第43章

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 373,000,000francs (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 1850its 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.This result becomes still more evident from the following survey of French bank legislation during the last few years.On June 10, 1847, the Bank was authorized to issue notes Of 200 francs; hitherto the smallest denomination had been 500 francs.A decree of March 15, 1848, declared the notes of the Bank of France legal tender and relieved it of the obligation of redeeming them in specie.Its note issue was limited to 350,000,000 francs.It was simultaneously authorized to issue notes of 100 francs.A decree of April 27 prescribed the merging of the departmental banks in the Bank of France; another decree, of May 2, 1848, increased the latter's note issue to 442,000,000 francs.

A decree of December 22, 1849, raised the maximum of the note issue to 525,000,000 francs.Finally, the law of August 6, 185o, reestablished the exchangeability of notes for specie.These facts, the continual increase in the circulation, the concentration of the whole of French credit in the hands of the Bank, and the accumulation of all French gold and silver in the Bank's vaults led M.Proudhon to the conclusion that the Bank must now shed its old snakeskin and metamorphose itself into a Proudhonist people's bank.He did not even need to know the history of the English bank restriction from 1797 to 1819; he only needed to direct his glance across the Channel to see that this fact, for him unprecedented in the history of bourgeois society, was nothing more than a very normal bourgeois event, which only now occurred in France for the first time.One sees that the allegedly revolutionary theoreticians who, after the Provisional Government, talked big in Paris were just as ignorant of the nature and the results of the measures taken as the gentlemen of the Provisional Government themselves.

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.

just as the period of crisis began later on the Continent than in England, so also did prosperity.The process originated in England, which is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos.On the Continent the various phases of the cycle repeatedly experienced by bourgeois society assume a secondary and tertiary form.First, the Continent exports to England disproportionately more than to any other country.This export to England, however, depends on the latter's position, especially in regard to the overseas market.England exports disproportionately more to overseas countries than to the whole Continent, so that the quantity of continental exports to those countries is always dependent on England's foreign trade.Hence when crises on the Continent produce revolutions there first, the bases for them are always laid in England.Violent outbreaks naturally erupt sooner at the extremities of the bourgeois body than in its heart, because in the latter the possibilities of accommodation are greater than in the former.On the other hand, the degree to which continental revolutions affect England is at the same time the thermometer that indicates to what extent these revolutions really put into question bourgeois life conditions, and to what extent they touch only their political formations.

Given this general prosperity, wherein the productive forces of bourgeois society arc developing as luxuriantly as it is possible for them to do within bourgeois relationships, a real revolution is out of the question.

Such a revolution is possible only in periods when both of these factors -- the modern forces of production and the bourgeois forms of production -- come into opposition with each other.The various bickerings in which representatives of the individual factions of the continental party of Order presently engage and compromise each other, far from providing an occasion for revolution, are, on the contrary, possible only because the bases of relationships are momentarily so secure and -- what the reactionaries do not know -- so bourgeois.On this all the reactionary attempts to hold back bourgeois development will rebound just as much as will all the ethical indignation and all the enraptured proclamations of the democrats.A new revolution is only a consequence of a new crisis.The one, however, is as sure to come as the other.