recipice of life, and either sojourn in the country
itself, or float with their rags and their children from the country to
the cities, and from the cities back to the country. Accordingly, the
interests of the farmers are no longer, as under Napoleon, in harmony
but in conflict with the interests of the bourgeoisie, i.e., with
capital; they find their natural allies and leaders among the urban
proletariat, whose mission is the overthrow of the bourgeois social
order. But the "strong and unlimited government"--and this is the second
of the "idees Napoleoniennes," which the second Napoleon has to carried
out--, has for its mission the forcible defence of this very "material"
social order, a "material order" that furnishes the slogan in
Bonaparte's proclamations against the farmers in revolt.

Along with the mortgage, imposed by capital upon the farmer's allotment,
this is burdened by taxation. Taxation is the fountain of life to the
bureaucracy, the Army, the parsons and the court, in short to the whole
apparatus of the Executive power. A strong government, and heavy taxes
are identical. The system of ownership, involved in the system of
allotments lends itself by nature for the groundwork of a powerful and
numerous bureaucracy: it produces an even level of conditions and of
persons over the whole surface of the country; it, therefore, allows the
exercise of an even influence upon all parts of this even mass from a
high central point downwards: it annihilates the aristocratic gradations
between the popular masses and the Government; it, consequently, calls
from all sides for the direct intervention of the Government and for the
intervention of the latter's immediate organs; and, finally, it produces
an unemployed excess of population, that finds no room either in the
country or in the cities, that, consequently, snatches after public
office as a sort of dignified alms, and provokes the creation of further
offices. With the new markets, which he opened at the point of the
bayonet, and with the plunder of the continent, Napoleon returned to the
farmer class with interest the taxes wrung from them. These taxes were
then a goad to the industry of the farmer, while now, on the contrary,
they rob his industry of its last source of support, and completely sap
his power to resist poverty. Indeed, an enormous bureaucracy, richly
gallooned and well fed is that "idee Napoleonienne" that above all
others suits the requirements of the