that in all the great towns, in all the industrial centers of France, the working class rose like one man to reject the plebiscite. Unfortunately the balance was turned by the heavy ignorance of the rural districts. The stock exchanges, the cabinets, the ruling classes and the press of Europe celebrated the plebiscite as a signal victory of the French Emperor over the French working class; and it was the signal for the assassination, not of an individual, but of nations.
The war plot of July, 1870, is but an amended edition of the coup d'état of December, 1851. At first view, the thing seemed so absurd that France would not believe in its real good earnest. It rather believed the deputy denouncing the ministerial war talk as a mere stock-jobbing trick. When, on July 15th, war was at last officially announced to the Corps Législatif, the whole Opposition refused to vote the preliminary subsidies—even Thiers branded it as "detestable"; all the independent journals of Paris condemned it, and, wonderful to relate, the provincial press joined in almost unanimously.
Meanwhile, the Paris members of the International
of a military despot. In other words, they understood the nature of the class struggle; hence the class character of their manifesto, which was obviously intended, not for "the people," so called in bourgeois parlance, but for the working people, "who alone are entitled to the esteem of their fellow citizens," and whose mission, as a body, "is to regenerate the world." Furthermore, it will be observed that while they made specific reference to a few only of the grievances and demands of the proletariat, they tersely summed up their whole programme in one brief and bold declaration, namely, that "the Socialist Republic is the only form of government through which the legitimate aspirations of the working class can be realized."
Here, then, were two antagonistic classes, irreconcilable enemies, each working separately and in its own way for the downfall of Louis Bonaparte; one with a view to the establishment of a bourgeois republic (or, this failing, of a bourgeois parliamentary republic); the other looking to the initiation of the Socialist Republic. The lines were tightly drawn, and upon the fall of Bonaparte a great class conflict was inevitable.—Note to the American Edition.
