Meanwhile the collisions between the different factions of the party of Order, as well as between the National Assembly and Bonaparte, continued.The National Assembly was far from pleased that Bonaparte, immediately after his coup d'etat, after appointing his own, Bonapartist ministry, summoned before him the invalids of the monarchy, newly appointed prefects, and made their unconstitutional agitation for his reelection as President the condition of their appointment; that Carlier celebrated his inauguration with the closing of a Legitimist club, or that Bonaparte founded a journal of his own, Le Napoleon, which betrayed the secret longings of the President to the public, while his ministers had to deny them from the tribune of the Legislative Assembly.The latter was far from pleased by the defiant retention of the ministry, notwithstanding its various votes of no confidence;far from pleased by the attempt to win the favor of the noncommissioned officers by an extra pay of four sous a day and the favor of the proletariat by a plagiarization of Eugene Sue's Mysteries by an honor loan bank; far from pleased, finally, by the effrontery with which the ministers were made to move the deportation of the remaining June insurgents to Algiers, in order to heap unpopularity on the Legislative Assembly en gros , while the President reserved popularity for himself en detail, by individual grants of pardon.Thiers let fall threatening words about coups d'etat and coups de tete [rash acts], and the Legislative Assembly revenged itself on Bonaparte by rejecting every proposed law that he put forward for his own benefit, and by inquiring with noisy mistrust, in every instance when he made a proposal in the common interest, whether he did not aspire, through increase of the executive power, to augment the personal power of Bonaparte.In a word, it revenged itself by a conspiracy of contempt.
The Legitimist party, on its part, saw with vexation the more capable Orléanists once more occupying almost all posts and centralization increasing, while it sought its salvation principally in decentralization.
And so it was.The counterrevolution centralized forcibly, that is, it prepared the mechanism of the revolution.It even centralized the gold and silver of France in the Paris Bank through the compulsory quotation of bank notes, and so created the ready war chest of the revolution.
Lastly, the Orléanists saw with vexation the emergent principle of legitimacy contrasted with their bastard principle, and themselves every moment snubbed and maltreated as the bourgeois misalliance of a noble spouse.
Little by little we have seen peasants, petty bourgeois, the middle classes in general, stepping alongside the proletariat, driven into open antagonism to the official republic and treated by it as antagonists.Revolt against bourgeois dictatorship, need of a change of society, adherence to democratic-republican institutions as organs of their movement, grouping around the proletariat as the decisive revolutionary power -- these are the common characteristics of the so-called party of social democracy, the party of the red republic.This party of anarchy, as its opponents christened it, is no less a coalition of different interests than the party of Order.From the smallest reform of the old social disorder to the overthrow of the old social order, from bourgeois liberalism to revolutionary terrorism -- as far apart as this lie the extremes that form the starting point and the finishing point of the party of "anarchy."Abolition of the protective tariff -- socialism! For it strikes at the monopoly of the industrial faction of the party of Order.Regulation of the state budget -- socialism! For it strikes at the monopoly of the financial faction of the party of Order.Free admission of foreign meat and corn -- socialism! For it strikes at the monopoly of the third faction of the party of Order, large landed property.The demands of the free --trade party, that is, of the most advanced English bourgeois party, appear in France as so many socialist demands.Voltaireanism socialism! For it strikes at a fourth faction of the party of Order, the Catholic.Freedom of the press, right of association, universal public education -- socialism, socialism! They strike at the general monopoly of the party of Order.
So swiftly had the march of the revolution ripened conditions that the friends of reform of all shades, the most moderate claims of the middle classes, were compelled to group themselves around the banner of the most extreme party of revolution, around the red flag.
Yet manifold as the socialism of the different large sections of the party of anarchy was, according to the economic conditions and the total revolutionary requirements of the class or fraction of a class arising out of these, in one point it is in harmony: in proclaiming itself the means of emancipating the proletariat and the emancipation of the latter as its object.Deliberate deception on the part of some; self-deception on the part of the others, who promote the world transformed according to their own needs as the best world for all, as the realization of all revolutionary claims and the elimination of all revolutionary collisions.
Behind the general socialist phrases of the party of anarchy, which sound rather alike, there is concealed the socialism of the National, of the Presse, and of the Siecle, which more or less consistently wants to overthrow the rule of the finance aristocracy and to free industry and trade from their hitherto existing fetters.This is the socialism of industry, of trade, and of agriculture, whose bosses in the party of Order deny these interests, insofar as they no longer coincide with their private monopolies.
