Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte | Page 6

what seems to

have been accomplished, in order to start over anew; scorn with cruel
thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of their
first attempts; seem to throw down their adversary only in order to
enable him to draw fresh strength from the earth, and again, to rise up
against them in more gigantic stature; constantly recoil in fear before
the undefined monster magnitude of their own objects--until finally that
situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, and the
conditions themselves cry out:
"Hic Rhodus, hic salta !" [#2 Here is Rhodes, leap here! An allusion to
Aesop's Fables.]
Every observer of average intelligence; even if he failed to follow step
by step the course of French development, must have anticipated that
an unheard of fiasco was in store for the revolution. It was enough to
hear the self-satisfied yelpings of victory wherewith the Messieurs
Democrats mutually congratulated one another upon the pardons of
May 2d, 1852. Indeed, May 2d had become a fixed idea in their heads;
it had become a dogma with them--something like the day on which
Christ was to reappear and the Millennium to begin had formed in the
heads of the Chiliasts. Weakness had, as it ever does, taken refuge in
the wonderful; it believed the enemy was overcome if, in its
imagination, it hocus-pocused him away; and it lost all sense of the
present in the imaginary apotheosis of the future, that was at hand, and
of the deeds, that it had "in petto," but which it did not yet want to
bring to the scratch. The heroes, who ever seek to refute their
established incompetence by mutually bestowing their sympathy upon
one another and by pulling together, had packed their satchels, taken
their laurels in advance payments and were just engaged in the work of
getting discounted "in partibus," on the stock exchange, the republics
for which, in the silence of their unassuming dispositions, they had
carefully organized the government personnel. The 2d of December
struck them like a bolt from a clear sky; and the 'peoples, who, in
periods of timid despondency, gladly allow their hidden fears to be
drowned by the loudest screamers, will perhaps have become
convinced that the days are gone by when the cackling of geese could
save the Capitol.

The constitution, the national assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue
and the red republicans, the heroes from Africa, the thunder from the
tribune, the flash-lightnings from the daily press, the whole literature,
the political names and the intellectual celebrities, the civil and the
criminal law, the "liberte', egalite', fraternite'," together with the 2d of
May 1852--all vanished like a phantasmagoria before the ban of one
man, whom his enemies themselves do not pronounce an adept at
witchcraft. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a
moment, to the end that, before the eyes of the whole world, it should
make its own testament with its own hands, and, in the name of the
people, declare: "All that exists deserves to perish."
It is not enough to say, as the Frenchmen do, that their nation was taken
by surprise. A nation, no more than a woman, is excused for the
unguarded hour when the first adventurer who comes along can do
violence to her. The riddle is not solved by such shifts, it is only
formulated in other words. There remains to be explained how a nation
of thirty-six millions can be surprised by three swindlers, and taken to
prison without resistance.
Let us recapitulate in general outlines the phases which the French
revolution of' February 24th, 1848, to December, 1851, ran through.
Three main periods are unmistakable:
First--The February period;
Second--The period of constituting the republic, or of the constitutive
national assembly (May 4, 1848, to May 29th, 1849);
Third--The period of the constitutional republic, or of the legislative
national assembly (May 29, 1849, to December 2, 1851).
The first period, from February 24, or the downfall of Louis Philippe,
to May 4, 1848, the date of the assembling of the constitutive
assembly--the February period proper--may be designated as the
prologue of the revolution. It officially expressed its' own character in
this, that the government which it improvised declared itself

"provisional;" and, like the government, everything that was broached,
attempted, or uttered, pronounced itself provisional. Nobody and
nothing dared to assume the right of permanent existence and of an
actual fact. All the elements that had prepared or determined the
revolution--dynastic opposition, republican bourgeoisie,
democratic-republican small traders' class, social-democratic labor
element-all found "provisionally" their place in the February
government.
It could not be otherwise. The February days contemplated originally a
reform of the suffrage laws, whereby the area of the politically
privileged among the property-holding class was to be extended, while
the exclusive rule of the aristocracy of