re
republicans had abused their own physical power against the people, so
cowardly, low-spirited, disheartened, broken, powerless did they yield,
now when the issue was the maintenance of their own republicanism
and their own legislative rights against the Executive power and
the royalists I need not here narrate the shameful history of their
dissolution. It was not a downfall, it was extinction. Their history is
at an end for all time. In the period that follows, they figure, whether
within or without the Assembly, only as memories--memories that seem
again to come to life so soon as the question is again only the word
"Republic," and as often as the revolutionary conflict threatens to sink
down to the lowest level. In passing, I might observe that the journal
which gave to this party its name, the "National," goes over to
Socialism during the following period.

Before we close this period, we must look back upon the two powers,
one of destroys the other on December 2, 1851, while, from December 20,
1848, down to the departure of the constitutional assembly, they live
marital relations. We mean Louis Bonaparte, on the-one hand, on the
other, the party of the allied royalists; of Order, and of the large
bourgeoisie.

At the inauguration of his presidency, Bonaparte forthwith framed a
ministry out of the party of Order, at whose head he placed Odillon
Barrot, be it noted, the old leader of the liberal wing of the
parliamentary bourgeoisie. Mr. Barrot had finally hunted down a seat in
the ministry, the spook of which had been pursuing him since 1830; and
what is more, he had the chairmanship in this ministry, although not,
as he had imagined under Louis Philippe, the promoted leader of the
parliamentary opposition, but with the commission to kill a parliament,
and, moreover, as an ally of all his arch enemies, the Jesuits and the
Legitimists. Finally he leads the bride home, but only after she
has been prostituted. As to Bonaparte, he seemed to eclipse himself
completely. The party of Order acted for him.

Immediately at the first session of the ministry the expedition to
Rome was decided upon, which it was there agreed, was to be carried out
behind I the back of the National Assembly, and the funds for which,
it was equally agreed, were to be wrung from the Assembly under false
pretences. Thus the start was made with a swindle on the National
Assembly, together with a secret conspiracy with the absolute foreign
power