Accordingly, France seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only in order to fall under the despotism of an individual, under the authority, at that of an individual without authority The struggle seems to settle down to the point where all classes drop down on their knees, equally impotent and equally dumb All the same, the revolution is thoroughgoing. It still is on its passage through purgatory. It does its work methodically: Down to December 2, 1851, it had fulfilled one-half of its programme, it now fulfils the other half. It first ripens the power of the Legislature into fullest maturity in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has accomplished that, the revolution proceeds to ripen the power of the Executive into equal maturity; it reduces this power to its purest expression; isolates it; places it before itself as the sole subject for reproof in order to concentrate against it all the revolutionary forces of destruction. When the revolution shall have accomplished this second part of its preliminary programme, Europe will jump up from her seat to exclaim: "Well hast thou grubbed, old mole!"
The Executive power, with its tremendous bureaucratic and military organization; with its wide-spreading and artificial machinery of government--an army of office-holders, half a million strong, together with a military force of another million men--; this fearful body of parasites, that coils itself like a snake around French society, stopping all its pores, originated at the time of the absolute monarchy, along with the decline of feudalism, which it helped to hasten. The princely privileges of the landed proprietors and cities were transformed into so many at-tributes of the Executive power; the feudal dignitaries into paid office-holders; and the confusing design of conflicting medieval seigniories, into the well regulated plan of a government, work is subdivided and centralized as in the factory. The first French revolution, having as a mission to sweep away all local, territorial, urban and provincial special privileges, with the object of establishing the civic unity of the nation, was hound to develop what the absolute monarchy had begun--the work of centralization, together with the range, the attributes and the menials of government. Napoleon completed this governmental machinery. The Legitimist and the July Monarchy contribute nothing thereto, except a greater subdivision of labor, that grew in the same measure as the division and subdivision of labor within bourgeois society raised new groups and interests, i.e., new material for the administration of government. Each Common interest was in turn forthwith removed from society, set up against it as a higher Collective interest, wrested from the individual activity of the members of society, and turned into a subject for governmental administration, from the bridges, the school house and the communal property of a village community, up to the railroads, the national wealth and the national University of France. Finally, the parliamentary republic found itself, in its struggle against the revolution, compelled, with its repressive measures, to strengthen the means and the centralization of the government. Each overturn, instead of breaking up, carried this machine to higher perfection. The parties, that alternately wrestled for supremacy, looked upon the possession of this tremendous governmental structure as the principal spoils of their victory.
Nevertheless, under the absolute monarchy, was only the means whereby the first revolution, and under Napoleon, to prepare the class rule of the bourgeoisie; under the restoration, under Louis Philippe, and under the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class, however eagerly this class strained after autocracy. Not before the advent of the second Bonaparte does the government seem to have made itself fully independent. The machinery of government has by this time so thoroughly fortified itself against society, that the chief of the "Society of December 10" is thought good enough to be at its head; a fortune-hunter, run in from abroad, is raised on its shield by a drunken soldiery, bought by himself with liquor and sausages, and whom he is forced ever again to throw sops to. Hence the timid despair, the sense of crushing humiliation and degradation that oppresses the breast of France and makes her to choke. She feels dishonored.
And yet the French Government does not float in the air. Bonaparte represents an economic class, and that the most numerous in the commonweal of France--the Allotment Farmer. [#4 The first French Revolution distributed the bulk of the territory of France, held at the time by the feudal lords, in small patches among the cultivators of the soil. This allotment of lands created the French farmer class.]
As the Bourbons are the dynasty of large landed property, as the Orleans are the dynasty of money, so are the Bonapartes the dynasty of the farmer, i.e. of the French masses. Not the Bonaparte, who threw himself at the feet of the bourgeois parliament, but the Bonaparte, who swept away the bourgeois parliament, is the elect of this farmer class. For three years the cities had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the election of December 10, and in cheating the farmer out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of December 10, 1848, is not carried out until the "coup d'etat" of December 2, 1851.
