Nothing is more understandable, then, than that the Paris proletariat sought to secure the advancement of its own interests side by side with those of the bourgeoisie, instead of enforcing them as the revolutionary interests of society itself, that it let the red flag be lowered to the tricolor.
The French workers could not take a step forward, could not touch a hair of the bourgeois order, until the course of the revolution had aroused the mass of the nation, peasants and petite bourgeois, standing between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, against this order, against the rule of capital, and had forced it to attach itself to the proletarians as its protagonists.The workers could buy this victory only through the tremendous defeat in June.
The Luxembourg Commission, this creation of the Paris workers, must be given the credit of having disclosed, from a Europe-wide tribune, the secret of the revolution of the nineteenth century: the emancipation, of the proletariat.The Moniteur blushed when it had to propagate officially the "wild ravings" which up to that time had lain buried in the apocryphal writings of the socialists and reached the ear of the bourgeoisie only from time to time as remote, half-terrifying, half-ludicrous legends.Europe awoke astonished from its bourgeois doze.Therefore, in the minds of the proletarians, who confused the finance aristocracy with the bourgeoisie in general; in the imagination of the good old republicans who denied the very existence of classes or, at most, admitted them as a result of the constitutional monarchy; in the hypocritical phrases of the factions of the bourgeoisie which up to now had been excluded from power, the rule of the bourgeoisie was abolished with the introduction of the republic.
At that time all the royalists were transformed into republicans and all the millionaires of Paris into workers.The phrase which corresponded to this imaginary abolition of class relations was fraternite , universal fraternization and brotherhood.This pleasant abstraction from class antagonisms, this sentimental reconciliation of contradictory class interests, this visionary elevation above the class struggle, this fraternite, was the real catchword of the February Revolution.The classes were divided by a mere misunderstanding, and on February 24 Lamartine christened the Provisional Government " une gouvernement qui suspends ce mal entendu terrible qui existe entre les differentes classes " [a government that removes this terrible misunderstanding which exists between the different classes].
The Paris proletariat reveled in this magnanimous intoxication of fraternity.
The Provisional Government, for its part, once it was compelled to proclaim the republic, did everything to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie and to the provinces.The bloody terror of the first French republic was disavowed by the abolition of the death penalty for political offenses;the press was opened to all opinions -- the army, the courts, the administration remained with a few exceptions in the hands of their old dignitaries; none of the July Monarchy's great offenders was brought to book.The bourgeois republicans of the National amused themselves by exchanging monarchist names and costumes for old republican ones.To them the republic was only a new ball dress for the old bourgeois society.The young republic sought its chief merit not in frightening, but rather in constantly taking fright itself, and in winning existence and disarming resistance by soft compliance and nonresistance.At home to the privileged classes, abroad to the despotic powers, it was loudly announced that the republic was of a peaceful nature.
Live and let live was its professed motto.In addition to that, shortly after the February Revolution the Germans, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, and Italians revolted, each people in accordance with its immediate situation.
Russia and England -- the latter itself agitated, the former cowed -- were not prepared.The republic, therefore, had no national enemy to face.Consequently there were no great foreign complications which could fire the energies, hasten the revolutionary process, drive the Provisional Government forward or throw it overboard.The Paris proletariat, which looked upon the republic as its own creation, naturally acclaimed each act of the Provisional Government which facilitated the firm emplacement of the latter in bourgeois society.
It willingly allowed itself to be employed on police service by Caussidière in order to protect property in Paris, just as it allowed Louis Blanc to arbitrate wage disputes between workers and masters.It made it a point d'honneur to preserve the bourgeois honor of the republic unblemished in the eyes of Europe.
The republic encountered no resistance either abroad or at home.
This disarmed it.Its task was no longer the revolutionary transformation of the world, but consisted only in adapting itself to the relations of bourgeois society.As to the fanaticism with which the Provisional Government undertook this task there is no more eloquent testimony than its financial measures.
Public credit and private credit were naturally shaken.Public credit rests on confidence that the state will allow itself to be exploited by the wolves of finance.But the old state had vanished and the revolution was directed above all against the finance aristocracy.The vibrations of the last European commercial crisis had not yet ceased.Bankruptcy still followed bankruptcy.
