of the farmers to the French revolution.

The epoch between December 20, 1848, and the dissolution of the
constitutional assembly in May, 1849, embraces the history of the
downfall of the bourgeois republicans. After they had founded a republic
for the bourgeoisie, had driven the revolutionary proletariat from the
field and had meanwhile silenced the democratic middle class, they
are themselves shoved aside by the mass of the bourgeoisie who justly
appropriate this republic as their property. This bourgeois mass was
Royalist, however. A part thereof, the large landed proprietors, had
ruled under the restoration, hence, was Legitimist; the other part, the
aristocrats of finance and the large industrial capitalists, had ruled
under the July monarchy, hence, was Orleanist. The high functionaries of
the Army, of the University, of the Church, in the civil service, of the
Academy and of the press, divided themselves on both sides, although in
unequal parts. Here, in the bourgeois republic, that bore neither the
name of Bourbon, nor of Orleans, but the name of Capital, they had
found the form of government under which they could all rule in common.
Already the June insurrection had united them all into a "Party of
Order." The next thing to do was to remove the bourgeois republicans who
still held the seats in the National Assembly. As brutally as these pure
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