"Tricolor Republican," "True Republican," "Political Republican,"
"Formal Republican," etc., etc. Under the bourgeois monarchy of Louis
Philippe, this party had constituted the Official Republican Opposition,
and consequently had been a recognized element in the then political
world. It had its representatives in the Chambers, and commanded
considerable influence in the press. Its Parisian organ, the "National,"
passed, in its way, for as respectable a paper as the "Journal des
Debats." This position in the constitutional monarchy corresponded to
its character. The party was not a fraction of the bourgeoisie, held
together by great and common interests, and marked by special
business requirements. It was a coterie of bourgeois with republican
ideas-writers, lawyers, officers and civil employees, whose influence
rested upon the personal antipathies of the country for Louis Philippe,
upon reminiscences of the old Republic, upon the republican faith of
a number of enthusiasts, and, above all, upon the spirit of French
patriotism, whose hatred of the treaties of Vienna and of the alliance
with England kept them perpetually on the alert. The "National" owed
a large portion of its following under Louis Philippe to this covert
imperialism, that, later under the republic, could stand up against it
as a deadly competitor in the person of Louis Bonaparte. The fought the
aristocracy of finance just the same as did the rest of the bourgeois
opposition. The polemic against the budget, which in France, was closely
connected with the opposition to the aristocracy of finance, furnished
too cheap a popularity and too rich a material for Puritanical leading
articles, not to be exploited. The industrial bourgeoisie was thankful
to it for its servile defense of the French tariff system, which,
however, the paper had taken up, more out of patriotic than economic
reasons the whole bourgeois class was thankful to it for its vicious
denunciations of Communism and Socialism For the rest, the party of the
"National" was purely republican, i.e. it demanded a republican instead