of the bourgeoisie, big and little, who worked for the interests of their class.
We know how they seized upon the six billion francs worth of property of the clergy and the nobility, and we know how so many of the great fortunes of the bourgeoisie were piled up by fishing in troubled waters during the whole of the revolutionary period,
We know how your class as soon as its appetite was satiated, as soon as the Revolution was over, in mortal dread of our Baboeuf[1] and the poverty-stricken proletariat whose anger and hopes he interpreted, sheltered its digestion_behind the sabre of Napoleon and the concordat of the Pope of Rome.
We know how the upstarts of your Revolution, having become prefects, state councilors, and senators of the Empire, manufactured Codes which rule us still, and which are so favorable to property, so hard on the workers and the poor.
We know how they drew up the functionaries of their class and for those of ours the scandalously unequal scales of pay still in force; and our system of taxation, so light a burden on the shoulders of the strong, so heavy on the shoulders of the weak. We know how they put their hands on coal mines, national wealth, collective property, which was appropriated by a few thousand shareholders, who saw their shares of 500 and 1,000 francs jump up to 10,000, 20,000, and a few, those of Anzin, even up to 500,000 francs each!
We know how, on the downfall of Napoleon, the upper classes laid hold of the law-making. machine, the Parliament, where 90,000 electors from 1815 to 1830, 300,000 from 1830 to 1848, arrogated to themselves the right of sending representatives, refusing universal suffrage to the mass of the nation. We know how, taking advantage of this seizure of the governing powers to in-
- ↑ Baboeuf organized one of the real proletarian risings of the Revolutionary period. For an account of the role of the working class in the Revolution see Peter Kropotkin's work, "The Great French Revolution."
