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timeline, excerpted from chapter 6
1. First period. From February 24 to May 4, 1848. February period. Prologue. Universal-brotherhood swindle.
2. Second period. Period of constituting the republic and of the Constituent National Assembly.
a. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.
b. June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by the election of Bonaparte as President.
c. December 20, 1848, to May 28, 1849. Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and with the party of Order in alliance with him. Passing of the Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie.
3. Third period. Period of the constitutional republic and of the Legislative National Assembly.
a. May 28, 1849, to June 13, 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy.
b. June 13, 1849, to May 31, 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of Order. It completes its rule by abolishing universal suffrage, but loses the parliamentary ministry.
c. May 31, 1850, to December 2, 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte.
(1) May 31, 1850, to January 12, 1851. The Assembly loses the supreme command of the army.
(2) January 12 to April 11, 1851. It is worsted in its attempts to regain the administrative power. The party of Order loses its independent parliamentary majority. It forms a coalition with the republicans and the Montagne.
(3) April 11, 1851, to October 9, 1851. Attempts at revision, fusion, prorogation. The party of Order decomposes into its separate constituents. The breach between the bourgeois parliament and press and the mass of the bourgeoisie becomes definite.
(4) October 9 to December 2, 1851. Open breach between parliament and the executive power. The Assembly performs its dying act and succumbs, left in the lurch by its own class, by the army, and by all the remaining classes. Passing of the parliamentary regime and of bourgeois rule. Victory of Bonaparte. Parody of restoration of empire.
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(preface to 2nd edition, Marx):" Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. With so complete a difference between the material, economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figures produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel."
(595-596): "But unheroic as bourgeois society is, yet it had need of heroism, of sacrifice, of terror, of civil war and of national battles to bring it into being." [and such heroism, of course, lends their world the illusion of the universal--when they confront post-revolutionary sobriety, of course, the 'icy waters' of bourgeois life reassert themselves]
(597): outstanding--the bourgeoisie has lost its fire, enter the proletariat, who have no time for the propaganda of the past: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself, before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required world-historical recollections in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase."
(597-598): how can you summarize the brilliance of this? the proletarian revolution, as one which will--for all the halting alliances with the bourgeoisie, for all the searching criticisms and tactical confusion--have to make the leap itself ["hic rhodus, hic salta!"]
(599): Delineating three main periods: (1) The February period; (2) The period of the Constituent National Assembly [May 1848 to May 1849]; (3) The period of the National Assembly [May 1849 to December 1851].
(599-600): The first period -- provisional, as "prologue." introduced, of course, the explicit spectre of the "social republic," which the proletariat was capable of "immediately realizing in practice." [reaching, this?]
(600-603): The second period -- the elections were "a living protest against the presumptuous aspirations of the February days and was to reduce the results of the Revolution to the bourgeois scale." From bourgeois monarchy to bourgeois republic, then--to which "the Paris proletariat responded with the June insurrection... the bourgeois republic triumphed." [no doubt, the homogeneity of the revolutionaries will be interrogated--"On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself."--Hobsbawm seems to prefer the term "labouring poor."]
(601): can equally be commentary on the non-viability of anarchist projects--after defeat, the proletariat sought "to achieve its salvation behind society's back, in private fashion [through cooperatives, exchange banks, etc.]" This is all merely symptomatic of its weakness and loss...
(602): it is this defeat, of course, that reveals that there are other questions, beside monarchy vs. progress. the social question is revealed unto the world--"the unlimited despotism" of the bourgeoisie.
[sections 2-6 not included in Tucker's excerpt]
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(chapter 2): "On the other hand, what was clear as daylight to it, and was publicly acknowledged at the reform banquets in the last days of Louis Philippe, was its unpopularity with the democratic petty bourgeois, and in particular with the revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as is indeed the way with pure republicans, were already at the point of contenting themselves in the first instance with a regency of the Duchess of Orleans[80] when the February Revolution broke out and assigned their best-known representatives a place in the Provisional Government." [in other words, the seeds for the bourgeoisie's betrayal were in place, well before the suppression of the June insurrection--having said that, it must be noted that Marx and Engels didn't have this unambiguous a relationship to the "permanent revolution," in advance]
(chapter 2): "The republican bourgeois faction, which had long regarded itself as the legitimate heir of the July Monarchy, thus found its fondest hopes exceeded; it attained power, however, not as it had dreamed under Louis Philippe, through a liberal revolt of the bourgeoisie against the throne, but through a rising of the proletariat against capital, a rising laid low with grapeshot. What it had conceived as the most revolutionary event turned out in reality to be the most counterrevolutionary. The fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life."
(chapter 2): "Where it forbids these liberties entirely to “the others,” or permits enjoyment of them under conditions that are just so many police traps, this always happens solely in the interest of “public safety” – that is, the safety of the bourgeoisie – as the constitution prescribes. In the sequel, both sides accordingly appeal with complete justice to the constitution: the friends of order, who abrogated all these liberties, as well as the democrats, who demanded all of them. For each paragraph of the constitution contains its own antithesis, its own upper and lower house, namely, liberty in the general phrase, abrogation of liberty in the marginal note. Thus so long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual realization prevented, of course in a legal way, the constitutional existence of liberty remained intact, inviolate, however mortal the blows dealt to its existence in actual life." [splendid deconstruction of the bourgeois game of appearances--State terror is always unintended, exception, or--if all else fails--done with a heavy heart.]
(chapter 2): "The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation, but the elected President in a personal relation, to the nation. The National Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this national spirit finds its incarnation. As against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the people."
(chapter 2): this is all an excellent indictment of all that earnest nonsense that envelops scholars and activists of constitutional law: "he constitution, which, like Achilles, had its weak spot, also had, like Achilles, a presentiment that it must go to an early death. It was sufficient for the constitution-making pure republicans to cast a glance from the lofty heaven of their ideal republic at the profane world to perceive how the arrogance of the royalists, the Bonapartists, the democrats, the communists, as well as their own discredit, grew daily in the same measure as they approached the completion of their great legislative work of art"
(chapter 2): ABSOLUTELY--the airy islands of bourgeois principle sit on seas of blood and terror: "While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy devising, discussing, and voting this constitution, Cavaignac outside the Assembly maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of Paris was the midwife of the Constituent Assembly in its travail of republican creation. If the constitution is subsequently put out of existence by bayonets, it must not be forgotten that it was likewise by bayonets, and these turned against the people, that it had to be protected in its mother’s womb and by bayonets that it had to be brought into existence."
(chapter 2): "The period from December 20, 1848, until the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in May, 1849, comprises the history of the downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After having founded a republic for the bourgeoisie, driven the revolutionary proletariat out of the field, and reduced the democratic petty bourgeoisie to silence for the time being, they are themselves thrust aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie, which justly impounds this republic as its property. This bourgeois mass was, however, royalist. One section of it, the large landowners, had ruled during the Restoration and was accordingly Legitimist. The other, the aristocrats of finance and big industrialists, had ruled during the July Monarchy and was consequently Orleanist." [remember, he is here, specifically, not even speaking about the bourgeoisie, in general--it is a specific section, the republican bourgeoisie, the most radical bourgeoisie, that comes in for scorn. most of the bourgeoisie were monarchists, of one and another sort (condensed into the Party of Order, who Bonaparte will cast aside later, from Dec 1848-Dec 1851]. it is the republicans--who have profited immensely from the rebellion of the proletarians, but then turn the State loose on them--that are here most deserving of Marx's righteous anger. and rightly so, for nothing was expected of the rest].
(chapter 2): "Bonaparte took note of all this invective against the legislative power, learned it by heart, and proved to the parliamentary royalists, on December 2, 1851, that he had learned from them. He repeated their own catchwords against them" [absolutely--beaten by their own stick]
(chapter 2): "A motive that particularly actuated the party of Order in forcibly cutting short the duration of the Constituent Assembly’s life was the organic laws supplementing the constitution, such as the law on education, the law on religious worship, etc. To the royalists in coalition it was most important that they themselves should make these laws and not let them be made by the republicans, who had grown mistrustful." [again--then it becomes the big bourgeoisie's turn to learn the lessons it helped teach the republicans]
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(603): reactionary role of the lumpenproletariat stands noted--relevant for our interests
(603-604): the bourgeoisie is betrayed, suffering on account of its own hesitancy and obduracy: "It suppressed every stirring in society by means of the state power; every stirring in its society is repressed by means of the state power."
(604): yet, of course, the parliamentary republic enshrines the bourgeoisie, at the same time
(606): even as they have, consciously, moved well past the bourgeoisie, they recognize the progressiveness of the parliamentary form they--for a brief minute--were willing to enshrine: "In parliament the nation made its general will the law, that is, it made the law of the ruling class its general will. Before the executive power it renounces all will of its own and surrenders itself to the superior orders of something alien, of authority."
(606-607): very fruitful pages here, for an analysis of the State -- under Napoleon III, Marx is suggesting, the State has finally metastasized into something autonomous from society. it has "made itself completely independent"--the outcome of a process of centralization. ["And yet the state power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class... the small peasants"]
(607): Bourbons were dynasty of landed elite; Orleans were dynasty of monarchy; and the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasantry, the mass of the French people [clearly, here, there is potential for relating this to analyses of fascism]
(608): CRITICAL: analysis of the small peasantry, whose dispersal and isolated nature (as well as the fact that they're more dependent on nature than exchange for their livelihoods) renders them a "great mass." "The great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes." They form a class, in the sense that they live under specific conditions of production, of course. But not a class in the active sense--they're incapable of representing themselves; they must be represented. "The political influence of the small peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself." [it is absolutely imperative to intervene, here, with "Peasant Wars of the 20th Century," if that's at all appropriate--we can state, in other words, the general thesis that this is a historically specific assertion Marx is making. but it must, also, be more specific. what is crucial, also, is that on the next page--pg. 609--Marx is immediately making a distinction between the "revolutionary" and "reactionary" peasantry. Bonaparte "represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasantry."]
(610): brilliantly put--"The bourgeoisie, to be sure, is bound to fear the stupidity of the masses, as long as they remain conservative, and the insight of the masses, as soon as they become revolutionary."
(610): the untenability of the Napoleonic form of peasant property (presumably the small-holding)--the peasant does not see this as the cause of his own pauperism, but Marx is diagnosing it as such. the small-holder, obviously, cannot stay afloat--qua smallholder--for very long, in a market. it is a temporary, stop-gap measure--a temporary relief from feudalism, which will only deliver the peasantry, before long, into the lap of the urban usurer [this is relevant as we think back, and forward...]--"The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly arisen small holding and manured it with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks out its blood and marrow and throws them into the alchemistic cauldron of capital."
(611-612): it is this subordination of the peasantry to bourgeois capital which sets the stage, it seems, for a potential alliance between them, and the urban proletariat [this is critical, insofar as it complicates, already, the simple 'sack-of-potatoes' shibboleths]
(613): this small-holding, which is burdened by debts, isn't even vulnerable to co-option via religion, he's arguing--to naked is the nonsense being fed him
(613): same, too, goes for the Napoleonic army--it too has run its course [he has thus, traced the obsolescence of five Napoleonic ideas: the small-holding, the taxes, the bureaucracy, the priests, and the army]--"One sees: all idees napoleoniennes are the ideas of the undeveloped small holding in the freshness of its youth: for the small holding that has outlived its day they are an absurdity."
(614): and, here, pointing again to peasant-proletarian unity, it is precisely this non-viability of the State machine built on a discontented peasant base that will lay the groundwork for the proletarian revolution--in all peasant nations it was, otherwise, a "solo song [which became] a swan song"
(614): brilliant--the bourgeoisie, realizing its fate with Bonaparte: "Only theft can now save property; only perjury, religion; only bastardy, the family; only disorder, order!"
(615-616): the question, raised again, of the "autonomy" of Bonapartism. lots up for discussion, here: "Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one class without taking from another."
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