The votes for Raspail -- the proletarians and their socialist spokesmen declared it loudly -- were to be merely a demonstration, so many protests against any presidency, that is, against the constitution itself, so many votes against Ledru-Rollin, the first act by which the proletariat, as an independent political party, declared its separation from the democratic party.This party, on the other hand -- the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its parliamentary representative, the Montagne [6] -- treated the candidature of Ledru-Rollin with all the seriousness with which it is in the habit of solemnly duping itself.For the rest, this was its last attempt to set itself up as an independent party, as against the proletariat.Not only the republican bourgeois party, but also the democratic petty bourgeoisie and its Montagne were beaten on December 10.
France now possessed a Napoleon side by side with a Montagne, proof that both were only the lifeless caricatures of the great realities whose names they bore.Louis Napoleon, with the emperor's hat and the eagle, parodied the old Napoleon no more miserably than the Montagne, with its phrases borrowed from 1793 and its demagogic poses, parodied the old Montagne.
Thus the traditional 1793 superstition was stripped off at the same time as the traditional Napoleon superstition.The revolution had come into its own only when it had won its own, its original name, and it could do that only when the modern revolutionary class, the industrial proletariat, came dominatingly into its foreground.One can say that December 10 dumfounded the Montagne and caused it to grow confused in its own mind, if for no other reason than because that day laughingly cut short with a contemptuous peasant jest the classical analogy to the old revolution.
On December 20 Cavaignac laid down his office and the Constituent Assembly proclaimed Louis Napoleon President of the Republic, On December 19, the last day of its sole rule, it reacted the proposal o amnesty for the June insurgents.Would revoking the decree of June 27, under which it had condemned 15,000 insurgents to deportation without judicial sentence, not have meant revoking the June battle itself.
Odilon Barrot, the last minister of Louis Philippe, became the first minister of Louis Napoleon.Just as Louis Napoleon dated his rule, not from December 10, but from a decree of the Senate of 1804, so he found a prime minister who did not date his ministry from December 20, but from a royal decree of February 24.As the legitimate heir of Louis Philippe, Louis Napoleon mollified the change of government by retaining the old ministry, which, moreover, had not had time to be worn out, since it had not found time to embark upon life.
The leaders of the royalist bourgeois factions advised him in this choice.The head of the old dynastic opposition, who had unconsciously constituted the transition to the republicans of the National, was still more fitted to constitute with full consciousness the transition from the bourgeois republic to the monarchy.
Odilon Barrot was the leader of the one old opposition party which, always fruitlessly struggling for ministerial portfolios, had not yet been used up.In rapid succession the revolution hurled all the old opposition parties to the top of the state, so that they would have to deny, to repudiate their old phrases not only in deeds but even in words, and might finally be flung all together, combined in a repulsive commixture, on the dung heap of history by the people.And no apostasy was spared this Barrot, this incarnation of bourgeois liberalism, who for eighteen years had hidden the rascally vacuity of his mind behind the serious demeanor of his body.
If at certain moments the far too striking contrast between the thistles of the present and the laurels of the past startled the man himself, one glance in the mirror gave him back his ministerial composure and human self-admiration.What beamed at him from the mirror was Guizot, whom he had always envied, who had always mastered him, Guizot himself, but Guizot with the Olympian forehead of Odilon.What he overlooked were the ears of Midas.
The Barrot of February 24 first became manifest in the Barrot of December 20.Associated with him, the Orléanist and Voltairean, was the Legitimist and Jesuit Falloux, as Minister of Public Worship.
A few days later, the Ministry of Home Affairs was given to Leon Faucher, the Malthusian.Law, religion, and political economy! The ministry of Barrot contained all this and, in addition, a combination of Legitimists and Orléanists.Only the Bonapartist was lacking.Bonaparte still hid his longing to signify Napoleon, for Soulouque did not yet play Toussaint L'Ouverture.
