15, Bonaparte bewitched the
fishwives, like a second Massaniello, on the occasion of laying the
corner-stone for the Market of Paris,—though, it must be admitted, one
fishwife was equal to seventeen Burgraves in real power—; the same as,
after the introduction of the “Quæstors’ Bill,” he enthused the
lieutenants, who were being treated at the Elysée;—so, likewise, did
he now, on November 25, carry away with him the industrial
bourgeoisie, assembled at the Circus, to receive from his hands the
prize-medals that had been awarded at the London Industrial
Exposition. I here reproduce the typical part of his speech, from the
“Journal des Débats”:
“With such unhoped for successes, I am justified to repeat how great
the French republic would be if she were only allowed to pursue her
real interests, and reform her institutions, instead of being
constantly disturbed in this by demagogues, on one side, and, on the
other, by monarchic hallucinations. (Loud, stormy and continued
applause from all parts of the amphitheater). The monarchic
hallucinations hamper all progress and all serious departments of
industry. Instead of progress, we have struggle only. Men, formerly
the most zealous supporters of royal authority and prerogative, become
the partisans of a convention that has no purpose other than to weaken
an authority that is born of universal suffrage. (Loud and prolonged
applause). We see men, who have suffered most from the revolution and
complained bitterest of it, provoking a new one for the sole purpose
of putting fetters on the will of the nation... I promise you peace
for the future.” (Bravo! Bravo! Stormy bravos.)
Thus the industrial bourgeoisie shouts its servile “Bravo!” to the
“coup d’état” of December 2, to the destruction of the parliament, to
the downfall of their own reign, to the dictatorship of Bonaparte. The
rear of the applause of November 25 was responded to by the roar of
cannon on December 4, and the house of Mr. Sallandrouze, who had been
loudest in applauding, was the one demolished by most of the bombs.
Cromwell, when he dissolved the Long Parliament, walked alone into its
midst, pulled out his watch in order that the body should not continue
to exist one minute beyond the term fixed for it by him, and drove out
each individual member with gay and humorous invectives. Napoleon,
smaller than his prototype, at least went on the 18th Brumaire into
the legislative body, and, though in a tremulous voice, read to it its
sentence of death. The second Bonaparte, who, moreover, found himself
in possession of an executive power very different from that of either
Cromwell or Napoleon, did not look for his model in the annals of
universal history, but in the annals of the “Society of December 10,”
in the annals of criminal jurisprudence. He robs the Bank of France of
twenty-five million francs; buys General Magnan with one million and
the soldiers with fifteen francs and a drink to each; comes secretly
together with his accomplices like a thief by night; has the houses of
the most dangerous leaders in the parliament broken into; Cavalignac,
Lamorcière, Leflô, Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc., taken out
of their beds; the principal places of Paris, the building of the
parliament included, occupied with troops; and, early the next
morning, loud-sounding placards posted on all the walls proclaiming
the dissolution of the National Assembly and of the Council of State,
the restoration of universal suffrage, and the placing of the
Department of the Seine under the state of siege. In the same way he
shortly after sneaked into the “Moniteur” a false document, according
to which influential parliamentary names had grouped themselves round
him in a Committee of the Nation.
Amidst cries of “Long live the Republic!”, the rump-parliament,
assembled at the Mayor’s building of the Tenth Arrondissement, and
composed mainly of Legitimists and Orleanists, resolves to depose
Bonaparte; it harangues in vain the gaping mass gathered before the
building, and is finally dragged first, under the escort of African
sharpshooters, to the barracks of Orsay, and then bundled into
convicts’ wagons and transported to the prisons of Mazas, Ham and
Vincennes. Thus ended the party of Order, the Legislative Assembly and
the February revolution.
Before hastening to the end, let us sum up shortly the plan of its
history:
I.—_First Period_. From February 24 to May 4, 1848. February
period. Prologue. Universal fraternity swindle.
II.—_Second Period_. Period in which the republic is constituted, and
of the Constitutive National Assembly.
1. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all the classes against the
proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.
2. June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois
republicans. Drafting of the Constitution. The state of siege hangs
over Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by
the election of Bonaparte as President.
3. December 20, 1848, to May 20, 1849. Struggle of the Constitutive
Assembly with Bonaparte and with the united party of Order. Death
of the Constitutive Assembly. Downfall of the republican
bourgeoisie.
III.—_Third Period_. Period of the constitutional republic and of the
Legislative National Assembly.
1. May 29 to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the small traders’, middle
class with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the small
traders’ democracy.
2. June 13, 1849, to May, 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the
party of Order. Completes its reign by the abolition of universal
suffrage, but loses the parliamentary Ministry.
3. May 31, 1850, to December 2, 1851. Struggle between the
parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte.
a. May 31, 1850, to January 12, 1851. The parliament loses the
supreme command over the Army.
b. January 12 to April 11, 1851. The parliament succumbs in the
attempts to regain possession of the administrative power. The
party of Order loses its independent parliamentary majority. Its
coalition with the republicans and the Mountain.
c. April 11 to October 9, 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion and
prorogation. The party of Order dissolves into its component
parts. The breach between the bourgeois parliament and the
bourgeois press, on the one hand, and the bourgeois mass, on the
other, becomes permanent.
d. October 9 to December 2, 1851. Open breach between the
parliament and the executive power. It draws up its own decree
of death, and goes under, left in the lurch by its own class, by
the Army, and by all the other classes. Downfall of the
parliamentary régime and of the reign of the bourgeoisie.
Bonaparte’s triumph. Parody of the imperialist restoration.