bers of the administrative committees of the International Workingmen's Association's throughout France, at Paris, Lyons, Rouen, Marseilles, Brest, etc., on the pretext that the International was a secret society dabbling in a complot for his assassination, a pretext soon after exposed in its full absurdity by his own judges. What was the real crime of the French branches of the International? They told the French people publicly and emphatically that voting the plebiscite was voting despotism at home and war abroad.[1] It has been, in fact, their work
- ↑ How the plebiscite was regarded by the French branches of the International is clearly set forth in the "Anti-Plebiscite Manifesto" issued jointly by the Paris Sections of that body and the Federal Chamber of Labor Societies. (See Appendix, page 107.) The historic importance of this document may not fully appear, however, until it is contrasted with another anti-plebiscite manifesto, issued at the same time by Leon Gambetta, Emmanuel Arago, Jules Ferry, Jules Simon, and other political mouthpieces of the dissatisfied fraction of the French bourgeoisie. These bourgeois "republicans" were, not less than Louis Bonaparte himself, apprehensive of the socialist movement, which men of their own kind and class had murderously stifled in 1848, but which the International was at last reviving despite all imperial obstacles and persecutions. In fact, they held the "personal government of the Emperor" responsible for that revival, and they appealed "to the people" in the name of "social peace and order, which could only be secured by conciliating the interests and the classes."
On the other hand, the Internationalists and their sympathizers in the labor societies had sufficiently learned the true meaning of the bourgeois expression "conciliation of the classes" to be no longer bamboozled by such logomachy; and they could see no greater virtue in the impersonal government of a "peace-loving" bourgeoisie than in the personal government
to act, mountebank-like, the part of a generous and liberal monarch. The French people, he said, rendered happy and wise under his reign, were at last fitted for greater freedom. He had, therefore, resolved to submit to a plebiscite—that is, to a general vote—such parliamentary reforms as he deemed adapted to the character and circumstances of the nation. This plebiscite, which was also intended to firmly establish his dynasty on the throne of France, took place in the midst of considerable excitement, heightened by its fraudulent manipulation. Some time before, in wild fear of the International, he had caused sixty of its leading agitators to be arrested. But this act of despotism further inflamed the urban proletariat against him. In its vote on the plebiscite he could read his doom. Terror-stricken at the prospect of a revolution, he evoked the god of patriotism and declared war to Prussia. Johnson had the like of him in his mind's eye when he said that patriotism was the last resort of a scoundrel.—Note to the American Edition.
