The _Social Republic_ appeared as a mere phrase, as a prophecy on the
threshold of the February Revolution; it was smothered in the blood of
the Parisian proletariat during the days of 1848; but it stalks about
as a spectre throughout the following acts of the drama. The
_Democratic_ Republic next makes its bow; it goes out in a fizzle on
June 13, 1849, with its runaway small traders; but, on fleeing, it
scatters behind it all the more bragging announcements of what it
means do to. The _Parliamentary Republic_, together with the
bourgeoisie, then appropriates the whole stage; it lives its life to
the full extent of its being; but the 2d of December, 1851, buries it
under the terror-stricken cry of the allied royalists: “Long live the
Republic!”
The French bourgeoisie reared up against the reign of the working
proletariat;—it brought to power the slum-proletariat, with the chief
of the “Society of December 10” at its head. It kept France in
breathless fear over the prospective terror of “red
anarchy;”—Bonaparte discounted the prospect when, on December 4, he
had the leading citizens of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard
des Italiens shot down from their windows by the grog-inspired “Army
of Order.” It made the apotheosis of the sabre;—now the sabre rules
it. It destroyed the revolutionary press;—now its own press is
annihilated. It placed public meetings under police surveillance;—now
its own salons are subject to police inspection. It disbanded the
democratic National Guards;—now its own National Guard is
disbanded. It instituted the state of siege;—now itself is made
subject thereto. It supplanted the jury by military commissions;—now
military commissions supplant its own juries. It subjected the
education of the people to the parsons’ interests;—the parsons’
interests now subject it to their own systems. It ordered
transportations without trial;—now itself is transported without
trial. It suppressed every movement of society with physical
force;—now every movement of its own class is suppressed by physical
force. Out of enthusiasm for the gold bag, it rebelled against its own
political leaders and writers;—now, its political leaders and writers
are set aside, but the gold bag is plundered, after the mouth of the
bourgeoisie has been gagged and its pen broken. The bourgeoisie
tirelessly shouted to the revolution, in the language of St. Orsenius
to the Christians: “Fuge, Tace, Quiesce!”—flee, be silent, submit!—;
Bonaparte shouts to the bourgeoisie: “Fuge, Tace, Quiesce!”—flee, be
silent, submit!
The French bourgeoisie had long since solved Napoleon’s dilemma: “Dans
cinquante ans l’Europe sera républicaine ou cosaque.”[21] It found the
solution in the “république cosaque.”[22] No Circe distorted with
wicked charms the work of art of the bourgeois republic into a
monstrosity. That republic lost nothing but the appearance of
decency. The France of to-day was ready-made within the womb of the
Parliamentary republic. All that was wanted was a bayonet thrust, in
order that the bubble burst, and the monster leap forth to sight.
Why did not the Parisian proletariat rise after the 2d of December?
The downfall of the bourgeoisie was as yet merely decreed; the decree
was not yet executed. Any earnest uprising of the proletariat would
have forthwith revived this bourgeoisie, would have brought on its
reconciliation with the army, and would have insured a second June
rout to the workingmen.
On December 4, the proletariat was incited to fight by
Messrs. Bourgeois & Small-Trader. On the evening of that day, several
legions of the National Guard promised to appear armed and uniformed
on the place of battle. This arose from the circumstance that
Messrs. Bourgeois & Small-Trader had got wind that, in one of his
decrees of December 2, Bonaparte abolished the secret ballot, and
ordered them to enter the words “Yes” and “No” after their names in
the official register. Bonaparte took alarm at the stand taken on
December 4. During the night he caused placards to be posted on all
the street corners of Paris, announcing the restoration of the secret
ballot. Messrs. Bourgeois & Small-Trader believed they had gained
their point. The absentees, the next morning, were
Messieurs. Bourgeois & Small-Trader.
During the night of December 1 and 2, the Parisian proletariat was
robbed of its leaders and chiefs of barricades by a raid of
Bonaparte’s. An army without officers, disinclined by the
recollections of June, 1848 and 1849, and May, 1850, to fight under
the banner of the Montagnards, it left to its vanguard, the secret
societies, the work of saving the insurrectionary honor of Paris,
which the bourgeoisie had yielded to the soldiery so submissively that
Bonaparte was later justified in disarming the National Guard upon the
scornful ground that he feared their arms would be used against
themselves by the Anarchists!
“C’est le triomphe complet et definitif du Socialism!”[23] Thus did
Guizot characterize the 2d of December. But, although the downfall of
the parliamentary republic carries with it the germ of the triumph of
the proletarian revolution, its immediate and tangible result was the
triumph of Bonaparte over the parliament, of the Executive over the
Legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of
phrases. In the parliament, the nation raised its collective will to
the dignity of law, _i.e._, it raised the law of the ruling class to
the dignity of its collective will. Before the Executive power, the
nation abdicates all will of its own, and submits to the orders of an
outsider of Authority. In contrast with the Legislative, the Executive
power expresses the heteronomy of the nation in contrast with its
autonomy. Accordingly, France seems to have escaped the despotism of a
class only in order to fall under the despotism of an individual,
under the authority, at that, of an individual without authority. The
struggle seems to settle down to the point where all classes drop down
on their knees, equally impotent and equally dumb.
All the same, the revolution is thoroughgoing. It still is on its
passage through purgatory. It does its work methodically. Down to
December 2, 1851, it had fulfilled one-half of its programme, it now
fulfils the other half. It first ripens the power of the Legislature
into fullest maturity in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it
has accomplished that, the revolution proceeds to ripen the power of
the Executive into equal maturity; it reduces this power to its purest
expression; isolates it; places it before itself as the sole subject
for reproof in order to concentrate against it all the revolutionary
forces of destruction. When the revolution shall have accomplished
this second part of its preliminary programme, Europe will jump up
from her seat to exclaim: “Well hast thou grubbed, old mole!”
The Executive power, with its tremendous bureaucratic and military
organization; with its wide-spreading and artificial machinery of
government—an army of office-holders, half a million strong, together
with a military force of another million men—; this fearful body of
parasites, that coils itself like a snake around French society,
stopping all its pores, originated at the time of the absolute
monarchy, along with the decline of feudalism, which it helped to
hasten. The princely privileges of the landed proprietors and cities
were transformed into so many attributes of the Executive power; the
feudal dignitaries into paid office-holders; and the confusing design
of conflicting mediæval seigniories, into the well regulated plan of a
government, work is subdivided and centralized as in the factory. The
first French revolution, having as a mission to sweep away all local,
territorial, urban and provincial special privileges, with the object
of establishing the civic unity of the nation, was bound to develop
what the absolute monarchy had begun—the work of centralization,
together with the range, the attributes and the menials of
government. Napoleon completed this governmental machinery. The
Legitimist and the July Monarchy contribute nothing thereto, except a
greater subdivision of labor, that grew in the same measure as the
division and subdivision of labor within bourgeois society raised new
groups and interests, _i.e._, new material for the administration of
government. Each _Common_ interest was in turn forthwith removed from
society, set up against it as a higher _Collective_ interest, wrested
from the individual activity of the members of society, and turned
into a subject for governmental administration, —from the bridges, the
school house and the communal property of a village community, up to
the railroads, the national wealth and the national University of
France. Finally, the parliamentary republic found itself, in its
struggle against the revolution, compelled, with its repressive
measures, to strengthen the means and the centralization of the
government. Each overturn, instead of breaking up, carried this
machine to higher perfection. The parties, that alternately wrestled
for supremacy, looked upon the possession of this tremendous
governmental structure as the principal spoils of their victory.
Nevertheless, under the absolute monarchy, during the first
revolution, and under Napoleon, the bureaucracy was only the means
whereby to prepare the class rule of the bourgeoisie; under the
restoration, under Louis Philippe, and under the parliamentary
republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class, however eagerly
this class strained after autocracy. Not before the advent of the
second Bonaparte does the government seem to have made itself fully
independent. The machinery of government has by this time so
thoroughly fortified itself against society, that the chief of the
“Society of December 10” is thought good enough to be at its head; a
fortune-hunter, run in from abroad, is raised on its shield by a
drunken soldiery, bought by himself with liquor and sausages, and whom
he is forced ever again to throw sops to. Hence the timid despair, the
sense of crushing humiliation and degradation that oppresses the
breast of France and makes her to choke. She feels dishonored.
And yet the French Government does not float in the air. Bonaparte
represents an economic class, and that the most numerous in the
commonweal of France—the _Allotment Farmer_.[24]
As the Bourbons are the dynasty of large landed property, as the
Orleans are the dynasty of money, so are the Bonapartes the dynasty of
the farmer, _i.e._, of the French masses. Not the Bonaparte, who threw
himself at the feet of the bourgeois parliament, but the Bonaparte,
who swept away the bourgeois parliament, is the elect of this farmer
class. For three years the cities had succeeded in falsifying the
meaning of the election of December 10, and in cheating the farmer out
of the restoration of the Empire. The election of December 10, 1848,
is not carried out until the “coup d’état” of December 2, 1851.
The allotment farmers are an immense mass, whose individual members
live in identical conditions, without, however, entering into manifold
relations with one another. Their method of production isolates them
from one another, instead of drawing them into mutual
intercourse. This isolation is promoted by the poor means of
communication in France, together with the poverty of the farmers
themselves. Their field of production, the small allotment of land
that each cultivates, allows no room for a division of labor, and no
opportunity for the application of science; in other words, it shuts
out manifoldness of development, diversity of talent, and the luxury
of social relations. Every single farmer family is almost
self-sufficient; itself produces directly the greater part of what it
consumes; and it earns its livelihood more by means of an interchange
with nature than by intercourse with society. We have the allotted
patch of land, the farmer and his family; alongside of that another
allotted patch of land, another farmer and another family. A bunch of
these makes up a village; a bunch of villages makes up a
Department. Thus the large mass of the French nation is constituted by
the simple addition of equal magnitudes—much as a bag with potatoes
constitutes a potato-bag. In so far as millions of families live under
economic conditions that separate their mode of life, their interests
and their culture from those of the other classes, and that place them
in an attitude hostile toward the latter, they constitute a class; in
so far as there exists only a local connection among these farmers, a
connection which the individuality and exclusiveness of their
interests prevent from generating among them any unity of interest,
national connections, and political organization, they do not
constitute a class. Consequently, they are unable to assert their
class interests in their own name, be it by a parliament or by
convention. They can not represent one another, they must themselves
be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as
their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental
power, that protects them from above, bestows rain and sunshine upon
them. Accordingly, the political influence of the allotment farmer
finds its ultimate expression in an Executive power that subjugates
the commonweal to its own autocratic will.
Historic tradition has given birth to the superstition among the
French farmers that a man named Napoleon would restore to them all
manner of glory. Now, then, an individual turns up, who gives himself
out as that man because, obedient to the “Code Napoléon,” which
provides that “La récherche de la paternité est interdite,”[25] he
carries the name of Napoleon.[26] After a vagabondage of twenty years,
and a series of grotesque adventures, the myth is verified, and that
man becomes the Emperor of the French. The rooted thought of the
Nephew becomes a reality because it coincided with the rooted thought
of the most numerous class among the French.
“But,” I shall be objected to, “what about the farmers’ uprisings over
half France, the raids of the Army upon the farmers, the wholesale
imprisonment and transportation of farmers?”
Indeed, since Louis XIV., France has not experienced such persecutions
of the farmer on the ground of his “demagogic machinations.”
But this should be well understood: The Bonaparte dynasty does not
represent the revolutionary, it represents the conservative farmer; it
does not represent the farmer, who presses beyond his own economic
conditions, his little allotment of land, it represents him rather who
would confirm these conditions; it does not represent the rural
population, that, thanks to its own inherent energy, wishes, jointly
with the cities to overthrow the old order, it represents, on the
contrary, the rural population that, hide-bound in the old order,
seeks to see itself, together with its allotments, saved and favored
by the ghost of the Empire; it represents, not the intelligence, but
the superstition of the farmer; not his judgment, but his bias; not
his future, but his past; not his modern Cevennes;[27] but his modern
Vendée.[28]
The three years’ severe rule of the parliamentary republic had freed a
part of the French farmers from the Napoleonic illusion, and, though
even only superficially; had revolutionized them. The bourgeoisie
threw them, however, violently back every time that they set
themselves in motion. Under the parliamentary republic, the modern
wrestled with the traditional consciousness of the French farmer. The
process went on in the form of a continuous struggle between the
school teachers and the parsons;—the bourgeoisie knocked the school
teachers down. For the first time, the farmer made an effort to take
an independent stand in the government of the country; this manifested
itself in the prolonged conflicts of the Mayors with the Prefects;—the
bourgeoisie deposed the Mayors. Finally, during the period of the
parliamentary republic, the farmers of several localities rose against
their own product, the Army;—the bourgeoisie punished them with states
of siege and executions. And this is the identical bourgeoisie, that
now howls over the “stupidity of the masses,” over the “vile
multitude,” which, it claims, betrayed it to Bonaparte. Itself has
violently fortified the imperialism of the farmer class; it firmly
maintained the conditions that constitute the birth-place of this
farmer-religion. Indeed, the bourgeoisie has every reason to fear the
stupidity of the masses—so long as they remain conservative; and their
intelligence—so soon as they become revolutionary.
In the revolts that took place after the “coup d’état” a part of the
French farmers protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of
December 10, 1848. The school house had, since 1848, sharpened their
wits. But they had bound themselves over to the nether world of
history, and history kept them to their word. Moreover, the majority
of this population was still so full of prejudices that, just in the
“reddest” Departments, it voted openly for Bonaparte. The National
Assembly prevented, as it thought, this population from walking; the
farmers now snapped the fetters which the cities had struck upon the
will of the country districts. In some places they even indulged the
grotesque hallucination of a “Convention together with a Napoleon.”
After the first revolution had converted the serf farmers into
freeholders, Napoleon fixed and regulated the conditions under which,
unmolested, they could exploit the soil of France, that had just
fallen into their hands, and expiate the youthful passion for
property. But that which now bears the French farmer down is that very
allotment of land; it is the partition of the soil, the form of
ownership, which Napoleon had consolidated. These are the material
conditions that turned the French feudal peasant into a small or
allotment farmer, and Napoleon into an Emperor. Two generations have
sufficed to produce the inevitable result: the progressive
deterioration of agriculture, and the progressive encumbering of the
agriculturist. The “Napoleonic” form of ownership, which, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition for the
emancipation and enrichment of the French rural population, has, in
the course of the century, developed into the law of their enslavement
and pauperism. Now, then, this very law is the first of the “idées
Napoléoniennes,” which the second Bonaparte must uphold. If he still
shares with the farmers the illusion of seeking, not in the system of
the small allotment itself, but outside of that system, in the
influence of secondary conditions, the cause of their ruin, his
experiments are bound to burst like soap-bubbles against the modern
system of production.
The economic development of the allotment system has turned bottom
upward the relation of the farmer to the other classes of
society. Under Napoleon, the parceling out of the agricultural lands
into small allotments supplemented in the country the free competition
and the incipient large production of the cities. The farmer class was
the ubiquitous protest against the aristocracy of land, just then
overthrown. The roots that the system of small allotments cast into
the soil of France, deprived feudalism of all nutriment. Its
boundary-posts constituted the natural buttress of the bourgeoisie
against every stroke of the old overlords. But in the course of the
nineteenth century, the City Usurer stepped into the shoes of the
Feudal Lord, the Mortgage substituted the Feudal Duties formerly
yielded by the soil, bourgeois Capital took the place of the
aristocracy of Landed Property. The former allotments are now only a
pretext that allows the capitalist class to draw profit, interest and
rent from agricultural lands, and to leave to the farmer himself the
task of seeing to it that he knock out his wages. The mortgage
indebtedness that burdens the soil of France imposes upon the French
farmer class the payment of an interest as great as the annual
interest on the whole British national debt. In this slavery of
capital, whither its development drives it irresistibly, the allotment
system has transformed the mass of the French nation into
troglodytes. Sixteen million farmers (women and children included),
house in hovels most of which have only one opening, some two, and the
few most favored ones three. Windows are to a house what the five
senses are to the head. The bourgeois social order, which, at the
beginning of the century, placed the State as a sentinel before the
newly instituted allotment, and that manured this with laurels, has
become a vampire that sucks out its heart-blood and its very brain,
and throws it into the alchemist’s pot of capital. The “Code Napoleon”
is now but the codex of execution, of sheriff’s sales and of
intensified taxation. To the four million (children, etc., included)
official paupers, vagabonds, criminals and prostitutes, that France
numbers, must be added five million souls who hover over the precipice
of life, and either sojourn in the country itself, or float with their
rags and their children from the country to the cities, and from the
cities back to the country. Accordingly, the interests of the farmers
are no longer, as under Napoleon, in harmony but in conflict with the
interests of the bourgeoisie, _i.e._, with capital; they find their
natural allies and leaders among the urban proletariat, whose mission
is the overthrow of the bourgeois social order. But the “strong and
unlimited government”—and this is the second of the “idées
Napoléoniennes,” which the second Napoleon has to carry out—, has for
its mission the forcible defence of this very “material” social order,
a “material order” that furnishes the slogan in Bonaparte’s
proclamations against the farmers in revolt.
Along with the mortgage, imposed by capital upon the farmer’s
allotment, this is burdened by taxation. Taxation is the fountain of
life to the bureaucracy, the Army, the parsons and the court, in short
to the whole apparatus of the Executive power. A strong government,
and heavy taxes are identical. The system of ownership, involved in
the system of allotments lends itself by nature for the groundwork of
a powerful and numerous bureaucracy: it produces an even level of
conditions and of persons over the whole surface of the country; it,
therefore, allows the exercise of an even influence upon all parts of
this even mass from a high central point downwards; it annihilates the
aristocratic gradations between the popular masses and the Government;
it, consequently, calls from all sides for the direct intervention of
the Government and for the intervention of the latter’s immediate
organs; and, finally, it produces an unemployed excess of population,
that finds no room either in the country or in the cities, that,
consequently, snatches after public office as a sort of dignified
alms, and provokes the creation of further offices. With the new
markets, which he opened at the point of the bayonet, and with the
plunder of the continent, Napoleon returned to the farmer class with
interest the taxes wrung from them. These taxes were then a goad to
the industry of the farmer, while now, on the contrary, they rob his
industry of its last source of support, and completely sap his power
to resist poverty. Indeed, an enormous bureaucracy, richly gallooned
and well fed is that “idée Napoléonienne” that above all others suits
the requirements of the second Bonaparte. How else should it be,
seeing he is forced to raise alongside of the actual classes of
society, an artificial class, to which the maintenance of his own
régime must be a knife-and-fork question? One of his first financial
operations was, accordingly, the raising of the salaries of the
government employés to their former standard, and the creation of new
sinecures.
Another “idée Napoléonienne” is the rule of the parsons as an
instrument of government. But while the new-born allotment, in harmony
with society, in its dependence upon the powers of nature, and in its
subordination to the authority that protected it from above, was
naturally religious, the debt-broken allotment, on the contrary, at
odds with society and authority, and driven beyond its own narrow
bounds, becomes as naturally irreligious. Heaven was quite a pretty
gift thrown in with the narrow strip of land that had just been won,
all the more as it makes the weather; it, however, becomes an insult
from the moment it is forced upon the farmer as a substitute for his
allotment. Then the parson appears merely as the anointed bloodhound
of the earthly police,—yet another “idée Napoléonienne.” The
expedition against Rome will next time take place in France, but in a
reverse sense from that of M. de Montalembert.
Finally, the culminating point of the “idées Napoléoniennes” is the
preponderance of the Army. The Army was the “point of honor” with the
allotment farmers: it was themselves turned into masters, defending
abroad their newly established property, glorifying their recently
conquered nationality, plundering and revolutionizing the world. The
uniform was their State costume; war was their poetry; the allotment,
expanded and rounded up in their phantasy, was the fatherland; and
patriotism became the ideal form of property. But the foe, against
whom the French farmer must now defend his property, are not the
Cossacks, they are the sheriffs and the tax collectors. The allotment
no longer lies in the so-called fatherland, but in the register of
mortgages. The Army itself no longer is the flower of the youth of the
farmers, it is the swamp-blossom of the slum-proletariat of the farmer
class. It consists of “remplaçants,” substitutes, just as the second
Bonaparte himself is but a “remplaçant,” a substitute, for
Napoleon. Its feats of heroism are now performed in raids instituted
against farmers and in the service of the police;—and when the
internal contradictions of his own system shall drive the chief of the
“Society of December 10” across the French frontier, that Army will,
after a few bandit-raids, gather no laurels but only hard knocks.
It is evident that all the “idées Napoléoniennes” are the ideas of the
undeveloped and youthfully fresh allotment; they are an absurdity for
the allotment that now survives. They are only the hallucinations of
its death struggle; words turned to hollow phrases, spirits turned to
spooks. But this parody of the Empire was requisite in order to free
the mass of the French nation from the weight of tradition, and to
elaborate sharply the contrast between Government and Society. Along
with the progressive decay of the allotment, the governmental
structure, reared upon it, breaks down. The centralization of
Government, required by modern society, rises only upon the ruins of
the military and bureaucratic governmental machinery that was forged
in contrast to feudalism.
The conditions of the French farmers’ class solve to us the riddle of
the general elections of December 20 and 21, that led the second
Bonaparte to the top of Sinai, not to receive, but to decree laws.
The bourgeoisie had now, manifestly, no choice but to elect
Bonaparte. When, at the Council of Constance, the puritans complained
of the sinful life of the Popes, and moaned about the need of a reform
in morals, Cardinal d’Ailly thundered into their faces: “Only the
devil in his own person can now save the Catholic Church, and you
demand angels.” So, likewise, did the French bourgeoisie cry out after
the “coup d’état”: “Only the chief of the ‘Society of December 10’ can
now save bourgeois society, only theft can save property, only perjury
religion, only bastardy the family, only disorder order!”
Bonaparte, as autocratic Executive power, fulfills his mission to
secure “bourgeois order.” But the strength of this bourgeois order
lies in the middle class. He feels himself the representative of the
middle class, and issues his decrees in that sense. Nevertheless, he
is something only because he has broken the political power of this
class, and daily breaks it anew. Hence he feels himself the adversary
of the political and the literary power of the middle class. But, by
protecting their material, he nourishes anew their political
power. Consequently, the cause must be kept alive, but the result,
wherever it manifests itself, swept out of existence. But this
procedure is impossible without slight mistakings of causes and
effects, seeing that both, in their mutual action and reaction, lose
their distinctive marks. Thereupon, new decrees, that blur the line of
distinction. Bonaparte, furthermore, feels himself, as against the
bourgeoisie, the representative of the farmer and the people in
general, who, within bourgeois society, is to render the lower classes
of society happy. To this end, new decrees, intended to exploit the
“true Socialists,” together with their governmental wisdom. But, above
all, Bonaparte feels himself the chief of the “Society of December
10,” the representative of the slum-proletariat, to which he himself,
his immediate surroundings, his Government, and his army alike belong,
the main object with all of whom is to be good to themselves, and draw
Californian tickets out of the national treasury. And he affirms his
chieftainship of the “Society of December 10” with decrees, without
decrees, and despite decrees.
This contradictory mission of the man explains the contradictions of
his own Government, and that confused groping about, that now seeks to
win, then to humiliate now this class and then that, and finishes by
arraying against itself all the classes; whose actual insecurity
constitutes a highly comical contrast with the imperious, categoric
style of the Government acts, copied closely from the Uncle.
Industry and commerce, _i.e._, the business of the middle class, are
to be made to blossom in hot-house style under the “strong
Government.” Loans for a number of railroad grants. But the
Bonapartist slum-proletariat is to enrich itself. Peculation is
carried on with railroad concessions on the Bourse by the initiated;
but no capital is forthcoming for the railroads. The bank then pledges
itself to make advances upon railroad stock; but the bank is itself to
be exploited; hence, it must be cajoled; it is released of the
obligation to publish its reports weekly. Then follows a leonine
treaty between the bank and the Government. The people are to be
occupied: public works are ordered; but the public works raise the tax
rates upon the people; thereupon the taxes are reduced by an attack
upon the national bond-holders through the conversion of the five per
cent. “rentes”[29] into four-and-halves. Yet the middle class must
again be tipped: to this end, the tax on wine is doubled for the
people, who buy it at retail, and is reduced to one-half for the
middle class, that drink it at wholesale. Genuine labor organizations
are dissolved, but promises are made of future wonders to accrue from
organization. The farmers are to be helped: mortgage-banks are set up
that must promote the indebtedness of the farmer and the concentration
of property; but again, these banks are to be utilized especially to
the end of squeezing money out of the confiscated estates of the House
of Orleans; no capitalist will listen to this scheme, which, moreover,
is not mentioned in the decree; the mortgage bank remains a mere
decree, etc., etc.
Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all
classes; but he can give to none without taking from the others. As
was said of the Duke of Guise, at the time of the Fronde, that he was
the most obliging man in France because he had converted all his
estates into bonds upon himself for his Parisians, so would Napoleon
like to be the most obliging man in France and convert all property
and all labor of France into a personal bond upon himself. He would
like to steal the whole of France to make a present thereof to France,
or rather to be able to purchase France back again with French
money;—as chief of the “Society of December 10,” he must purchase that
which is to be his. All the State institutions, the Senate, the
Council of State, the Legislature, the Legion of Honor, the Soldiers’
decorations, the public baths, the public buildings, the railroads,
the General Staff of the National Guard, exclusive of the rank and
file, the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans, —all are
converted into institutions for purchase and sale. Every place in the
Army and the machinery of Government becomes a purchasing power. The
most important thing, however, in this process, whereby France is
taken to be given back to herself, are the percentages that, in the
transfer, drop into the hands of the chief and the members of the
“Society of December 10.” The witticisms with which the Countess of
L., the mistress of de Morny, characterized the confiscations of the
Orleanist estates: “C’est le premier vol de l’aigle,”[30] fits every
flight of the eagle that is rather a crow. He himself and his
followers daily call out to themselves, like the Italian Carthusian
monk in the legend does to the miser, who displayfully counted the
goods on which he could live for many years to come: “Tu fai conto
sopra i beni, bisogna prima far il conto sopra gli anni.”[31] In order
not to make a mistake in the years, they count by minutes. A crowd of
fellows, of the best among whom all that can be said is that one knows
not whence he comes—a noisy, restless “Bohème,” greedy after plunder,
that crawls about in gallooned frocks with the same grotesque dignity
as Soulonque’s[32] Imperial dignitaries—, thronged the court, crowded
the ministries, and pressed upon the head of the Government and of the
Army. One can picture to himself this upper crust of the “Society of
December 10” by considering that Véron Crevel[33] is their preacher of
morality, and Granier de Cassagnac their thinker. When Guizot, at the
time he was Minister, employed this Granier on an obscure sheet
against the dynastic opposition, he used to praise him with the term:
“C’est le roi des drôles.”[34] It were a mistake to recall the days of
the Regency or of Louis XV. by the court and the kit of Louis
Bonaparte’s: “Often did France have a mistress-administration, but
never yet an administration of kept men.”[35]
Harassed by the contradictory demands of his situation, and compelled,
like a sleight-of-hands performer, to keep, by means of constant
surprises, the eyes of the public riveted upon himself as the
substitute of Napoleon, compelled, consequently, every day to
accomplish a sort of “coup” on a small scale, Bonaparte throws the
whole bourgeois social system into disorder; he broaches everything
that seemed unbroachable by the revolution of 1848; he makes one set
of people patient under the revolution, and another anxious for it;
and he produces anarchy itself in the name of order, by rubbing off
from the whole machinery of Government the veneer of sanctity, by
profanating it, by rendering it at once nauseating and laughable. He
rehearses in Paris the cult of the sacred coat of Trier with the cult
of the Napoleonic Imperial mantle. But, when the Imperial Mantle shall
have finally fallen upon the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, then will
also the iron statue of Napoleon drop down from the top of the Vendôme
column.[36]
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