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Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx
page 37 of 132 (28%)
not only intrigue against each other, each aiming to raise its own
Pretender to the throne, and exclude the Pretender of the Opposite
party, but also are all united in a common hatred for and common
attacks against the "Republic." On its side, the Mountain appears, in
counter-distinction to the royalist conspiracy, as the representative
of the "Republic." The party of Order seems constantly engaged in a
"Reaction," which, neither more nor less than in Prussia, is directed
against the press, the right of association and the like, and is
enforced by brutal police interventions on the part of the bureaucracy,
the police and the public prosecutor--just as in Prussia; the Mountain
on the contrary, is engaged with equal assiduity in parrying these
attacks, and thus in defending the "eternal rights of man"--as every
so-called people's party has more or less done for the last hundred and
fifty years. At a closer inspection, however, of the situation and
of the parties, this superficial appearance, which veils the Class
Struggle, together with the peculiar physiognomy of this period,
vanishes wholly.

Legitimists and Orleanists constituted, as said before, the two large
factions of the party of Order. What held these two factions to their
respective Pretenders, and inversely kept them apart from each other,
what else was it but the lily and the tricolor, the House of Bourbon and
the house of Orleans, different shades of royalty? Under the Bourbons,
Large Landed Property ruled together with its parsons and lackeys; under
the Orleanist, it was the high finance, large industry, large commerce,
i.e., Capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors and orators. The
Legitimate kingdom was but the political expression for the hereditary
rule of the landlords, as the July monarchy was bur the political
expression for the usurped rule of the bourgeois upstarts. What,
accordingly, kept these two factions apart was no so-called set of
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