The party of Order was formed directly after the June days; only after December 10 had allowed it to cast off the coterie of the National, of the bourgeois republicans, was the secret of its existence, the coalition of Orléanists and Legitimists into one party, disclosed.The bourgeois class fell apart into two big factions which alternately -- the big landed proprietors under the restored monarchy and the finance aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under the July Monarchy -- had maintained a monopoly of power.Bourbon was the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the one faction, Orléans the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the other faction -- the nameless realm of the republic was the only one in which both factions could maintain with equal power the common class interest without giving up their mutual rivalry.If the bourgeois republic could not be anything but the perfected and clearly expressed rule of the whole bourgeois class, could it be anything but the rule of the Orléanists supplemented by the Legitimists, and of the Legitimists supplemented by the Orléanists, the synthesis of the Restoration and the July Monarchy.The bourgeois republicans of the National did not represent any large faction of their class resting on economic foundations.They possessed only the importance and the historical claim of having asserted, under the monarchy, as against the two bourgeois factions that understood only their particular regime, the general regime of the bourgeois class, the nameless realm of the republic, which they idealized and embellished with antique arabesques, but in which above all they hailed the rule of their coterie.If the party of the National grew confused in its own mind when it descried the royalists in coalition at the top of the republic founded by it, these royalists deceived themselves no less concerning the fact of their united rule.They did not comprehend that if each of their factions, regarded separately, by itself, was royalist, the product of their chemical combination had necessarily to be republican, that the white and the blue monarchy had to neutralize each other in the tricolor republic.Forced by antagonism to the revolutionary proletariat and the transition classes thronging more and more around it as their center to summon their united strength and to conserve the organization of this united strength, each faction of the party of Order had to assert, as against the desire for restoration and the overweening presumption of the other, their joint rule, that is, the republican form of bourgeois rule.Thus we find these royalists in the beginning believing in an immediate restoration, later preserving the republican form with foaming rage and deadly invective against it on their lips, and finally confessing that they can endure each other only in the republic and postponing the restoration indefinitely.
The enjoyment of the united rule itself strengthened each of the two factions, and made each of them still more unable and unwilling to subordinate itself to the other, that is, to restore the monarchy.
The party of Order directly proclaimed in its election program the rule of the bourgeois class, that is, the preservation of the life conditions of its rule: property , family, religion, order! Naturally it represented its class rule and the conditions of its class rule as the rule of civilization and as the necessary conditions of material production as well as of the relations of social intercourse arising from it.The party of Order had enormous money and resources at its command; it organized its branches throughout France -- it had all the ideologists of the old society in its pay -- it had the influence of the existing governmental power at its disposal; it possessed an army of unpaid vassals in the whole mass of petty bourgeois and peasants, who, still removed from the revolutionary movement, found in the high dignitaries of property the natural representatives of their petty prejudices.This party, represented throughout the country by countless petty kings, could punish the rejection of their candidates as insurrection, dismiss the rebellious workers, the recalcitrant farm hands, domestic servants, clerks, railway officials, copyists, all the functionaries civilly subordinate to it.Finally, here and there it could maintain the delusion that the republican Constituent Assembly had prevented the Bonaparte of December 10 from manifesting his wonderworking powers.
We have not mentioned the Bonapartists in connection with the party of Order.They were not a serious faction of the bourgeois class, but a collection of old, superstitious invalids and young, unbelieving soldiers of fortune.
The party of Order was victorious in the elections; it sent a large majority to the Legislative Assembly.
As against the coalesced counterrevolutionary bourgeois class, the sections of the petty bourgeoisie and peasant class already revolutionized naturally had to ally themselves with the high dignitary of revolutionary interests, the revolutionary proletariat.We have seen how the democratic spokesmen of the petty bourgeoisie in parliament, that is, the Montagne, were driven by parliamentary defeats to the socialist spokesmen of the proletariat, and how the actual petty bourgeoisie, outside of parliament, was driven by the concordats d l'amiable , by the brutal enforcement of bourgeois interests, and by bankruptcy to the actual proletarians.On January 27 Montagne and the socialists had celebrated their reconciliation;at the great banquet of February, 1849, they repeated their act of union.
The social and the democratic party, the party of the workers and that of the petty bourgeois, united to form the Social-Democratic party, that is, the Red party.
