first revolution, and under Napoleon, to prepare the class rule of
the bourgeoisie; under the restoration, under Louis Philippe, and under
the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument of the ruling class,
however eagerly this class strained after autocracy. Not before the
advent of the second Bonaparte does the government seem to have made
itself fully independent. The machinery of government has by this time
so thoroughly fortified itself against society, that the chief of the
"Society of December 10" is thought good enough to be at its head; a
fortune-hunter, run in from abroad, is raised on its shield by a drunken
soldiery, bought by himself with liquor and sausages, and whom he is
forced ever again to throw sops to. Hence the timid despair, the sense
of crushing humiliation and degradation that oppresses the breast of
France and makes her to choke. She feels dishonored.

And yet the French Government does not float in the air. Bonaparte
represents an economic class, and that the most numerous in the
commonweal of France--the Allotment Farmer. [#4 The first French
Revolution distributed the bulk of the territory of France, held at the
time by the feudal lords, in small patches among the cultivators of the
soil. This allotment of lands created the French farmer class.]

As the Bourbons are the dynasty of large landed property, as the Orleans
are the dynasty of money, so are the Bonapartes the dynasty of the
farmer, i.e. of the French masses. Not the Bonaparte, who threw himself
at the feet of the bourgeois parliament, but the Bonaparte, who swept
away the bourgeois parliament, is the elect of this farmer class. For
three years the cities had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of
the election of December 10, and in cheating the farmer out of the
restoration of the Empire. The election of December 10, 1848, is not
carried out until the "coup d'etat" of December 2, 1851.

The allotment farmers are an immense mass, whose individual members
live in identical conditions, without, however, entering into manifold
relations with one another. Their method of production isolates them
from one another, instead of drawing them into mutual intercourse. This
isolation is promoted by the poor means of communication in France,
together with the poverty of the farmers themselves. Their field of
production, the small allotment of land that each cultivates, allows no
room for a division of labor, and no opportunity for the applic