epublic itself, but
also the joint reign of the two bourgeois factions; and it revived, with
the possibility of the monarchy, both the rivalry of interests which
these two factions had alternately allowed to preponderate, and the
struggle for the supremacy of the one over the other. The diplomats
of the party of Order believed they could allay the struggle by a
combination of the two dynasties through a so-called fusion of the
royalist parties and their respective royal houses. The true fusion of
the restoration and the July monarchy was, however, the parliamentary
republic, in which the Orleanist and Legitimist colors were dissolved,
and the bourgeois species vanished in the plain bourgeois, in the
bourgeois genus. Now however, the plan was to turn the Orleanist
Legitimist and the Legitimist Orleanist. The kingship, in which their
antagonism was personified, was to incarnate their unity, the expression
of their exclusive faction interests was to become the expression of
their common class interest; the monarchy was to accomplish what only
the abolition of two monarchies--the republic could and did accomplish.
This was the philosopher's stone, for the finding of which the
doctors of the party of Order were breaking their heads. As though
the Legitimate monarchy ever could be the monarchy of the industrial
bourgeoisie, or the bourgeois monarchy the monarchy of the hereditary
landed aristocracy! As though landed property and industry could
fraternize under one crown, where the crown could fall only upon one
head, the head of the older or the younger brother! As though industry
could at all deal upon a footing of equality with landed property, so
long as landed property did not decide itself to become industrial. If
Henry V were to die tomorrow, the Count of Paris would not, therefore,
become the king of the Legitimists, unless he ceased to be the King of
the Orleanists. Nevertheless, the fusion philosophers, who became louder
in the measure that the question of revision stepped to the fore, who
had provided themselves with a daily organ in the "Assemblee Nationale,"
who, even at this very moment (February, 1852) are again at work,
explained the whole difficulty by the opposition and rivalries of the
two dynasties. The attempts to reconcile the family of Orleans with
Henry V., begun since the death of Louis Philippe, but, as all these
dynastic intrigues carried on only during the vacation of the National
Assembly, between a