第34章

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.

Thus the constitutional republic had gone forth from the hands of the bourgeois republicans as a hollow ideological formula to become a form full of content and life in the hands of the royalists in coalition.

And Thiers spoke more truly than he suspects when he said: "We, the royalists, are the true pillars of the constitutional republic."The overthrow of the ministry of the coalition and the appearance of the ministry of the clerks has a second significance.Its Finance Minister was Fould.Fould as Finance Minister signifies the official surrender of France's national wealth to the Bourse, the management of the state's property by the Bourse and in the interests of the Bourse.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.

Louis Philippe had never dared to make a genuine loup-cervier [stock-exchange wolf] finance minister.just as his monarchy was the ideal name for the rule of the big bourgeoisie, so in his ministries the privileged interests had to bear ideologically disinterested names.The bourgeois republic every where pushed into the forefront what the different monarchies, Legitimist as well as Orléanist, had kept concealed in the background.

It made earthly what they had made heavenly.In place of the names of the saints it put the bourgeois proper names of the dominant class interests.

Our whole exposition has shown how the republic, from the first day of its existence, did not overthrow but consolidated the finance aristocracy.

But the concessions made to it were a fate to which submission was made without the desire to bring it about.With Fould, the initiative in the government returned to the finance aristocracy.

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.

In a country like France, where the volume of national production stands at a disproportionately lower level than the amount of the national debt, where government bonds form the most important subject of speculation and the Bourse the chief market for the investment of capital that wants to turn itself to account in an unproductive way -- in such a country a countless number of people from all bourgeois or semibourgeois classes must have an interest in the state debt, in the Bourse gamblings, in finance.

Do not all these interested subalterns find their natural mainstays and commanders in the faction which represents this interest in its vastest outlines, which represents it as a whole?

What conditions the accrual of state property to high finance?

The constantly growing indebtedness of the state.And the indebtedness of the state? The constant excess of its expenditure over its income, a disproportion which is simultaneously the cause and effect of the system of state loans.

In order to escape from this indebtedness, the state must either restrict its expenditure, that is, simplify and curtail the government organism, govern as little as possible, employ as few personnel as possible, enter as little as possible into relations with bourgeois society.This path was impossible for the party of Order, whose means of repression, official interference in the name of the state, and ubiquity through organs of state were bound to increase in the same measure as the number of quarters increased from which its rule and the conditions for the existence of its class were threatened.The gendarmerie cannot be reduced in the same measure as attacks on persons and property increase.

Or the state must seek to evade the debts and produce an immediate but transitory balance in its budget by putting extraordinary taxes on the shoulders of the wealthiest classes.But was the party of Order to sacrifice its own wealth on the altar of the fatherland to stop the national wealth from being exploited by the Bourse? Pas si bete ! [Not so stupid!]

Therefore, without a complete revolution in the French state, no revolution in the French state budget.Along with this state budget necessarily goes the lordship of the trade in state debts, of the state creditors, the bankers, the money dealers, and the wolves of the Bourse.

Only one faction of the party of Order was directly concerned in the overthrow of the finance aristocracy -- the manufacturers.We are not speaking of the middle, of the smaller people engaged in industry; we are speaking of the reigning princes of the manufacturing interests, who had formed the broad basis of the dynastic opposition under Louis Philippe.Their interest is indubitably reduction of the costs of production and hence reduction of the taxes, which enter into production, and hence reduction of the state debts, the interest on which enters into the taxes, hence the overthrow of the finance aristocracy.