Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx [electronic reader TXT] 📗

and the dismissal of the Minister of War, d’Hautpoul, Bonaparte had, with his own hands, sacrificed the scapegoats on the altar of the fatherland. He had turned off the expected collision. Finally, the party of Order itself anxiously sought to avoid every decisive conflict with the Executive, to weaken and to blur it over. Fearing to lose its conquests over the revolution, it let its rival gather the fruits thereof. “France demands, above all things, peace,” with this language had the party of Order been apostrophizing the revolution, since February; with this language did Bonaparte’s message now apostrophize the party of Order: “France demands, above all things, peace.” Bonaparte committed acts that aimed at usurpation, but the party of Order committed a “disturbance of the peace,” if it raised the hue and cry, and explained them hypochrondriacally. The sausages of Satory were mouse-still when nobody talked about them;—France demands, above all things, peace.”

Accordingly, Bonaparte demanded that he be let alone; and the parliamentary party was lamed with a double fear: the fear of re-conjuring up the revolutionary disturbance of the peace, and the fear of itself appearing as the disturber of the peace in the eyes of its own class, of the bourgeosie. Seeing that, above all things, France demanded peace, the party of Order did not dare, after Bonaparte had said “peace” in his message, to answer “war.” The public, who had promised to itself the pleasure of seeing great scenes of scandal at the opening of the National Assembly, was cheated out of its expectations.

The opposition deputies, who demanded the submission of the minutes of the Permanent Committee over the October occurrences, were outvoted.

All debate that might excite was fled from on principle. The labors of the National Assembly during November and December, 1850, were without interest.

 

Finally, toward the end of December, began a guerilla warfare about certain prerogatives of the parliament. The movement sank into the mire of petty chicaneries on the prerogative of the two powers, since, with the abolition of universal suffrage, the bourgeoisie had done away with the class struggle.

 

A judgment for debt had been secured against Mauguin, one of the Representatives. Upon inquiry by the President of the Court, the Minister of Justice, Rouher, declared that an order of arrest should be made out without delay. Manguin was, accordingly, cast into the debtors’ prison. The National Assembly bristled up when it heard of the “attentat.” It not only ordered his immediate release, but had him forcibly taken out of Clichy the same evening by its own greffier. In order, nevertheless, to shield its belief in the “sacredness of private property,” and also with the ulterior thought of opening, in case of need, an asylum for troublesome Mountainers, it declared the imprisonment of a Representative for debt to be permissible upon its previous consent. It forgot to decree that the President also could be locked up for debt. By its act, it wiped out the last semblance of inviolability that surrounded the members of its own body.

 

It will be remembered that, upon the testimony of one Allais, Police Commissioner Yon had charged a Section of Decembrists with a plan to murder Dupin and Changarnier. With an eye upon that, the questors proposed at the very first session, that the parliament organize a police force of its own, paid for out of the private budget of the National Assembly itself, and wholly independent of the Police Prefects.

The Minister of the Interior, Baroche, protested against this trespass on his preserves. A miserable compromise followed, according to which the Police Commissioner of the Assembly was to be paid out of its own private budget and was to be subject to the appointment and dismissal of its own questors, but only upon previous agreement with the Minister of the Interior. In the meantime Allais had been prosecuted by the Government. It was an easy thing in Court, to present his testimony in the light of a mystification, and, through the mouth of the Public Prosecutor, to throw Dupin, Changarnier, Yon, together with the whole National Assembly, into a ridiculous light. Thereupon, on December 29, Minister Baroche writes a letter to Dupin, in which he demands the dismissal of Yon. The Committee of the National Assembly decides to keep Yon in office; nevertheless, the National Assembly, frightened by its own violence in the affair of Mauguin, and accustomed, every time it has shied a blow at the Executive, to receive back from it two in exchange, does not sanction this decision. It dismisses Yon in reward for his zeal in office, and robs itself of a parliamentary prerogative, indispensable against a person who does not decide by night to execute by day, but decides by day and executes by night.

 

We have seen how, during the months of November and December, under great and severe provocations, the National Assembly evaded and refused the combat with the Executive power. Now we see it compelled to accept it on the smallest occasions. In the affair of Mauguin, it confirms in principle the liability of a Representative to imprisonment for debt, but to itself reserves the power of allowing the principle to be applied only to the Representatives whom it dislikes,-and for this infamous privilege we see it wrangling with the Minister of Justice. Instead of utilizing the alleged murder plan to the end of fastening an inquest upon the “Society of December 10,” and of exposing Bonaparte beyond redemption before France and his true figure, as the head of the slum-proletariat of Paris, it allows the collision to sink to a point where the only issue between itself and the Minister of the Interior is.

Who has jurisdiction over the appointment and dismissal of a Police Commissioner? Thus we see the party of Order, during this whole period, compelled by its ambiguous position to wear out and fritter away its conflict with the Executive power in small quarrels about jurisdiction, in chicaneries, in pettifogging, in boundary disputes, and to turn the stalest questions of form into the very substance of its activity. It dares not accept the collision at the moment when it involves a principle, when the Executive power has really given itself a blank, and when the cause of the National Assembly would be the cause of the nation. It would thereby have issued to the nation an order of march; and it feared nothing so much as that the nation should move. Hence, on these occasions, it rejects the motions of the Mountain, and proceeds to the order of the day. After the issue has in this way lost all magnitude, the Executive power quietly awaits the moment when it can take it up again upon small and insignificant occasions; when, so to say, the issue offers only a parliamentary local interest. Then does the repressed valor of the party of Order break forth, then it tears away the curtain from the scene, then it denounces the President, then it declares the republic to be in danger,—but then all its pathos appears stale, and the occasion for the quarrel a hypocritical pretext, or not at all worth the effort. The parliamentary tempest becomes a tempest in a tea-pot, the struggle an intrigue, the collision a scandal.

While the revolutionary classes gloat with sardonic laughter over the humiliation of the National Assembly—they, of course, being as enthusiastic for the prerogatives of the parliament as that body is for public freedom—the bourgeoisie, outside of the parliament, does not understand how the bourgeoisie, inside of the parliament, can squander its time with such petty bickerings, and can endanger peace by such wretched rivalries with the President. It is puzzled at a strategy that makes peace the very moment when everybody expects battles, and that attacks the very moment everybody believes peace has been concluded.

 

On December 20, Pascal Duprat interpellated the Minister of the Interior on the “Goldbar Lottery.” This lottery was a “Daughter from Elysium”; Bonaparte, together with his faithful, had given her birth; and Police Prefect Carlier had placed her under his official protection, although the French law forbade all lotteries, with the exception of games for benevolent purposes. Seven million tickets, a franc a piece, and the profit ostensibly destined to the shipping of Parisian vagabonds to California. Golden dreams were to displace the Socialist dreams of the Parisian proletariat; the tempting prospect of a prize was to displace the doctrinal right to labor. Of course, the workingmen of Paris did not recognize in the lustre of the California gold bars the lack-lustre francs that had been wheedled out of their pockets. In the main, however, the scheme was an unmitigated swindle. The vagabonds, who meant to open California gold mines without taking the pains to leave Paris, were Bonaparte himself and his Round Table of desperate insolvents. The three millions granted by the National Assembly were rioted away; the Treasury had to be refilled somehow or another. In vain did Bonaparte open a national subscription, at the head of which he himself figured with a large sum, for the establishment of so-called “cites ouvrieres.” [#3 Work cities.] The hard-hearted bourgeois waited, distrustful, for the payment of his own shares; and, as this, of course, never took place, the speculation in Socialist castles in the air fell flat. The gold bars drew better. Bonaparte and his associates did not content themselves with putting into their own pockets part of the surplus of the seven millions over and above the bars that were to be drawn; they manufactured false tickets; they sold, of Number 10 alone, fifteen to twenty lots—a financial operation fully in the spirit of the “Society of December 10”! The National Assembly did not here have before it the fictitious President of the Republic, but Bonaparte himself in flesh and blood. Here it could catch him in the act, not in conflict with the Constitution, but with the penal code. When, upon Duprat’s interpellation, the National Assembly went over to the order of the day, this did not happen simply because Girardin’s motion to declare itself “satisfied” reminded the party of Order of its own systematic corruption: the bourgeois, above all the bourgeois who has been inflated into a statesman, supplements his practical meanness with theoretical pompousness. As statesman, he becomes, like the Government facing him, a superior being, who can be fought only in a higher, more exalted manner.

 

Bonaparte-who, for the very reason of his being a “bohemian,” a princely slum-proletarian, had over the scampish bourgeois the advantage that he could carry on the fight after the Assembly itself had carried him with its own hands over the slippery ground of the military banquets, of the reviews, of the “Society of December 10,” and, finally, of the penal code-now saw that the moment had arrived when he could move from the seemingly defensive to the offensive. He was but little troubled by the intermediate and trifling defeats of the Minister of Justice, of the Minister of War, of the Minister of the Navy, of the Minister of Finance, whereby the National Assembly indicated its growling displeasure. Not only did he prevent the Ministers from resigning, and thus recognizing the subordination of the executive power to the Parliament; he could now accomplish what during the vacation of the National Assembly be had commenced, the separation of the military power from the Assembly—the deposition of Changarnier.

 

An Elysee paper published an order, issued during the month of May, ostensibly to the First Military Division, and, hence, proceeding from Changarnier, wherein the officers were recommended, in case of an uprising, to give no quarter to the traitors in their own ranks, to shoot them down on the spot, and to refuse troops to the National Assembly, should it make a requisition for such. On January 3, 1851, the Cabinet was interpellated on this order. The Cabinet demands for the examination of the affair