It decreed new "standing orders," which annihilate the freedom of the tribune and authorize the president of the National Assembly to punish representatives for violation of the standing orders with censure, with fines, with stoppage of their salaries, with suspension of membership, with incarceration.Over the rump of the Montagne it hung the rod instead of the sword.The remainder of the deputies of the Montagne owed it to their honor to make a mass exit.
By such an act the dissolution of the party of Order would have been hastened.
It would have had to break up into its original component parts the moment not even the semblance of an opposition would hold it together any longer.
Simultaneously with their parliamentary power, the democratic petty bourgeois were robbed of their armed power through the dissolution of the Paris Artillery and the eighth, ninth, and twelfth legions of the National Guard.On the other hand, the legion of high finance, which on June 13 had raided the print shops of Boule and Roux, demolished the presses, played havoc with the offices of the republican journals, and arbitrarily arrested editors, compositors, printers, shipping clerks, and errand boys, received encouraging approval from the tribune of the National Assembly.
All over France the disbanding of National Guards suspected of republicanism was repeated.
A new press law, a new law of association, a new law on the state of siege, the prisons of Paris overflowing, the political refugees driven out, all the journals that go beyond the limits of the National suspended, Lyon and the five departments surrounding it abandoned to the brutal persecution of military despotism, the courts ubiquitous, and the army of officials, so often purged, purged once more -- these were the inevitable, the constantly recurring commonplaces of victorious reaction, worth mentioning after the massacres and the deportations of June only because this time they were directed not only against Paris but also against the departments, not only against the proletariat but, above all, against the middle classes.
The repressive laws by which the declaration of a state of siege was left to the discretion of the government, the press still more firmly muzzled, and the right of association annihilated, absorbed the whole of the legislative activity of the National Assembly during the months of June, July, and August.
However, this epoch is characterized not by the exploitation of victory in fact, but in principle; not by the resolutions of the National Assembly, but by the grounds advanced for these resolutions; not by the thing but by the phrase; not by the phrase but by the accent and the gesture which enliven the phrase.The brazen, unreserved expression of royalist sentiments, the contemptuously aristocratic insults to the republic, the coquettishly frivolous babbling of restoration aims in a word, the boastful violation of republican decorum -- give its peculiar tone and color to this period.Long live the Constitution! was the battle cry of the vanquished of June 13.The victors were therefore absolved from the hypocrisy of constitutional, that is, republican, speech.The counterrevolution subjugated Hungary, Italy, and Germany, and they believed that the restoration was already at the gates of France.Among the masters of ceremonies of the factions of Order there ensued a real competition to document their royalism in the Moniteur, and to confess, repent, and crave pardon before God and man for liberal sins perchance committed by them under the monarchy.No day passed without the February Revolution being declared a national calamity from the tribune of the National Assembly, without some Legitimist provincial cabbage-junker solemnly stating that he had never recognized the republic, without one of the cowardly deserters of and traitors to the July Monarchy relating the belated deeds of heroism in the performance of which only the philanthropy of Louis Philippe or other misunderstandings had hindered him.What was admirable in the February days was not the magnanimity of the victorious people, but the self-sacrifice and moderation of the royalists, who had allowed it to be victorious.One Representative of the People proposed to divert part of the money destined for the relief of those wounded in February to the Municipal Guards, who alone in those days had deserved well of the fatherland.Another wanted to have an equestrian statue decreed to the Duke of Orléans in the Place du Carrousel.Thiers called the constitution a dirty piece of paper.There appeared in succession on the tribune Orléanists, to repent of their conspiracy against the legitimate monarchy by Legitimists, who reproached themselves with having hastened the overthrow of monarchy in general by resisting the illegitimate monarchy; Thiers, who repented of having intrigued against Mole; Mole, who repented of having intrigued against Guizot; Barrot, who repented of having intrigued against all three.The cry "Long live the Social-Democratic Republic! " was declared unconstitutional; the cry "Long live the Republic!
" was prosecuted as social-democratic.On the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, a representative declared: "I fear an invasion of the Prussians less than the entry of the revolutionary refugees into France." To the complaints about the terrorism organized in Lyon and the neighboring departments, Baraguay d'Hilliers answered: "I prefer the white terror to the red terror."And the Assembly applauded frantically every time an epigram against the republic, against the revolution, against the constitution, for the monarchy, or for the Holy Alliance fell from the lips of its orators.Every infringement of the minutest republican formality -- for example, that of addressing the representatives as citoyens -- filled the knights of order with enthusiasm.
