removing Blanqui and his associates, i.e. the real
leaders of the proletarian party, from the public scene for the whole
period of the cycle which we are here considering.

Upon the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe, only the bourgeois
republic could follow; that is to say, a limited portion of the
bourgeoisie having ruled under the name of the king, now the whole
bourgeoisie was to rule under the name of the people. The demands of the
Parisian proletariat are utopian tom-fooleries that have to be done away
with. To this declaration of the constitutional national assembly, the
Paris proletariat answers with the June insurrection, the most colossal
event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic
won. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial
bourgeoisie; the middle class; the small traders' class; the army; the
slums, organized as Guarde Mobile; the intellectual celebrities, the
parsons' class, and the rural population. On the side of the Parisian
proletariat stood none but itself. Over 3,000 insurgents were massacred,
after the victory 15,000 were transported without trial. With this
defeat, the proletariat steps to the background on the revolutionary
stage. It always seeks to crowd forward, so soon as the movement seems
to acquire new impetus, but with ever weaker effort and ever smaller
results; So soon as any of the above lying layers of society gets into
revolutionary fermentation, it enters into alliance therewith and thus
shares all the defeats which the several parties successively suffer.
But these succeeding blows become ever weaker the more generally they
are distributed over the whole surface of society. The more important
leaders of the Proletariat, in its councils, and the press, fall one
after another victims of the courts, and ever more questionable
figures step to the front. It partly throws itself it upon doctrinaire
experiments, "co-operative banking" and "labor exchange" schemes; in
other words, movements, in which it goes into movements in which it
gives up the task of revolutionizing the old world with its own large
collective weapons and on the contrary, seeks to bring about its
emancipation, behind the back of society, in private ways, within the
narrow bounds of its own class conditions, and, consequently, inevitably
fails. The proletariat seems to be able neither to find again the
revolutionary magnitude within itself nor to draw new energy from the
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