The by-elections in Paris on July 8, held under the influence of the state of siege and of the abstention of a great part of the proletariat from the ballot box, the taking of Rome by the French army, the entry into Rome of the red eminences and, in their train, of inquisition and monkish terrorism, added fresh victories to the victory of June and increased the intoxication of the party of Order.
Finally, in the middle of August, half with the intention of attending the Department Councils just assembled, half through exhaustion from the tendentious orgy of many months, the royalists decreed a two -- month recess of the National Assembly.With transparent irony they left behind a commission of twenty-five representatives, the cream of the Legitimists and the Orléanists, a Mole and a Changarnier, as proxies for the National Assembly and as guardians of the republic.The irony was more profound than they suspected.They, condemned by history to help to overthrow the monarchy they loved, were destined by it to conserve the republic they hated.
The second period in the life of the constitutional republic, its royalist period of sowing wild oats, closes with the recess of the Legislative Assembly.
The state of siege in Paris had again been raised, the activities of the press had again begun.During the suspension of the Social-Democratic papers, during the period of repressive legislation and royalist bluster, the Siecle, the old literary representative of the monarchist-constitutional petty bourgeois, republicanized itself; the Presse, the old literary exponent of the bourgeois reformers, democratized itself; while the National, the old classic organ of the republican bourgeois, socialized itself.
The secret societies grew in extent and intensity in the same degree that the public clubs became impossible.The workers' industrial cooperatives, tolerated as purely commercial societies, while of no account economically, became politically so many means of cementing the proletariat.
June 13 had struck off the official heads of the various semirevolutionary parties; the masses that remained won a head of their own.The knights of order had practiced intimidation by prophecies of the terror of the red republic; the base excesses, the hyperborean atrocities of the victorious counterrevolution in Hungary, in Baden, and in Rome washed the "red republic"white.And the malcontent intermediate classes of French society began to prefer the promises of the red republic with its problematic terrors to the terrors of the red monarchy with its actual hopelessness.No socialist in France spread more revolutionary propaganda than Haynau.A chaque capacite selon ses oeuvres ! [to each man of talent according to his work! ]
In the meantime Louis Bonaparte exploited the recess of the National Assembly to make princely tours of the provinces, the most hot-blooded Legitimists made pilgrimages to Ems, to the grandchild of the saintly Louis, and the mass of the popular representatives on the side of order intrigued in the Department Councils, which had just met.It was necessary to make them pronounce what the majority of the National Assembly did not yet dare pronounce, an urgent motion for immediate revision of the constitution.
According to the constitution, it could not be revised before 1852, and then only by a National Assembly called together expressly for this purpose.
If, however, the majority of the Department Councils expressed themselves to this effect, was not the National Assembly bound to sacrifice the virginity of the constitution to the voice of France? The National Assembly entertained the same hopes in regard to these provincial assemblies as the nuns in Voltaire's Henriade entertained in regard to the pandours.But, some exceptions apart, the Potiphars of the National Assembly had to deal with just so many Josephs of the provinces.The vast majority did not want to understand the importunate insinuation.The revision of the constitution was frustrated by the very instruments which were to have called it into being, by the votes of the Department Councils.The voice of France, and indeed of bourgeois France, had spoken and had spoken against revision.
At the beginning of October the Legislative National Assembly met once more -- tantum mutatus ab illo.[7] Its physiognomy was completely changed.The unexpected rejection of revision on the part of the Department Councils had put it back within the limits of the constitution and indicated the limits of its term of life.The Orléanists had become mistrustful because of the pilgrimages of the Legitimists to Ems; the Legitimists had grown suspicious because of the Orléanists'
negotiations with London; the journals of the two factions had fanned the fire and weighed the reciprocal claims of their pretenders.Orléanists and Legitimists grumbled in unison at the machinations of the Bonapartists, which showed themselves in the princely.tours, in the more or less transparent emancipatory attempts of the President, in the presumptuous language of the Bonapartist newspapers; Louis Bonaparte grumbled at a National Assembly which found only the Legitimist-Orléanist conspiracy legitimate, at a ministry which betrayed him continually to this National Assembly.
Finally the ministry was itself divided on the Roman policy and on the income tax proposed by Minister Passy, decried as socialistic by the conservatives.
