Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte | Page 9

its way, for as respectable a
paper as the "Journal des Debats." This position in the constitutional
monarchy corresponded to its character. The party was not a fraction of
the bourgeoisie, held together by great and common interests, and
marked by special business requirements. It was a coterie of bourgeois
with republican ideas-writers, lawyers, officers and civil employees,
whose influence rested upon the personal antipathies of the country for
Louis Philippe, upon reminiscences of the old Republic, upon the
republican faith of a number of enthusiasts, and, above all, upon the
spirit of French patriotism, whose hatred of the treaties of Vienna and
of the alliance with England kept them perpetually on the alert. The
"National" owed a large portion of its following under Louis Philippe
to this covert imperialism, that, later under the republic, could stand up
against it as a deadly competitor in the person of Louis Bonaparte. The
fought the aristocracy of finance just the same as did the rest of the
bourgeois opposition. The polemic against the budget, which in France,
was closely connected with the opposition to the aristocracy of finance,

furnished too cheap a popularity and too rich a material for Puritanical
leading articles, not to be exploited. The industrial bourgeoisie was
thankful to it for its servile defense of the French tariff system, which,
however, the paper had taken up , more out of patriotic than economic
reasons the whole bourgeois class was thankful to it for its vicious
denunciations of Communism and Socialism For the rest, the party of
the "National" was purely republican, i.e. it demanded a republican
instead of a monarchic form of bourgeois government; above all, it
demanded for the bourgeoisie the lion's share of the government. As to
how this transformation was to be accomplished, the party was far from
being clear. What, however, was clear as day to it and was openly
declared at the reform banquets during the last days of Louis Philippe's
reign, was its unpopularity with the democratic middle class, especially
with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as pure
republicans go, were at first on the very point of contenting themselves
with the regency of the Duchess of Orleans, when the February
revolution broke out, and when it gave their best known representatives
a place in the provisional government. Of course, they enjoyed from the
start the confidence of the bourgeoisie and of the majority of the
Constitutional National Assembly. The Socialist elements of the
Provisional Government were promptly excluded from the Executive
Committee which the Assembly had elected upon its convening, and
the party of the "National" subsequently utilized the outbreak of the
June insurrection to dismiss this Executive Committee also, and thus
rid itself of its nearest rivals--the small traders' class or democratic
republicans (Ledru-Rollin, etc.). Cavaignac, the General of the
bourgeois republican party, who command at the battle of June, stepped
into the place of the Executive Committee with a sort of dictatorial
power. Marrast, former editor-in-chief of the "National", became
permanent President of the Constitutional National Assembly, and the
Secretaryship of State, together with all the other important posts,
devolved upon the pure republicans.
The republican bourgeois party, which since long had looked upon
itself as the legitimate heir of the July monarchy, thus found itself
surpassed in its own ideal; but it cam to power, not as it had dreamed
under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against

the throne, but through a grape-shot-and-canistered mutiny of the
proletariat against Capital. That which it imagined to be the most
revolutionary, came about as the most counter-revolutionary event. The
fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the Tree of Knowledge, not from
the Tree of life.
The exclusive power of the bourgeois republic lasted only from June 24
to the 10th of December, 1848. It is summed up in the framing of a
republican constitution and in the state of siege of Paris.
The new Constitution was in substance only a republicanized edition of
the constitutional charter of 1830. The limited suffrage of the July
monarchy, which excluded even a large portion of the bourgeoisie from
political power, was irreconcilable with the existence of the bourgeois
republic. The February revolution had forthwith proclaimed direct and
universal suffrage in place of the old law. The bourgeois republic could
not annul this act. They had to content themselves with tacking to it the
limitation a six months' residence. The old organization of the
administrative law, of municipal government, of court procedures of
the army, etc., remained untouched, or, where the constitution did
change them, the change affected their index, not their subject; their
name, not their substance.
The inevitable "General Staff" of the "freedoms" of 1848--personal
freedom, freedom of the press, of speech, of association and of
assemblage, freedom