do so any more. At least, not at that time, when it was in its majority monarchical, and moreover split into three dynastic parties besides one Republican party. The internal dissensions of the bourgeoisie allowed the adventurer Louis Bonaparte to filch all positions of influence—army, police, administrative machinery—and, on December 2, 1851, to blow up the last stronghold of the bourgeoisie, the National Assembly. The Second Empire followed. It brought about the exploitation of France by a band of political and financial adventurers, but at the same time an industrial development such as had not been possible under the narrow and timid system of Louis Philippe, when France was under the exclusive domination of a mere fraction of the wealthier bourgeoisie. Louis Bonaparte took from the capitalists their political power, under the pretense, on the one hand, of protecting them against the workers, and on the other hand of protecting the workers against them; but, in return for this, his Government favored speculation and industrial activity, in short, the rise and enrichment of the whole of the capitalist class in a hitherto unheard of degree. Corruption and wholesale robbery, it is true, developed to a still greater extent at the Imperial Court and among its hangers-on, who exacted no trifling percentage of the new wealth accumulated by the bourgeoisie.
But the Second Empire—that meant also the appeal to French Chauvinism,[1] which implied the demand for the reacquisition of the frontier of the First Empire lost in 1814, at the very least that of the First Republic. A French Empire within the boundaries of the old Monarchy, not to say the still more circumscribed ones of 1815, was impossible for long. Hence the necessity of occasional wars and extensions of frontier; but no exten-
- ↑ Jingoism.
