The gradual revolutionizing of the peasants was manifested by various symptoms.It early revealed itself in the elections to the Legislative Assembly -- it was revealed in the state of siege in the five departments bordering Lyon; it was revealed a few months after June 13 in the election of a Montagnard in place of the former president of the Chambre introuvable [11] by the Department of the Gironde; it was revealed on December 20, 1849, in the election of a red in place of a deceased Legitimist deputy in the Department du Gard, that promised land of the Legitimists, the scene of the most frightful infamies committed against the republicans in 1794 and 1795 and the center of the white terror in 1815, when liberals and Protestants were publicly murdered.This revolutionizing of the most stationary class is most clearly evident since the reintroduction of the wine tax.The governmental measures and the laws of January and February, 1850, are directed almost exclusively against the departments and the peasants.
The most striking proof of their progress.
The Hautpout circular, by which the gendarme was appointed inquisitor of the prefect, of the subprefect, and, above all, of the mayor, and by which espionage was organized even in the hidden corners of the remotest village community; the law against the schoolteachers, by which they (the men of talent, the spokesmen, the educators and interpreters of the peasant class) were subjected to the arbitrary power of the prefect -- they, the proletarians of the learned class, were chased like hunted beasts from one community to another; the bill against the mayors, by which the Damocles sword of dismissal was hung over their heads, and they, the presidents of the peasant communities, were every moment set in opposition to the President of the Republic and the party of Order; the ordinance which transformed the seventeen military districts of France into four pashaliks and forced the barracks and the bivouac on the French as their national salon; the education law, by which the party of Order proclaimed unconsciousness and the forcible stupefaction of France as the condition of its life under the regime of universal suffrage what were all these laws and measures?
Desperate attempts to reconquer the departments and the peasants of the departments for the party of Order.
Regarded as repression, they were wretched methods that wrung the neck of their own purpose.The big measures, like the retention of the wine tax, of the 45-centime tax, the scornful rejection of peasant petitions for the repayment of the milliard, etc., all these legislative thunderbolts struck the peasant class all at once, wholesale, from the center; the laws and measures cited made attack and resistance general, the topic of the day in every hut; they inoculated every village with revolution;they localized and peasantized the revolution.
On the other hand, do not these proposals of Bonaparte and their acceptance by the National Assembly prove the unity of the two powers of the constitutional republic, so far as it is a question of repression of anarchy -- that is, of all the classes that rise against the bourgeois dictatorship? Did not Soulouque [Louis Bonaparte], directly after his brusque message, assure the Legislative Assembly of his divouement [devotion]
to order, through the immediately following message of Carlier, that dirty, mean caricature of Fouche, as Louis Bonaparte himself was the shallow caricature of Napoleon?
The education law shows us the alliance of the young Catholics with the old Voltaireans.Could the rule of the united bourgeois be anything else but the coalesced despotism of the pro-Jesuit Restoration and the make -- believe free -- thinking July Monarchy? Had not the weapons that the one bourgeois faction had distributed among the people against the other faction, in their mutual struggle for supremacy, again been torn from it, the people, since the latter was confronting their united dictatorship?
Nothing has aroused the Paris shopkeeper more than this coquettish italage [display] of Jesuitism, not even the rejection of the concordats d l'amiable.
