Louis Philippe was the director of this companion -- Robert Macaire [1] on the throne.Trade, industry, agriculture, shipping, the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, were bound to be continually endangered and prejudiced under this system.Cheap government, government a bon marche , was what it had inscribed on its banner in the July days.
Since the finance aristocracy made the laws, was at the head of the administration of the state, had command of all the organized public authorities, dominated public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from the court to the Cafe Borgne [2] to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others, Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society -- lusts wherein 'wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes debauched, where money, filth, and blood commingle.The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpen proletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.
And the nonruling factions of the French bourgeoisie cried: Corruption!
The people cried: A bas les grands voleurs! A bas les assassins !
[Down with the big thieves! Down with the assassins! when in 1847, on the most prominent stages of bourgeois society, the same scenes were publicly enacted that regularly lead the lumpen proletariat to brothels, to workhouses and lunatic asylums, to the bar of justice, to the dungeon, and to the scaffold.The industrial bourgeoisie saw its interests endangered, the petty bourgeoisie was filled with moral indignation, the imagination of the people was offended, Paris was flooded with pamphlets -- "The Rothschild Dynasty," "Usurers Kings of the Epoch," etc.-- in which the rule of the finance aristocracy was denounced and stigmatized with greater or less wit.
Rien pour la gloire ! [Nothing for glory! Glory brings no profit!] La paix partout et toujours! [Peace everywhere and always!]
War depresses the quotations of the 3 and 4 percents which the France of the Bourse jobbers had inscribed on her banner.Her foreign policy was therefore lost in a series of mortifications to French national sentiment, which reacted all the more vigorously when the rape of Poland was brought to its conclusion with the incorporation of Cracow by Austria, and when Guizot came out actively on the side of the Holy Alliance in the Swiss separatist war.The victory of the Swiss liberals in this mimic war raised the self-respect of the bourgeois opposition in France; the bloody uprising of the people in Palermo worked like an electric shock on the paralyzed masses of the people and awoke their great revolutionary memories and passions.
The eruption of the general discontent was finally accelerated and the mood for revolt ripened by two economic world events.
The potato blight and the crop failures of I845 and 1846 increased the general ferment among the people.The famine of 1847 called forth bloody conflicts in France as well as on the rest of the Continent.As against the shameless orgies of the finance aristocracy, the struggle of the people for the prime necessities of life! At Buzançais, hunger rioters executed; in Paris, oversatiated escrocs [swindlers] snatched from the courts by the royal family!
The second great economic event that hastened the outbreak of the revolution was a general commercial and industrial crisis in England.
Already heralded in the autumn of 1845 by the wholesale reverses of the speculators in railway shares, staved off during 1846 by a number of incidents such as the impending abolition of the Corn Laws, the crisis finally burst in the autumn of 1847 with the bankruptcy of the London wholesale grocers, on the heels of which followed the insolvencies of the land banks and the closing of the factories in the English industrial districts.The aftereffect of this crisis on the Continent had not yet spent itself when the February Revolution broke out.
The devastation of trade and industry caused by the economic epidemic made the autocracy of the finance aristocracy still more unbearable.Throughout the whole of France the bourgeois opposition agitated at banquets for an electoral reform which should win for it the majority in the Chambers and overthrow the Ministry of the Bourse.In Paris the industrial crisis had, moreover, the particular result of throwing a multitude of manufacturers and big traders, who under the existing circumstances could no longer do any business in the foreign market, onto the home market.They set up large establishments, the competition of which ruined the small épiciers [grocers] and boutiquiers [shopkeepers] en masse.Hence the innumerable bankruptcies among this section of the Paris bourgeoisie, and hence their revolutionary action in February.It is well known how Guizot and the Chambers answered the reform proposals with an unambiguous challenge, how Louis Philippe too late resolved on a ministry.led by Barrot, how things went as far as hand-to-hand fighting between the people and the army, how the army was disarmed by the passive conduct of the National Guard, how the July Monarchy had to give way to a provisional government.
