第19章

The party of the National was immediately relieved of all the higher posts, where it had entrenched itself.The prefecture of police, the post-office directorship, the procuratorship general, the mairie [mayor's office] of Paris were all filled with old creatures of the monarchy.Changarnier, the Legitimist, received the unified supreme command of the National Guard of the Department of the Seine, of the Mobile Guard and the troops of the line of the first military division; Bugeaud, the Orléanist, was appointed commander in chief of the Alpine Army.This change of officials continued uninterrupted under the Barrot government.The first act of his ministry was the restoration of the old royalist administration.The official scene was at once transformed -- scenery, costumes, speech, actors, supers, mutes, prompters, the position of the parties, the theme of the drama, the content of the conflict, the whole situation.Only the premundane Constituent Assembly remained in its place.But from the hour when the National Assembly had installed Bonaparte, Bonaparte Barrot, and Barrot Changarnier, France stepped out of the period of republican constitution into the period of the constituted republic.And what place was there for a Constituent Assembly in a constituted republic? After the earth had been created, there was nothing else for its creator to do but flee to heaven.The Constituent Assembly was determined not to follow his example; the National Assembly was the last asylum of the party of the bourgeois republicans.If all levers of executive power had been wrested from it, was there not left to it constituent omnipotence Its first thought was to hold under all circumstances the position of sovereignty it occupied, and thence to reconquer the lost ground.Once the Barrot Ministry was displaced by a ministry of the National, the royalist personnel would have to vacate the palaces of the administration forthwith and the tricolor personnel would triumphantly move in again.The National Assembly resolved on the overthrow of the ministry and the ministry itself offered an opportunity for the attack, a better one than the Constituent Assembly itself could have invented.

It will be remembered that for the peasants Louis Bonaparte signified:

No more taxes! Six days he sat in the President's chair, and on the seventh, on December 27, his ministry proposed the retention of the salt tax, whose abolition the Provisional Government had decreed.The salt tax shares with the wine tax the privilege of being the scapegoat of the old French financial system, particularly in the eyes of the country folk.The Barrot Ministry could not have put into the mouth of the peasants choice a more mordant epigram on his electors than the words: Restoration of the salt tax! With the salt tax, Bonaparte lost his revolutionary salt -- the Napoleon of the peasant insurrection dissolved like an apparition, and nothing remained but the great unknown of royalist bourgeois intrigue.And not without intention did the Barrot Ministry make this act of tactlessly rude disillusionment the first governmental act of the President.

The Constituent Assembly, for its part, eagerly seized the double opportunity of overthrowing the ministry and, as against the elected choice of the peasantry, setting itself up as the representative of peasant interests.

It rejected the proposal of the finance minister, reduced the salt tax to a third of its former amount, thus increasing by sixty millions a state deficit of five hundred and sixty millions, and, after this vote of no confidence, calmly awaited the resignation of the ministry.So little did it comprehend the new world that surrounded it and its own changed position.

Behind the ministry stood the President and behind the President stood six millions who had placed in the ballot box as many votes of no confidence in the Constituent Assembly.The Constituent Assembly gave the nation back its no-confidence vote.Absurd exchange! It forgot that its votes were no longer legal tender.The rejection of the salt tax only matured the decision of Bonaparte and his ministry to finish the Constituent Assembly.

There began that long duel which lasted the entire latter half of the life of the Constituent Assembly.January 29, March 31, and May 8 are the journees , the great days of this crisis, just so many forerunners of June 13.