Marx on Bonapartism – Reading Notes on “The 18th Brumaire” and “Class Struggles in France”

Image: Eugene Delacroix “Liberty Leading the People”; at the Louvre Paris; Delacroix painted this in 1830 “as a reminder” of the values of the French Revolution. It was removed from public view swiftly: “After the June Rebellion of 1832, it was returned to the artist. According to Albert Boime, Champfleury wrote in August 1848 that it had been “hidden in an attic for being too revolutionary.” Although Louis-Philippe’s Ministry of the Interior initially acquired it as a gesture to the Left, after the uprising at the funeral of Lamarque in June 1832 it was never again openly displayed for fear of setting a bad example.” (Wikipedia accessed 7 July 2026) It only re-emerged to public view at the Louvre in 1874.
(Image from “Roaming Paris”; July 2026).

Reading Notes on Karl Marx – “18th Brumaire” and “Class Struggles in France”
July 13, 2026

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and a simplified bald summary
2. Background notes on the original formulation of  “Bonapartism“ by Marx
   i) Marx’s two main writings on the period in France from 1830-1952
   ii) Reprise of events in the 1789 French Revolution up to the 1830 “July Monarchy”
   iii) The Bourbon Restoration 1815-1830
   iv) The Louis Philippe Constitutional Monarchy July 1830- February 1848
3. The period 1848-1851 covered in Marx’s two books
   i) February 1848-May 1848 – the “prologue of the revolution”; Fall of the July Monarchy – 1848 Revolution led by the working class – but usurped by the Republican bourgeoisie
   ii) Did the workers make a mistake by lending its strength to the republican bourgeoisie?
   iii) Building a force of lumpen elements to attack the working class
   iv) Further division of the peasants off from the workers – the 45 centime tax
   v) Further deception by false accusations against the workers
   vi) The Party of Order
   vii) the 4 May Constituent Assembly was a ‘bourgeois republic’ – not a workers republic
   viii) Goading the workers to the June Defeat and massacre
   ix) The united reactionary classes headed by the bourgeoisie
   x) From the June 25 Days 1848 to December 10, 1848 – the dictatorship of the “pure bourgeois republicans”
   xi) The 4 November 1848 Constitution
   xii) The two headed nature of the Constitution
   xiii) The formation of the Montagne in November 1848
   xiv) The first act of the proletariat as an independent political party – voting for Raspail in December 1848 presidential elections
   xv) The ‘revolt of the peasants’ – the election of Louis Napolean as President
   xvi) Reneging on promises to lift the salt tax on the peasantry
   xvii) Louis Napoleon appoints the Party of Order as his instrument of rule
   xviii) The ignominious death of the Montagnard party – May 28, 1849-June 11 1849
   xix) Dispersal of the Barrot Government
   xx) 3Disarming the Assembly and thus the Party of Order
   xxi) The Stagnation of the Party of Order
   xxii) Counter attacks from the peasantry and the Montagne
   xxiii) The forced new unity of the Party of order and Louis Napoleon
   xxiv) Weakening of the proletarian by thoughts of only ‘legal’ change being needed
   xxv) The Financial Aristocracy doing well.
   xxvi)  Louis Napoleon forms lumpen proletariat ‘December 10′ and dismisses General Changarnier
   xxvii)  The constitutional dilemma of the bourgeoisie in 1852 – the voice of the “commercial            bourgeoise”
   xxviii) The end game
   xxix) The State in France
   xxx) Why the peasantry went back to Louis Napoleon
   xxxi) Marx’s later assessment of Louis Napoleon’s accession to power in 1870
   xxxii) Engels and the “real religion of” rule of the “modern bourgeoisie”

1. Introduction

This article is a companion piece to the article entitled “Recent critiques of MLRG.online analysis of the Trump Presidency” (shortly to be found at MLRG.online). That article – “Recent Critiques…” – responds to recent arguments on our views on the Trump Presidency, as expressed on the e-list ‘Marx Mail’.

Anthony Teso, argues that MLRG.online erred by omitting the designation of Trump’s government as being a Bonapartist regime (Teso, Jun 15 message #42051 on Marxism e-list at www.Marxmail.world marxmail@groups.io). As we acknowledge in our response, “he rightly forces us to rehearse the meaning and history of the term ‘Bonapartism’.”  (shortly on MLRG.online).

We note that:

“The term Bonapartism was first coined somewhat in the manner that Leftists use it, by Marx and Engels. But there is a problem in that naturally the entire class terrain is quite different from that when they were writing about Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808–1873)….
Since the interpretation of the term rests so critically on two texts of Marx – we publish at the same time a separate, and more detailed interpretation of Marx’s texts. This is because the reply to Teso simply becomes unwieldy to include this in full. And yet Marx’s detailed analysis of the complex manoeuvres in France of 1848-1851 certainly deserve a better understanding in the Marxist-Leninist community. Hence we put the companion text.”
MLRG.online

We believe the term “Bonapartism” – specifically in relation to a fully formed and now degenerating USA monopoly imperialist ruling class and its President Trump – is only a “superficial historical analogy“. That phrase derives directly from Marx – talking about “Caeserism.” (Marx: “Preface to 18th Burmaire”;  At Marxist Internet Archive MIA  ‘Preface to the 18th Brumaire).

We have separated out these “Reading Notes” from our response to Teso. We term this as “Reading Notes” to Marx’s two books on the 1848 Revolution and its aftermath. In reality it was meant for us to more clearly understand the twisting history related by Marx. Some Marxists may find these “Reading  Notes” superfluous preferring Marx in the original. But perhaps others may find them of use.

One advantage of a separate treatment is that we do not need to stint in using even long quotations. Marx’s own language of course, is enthralling, but it is complex. We have not hesitated to insert a few selected, newer sources if it amplifies the discussion.

Marx’s style uniquely compounds insightful flashes, satire, acute analysis and far ranging historical comparisons. But it is not simple language. One particular example of complexity is that Marx uses certain words (eg “republican”) whose meaning changes by the period. That was simply because almost all classes had to use the word ‘republican’ as it inspired respect. Thus even anti-republican bourgeoisie disguised themselves as ‘republican’ and wrapped themselves in the tricolour flag of France. Only the working class wanted unequivocally and openly the red flag of a socialist republicanism.

In addition in the two texts on France, Marx often goes backwards and forwards in history, with resulting potential for confusion. Finally – While Marx focuses on the 1848 period to 1951, the processes of the French Revolution of 1789-93, are largely assumed to be known to the reader.

1.i A simplified bald summary

All the events of 1848-1851 described by Marx take place in the shadow of the First French Republic and the French Revolution (1789-1793). One key interpretation of this period is that the events show the two great opposing classes forming into a recognisable shape on the stage of the nation of France. These two great classes are of course the capitalists and proletarians. These two would continue to struggle against each other right up to this day. Engels put this clearly in his preface to the later work of Marx, ‘The Civil War in France”:

“Thanks to the economic and political development of France since [the French Revolution of] 1789, for 50 years the position of Paris has been such that no revolutions could break out there without assuming a proletarian character, that is to say, the proletariat, which had bought victory with its blood, would advance its own demands after victory. These demands were more or less unclear and even confused, corresponding to the state of evolution reached by the workers of Paris at the particular period, but in the last resort they all amounted to the abolition of the class antagonism between capitalist and workers. It is true that no one knew how this was to be brought about. But the demand itself, however indefinite it still was in its formulation, contained a threat to the existing order of society; the workers who put it forward were still armed; therefore the disarming of the workers was the first commandment for the bourgeois at the helm of the state. Hence, after every revolution won by the workers, a new struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers.”
Frederick Engels; “1891 Introduction – On the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune [Historical Background & Overview of the Civil War]” at MIA Engels Preface to Civil War France

But each of these two classes had a dialectical relationship with all the other great, but older classes. That is the class of landowning aristocrats and clergy tied to the monarchists; and the masses of the rural peasantry; and an urban petty-bourgeoisie.

Several successive class alliances and divisions emerged and dissolved over this period. Each class had to contend with the legacy of the French Revolution of 1789-1793. That is why whenever the masses moved into motion at the start of this period, all classes exerting influence had to show themselves as “republican.” The bourgeoisie and Monarchists all had to wear masks for periods.

Increasingly through this period, the masks came off. By the end of the period, all factions of the bourgeoisie including the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte – Louis Napoleon – joined forces to put down working class led resistance. That was because by 1850 the workers, petty bourgeoisie and peasants had to some extent united in actions to pull down the bourgeoisie. They failed stopped by the united actions of the bourgeoisie and Louis Napoleon.

In the two texts by Marx that we deal with primarily, he directly deals with 1848-1851 and the 1830 Constitutional Monarchy.

To summarise briefly,  the alliances and the entailed struggles followed this general sequence:

1. The first great French Revolution of 1789-1793 pitted all subordinate classes in society (working class, peasantry, emerging bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoise) against the landed aristocracy and clergy under the ruling Absolutist Bourbon King Charles XVI.
2. The sans culottes, or working class under the Mountain were pitted against the representatives of the petty bourgeoise and bourgeoise in the Girondin. The counter-revolutionary victory of the Girondins,  left the revolutionary aspirations of the working class un-fulfilled. But the workers still held hopes for republicanism or socialism. At this time the two notions were somewhat confusedly intertwined. Attempting to still a bubbling working class ferment, a smaller set of leaders seized governmental power. This became narrowed to Emperor Bonaparte whose coup formed the First Empire.
3. Bonaparte attempted to exercise French hegemony over Europe. But the main opposing European powers defeated this. After the fall of the First Empire under Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815, the coalition of European powers installed the heirs of the executed Louis XVI.
4. Though supposedly a Constituional Monarchy, Charles X inspired a new White counter-revolution. The gains of the French revolution were being quickly erased – and a landed aristocracy and clergy were unrestrained. Several classes resented this, including the two sectors of developing capitalists – financial and industrial.
5. While divided between two arms the bourgeoisie (financial and industrial) used the already armed working class to rid itself of the Bourbon Restoration. This succeeded in removing the Bourbon monarchy. The ultra-Monarchists favouring the Bourbons survived organised in the Bourbon Legitimist party;
6. The coup put into power in July 1830 a Constitutional Monarchy headed by Louis Philippe – formerly Duc D’Orléans. His Monarchist supporters were dubbed Orléanists. He was closely allied to the financial aristocracy. There were therefore two factions of Monarchists – Bourbon Legitimists and Orléanists
7. The class coalition of monarchists Orléanists and the financial aristocracy led by Louis Philippe took France into a speculative frenzy. In this the coalition the developing industrialists played second fiddle. The speculation and embezzlement impoverished in particular the workers, petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. As Marx wrote “The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people.” Marx 18th Brumaire Part 1 at MIA Part 2 18th Brumaire
8. By 1848, the disgruntled industrial bourgeoisie had allied with the “republicans”. This large umbrella term was composed of several factions. There were two main wings, the ‘democratic republican’ wing were the left republicans. They would become later in November 1848 ’social democrats’ as Marx termed them. The right wing of the republicans were bourgeois republicans – largely anti-republican bourgeoisie who adopted this mask to gain a hearing. Together the republicans conspired to remove the 1830 July Monarchy. But to effect this they needed an armed mass. They therefore incited the workers to revolt.  In February 1848 the workers of Paris rose and deposed the Monarchy and begin a new republic. But the workers understanding of ‘republic’ included socialist demands that went beyond the progressive rights of suffrage.
9. The working class had thought they had managed to secure such a republic. But they were tricked by the various forces making up the republicans. Even the workers calls for suffrage were being side-lined or ignored. In much ferment with the explosion of new presses and debating societies (’the clubs’) the workers rose in revolt again in June 1848. But they were massacred as they rose by the brutal troops of General Cavaignac (“the butcher of Paris’). This was the June 1848 defeat.
10. Throughout the entire process the bourgeoise had worked to obstruct the working class forming a united front with other classes (the petty bourgeois and peasantry) against them. The strategy had succeeded, the working class had ended up battling completely on their own.
11. While they had still objective differences, both the industrial and financial wings of capital came to formally join together in a party called the ‘Party of Order’. These two wings were united as Marx says – under the banner ‘capital’. Yet each wing was also linked closely with the one of the opposing two Monarchist factions. All the component parts of the ‘Party of Order’ were against the working class.
12. The June Defeat led to the final short-lived sole victory of the ‘pure republicans’. But who were they? Before long the democratic republicans were attacked by the bourgeois republicans. Before they were completely removed however, the two main factions of the ‘republicans’ inaugurated a new constitution that decreed the single National Assembly would have an ‘independent’ elected President.
13. At this election in December 10, 1848, the thus far much abused peasantry gave their vote for Louis Bonaparte. Marx considers that Louis Napoleon was objectively the representative of the peasant. The vote for Louis Napoleon far outnumbered the votes for either the ‘Butcher of Paris’ Cavaignac, or the petty bourgeois party candidate (Ledru-Rollin for the reborn social democrats in the newly formed ‘Montagne’); or in fourth place the communist candidate Raspail. However even though the communists were last in the poll, it was a milestone. For now, the communists had for the first time organised completely separately.
14. Louis Napoleon installed the now un-masked bourgeoisie in government. Another attempt was made by the petty bourgeoisie in the Mountain, at enshrining a democratic form of repubicanism. They tried to impeach Louis Napoleon as President. But their attempt was halting and mis-led by the Mountain – who were riven between wanting to stop erosion of democratic rights and a fear of inciting the working class to further actions moving into a more socialist direction.  Consequently they were outmanouevred in parliament while being beaten in the streets. They lost any semblance of governmental authority.
15. Louis Napoleon having used the bourgeois republicans of the Party of Labour to oust the Mountain, now ousted from effective power the Party of Labour. But he made an alliance with a new Minister of Finance (Fould). He was put into power but as a financial autocrat himself, he restarted a fervent speculative money making and corruption. A deepening of poverty, and a renewed assault on the peasantry – led to a new radicalisation. This became apparent in elections in 1850 when the peasantry, the petty bourgeois and the working class joined together under the party of the Mountain. They won in alarming numbers, including even votes of  army members.
16. It was this class alliance and its electoral success that frightened the Party of Order and Louis Napoleon who effectively closed ranks together and further suppressed the opposition.
17. Bonaparte now manouevred in several ways to retain power. Within a year he had transformed himself into an Emperor – by moving against all other parties. The alienated and poverty stricken peasantry was his main social class of support, backed by the industrial and financial bourgeoisie.
18. Marx reflected as he placed the 1870 Paris Commune in perspective, that the Emperor was a unity figure: “However, after their one heroic exploit of June 1848 (when under General Cavaignac’s direction the masses were slaughtered -ed) the bourgeois republicans had, from the front, to fall back to the rear of the “Party of Order” – a combination formed by all the rival fractions and factions of the appropriating classes. The proper form of their joint-stock government was the parliamentary republic, with Louis Bonaparte for its president. Theirs was a regime of avowed class terrorism and deliberate insult towards the “vile multitude.”
    Karl Marx, “The Third Address, May, 1871”; [The Paris Commune]; at MIA
19. The situation of the bourgeoisie was such that it required an authoritarian rule:
    “In reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation. It was acclaimed throughout the world as the savior of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce expanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury. The state power, apparently soaring high above society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions.”
    MIA Marx’s 3rd Address to the International: MIA Marx on the Civil War chapter 5   

This abbreviated set of points above, naturally does not do adequate justice to Marx’s sophisticated formulation of all these complex moves and class alliances. To see this more clearly, we walk through his historical writings of 1848-1851. We synopsise the period of the First French revolution 1789-1830, and only then proceed to 1830-1848-1851. We use and adapt the periodisation Marx gives in Chapter 6 18th Brumaire.

1.2 A Nomenclature

Faction                         Sub-fractions and Class             Representatives
1789-93
Girondins                         petty bourgeoise; bourgeoise           Jean Jaques Danton
Mountain                   workers; progressive petty bourgeois   Robespierre, St Just, Marat

1848-1851
Republican                   socialist, sans-culotte, proletariat      Raspail, Louis Blanc, Albert
republican                    democratic  petty bourgeoisie             Ledru-Rollin
republican                    bourgeois;  big bourgeoisie                  Adolphe Thiers

Mountain (Montagnard)                 petty-bourgeois               Ledru-Rollin
Legitimatist, Bourbonist  Autocracy, Landed aristocracy    Charles de  Talleyrand                                                                                                       Orléanist                                                Financial aristocracy   Francois Guizot, Alphonse Lamartine
Party of Order       Big bourgeoise of finance and industry.  See Legitimatists and Orléanists
Bonapartist                                             Peasantry                      Louis Napoleon Bonaparte

 

2. Background Notes on the original formulation of  “Bonapartism“ by Marx 

Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in February 1848 in London. Shortly after, the 1848 revolution broke out in France in February, and the Second Republic was announced. In Brussels at the time, Marx wrote a message of ‘celebration’ and solidarity to the French Provisional Government on behalf of the ‘Brussels Democratic Union’. The French Provisional Government invited Marx to France. Marx was also under threat from the King of Belgium for deportation from Belgium. He went to Paris with his wife, and was joined by Engels shortly.

i) Marx’s two main writings on the period in France from 1830-1952

The 1848 revolutions swept Northwards across all of Europe from Palmero. It broke into France under Marx’s eyes, but it then also hit Germany. Whereupon Marx and Engels moved to Cologne to publish on 1 June 1848, the ‘Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue’ (the New Rhenish Political-Economic Review). We reviewed this episode at “Views of Marx and Engels on Revolutionary Organisations”; MLRG.online 13 January 2026.

From Germany Marx watched the unfolding events in Paris carefully. By February 1852, Marx had completed a series of articles initially meant for two different papers, and eventually two books.

“The Class Struggles in France” was a series in the ‘Neue Rheinische Zeitung’ published over 4 months in 1850, in London. It was re-published as a book in 1895 with a preface by Engels. Meanwhile “The 18th Brumaire” was also intended as news articles, this time for the weekly ‘Die Revolution’ published by Joseph Weydemayer in New York. It was only fully published as a book in 1869. The collected writings were given the name of “18th Brumaire”. They overlap tremendously, but are complementary as Cem Eroğul remarks:

“Because they shed light on events from different angles, these two studies in fact complement each other. “Class Struggles” looks at events generally closer up. “The Eighteenth Brumaire”, on the other hand, takes a bird’s eye view of events from a higher altitude since it was written after the period in question was closed. That is why it is impossible to grasp the nature of the period if one studies only one of the texts.”
Cem Eroğul (2025) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: A Case Study of Marx’s Method of Analysis, Socialism and Democracy, 39:1-2, 78-115, at p. 85

In these two books Marx methodically analysed the French opponents and heirs of the French Revolution. He does this while vividly showing the dizzying series of events. In his observations he shows sections of the bourgeoisie struggling against each other – but then coming together in the ‘Party of Order’. The bourgeoisie was divided within itself into two major factions – those drawn from finance capital and those drawn from an industrial base. Both sections of the bourgeoisie tried to continually shave off any potential of a united front with their feared enemy of the working class. Namely they alienated the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry away from the working class.

However at least in our view these writings assume a lot of background in French history.

Therefore before directly plunging into them, we first briefly recap the main events after the French revolution. Then we examine the years 1848-1951 using Marx’s own division into three main periods (Chapter 6 of the 18th Brumaire). We largely follow his periodisation, adding a few more for clarity.

ii) Reprise of events in the 1789 French Revolution up to the 1830 “July Monarchy”

The bourgeois democratic first French Revolution (1789-1799) against the Bourbon Monarchy began with the calling of the Estates General in 1789. On 21 September 1792, the  revolutionary National Convention abolished the absolutist monarchy or “King of France”-  and deposed Louis XVI, later to be executed by guillotine. His heir Louis XVII died in prison.

However the revolutionary government splintered as the revolutionary wing (responsive to the sans-culotte (i.e. those not wearing silk knee-breeches, but long pants – also known as the workers of Paris, or the proletarians or the working class) of the liberals in the Montagne (the Mountain) struggled against the moderates (responsive to the merchant and financial sections of the bourgeoisie) of the Girondins.

The leader of the left-wing of the Montagne was Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794). In the short term the Girondins were defeated, and excluded from the National Convention in June 1793. Meanwhile the rest of the Jacobins moved to restrict inheritances using a legislative committee. Meanwhile Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767- 1794) headed a committee that pushed forward universal male suffrage. This was to be part of the Constitution of June 1793, or the Constitution of the Year I or the Montagnard Constitution. It was far reaching and became known as the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793“:

“A complete constitutional document was submitted to the convention on 10 June 1793. It was subsequently accepted … and put to a public referendum. Employing universal male suffrage, the vote was a resounding popular victory for the new constitution, which received the approval of 1,784,377 out of approximately 1,800,000 voters.

The Constitution expanded upon the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, to which it added several rights: it proclaimed the superiority of popular sovereignty over national sovereignty. It added several new economic and social rights, including right of association, right to work and public assistance, right to public education, right of rebellion (and duty to rebel when the government violates the right of the people), all written into what is known as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793.”
Wikipedia French Constitution of 1793

Before this could be enacted however, the assassination of the Montagnard Jean-Paul Marat (1743 –1793) on 13 July by the Girondist Charlotte Corday (1768-1793) supervened. This suspended the 1793 Constitution indefinitely. Its unresolved questions formed the content of the 1848 struggles.

To counter the Girondist and counter-revolutionary threats the Montagnards formed the Committee of Public Safety and moved to control the military. They then continued towards land reform and suppression of governmental corruption. But this led to the counter-revolutionary plots of the  ‘moderates’ led by Georges Jacques Danton (1759- 1794). His faction managed to effect and lead the Thermidorian Counter-Revolution (9 Thermidor II in the revolutionary calendar, or 27 July 1794). a White Terror. It culminated in the execution of Robespierre and other bourgeois  revolutionaries who favoured advances for the sans-culottes.

Ultimately, this led to the inauguration of the French Directory composed of five individuals headed by Paul Vicomte de Barras – or Paul Barras (1755-1829). The Directory began in 1795, lasting until 1799.
The first democratic revolutionary period ended with overthrowing of the leadership of the Directory. This replaced the  figures of the bourgeois republicans with the briefly lived French Consulate. The process continued till the coup d’Etat on 9 November 1799, also known as 18th Brumaire of Year VIII by the Republican Calendar. That date marked Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769-1821) accession as First Consul of the French First Republic. Shortly after Bonaparte seized power as Emperor he formed the First French Empire (1804-1815). But after a period of imperial expansion and foreign wars, his rule ended in failed battles against a coalition of European powers in 1815.

• As Marx said of this period it “unchained and established modern bourgeois society“:
  “Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society … The first one destroyed the feudal foundation and cut off the feudal heads that had grown on it. The other created inside France the only conditions under which free competition could be developed, parceled-out land properly used, and the unfettered productive power of the nation employed; and beyond the French borders it swept away feudal institutions everywhere, to provide, as far as necessary, bourgeois society in France with an appropriate up-to-date environment on the European continent.”
  18th Brumaire Chapter 1 at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 1
• After the 1793 fall of the French Revolution, the rights won by the French people – including the working class – numbered amongst other achievement the rights of universal male suffrage. But in some measure or another they were clawed back.
• Despite the subsequent counter-revolutions and the loss of such rights, they were not forgotten by the working class of Paris as events in 1848 were to show.
• While the counter-revolution had removed some of these “Rights of Man” – restrictions on the landed aristocracy and the clergy remained. It was these which the Bourbon Restoration would attempt to erase.

(iii) The Bourbon Restoration 1815-1830

The victorious European powers restored the monarchic heirs in the Bourbon Restoration. But their reign was now fashioned into a constitutional monarchy. The exiled brother of the ancien régime’s executed Louis XVI was made Louis XVIII. But he was compelled to grant a constitution in the Charter of 1814 which limited the Monarch’s power.

Nonetheless his return stimulated another White Terror by an ‘Ultra-royalist’ faction. This formed the Bourbonist or the Ultra-royalists with their landowning aristocracy. Its most reactionary fraction was known as Legitimists or those royalists who demanded the Bourbon dynastic succession to the French crown – continuing even after the overthrow of the 1830 July Revolution. One expression of their reaction was the limitation of the universal rights of suffrage of the male citizens of France.  This was limited to a tiny portion of the aristocracy and a small number of the bourgeoisie.

Another ‘less’ reactionary group of Royalists was called the Doctrinals. They confusedly wished to  reconcile the monarchy with the French Revolution notion of liberty. Headed by Pierre Paul Royer-Collard (1763-1845) they called for a restricted census suffrage. Ultimately in 1815, Louis XVIII relapsed back into a more obvious absolutist rule, and dissolved the parliament. The liberal Royalists became known as the Doctrinaires and would later merge into the Orleanists (see below).

After the death of Louis XVIII, the monarchy passed to Louis X, who embarked upon an even more intense White reaction. As noted the monarchy were in alliance with the Bourbonist rural landed aristocracy.

When Charles X took the throne in 1824, he moved to severely restrict the rights of suffrage to only the property owners – leaving out the whole of the working class and peasantry and large sections of the petty-bourgeoisie. In addition he tried to reinstate ancien privileges for the clergy and the rural aristocrats. He decreed the death penalty for those attacking the Eucharist in an Anti-Sacrilege Act. Charles X also tried to enforce the financial restitution for those property owners dispossessed by the 1789 Revolution and the First Empire of Napoleon. This was intended to restore property to all those declared “enemies of the revolution” by the various revolutionary governments.

• The Bourbon Restoration aimed to complete the reversal of the prior gains of the First French Revolution and re-erect the power of the landed aristocracy. The Monarchy had its political representatives in the Legitimists.
• But open Bourbonist reaction was unlikely to last. The gains of the 1793 French Revolution were not yet completely forgotten, including the rights of suffrage that had been lost.
• It had been seared into the working class memory – especially in Paris – that they had a right to their voice in government.
• However, the working class still did not yet know it could exert its own power for itself.
• The petty bourgeoisie also felt disgruntled; although less so, this was also true of the peasantry.

iv) Fall of the Bourbon Restoration and the 1830-1848 “July Monarchy”

As Charles X and the Bourbonists pushed harder against the boundaries of the constitution to restore landowning aristocratic and clerical powers, resistance grew. On 10 July 1830, the liberal opposition united under the leadership of Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877; President 3rd Republic 1871-1873), to resist Charles X. On 25 July 1830, the liberals accused Charles X of being a despot, as a prelude to his removal.

Meanwhile, the working class of Paris struggled hard as inflation and taxes rose. They joined in battle against Charles X. The King finally abdicated on 30 July 1830. This is often referred to as the “July Revolution”. It had been the workers of Paris who rose to force this. Nonetheless, it brought to power a class alliance comprised mainly of the financial bourgeoisie with the ‘liberal’ monarchists:

“(The) July Revolution, (1830), insurrection… brought Louis-Philippe to the throne of France. The revolution was precipitated by Charles X’s publication (July 26) of restrictive ordinances contrary to the spirit of the Charter of 1814. Protests and demonstrations were followed by three days of fighting (July 27–29), the abdication of Charles X (August 2), and the proclamation of Louis-Philippe as “king of the French” (August 9). In the July Revolution the upper middle class, or bourgeoisie, secured a political and social ascendancy that was to characterize the period known as the July Monarchy (1830–48).”
Encyclopedia Britannica accessed 23 June, 2026 at Encyclopaedia 

• The Bourbonist land aristocracy pushed hard for anti-democratic counter-revolution.
• The working class overthrew the Bourbonist Charles X in the July Days.
• What class did the Republican bourgeoisie represent in this next period? There was a range of such Republicans from left to right.
• The next period of the class struggle in France saw power pass from an older, more entrenched reactionary land-based aristocracy – to a financial-based aristocracy allied to the right of the Republicans.

v) The Louis Philippe Constitutional Monarchy July 1830- February 1848

Under  Louis Philippe, a further impoverishment of the working class and peasants began. In this period, the financial aristocracy undertook an orgy of financial speculation. It was only finally in February 1848 that the resulting contradictions would burst asunder in the 1848 February Days.

After the overthrow of Charles X, the ‘Doctrinaire’ liberals-republicans held the Chamber of Deputies. They shortly declared a new King “of the French” (i.e. no longer “of France” – but of  “the people”) on 9th August. This was the “July Monarchy” of Louis Philippe I  who became known as the so-called “Citizen King”.

Louis Philippe I (1773- 1850) was not a Bourbon, but he was the son of Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. One monarchist faction in the Deputies thereafter became known as the ‘Orleanists’. What was the class composition of the new government of Louise Philippe?

Louis-Philippe was firmly tied to the financial aristocracy.  This itself had arisen from some of the landed aristocrats with their wealth. They were led by Francois Guizot (1787-1874), who instituted policies to industrialise France:

“Guizot, devoted to the king and the preservation of the status quo, became the key figure in the ministry. He imposed high protective tariffs that resulted in an economic boom, beginning France’s transformation to an industrial society.”
July monarchy”; Encyclopedia Britannica accessed 23 June, 2026; 

Guizot was not an industrialist, but he represented the financiers and speculators who played on industry, including the rail boom. More precisely, Louis Phillipe’s reign was characterised by Marx as a “joint stock company for the exploitation of France’s national wealth… for one faction“ – as follows:

“It was not the French bourgeoisie that ruled under Louis Philippe, but one faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with them – the so-called financial aristocracy. It sat on the throne, it dictated laws in the Chambers, it distributed public offices, from cabinet portfolios to tobacco bureau posts…
The July Monarchy was nothing other than a joint stock company for the exploitation of France’s national wealth, whose dividends were divided among ministers, Chambers, 240,000 voters, and their adherents. Louis Philippe was the director of this company.”
Karl Marx; “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 – Part I -The Defeat of June, 1848”: at MIA

What linked the Monarch and the financial aristocracy to each other? In that age of speculation, both partners were willing to embark on reckless state debt financing. They did not allow any state development, as that would have meant a balanced budget with “taxation on the shoulders of the big bourgeoisie” says Marx.

Instead, this “faction of bourgeoisie had a direct interest in the indebtedness of the state” because “the state deficit was the main object of its speculation”. Marx is withering about that faction’s “bribery, defalcations (i.e. embezzlements.”):

“Owing to its financial straits, the July Monarchy was dependent from the beginning on the big bourgeoisie, and its dependence on the big bourgeoisie was the inexhaustible source of increasing financial straits. It was impossible to subordinate the administration of the state to the interests of national production without balancing the budget, without establishing a balance between state expenditures and revenues. And how was this balance to be established without limiting state expenditures – that is, without encroaching on interests which were so many props of the ruling system – and without redistributing taxes – that is, without shifting a considerable share of the burden of taxation onto the shoulders of the big bourgeoisie itself?…
the faction of the bourgeoisie that ruled and legislated through the Chambers had a direct interest in the indebtedness of the state. The state deficit was really the main object of its speculation and the chief source of its enrichment. At the end of each year a new deficit. After the lapse of four or five years a new loan. And every new loan offered new opportunities to the finance aristocracy for defrauding the state, which was kept artificially on the verge of bankruptcy… In general, the instability of state credit and the possession of state secrets gave the bankers and their associates in the Chambers and on the throne the possibility of evoking sudden, extraordinary fluctuations in the quotations of government securities,… As the state deficit was in the direct interest of the ruling faction of the bourgeoisie, it is clear why the extraordinary state expenditure in the last years of Louis Philippe’s reign was far more than double the extraordinary state expenditure under Napoleon, indeed reached a yearly sum of nearly 400,000,000 francs, whereas the whole average annual export of France seldom attained a volume amounting to 750,000,000 francs. The enormous sums which in this way flowed through the hands of the state facilitated, moreover, swindling contracts for deliveries, bribery, defalcations (Ed-embezzlements) and all kinds of roguery.”
Karl Marx; “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 – Part I -The Defeat of June, 1848”: at MIA

It was in this period, that France started an industrialisation with a rail boom, and a huge growth in the financial bourgeoisie.  Of course, while industrialists were obviously still required to actually build industry, they themselves were somewhat sidelined:

“Trade, industry, agriculture, shipping, the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, were bound to be continually endangered and prejudiced under this system. Cheap government, governement à bon marché, was what it had inscribed on its banner in the July days.”
Karl Marx; “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 – Part I -The Defeat of June, 1848”: at MIA Ibid.

Thus the bourgeoisie was divided – the financial aristocracy had gained the privilege of government allied to the Orleanist monarchists. The industrialists were only in government as “a minority… part of the official opposition” according to Marx. Hence their struggle against the financial aristocracy was a minority within government Chambers:

“(After 1830 – Ed) The industrial bourgeoisie proper formed part of the official opposition, that is, it was represented only as a minority in the Chambers. Its opposition was expressed all the more resolutely the more unalloyed the autocracy of the finance aristocracy became, and the more it imagined that its domination over the working class was insured after the revolts of 1832, 1834, and 1839, which had been drowned in blood…”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

As noted above, over the period of Louis-Philippe’s government, the working class had become more and more impoverished. The class had risen in rebellions previously, but had been put down brutally. Hence, the republicans of a pro-industrial stripe saw no reason not to use them as a potential weapon. It “imagined their domination over the working class”:

“The industrial bourgeoisie proper … imagined that its domination over the working class was insured after the revolts of 1832, 1834, and 1839, which had been drowned in blood.”
“The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; MIA Class Struggles France 

As impoverished were the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry who had also been “excluded” from the gains of the 1830 June Monarchy:

“The petty bourgeoisie of all gradations, and the peasantry also, were completely excluded from political power.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

Apart from the rising costs of living, two other harsh factors hit the working class, the small petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. These were crop failures with a potato blight and an international trade crisis. Together, it was a potent mix:

“…The eruption of the general discontent was finally accelerated and the mood for revolt ripened by two economic world events. …
As against the shameless orgies of the finance aristocracy, the struggle of the people for the prime necessities of life! …
The potato blight and the crop failures of 1845 and 1846 increased the general ferment among the people. The famine of 1847 called forth bloody conflicts in France as well as on the rest of the Continent. As against the shameless orgies of the finance aristocracy, the struggle of the people for the prime necessities of life! At Buzançais, hunger rioters executed; in Paris, oversatiated escrocs [swindlers] snatched from the courts by the royal family!

The second great economic event that hastened the outbreak of the revolution was a general commercial and industrial crisis in England. Already heralded in the autumn of 1845 by the wholesale reverses of the speculators in railway shares, staved off during 1846 by a number of incidents such as the impending abolition of the Corn Laws, the crisis finally burst in the autumn of 1847 with the bankruptcy of the London wholesale grocers, on the heels of which followed the insolvencies of the land banks and the closing of the factories in the English industrial districts. The after-effect of this crisis on the Continent had not yet spent itself when the February Revolution broke out.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’.

To emphasise, the bourgeoisie were divided into two main factions. This division between the industrialists and the financiers was important:

“The industrial bourgeoisie can rule only where modern industry shapes all property relations to suit itself, and industry can win this power only where it has conquered the world market, for national bounds are inadequate for its development. But French industry, to a great extent, maintains its command even of the national market only through a more or less modified system of prohibitive duties. “
Marx, “Class Struggles in France” Ibid; at MIA Class Struggles France 

Moreover, the “republican bourgeoisie” represented several tendencies from left to right. Marx distinguishes between the “democratic republicans; that is, of the republicans in the sense of the petty bourgeoisie” and the “bourgeois republicans”. When the ‘democratic republicans’ conspired against the proletariat they became dependent upon the ‘bourgeois republicans’ . The ‘democratic republicans’ therefore became ultimately threatened by the “anti-republican bourgeois factions (of the) the Orléanists and the Legitimists”.

Marx believed that these sub-divisions only became clear, in the aftermath of the defeat of the workers in the “June Days” of 1848 (See below). The so-called “bourgeois republicans” were in reality “tricolor men.. anti-republican bourgeois factions of the Orléanist or Legitimist brands:

“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 “Réforme.” 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 which the bourgeois republicans, reluctantly and with reservations, concluded with them 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 (i.e. bourgeois republicans), 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 anti-republican bourgeois factions. Lastly, these factions, the Orléanists and the Legitimists, were from the very beginning in a minority in the Constituent National Assembly.”
Karl Marx; “Class Wars France“; (our emphasis) at MIA Chapter 2 “Class Wars France”

The left ‘democratic republicans’ had illusions about its own role as we shall see. They ultimately, after the June Defeat would form themselves into the ‘Montagne‘ – taking the name of Robespierre’s faction of the Jacobins (We discuss this below).

• The division between two large sections of the bourgeoisie – one the financial aristocracy and the industrial sector – meant that the weaker industrialists searched for a way to push back against the financiers.
• Government was dominated by the landed and financial aristocracy with the Orleanist Monarchy.
• The Republicans, the petty bourgeoisie and their industrialist allies – were all unable by their own means to unseat the landed and financial aristocracy with the Orleanist Monarchy.
• While the working class remained armed and were a force to be reckoned with – the industrialists under-estimated the workers dependency on them – and the industrialists decided to entice the workers into battle against the financiers.
• Still unclear of its own abilities, the working class was able to be led and manipulated to a certain degree.
• Although the republicans and industrialists decided to incite the workers to rise, they counted on being able to control the workers and to with hold from them any reins of power.

How could the republican bourgeoisie use the workers to displace the financial aristocracy, without letting the workers become dominant? This problem is one central theme of Marx’s two books on France. It is here that Marx starts with the period that he calls  “the prologue“:

“The first period – from February 24, the overthrow of Louis Philippe, to May 4, 1848, the meeting of the Constituent Assembly – the February period proper, may be designated as the prologue of the revolution.”
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852 – I; at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 1

It is the period 1948- 1951 that is treated by Marx in a riveting manner to unravel the machination of the bourgeoisie for us. As noted earlier, we break it up into smaller digestible portions.

 3. The period 1848-1851 covered in Marx’s two books

3. (i) February 1848-May 1848 – the “prologue of the revolution”; Fall of the July Monarchy – 1848 Revolution led by the working class – but usurped by the Republican bourgeoisie

As conditions under Louis-Philippe had deteriorated, life conditions of the working class became even more intolerable. How big was the working class now?

“At the eve of the revolution there were 342,530 workers in Paris, including
112,891 women and 24,714 children, which amounted to a third of the total population of
Paris. “
Cited from Statistique de l’industrie à Paris résultant de l’enquête faite par la chambre de
commerce pour les années 1847-1848 (Paris, 1851), pp. 36-55; in Samuel Hayat; “The Revolution of 1848 in the History of French Republicanism”; History of Political Thought, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 331-353 ”.

But the petty bourgeoisie was also hit hard, which affected and frustrated the republican bourgeoisie and the industrialists. Some of the latter even faced bankruptcies themselves:

“In Paris the industrial crisis had, moreover, the particular result of throwing a multitude of manufacturers and big traders, who under the existing circumstances could no longer do any business in the foreign market, onto the home market. They set up large establishments, the competition of which ruined the small épiciers [grocers] and boutiquiers [shopkeepers] en masse. Hence the innumerable bankruptcies among this section of the Paris bourgeoisie, and hence their revolutionary action in February. It is well known how Guizot and the Chambers answered the reform proposals with an unambiguous challenge, how Louis Philippe too late resolved on a ministry led by Barrot, how things went as far as hand-to-hand fighting between the people and the army, how the army was disarmed by the passive conduct of the National Guard, how the July Monarchy had to give way to a provisional government.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

To incite the working class into mass actions, the left Republican bourgeoisie held large banquets to persuade the people of Paris to rise. Indeed a large mass did arise which forced the end of the July Monarchy:

“The devastation of trade and industry caused by the economic epidemic made the autocracy of the finance aristocracy still more unbearable. Throughout the whole of France the bourgeois opposition agitated at banquets for an electoral reform which should win for it the majority in the Chambers and overthrow the Ministry of the Bourse.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

On the 24th February 1948, in Paris over 1500 barricades were raised, and the people resisted the army – which however killed many. But this rising brought into being the February Republic. At this time the army was thwarted by the National Guard who remained “passive“:

“… things went as far as hand-to-hand fighting between the people and the army, how the army was disarmed by the passive conduct of the National Guard… the July Monarchy had to give way to a provisional government.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

Recall that at this time the working class was not independent.

They were largely led by the rather diverse large grouping termed ‘republicans’. All the groups – or class representatives – within this broader category-  had been to differing extents the movers of the 1789-1793 French revolution. Hence to exert any influence on politics at this time – all factions including the bourgeoisie, had to maintain a “republican’ mask. The sub-groups (really class factions) within the term ‘republicans’  ranged far. On the left from the “democratic republican’ stratum – extending to a ‘bourgeois republican’ grouping of capitalists, who even expressed at times Monarchist convictions. The ‘left’ democratic grouping had sway over the sans-culottes-workers.

The poet and Liberal monarchist Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) and the left republican deputy Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (1807-1874), led marches to the Hôtel de Ville (city hall). The government and King – Guizot and Louis-Phillippe – were deposed after pitched battles. The National army under the Orleanists conducted a massacre – but the National Guard of Paris remained neutral or “passive”.

Presaging the battles yet to come, Lamartine now appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs – declared from a chair to the workers – recall the Champ de Mars of 1791 when the National guard under General Marquis de La Fayette (1757-1834) had fired on the workers :

“the red flag which you offer us was only paraded around the Champ de Mars, dragged through the blood of the people… whereas the tricolour flag has been paraded right round the world, with the name, the glory and liberty of the country!”
Alphonse de Lamartine, “Histoire de la Révolution de 1848”; Paris 1849; cited by Bruno Leipold, “Citizen Marx“; Princeton, 2024; p. 187.

Thus the constitutional monarchy duly fell in the February days of 1848. It was the armed workers of Paris who unseated the Louis-Philippe 1830 government; they were the motor of the February Revolution. Armed since the days of the fall of the Bastille they were a feared force when united.

The first act of the new Provisional Government was undoubtedly interpreted as going to help the workers:

“the first act of the self-appointed Provisional Government of 1848 — whose members were
mostly former parliamentarians, but also two radical press leaders, Armand Marrast and Ferdinand Flocon, and two socialists, Louis Blanc and the worker Albert – was to announce that the Republic would be proclaimed after its ratification by the people ‘who were to be consulted immediately’.”
Samuel Hayat; “The Revolution of 1848 in the History of French Republicanism”;
History of Political Thought, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 331-353

The working class thought they had ensured the survival of the republic in their image.

But they soon realised the bourgeoisie was not granting the working class full rights including of suffrage. After the fall of the 1830 Monarchy, the republican bourgeoise had quickly apportioned seats for themselves only.

Therefore, the working class had to force ‘socialist concessions’ including a formal declaration of the right to vote. But these required new battles. How did these battles play out? The democratic and republican bourgeoise had given the pretext that the whole of France needed to vote for seats, and that it was not for the proletariat of Paris alone to decide to vote:

“If Paris, as a result of political centralization, rules France, the workers, in moments of revolutionary earthquakes, rule Paris. The first act in the life of the Provisional Government was an attempt to escape from this overpowering influence by an appeal from intoxicated Paris to sober France. Lamartine (1790-1869) disputed the right of the barricade fighters to proclaim a republic on the ground that only the majority of Frenchmen had that right; they must await their votes, the Paris proletariat must not besmirch its victory by a usurpation… The bourgeoisie allows the proletariat only one usurpation – that of fighting.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

Given this, the workers rose to challenge this transparent pretext, and revolted again.  At a mass siege of the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) on the February 25th 1848, one of their leaders – the Carbonarist François-Vincent Raspail (1794-1878) – Marx uses the word “commanded” – the full declaration of the Republic. He also demanded promises of a general suffrage within 2 hours.

The Republicans defused the challenge by quickly agreeing to these:

“Up to noon of February 25 the republic had not yet been proclaimed; on the other hand, all the ministries had already been divided among the bourgeois elements of the Provisional Government and among the generals, bankers, and lawyers of the National. But the workers were determined this time not to put up with any bamboozlement like that of July, 1830. They were ready to take up the fight anew and to get a republic by force of arms. With this message, Raspail betook himself to the Hôtel de Ville. In the name of the Paris proletariat, he commanded the Provisional Government to proclaim a republic; if this order of the people were not fulfilled within two hours, he would return at the head of 200,000 men. The bodies of the fallen were scarcely cold, the barricades were not yet disarmed, and the only force that could be opposed to them was the National Guard. Under these circumstances, the doubts born of considerations of state policy and the juristic scruples of conscience entertained by the Provisional Government suddenly vanished. The time limit of two hours had not yet expired when all the walls of Paris were resplendent with the gigantic historical words:
République français! Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!
Even the memory of the limited alms and motives which drove the bourgeoisie into the February Revolution was extinguished by the proclamation of the republic on the basis of universal suffrage. ..”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

But the workers continued to raise increasingly left or ‘socialist’ demands. These included demands for what Marx called ‘social institutions’ enabling some security of work. Marx thought this was ultimately a useless demand – at least “without a European revolutionary war”.  It would leave the workers firmly in the realm of “wage labour… existing bourgeois organization of labour”.

Nevertheless, the workers fought to obtain such security in the constitution. Therefore, when they again rose and yet again descended on the Hôtel de Ville, they raised this as a central demand:

“the February Republic was forced to proclaim itself a republic surrounded by social institutions. The Paris proletariat compelled this concession, too…
Organize labor! But wage labor, that is the existing, the bourgeois organization of labor. Without it there is no capital, no bourgeoisie, no bourgeois society.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

Workers and their representatives including the left democratic republican and cooperativist Louis Blanc (1811-1882) were however tricked. They were in effect isolated by promises from the more centrist and right wing Republicans for a sort of a ’think tank’. Or as Marx put it a “permanent special commission” – but away from “the seat of Provisional Government“:

“When a few days later it forgot its promises and seemed to have lost sight of the proletariat, a mass of 20,000 workers marched on the Hôtel de Ville with the cry: Organize labor! Form a special Ministry of labor! Reluctantly and after long debate, the Provisional Government nominated a permanent special commission charged with lending means of improving the lot of the working classes! This commission consisted of delegates from the corporations [guilds] of Paris artisans and was presided over by Louis Blanc and Albert. The Luxembourg Palace was assigned to it as its meeting place. In this way, the representatives of the working class were banished from the seat of the Provisional Government, the bourgeois part of which retained the real state power and the reins of administration exclusively in its hands.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

“the Commission de gouvernement pour les travailleurs, or ‘Commission du Luxembourg’, an assembly of workers, was created by the Provisional Government on 28 February under pressure from Parisian workers who had already obtained the recognition of the right to work on 25 February, leading to the creation of National Workshops.”
Hayat; “The Revolution of 1848”; Ibid; 2015.

By 5 March a decree was promulgated that by universal suffrage an election of a ‘National Constituent Assembly” was to be held. In the short term the working class had dominated the republican bourgeoisie. Previously denied rights of association and publication were not so much legally replaced, as simply fell by the wayside:

“First, there was a massive enrolment in the democratized National Guard, now open to all male citizens, moving from 60,000 to 190,000 members in Paris in a few weeks. Second, with the adjournment of the timbre (i.e. stamp taxes – ed) and the cautionnement that strictly limited the freedom of the press, hundreds of newspapers were launched, especially in Paris. Third, hundreds of clubs were created and tens of thousands of citizens (in Paris alone) gathered there every night to discuss the principles of the new Republic, the measures taken by the Provisional Government or the candidates to the National Assembly….”
Hayat; “The Revolution of 1848”; Ibid; 2015.

Ultimately however the republican bourgeoisie would “refute arms in hand the demands of the proletariat.” That would come in “the June defeat”:

“The February Republic was won by the workers with the passive support of the bourgeoisie. The proletarians rightly regarded themselves as the victors of February, and they made the arrogant claims of victors. They had to be vanquished in the streets, they had to be shown that they were worsted as soon as they did not fight with the bourgeoisie, but against the bourgeoisie. Just as the February Republic, with its socialist concessions, required a battle of the proletariat, united with the bourgeoisie, against the monarchy, so a second battle was necessary to sever the republic from socialist concessions, to officially work out the bourgeois republic as dominant. The bourgeoisie had to refute, arms in hand, the demands of the proletariat. And the real birthplace of the bourgeois republic is not the February victory; it is the June defeat.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

It is true that the general suffrage that had been won was for men only. But this also extended to the peasants – who formed the majority of the people of France. This was consistent with the open rule of the bourgeoisie:

“The nominal proprietors, the peasants, who form the great majority of the French people, were put by universal suffrage in the position of arbiters of the fate of France. The February Republic finally brought the rule of the bourgeoisie clearly into view, since it struck off the crown behind which capital had kept itself concealed.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

The timing of the election was disputed. The socialists led by August Blanqui had argued for a delay – so that the proletarians could disseminate their viewpoint in a conservative countryside. But Lamarintine and the liberals of ‘the party of the National’ disagreed. They numerically dominated the Provisional Government.

An election was held on 23 April 1848, for the national Constituent Assembly. In fact the results did not show strong support for left ’socialist’ republicans such as Louis Blanc:

“The Assembly’s centre of gravity was composed of moderate Republicans close to the National party, and the new body proclaimed the Republic on its first day in session. From 4 May to 12 May, the Assembly … verified the legality of the elections…
a first draft of the Constitution should be written by a commission of eighteen Assembly members, to be elected a few days later. At this point, the definition of the citizens’ role in the future Constitution still remained unclear. Since April, the sprit of fraternity had clearly been declining, and many clubs and newspapers had closed down after the failure of a
workers’ demonstration on 16 April, but the direct participation of citizens had not yet been explicitly invalidated.”

Obviously even now, the workers faced a continued struggle. They not “won their emancipation” yet – but they had laid the “terrain for its emancipation”, as Marx says:

“By dictating the republic to the Provisional Government, and through the Provisional Government to the whole of France, the proletariat immediately stepped into the foreground as an independent party, but at the same time challenged the whole of bourgeois France to enter the lists against it. What it won was the terrain for the fight for its revolutionary emancipation, but by no means this emancipation itself.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’

Thus the Provisional Government reflected the dominance of the bourgeoisie, although it had been brought into being by a class coalition. The interests within the coalition “were mutually antagonistic”.  The working class had few representatives in the Provisional Government:

“The Provisional Government which emerged from the February barricades, necessarily mirrored in its composition the different parties which shared in the victory. It could not be anything but a compromise between the different classes which together had overturned the July throne, but whose interests were mutually antagonistic. The great majority of its members consisted of representatives of the bourgeoisie. The republican petty bourgeoisie was represented by Ledru-Rollin and Flocon, the republican bourgeoisie by the people from the ‘National’ (A bourgeois Republican paper), the dynastic opposition by Crémieux, Dupont de l’Eure, etc. (i.e. The Bourbonists – Ed) The working class had only two representatives, Louis Blanc and Albert. Finally, Lamartine in the Provisional Government; this was at first no real interest, no definite class; this was the February Revolution itself, the common uprising with its illusions, its poetry, its visionary content, and its phrases. For the rest, the spokesman of the February Revolution, by his position and his views, belonged to the bourgeoisie.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’.

The reference to Lamartine’s phrase by Marx in the above quote, refers to these following words of Lamartine – who referred to “le printemps de la Fraternité’ or ‘springtime of fraternity”, as follows:

“Lamartine assert(ed) on 19 March that thanks to the new electoral law, ‘there are no longer proletarians in France’.”
Cited by Samuel Hayat 2015 Ibid.

Of course that was a fiction.

• The workers were courted at banquets by the Republicans and industrialists to rise. They did rise.
• Having done so they were even being denied of the rights of suffrage.
• The working class rose again and the bourgeoisie had to pacify them.
• But the Provisional Government was dominated by the bourgeoise.

How would the bourgeois republicans prevent the working class from moving to socialism? The strategy was to isolate them, to build up a counter armed force – and continue to deceive them.

3. (ii) Did the workers make a mistake by lending its strength to the republican bourgeoisie?

It is quite obvious now what happened – but what is remarkable is that Marx was able to see this unfolding and make an accurate analysis on the fly:

“Nothing is more understandable, then, than that the Paris proletariat sought to secure the advancement of its own interests side by side with those of the bourgeoisie, instead of enforcing them as the revolutionary interests of society itself, that it let the red flag be lowered to the tricolor…”
“Class Struggles” Ibid Chapter 1 at MIA Chapter 1

Marx makes the important point that an objective reality for the workers had left them little choice but to unite with the republican bourgeoisie.

The working class needed to make alliances, and ultimately, their alliance should be with the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie. But this was not possible at this juncture as the various classes were still jostling. Moreover, the “struggle against capital’s secondary modes of exploitation, that of the peasant against usury and mortgages or of the petty bourgeois against the wholesale dealer, banker, and manufacturer… was still hidden”.

In Marx’s words the workers “could not touch a hair of the bourgeois order, until the course of the revolution had aroused the mass of the nation, peasants and petite bourgeois, standing between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie… against the rule of capital” . This would only happen says Marx, after “the workers could buy this victory only through the tremendous defeat in June”:

“the French proletariat, at the moment of a revolution, possesses in Paris actual power and influence which spur it on to a drive beyond its means, in the rest of France it is crowded into separate, scattered industrial centers, almost lost in the superior number of peasants and petty bourgeois. The struggle against capital in its developed, modern form – in its decisive aspect, the struggle of the industrial wage worker against the industrial bourgeois – is in France a partial phenomenon, which after the February days could so much the less supply the national content of the revolution, since the struggle against capital’s secondary modes of exploitation, that of the peasant against usury and mortgages or of the petty bourgeois against the wholesale dealer, banker, and manufacturer – in a word, against bankruptcy – was still hidden in the general uprising against the finance aristocracy. Nothing is more understandable, then, than that the Paris proletariat sought to secure the advancement of its own interests side by side with those of the bourgeoisie, instead of enforcing them as the revolutionary interests of society itself, that it let the red flag be lowered to the tricolor. The French workers could not take a step forward, could not touch a hair of the bourgeois order, until the course of the revolution had aroused the mass of the nation, peasants and petite bourgeois, standing between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, against this order, against the rule of capital, and had forced it to attach itself to the proletarians as its protagonists. The workers could buy this victory only through the tremendous defeat in June.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’

• It was premature for the workers to move against the bourgeoisie.
• In fact the workers needed the “mass of the nation” the “peasants and petit bourgeoisie” to “attach itself” to the proletariat first.

3. (iii) Building a force of lumpen elements to attack the working class 

The working class in February 1848 had already demonstrated its powers after the major February insurrection – and twice directed against the republicans themselves. Now the republican bourgeoisie were at pains to be able to counter the workers.

The bourgeoisie dominated Provisional Government knew that workers were armed. The workers had cowed the National Guard, which in any case was in part, sympathetic to the workers. Therefore they created a new armed force composed mainly of lumpen elements who were bribed into being an armed bulwark. It was called the Mobile Guards:

“The February Revolution had cast the army out of Paris. The National Guard, that is, the bourgeoisie in its different gradations, constituted the sole power. Alone, however, it did not feel itself a match for the proletariat. Moreover, it was forced gradually and piecemeal to open its ranks and admit armed proletarians, albeit after the most tenacious resistance and after setting up a hundred different obstacles. There consequently remained but one way out: to play off part of the proletariat against the other.

For this purpose the Provisional Government formed twenty-four battalions of Mobile Guards, each a thousand strong, composed of young men from fifteen to twenty years old. They belonged for the most part to the lumpen proletariat, which in all big towns forms a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu [men without hearth or home]….  at the youthful age at which the Provisional Government recruited them, thoroughly malleable, as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption. The Provisional Government paid them 1 franc 50 centimes a day; that is, it bought them. It gave them their own uniform; that is, it made them outwardly distinct from the blouse-wearing workers. In part it assigned officers from the standing army as their leaders; in part they themselves elected young sons of the bourgeoisie whose rodomontades about death for the fatherland and devotion to the republic captivated them.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’

In the meantime, a united front against the workers was being constructed. The republican bourgeoisie saw a problem. Namely elements of the petty bourgeoisie and the rural peasants had also seen some potential promise in the working class demands of socialism. They had to be disillusioned. The bourgeoisie therefore designed new tricks or strategems designed to deceive both the workers and alienate its potential allies.

• How would the bourgeoisie divide the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie from the working class?

3. iv) The bourgeoisie strategy of deception to isolate the workers from the petty bourgeoisie and peasants.

To effect the division, the bourgeoisie used various cunning tricks.

It created “English work-houses in the open air” or “National Ateliers” to supposedly give a secure work to the unemployed workers. Cleverly they made this appear to masquerade as the invention of Louis Blanc; and as a first step of “socialism” – with a state payment:

“the government decided to rally around itself an army of industrial workers. A hundred thousand workers, thrown on the streets by the crisis and the revolution, were enrolled by the Minister Marie in so-called national ateliers [workshops]. Under this grandiose name was hidden nothing else than the employment of the workers on tedious, monotonous, unproductive earthworks at a wage of 23 sous. English workhouses in the open – that is what these national ateliers were.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’

Effectively, the bourgeoisie took the workers’ and Louis Blanc’s idea of work-labour security, to make it into a labour source. But at the same time they cleverly made this into a means to discredit ‘socialism’, and to divide the workers from the petty bourgeoisie. How this policy developed into a policy to “artificially mold (the) opinion of France, of Europe“ is interesting, it was a policy that evolved. At first says Marx, it was by a “half-naive, half-intentional confusion of the Paris bourgeoisie, in the artificially molded opinion of France, of Europe“.

Nonetheless, it was succeeding. “Why” asked the petty bourgeois and the peasants “should the workers be paid from state finances?” The latter saw such moves as being  “… a state pension for sham labor, so that’s socialism! they grumbled to themselves. They sought the reason for their misery in the national ateliers, the declamations of the Luxembourg, the processions of the workers through Paris..”

This fueled anti-worker and anti-socialist feelings on the part of the petty-bourgeoisie:

“National ateliers was the name of the people’s workshops which Louis Blanc preached in the Luxembourg Palace… The Provisional Government itself surreptitiously spread the report that these national ateliers were the discovery of Louis Blanc, and this seemed the more plausible because Louis Blanc, the prophet of the national ateliers, was a member of the Provisional Government. And in the half-naive, half-intentional confusion of the Paris bourgeoisie, in the artificially molded opinion of France, of Europe, these workhouses were the first realization of socialism, which was put in the pillory, with them…
In their appellation, though not in their content, the national ateliers were the embodied protest of the proletariat against bourgeois industry, bourgeois credit, and the bourgeois republic. The whole hate of the bourgeoisie was therefore turned upon them. It had found in them, simultaneously, the point against which it could direct the attack, as soon as it was strong enough to break openly with the February illusions. All the discontent, all the ill humor of the petty bourgeois too was directed against these national ateliers, the common target. With real fury they totted up the money the proletarian loafers swallowed up while their own situation was becoming daily more unbearable. A state pension for sham labor, so that’s socialism! they grumbled to themselves. They sought the reason for their misery in the national ateliers, the declamations of the Luxembourg, the processions of the workers through Paris. And no one was more fanatic about the alleged machinations of the communists than the petty bourgeoisie, who hovered hopelessly on the brink of bankruptcy.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’

• Part of the alienation of peasants and petty bourgeoisie from the workers was achieved by painting the National Ateliers as giving ’state pensions’ to the workers for meaningless work.
• “Socialism” was being given a bad name

3. (iv) Further division of the peasants off from the workers – the 45 centime tax 

The basis of the July Monarchy, as we saw, was the financial aristocracy. They owned the banks, including the Banque de France. After being dispossessed of government by the February 1848 revolution, the financial aristocrats reverted to sabotage. They withheld credit, to as Marx said “discredit the republic by making the lack of credit general.“

But this led to a run on all the commercial banks and businesses. The Provisional government did not allow the banks to simply become bankrupt, while creating a really effective and truly nationalised state National Bank. Thus, the National Deficit grew:

“The finance aristocracy, which ruled under the July Monarchy, had its high church in the Bank. Just as the Bourse governs state credit, the Bank governs commercial credit.

Directly threatened not only in its rule but in its very existence by the February Revolution, the Bank tried from the outset to discredit the republic by making the lack of credit general. It suddenly stopped the credits of the bankers, the manufacturers, and the merchants. As it did not immediately call forth a counterrevolution, this maneuver necessarily reacted on the Bank itself. The capitalists drew out the money they had deposited in the vaults of the Bank. The possessors of bank notes rushed to the pay office in order to exchange them for gold and silver.

The Provisional Government could have forced the Bank into bankruptcy without forcible interference, in a legal manner; it would have had only to remain passive and leave the Bank to its fate. The bankruptcy of the Bank would have been the deluge which, in an instant, would have swept from French soil the finance aristocracy, the most powerful and dangerous enemy of the republic, the golden pedestal of the July Monarchy. And once the Bank was bankrupt, the bourgeoisie itself would have had to regard it as a last desperate attempt at rescue, if the government had formed a national bank and subjected national credit to the control of the nation.

The Provisional Government, on the contrary, fixed a compulsory quotation for the notes of the Bank. It did more. It transformed all provincial banks into branches of the Banque de France and allowed it to cast its net over the whole of France. Later it pledged the state forests to the Bank as a guarantee for a loan contracted from it. In this way the February Revolution directly strengthened and enlarged the bankocracy which it should have overthrown.”
Karl Marx, “Class Struggles in France”: Ibid; at MIA Class Struggles France Part 1 

The Provisional Government could have confronted the financial bankocrats-aristocracy. But it chose not to. Instead… it taxed the peasant – or as Marx called them “Jacques le bonhomme“. But it was again presented in such a way that it was believed to be the fault of the working class of Paris:

“Meanwhile the Provisional Government was writhing under the incubus of a growing deficit. In vain it begged for patriotic sacrifices. Only the workers threw it their alms. Recourse had to be had to a heroic measure, to the imposition of a new tax. But who was to be taxed? The Bourse wolves, the bank kings, the state creditors, the rentiers, the industrialists? That was not the way to ingratiate the republic with the bourgeoisie. That would have meant, on the one hand, to endanger state credit and commercial credit, while on the other, attempts were made to purchase them with such great sacrifices and humiliations. But someone had to fork over the cash. Who was sacrificed to bourgeois credit? Jacques le bonhomme, the peasant.

“The Provisional Government imposed an additional tax of 45 centimes to the franc on the four direct taxes. The government press cajoled the Paris proletariat into believing that this tax would fall chiefly on the big landed proprietors, on the possessors of the milliard granted by the Restoration. But in truth it hit the peasant class above all, that is, the large majority of the French people. They had to pay the costs of the February Revolution; in them the counterrevolution gained its main material. The 45-centime tax was a question of life and death for the French peasant. He made it a life and death question for the republic. From that moment the republic meant to the French peasant the 45 centime tax, and he saw in the Paris proletariat the spendthrift who did himself well at his expense.”
Karl Marx, “Class Struggles in France”: Ibid; at MIA Class Struggles France Part 1 

The bourgeoisie in their divided state had warred on each other by the issue of debt financing.
To resolve the mounting State debt the Republicans with their allied industrial bourgeoisie laid a huge tax on the peasantry.

• The financial aristocracy that had benefited especially under the 1830 Constitutional Monarchy, tried to sabotage the post 1848 Government by refusing credit.
• State debt rose hugely with major consequences for the people.
• The Government did not confront the financiers. instead it chose to attack the peasantry.
• To further alienate the peasantry away from the workers a 45 centime tac was imposed on peasants.

3. (v) Further deception by false accusations against the workers

Clashes between workers and the republican bourgeoisie of the Constituent Assembly escalated fast. The right Republican bourgeoisie continued to present the sans-culottes and workers as attacking the Republic. Such deceptions also persuaded the petty-bourgeois middle strata against the working class.

For example, the events of April 16, 1848, where the working class leaders held a rally to decide their candidates for the leadership of the National Guard:

“April 16 was a misunderstanding engineered by the Provisional Government in alliance with the bourgeoisie. The workers had gathered in great numbers in the Champ de Mars and in the Hippodrome to choose their nominees to the general staff of the National Guard. Suddenly throughout Paris, from one end to the other, a rumor spread as quick as lightning, to the effect that the workers had met armed in the Champ de Mars, under the leadership of Louis Blanc, Blanqui, Cabet, and Raspail, in order to march thence on the Hôtel de Ville, overthrow the Provisional Government, and proclaim a communist government. The general alarm is sounded – Ledru-Rollin, Marrast, and Lamartine later contended for the honor of having initiated this – and in an hour 100,000 men are under arms; the Hôtel de Ville is occupied at all points by the National Guard; the cry Down with the Communists! Down with Louis Blanc, with Blanqui, with Raspail, with Cabet! thunders throughout Paris. Innumerable deputations pay homage to the Provisional Government, all ready to save the fatherland and society. When the workers finally appear before the Hôtel de Ville, in order to hand over to the Provisional Government a patriotic collection they had made in the Champ de Mars, they learn to their amazement that bourgeois Paris has defeated their shadow in a very carefully calculated sham battle. The terrible attempt of April 16 furnished the excuse for recalling the army to Paris – the real purpose of the clumsily staged comedy and for the reactionary federalist demonstrations in the provinces.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

This provocation was soon followed by others including revoking the direct access of workers to the Assembly. During the First French Revolution, it had been a standard right of workers to directly address their grievances to the Assembly. Since February 1848 this was again a norm. Now the Constituent Assembly ruled this as being outlawed.

vi) The Party of Order

As class tensions rose in this fervid time, the “Party of Order” was formed led by Adolphe Thiers, Odillon Barrot, François Guizot  Alexis de Tocqueville.

It was a merger of several Legitimist and Ultra-Royalist smaller parties. It was organised under the slogan of  “Order, Property, Religion”.

From the June 25 Days 1848, to December 10 1848, they went on to be the emerging force in the “dictatorship of the “pure bourgeois republicans” (See 3.x below).  Later still it would fracture. However it was a crucial part of preparing the “June 1848 Defeat” of the workers.

• The republican bourgeois and the industrialists had sidelined the workers; but they were forced by workers’ resistance to grant concessions.
• But the republicans took a preliminary reform (“institutions of socialism”) and warped it into a deception to alienate the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry.
• They had thus prepared for subduing the workers by ensuring a division between the petty bourgeoisie and the working class;
• Meanwhile they had already prepared a new armed force to hit the workers with.

3. vii) the 4th May Constituent Assembly – now a formal ‘bourgeois republic’ – no longer any  semblance of a workers’ republic 

Following direct general elections (of 23-24 April 1848 ), on the 4th May 1848, the Constituent Assembly met. Contrary to the mythology that the “republicans of the old school had ascribed to it” universal suffrage was not a “magic” solution for the people. Because it brought real people to power. The republicans had thought of an ideal homogenous citzenry – but instead real people of different classes had been elected:

“The whole of France, at least in the majority of Frenchmen (as) citoyens [citizens] with the same interests, the same understanding, etc. This was their cult of the people. Instead of their imaginary people, the elections brought the real people to the light of day; that is, representatives of the different classes into which it falls.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’

What had come into being was a bourgeois republic:

“In the Constituent National Assembly, which met on May 4, the bourgeois republicans, the republicans of the National, had the upper hand. Even Legitimists and Orléanists at first dared to show themselves only under the mask of bourgeois republicanism. The fight against the proletariat could be undertaken only in the name of the republic.
The republic dates from May 4, not from February 25 – that is, the republic recognized by the French people; it is not the republic which the Paris proletariat thrust upon the Provisional Government, not the republic with social institutions, not the vision that hovered before the fighters on the barricades. The republic proclaimed by the National Assembly, the sole legitimate republic, is a republic which is no revolutionary weapon against the bourgeois order, but rather its political reconstitution, the political reconsolidation of bourgeois society; in a word, a bourgeois republic.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’

At the same time, the Constituent Assembly hastened to ally itself to reactionary forces across Europe. This included the refusal of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Minister, Jules Bastide of help to insurgent nationalist Poland. The Poles were being suppressed by troops of Prussia and Austria. On 15 May a Polish delegation came to Paris and met with the left Republicans, including with Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881).

While Blanqui and Raspail were reluctant to fully support it, a demonstration was held orgniased by the ‘clubs’, which culminated in forcing an entry into the Palais Bourbon where the Assembly was meeting. A petition  for Poland was read, and Aloysius Huber (1815-1865) exclaimed: “The National Assembly is dissolved! and called for a new Provisional Government. An insurrectionary new government was declared at City Hall, including Blanqui, Louis Blanc, Aloysius Huber, and Raspail as ministers.

But it was put down by the majority of the National Guard, led by Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin, and most of the Executive Committee. (Wikipedia 1848) Accessed July 2026). The extent of participation in political life was at a fevered pitch:

“After the 15 May, most of the clubs and the Luxembourg Commission were closed and many debates were taking place in the streets. A real movement of radicalization of the Parisian workers
took place, embodied in the creation of many journaux rouges, radical news papers advocating the emancipation of workers and the subjection of the Assembly to the sovereign people. They contrasted the moderate Republic advocated by the majority of the National Assembly with what a true Republic should be, a République démocratique et sociale.”
Samuel Hayat 2015 Ibid.

In the 15 May response of the working class, they had tried to physically force the Executive of the Constituent National Assembly onto a socialist path. They “pushed their way into the Assembly”. But as Marx says – this only helped firm up the bourgeoisie’s determination to break the workers’ resistance:

“The proletariat hastened the decision when, on the fifteenth of May, it pushed its way into the National Assembly sought in vain to recapture its revolutionary influence, and only delivered its energetic leaders to the jailers of the bourgeoisie. Il faut en finir! This situation must end! With this cry, the National Assembly gave vent to its determination to force the proletariat into a decisive struggle. The Executive Commission issued a series of provocative decrees, such as that prohibiting congregations of people, etc. The workers were directly provoked, insulted, and derided from the tribune of the Constituent National Assembly. But the real point of the attack was, as we have seen, the national ateliers. The Constituent Assembly imperiously pointed these out to the Executive Commission, which waited only to hear its own plan proclaimed the command of the National Assembly.”
Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850”, Part I The Defeat of June, 1848; at MIA Class Struggles France Chapter 1

It was at this point that Ledru-Rollins led his ‘democratic republican’ faction into conspiracy with the bourgeois republicans. He no longer raised concerns to advocate direct popular representation.

3. (viii) Goading the workers to the leads to the June 1858 Defeat and massacre. 

The stage was set, and the republican bourgeoisie had prepared itself. It now simply goaded the workers into a further rebellion. The bourgeoisie knew they had a more reliable armed forces at their disposal.  They had created the Mobile Guard as we saw. The bourgeoisie had managed to trick the workers into somehow believing this new force would protect the working class:

“And so the Paris proletariat was confronted with an army, drawn from its own midst, of 24,000 young, strong, foolhardy men. it gave cheers for the Mobile Guard on its marches through Paris. It acknowledged it to be its foremost fighters on the barricades. It regarded it as the proletarian guard in contradistinction to the bourgeois National Guard. Its error was pardonable.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’

But in addition, the regular National Guard was fortified with the appointment of General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, (1802-1857). He was originally served the Bourbons – but then was loyal to the July Monarchy. Sent to Algeria in the 1840s, he was appointed as Governor-General. But he was elected to the legislature, and became minister of war to the Second Republic. As Encyclopaedia Britannica states:

“Cavaignac directed the suppression of the revolt, for which he became known as “the butcher of June.” On June 28 the National Assembly named him chief executive of France…”
Louis-Eugène Cavaignac; at Encylopaedia Britannica at EB

The ‘Butcher of June’ was in a short period of time, ready to tackle the “June Days” uprising of workers in Paris (22-26 June 1848).

The bourgeoisie simply repealed the minimal – but still needed – work security that the workers had fought for. As planned, the workers had no choice – but to respond to republican plans to close the National Workshops. Recall that these were supposedly created by the Second Republic in order to provide work and a guaranteed minimal source of income for the unemployed:

“The Executive Commission began by making admission to the national ateliers more difficult, by turning the day wage into a piece wage, by banishing workers not born in Paris to the Sologne, ostensibly for the construction of earthworks. These earthworks were only a rhetorical formula with which to embellish their exile, as the workers, returning disillusioned, announced to their comrades. Finally, on June 21, a decree appeared in the Moniteur which ordered the forcible expulsion of all unmarried workers from the national ateliers or their enrollment in the army.
The workers were left no choice; they had to starve or let fly. They answered on June 22 with the tremendous insurrection in which the first great battle was fought between the two classes that split modern society. It was a fight for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order.”
Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850”, Part I The Defeat of June, 1848; at MIA Class Struggles France Chapter 1

The battle was imminent and members of the National Workshops were called to arms:

“When the National Assembly decided to close the National Workshops and to exclude unemployed workers from Paris, it was interpreted by the most radical republicans not only as an abuse of power and a betrayal of the Provisional Government’s promises, but also as a way to get rid of ‘real’ republicans, to prevent them from exerting a revolutionary influence on political decisions. On 22 June, one day before the barricades were built, Louis Pujol, an elected delegate of the National Workshops, had tried to convince Pierre Marie de Saint-Georges (known as Marie), a member of the Executive Commission, not to close the Workshops. Marie had responded by ordering the arrest of Pujol and fifty other delegates, leading Pujol to call workers to arms the next day on the Bastille square in the name of the Republic.”
Samuel Hayat; “The Revolution of 1848”; Ibid; 2015.

The National Guard was unreliable in the districts from where its recruits came from the working class. But where its’ recruits came from the richer areas of Paris it was ‘reliable’ to the republicans and industrialists. Nonetheless Cavaignac relied heavily on the Mobile Guards to savage effect:

“So divided was the National Guard by the time insurrection broke out in June 1848, that General Cavaignac did not even include it in his plan of repression. And, by this time, the government had found a much more satisfactory force of citizen soldiers to do its bidding: the gardes mobiles, often young unemployed workers, operating under army command. Suspicions about the guard’s reliability proved to be well-founded. When it was called out on June 23, few units responded. In working-class areas, guardsmen either stayed at home or joined the insurrection. Remi Gossez, in his Ouvriers de Paris, claims that the “cadres” of the rebellion were guard units from the poorer districts. In the more affluent central arrondissements, only 4,000 guardsmen responded to the call, while 60,000 remained at home. Even in the solidly bourgeois western districts, the majority of guardsmen never left their quarters. But an estimated 12,000 guards from the better-off arrondissements did take up arms against the rebels, and rendered yeoman service to the government cause. It was, for example, guardsmen who shot the two prostitutes whose deaths on the barricades were so vividly described by Victor Hugo in Choses vues. “ In June the National Guard behaved with exemplary valor, wrote Georges Duveau. “Indeed, at time their valor was almost excessive and showed signs of a social vindictiveness which had its origins in the basest instincts. The idea that his strongbox was at stake turned the mildest shopkeeper into a lion”.
Bruce Vandervort “National Guard (France)” at U Ohio: site here at U Ohio Education

They brutally put down the workers’ revolt. Over 4,500 people were killed or injured, and 4,000 insurgents were deported to French Algeria. Marx’s own estimates were that “more than 3000 people were butchered”. Along with them the working class “seemed to be unable to rediscover its revolutionary greatness in itself”:

“More than three thousand insurgents were butchered after the victory, and fifteen thousand were deported without trial. With this defeat, the proletariat passes into the background on the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on every occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start, but with ever-decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter results. As soon as one of the social strata above it gets into revolutionary ferment, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and so shares all the defeats that the different parties suffer, one after another. But these subsequent blows become weaker, the greater the surface of society over which they are distributed. The more important leaders of the proletariat in the Assembly and in the press successively fall victim to the courts, and ever more equivocal figures come to head it. In part it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionizing of the old world by means of the latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck. It seems to be unable either to rediscover revolutionary greatness in itself or to win new energy from the connections newly entered into, until all classes with which it contended in June themselves lie prostrate beside it.”
MIA Chapter 1 18th Brumaire

Throughout the June Days when the workers rose again against the usurpation of power by the republicans, they stood alone. In contrast, the Assembly facing them was the class alliance of all the other classes – backed up by the Mobile Guard :

“On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More than three thousand insurgents were butchered after the victory, and fifteen thousand were deported without trial. With this defeat, the proletariat passes into the background on the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on every occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start, but with ever-decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter results. As soon as one of the social strata above it gets into revolutionary ferment, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and so shares all the defeats that the different parties suffer, one after another. But these subsequent blows become the weaker, the greater the surface of society over which they are distributed. The more important leaders of the proletariat in the Assembly and in the press successively fall victim to the courts, and ever more equivocal figures come to head it.”
Marx 18th Brumaire at Chapter 1 MIA;

Marx’s final verdict on the June Rising was to hail it – but also to mourn it:

“None of the numerous revolutions of the French bourgeoisie since 1789 assailed the existing order, for they retained the class rule, the slavery of the workers, the bourgeois system, even though the political form of this rule and this slavery changed frequently. The June uprising did assail this system. Woe to the June uprising!”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

But all the pretences wee gone, the “bourgeois republic” was “compelled to come out in it pure form” aimed to “perpetuate the rule of capital, the slavery of labor”:

“The Paris proletariat was forced into the June insurrection by the bourgeoisie. This sufficed to mark its doom. …  In place of the demands, exuberant in form but still limited and even bourgeois in content, whose concession the proletariat wanted to wring from the February Republic, there appeared the bold slogan of revolutionary struggle: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the Working class!”

By making its burial place the birthplace of the bourgeois republic, the proletariat compelled the latter to come out forthwith in its pure form as the state whose admitted object it is to perpetuate the rule of capital, the slavery of labor.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

• The two wings of the republican bourgeoisie had successfully goaded the working class to rise up at a time when the Constituent Assembly had installed a new chief of the National Guard – Cavaignac.
• In addition, they had created a new military force entirely under its own control – the Mobile Guard.
• The trap was successful and butchery followed.
• The leaders of the working class, the democratic republican, Louis Blanqui was arrested and removed from possible leadership of the working class.
• The savage repressions would include 4,500 people killed or injured, and exile of 4,000 insurgents to French Algeria
• After June 1848, the Party of Order dominated the Assembly and immediately attacked the democratic republicans.
• General Cavaignac now installed a military dictatorship that ‘protected’ the Constituent Assembly

3.ix) The united reactionary classes headed by the bourgeoisie 

Any hopes of a truly republican state were now destroyed.

As we noted above the “democratic republican bourgeoisie” had conspired with the bourgeois republicans and turned their backs on the proletariat. This left the democratic republicans dependent on the republican bourgeoisie.

But now, after the June Defeat, the republican bourgeoisie turned on the ‘democratic republicans’. The petty bourgeoisie which the ‘democratic republicans’ largely represented, and were largely composed of, were destitute as they had been increasingly living on ‘credit’. But credit was being called in and the plight of the petty bourgeois became serious – illusions were stripped “The petty bourgeois saw with horror that by striking down the workers, they had delivered themselves without resistance into the hands of their creditors “:

“No one had fought more fanatically in the June days for the salvation of property and the restoration of credit than the Parisian petty bourgeois – keepers of cafes and restaurants, marchands de vins [wine merchants], small traders, shopkeepers, handicraftsman, etc. The shopkeeper had pulled himself together and marched against the barricades in order to restore the traffic which leads from the streets into the shop. … And when the barricades were thrown down and the workers were crushed and the shopkeepers, drunk with victory, rushed back to their shops, they found the entrance barred by a savior of property, an official agent of credit, who presented them with threatening notices: Overdue promissory note! Overdue house rent! Overdue bond! Doomed shop! Doomed shopkeeper!

Salvation of property! But the house they lived in was not their property; the shop they kept was not their property; the commodities they dealt in were not their property. Neither their business, nor the plate they ate from, nor the bed they slept on belonged to them any longer…. Restoration of credit! But credit… turned the debtor who could not pay out of his four walls, together with wife and child, surrendered his sham property to capital, and threw the man himself into the debtors’ prison, which had once more reared its head threateningly over the corpses of the June insurgents.

The petty bourgeois saw with horror that by striking down the workers, they had delivered themselves without resistance into the hands of their creditors. Their bankruptcy, which since February had been dragging on in chronic fashion and had apparently been ignored, was openly declared after June.
… In Paris the mass of overdue paper amounted to over 21,000,000 francs; in the provinces to over 1,000,000. The proprietors of more than 7,000 Paris firms had not paid their rent since February.”
Karl Marx; “Class Struggles in France” Chapter2:  MIA Class Struggles Chapter 2

We saw the reactionary classes had all united under one banner.  That was in the so-called self-named Party of Order, which was an anti-working class coalition pure and simple:

“During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from “the enemies of society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as passwords…”
Marx; 18th Brumaire Part 1; Ibid; at MIA 18th Brumaire 

• The Party of Order – was now the united front of all reactionaries, and now were in a dominant position
• They did not exercise full control for a period – the ‘democratic republicans’ still posed a potential threat to them. Especially since the financiers called in their credit lines – the small petty bourgeois were thrown into crisis.

3. x) From the June 25 Days 1848 to December 10 1848 – the dictatorship of the “pure bourgeois republicans”

The June defeat of the working class now ensured the “exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans.” Marx saw June 25, 1848, to the December 10, 1848 as the “Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans.” 18th Brumaire; at MIA Chapter 6.

The victorious blood-stained rulers in the National Assembly made no bones of their intent to further suppress the working class:

“In the National Assembly all France sat in judgment upon the Paris proletariat. The Assembly broke immediately with the social illusions of the February Revolution; it roundly proclaimed the bourgeois republic, nothing but the bourgeois republic. It at once excluded the representatives of the proletariat, Louis Blanc and Albert, from the Executive Commission it had appointed; it threw out the proposal of a special Labor Ministry and received with acclamation the statement of Minister Trélat: “The question now is merely one of bringing labor back to its old conditions.” [from Trélat’s speech of 20 June 1848].”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part I The Defeat of June, 1848”; at Part 1 ‘Class Struggles’;

Almost immediately, many of the reforming laws planned or passed by the previous Assembly, were repealed:

“The plan formed by the Provisional Government… of taxing capital – in the form of a mortgage tax was rejected by the Constituent Assembly; the law that limited the working day to ten hours was repealed; imprisonment for debt was once more introduced; the large section of the French population that can neither read nor write was excluded from jury service. Why not from the franchise also? Journals again had to deposit caution money. The right of association was restricted.”
The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850; Part 2 The Defeat of June 13, 1849”; at Part 2 ‘Class Struggles’;

As the working class was being physically, brutally put down, from the February 1848 days forward – the bourgeois republicans became more flagrant and open, whereas previously they had to pose as – or be “masked” as “republicans”. The meeting of the Constituent National Assembly on May 4th organised the suppression of the workers.

The ‘left’ democratic republican bourgeoisie were now fully exposed as in truth – representing the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie. They had participated in planning the June Defeat – and the subsequent legal attacks on the workers and their leaders – and the Military Dictatorship of General Cavaignac now laying siege to Paris. That did not protect them from the spleen of the bourgeoisie. Nonetheless, the left sections of it would be resurrected – as the Montagne (Mountain) – see below 3.(x).

During the remaining June days of the Constituent Assembly, the June working-class living, captured insurgents were tried and sentenced to exile. The Constituent Assembly was fast disintegrating and was now completely dominated by the ‘bourgeois republicans’:

“The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is the history of the domination and the disintegration of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie, of the faction known by the names of tricolor republicans, pure republicans, political republicans, formalist republicans, etc.”
Karl Marx; “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”; Karl Marx 1852; Ibid; at 18th Brumaire Part II MIA

After June 24, the bourgeoisie and the monarchists were thus firmly united.

They now formally paid out the ‘democratic republicans’. These factions of the republicans were finally “thrust aside” in May 1849. Recall that the “republicans” were composed of three major factions:

“… 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 “Réforme.” Together with the bourgeois republicans, they had conspired on April 16 against the proletariat… The proletarians were dismissed. The sham alliance which the bourgeois republicans… concluded with them during the epoch of the Provisional Government and the Executive Commission was openly broken by the bourgeois republicans. …  the anti-republican bourgeois factions. Lastly, these factions, the Orléanists and the Legitimists, were … in a minority in the Constituent National Assembly.”
Karl Marx; “Class Wars France“; at MIA Chapter 2 “Class Wars France”

The latter faction, the anti-republican factions, were openly joined together in the Party of Order. This was the unity of Legitimists, Orleanists (including “aristocrats of finance and big industrialists“), which did not now use those labels. But now says Marx, it only “bore the name Capital” – but this “mass of the bourgeoisie was royalist”. This royalist bourgeois mass was the force of reaction – they had “found their form of  state“:

“The period from December 20, 1848, until the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in May, 1849, comprises the history of the downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the field, and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the time being, they are themselves thrust aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as its property. This bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. One section of it, the large landowners, had ruled during the Restoration and was accordingly Legitimist. The other, the aristocrats of finance and big industrialists, had ruled during the July Monarchy and was consequently Orleanist. The high dignitaries of the army, the university, the church, the bar, the academy, and the press were to be found on either side, though in various proportions. Here, in the bourgeois republic, which bore neither the name Bourbon nor the name Orleans, but the name capital, they had found the form of state in which they could rule conjointly.”
Marx 18th Brumaire Part 2; at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 2 

Together the industrial wing and the financial wing of capital – even while being Royalist to a certain varying degree, each to a differing faction of the Monarchy – found they could and would live together.  A modus vivendi – to face the workers and petty bourgeoisie. Indeed Marx quotes Thiers as saying:

“Thiers spoke more truly than he suspects when he said: “We, the royalists, are the true pillars of the constitutional republic.”
Marx “Class Struggles”; Chapter 3; at MIA Chapter 3 Class Struggles

The Party of Order now increasingly came out of hiding with no disguise. Marx noted the “cowardice” of the democratic or ‘pure republicans’ in their lack of fight against the usurpation of their power. It was he says an “ignominious history”. They would he notes in passing, become “socialist”:

“Just as brutal as these pure republicans had been in their misuse of physical force against the people, just as cowardly, mealy-mouthed, broken-spirited, and  incapable of fighting were they now in their retreat, when it was a question of maintaining  their republicanism and their legislative rights against the executive power and the royalists.
I need not relate here the ignominious history of their dissolution. They did not succumb; they passed out of existence. Their history has come to an end forever, and, both inside and
outside the Assembly, … converted to socialism in the following period.”
Marx 18th Brumaire Part 2; at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 2

After the June defeat of the workers, Cavaignac’s troops enforced a military dictatorship. Now the anti-republican party emerged fully into the open dropping their masks.

The Orleanist M. Odilon Barrot (1791-1873) chaired a biased commission of inquiry against the February Revolution. The socialist representatives Louis Blanc and Marc Caussidière (1808-1861) were seized and brought before the courts.

Meanwhile, the republic instituted a single sovereign National Assembly – not two limited constitutional chambers. They transformed the dictatorship of Cavaignac into an “elective monarchy, with a quadrennial presidency.” (Class Struggles Chapter 2).

3. (xi) The 4 November 1848 Constitution

The 1848 Constitution was finished on October 23, and quickly passed on 4 November 1848 by the National Assembly. The Constituent Assembly had decided to elect the President, on December 4, 1848. Of this decision, Marx said that “in the abyss of the ballot box lay its (the Constituent Assembly) sentence of death.”

In their short rule, the “pure bourgeois republicans” had certainly presided over the extension of suffrage, and the “inevitable general staff of the liberties of 1848”. However, these were hedged with limitations – which Marx terms “marginal notes“:

“The exclusive rule of the bourgeois republicans lasted only from June 24 to December 10, 1848. It is summed up in the drafting of a republican constitution and in the state of siege of Paris.”
“The narrow electoral qualification of the July Monarchy, which excluded even a large part of the bourgeoisie from political rule, was incompatible with the existence of the bourgeois republic. In lieu of this qualification, the February Revolution had at once proclaimed direct universal suffrage. The bourgeois republicans could not undo this event. They had to content themselves with adding the limiting proviso of a six months’ residence in the constituency. …
The inevitable general staff of the liberties of 1848, personal liberty, liberty of the press, of speech, of association, of assembly, of education and religion, etc., received a constitutional uniform which made them invulnerable. For each of these liberties is proclaimed as the absolute right of the French citoyen, but always with the marginal note that it is unlimited so far as it is not limited by the “equal rights of others and the public safety” or by “laws” which are intended to mediate just this harmony of the individual liberties with one another and with the public safety. “
Marx 18th Brumaire; Ibid; at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 2 

Later historians have vindicated Marx’s judgement. We note that the new constitution ensured the mythical notion of “one people” – harking back to the rejection of the sans-culotte claims of legitimacy as representing worker rights:

“Conservative deputies forcefully repeated that the Parisian working class was not entitled to
claim rights in the name of the people, since the people as ‘universality of citizens’ could not be reduced to a social class. This rhetoric was used, for example, by the conservative Nicolas Levet on 6 September:
The people is not exclusively [composed of] this so-very-interesting working class … the people is also this more numerous and no-less-interesting class of farmers and small landowners… the people is all the merchants, all the industrialists… In sum, the people is the generality of citizens, all of whose rights must be guaranteed by your Constitution.”
Samuel Hayat; “Revolution of 1848 in the History of French Republicanism”: 2015 Ibid.

In the old 1793 Constitution there had been assurances of a representative democracy – but in 1848, this was now stripped away:

“the election of deputies (art. 8), but also the indirect election of civil servants and judges (art. 9) and, more importantly, the direct deliberation of laws by citizens (art. 10).”
Samuel Hayat; “Revolution of 1848 in the History of French Republicanism”: 2015 Ibid.

Indeed the very phrase “universal suffrage” was meant to disembowel “direct popular participation”, as explained by Hayat:

“the adoption of universal suffrage in 1848 was seen as an antidote to direct popular participation, as much as a legitimizing principle. By giving every male adult the right to vote, the Provisional Government and then the Constituent Assembly also ‘restricted [the people’s] participation in politics to this particular and relatively harmless one’ . M. But not only was universal suffrage used to justify the limitation to political participation; we should also add that this specific use of universal suffrage to vote for legislators was used to delegitimize other uses of the same procedure.
Indeed, during the first few months of the new regime, universal suffrage had been used to elect different sorts of representatives: members of the Constituent Assembly, but also officers of the National Guard, delegates in clubs, trade associations, National Workshops, and there were projects to organize votes for almost any position of power or authority. As Courtais put it about the National Guard on 17 March, 1848, “there should be be no elite men, only men elected by all’. But after the June days, the use of ‘universal suffrage’ outside the institutional election of State authorities was considered suspicious, possibly threatening the legitimacy of the Assembly.
During the examination of the first Constitution draft, the bureaux rejected any proposition containing the extension of ‘universal suffrage’ and its logic. Juges de paix (low-ranking local magistrates) for example were supposed to be elected by citizens themselves. As Jean-Pierre Pagès put it during the Commission de Constitution’s debates on 23 May, ‘one of the victories of the February revolution must consist in giving the people the right to choose the first administrative magistrate, the mayor, and the first judiciary magistrate, the juge de paix’. But in the summer, the bureaux rejected this proposal, and the second Draft of the Constitution had these judges directly appointed by the President. The election of the mayor of Paris was also rejected, as was the election of the supreme officers of the National Guard — which was consistent with the July Monarchy practice, but not with the principles of early 1848 republicanism.”
Samuel Hayat; “Revolution of 1848 in the History of French Republicanism”: 2015 Ibid.

As Hayat says attempts by the few left wingers remaining in the debates were rejected out of hand:

“the proposal made by left-wing republican Hippolyte Detours on 15 September, stating that
citizens’ right to participate directly in the election of representatives was irrevocable and inalienable, was rejected without debate by the conservatives and most of the moderate republicans. On the same day, the idea of popular ratification of the Constitution was also rejected without debate.”
Samuel Hayat; “Revolution of 1848 in the History of French Republicanism”: 2015 Ibid.

The removal of the remaining representatives of the democratic republicans from any significant administrative posts left the Constituent Assembly in the hands of the Party of Order.

• The 1848 Constitution stripped away any older republican understandings of any representative democracy
• Marx saw the pointed nature of the limitations and how it curbed the workers while giving the bourgeoisie a figleaf to show a liberal face.

3. (xii) The two headed nature of the Constitution

3. (xiii) The formation of the Montagne in November 1848

As noted the democratic republicans, had been shut out of the ruling echelons. But some left wing fractions still managed to resurrect themselves. Under Ledru-Rollin they re-formed a version of Robespierre’s “Mountain”. It was that inspired Marx’s famous words:

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.”
“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852 I: at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 1

They now fielded Ledru-Rollin for the Presidential elections of 1848. But the Montagnards came third – polling lower than even Cavaignac:

“In November 1848, democratic-socialist republicans founded “Solidarité républicaine” to support Ledru-Rollin’s presidential bid. He secured 381,026 votes (approximately 5%), finishing third behind Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (elected president with 75%) and Cavaignac (the moderate candidate, with 19.6%).
In the legislative elections of May 1849, *La Montagne* put forward a reformist platform: the abolition of the “45-centime tax,” the introduction of an income tax, the nationalization of railways, mines, canals, and insurance, the abolition of the death penalty, military service reform, a 3% credit rate, and the expansion of education. The group succeeded in making inroads among the rural electorate of small landowners while consolidating its base among the petty bourgeoisie, artisans, and civil servants.”
Wiki Rouge’ accessed 8 July 2026; at ‘Montagnard’ 

The Montagne was to last limpingly – until 1851. But its strength was sapped in 1849 after a parliamentary rebellion, when it was:

“… crippled by the crackdown following the failure of the events of June 13, 1849: 34 of its deputies were stripped of their mandates and prosecuted before the High Court of Justice (with most being forced to flee)….
the parliamentary group survived until November 1851. That year, the “Reds” split… From that point on, the faction divided between those in favor of … an official coalition with Thiers – and those who advocated voting against this…”
Wiki Rouge’ accessed 8 July 2026; at ‘Montagnard’ 

We will discuss this episode below under June 13 1849 (See 3. (xv).

• The Montagne formed as the democratic bourgeoisie were forced to retreat by the Party of Order.

3. (xiv) The first act of the proletariat as an independent political party – voting for Raspail in December 1848 presidential elections

Despite Montagne’s candidacy of Ledru-Rollin, the “more advanced workers” had said Marx, had “put forward their own candidates” for the Presidency. For the working class this was Raspail – for the proletariat this signified a “protest against the presidency”.

That the working class  candidate was not Ledru-Rollin showed for Marx, that it was “the first act by which the proletariat, as an independent political party, declared its separation from the democratic party.“ But the “former democratic petty bourgeoisie,” the candidate was Ledru-Rollin:

“The more advanced sections of the two classes, however, put forward their own candidates. Napoleon was the collective name of all parties in coalition against the bourgeois republic; Ledru-Rollin and Raspail were the proper names, the former of the democratic petty bourgeoisie, the latter of the revolutionary proletariat. The votes for Raspail – the proletarians and their socialist spokesmen declared it loudly – were to be merely a demonstration, so many protests against any presidency, that is, against the constitution itself, so many votes against Ledru-Rollin, the first act by which the proletariat, as an independent political party, declared its separation from the democratic party.”  This party, on the other hand – the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its parliamentary representative, the Montagne – treated the candidature of Ledru-Rollin with all the seriousness with which it is in the habit of solemnly duping itself. For the rest, this was its last attempt to set itself up as an independent party, as against the proletariat. Not only the republican bourgeois party, but also the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its Montagne were beaten on December 10.”
(Class Struggles Chapter 2).

• Even after the June defeat, the workers took their first independent act – to separate from the ‘democratic republicans’.
• Marx insists throughout the latter parts of his text, this is a necessary step for the proletariat.

3.(xv) The ‘revolt of the peasants’ – the election of Louis Napoleon as President

So who won the elections of 1848? It took place on December 10, 1848.

The victor was Louis Napoleon’s father was Louis Bonaparte – younger brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. Louis was put on the throne of Holland from 1806 until 1810. His mother was Hortense de Beauharnais, the only daughter of Napoleon’s wife Joséphine de Beauharnais by her first marriage.  Louis Napoleon had tried unsuccessfully twice to raise coups against Louis-Philippe and was imprisoned in 1840.

General Cavaignac gained one million votes, but Napoleon accrued six million. Louis Napoleon was the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. He was initially mocked, for trying to use his background as an entree into politics.

and the those such as

How did that occur? It was a revenge – in his words Marx called it the “reaction of the peasantry“:

“… the significance of the election of December 10… was a reaction of the peasants, who had had to pay the costs of the February Revolution, against the remaining classes of the nation; a reaction of the country against the town. It met with great approval in the army, for which the republicans of the National had provided neither glory nor additional pay…”
Chapter 2 18th Brumaire; (Class Struggles Chapter 2).

The peasantry anticipated that Louis Napoleon would honour his promises to relieve them of enormous tax burdens:

“December 10, 1848, was the day of the peasant insurrection. Only from this day does the February of the French peasants date. …
The republic had announced itself to this class with the tax collector; it announced itself to the republic with the emperor. Napoleon was the only man who had exhaustively represented the interests and the imagination of the peasant class, newly created in 1789. By writing his name on the frontispiece of the republic, it declared war abroad and the enforcing of its class interests at home. Napoleon was to the peasants not a person but a program. With banners, with beat of drums and blare of trumpets, they marched to the polling booths shouting: Plus d’impôts, à bas les riches, à bas la république, vive l’Empereur! No more taxes, down with the rich, down with the republic, long live the emperor! Behind the emperor was hidden the peasant war. The republic that they voted down was the republic of the rich.

December 10 was the coup d’état of the peasants, which overthrew the existing government. And from that day on, when they had taken a government from France and given a government to her, their eyes were fixed steadily on Paris. For a moment, active heroes of the revolutionary drama, they could no longer be forced back into the inactive and spineless role of the chorus.”
Chapter 2 18th Brumaire; (Class Struggles Chapter 2).

Although it was true, said Marx, that other classes had helped Louis Napoleon win the election:

“to complete the election victory of the peasants. To the proletariat, the election of Napoleon meant the deposition of Cavaignac, the overthrow of the Constituent Assembly, the dismissal of bourgeois republicanism, the cessation of the June victory. To the petty bourgeoisie, Napoleon meant the rule of the debtor over the creditor. For the majority of the big bourgeoisie, the election of Napoleon meant an open breach with the faction of which it had had to make use, for a moment, against the revolution, but which became intolerable to it as soon as this faction sought to consolidate the position of the moment into a constitutional position. Napoleon, in place of Cavaignac, meant to this majority the monarch, in place of the republic, the beginning of the royalist restoration, a sly hint at Orléans, the fleur-de-lis hidden beneath the violets. Lastly, the army voted for Napoleon against the Mobile Guard, against the peace idyll, for war. Petty bourgeoisie and proletariat had voted en bloc for Napoleon, in order to vote against Cavaignac and, by pooling their votes, to wrest the final decision from the Constituent Assembly.”
Chapter 2 18th Brumaire; (Class Struggles Chapter 2).

• The peasantry overwhelmingly voted to make Louis Napoleon President.
• Their slogans were “No more taxes, down with the rich, down with the republic, long live the emperor!”

3. (xvi) Reneging on promises to lift the salt tax on the peasantry 

Within six days of his election, Louis Napoleon’s first minister Barrot (previously the last minister of Louis Philippe, and who had then chaired the biased enquiry into the June events) – reneged on Louis Napoleon’s own promises to lift the salt tax on the peasantry:

“On December 27, his ministry proposed the retention of the salt tax, whose abolition the Provisional Government had decreed. The salt tax shares with the wine tax the privilege of being the scapegoat of the old French financial system, particularly in the eyes of the country folk. The Barrot Ministry could not have put into the mouth of the peasants’ choice a more mordant epigram on his electors than the words: Restoration of the salt tax! With the salt tax, Bonaparte lost his revolutionary salt… ”
(Class Struggles Chapter 2).

The ‘democratic republicans’ still in the Constituent Assembly now saw a new chance to redeem themselves, and they tried to reduce the renewed taxation laws. But their time had passed:

“what place was there for a Constituent Assembly in a constituted republic? After the earth had been created, there was nothing else for its creator to do but flee to heaven…
The rejection of the salt tax only matured the decision of Bonaparte and his ministry to finish the Constituent Assembly. There began that long duel which lasted the entire latter half of the life of the Constituent Assembly…”
(Class Struggles Chapter 2).

The ‘democratic republicans’ moved a “no confidence” motion, but they were immediately countered by demands to dissolve, and then were denied entry to the Assembly by the army (see 3. (xv) Post-1948). 

• The peasants were still facing huge oppressions, including the taxes that had been promised to be lifted by Louis Napoleon

3. (xvii)Louis Napoleon appoints the Party of Order as his instrument of rule

Meanwhile, the Party of Order was in control.

Once more – let us look back and ask who were they? They were a coalition of big bourgeois interests together with Monarchists.

But how could they stay in one party with such differences?   They had united to break the working class.

Nonetheless there remained real differences between them which would later break out into the open, as quite simply put, they had different class interests.

The Legitimists were for Bourbon restoration with rule of “big landed property with priests and its lackeys”. The Orleanists were for “high finance, large-scale industry, large scale trade that is capital”:

“Legitimists and Orleanists,… formed the two great factions of the party of Order. … was it at all the confession of faith of royalism? Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors, and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus. What kept the two factions apart, therefore, was not any so-called principles, it was their material conditions of existence, two different kinds of property; it was the old contrast between town and country, the rivalry between capital and landed property. That at the same time old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and principles bound them to one or the other royal house, who denies this? Upon the different forms of property upon the social conditions of existence rises an entire different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. ”
Marx 18th Brumaire Part 2; at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 2

Bonaparte proceeded to install this Party as his government – but probably he was already planning its demise. Nonetheless, up to May 1849 – the real power was shared between  two powers – Louis Bonaparte and “the coalesced royalists, the party of Order, of the big bourgeoisie” led now by Odilon Barrot (1791-1873):

“… the two powers, one of which annihilated the other on December 2, 1851, whereas from December 20, 1848, until the exit of the Constituent Assembly, they had lived in conjugal relations. We mean Louis Bonaparte, on the one hand, and the part of the coalesced royalists, the party of Order, of the big bourgeoisie, on the other. On acceding to the presidency, Bonaparte at once formed a ministry of the party of Order, at the head of which he placed Odilon Barrot, the old leader, nota bene, of the most liberal faction of the parliamentary bourgeoisie.”
Marx 18th Brumaire Part 2; at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 2

Having obtained a large majority by election in the Constituent Assembly, the Government now removed Cavaignac. It wished to control its own General of the army who was now appointed – Nicolas Anne Theodule Changarnier (1793-1877):

“… the ministry which Bonaparte installed on December 20, 1848, on his Ascension Day, was a ministry of the party of Order, of the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. This Barrot-Falloux Ministry had outlived the republican Constituent Assembly, whose term of life it had more or less violently cut short, and found itself still at the helm. Changarnier, the general of the allied royalists, continued to unite in his person the general command of the First Army Division and of the National Guard of Paris. Finally, the general elections had secured the party of Order a large majority in the National Assembly. … The Bonapartist representatives of the people were too sparse to be able to form an independent parliamentary party. … Thus the party of Order was in possession of the governmental power, the army and the legislative body, in short, of the whole of the state power; it had been morally strengthened by the general elections, which made its rule appear as the will of the people…”
Karl Marx; 18th Brumaire Part 3: at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 3

• Louis Napoleon had put in the Party of Order.
• They won a large majority of seats in the National Assembly

3. (xviii) Post-1948 – Towards seizure of full power by Louis Bonaparte – forcing a vote on dissolving the Constituent Assembly

The Constituent Assembly had declared in August 1848, that it would dissolve after forming new laws to “supplement the constitution”. But despite this, the Constituent Assembly was now being bullied into declaring a self-dissolution by the Barrot lackeys of Louis Napoleon:

“On January 6, 1849, the party of Order had a deputy named Rateau move that the Assembly should let the organic laws go and rather decide on its own dissolution. Not only the ministry, with Odilon Barrot at its head, but all the royalist members of the National Assembly told it in bullying accents then that its dissolution was necessary for the restoration of credit, for the consolidation of order, for putting an end to the indefinite provisional arrangements and establishing a definitive state of affairs; that it hampered the productivity of the new government and sought to prolong its existence merely out of malice; that the country was tired of it.”
Marx 18th Brumaire Part 2; at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 2

Then an orchestrated war of petitions began to bombard the Constituent Assembly with calls to resign:

“The Barrot Ministry and the party of Order went further. They caused petitions to the National Assembly to be made throughout France, in which this body was politely requested to decamp. They thus led the unorganized popular masses into the fire of battle against the National Assembly, the constitutionally organized expression of the people.”
Marx 18th Brumaire Part 2; at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 2

But when the National Assembly was due to vote on this question, the members were locked out by the Army and National Guard under Changarnier. The members of the Assembly caved to this humiliation.  Marx considered that January 29 1849 was only an anticipation, the equivalent of the Coup that would be launched by Louis Napoleon on December 2 1851:

“.. At length, on January 29, 1849, the day had come on which the Constituent Assembly was to decide concerning its own dissolution. The National Assembly found the building where its sessions were held occupied by the military; Changarnier, the general of the party of Order, in whose hands the supreme command of the National Guard and troops of the line had been united, held a great military review in Paris, as if a battle were impending, and the royalists in coalition threateningly declared to the Constituent Assembly that force would be employed if it should prove unwilling. It was willing, and only bargained for a very short extra term of life. What was January 29 but the coup d’etat of December 2, 1851, only carried out by the royalists with Bonaparte against the republican National Assembly?”
(18th Brumaire Chapter 2 at MIA ).

Now the Barrot government continued to “hound” the Constituent Assembly members – and the workers. Attacks on the rights of free association and on the working class clubs were launched:

“On March 21 Faucher’s bill against the right of association: the suppression of the clubs was on the order of the day in the National Assembly. Article 8 of the constitution guarantees to all Frenchmen the right to associate. The prohibition of the clubs was therefore an unequivocal violation of the constitution, and the Constituent Assembly itself was to canonize the profanation of its holy of holies. But the clubs – these were the gathering points, the conspiratorial seats of the revolutionary proletariat. The National Assembly had itself forbidden the coalition of the workers against its bourgeois. And the clubs – what were they but a coalition of the whole working class against the whole bourgeois class, the formation of a workers’ state against the bourgeois state? Were they not just so many constituent assemblies of the proletariat and just so many military detachments of revolt in fighting trim – what the constitution was to constitute above all else was the rule of the bourgeoisie. By the right of association the constitution, therefore, could manifestly mean only associations that harmonized with the rule of the bourgeoisie, that is, with bourgeois order.”
(Class Struggles Chapter 2).

But Barrot’s government would itself soon be dismissed by Louis-Napoleon – after he had used it to destroy the ‘democratic republicans’.

3. (xviii) The ignominious death of the Montagnards (Mountain Party) -June 11 1849

We saw above (See 3. (x)) that the ‘democratic republicans’ after being thrown into defence by the Part of Order, had reassembled themselves into the Montagnards. They named themselves the “Opposition,” and Marx calls the Mountain “the social-democratic party”:

“The social-democratic party had given itself this parliamentary baptismal name.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

What was the character of this “social-democracy”? Here we are far more concerned about the actual history, in  order to place in context, the role of Bonapartism. However, it is impossible to avoid Marx’s astute characterisation about social-democracy – and what is involved in the psychology of the social democrat. Also,  he shows us about how sophisticated is the theory that he and Engels put forward of historical materialism. It is far from crude as alleged by the enemies of Marxism.

The following passage shows the mentality of the democratic republican approach. For they envisaged that  reconciling “two extremes, capital and wage labour” – and somehow “weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony” – was not only possible – but it was the only way forward:

“However, in the course of development, it had changed with the class that it represented. The peculiar character of social-democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

Recall that one major strategic goal of the ‘bourgeois republicans’ had always been to obstruct the formation of any unity between the workers and any other classes. But by the end of 1848, this policy was failing to some extent.

That is because reality of the attacks by the ‘bourgeois republicans’ and the Party of Order Monarchists was hitting the petty bourgeois as well as the workers. The democratic republicans – were the petty-bourgeoisie and were their political representatives. They had been severely shaken up by the credit crisis.

To an extent therefore, a new “closeness” had developed between them and the workers:

“a coalition between petty bourgeois and workers had been formed, the so-called Social-Democratic party. The petty bourgeois saw that they were badly rewarded after the June days of 1848, that their material interests were imperilled, and that the democratic guarantees which were to insure the effectuation of these interests were called in question by the counterrevolution. Accordingly they came closer to the workers. On the other hand, their parliamentary representation, the Montagne, thrust aside during the dictatorship of the bourgeois republicans, had in the last half of the life of the Constituent Assembly reconquered its lost popularity through the struggle with Bonaparte and the royalist ministers. It had concluded an alliance with the socialist leaders. In February, 1849, banquets celebrated the reconciliation. A joint program was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. The revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to the social demands of the proletariat; the purely political form was stripped off the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their socialist point thrust forward. Thus arose social-democracy. The new Montagne, the result of this combination, contained, apart from some supernumeraries from the working class and some socialist sectarians, the same elements as the old Montagne, but numerically stronger.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

In the 1849 Parliamentary elections (13-14 May 1849), voters elected the first National Assembly of the Second Republic. The Social Democrats had become now a sizeable contingent. It could have been able to command the streets had it wished to combine determinedly with the working class. But as Marx said however, in the process the workers had blunted themselves. Marx put it like this – the “revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to the social demands of the proletariat”.

Nonetheless for a short period the Montagne had considerable sway after the 1848 elections:

“The great opposition party, however, was formed by the Montagne. It commanded more than two hundred of the seven hundred and fifty votes of the National Assembly and was consequently at least as powerful as any one of the three factions of the party of Order taken by itself. Its numerical inferiority compared with the entire royalist coalition seemed compensated by special circumstances. Not only did the elections in the departments show that it had gained a considerable following among the rural population. It counted in its ranks almost all the deputies from Paris; the army had made a confession of democratic faith by the election of three non-commissioned officers; and the leader of the Montagne, Ledru-Rollin, in contradistinction to all the representatives of the party of Order, had been raised to the parliamentary peerage by five departments, which had pooled their votes for him. In view of the inevitable clashes of the royalists among themselves and of the whole party of Order with Bonaparte, the Montagne thus seemed to have all the elements of success before it on May 28, 1849. A fortnight later it had lost everything, honor included.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

But as Marx describes, it had illusions in the parliamentary process and what was meant by “the republic“:

“it is obvious that if the Montagne continually contends with the party of Order for the republic and the so-called rights of man, neither the republic nor the rights of man are its final end.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

Hence they thought they could use the Assembly floor to push their social democratic programme.

But Marx describes next how the Party of Order “baited” a trap to “provoke” the Montagnards, into a leftist position upon which they could be attacked by the bourgeoise. It was a morass into which the Montagnards fell.

The casus belli was the “bombardment of Rome” – which had been ordered by the President. This was formally anti-constitutional, and the Montagnards launched an attempt to impeach Bonaparte on June 11, 1849:

“The bombardment of Rome by the French troops was the bait that was thrown. It violated Article 5 of the constitution, which forbids the French Republic to employ its military forces against the freedom of another people. In addition to this, Article 54 prohibited any declaration of war by the executive power without the assent of the National Assembly, and by its resolution of May 8 the Constituent Assembly had disapproved of the Roman expedition. On these grounds Ledru-Rollin brought in a bill of impeachment against Bonaparte and his ministers on June 11, 1849.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

The trap lay in the dilemma of the Montagnards – would they go into the streets or restrict themselves to the parliamentary floor. Did they understand their own strength was in the National Assembly? Were they actually truly prepared to fight in the streets – which would have meant relying on the alliance with the workers? That risked inflaming the left movement again. But the social-democrats did not want that in fact:

“The strength of the proletarian party lay in the streets, that of the petty bourgeois in the National Assembly itself. It was therefore a question of decoying them out of the National Assembly into the streets and causing them to smash their parliamentary power themselves, before time and circumstances could consolidate it. The Montagne rushed headlong into the trap.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

Of course, they were crushed in parliament and Ledru-Rollins lost ihs self-control:

“Exasperated by the wasp stings of Thiers, he actually let himself be carried away to the point of threatening that he would defend the constitution by every means, even with arms in hand. The Montagne rose to a man and repeated this call to arms.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

But now rushing out to the streets, they only half-heartedly tried to organise protest, and they were dispersed quickly. Some deputies fled France and the remainder were effectively silenced:

“On June 12 the National Assembly rejected the bill of impeachment, and the Montagne left the parliament. The events of June 13 are known: the proclamation issued by a section of the Montagne declaring Bonaparte and his ministers “outside the constitution”; the street procession of the democratic National Guard, who, unarmed as they were, dispersed on encountering the troops of Changarnier, etc., etc. A part of the Montagne fled abroad; another part was arraigned before the High Court at Bourges; and a parliamentary regulation subjected the remainder to the schoolmasterly surveillance of the President of the National Assembly. Paris was again declared in a state of siege and the democratic part of its National Guard dissolved. Thus the influence of the Montagne in parliament and the power of the petty bourgeois in Paris were broken.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

The Montagne had not even prepared its press – who “deserted” – and not ensured support form the “National Guard”. Even worse in Marx’s view was that the Montagne had “infected the proletariat with its own weakness”.

What were the leaders of the Montagne thinking? It did not and could not break its own ‘democratic’ way of thinking. It had tried to impeach the Ministry – a “purely parliamentary insurrection”. But then drew back from storming the streets – as it feared arousing the working class.

The delegates of the workers from the secret workers societies tried to convince the social democrats (the democratic petty bourgeoisie and the Montagne) to counter-attack the same day. But the petty bourgeoisie refused:

“What the Montagne attempted on June 11 was “an insurrection within the limits of pure reason,” that is, a purely parliamentary insurrection. The majority of the Assembly, intimidated by the prospect of an armed rising of the popular masses, was, in Bonaparte and the ministers, to destroy its own power and the significance of its own election…
If the Montagne were successful in a parliamentary insurrection, the helm of state would fall directly into its hands. The democratic petty bourgeoisie, for its part, wished, as always, for nothing more fervently than to see the battle fought out in the clouds over its head between the departed spirits of parliament. Finally, both of them, the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its representatives, the Montagne, would, through a parliamentary insurrection, achieve their great purpose, that of breaking the power of the bourgeoisie without unleashing the proletariat or letting it appear otherwise than in perspective; the proletariat would have been used without becoming dangerous…
After the vote of the National Assembly on June 11, a conference took place between some members of the Montagne and delegates of the secret workers’ societies. The latter urged that the attack be started the same evening. The Montagne decisively rejected this plan. On no account did it want to let the leadership slip out of its hands; its allies were as suspect to it as its antagonists, and rightly so. The memory of June, 1848, surged through the ranks of the Paris proletariat more vigorously than ever. Nevertheless it was chained to the alliance with the Montagne. The latter represented the largest part of the departments – it had increased its influence in the army; it had at its disposal the democratic section of the National Guard; it had the moral power of the shopkeepers behind it. To begin the revolution at this moment against the will of the Montagne would have meant for the proletariat, decimated moreover by cholera and driven out of Paris in considerable numbers by unemployment, to repeat uselessly the June days of 1848, without the situation which had forced this desperate struggle. The proletarian delegates did the only rational thing. They obligated the Montagne to compromise itself, that is, to come out beyond the confines of the parliamentary struggle, in the event that its bill of impeachment was rejected. During the whole of June 13 the proletariat maintained this same skeptically watchful attitude, and awaited a seriously engaged irrevocable melee between the democratic National Guard and the army, in order then to plunge into the fight and push the revolution forward beyond the petty bourgeois aim set for it. In the event of victory a proletarian commune was already formed which would take its place beside the official government. The Parisian workers had learned in the bloody school of June, 1848.”
18th Brumaire Chapter 3; at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

Marx’s sad but scathing final comments on this farce follow:

“The bulk of the Montagne had left its vanguard in the lurch, having refused to subscribe to its proclamation. The press had deserted, only two journals having dared to publish the pronunciamento. The petty bourgeois betrayed their representatives in that the National Guard either stayed away or, where they appeared, hindered the building of barricades. The representatives had duped the petty bourgeois in that the alleged allies from the army were nowhere to be seen. Finally, instead of gaining an accession of strength from it, the democratic party had infected the proletariat with its own weakness and, as usual with the great deeds of democrats, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to charge their “people” with desertion, and the people the satisfaction of being able to charge its leaders with humbugging it.

Seldom had an action been announced with more noise than the impending campaign of the Montagne, seldom had an event been trumpeted with greater certainty or longer in advance than the inevitable victory of the democracy. Most assuredly the democrats believe in the trumpets before whose blasts the walls of Jericho fell down. And as often as they stand before the ramparts of despotism, they seek to imitate the miracle. If the Montagne wished to triumph in parliament it should not have called to arms. If it called to arms in parliament it should not have acted in parliamentary fashion in the streets. If the peaceful demonstration was meant seriously, then it was folly not to foresee that it would be given a warlike reception. If a real struggle was intended, then it was a queer idea to lay down the weapons with which it would have to be waged. But the revolutionary threats of the petty bourgeois and their democratic representatives are mere attempts to intimidate the antagonist.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

And in a closing analysis of the petty bourgeois mentality and political thoughts of the Montagne leaders, Marx says:

“… the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie – that is, a transition class, in which the interests of two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted – imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally. The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people’s rights; what interests them is the people’s interests. Accordingly, when a struggle is impending they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors. Now if in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and their potency impotence, then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalized and blinded to comprehend that the pure aims of democracy are the best thing for it, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoiled the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him.”
18th Brumaire at MIA 18th Brumaire Chapter 3

• The Montagne and its leaders had failed to press the strength of their convictions when confronted by the refusal of the National Assembly to allow them to impeach the President.
• They then refused advice from workers representatives to press an assault.
• Now the petty bourgeoisie had joined the workers from having lost any real force that could resist the capitalisation of the republic.

3. (xix) Dispersal of the Barrot Government and the new Minister of Finance

“On May 28, 1849, the Legislative National Assembly met. On December 2, 1851, it was dispersed. This period covers the span of life of the constitutional, or parliamentary, republic.”
(18th Brumaire Chapter 3 at MIA ).

While the constitutional parliamentary republic lasted as a whole from May 28 1849 to December 2 1851 – it was constantly subject to the whim of Louis Napoleon. He simply dismissed the Barrot-Falloux government having used it to break the democratic republicans:

“In the middle of October, 1849, the National Assembly met once more. On November 1 Bonaparte surprised it with a message in which he announced the dismissal of the Barrot-Falloux Ministry and the formation of a new ministry. No one has ever sacked lackeys with less ceremony than Bonaparte his ministers. …
Bonaparte had needed it to dissolve the republican Constituent Assembly, to bring about the expedition against Rome, and to break the Democratic party…
Its dismissal forms, accordingly, a decisive turning point. With it the party of Order lost, never to reconquer it, an indispensable position for the maintenance of the parliamentary regime, the lever of executive power.”
18th Brumaire at MIA Chapter 4

For a period more, various of the party of Order were put into government by Louis Napoleon but their days were numbered. While one General Hautpoul performed the task of Prime Minister he was denied the title. But a moneylender Achille Marcus Fould (1800-1867) “one of the most notorious of the high financiers” was made the Minister of Finance.

At first the Ministry of Finance was discreet. Nevertheless, the honey pot of finances of the state proved irresistible:

“Alongside the other jealous bourgeois factions, the finance aristocracy naturally did not act in so shamelessly corrupt a manner under Fould as under Louis Philippe. But once it existed, the system remained the same: constant increase in the debts, masking of the deficit. And in time the old Bourse swindling came out more openly. Proof: the law concerning the Avignon Railway; the mysterious fluctuations in government securities, for a brief time the topic of the day throughout Paris; finally, the ill-starred speculations of Fould and Bonaparte on the elections of March 10.
With the official restoration of the finance aristocracy, the French people soon had to stand again before a February 24.”
Class Struggles Chapter 3

How could the “coalesced bourgeoisie bear and suffer the rule of finance?” asks Marx.

He gives the clear answer that the finance aristocracy were a part of the Royalists and “in general, the combination of large landed property with high finance is a normal fact. Proof: England; proof: even Austria”:

“With the nomination of Fould, the finance aristocracy announced its restoration in the Moniteur. This restoration necessarily supplemented the other restorations, which form just so many links in the chain of the constitutional republic….

The question will be asked how the coalesced bourgeoisie could bear and suffer the rule of finance, which under Louis Philippe depended on the exclusion or subordination of the remaining bourgeois factions.

The answer is simple.

First of all, the finance aristocracy itself forms a weighty, authoritative part of the royalist coalition, whose common governmental power is denominated republic. Are not the spokesmen and leading lights among the Orléanists the old confederates and accomplices of the finance aristocracy? Is it not itself the golden phalanx of Orleanism? As far as the Legitimists are concerned, under Louis Philippe they had already participated in practice in all the orgies of the Bourse, mine, and railway speculations. In general, the combination of large landed property with high finance is a normal fact. Proof: England; proof: even Austria.”
Class Struggles Chapter 3; at MIA Class Struggles Chapter 3

3. (xx) Disarming the Assembly and thus the Party of Order

Louis Napoleon continued to make clear his intentions:

“As often as Bonaparte blurted out his intentions behind the ministers’ backs and played with his “idees napoleoniennes,” his own ministers disavowed him from the tribune of the National Assembly. His usurpatory longings seemed to make themselves heard only in order that the malicious laughter of his opponents might not be muted. He behaved like an unrecognized genius, whom all the world takes for a simpleton. Never did he enjoy the contempt of all classes in fuller measure than during this period. Never did the bourgeoisie rule more absolutely, never did it display more ostentatiously the insignia of domination.”
18th Brumaire Chapter 4 at MIA Chapter 4 18th Brumaire 

The previous Barrot Ministry had already disbanded the Mobile Guard, so the remaining shards of the Constituent Assembly were powerless. Moreover after the Montagne had been defeated and subordinated, it occurred to the royalists of the Party of Order – that some vacillating sections of the National Guard had sided with the Montagne. Could they be allowed to exist…? Of course not!:

“On June 13, 1849, the bourgeoisie let the petty-bourgeois National Guard be dispersed by the army; on December 2, 1851, the National Guard of the bourgeoisie itself had vanished, and Bonaparte merely registered this fact when he subsequently signed the decree for its disbandment, Thus the bourgeoisie had itself smashed its last weapon against the army; the moment the petty bourgeoisie no longer stood behind it as a vassal, but before it as a rebel, it had to smash it as in general it was bound to destroy all its means of defense against absolutism with its own hand as soon as it had itself become absolute.”
18th Brumaire at MIA Chapter 3 18th Brumaire

But of course, the Party of order having thrown off disguises, also could hardly call out the working class to defend themselves now! So the Party of Order govrnment was left without is own forces. Louis Napolean had effectively bribed, or suborned the regular army. The machinations of this are described by Marx. We will leave that topic without further details in this account.

However matters were moving inevitably towards a coup d’etat. Marx:

“If the Constituent Assembly, as against the President and the ministers, was driven to insurrection, the President and the ministers, as against the Constituent Assembly, were driven to a coup d’etat, for they had no legal means of dissolving it. But the Constituent Assembly was the mother of the constitution and the constitution was the mother of the President. With the coup d’etat the President tore up the constitution and extinguished his republican legal title. He was then forced to pull out his imperial legal title, but the imperial legal title woke up the Orléanist legal title and both paled before the Legitimist legal title.”
(Class Struggles Chapter 2).

Now  “thus the comedy was played.” This “comedy” was all that was left before the final coup taking power formally. The Party of Order royalists considered Louis Napoleon as “their dupe”:

Only foreign policy remained to be subverted to the counter-revolution. Bonaparte congratulated publicly the counter-revolutionary forces of France, helping the Pope in Rome. First in 1849 the Army in the guise of Changarnier refused any longer to protect the Constituent Assembly; and later in 1851 Bonapartist Minister of War refused to allow the National Assembly to deny the President rights of troops:

“Bonaparte, occupied with his fixed Napoleonic idea, was brazen enough to exploit publicly this degradation of the parliamentary power. For when on May 8, 1849, the National Assembly passed a vote of censure of the ministry because of the occupation of Civitavecchia by Oudinot, and ordered it to bring back the Roman expedition to its alleged purpose, Bonaparte published the same evening in the Moniteur a letter to Oudinot in which he congratulated him on his heroic exploits and, in contrast to the ink-slinging parliamentarians, already posed as the generous protector of the army. The royalists smiled at this. They regarded him simply as their dupe. Finally, when Marrast, the President of the Constituent Assembly, believed for a moment that the safety of the National Assembly was endangered and, relying on the constitution, requisitioned a colonel and his regiment, the colonel declined, cited discipline in his support, and referred Marrast to Changarnier, who scornfully refused him with the remark that he did not like baionnettes intelligentes [intellectual bayonets]. In November, 1851, when the royalists in coalition wanted to begin the decisive struggle with Bonaparte, they sought to put through in their notorious Quaestors’ Bill the principle of the direct requisition of troops by the President of the National Assembly. One of their generals, Le Flo, had signed the bill. In vain did Changarnier vote for it and Thiers pay homage to the farsighted wisdom of the former Constituent Assembly. The War Minister, Saint-Arnaud, answered him as Changarnier had answered Marrast – and to the acclamation of the Montagne!”
Marx 18th Brumaire Part 2; at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 2

3. (xxi) The Stagnation of the Party of Order

In response the Party of order merely closed its eyes. It had fallen into a lethargy. It pronounced any and every reform as “socialistic!” All forward developments were impeded:

“the party of Order against the minority from the tribune of the National Assembly, its speech remained as monosyllabic as that of the Christians, whose words were to be: Yea, yea; nay, nay! As monosyllabic on the platform as in the press. Flat as a riddle whose answer is known in advance. Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: “Socialism!” Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.”
Chapter 4 18th Brumaire

The energy of the royalist bourgeoisie was taken up with a “wrangling between executive (ie the Presidency) and legislative (ie the Assembly) power”:

“From November 1, 1849, dates the third period in the life of the constitutional republic, a period which closes with March 10, I850. The regular game, so much admired by Guizot, of the constitutional institutions, the wrangling between executive and legislative power, now begins. More, as against the hankering for restoration on the part of the united Orléanists and Legitimists, Bonaparte defends his title to his actual power, the republic; as against the hankering for restoration on the part of Bonaparte, the party of Order defends its title to its common rule, the republic; as against the Orléanists, the Legitimists, and as against the Legitimists, the Orléanists, defend the status quo, the republic. All these factions of the party of Order, each of which has its own king and its own restoration in petto [secretly], mutually enforce, as against their rivals’ hankering for usurpation and revolt, the common rule of the bourgeoisie, the form in which the special claims remain neutralized and reserved the republic.
Chapter 4 18th Brumaire

“Just as Kant makes the republic, so these royalists make the monarchy the only rational form of state, a postulate of practical reason whose realization is never attained, but whose attainment must always be striven for and mentally adhered to as the goal.”
Chapter 4 18th Brumaire

Throughout the wranglings, the Party of order “unites in common hatred of the “republic”… prompting attacks of “reaction” – against which the Montagne has to ward off – although it odes so by simply repeating an old formula of  “the eternal rights of man”:

“the party of Order reveals a maze of different royalist factions which not only intrigue against each other – each seeking to elevate its own pretender to the throne and exclude the pretender of the opposing faction – but also all unite in common hatred of, and common onslaughts on, the “republic.” In opposition to this royalist conspiracy the Montagne, for its part, appears as the representative of the “republic.” The party of Order appears to be perpetually engaged in a “reaction,” directed against press, association, and the like, neither more nor less than in Prussia, and, as in Prussia, carried out in the form of brutal police intervention by the bureaucracy, the gendarmerie, and the law courts. The Montagne, for its part, is just as continually occupied in warding off these attacks and thus defending the “eternal rights of man” as every so-called people’s party has done, more or less, for a century and a half.”
Karl Marx; 18th Brumaire Part 3: at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 3

“Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves side by side in the republic, with equal claims. If each side wished to effect the restoration of its own royal house against the other, that merely signified that each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split – landed property and capital – sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other. ”
Karl Marx; 18th Brumaire Part 3: at MIA 18th Brumaire Part 3

A brief reprieve for the workers and progressive petty bourgeoisie, and even the disgruntled peasants, however came in the elections of March 10, 1850. This forced a temporary shock to both the Party of Order and to Napoleon:

“The discord between the party of Order and the President had taken on a threatening character when an unexpected event threw him back repentant into its arms. We mean the by-elections of March 10, 1850.”
Chapter 4 18th Brumaire

3. (xxii) Counter attacks from the unity of workers, petty bourgeoisie, peasantry and the Montagne 

Meanwhile the temperaure again rose. Once more the peasant had been attacked with new taxes; and now also by a hugely oppressive system of spying on the countryside:

“The peasants, disappointed in all their hopes, crushed more than ever by the low level of grain prices on the one hand, and by the growing burden of taxes and mortgage debts on the other, began to bestir themselves in the departments. They were answered by a drive against the schoolmasters, who were made subject to the clergy, by a drive against the mayors, made subject to the prefects, and by a system of espionage to which all were made subject.”
Chapter 4 18th Brumaire

The peasantry had stirred, and indications had been coming in from even intensely counter-revolutionary parts of the countryside and departments (rural districts of administration):

“The gradual revolutionizing of the peasants was manifested by various symptoms. It early revealed itself in the elections to the Legislative Assembly – it was revealed in the state of siege in the five departments bordering Lyons; it was revealed a few months after June 13 in the election of a Montagnard in place of the former president of the Chambre introuvable by the Department of the Gironde; it was revealed on December 20, 1849, in the election of a red in place of a deceased Legitimist deputy in the Department du Gard, that promised land of the Legitimists, the scene of the most frightful infamies committed against the republicans in 1794 and 1795 and the center of the white terror in 1815, when liberals and Protestants were publicly murdered. This revolutionizing of the most stationary class is most clearly evident since the reintroduction of the wine tax. The governmental measures and the laws of January and February, 1850, are directed almost exclusively against the departments and the peasants. The most striking proof of their progress.
The Hautpoul circular, by which the gendarme was appointed inquisitor of the prefect, of the subprefect, and, above all, of the mayor, and by which espionage was organized even in the hidden corners of the remotest village community; the law against the schoolteachers, by which they (the men of talent, the spokesmen, the educators and interpreters of the peasant class) were subjected to the arbitrary power of the prefect – they, the proletarians of the learned class, were chased like hunted beasts from one community to another; the bill against the mayors, by which the Damocles sword of dismissal was hung over their heads, and they, the presidents of the peasant communities, were every moment set in opposition to the President of the Republic and the party of Order; the ordinance which transformed the seventeen military districts of France into four pashaliks and forced the barracks and the bivouac on the French as their national salon; the education law, by which the party of Order proclaimed unconsciousness and the forcible stupefaction of France as the condition of its life under the regime of universal suffrage what were all these laws and measures? Desperate attempts to reconquer the departments and the peasants of the departments for the party of Order.

Regarded as repression, they were wretched methods that wrung the neck of their own purpose. The big measures, like the retention of the wine tax, of the 45-centime tax, the scornful rejection of peasant petitions for the repayment of the milliard, etc., all these legislative thunderbolts struck the peasant class all at once, wholesale, from the center; the laws and measures cited made attack and resistance general, the topic of the day in every hut; they inoculated every village with revolution; they localized and peasantized the revolution.”
Class Struggles Chapter 3; at MIA ‘Class Struggles’ Chapter 3 

Even more alarming for the Party of Order and Louis Napoleon was the situation in Paris. Here the “petty bourgeoisie in alliance with the proletariat” had obtained success in “Paris electing only social-democratic candidates”:

” These elections were held for the purpose of filling the representatives’ seats that after June 13 had been rendered vacant by imprisonment or exile. Paris elected only social-democratic candidates. It even concentrated most of the votes on an insurgent of June, 1848, on De Flotte. Thus did the Parisian petty bourgeoisie, in alliance with the proletariat, revenge itself for its defeat on June 13, 1849. It seemed to have disappeared from the battlefield at the moment of danger only to reappear there on a more propitious occasion with more numerous fighting forces and with a bolder battle cry. One circumstance seemed to heighten the peril of this election victory.”

They were capably led and had ignored numerous governmental provocations – such as cutting down the “trees of liberty”. Instead they focused on uniting to defeat the government. They had united “the three allied classes“:

“Unhindered by the provocations of the government, which only heightened the general exasperation at the existing situation, the election committee, wholly under the influence of the workers, put forward three candidates for Paris: Deflotte, Vidal, and Carnot (Lazare Hippolyte Carnot (1801 -1888).  Deflotte was a June deportee, amnestied through one of Bonaparte’s popularity-seeking ideas; he was a friend of Blanqui and had taken part in the attempt of May 15. Vidal, known as a communist writer through his book Concerning the Distribution of Wealth, was formerly secretary to Louis Blanc in the Luxembourg Commission. Carnot, son of the man of the Convention who had organized the victory, the least compromised member of the National party, Minister of Education in the Provisional Government and the Executive Commission, was through his democratic public education bill a living protest against the education law of the Jesuits. These three candidates represented the three allied classes: at the head, the June insurgent, the representative of the revolutionary proletariat; next to him the doctrinaire socialist, the representative of the socialist petty bourgeoisie; finally, the third, the representative of the republican bourgeois party whose democratic formulas had gained a socialist significance vis-a-vis the party of Order and had long lost their own significance. This was a general coalition against the bourgeoisie and the government, as in February. But this time the proletariat was at the head of the revolutionary league.”
Class Struggles Chapter 3

“In spite of all efforts the socialist candidates won. The army itself voted for the June insurgent against its own War Minister La Hitte. The party of Order was thunderstruck. The elections in the departments did not solace them; the departments gave a majority to the Montagnards.”
Class Struggles Chapter 3

Even the army had gravitated towards the Mountain:

“The army voted in Paris for the June insurgent against La Hitte, a minister of Bonaparte’s, and in the departments largely for the Montagnards, who here too, though indeed not so decisively as in Paris, maintained the ascendancy over their adversaries.”
Chapter 4 18th Brumaire

“The election of March 10, 1850! It was the revocation of June, 1848: … It was the revocation of June 13, 1849: the Montagne, proscribed by the National Assembly, returned to the National Assembly, but as advance trumpeters of the revolution, no longer as its commanders. It was the revocation of December 10: Napoleon had lost out with his Minister La Hitte. …
The election of March 10 protested against the majority of May 13. March 10 was a revolution. Behind the ballots lie the paving stones.
“The vote of March 10 means war,” shouted Ségur d’Aguesseau, one of the most advanced members of the party of Order.”
Class Struggles Chapter 3 Class Struggles Chapter 3

3. (xxiii) The forced new unity of the Party of order and Louis Napoleon

Now it was the turn of the bourgeoisie of all stripes to close ranks – Louis Napoleon and the Party of Order royalists joined together again:

“With March 10, 1850, the constitutional republic entered a new phase, the phase of its dissolution. The different factions of the majority are again united among themselves and with Bonaparte; they are again the saviors of order – he is again their neutral man. If they remember that they are royalists, it happens only from despair of the possibility of a bourgeois republic; if he remembers that he is a pretender, it happens only because he despairs of remaining President.
At the command of the party of Order, Bonaparte answers the election of Deflotte, the June insurgent, by appointing Baroche Minister of Internal Affairs, Baroche, the accuser of Blanqui and Barbès, of Ledru-Rollin and Guinard. The Legislative Assembly answers the election of Carnot by adopting the education law, the election of Vidal by suppressing the socialist press. The party of Order seeks to blare away its own fears by the trumpet blasts of its press. “The sword is holy,” cries one of its organs; “the defenders of order must take the offensive against the Red party,” cries another; “between socialism and society there is a duel to the death, a war without surcease or mercy; in this duel of desperation one or the other must go under; if society does not annihilate socialism, socialism will annihilate society,” crows a third cock of Order. Throw up the barricades of order, the barricades of religion, the barricades of the family! An end must be made of the 127,000 voters of Paris!
3 Class Struggles Chapter 3

This alarming situation faced the government and the would-be dictator – despite all the actions the Barrot government had taken to ensure that the workers could not easily rise again.

It is unsurpring then, that these elections of March 10, 1850 therefore forced the Party of Order and Napoleon to re-find each other as allies:

“Bonaparte saw himself suddenly confronted with revolution once more. As on January 29, 1849, as on June 13, 1849, so on March 10, 1850, he disappeared behind the party of Order. He made obeisance, he pusillanimously begged pardon, he offered to appoint any ministry it pleased at the behest of the parliamentary majority, he even implored the Orleanist and Legitimist party leaders, the Thiers, the Berryers, the Broglies, the Moles, in brief, the so-called burgraves, to take the helm of state themselves. The party of Order proved unable to take advantage of this opportunity that would never return. Instead of boldly possessing itself of the power offered, it did not even compel Bonaparte to reinstate the ministry dismissed on November 1; it contented itself with humiliating him by its forgiveness and adjoining M. Baroche to the Hautpoul Ministry.”
Chapter 4 18th Brumaire

The party of Order was forced to try to dissolve even its’ own sovereignity resting on “universal suffrage”:

“The party of Order naturally returns to its inevitable commonplace. “More repression,” it cries, “tenfold repression!” But its power of repression has diminished tenfold, while resistance has increased a hundredfold. Must not the chief instrument of repression, the army, itself be repressed? And the party of Order speaks its last word: “The iron ring of suffocating legality must be broken. The constitutional republic is impossible. We must fight with our true weapons; since February, 1848, we have fought the revolution with its weapons and on its terrain – , we have accepted its institutions; the constitution is a fortress which safeguards only the besiegers, not the besieged! …”
The foundation of the constitution, however, is universal suffrage. Annihilation of universal suffrage – such is the last word of the party of Order, of the bourgeois dictatorship.”
Class Struggles Chapter 3

“On March 10, 1850, universal suffrage admitted that it had itself been wrong. Bourgeois rule as the outcome and result of universal suffrage, as the express act of the sovereign will of the people – that is the meaning of the bourgeois constitution.”

3. (xxiv) Weakening of the proletarian by thoughts of only ‘legal’ change being needed

Lapsing into its old reliance on ‘reason’ and a steady progress towards the goal of social-democracy, the petty bourgeoisie led the workers into a fatal “accustoming” to “legal triumphs”:

“The victory that the people, in conjunction with the petty bourgeois, had won in the elections of March 10 was annulled by the people itself when it provoked the new election of April 28. Vidal was elected not only in Paris, but also in the Lower Rhine. The Paris Committee, in which the Montagne and the petty bourgeoisie were strongly represented, induced him to accept for the Lower Rhine. The victory of March 10 ceased to be a decisive one; the date of the decision was once more postponed; the tension of the people was relaxed; it became accustomed to legal triumphs instead of revolutionary ones.”
Class Struggles Chapter 4 MIA Chapter 4

This was countered by a a simple move – the Party of Order “abolished universal suffrage”:

“The revolutionary meaning of March 10, the rehabilitation of the June insurrection, was finally completely annihilated… by the Montagne and the petty bourgeoisie in high feather. They already exulted in the thought of being able to arrive at the goal of their wishes in a purely legal way and without again pushing the proletariat into the foreground through a new revolution; they reckoned positively on bringing Ledru-Rollin into the presidential chair and a majority of Montagnards into the Assembly through universal suffrage in the new elections of 1852. The party of Order… answered the two election victories with an election law which abolished universal suffrage.”
Class Struggles Chapter 4 MIA Chapter 4

(xxv) The Financial Aristocracy doing well.

All the while, with these repressions there was a restored economy – at least as far as the financial bourgeoise were concerned:

“The most striking proof of restored prosperity is the Bank’s reintroduction of specie payment by the law of August 6, 1850. On March 15, 1848, the Bank had been authorized to suspend specie payment. Its note circulation, including that of the provincial banks, amounted at that time to 373,000,000 francs (14,920,000 pounds). On November 2, 1849, this circulation amounted to 482,000,000 francs, or 19,280,000, an increase of 4,360,000 pounds, and on September 2, 1850, to 496,000,000 francs, or 19,840,000 pounds, an increase of about 5,000,000 pounds. This was not accompanied by any depreciation of the notes; on the contrary, the increased circulation of the notes was accompanied by the steadily increasing accumulation of gold and silver in the vaults of the Bank, so that in the summer of 1850 its metallic reserve amounted to about 141,000,000 pounds, an unprecedented sum in France. That the Bank was thus placed in a position to increase its circulation and therewith its active capital by 123,000,000 francs, or 5,000,000 pounds, is striking proof of the correctness of our assertion in an earlier issue that the finance aristocracy has not only not been overthrown by the revolution, but has even been strengthened….
In spite of the industrial and commercial prosperity that France momentarily enjoys, the mass of the people, the twenty-five million peasants, suffer from a great depression. The good harvests of the past few years have forced the prices of corn much lower even than in England, and the position of the peasants under such circumstances, in debt, sucked dry by usury and crushed by taxes, must be anything but splendid. The history of the past three years has, however, provided sufficient proof that this class of the population is absolutely incapable of any revolutionary initiative.“
Class Struggles Chapter 4 MIA Chapter 4

3. (xxvi) Louis Napoleon forms lumpen proletariat ‘December 10′ and dismisses General Changarnier

“the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10…
the Society of December 10 was for Bonaparte, the party fighting force peculiar to him…
The Society of December 10 was to remain the private army of Bonaparte until he succeeded in transforming the public army into a Society of December 10. … (using bribery including) cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic sausage.”
18th Brumaire Chapter 5; At MIA 

Meanwhile the Party of Order was cosying up to the Montagne representatives to ally against Louis Bonaparte to impeach him. All parties were riven and thus rendered “neutralised”:

“Let us now consider the party of Order. The “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” had said: “As against the hankering for restoration on the part of the united Orléanists and Legitimists, Bonaparte defends his title to his actual power, the republic; as against the hankering for restoration on the part of Bonaparte, the party of Order defends its title to its common rule, the republic; as against the Orléanists, the Legitimists, and as against the Legitimists, the Orléanists, defend the status quo, the republic. All these factions of the party of Order, each of which has its own king and its own restoration in petto, mutually enforce, as against their rivals’ hankering for usurpation and revolt, the common rule of the bourgeoisie, the form in which the special claims remain neutralized and reserved — the republic…. And Thiers spoke more truly than he suspects when he said: ‘We, the royalists, are the true pillars of the constitutional republic’.”
Class Struggles Chapter 4 MIA Chapter 4

Both the Montagne and the Royalists had succumbed says Marx, into “parliamentary cretinism.” At this point the want-to-be dictator simply took control of the army by dismissing its General Changarnier:

“Bonaparte, who precisely because he was a bohemian, a princely lumpen proletarian, had the advantage over a rascally bourgeois in that he could conduct the struggle meanly…   he severed…  the military power from parliament, (he) removed Changarnier… The dismissal of Changarnier and the falling of the military power into Bonaparte’s hands closes the first part of the period we are considering, the period of struggle between the party of Order and the executive power. War between the two powers has now been openly declared, is openly waged, but only after the party of Order has lost both arms and soldiers. Without the ministry, without the army, without the people, without public opinion, after its electoral law of May 31 no longer the representative of the sovereign nation, sans eyes, sans ears, sans teeth, sans everything, the National Assembly had undergone a gradual transformation into an ancient French parliament that has to leave action to the government and content itself with growling remonstrances post festum.”
18th Brumaire at MIA Chapter 5

3. (xxvii) The constitutional dilemma of the bourgeoisie in 1852 – the voice of the “commercial bourgeoise”

Fighting a rearguard battle, the Party of Order knew that a deadline approached. That of Article 45 of the 1848 Constitution which mandated that the President only had one term and could not be re-elected. They feared a new election as it might “surrender France to revolutionary anarchy”. On the other hand they were knew that not revising the clause would leave “Bonaparte only one way out… force”. They were “caught“:

“the party of Order found itself inextricably caught in contradictions. If it should reject revision, it would imperil the status quo, since it would leave Bonaparte only one way out, that of force; and since on the second Sunday in May, 1852, at the decisive moment, it would be surrendering France to revolutionary anarchy, with a President who had lost his authority, with a parliament which for a long time had not possessed it, and with a people that meant to reconquer it. If it voted for constitutional revision, it knew that it voted in vain and would be bound to fail constitutionally because of the republicans’ veto.”
18th Brumaire Chapter 6: at MIA Chapter 6 18th Brumaire

Not only were they frightened to go forward they were unable to go backward to a monarchy. Recall the Part of Order was spilt into Legitimists wanting now Henry V to be Monarch, and the Orléanists had the Count of Paris François d’Orléans, Prince de Joinville (1818- 1900) the third son of Louis Philippe. But these were “two heads” when only one could “rule”. And in any case, how could the two wings come together ultimately? It was a failed concept:

“As if the Legitimist monarchy could ever become the monarchy of the industrial bourgeois or the bourgeois monarchy ever become the monarchy of the hereditary landed aristocracy. As if landed property and industry could fraternize under one crown, when the crown could descend to only one head, the head of the elder brother or of the younger. As if industry could come to terms with landed property at all, so long as landed property itself does not decide to become industrial.”
Marx K, 18th Brumaire; Chapter 6 at MIA 18th Brumaire chapter 6 

While the politicians bickered in parliament, and made unseemly compromises – all of which failed – the “commercial bourgeoisie” began calling the shots more openly than before. Most in the forefront were once again, the financial bourgeoisie and Fould:

“Far more fateful and decisive was the breach of the commercial bourgeoisie with its politicians. It reproached them not as the Legitimists reproached theirs, with having abandoned their principles, but on the contrary, with clinging to principles that had become useless.

… since Fould’s entry into the ministry the section of the commercial bourgeoisie which had held the lion’s share of power under Louis Philippe, namely, the aristocracy of finance, had become Bonapartist. Fould not only represented Bonaparte’s interests in the Bourse, he represented at the same time the interests of the Bourse before Bonaparte. The position of the aristocracy of finance is most strikingly depicted in a passage from its European organ, the London Economist. In the issue of February 1, 1851, its Paris correspondent writes:

“Now we have it stated from numerous quarters that above all things France demands tranquillity. The President declares it in his message to the Legislative Assembly; it is echoed from the tribune; it is asserted in the journals; it is announced from the pulpit, it is demonstrated by the sensitiveness of the public funds at the least prospect of disturbance, and their firmness the instant it is made manifest that the executive is victorious.”

In its issue of November 29, 1851, the Economist declares in its own name:

“The President is the guardian of order, and is now recognized as such on every stock exchange of Europe.”
Marx K, 18th Brumaire; Chapter 6 at MIA 18th Brumaire chapter 6 

But not only the financiers, but also the industrialists were in favour of “angered by the squabbles of the parliamentary Party of Order”:

“The aristocracy of finance, therefore, condemned the parliamentary struggle of the party of Order with the executive power as a disturbance of order, and celebrated every victory of the President over its ostensible representatives as a victory of order. By the aristocracy of finance must here be understood not merely the great loan promoters and speculators in public funds, in regard to whom it is immediately obvious that their interests coincide with the interests of the state power. All modern finance, the whole of the banking business, is interwoven in the closest fashion with public credit. A part of their business capital is necessarily invested and put out at interest in quickly convertible public funds. Their deposits, the capital placed at their disposal and distributed by them among merchants and industrialists, are partly derived from the dividends of holders of government securities. If in every epoch the stability of the state power signified Moses and the prophets to the entire money market and to the priests of this money market, why not all the more so today, when every deluge threatens to sweep away the old states, and the old state debts with them?

The industrial bourgeoisie too, in its fanaticism for order, was angered by the squabbles of the parliamentary party of Order with the executive power. After their vote of January 18 on the occasion of Changarnier’s dismissal, Thiers, Angles, Sainte-Beuve, etc., received from their constituents, in precisely the industrial districts, public reproofs in which their coalition with the Montagne was especially scourged as high treason to order.”
Marx K, 18th Brumaire; Chapter 6 at MIA 18th Brumaire chapter 6 

Order, Order! was the requirement. Business was in the throes of a “triennial crisis”. Louis Napoleon thus fortified, went on to seize the Presidency again before the fateful hour of the election. In Marx’s words:

“Now picture to yourself the French bourgeois, how in the throes of this business panic his trade-crazy brain is tortured, set in a whirl, and stunned by rumors of coups d’etat and the restoration of universal suffrage, by the struggle between parliament and the executive power, by the Fronde war between Orleanists and Legitimists, by the communist conspiracies in the south of France, by alleged Jacqueries in the departments of Nievre and Cher, by the advertisements of the different candidates for the presidency, by the cheapjack solutions offered by the journals, by the threats of the republicans to uphold the constitution and universal suffrage by force of arms, by the gospel-preaching emigre heroes in partibus, who announced that the world would come to an end on the second Sunday in May, 1852 — think of all this and you will comprehend why in this unspeakable, deafening chaos of fusion, revision, prorogation, constitution, conspiration, coalition, emigration, usurpation, and revolution, the bourgeois madly snorts at his parliamentary republic:
“Rather an end with terror than terror without end!
Bonaparte understood this cry.
His power of comprehension was sharpened by the growing turbulence of creditors, who with each sunset which brought settling day, the second Sunday in May, 1852, nearer, saw a movement of the stars protesting their earthly bills of exchange. They had become veritable astrologers.””
Marx K, 18th Brumaire; Chapter 6 at MIA 18th Brumaire chapter 6 

As Marx writes there was no secret about what was taking place…

“If ever an event has, well in advance of its coming, cast its shadow before, it was Bonaparte’s coup d’etat. As early as January 29, 1849, barely a month after his election, he had made a proposal about it to Changarnier. In the summer of 1849 his own Prime Minister, Odilon Barrot, had covertly denounced the policy of coups d’etat; in the winter of 1850 Thiers had openly done so. In May, 1851, Persigny had sought once more to win Changarnier for the coup; the Messager de l’Assemblee had published an account of these negotiations. During every parliamentary storm the Bonapartist journals threatened a coup d’etat, and the nearer the crisis drew, the louder their tone became. In the orgies that Bonaparte kept up every night with men and women of the “swell mob,” as soon as the hour of midnight approached and copious potations had loosened tongues and fired imaginations, the coup d’etat was fixed for the following morning.”
Marx K, 18th Brumaire; Chapter 6 at MIA 18th Brumaire chapter 6 

3. (xviii) The end game

The deal had been settled in principle by the “commercial bourgeoisie“, now only the formalities awaited. A slowish course now ensued:

“On October 10 Bonaparte announced to his ministers his decision to restore universal suffrage; on the sixteenth they handed in their resignations…
On November 4 the National Assembly resumed its sessions…
On the very first day of its reopening, the National Assembly received the message from Bonaparte in which he demanded the restoration of universal suffrage and the abolition of the law of May 31, 1850. The same day his ministers introduced a decree to this effect. The National Assembly at once rejected the ministry’s motion of urgency and rejected the law itself on November 13 by three hundred and fifty-five votes to three hundred and forty-eight. Thus, it tore up its mandate once more; it once more confirmed the fact that it had transformed itself from the freely elected representatives of the people into the usurpatory parliament of a class; it acknowledged once more that it had itself cut in two the muscles which connected the parliamentary head with the body of the nation.”
Marx K, 18th Brumaire; Chapter 6 at MIA 18th Brumaire chapter 6 

The Montagnards played once more says Marx, a “not heroic position”:

“If by its motion to restore universal suffrage the executive power appealed from the National Assembly to the people, the legislative power appealed by its Quaestors’ Bill from the people to the army. This Quaestors’ Bill was to establish its right of directly requisitioning troops, of forming a parliamentary army. … The Montagne… decided the issue. It found itself in the position of Buridan’s ass — not, indeed, between two bundles of hay with the problem of deciding which was the more attractive, but between two showers of blows with the problem of deciding which was the harder. On the one hand, there was the fear of Changarnier; on the other, the fear of Bonaparte. It must be confessed that the position was not a heroic one.”
Marx K, 18th Brumaire; Chapter 6 at MIA 18th Brumaire chapter 6 

On December 1-2nd the ‘Pretender’ launched his successful coup, and the few barricades put up were dispersed quickly. Among the first steps had been to chop off the head of the potential resistance – the working class leaders – the “barricade commanders“:

“By a coup de main the night of December 1-2 Bonaparte had robbed the Paris proletariat of its leaders, the barricade commanders. An army without officers, averse to fighting under the banner of the Montagnards because of the memories of June, 1848 and 1849, and May, 1850, it left to its vanguard, the secret societies, the task of saving the insurrectionary honor of Paris, which the bourgeoisie had surrendered to the military so unresistingly that, subsequently, Bonaparte could disarm the National Guard with the sneering motive of his fear that its weapons would be turned against it by the anarchists!”
Marx; “18th Brumaire Chapter 7”; at MIA Chapter 7

Repressions and press closures followed aimed especially at the workers and other red republicans.  Around 26,000 people were arrested, of whom 4,000 were in Paris. Of these 239 inmates were sent to a penal colony in Cayenne, 9,530 sent to French Algeria, while 1,500 were expelled from France, and 3,000 forced out of their homes (Wikipedia Napoleon III accessed 13 July 2026).).

To seek a ‘public mandate’ he held on 20–21 December a national plebiscite to ask if voters agreed to the coup. In many areas mayors published names of electors refusing to vote. Marx writes:

“For the bourgeois and the shopkeeper had learned that in one of his decrees of December 2 Bonaparte had abolished the secret ballot and had ordered them to put a “yes” or “no” after their names on the official registers. The resistance of December 4 intimidated Bonaparte. During the night he had placards posted on all the street corners of Paris announcing the restoration of the secret ballot. The bourgeois and the shopkeeper believed they had gained their objective. Those who failed to appear next morning were the bourgeois and the shopkeeper.”
Marx; “18th Brumaire Chapter 7”; at MIA Chapter 7

When asked if they agreed to the coup, 7,439,216 voters said yes, 641,737 voted no, and 1.7 million voters abstained (Wikipedia Napoleon III accessed 13 July 2026). As Marx puts it:

“On December 4 the proletariat was incited by bourgeois and shopkeeper to fight. On the evening of that day several legions of the National Guard promised to appear, armed and uniformed, on the scene of battle. The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat to domination, with the Chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy – Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the drunken army of law and order. The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are placed under police supervision. It disbanded the democratic National Guard, its own National Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It supplanted the juries by military commissions; its juries are supplanted by military commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of the priests; the priests subject it to their own education. It jailed people without trial, it is being jailed without trial. It suppressed every stirring in society by means of state power; every stirring in its society is suppressed by means of state power. Out of enthusiasm for its moneybags it rebelled against its own politicians and literary men; its politicians and literary men are swept aside, but its moneybag is being plundered now that its mouth has been gagged and its pen broken.”
Marx; “18th Brumaire Chapter 7”; at MIA Chapter 7

Says Marx, the French bourgeoisie had long ago found the solution to Napoleon’s dilemma:

“In fifty years Europe will be republican or Cossack.” It solved it in the “Cossack republic.”

3. (xxix) The State in France

The question has been raised in modern left literature as to whether the state under capital can be “independent”.

Marx himself raised this possibility for the French state with its “enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its wide-ranging and ingenious state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million – this terrifying parasitic body “:

“The executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its wide-ranging and ingenious state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million – this terrifying parasitic body which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores sprang up in the time of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system which it had helped to hasten. The seignorial privileges of the landowners and towns became transformed into so many attributes of the state power, the feudal dignitaries into paid officials, and the motley patterns of conflicting medieval plenary powers into the regulated plan of a state authority whose work is divided and centralized as in a factory.

The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all separate local, territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order to create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to develop what the monarchy had begun, centralization, but at the same time the limits, the attributes, and the agents of the governmental power. Napoleon completed this state machinery. The Legitimate Monarchy and the July Monarchy added nothing to it but a greater division of labor, increasing at the same rate as the division of labor inside the bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and therefore new material for the state administration. Every common interest was immediately severed from the society, countered by a higher, general interest, snatched from the activities of society’s members themselves and made an object of government activity – from a bridge, a schoolhouse, and the communal property of a village community, to the railroads, the national wealth, and the national University of France. Finally the parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen the means and the centralization of governmental power with repressive measures. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.”
Marx; “18th Brumaire Chapter 7”; at MIA Chapter 7

However he then very quickly qualifies himself, with the word “seem”:

“Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent.
Marx; “18th Brumaire Chapter 7”; at MIA Chapter 7

3.(xxx) Why the peasantry went back to Louis Napoleon

Marx goes on to make it immediately clear why the state only “seems” to be “completely independent”. It is because it and its ruler represents the peasantry:

“And yet the state power is not suspended in the air. Bonaparte represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasants.
Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, that is, the French masses.”
Marx; “18th Brumaire Chapter 7”; at MIA Chapter 7

And yet Marx has already noted the heavy influence of capitalists – both fiancnial and industrial – in the accession of Louis Napoeon. We will return to this point, in a moment. First we follow Marx’s reasoning on the peasantry. He equates the peasantry with the proletariat in that are oppressed by capital. The difference lies in the “form” of their oppression. And we have discussed above their tax burdens. Marx points out how poor French agriculture is:

“According to a statistical statement of 1840, the gross production of French agriculture amounted to 5,237,178,000 francs. Of this the costs of cultivation came to 3,552,000,000 francs, including consumption by the persons working. There remained a net product of 1,685,178,000 francs, from which 550,000,000 had to be deducted for interest on mortgages, 100,000,000 for law officials, 350,000,000 for taxes, and 107,000,000 for registration money, stamp duty, mortgage fees, etc. There was left one-third of the net product or 538,000,000; when distributed over the population, not 25 francs per head net product. Naturally, neither usury outside of mortgage nor lawyers’ fees, etc., are included in this calculation.

The condition of the French peasants, when the republic had added new burdens to their old ones, is comprehensible. It can be seen that their exploitation differs only in form from the exploitation of the industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same: capital. The individual capitalists exploit the individual peasants through mortgages and usury, the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through the state taxes. The peasant’s title to property is the talisman by which capital held him hitherto under its spell, the pretext under which it set him against the industrial proletariat. Only the fall of capital can raise the peasant; only an anti-capitalist, a proletarian government can break his economic misery, his social degradation. The constitutional republic is the dictatorship of his united exploiters; the social-democratic, the red republic, is the dictatorship of his allies.”
“Class Struggles”; Chapter 3 MIA 

3. (xxxi) Marx’s own later assessment of Louis Napoleon’s accession to power in 1870

The basis of Louis Napoleon’s rule was for Marx, notwithstanding his discussion of the peasantry in our view remains the bourgeoisie. Buttressing this is how he expresses later in 1870, his view of what had underlay Louis Napoleon’s rule – “it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation“:

“In their uninterrupted crusade against the producing masses, they were, however, bound not only to invest the executive with continually increased powers of repression, but at the same time to divest their own parliamentary stronghold – the National Assembly – one by one, of all its own means of defence against the Executive. The Executive, in the person of Louis Bonaparte, turned them out. The natural offspring of the “Party of Order” republic was the Second Empire.

The empire, with the coup d’etat for its birth certificate, universal suffrage for its sanction, and the sword for its sceptre, professed to rest upon the peasantry, the large mass of producers not directly involved in the struggle of capital and labor. It professed to save the working class by breaking down parliamentarism, and, with it, the undisguised subserviency of government to the propertied classes. It professed to save the propertied classes by upholding their economic supremacy over the working class; and, finally, it professed to unite all classes by reviving for all the chimera of national glory.

In reality, it was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation. It was acclaimed throughout the world as the savior of society. Under its sway, bourgeois society, freed from political cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself. Its industry and commerce expanded to colossal dimensions; financial swindling celebrated cosmopolitan orgies; the misery of the masses was set off by a shameless display of gorgeous, meretricious and debased luxury. The state power, apparently soaring high above society and the very hotbed of all its corruptions.”
MIA Marx’s 3rd Address to the International: MIA Marx on the Civil War chapter 5   

3. (xxxii) Engels and the “real religion of” rule of the “modern bourgeoisie”

Later on Engels used the designation of “Bonapartism” in 1866,  in his private correspondence to Marx. Engels syas that “Bonapartism” serves as the “real religion of” rule of the “modern bourgeoisie” – who do not “have the stuff” to rule directly by itself unless there is an “oligarchy.” Says Engels in 1866:

“So Bismarck has brought off his universal suffrage stroke even though without his Lassalle. It looks as if the German bourgeois will agree to it after some resistance, for Bonapartism is after all the real religion of the modern bourgeoisie. It is becoming more and more clear to me that the bourgeoisie has not the stuff in it to rule directly itself, and that therefore unless there is an oligarchy, as here in England, capable of taking over, for good pay, the management of state and society in the interests of the bourgeoisie, a Bonapartist semi-dictatorship is the normal form. It upholds the big material interests of the bourgeoisie even against the will of the bourgeoisie, but allows the bourgeoisie no share in the government. The dictatorship in its turn is forced against its will to adopt these material interests of the bourgeoisie as its own.”
Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx in Margate, 13 April 1866; from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence; Moscow, 1975 at: Marxist Internet Archive

It is true that very much later in 1884, Engels does use a formula giving credence to “state power as apparent mediator” between two forces are nearly equal. Now he sees a situation where there is a state power that balances various contending forces who are “nearly equal in force”:

“Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and the bourgeoisie against one another; and to the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.”
Frederick Engels; “Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State IX. Barbarism and Civilization”; first published in 1884; from version at MIA

However these are “exceptional periods”.

Conclusions

Marx’s views the accession of Louis Napoleon as a direct consequence of the urging of the “commercial bourgeoisie” for “order”. This would allow it to overcome an economic crisis.

Moreover all powers concerned that had emerged from the “Party of Order” were convinced that an armed dictatorship was necessary to suppress any re-emergence of “left” republicanism. They felt that there two choices –  giving up a republican parliament with an attendant risk of the workers finding their way back to a ‘red republicanism – or dictatorship. They chose the latter.

The later qualification as expressed by Engels – seems to sum up both the views of Marx and Engels – namely:

“It is becoming more and more clear… that the bourgeoisie has not the stuff in it to rule directly itself, and that therefore unless there is an oligarchy, as here in England, capable of taking over, for good pay, the management of state and society in the interests of the bourgeoisie, a Bonapartist semi-dictatorship is the normal form.”

 In concluding, the particular consequences of events in France should be noted. A French historian writes:

“Embodied in the Constitution voted in November 1848, this new republicanism strictly limited the expression of popular sovereignty to the election of legislators and leaders through male universal suffrage. As a result, the 1848 revolution allowed republicans to clarify their conception of what the people is, and how it should participate in politics in a Republic. While it has never become entirely hegemonic, this form of republicanism has been very influential throughout the nineteenth
and most of the twentieth centuries. This could explain a major distinctive feature of French republicanism: a long-standing distrust of the people, especially the poor, leading to a reluctance to accept their direct participation in public affairs. This has only recently been challenged by the movement of decentralization that began in the 1980s …”
Samuel Hayat; “The Revolution of 1848 in the History of French Republicanism”; History of Political Thought, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 331-353; (emphasis ours). 

MLRG.online 13 July, 2026