第15章

Thus long after the democratic representatives of the petty bourgeois had been repulsed within the National Assembly by the republican representatives of the bourgeoisie, this parliamentary breach received its bourgeois, its real economic meaning by the petty bourgeois as debtors being handed over to the bourgeois as creditors.A large part of the former were completely ruined and the remainder were allowed to continue their businesses only under conditions which made them absolute serfs of capital.On August 22, 1848, the National Assembly rejected the concordats d l'amiable ;on September 19, 1848, in the midst of the state of siege, Prince Louis Bonaparte and the prisoner of Vincennes, the Communist Raspail, were elected representatives of Paris.The bourgeoisie, however, elected the usurious moneychanger and Orléanist Fould.From all sides at once, therefore, open declaration of war against the Constituent National Assembly, against bourgeois republicanism, against Cavaignac.

It needs no argument to show how the mass bankruptcy of the Paris petty bourgeois was bound to produce aftereffects far transcending the circle of its immediate victims, and to convulse bourgeois commerce once more, while the state deficit was swollen anew by the costs of the June insurrection, and state revenues sank continuously through the hold-up of production, the restricted consumption, and the decreasing imports.

Cavaignac and the National Assembly could have recourse to no other expedient than a new loan, which forced them still further under the yoke of the finance aristocracy.

While the petty bourgeois had harvested bankruptcy and liquidation by order of court as the fruit of the June victory, Cavaignac's Janisseries, the Mobile Guards, found their reward in the soft arms of the courtesans, and as "the youthful saviors of society" they received all kinds of homage in the salons of Marrast, the knight of the tricolor, who served simultaneously as the Amphitryon and the troubadour of the respectable republic.Meantime, this social favoritism and the disproportionately higher pay of the Mobile Guard embittered the army, while all those national illusions with which bourgeois republicanism, through its journal, the National, had been able to attach to itself a part of the army and peasant class under Louis Philippe vanished at the same time.The role of mediator which Cavaignac and the National Assembly played in North Italy in order, together with England, to betray it to Austria -- this one day of rule destroyed eighteen years of opposition on the part of the National.No government was less national than that of the National, none more dependent on England, and, under Louis Philippe, the National lived by paraphrasing daily Cato's dictum: Carthaginem esse delendam [Carthage must be destroyed] none was more servile toward the Holy Alliance, and from a Guizot the National had demanded the tearing up of the Treaties of Vienna.The irony of history made Bastide, the ex-editor for foreign affairs of the National, Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, so that he might refute every one of his articles in every one of his dispatches.

For a moment, the army and the peasant class had believed that, simultaneously with the military dictatorship, war abroad and gloire had been placed on the order of the day in France.But Cavaignac was not the dictatorship of the saber over bourgeois society; he was the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the saber.And of the soldier they now required only the gendarme.Under the stern features of antique-republican resignation Cavaignac concealed humdrum submission to the humiliating conditions of his bourgeois office.L'argent n'a pas de maitre ! Money has no master!

He, as well as the Constituent Assembly in general, idealized this old election cry of the Third Estate by translating it into political speech:

The bourgeoisie has no king; the true form of its rule is the republic.

And the "great organic work" of the Constituent National Assembly : consisted in working out this form, in producing a republican constitution.

The rechristening of the Christian calendar as a republican one, of the saintly Bartholomew as the saintly Robespierre, made no more change in the wind and weather than this constitution made or was supposed to make in bourgeois society.Where it went beyond a change of costume, it put on record the existing facts.Thus it solemnly registered the fact of the republic, the fact of universal suffrage, the fact of a single sovereign National Assembly in place of two limited constitutional chambers.Thus it registered and regulated the fact of the dictatorship of Cavaignac by replacing the stationary, irresponsible hereditary monarchy with an ambulatory, responsible, elective monarchy, with a quadrennial presidency.Thus it elevated no less to an organic law the fact of the extraordinary powers with which the National Assembly, after the horrors of May 15 and June 25, had prudently invested its president in the interest of its own security.

The remainder of the constitution was a work of terminology.The royalist labels were torn off the mechanism of the old monarchy and republican labels stuck on.Marrast, former editor in chief of the National, now editor in chief of the constitution, acquitted himself of this academic task not without talent.