FROM JUNE 1848 TO JUNE 13, 1849 F ebruary 25, 1848, granted the republic to France, June 25 thrust the revolution upon her.And revolution, after June, meant:
overthrow of bourgeois society, whereas before February it meant: overthrow of the form of government.
The June fight was led by the republican faction of the bourgeoisie;with victory political power necessarily fell to its share.The state of siege laid , gagged Paris unresisting at its feet, and in the provinces there prevailed a moral state of siege, the threatening, brutal arrogance of victory of the bourgeoisie and the unleashed property fanaticism of the peasants.No danger, therefore, from below!
The crash of the revolutionary might of the workers was simultaneously a crash of the political influence of the democratic republicans; that is, of the republicans in the sense of the petty bourgeoisie, represented in the Executive Commission by Ledru-Rollin, in the Constituent National Assembly by the part of the Montagne and in the press by the Reforme.Together with the bourgeois republicans, they had conspired on April 16 against the proletariat, together with them they had warred against it in the June days.Thus they themselves blasted the background against which their party stood out as a power, for the petty bourgeoisie can preserve a revolutionary attitude toward the bourgeoisie only as long as the proletariat stands behind it.The proletarians were dismissed.The sham alliance concluded with them reluctantly and with mental reservations during the epoch of the Provisional Government and the Executive Commission was openly broken by the bourgeois republicans.Spurned and repulsed as allies, they sank down to subordinate henchmen of the tricolor men, from whom they could not wring any concessions but whose domination they had to support whenever it, and with it the republic, seemed to be put in jeopardy by the antirepublican bourgeois factions.Lastly, these factions, the Orléanists and the Legitimists, were from the very beginning in a minority in the Constituent National Assembly.Before the June days they dared to react only under the mask of bourgeois republicanism -- the June victory allowed for a moment the whole of bourgeois France to greet its savior in Cavaignac; and when, shortly after the June days, the antirepublican party regained independence, the military dictatorship and the state of siege in Paris permitted it to put out its antennae only very timidly and cautiously.
Since 1830 the bourgeois republican faction, in the person of its writers, its spokesmen, its men of talent and ambition, its deputies, generals, bankers, and lawyers, had grouped itself around a Parisian journal, the National.In the provinces this journal had its branch newspapers.
The coterie of the National was the dynasty of the tricolor republic.It immediately took possession of all state offices -- of the ministries, the prefecture of police, the post-office directorship, the prefectures, the higher army officers posts -- which had now become vacant.At the head of the executive power stood its general, Cavaignac; its editor in chief, Marrast, became permanent president of the Constituent National Assembly.
As master of ceremonies he at the same time did the honors, in his salons, of the respectable republic.
Even revolutionary French writers, awed, as it were, by the republican tradition, have strengthened the mistaken belief that the royalists dominated the Constituent National Assembly.On the contrary, after the June days, the Constituent Assembly remained the exclusive representative of bourgeois republicanism, and it emphasized this aspect all the more resolutely, the more the influence of the tricolor republicans collapsed outside the Assembly.
If the question was one of maintaining the form of the bourgeois republic, then the Assembly had the votes of the democratic republicans at its disposal;if one of maintaining the content, then even its mode of speech no longer separated it from the royalist bourgeois factions, for it is the interests of the bourgeoisie, the material conditions of its class rule and class exploitation, that form the content of the bourgeois republic.
Thus it was not royalism but bourgeois republicanism that was realized in the life and work of this Constituent Assembly, which in the end did not die, nor was killed, but decayed.
For the entire duration of its rule, for as long as it gave its grand performance of state on the proscenium, an unbroken sacrificial feast was being staged in the background -- the continual sentencing by courts -- martial of the captured June insurgents or their deportation without trial.The Constituent Assembly had the tact to admit that in the June insurgents it was not judging criminals but wiping out enemies.
