March 17 revealed the proletariat's ambiguous situation, which permitted no decisive act.Its demonstration originally pursued the purpose of pushing the Provisional Government back onto the path of revolution, of effecting the exclusion of its bourgeois members, according to circumstances, and of compelling the postponement of the elections for the National Assembly and the National Guard.But on March 16 the bourgeoisie represented in the National Guard staged a hostile demonstration against the Provisional Government.With the cry A bas Ledru-Rollin ! it surged to the H6tel de Ville.And the people were forced, on March 17, to shout: Long live Ledru-Rollin! Long live the Provisional Government! They were forced to take sides against the bourgeoisie in support of the bourgeois republic, which seemed to them to be in danger.They strengthened the Provisional Government, instead of subordinating it to themselves.March 17 went off in a melodramatic scene, and whereas the Paris proletariat on this day once more displayed its giant body, the bourgeoisie both inside and outside the Provisional Government was all the more determined to smash it.
April 16 was a misunderstanding engineered by the Provisional Government in alliance with the bourgeoisie.The workers had gathered in great numbers in the Champ de Mars and in the Hippodrome to choose their nominees to the general staff of the National Guard.Suddenly throughout Paris, from one end to the other, a rumor spread as quick as lightning, to the effect that the workers had met armed in the Champ de Mars, under the leadership of Louis Blanc, Blanqui, Cabet, and Raspail, in order to march thence on the H6tel de Ville, overthrow the Provisional Government, and proclaim a communist government.The general alarm is sounded -- Ledru-Rollin, Marrast, and Lamartine later contended for the honor of having initiated this -- and in an hour 100,000 men are under arms; the H6tel de Ville is occupied at all points by the National Guard; the cry Down with the Communists!
Down with Louis Blanc, with Blanqui, with Raspail, with Cabet! thunders throughout Paris.Innumerable deputations pay homage to the Provisional Government, all ready to save the fatherland and society.When the workers finally appear before the H6tel de Ville, in order to hand over to the Provisional Government a patriotic collection they had made in the Champ de Mars, they learn to their amazement that bourgeois Paris has defeated their shadow in a very carefully calculated sham battle.The terrible attempt of April 16 furnished the excuse for recalling the army to Paris -- the real purpose of the clumsily staged comedy and for the reactionary federalist demonstrations in the provinces.
On May 4 the National Assembly [4] met the result of the direct general elections, convened.Universal suffrage did not possess the magic power which republicans of the old school had ascribed to it.
They saw in the whole of France, at least in the majority of Frenchmen, citoyens with the same interests, the same understanding, etc.This was their cult of the people.Instead of their imaginary people, the elections brought the real people to the light of day; that is, representatives of the different classes into which it falls.We have seen why peasants and petty bourgeois had to vote under the leadership of a bourgeoisie spoiling for a fight and of big landowners frantic for restoration.But if universal suffrage was not the miracle -- working magic wand the republican worthies had taken it for, it possessed the incomparable higher merit of unchaining the class struggle, of letting the various middle strata of bourgeois society rapidly get over their illusions and disappointments, of tossing all the sections of the exploiting class at one throw to the apex of the state, and thus tearing from them their deceptive mask, whereas the monarchy with its property qualifications had let only certain factions of the bourgeoisie compromise themselves, allowing the others to lie hidden behind the scenes and surrounding them with the halo of a common opposition.
In the Constituent National Assembly, which met on May 4, the bourgeois republicans, the republicans of the National, had the upper hand.
Even Legitimists and Orléanists at first dared to show themselves only under the mask of bourgeois republicanism.The fight against the proletariat could be undertaken only in the name of the republic.
The republic dates from May 4, not from February 25 -- that is, the republic recognized by the French people; it is not the republic which the Paris proletariat thrust upon the Provisional Government, not the republic with social institutions, not the vision that hovered before the fighters on the barricades.The republic proclaimed by the National Assembly, the sole legitimate republic, is a republic which is no revolutionary weapon against the bourgeois order, but rather its political reconstitution, the political reconsolidation of bourgeois society; in a word, a bourgeois republic.This contention resounded from the tribune of the National Assembly, and in the entire republican and antirepublican bourgeois press it found its echo.
And we have seen how the February Republic in reality was not and could not be other than a bourgeois republic; how the Provisional Government, nevertheless, was forced by the immediate pressure of the proletariat to announce it as a republic with social institutions; how the Paris proletariat was still incapable of going beyond the bourgeois republic otherwise than in its fancy, in imagination; how even where the republic acted in the service of the bourgeoisie when it really came to action; how the promises made to it became an unbearable danger for the new republic; how the whole life process of the Provisional Government was comprised in a continuous fight against the demands of the proletariat.
