utions. And this is the identical bourgeoisie, that now howls over
the "stupidity of the masses," over the "vile multitude," which, it
claims, betrayed it to Bonaparte. Itself has violently fortified the
imperialism of the farmer class; it firmly maintained the conditions
that Constitute the birth-place of this farmer-religion. Indeed, the
bourgeoisie has every reason to fear the stupidity of the masses--so
long as they remain conservative; and their intelligence--so soon as
they become revolutionary.

In the revolts that took place after the "coup d'etat" a part of the
French farmers protested, arms in hand, against their own vote of
December 10, 1848. The school house had, since 1848, sharpened their
wits. But they had bound themselves over to the nether world of history,
and history kept them to their word. Moreover, the majority of this
population was still so full of prejudices that, just in the "reddest"
Departments, it voted openly for Bonaparte. The National Assembly
prevented, as it thought, this population from walking; the farmers now
snapped the fetters which the cities had struck upon the will of the
country districts. In some places they even indulged the grotesque
hallucination of a "Convention together with a Napoleon."

After the first revolution had converted the serf farmers into
freeholders, Napoleon fixed and regulated the conditions under which,
unmolested, they could exploit the soil of France, that had just fallen
into their hands, and expiate the youthful passion for property. But
that which now bears the French farmer down is that very allotment of
land, it is the partition of the soil, the form of ownership, which
Napoleon had consolidated. These are the material condition that turned
French feudal peasant into a small or allotment farmer, and Napoleon
into an Emperor. Two generations have sufficed to produce the inevitable
result the progressive deterioration of agriculture, and the progressive
encumbering of the agriculturist The "Napoleonic" form of ownership,
which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition for
the emancipation and enrichment of the French rural population, has, in
the course of the century, developed into the law of their enslavement
and pauperism. Now, then, this very law is the first of the "idees
Napoleoniennes," which the second Bonaparte must uphold. If he still
shares with the farmers the illusion of seeking, not in the system of
the small allotm