its leaders and chiefs of barricades by a raid of Bonaparte's.
An army without officers, disinclined by the recollections of June, 1848
and 1849, and May, 1850, to fight under the banner of the Montagnards,
it left to its vanguard, the secret societies, the work of saving the
insurrectionary honor of Paris, which the bourgeoisie had yielded to the
soldiery so submissively that Bonaparte was later justified in disarming
the National Guard upon the scornful ground that he feared their arms
would be used against themselves by the Anarchists!

"C'est Ic triomphe complet et definitif du Socialism!"' Thus did Guizot
characterize the 2d of December. But, although the downfall of the
parliamentary republic carries with it the germ of the triumph of
the proletarian revolution, its immediate and tangible result was
the triumph of Bonaparte over parliament, of the Executive over the
Legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of phrases.
In the parliament, the nation raised its collective will to the dignity
of law, i.e., it raised the law of the ruling class to the dignity of
its collective will. Before the Executive power, the nation abdicates
all will of its own, and submits to the orders of an outsider of
Authority. In contrast with the Legislative, the Executive power
expresses the heteronomy of the nation in contrast with its autonomy.
Accordingly, France seems to have escaped the despotism of a class
only in order to fall under the despotism of an individual, under the
authority, at that of an individual without authority The struggle seems
to settle down to the point where all classes drop down on their knees,
equally impotent and equally dumb.

All the same, the revolution is thoroughgoing. It still is on its
passage through purgatory. It does its work methodically: Down to
December 2, 1851, it had fulfilled one-half of its programme, it now
fulfils the other half. It first ripens the power of the Legislature
into fullest maturity in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it
has accomplished that, the revolution proceeds to ripen the power of
the Executive into equal maturity; it reduces this power to its purest
expression; isolates it; places it before itself as the sole subject for
reproof in order to concentrate against it all the revolutionary forces
of destruction. When the revolution shall have accomplished this second
part of its preliminary programme, Europe will jump up from her seat to
exclai