In England -- and the largest French manufacturers are petty bourgeois compared with their English rivals actually find the manufacturers, a Cobden, a Bright, at the head of the crusade against the bank and the stock-exchange aristocracy.Why not in France? In England industry predominates -- in France, agriculture.In England industry requires free trade; in France, protective tariffs, national monopoly alongside the other monopolies.French industry does not dominate French production; the French industrialists, therefore, do not dominate the French bourgeoisie.In order to secure the advancement of their interests as against the remaining factions of the bourgeoisie, they cannot, like the English, take the lead of the movement and simultaneously push their class interests to the fore; they must follow in the train of the revolution, and serve interests which are opposed to the collective interests of their class.In February they had misunderstood their position; February sharpened their wits.And who is more directly threatened by the workers than the employer, the industrial capitalists The manufacturer, therefore, of necessity became in France the most fanatical member of the party of Order.The reduction of his profit by finance, what is that compared with the abolition of profit by the proletariat?
In France, the petty bourgeois does what normally the industrial bourgeois would have to do; the worker does what normally would be the task of the petty bourgeois; and the task of the worker, who accomplishes that? No one.In France it is not accomplished; in France it is proclaimed.
It is not accomplished anywhere within the national boundaries.The class war within French society turns into a world war, in which the nations confront one another.Accomplishment begins only at the moment when, through the world war, the proletariat is pushed to the van of the people that dominates the world market, to the van of England.The revolution, which finds here not its end, but its organizational beginning, is no short-lived revolution.The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness.It not only has a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for the men who are able to cope fit a new world.
Let us return to Fould.
On November 14, 1849, Fould mounted the tribune of the National Assembly and expounded his system of finance: an apology for the old system of taxes! Retention of the wine tax! Abandonment of Passy's income tax!
Passy, too, was no revolutionist; he was an old minister of Louis Philippe's.He belonged to the Puritans of the Dufaure brand and to the most intimate confidants of Teste [10] , the scapegoat of the July Monarchy.Passy, too, had praised the old tax system and recommended the retention of the wine tax, but he had at the same time torn the veil from the state deficit.He had declared the necessity for a new tax, the income tax, if the bankruptcy of the state was to be avoided.Fould, who had recommended state bankruptcy to Ledru-Rollin, recommended the state deficit to the Legislative Assembly.He promised economies, the secret of which later revealed itself in that, for example, expenditures diminished by sixty millions while the floating debt increased by two hundred millions -- conjurers' tricks in the grouping of figures, in the drawing up of accounts, which all finally amounted to new loans.
Alongside the other jealous bourgeois factions, the finance aristocracy naturally did not act in so shamelessly corrupt a manner under Fould as under Louis Philippe.But once it existed, the system remained the same:
constant increase in the debts, masking of the deficit.And in time the old Bourse swindling came out more openly.Proof: the law concerning the Avignon Railway; the mysterious fluctuations in government securities, for a brief time the topic of the day throughout Paris; finally, the ill-starred speculations of Fould and Bonaparte on the elections of March 10.
With the official restoration of the finance aristocracy, the French people soon had to stand again before a February 24.
The Constituent Assembly, in an attack of misanthropy against its heir, had abolished the wine tax for the year of our Lord 1850.New debts could not be paid with the abolition of old taxes.Creton, a cretin of the party of Order, had moved the retention of the wine tax even before the Legislative Assembly recessed.Fould took up this motion in the name of the Bonapartist ministry and on December 20, 1849, the anniversary of the day Bonaparte was proclaimed President, the National Assembly decreed the restoration of the wine tax.
The sponsor of this restoration was not a financier; it was the Jesuit chief Montalembert.His argument was strikingly simple: Taxation is the maternal breast on which the government is suckled.The government is the instruments of repression; it is the organs of authority; it is the army; it is the police; it is the officials, the judges, the ministers;it is the priests.An attack on taxation is an attack by the anarchists on the sentinels of order, who safeguard the material and spiritual production of bourgeois society from the inroads of the proletarian vandals.Taxation is the fifth god, side by side with property, the family, order, and religion.
And the wine tax is incontestably taxation and, moreover, not ordinary, but traditional, monarchically disposed, respectable taxation.Vive l'impot des boissoins ! [Long live the tax on drinks!] Three cheers and one cheer more!
