第47章

The constitutional solution, the retirement of Bonaparte in May, 1852, the simultaneous election of a new President by all the electors of the land, the revision of the constitution by a Chamber of Revision during the first months of the new presidency, is utterly inadmissible for the ruling class.The day of the new presidential election would be the day of rendezvous for all the hostile parties, the Legitimists, the Orléanists, the bourgeois republicans, the revolutionists.It would have to come to a violent decision between the different factions.Even if the party of Order should succeed in uniting around the candidature of a neutral person outside the dynastic families, he would still be opposed by Bonaparte.In its struggle with the people, the party of Order is compelled constantly to increase the power of the executive.Every increase of the executive's power increases the power of its bearer, Bonaparte.In the same measure, therefore, as the party of Order strengthens its joint might, it strengthens the fighting resources of Bonaparte's dynastic pretensions, it strengthens his chance of frustrating a constitutional solution by force on the day of the decision.He will then have, as against the party of Order, no more scruples about the one pillar of the constitution than that party had, as against the people, about the other pillar in the matter of the election law.He would, seemingly even against the Assembly, appeal to universal suffrage.In a word, the constitutional solution questions the entire political status quo and behind the jeopardizing of the status quo the bourgeois sees chaos, anarchy, civil war.He sees his purchases and sales, his promissory notes, his marriages, his agreements duly acknowledged before a notary, his mortgages, his ground rents, house rents, profits, all his contracts and sources of income called in question on the first Sunday in May, 1852, and he cannot expose himself to this risk.Behind the jeopardizing of the political status quo lurks the danger of the collapse of the entire bourgeois society.The only possible solution in the framework of the bourgeoisie is the postponement of the solution.It can save the constitutional republic only by a violation of the constitution, by the prolongation of the power of the President.This is also the last word of the press of Order, after the protracted and profound debates on the "solutions" in which it indulged after the session of the general councils.

The high and mighty party of Order thus finds itself, to its shame, compelled to take seriously the ridiculous, commonplace, and, to it, odious person of the pseudo Bonaparte.

This dirty figure likewise deceived himself about the causes that clothed him more and more with the character of the indispensable man.

While his party had sufficient insight to ascribe the growing importance of Bonaparte to circumstances, he believed that he owed it solely to the magic power of his name and his continual caricaturing of Napoleon.He became more enterprising every day.To offset the pilgrimages to St.Leonards and Wiesbaden, he made his round trips through France.The Bonapartists had so little faith in the magic effect of his personality that they sent with him everywhere as claquers people from the Society of December 10, that organization of the Paris lumpen proletariat, packed en masse into railway trains and post chaises.They put speeches into the mouth of their marionette which, according to the reception in the different towns, proclaimed republican resignation or perennial tenacity as the keynote of the President's policy.In spite of all maneuvers these journeys were anything but triumphal processions.

When Bonaparte believed he had thus made the people enthusiastic, he set out to win the army.He caused great reviews to be held on the plain of Satory, near Versailles, at which he sought to buy the soldiers with garlic sausages, champagne, and cigars.Whereas the genuine Napoleon, amid the hardships of his campaigns of conquest, knew how to cheer up his weary soldiers with outbursts of patriarchal familiarity, the pseudo Napoleon believed it was in gratitude that the troops shouted: Vive Napoleon, vive le saucisson ! that is, Hurrah for the Wurst [sausage], hurrah for the Hanswurst [buffoon]!