The Constituent Assembly resembled the Chilean official who wanted to regulate property relations in land more firmly by a cadastral survey just at the moment when subterranean rumblings announced the volcanic eruption that was to hurl away the land from under his very feet.While in theory it accurately marked off the forms in which the rule of the bourgeoisie found republican expression, in reality it held its own only by the abolition of all formulas, by force sans phrase , by the state of siege.Two days before it began its work on the constitution, it proclaimed an extension of the state of siege.Formerly constitutions had been made and adopted as soon as the social process of revolution had reached a point of rest, the newly formed class relationships had established themselves, and the contending factions of the ruling class had had recourse to a compromise which allowed them to continue the struggle among themselves and at the same time to keep the exhausted masses of the people out of it.This constitution, on the contrary, did not sanction any social revolution -- it sanctioned the momentary victory of the old society over the revolution.
The first draft of the constitution, made before the June days, still contained the droit au travail, the right to work, the first clumsy formula wherein the revolutionary demands of the proletariat are summarized.
It was transformed into the droit a l'assistance , the right to public relief, and what modern state does not feed its paupers in some form or other? The right to work is, in the bourgeois sense, an absurdity, a miserable, pious wish.But behind the right to work stands the power over capital;behind the power over capital, the appropriation of the means of production, their subjection to the associated working class, and therefore the abolition of wage labor, of capital, and of their mutual relations.Behind the "right to work" stood the June insurrection.The Constituent Assembly, which in fact put the revolutionary proletariat hors la loi , outside the law, had on principle to throw the proletariat's formula out of the constitution, the law of laws; had to pronounce its anathema upon the "right to work."But it did not stop there.As Plato banned the poets from his republic, so it banished forever from its republic the progressive tax.And the progressive tax is not only a bourgeois measure, which can be carried out within the existing relations of production to a greater or less degree, it was the only means of binding the middle strata of bourgeois society to the "respectable"republic, of reducing the state debt, of holding the antirepublican majority of the bourgeoisie in check.
In the matter of the concordats d I'amiable , the tricolor republicans had actually sacrificed the petty bourgeoisie to the big bourgeoisie.
They elevated this isolated fact to a principle by the legal prohibition of a progressive tax.They put bourgeois reform on the same level as proletarian revolution.But what class then remained as the mainstay of their republic?
The big bourgeoisie.And its mass was antirepublican.While it exploited the republicans of the National in order to consolidate again the old relations of economic life, it thought, on the other hand, of exploiting the once more consolidated social relations in order to restore the political forms that corresponded to them.As early as the beginning of October, Cavaignac felt compelled to make Dufaure and Vivien, previously ministers of Louis Philippe, ministers of the republic, however much the brainless puritans of his own party growled and blustered.
While the tricolor constitution rejected every compromise with the petty bourgeoisie and was unable to win the attachment of any new social element to the new form of government, it hastened, on the other hand, to restore its traditional inviolability to a body that constituted the most hard -- bitten and fanatical defender of the old state.It raised the irremovability of judges, which had been questioned by the Provisional Government, to an organic law.The one king whom it had removed rose again, by the score, in these irremovable inquisitors of legality.
The French press has analyzed from numerous aspects the contradictions of M.Marrast's constitution, for example, the coexistence of two sovereigns, the National Assembly and the President, etc., etc.
The comprehensive contradiction of this constitution, however, consists in the following: The classes whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate -- proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie puts in possession of political power through universal suffrage.And from the class whose old social power it sanctions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the political guarantees of this power.It forces the political rule of the bourgeoisie into democratic conditions, which at every moment help the hostile classes to victory and jeopardize the very foundations of bourgeois society.From the first group it demands that they should not go forward from political to social emancipation; from the others that they should not go back from social to political restoration.
These contradictions perturbed the bourgeois republicans little.
To the extent that they ceased to be indispensable -- and they were indispensable only as the protagonists of the old society against the revolutionary proletariat -- they fell, a few weeks after their victory, from the position of a party to that of a coterie.And they treated the constitution as a big intrigue.
What was to be constituted in it was, above all, the rule of the coterie.
