第27章

In the latter half of the life of the Constituent Assembly it represented the Assembly's republican fervor and caused to be buried in oblivion its sins during the Provisional Government, during the Executive Commission, during the June days.In the same measure as the party of the National, in accordance with its half-and-half nature, had allowed itself to be put down by the royalist ministry, the party of the Mountain, which had been brushed aside during the omnipotence of the National, rose and asserted itself as the parliamentary representative of the revolution.In fact, the party of the National had nothing to oppose to the other, royalist factions but ambitious personalities and idealistic humbug.The party of the Mountain, on the contrary, represented a mass hovering between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a mass whose material interests demanded democratic institutions.In comparison with the Cavaignacs and the Marrasts, Ledru-Rollin and the Montagne, therefore, represented the true revolution, and from the consciousness of this important situation they drew the greater courage the more the expression of revolutionary energy limited itself to parliamentary attacks, bringing in bills of impeachment, threats, raised voices, thundering speeches, and extremes which were pushed only as far as phrases.The peasants were in about the same position as the petty bourgeoisie;they had more or less the same social demands to put forward.All the middle strata of society, so far as they were driven into the revolutionary movement, were therefore bound to find their hero in Ledru-Rollin.Ledru-Rollin was the personage of the democratic petty bourgeoisie.As against the party of Order, the half-conservative, half-revolutionary, and wholly utopian reformers of this order had first to be pushed to the forefront.

The party of the National, "the Friends of the Constitution quand meme, the republicains purs et simples , were completely defeated in the elections.A tiny minority of them was sent into the Legislative Chamber;their most noted leaders vanished from the stage, even Marrast, the editor in chief and the Orpheus of the respectable republic.

On May 28 the Legislative Assembly convened; on June 11 the collision of May 8 was renewed and, in the name of the Montagne, Ledru-Rollin brought in a bill of impeachment against the President and the ministry for violation of the constitution, for the bombardment of Rome.On June 12 the Legislative Assembly rejected the bill of impeachment, just as the Constituent Assembly had rejected it on May 11, but the proletariat this time drove the Montagne onto the streets -- not to a street battle, however, but only to a street procession.It is enough to say that the Montagne was at the head of this movement to know that the movement was defeated, and that June, 1849, was a caricature, as ridiculous as it was vile, of June, 1848.The great retreat of June 13 was eclipsed only by the still greater battle report of Changarnier, the great man that the party of Order improvised.Every social epoch needs its great men, and when it does not find them, it invents them, as Helvetius says.

On December 20 only one half of the constituted bourgeois republic was in existence: the President; on May 28 it was completed by the other half, the Legislative Assembly.In June, 1848, the constituent bourgeois republic, by an unspeakable battle against the proletariat, and in June, 1849, the constituted bourgeois republic, by an unutterable comedy with the petty bourgeoisie, engraved their names in the birth register of history.

June, 1849, was the nemesis of June, 1848.In June, 1849, it was not the workers that were vanquished; it was the petty bourgeois, who stood between them and the revolution, that were felled.June, I849, was not a bloody tragedy between wage labor and capital, but a prison-filling and lamentable play of debtors and creditors.The party of Order had won, it was all-powerful;it had now to show what it was.