r Representatives than
to be silent, to avoid the burning point. If their Representatives did
not speak, so argued they, Bonaparte would not act. They desired an
ostrich Parliament that would hide its head, in order not to be seen.
Another part of the bourgeoisie preferred that Bonaparte, being once in
the Presidential chair, be left in the Presidential chair, in order that
everything might continue to run in the old ruts. They felt indignant
that their Parliament did not openly break the Constitution and resign
without further ado. The General Councils of the Departments, these
provisional representative bodies of the large bourgeoisie, who had
adjourned during the vacation of the National Assembly since August 25,
pronounced almost unanimously for revision, that is to say, against the
Parliament and for Bonaparte.

Still more unequivocally than in its falling out with its Parliamentary
Representatives, did the bourgeoisie exhibit its wrath at its literary
Representatives, its own press. The verdicts of the bourgeois juries,
inflicting excessive fines and shameless sentences of imprisonment for
every attack of the bourgeois press upon the usurping aspirations of
Bonaparte, for every attempt of the press to defend the political rights
of the bourgeoisie against the Executive power, threw, not France alone,
but all Europe into amazement.

While on the one hand, as I have indicated, the Parliamentary party of
Order ordered itself to keep the peace by screaming for peace; and while
it pronounced the political rule of the bourgeoisie irreconcilable with
the safety and the existence of the bourgeoisie, by destroying with
its own hands in its struggle with the other classes of society all the
conditions for its own, the Parliamentary regime; on the other hand, the
mass of the bourgeoisie, outside of the Parliament, urged Bonaparte--by
its servility towards the President, by its insults to the Parliament,
by the brutal treatment of its own press--to suppress and annihilate
its speaking and writing organs, its politicians and its literati, its
orators' tribune and its press, to the end that, under the protection
of a strong and unhampered Government, it might ply its own private
pursuits in safety. It declared unmistakably that it longed to be rid of
its own political rule, in order to escape the troubles and dangers of
ruling.

And this bourgeoisie, that had rebelled against even the Parliamentary
and literary contest for t