For this purpose the Provisional Government formed twenty -- four battalions of Mobile Guards, each a thousand strong, composed of young men from fifteen to twenty years old.They belonged for the most part to the lumpen proletariat, which in all big towns forms a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans et sans aveu [men without hearth or home], varying according to the degree of civilization of the nation to which they belong, but never renouncing their lazzaroni character -- at the youthful age at which the Provisional Government recruited them, thoroughly malleable, as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption.
The Provisional Government paid them franc 50 centimes a day; that is, it bought them.It gave them their own uniform; that is, it made them outwardly distinct from the blouse-wearing workers.In part it assigned officers from the standing army as their leaders; in part they themselves elected young sons of the bourgeoisie whose rodomontades about death for the fatherland and devotion to the republic captivated them.
And so the Paris proletariat was confronted with an army, drawn from its own midst, of 24,000 young, strong, foolhardy men.it gave cheers for the Mobile Guard on its marches through Paris.It acknowledged it to be its foremost fighters on the barricades.It regarded it as the proletarian guard in contradistinction to the bourgeois National Guard.Its error was pardonable.
Besides the Mobile Guard, the government decided to rally around itself an army of industrial workers.A hundred thousand workers, thrown on the streets by the crisis and the revolution, were enrolled by the Minister Marie in so-called national ateliers [workshops].Under this grandiose name was hidden nothing else than the employment of the workers on tedious, monotonous, unproductive earthworks at a wage of 23 sous.English workhouses in the open -- that is what these national ateliers were.The Provisional Government believed that it had formed, in them, a second proletarian army against the workers themselves.This time the bourgeoisie was mistaken in the national ateliers , just as the workers were mistaken in the Mobile Guard.It had created an army for mutiny.
But one purpose was achieved.
National ateliers was the name of the people's workshops which Louis Blanc preached in the Luxembourg Palace.Marie's ateliers , devised in direct antagonism to the Luxembourg, offered occasion, thanks to the common label, for a comedy of errors worthy of the Spanish servant farce.The Provisional Government itself surreptitiously spread the report that these national ateliers were the discovery of Louis Blanc, and this seemed the more plausible because Louis Blanc, the prophet of the national ateliers , was a member of the Provisional Government.
And in the half-naive, half-intentional confusion of the Paris bourgeoisie, in the artificially molded opinion of France, of Europe, these workhouses were the first realization of socialism, which was put in the pillory, with them.
In their appellation, though not in their content, the national ateliers were the embodied protest of the proletariat against bourgeois industry, bourgeois credit, and the bourgeois republic.The whole hate of the bourgeoisie was therefore turned upon them.It had found in them, simultaneously, the point against which it could direct the attack, as soon as it was strong enough to break openly with the February illusions.
All the discontent, all the ill humor of the petty bourgeois too was directed against these national ateliers , the common target.With real fury they totted up the money the proletarian loafers swallowed up While their own situation was becoming daily more unbearable.A state pension for sham labor, so that's socialism! they grumbled to themselves.They sought the reason for their misery in the national ateliers , the declamations of the Luxembourg, the processions of the workers through Paris.And no one was more fanatic about the alleged machinations of the communists than the petty bourgeoisie, who hovered hopelessly on the brink of bankruptcy.
Thus in the approaching melee between bourgeoisie and proletariat, all the advantages, all the decisive posts, all the middle strata of society were in the hands of the bourgeoisie, at the same time as the waves of the February Revolution rose high over the whole Continent, and each new post brought a new bulletin of revolution, now from Italy, now from Germany, now from the remotest parts of southeastern Europe, and maintained the general ecstasy of the people, giving it constant testimony of a victory that it had already forfeited.
March 17 and April 16 were the first skirmishes in the big class struggle which the bourgeois republic hid under its wing.
