The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

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 soldier. With-out 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 blase 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, 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 hankerings? 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 whole 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 Baisse, 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 reappear, 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 Baisse 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 Lenoist 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. Etienue, 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. Leon 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'etat." 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."

VI

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 of 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 reelection 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 "Assemblee 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 Oleanist 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 I 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 I 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 Villele and Polignac; the Orleanists lived anew through the golden period of the tourneys between Guizot, Mole, 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 Mole, 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 Oleanists, 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 lilymind¹⁹ 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."