The Protocols of Zion and the Revolutions in Europe

The Protocols of Zion Toolkit - Part 2

Peter Myers; date October 8, 2002; update May 8, 2006. My comments are shown {thus}.

You are at http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/toolkit2.html.

This is Part 2; Part 1 is at toolkit.html; Part 3 is at toolkit3.html.

added August 11, 2003: 19. Stalin accused of endorsing the Protocols: toolkit3.html.

Part 2 of the Protocols of Zion Toolkit deals with the Revolutionary background to Napoleon III, against whom Joly's Dialogues is pitched. The French Revolution, the Communist Revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1871, and the Bolshevik Revolution are covered here.

Joly's Dialogues was written during the rule of Emperor Naploeon III of France, and directed against him. Given the despotic nature of Bolshevism, and the plan for such despotism enunciated in the Protocols, it is instructive to compare Napoleon with the Bolsheviks, to see which has the worse record for killing, torture etc.

It will be seen that the Bolsheviks win hands-down; it's no contest. But those claiming the Protocols a forgery, must pin the despotism on Napoleon III rather than the Bolsheviks.

As Joly presents it, Napoleon III is the Machiavellian, fooling the people; as the Protocols present it, the Revolutionaries are the Machiavellians, causing chaos and turmoil, and aiming at totalitarian control and a Reign of Terror.

The Ancestry of Political Correctness: correctness.html.

6. The Revolutionary background to Napoleon III

6.1 Communist Revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1871

Emperor Napoleon III of France came to power soon after the attempted Europe-wide Communist Revolution of 1848; and after his ousting there was another Communist Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871.

Karl Marx took part in both revolutions (the German part of the 1848 one, and the 1871 Paris Commune).

Of Marx' role in the Paris Commune, Michael Shapiro writes in his book The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time, Simon & Schuster, London, 1997:

{p. 33} In their frenzy, the Commune leaders executed the archbishop of Paris and other prominent leaders. Establishment forces reacted with a massacre of their own, staining the medieval byways of old Paris blood red. For his support, Marx became internationally known as the infamous "Red Doctor." In the common psyche, communism became synonymous with deadly violence, an association which Lenin and Mao later proved true. {endquote}

Interpreting the Revolutions begun in 1789, which were attempted again in 1830, 1848, and 1871, Marx wrote:

Karl Marx, The Holy Family, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 4, Lawrence & Wishart, London 1975:

{p. 119} ... the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf's conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf's friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the idea of the new world order. {endquote}

Karl Marx, Socialism, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 25, Lawrence & Wishart, London 1987:

{p. 244} The state based on reason completely collapsed. Rousseau's Contrat Social had found its realisation in the Red Terror, from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their own political capacity, had taken refuge first in the corruption of the Directorate, and, finally, under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better.

{p. 245} The right of the first night was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. ...

The propertyless masses, during the Reign of Terror, were able for a moment to gain the mastery.

{endquote}

It seems, then, that the French people had to choose between Marx and Napoleon III.

6.2 Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: his life and environment, Thornton Butterworth, London 1939.

{p. 16} All that is important during the actual war is accurate knowledge of one's own resources and of those of the adversary ... Das Kapital is an attempt to provide such an analysis. ... The conceptions of natural rights, and of conscience, as belonging to every man irrespective of his position in the class struggle, are rejected as liberal illusions ... Moral, political, economic conceptions and ideals alter ... to regard any one of them as universal and immutable is tantamount to believing that the order to which they belong ... is eternal. ... Hence the contempt and loathing poured by Marx upon the common assumption, made by liberals and utilitarians, that since the interests of all men are ultimately and have always been the same, a measure of goodwill and benevolence on the part of

{p. 17} everyone may yet make it possible to manufacture some sort of general compromise. If the war is real, these interests are totally incompatible. ... He detested romanticism, emotionalism, and humanitarianism of every kind, and, in his anxiety to avoid any appeal to the idealistic feelings of his audience, systematically removed every trace of the old democratic vocabulary from the propagandist literature of his movement. ...

The war must be fought on every front, and ... a political party must be formed out of those elements ... destined to emerge as the conquering class.

{p. 20} The characteristic for which Marx sought was not novelty but truth, and when he found it in the works of others, he endeavoured, at any rate during the early years in Paris, in which his thought took its final shape, to incorporate it in his new synthesis. ...

{p. 21} Marx sifted this immense mass of chaotic material ... and in the light of it constructed a new instrument of social analysis, whose merit consists ...

{p. 22} ... in the remarkable combination of simple fundamental principles with comprehensiveness, detail and realism. ...

It was composed largely in Paris during the troubled years between 1843 and 1850 ...

{p. 143} In 1847 the London centre of the Communist League showed its confidence in him by commissioning him to compose a document containing a definitive statement of its beliefs and aims. He eagerly embraced this opportunity for an explicit summary of the new doctrine which had lately assumed its final shape in his head; He delivered it into their hands early in 1848. It was published a few weeks before the outbreak of the Paris revolution under the title of The Manifesto of the Communist Party. ...

{p. 147} The Manifesto ends with the celebrated words "The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all lands, unite!"

{p. 148} ... As an instrument of destructive propaganda it has no equal anywhere ... The Belgian Government, which behaved with considerable tolerance to political exiles, could not overlook this formidable publication, and brusquely expelled him and his family from its territory. On the next day the long expected revolution broke out in Paris. Flocon, a radical member of the new French Government, in a highly flattering letter, invited Marx to return to the revolutionary city. He immediately set off and arrived a day later.

He found the city in a state of universal and uncritical enthusiasm. The barriers had fallen once more, this time it seemed for ever. ...

{p. 149} News presently arrived that Naples had revolted, then Milan, Rome, Venice and other Italian cities. Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest had risen in arms. Europe was ablaze at last.

{p. 150} Acting in the name of the Communist League, Marx sent his agents to agitate among the German industrial masses, and used their reports as the material for his leading articles. There was at this time no formal censorship in the Rhineland, and his inflammatory words reached an ever-widening public.

{p. 151} As in 1842 Marx demanded an immediate war with Russia, both because no attempt at democratic revolution could succeed in Germany in view of the certainty of Russian intervention, and as a means of welding the German principalities into a united democratic whole ...

{p. 153} By July, 1848, the heroic phase of the Paris revolution had spent itself, and the conservative forces began to rally their strength.

{p. 156} The Prussian Government, which had annulled his Prussian citizenship four years previously, unable to reverse the verdict itself, in July 1849 expelled him from the Rhineland. He went to Paris, where the Bonapartist agitation in favour of Napoleon's nephew made the political situation even more confused than before, and it looked as if something of importance might occur at any moment.

... The revolution had patently failed.

{p. 157} ... only one European country placed no obstacle in his path. ... He arrived in London on the 2th August, 1849; his family followed a month later, and Engels, after dallying in Switzerland, and making a long and agreeable sea voyage from Genoa, came in the beginning of November. He found Marx convinced that the revolution might at any moment break out once more, and engaged on a pamphlet against the conservative republic.

{p. 164} There is no doubt that by 1848 Marx thought of it in terms of a self-appointed elite ... as Babeuf had conceived it in 1797, a small body of convinced and ruthless individuals, who were to wield dictatorial power and educate the proletariat until it reached a level at which it comprehended its proper task.

{p. 224} The Commune, as the new government described itself, was neither created nor inspired by the International ... By a great effort the people had shaken off the nightmare first of the Empire then of the siege; ... they announced

{p. 225} that the state in its old form was abolished, and called upon the people in arms to govern itself.

Presently, as supplies began to give out, and the condition of the besieged grew more desperate, terror developed: proscriptions began, men and women were condemned and executed, many of them certainly guiltless, and few deserving of death. Among those executed was the Archbishop of Paris who had been held as a hostage against the army at Versailles. The rest of Europe watched the monstrous events with growing indignation and disgust. The Communards seemed even to enlightened opinion, even, to old and tried friends of the people like Louis Blanc and Mazzini, to be a band of criminal lunatics dead to the appeal of humanity, social incendiaries pledged to destroy all religion and all morality, men driven out of their minds by real and imaginary wrongs, scarcely responsible for their enormities.

{p. 226} ... Marx ... acclaimed it as the first open and defiant manifestation in history of the strength and idealism of the working class - the first pitched battle which it had fought against its oppressors before the eyes of the whole world ...

The pamphlet, later entitled The Civil War in France was not primarily intended as a historical study: it was a tactical move, and one of typical audacity and intransigeance. Marx was sometimes blamed by his own followers for allowing the International to be linked in the popular mind with a band of law-breakers and assassins, an association which earned for it an unnecessarily sinister reputation. This was not the kind of consideration which could have influenced him in the slightest degree. He was, all his life, a convinced and uncompromising believer in a violent working class

{p. 227} revolution. The Commune was the first spontaneous rising of the workers in their capacity as workers: the July emeute of 1848, was, in his view, an attack on, and not by, them. ...

{p. 228} Marx attempted to forestall all reproaches by revealing his name as the sole author of the work. "The Red Terrorist Doctor," as he was now popularly known, became overnight the object of public odium ...

{p. 229} A large part of Paris was destroyed by fire during the Commune: this fire seemed to him a symbol of his own life, and a magnificent realization of his favourite paradox: "Destruction, too, is a kind of creation."

{end of quotes}

6.3 The Machiavelli Tradition

The Protocols of Zion and Joly's Dialogues are political documents in the tradition of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527).

Machiavelli's book The Prince is one of the most famous, if notorious, texts in Political Science. Yet, although the disparaging term Machiavellian implies that Machiavelli himself was an intriguer, in fact all he did was document how unscrupulous absolute rulers operated. He did this in the guise of giving them advice.

The proof is that his exposes were not published until after his death. His own life might have been endangered, by publication while he was alive.

John Plamenatz writes,

"Of Machiavelli's four major works, only one, The Art of War, was printed during his lifetime, in 1521. The other three, The Prince, the Discourses and the Florentine Histories were not published till more than four years after his death." (John Plamenatz, ed., Machiavelli: The Prince, selections from The Discourses and other writings, Fontanas/Collins, London, 1972, p. 12).

J. R. Hale writes,

"The Discourses, like The Prince, were never revised for the press, they were not printed in Macchiavelli's lifetime, and it is hazardous to conjecture from the work as it strands what its final form would have been" (Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy, The English Universities Press Ltd, London 1961, p. 173).

The Prince is at http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm.

The Discourses is at http://www.constitution.org/mac/disclivy1.htm#1:11.

Moses and Machiavellism: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/Publications/moses.html.

To undermine the Old World Order, the Enlightenment activists chose to use the same methods the Old Order used to maintain itself, which Machiavelli had described in The Prince. In other words, it adopted the ethic that the end justifies the means.

This is clearly stated by Jean Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract: "Machiavelli's Prince is a handbook for Republicans." (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970, p.118).

Rousseau's footnote to the above, on p. 118, reads:

"Machiavelli was a gentleman and a good citizen; but being attached to the house of Medici, he was forced during the oppression of his country to disguise his love of liberty. The very choice of an execrable hero reveals his secret intention, and the antithesis between his principles in his book The Prince and those in his Discourses on Livy and his History of Florence proves that this profound thinker has so far had only superficial or corrupted readers. The Pope's court strictly prohibited his book, which I can well believe, since that was the court he depicts most plainly." (p. 118n).

By this he meant, that Machiavelli's insights could be used by the revolutionary movement. Further, Rousseau stated,

"In ancient times, Greece flourished at the height of the cruellest wars; blood flowed in torrents, but the whole country was thickly populated. 'It appeared,' says Machiavelli, 'that in the midst of murder, proscription and civil wars, our republic became stronger than ever; the civil virtue of the citizens, their morals, and their independence, served more effectively to strengthen it than all their dissensions may have done to weaken it.' A little disturbance gives vigour to the soul, and what really makes the species prosper is not peace but freedom." (The Social Contract, Penguin, note on p.131).

Even Babeuf, the only person praised by Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, appealed to Machiavelli in his defence during the French Revolution.

6.4 Babeuf on the Revolution

Marx and Engels name six people in the Communist Manifesto: Sismondi, Proudhon, Babeuf, St. Simon, Fourier and Owen. Babeuf is held up as a hero; all the others are criticised.

Robespierre was overthrown on July 29, 1794.

Francois-Noel Babeuf, who adopted the revolutionary name Gracchus, was arrested by the Directorate (principally Napoleon), who had seized power following the fall of Robespierre. Babeuf had been agitating for equality, peoples's rights, and a return to the Jacobin Constitution of 1793; but the Republican Government which tried and executed him probably saw him as representing a return to the Terror.

J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Frederick A. Praeger, New York 1960.

{p. 196} THE STORY OF THE PLOT OF BABEUF

(a) THE PREHISTORY OF THE CONSPIRACY

THE seeds of the Conspiracy of the Equals were sown in the political prisons which held the Jacobins taken captive after the unsuccessful uprisings of the 12 Germinal and 1 Prairial. These prisons became a kind of political academy.

... The Irreconcilables raised the rallying cry of "Bread and the Constitution of 1793". Some of these moved still further to the Left, to Communism, but even those who would not go so far welcomed and encouraged the vigorous and effective propaganda against the regime conducted by the extreme Left, especially Babeuf in his Tribun du Peuple, which was the successor of the more moderate Journal de la Liberte de la Presse.

The Left had no proper organization. Its members were in loose touch with each other, met casually in cafes and parks, indulging in general discussions. The Jacobin Club had been dissolved. The Constitution of 1795 forbade affiliations and correspondence between societies, prohibited the election of permanent officers and fixed conditions of admission and eligibility. It also banned collective petitions and closed meetings. The

{p. 197} popular societies were to be no more than casual Hyde Park gatherings to listen to a soap-box speaker.

During the liberal period soon after the Vendemiaire events, the Directory allowed the Society of the Pantheon, called the "Reunion des amis de la Republique", to be founded, and to become a rallying centre for the Left. The Government hoped to be able to control the Society through its agents.

The Society proceeded without permanent officers, rules of procedure, registers or minutes. It was a very loose body. The meetings were held in the ancient refectory of the nuns, and, when this hall was occupied, in the Convent's vault or crypt, "where", in the words of Buonarroti, "the dim paleness of the torch light, the hollow echoes of their voices, and the constrained positions of the persons present, either standing or seated on the ground, impressed on them the greatness and the perils of their enterprise, as well as of the courage and prudence it required".

The Societe de Pantheon became the scene of a tug of war between Left extremists and Government agents. When its discussions became too menacing, the Government ordered General Bonaparte to close it down, on 1 Ventase, an IV.

{p. 198} Events were however hastening the outbreak of the insurrection.

{end quotes}

In his defence, at his trial for conspiracy to overthrow the Government, Babeuf said:

John Scott, ed., The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf Before the High Court of Vendome, University of Massachusetts Press, 1967 (with an Essay by Herbert Marcuse):

{p. 19} Gentelemen of the Jury, ...

{p. 22} Socrates made war on bigotry - and drank the poisoned cup. Jesus of Galilee, who taught men to love equality, truth, and justice, and to hate the rich, was nailed live to the stake. Lycurgus fled his native land to escape death at the hands of those whom his deeds had made happy. ...

{p. 23} Two hundred and eighty-four members of the Areopagus passed sentence upon Socrates, to be sure; but they were the creatures of two scoundrels, Anytus and Meletus, and Socrates did not defend himself. Christ's trial amounted to nothing more than a brief interrogation before Pontius Pilate.

{Karl Marx rejected the analogy drawn by F. C. Baur between Socrates and Christ (see his Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 1, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, pp. 493-4)}

{p. 24} It cannot be said too often that this trial is the trial of the Revolution itself.

{p. 26} I am aware that in this last observation I reveal the secret of the people's weakness and the corresponding strength of their would-be oppressors. My words, indeed, might provide them with a commentary upon a theme by Machiavelli. ... In a democracy, yes, even in Rome, I would be brought before the people themselves, in the public square, to argue my case.

{p. 41} After 13 vendemairie I became aware that the masses - weary of a Revolution whose twists and turns had brought them only sorrow - had, it must be admitted, turned back to royalism. In Paris I saw that the simple and unlettered people had been led by their enemies to feel a cordial detestation for the Republic. The masses, whose judgment is guided by daily experience, had with little difficulty been induced to ask themselves: How did we fare under the Crown, and how is it now under the Republic? In the ensuing comparison the Republic came off second best. It was then only a step to the conclusion that the Republic was something detestable and that monarchy was far better.

{p. 42} I launched the Tribune of the People and through it I spoke to the masses.

Listen to me, I say, many of you have drawn the same conclusion that the long succession of disasters which we have suffered that the Republic is worthless and that monarchy is preferred. You are right - and I spell it out in capitals - WE WERE BETTER OFF UNDER THE BOURBONS THAN WE ARE NOW UNDER THE REPUBLIC. But, I continue, we must be clear which Republic we mean ... The real Republic is something of which we have not yet made trial. ...

The slogan of liberty and equality, which was for so long dinned into your ears, had a certain charm in the early days of the Revolution, because you believed that it contained real meaning. Today this slogan means nothing to you any more; it is only an empty oratorical flourish. But we must repeat again and again that this

{p. 44} slogan, notwithstanding all our recent painful experiences, can and should connote something of deep significance for the masses.

The Revolution, I went on, ought not to pass into history as an event without meaning. It is inconceivable that the people should shed their blood in torrents only to end up in greater torment than before. ...

{p. 48} The man who wills an end also wills the means to gain that end.

{p. 51} In the Tribune

{p. 52} of the People (number 55, page 102), I wrote:

In the beginning the soil belonged to none, its fruits to all. The introduction of private property was a piece of trickery put over on the simple and unassuming masses. The laws that buttressed property operated inevitably to create social classes - privileged and oppressed, masters and slaves.

The law of inheritance is a sovereign wrong. It breeds misery even from the second generation. ... Hence we find masters and servants even among the grandchildren of a single man.

The law of inalienability is no less unjust. This one man, already master over all the other grandchildren in the same line, pays what he will for the work they must do for him. ...

The gulf between rich and poor, rulers and rules, proceeds from yet another cause, the difference in value and in price that arbitrary opinion attaches to the diverse products of soil and manufacture. Thus a watchmaker's working day has been valued twenty times higher than a ploughman's or laborer's. The wages of the watchmaker enable him to get possession of the inheritance of twenty ploughmen ...

{p. 57} We must try to guarantee to each man and his posterity, however numerous, a sufficiency of the means of existence, and nothing more. We must try and close all possible avenues by which a man may acquire more than his fair share of the fruits of toil and the gifts of nature.

The only way to do this is to organize a communal regime which will suppress private property, set each to work at the skill or job he understands, require each to deposit the fruits of his labor at the common store, and establish an agency for the distribution of basic necessities. ...

A system such as this has been proven practicable by actual experience, for it is used by our twelve armies with their 1,2000,000 men. And what is possible on a small scale can also be done on a large one. ...

{p. 58} Such a regime, I continued, will sweep away iron bars, dungeon walls, and bolted doors, trials and disputations, murders, thefts and crimes of every kind; it will sweep away the judges and the judged ...

Such, gentlemen of the jury, was the body of truth that I concerned myself with and that I thought to have divined from my study of the ageless book of nature.

{p. 61} What are the quotations from Rousseau, that I shall cite later, doing here, if the intention is not to convict him along with us?

{p. 62} Poor Jean-Jacques! This will not save you from being sentenced in absentia ...

{p. 63} As you may easily see, it is writers like Rousseau who have subverted us. ... Rousseau, who is cast here in the role of our accomplice ...

{p. 64} Such are the ravings of Rousseau, our co-conspirator, about private property ... If the Genevan dreamer were still alive, he would learn soon enough that dissent is dangerous.

{end quotes}

Babeuf and A. A. Darthe were found guilty on May 24, 1797; sentenced on May 26; and executed on May 27. Seven others, including Philippe Buonarroti, were also found guilty, and deported (p. 11).

Buonarroti later memorialized Babeuf in his book Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality, tr. Bronterre O'Brien, 1836.

6.5 Social Revolution from Babeuf to the Bolsheviks

The revolutionary movement spans centuries, from the French Revolution to Karl Marx, to the Bolsheviks, to our own time. And thus our investigation must delve into the historical continuity.

The Anarchist leader Bakunin wrote in his paper Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism:

"Babeuf's conspiracy failed; he was guillotined, together with some of his old friends. But his idea of a socialist republic did not die with him. It was picked up by his friend Buonarroti, the arch-conspirator of the century, who transmitted it as a sacred trust to future generations".

According to James Billington, in his book Fire In the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, Buonarroti was a member of the Illuminati. Billington's big book is an account of the secret societies behind revolutions.

The back of the dust jacket of this book reads:

{quote} JAMES H. BILLINGTON has been, since 1973, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars ... he received his doctorate as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford ...{endquote}

Billington later became Librarian of Congress.

There's no mention in the book of the secret society of Cecil Rhodes for furthering the British Empire, which endows the Rhodes Scholarships to this day: rhodes-scholars.html.

And despite its size (677 pages, weighing 1.1 kgs), Billington's book manages to omit any Jewish connection to Revolutions.

That Jewish connection is, however, supplied by two impeccable Jewish sources, Benjamin Disraeli and J. L. Talmon.

Benjamin Disraeli wrote in his "novel" Coningsby, in 1844 (5th edition, published by Peter Davies, London, 1927):

'that mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany, and which will be, in fact, a second and greater Reformation, and of which so little is as yet known in England, is entirely developing under the auspices of Jews, who almost monopolise the professorial chairs of Germany. ... ' (p. 264).

Disraeli, writing in 1844, is referring (four years in advance) to the revolution of 1848, launched shortly after the appearance of The Communist Manifesto.

In 1852 Disraeli wrote in Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography (Archibald, Constable & Co. Ltd., London 1905):

{p. 324} An insurrection takes place against tradition and aristocracy, against religion and property. Destruction of the Semitic principle, extirpation of the Jewish religion, whether in the mosaic or in the christian form, the natural equality of man and the abrogation of property, are proclaimed by the secret societies who form provisional governments, and men of Jewish race are found at the head of every one of them. The people of God co-operate with atheists; the most skilful accumulators of property ally themselves with communists; the peculiar and chosen race touch the hand of all the scum and low castes of Europe! And all this because they wish to destroy that ungrateful Christendom which owes to them even its name, and whose tyranny they can no longer endure.

When the secret societies, in February 1848, surprised Europe, they were themselves surprised by the unexpected opportunity, and so little capable were they of seizing the occasion, that had it not been for the Jews, who of late years unfortunately have been connecting themselves with these unhallowed associations, imbecile as were the governments the uncalled-for outbreak would not have ravaged Europe. But the fiery energy and the teeming resources of the children of Israel maintained for a long time the unnecessary and useless struggle. If the reader throws over the provisional governments of Germany, and Italy, and even of France, formed at that period, he will recognise everywhere the Jewish element. {endquote}

Disraeli's message is: if you don't want Communism, support Zionism. The West used this strategy in the Cold War.

More from Disraeli at disraeli.html.

J. L. Talmon wrote two studies of the revolutionary tradition. The first, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, "writes out" any mention of Jewish involvement.

The second, Israel Among the Nations, "writes it back in":

{p. 1} It has for a long time been almost an axiom that The Revolution was the ally, some were even wont to say saviour of the Jews, and that the Jews were the natural standard-bearers of the revolution. ... Those who should be most interested, revolutionaries of Jewish extraction, or revolutionaries in general, tend to deny the very legitimacy of the juxtaposition, 'Jews and revolution'. It is, they argue, men, classes, peoples who rise in revolt against oppression, that many revolutionaries have {p. 2} been of Jewish ancestry is quite irrelevant and the very desire to see it as relevant arises out of a sinister intention to discredit the cause of revolution itself ... Then there are those Jews who are unable to ignore the intimate relation between Jews and revolution, but wish they had never heard of it. ... {p. 69} Three years later the Tsar and all his family were helpless prisoners guarded by a Jew and a few Latvian assistants. ... - 'in the fact that the chief executioner of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in the Ekaterinburg cellar was a Jew', Jacob Yurovsky.

{p. 21} The great wave of revolutions in 1848, spreading with lightning speed from capital to capital, almost from town to town across Europe, was greeted by very many Jews as proof that all nations were about to enter into a revolutionary world association. {i.e. World Government, i.e. the messianic age}

There was hardly a revolution - that year of revolutions - in which Jews were not prominent or at least very active.

{end of quotes}

More of Talmon at talmon.html.

John S. Curtiss wrote a book (an Anvil Original) titled The Russian Revolutions of 1917 (D. Van Nostrand Company, Princeton, NJ 1957), in which the word "Jew" does not even appear in the index. Not surprisingly, Curtiss' book about the Protocols, titled An Appraisal of the Protocols of Zion (Columbia University Press, New York, 1942) takes a similar line to Herman Bernstein.

Nesta Webster's book Secret Societies and Subversive Movements is another indispensable source. First published in 1924, it is now issued by Omni Publications of Palmdale, Ca (no date supplied): http://www3.addall.com/New/submitNew.cgi?query=Secret+Societies+Subversive+Movements.

Unlike Marx, Babeuf and Buonarroti offered detailed plans for the New Order, but their organisation had the same "vanguard" and conspiratorial qualities as Lenin's.

Rousseau inspired the American Revolution of 1776, and French of 1789. As theorised by Rousseau and Babeuf, the New Order is nationalist: socialism in one country. However, as theorised by Weishaupt and later Marx, it is internationalist: on a world-wide scale: rousseau.html.

The divergence between the nationalist ("non-Jewish") and internationalist ("Jewish") forms of the New Order appears in the confrontation between the Stalinist and Trotskyist traditions, although that was complicated by the struggle between Slavs and Jews in Eastern Europe, the Jews having rallied to Trotsky, who described himself as a "non-Jewish Jew". Stalin's purges were in part a cover for the removal of the Jewish intelligensia which had rallied to the Red Army during the civil war and which dominated the administration for the first 20 years of the New Order.

6.6 The "Social Revolution" as "Heaven on Earth"

We now connect the current "social revolution" in the Anglo-American countries, with its ancestors in France and Russia.

The U.S. is being undermined both by "right-wing" internationalist bankers and their lawyers, media and academics, and by "left-wing" subversives. The former destroy the American economy, while the latter launch a social revolution which destroys the metaphysics at the centre of society, and upon which its ethics and civility rests.

E.F. Schumacher, in his book Small Is Beautiful, quotes the statement "It was not barbarian attacks that destroyed the Greco-Roman world ... The cause was a metaphysical cause. The 'pagan' world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions ... because owing to faults in metaphysical analysis it had become confused as to what those convictions were ... If metaphysics had been a mere luxury of the intellect, this would not have mattered".

Then he comments, "This passage can be applied, without change, to present-day civilisation." (p.90).

This revolution in the West was launched as much in the name of Socrates as of Marx - Socrates being the Christ of Enlightenment intellectuals.

Following the fall of Robespierre, Babeuf, in the trial prior to his execution, appealed to both Socrates and Christ (John Scott, op. cit.).

Works such as Scott's were being published and studied in the U.S. in the decade from the mid 60s to the mid 70s, because the revolution which had smouldered in nineteenth century Europe finally broke out in the United States at that time.

Marx opposed F. C. Baur's appropriation of Socrates to Christianity, in his book Das Christliche im Platonismus. He rejected Baur's depiction of Socrates as a Jesus-like figure, a forerunner of Christ, in his doctoral dissertation:

The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature - in From the Preparatory Materials, Second and Sixth Notebooks. Collected Works, Volume 1, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975:

{p. 494} If therefore there is any analogy between Socrates and Chist, it must consist in the fact that Socrates is philosophy personified and Christ is religion personified.

{p. 495} In general it is far more correct to say that there are Platonic elkements in Christianity rather than Christian elements in Plato. {endquote}

This thesis displays the foundations of all Marx' later thinking, in particular his condemnation of Democritus for asserting the uncertainty of all human knowledge, and his praise of Epicurus for being, on the contrary, a dogmatist (op. cit, pp. 34-45).

Engels, in describing the history of the Communist movement, candidly admits the role of secret societies, unlike some later historians who pretend that all those uprisings happened purely spontaneously. Engels, History of the Communist League, in Lewis D. Feuer (ed), Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics & Philosophy, 1959, pp. 459-470.

In the same article he states that the revolutionary movement had been underground (conspiratorial) until 1847, when the first Congress of the League of the Just was held. At this Congress the league was reorganised and renamed the "Communist League", and, coming out of its underground mode, "barred all hankering after conspiracy, which requires dictatorship".

Acknowledgement of the connection to Weishaupt is implied: "Whatever remained of the old mystical names dating back to the conspiratorial period was now abolished".

Such names (Spartacus, Philo, Gracchus etc.) had been a feature of Weishaupt's underground organisation, the Illuminati; although Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin etc. were "new names" in the same style.

The granting of such new names upon conversion to a new faith is reminiscent of the way Catholic monks and nuns, on admission to the order, gave up their old name and used a new, religious, one, that of a saint. Weishaupt, of course, would have been familiar with this.

In 1848 the Communist League commissioned Marx and Engels to write the Manifesto.

According to Marxist theory, the metaphysics at the core of a society's beliefs is but a fabrication, a smokescreen to legitimate the status quo; the real basis of the society is its economy.

The destruction of the U.S. economy in recent decades has been done by the internationalists, through laissez-faire policies which remove the operation of the economy as an issue for determination by the public, and hand it to private interests - moneylenders, local and foreign. Greed and manipulation were legitimated by economic theories based on deduction from first principles, in the Platonic style, as is the trademark of academia these days.

But if the social revolutionaries of the Left believed the economy to be so important, in line with Marx' view, why did they not try to save their own economy? In recent decades they have been more concerned with feminism and the gay movement, liberating students from the rigours of schooling, etc. Why did they take their economy for granted?

They were led by intellectuals forged by Trotskyist Internationalists. Germaine Greer writes in The Female Eunuch:

"Hopefully, this book is subversive ... the oppression of women is necessary to the maintenance of the economy ... If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible." (Paladin, 1972, p.21).

Greer continues,

"The most telling criticisms will come from my sisters of the Left, the Maoists, the Trots, the I.S., the S.D.S., because of my fantasy that it might be possible to leap the steps of revolution and arrive somehow at liberty and communism without strategy or revolutionary discipline. But if women are the true proletariat, the truly oppressed majority, the revolution can only be drawn nearer by their withdrawal of support for the capitalist system. The weapon I suggest is that most honoured of the proletariat, withdrawal of labour" (p. 22; the I.S. are International Socialists; they and the "Trots" are Trotskyist communists).

Trotskyism is thus at the heart of Radical Feminism, yet this fact remains un-commented on by the media which have promoted the Feminist and Gay movements.

Greer is here calling upon women to destroy the family. The family being a microcosm of society, the price of Radical Feminism is the social and economic destruction of the old society; but for what?

In 1920, Alexandra Kollontai, Lenin's Minister for Social Welfare, published a pamphlet called Communism and the Family (republished in Sydney in 1971), in which she uses the expression "heaven on earth", in describing the Bokshevik strategy:

"The red flag of the social revolution which will shether, after Russia, other countries of the world also, already proclaims to us the approach of the heaven on earth to which humanity has been aspiring for centuries".

The expression "social" revolution was the heritage of the French Revolution, whereas the American was little more than a "political" revolution. In the last 30 years, this same "social" revolution has shaken the entire Anglo-American world.

Marx himself used the expression "heaven on earth", in describing his goal at the First International:

"Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labor; he must overthrow the old politics which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose heaven on earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics" - Qualifying Violent Revolution (speech on September 8, 1872), Karl Marx Library, McGraw-Hill, 1971, Vol. 1, p.64.

Finally Engels explained the socialist heaven thus:

"The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and the workers' socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society". On the History of Early Christianity, in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1975, Volume 27.

Marx' expression "lose heaven on earth" is elucidated by Engels a little further on, as follows:

'If, therefore, Professor Anton Menger wonders ... why ... "socialism did not follow the overthrow of the Roman Empire in the West", it is because he cannot see that this "socialism" did in fact, as far as it was possible at the time, exist and even became dominant - in Christianity. Only this Christianity ... did not want to accomplish the social transformation in this world, but beyond it, in heaven ..."

Engels' article On the History of Early Christianity is at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894chri/index.htm.

In the light of Engels' statements, it is clear that today's Liberation and Social Justice movements in the churches are Marxist in inspiration, and represent, not a return to the roots of Christianity, but an infiltration of the Churches, which Marx saw as the basis of the Old Order, by the Marxist movement.

For comparison, here is a speech by Trotsky on this theme:

A Paradise In This World, by Leo Trotsky

An Address delivered to a Working Class audience on April 14th, 1918

Published by British Socialist Party, London, 1920

{p. 19} ... we shall turn the whole globe into one world re-

{p. 20} public of Labour. All the earthly riches, all the lands and all the seas - all this shall be one common property of the whole of humanity ... one blossoming garden, where our chidren, grand-children, and great-grand-children will live as in a paradise. Time was when people believed in legends which told of a paradise. These were vague and confused dreams, the yearning of the soul of the oppressed Man after a better life. There was the yearning after a purer, more righteous life, and Man said: "There must be such a paradise, at least, in the 'other' world, an unknown and mysterious country." But we say, we shall create such a paradise with our toiling hands here, in this world, upon earth, for all, for our children and grand children and for all eternity! ... {end}

6.7 The Revolutions of 1848

6.7.1 J. L. Talmon, Israel Among the Nations, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1970.

{p. 9} With the exception of the ultra-orthodox, desperately fearful of change of any kind, Jews everywhere looked upon the French Revolution as a date comparable to the exodus from Egypt, and to the issuing of the Law from Mount Sinai, this time not to the Jews alone, but to all the nations. France of the Revolution became to them a second country, to more exalted believers in the superiority of the spirit over matter, their sole spiritual fatherland, just as the Soviet Union was to millions of Communists throughout the world just a short while ago.

{p. 17} I believe that there is reason to speak of a certain common denominator linking the Jewish Saint-Simonists - among the first Socialists in France, Moses Hess - the first Communist (at a later date Zionist) in Germany, the two leading Socialists of Europe, Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, and many lesser Jewish figures in the camp of revolution.

To be sure, it was not the Jews who created that particular climate of Messianic revolutionary expectation and preparation which it takes today some effort of imagination to conjure up. Babeuf, Buonarotti, Blanqui, Barbes, Mazzini, Harney, Mieroslavski - none of them and hardly any of their immediate followers were Jews. But it was the Jews who experienced and articulated that state of mind with peculiar intensity and their restless zeal spilled over into effective organisational activity.

Not only the democratic and Socialist aspirations, but even the national liberation movements bore at least in the early phase a distinctly universalist character. So great was the enthusiasm of the Jews that they were prepared to overlook the anti-Jewish excesses or gloss them over as tokens of too great an exuberance, misguided expressions of social resentment, marginal episodes, unavoidable accidents or counter-revolutionary provocations, or 'birth pangs, which bring redemption to our world'; and even to proclaim that the victory of universal brotherhood had put 'an end to any distinct Jewish history', 'for liberty, like love, is cosmopolitan, wandering from people to people'.

There was hardly a revolution - that year of revolutions - in which Jews were not prominent or at least very active.

{p. 22} In France, where there was no Jewish proletariat and where Jews except for the Jewish Saint-Simonists, were generally no further to the Left than bourgeois republicanism, Adolphe Cremieux and Goudchaux joined the government of the Republic as mild liberal Republicans. In Germany, where the Jews were more numerous, of a lesser social status, and less a part of the general society than across the Rhine, we find a much greater proportion of Jews in the Radical Left. Karl Marx is the editor of the extreme Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Jacoby is the spokesman of radical democracy ...

Although it would be a wild exaggeration to depict the wave of revolutions as led by Jews or as a result of a Jewish plot, it was possible for King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to charge 'the circumcised' for having brought 'that shame upon Germany' ...

We have two astonishingly similar comments on the role of the Jews in the revolution from two eminent Jews standing at opposite poles of the political spectrum. One comes from Benjamin Disraeli in his Life of Lord George Bentinck, published in 1852, and the other from the German-Jewish Socialist J. L. Bernays in the

{p. 23} New York German-Jewish journal Israels Herold in 1849. Disraeli had set out to prove the superiority of the Jewish race.

{p. 24} {quote} Had it not been for the Jews ... imbecile as were the governments, the uncalled-for outbreak would not have ravaged Europe. But the fiery energy and the teeming resources of the Children of Israel maintained for a long time the unnecessary and useless struggle ... everywhere the Jewish element. ... And all this because they wish to destroy that ungrateful Christendom which owes to them even its name, and whose tyranny they can no longer endure. {endquote} ...

Bernays gives a similar evaluation of 'the Jewish element in the latest European movement', but in a spirit that he himself recognises 'will be considered by a large part of the readers as highly dangerous', namely that of joyous triumph, instead of the anxious regret of Disraeli. Bernays is soaked in young Hegelian modes of thought, and often employs the same terms as Marx, only to reach the opposite conclusion. Both were agreed that the surest way of destroying political and social oppression was through the destruction of the faith in and respect for God and all religious authority - the fountain-head of all systems of oppression and alienation which the Gentile leftist Hegelians like Feuerbach, Fr. D. Strauss, Rugge, and Bauer brothers actually set out to do. The Jews - Bernays claims - have succeeded in 'galvanising the raw mob' against Pope, bishops, kings and princes, feudal potentates and plutocrats. They 'laid bare the human essence buried under the thick crust of intolerance', and 'in the face of human worth, ... there comes an end to priest and Rabbi'. In order to obtain their emancipation, the Jews had first to destroy the Christian essence of the state, the 'Christian State'. 'They criticised Christianity with great dialectical skill and with no pity', and by becoming 'in the process atheists, radicals, they became truly free men, with no prejudices'. And once they had shown that the Christian religion was nothing but a myth, 'the work was accomplished'.

More than that, the Jews 'have rescued men from the narrow idea of an exclusive fatherland, from patriotism. ... The Jew is not only an atheist, but a cosmopolitan, and he has turned men into

{p. 25} atheists and cosmopolitans; he has made man only a free citizen of the world.' Almost consciously contradicting Marx's famous dictum on the emancipation of mankind through its emancipation from Judaism, and of the Jews from Judaism, Bernays triumphantly proclaims: 'In their struggle for emancipation the Jews have emancipated the European States from Christianity'. In other words it is not the Christians who gave emancipation to the Jews, the Jews enabled the Christians to obtain their own emancipation. 'The Jews took their revenge upon the hostile world in an entirely new manner ... by liberating men from all religion, from all patriotic sentiment ... from everything that reminded them of race, place of origin, dogma and faith. Men emancipated themselves that way, and the Jew emancipated them, and the Jew became free with them ... They achieved the incredible, and historians of the people will in the future recognise their merit willingly and justly.' It was not their religion or racial qualities that enabled theJ ews to accomplish all this. It was their existential situation, their fate: 'Only as the result of a general emancipatory effort could they become free themselves.' The Jews succeeded in forging for themselves some mighty levers of power to help them in their work: 'the power of mobile property represented by the Rothschilds'; the psychological, spiritually therapeutic influence of Jewish doctors whose very existence and sought-after activity defied religious taboos and differences of religion, race and tradition; and above all the press, 'which fell everywhere in Europe into Jewish hands'. And when the revolution broke out, the Jews were everywhere in the forefront. After all, Christendom had now become atheistic and cosmopolitan, the Jews might as well leave the stage as a separate people. Their mission had been fulfilled. In a Hegelian manner the highest assertion of their particularity marks their disappearance within universality.

{p. 26} Bernays and the Jews in general, so eager in that year of universal brotherhood to renounce their corporate identity, in some cases even their religious separateness, entirely misread the real significance of the revolutionary upheaval. The victor in that revolution proved to be not universalism, but nationalism of the exclusive type {symbolised by Emperor Napoleon III, target of Maurice Joly's Dialogues}; not abstract idealism, but historic continuity; not rationalism, but the powers of instinct; not the idea of concord, but the fact of force. The Jews became the test case and whipping-block, when the victory of these counter-revolutionary forces had time to work itself out.

In the meantime, some fifteen years after the debacle of the revolutionary hopes in 1848, two Jews emerged as the acknowledged leaders of the revolution. German workers made their appeal to the Jewish litterateur Lassalle to become their chief and in response the young dictatorial leader launched his terrific campaign, which was cut short by his death in an absurd duel, and Karl Marx became the head of the First International.

At that very time the problem of Jews and revolution began to assume truly vital significance in the Empire of the Tsars.

{end of quotes}

More of Talmon at talmon.html.

6.7.2 Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1993).

{p. 17} In the decades after the war, governments became increasingly {p. 18} dependent upon foreign borrowing - an activity that the Rothschilds came to dominate. Between 1818 and 1832, Nathan Rothschild handled 39% of the loans floated in London by such governments as Austria, Russia and France. Similarly, the Vienna and Paris branches of the family raised money and sold bonds for the Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Orleanists, and Bonaparts. By mid-century, the entire European state system was dependent upon the international financial network dominated by the Rothschilds. In the 1860s and 1870s, another Jewish financier, Baron Gerson von Bleichroeder, was a principal figure in the creation of a united German state. Bleichroeder helped Bismarck obtain loans for the war against Austria after the chancellor failed to secure financing from the Prussian parliament. Subsequently, Bismarck entrusted Bleichroeder with negotiating the indemnity to be paid by France after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 (on the French side, negotiations were conducted by the Rothschilds).

{p. 18} Significant numbers of Jews participated in the liberal revolutions of 1848 in central Europe. In Germany, Jews fought at the barricades in Berlin and helped to lead the Prussian national assembly and

{p. 19} Frankfurt parliament. Such intellectuals as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Borne were major publicists and propagandists for the liberal cause. In Austria, Jews participated in the Vienna uprising and helped to formulate a new liberal constitution. In Hungary, 20,000 Jews enlisted in the national army formed by Louis Kossuth. The constitutions of most of the liberal regimes established in 1848 provided for emancipation of the Jews. After these regimes were overthrown by conservative forces, however, many of the Jews' new privileges were rescinded. Central European Jews continued to support liberal movements even after the revolutions of 1848 were defeated. In the 1860s and 1870s Austrian and German rulers were compelled to make concessions to liberal forces, and Jewish disabilities were removed as they had been earlier in France and Britain when liberal regimes were consolidated in those countries....

In France, Jews supported the liberal revolution of 1848. Two prominent Jews, Adolphe Cremieux and Michel Goudchaux, served the Second Republic as ministers of justice and finance, respectively. The accession of Napoleon III brought an end to this short-lived regime, and Jews played little role in the Second Empire that followed. After the rout of French forces in the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870, Jews were active in the founding of the Third Republic. The Rothschilds organized the payment of the German war indemnity, and a number of Jews participated in the early republican governments. Cremieux once again served as minister of justice; Eugene Manuel, Narcisse Leven, and Leonce Lehmann occupied important government posts; and several Jews served in the Chamber of Deputies.

{p. 20} Between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, Paris was a major international banking and financial center, and Jews were among the dominant figures in French finance. In the late nineteenth century, roughly one-third of all Paris bankers were Jews. {endquote}

More of Ginsberg at ginsberg.html.

7. Napoleon III's Rule

7.1 Napoleon III's Political Program

Napoleon III, Napoleonic Ideas - originally published as Des Idees Napoleoniennes, par le Prince Napoleon-Louis Bonaparte, in July, 1839. Edited by Briston D. Gooch, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1967.

Napoleon III here writes (before he became Emperor) of his uncle, Napoleon I, and sets out his program.

{p. 41} The Domestic Situation

The different governments which held power successively from 1789 to 1800 obtained great results in spite of their excesses. The independence of France had been maintained, the feudal system had been broken up, and salutary principles had been widely spread. Nevertheless, nothing was as yet solidly established; too many hostile elements stood face to face.

At the epoch when Napoleon arrived at power, true legislative genius consisted in judgments based on an awareness of how past, present, and future were related.

{p. 42} It was necessary to solve and answer the following questions:

What ideas have passed away never to return?

What ideas must ultimately triumph?

Finally, what ideas are susceptible of immediate application, and will hasten the reign of those destined to prevail?

The Emperor rapidly discerned these various distinctions, and though he clearly foresaw the possibilities of the future, he confined his action to the realization of present possibilities.

The great difflculty in revolutions is to avoid confusion in popular ideas. The duty of every government is to oppose false ideas and to guide true ones by placing itself boldly at their head; for if a government allows itself to be led instead of guiding, it hastens to destruction and compromises society instead of protecting it.

The Emperor acquired his immense ascendency so easily because he represented the true ideas of his age. As to harmful ideas, he never attacked them frontally, but always flanked, parleyed and negotiated with them, finally reducing them to submission by moral influence, for he knew that violence is unavailing and worthless against ideas.

Having always an object in view, he employed the promptest means which circumstances permitted to attain it.

What was his ultimate object? ... Liberty!

Yes, liberty! and the more one studies the history of Napoleon, the more will he be convinced of this truth. For liberty is like a river; in order that it may bring abundance and not devastation, it is necessary to prepare for it a broad and deep channel. If in its regular and majestic course it remains within its natural limits, the regions it traverses bless its passage; but if it comes like an overflowing torrent, it is regarded as the most terrible of calamities; it awakens every form of distrust, and then one

{p. 43} sees men in their fear reject liberty because she may destroy, as if one should banish fire because it may burn or water because it may inundate.

But is it said liberty was not secured by the imperial laws? The name of liberty was not, it is true, placed at the head of every law or placarded at every public square, but every law of the Empire prepared for its peaceful and certain reign.

When in a country there exist parties exasperated with each other and possessing violent mutual hatreds, it is necessary for these parties to disappear and for these hatreds to be pacified before liberty is possible.

When in a country become thoroughly democratic like France, the principle of equality is not generally applied, it must be introduced into all the laws before liberty is possible.

When there is neither public spirit nor religion nor political faith, it is necessary to create at least one of these elements before liberty is possible.

When the ancient manners and customs have been destroyed by a social revolution, it is necessary to create new manners and customs in harmony with the new principles before liberty is possible.

When there is no longer an aristocracy in a nation, and nothing remains organized but the army, it is necessary to reconstruct a civil order based upon a precise and regular organization before liberty is possible.

Finally, when a country is at war with its neighbors and contains in its bosom partisans of its enemies, it is necessary to conquer those enemies and convert them into sure allies before liberty is possible.

We must pity those who wish to reap before having plowed the field or sown the seed or given to the plant the necessary time to germinate, to blossom, and to ripen its fruit. It is a fatal error to imagine that a declaration of principles is sufficient to constitute a new order of things.

{p. 44} After a revolution the essential thing is not to make a constitution but to adopt a system which, based upon popular principles, possesses all the force necessary to found and establish and which, while surmounting the difficulties of the moment, possesses flexibility enough to adapt itself to circumstances. Besides, after a conflict, can a constitution safeguard itself against reactionary passions? How dangerous it is to attempt to convert transitory necessities into general and permanent principles! "A Constitution," Napoleon has said, "is the work of time; one cannot provide in it too broad a power of amendment."

We proceed to recapitulate under the preceding points of view the actions of the Emperor. To judge is to compare. We will compare his reign with the epoch which preceded it and with the epoch which followed. We will judge his plans by what he did when victorious - by what he has left in spite of his defeat.

When Napoleon returned from Egypt all France received him with enthusiasm, regarding him as the savior of the dying Revolution. France, fatigued by so many successive efforts, agitated by so many different parties, had gone to sleep amidst the thunder of her victories, and seemed about to lose the fruit of what she had acquired. The government was without moral force, without principle, without virtue. Furnishers and contractors were at

{p. 45} the head of society and held the highest rank in the midst of corruption. Generals of the army, such as Championnet at Naples and Brune in Lombardy, feeling that they were the strongest, began to refuse obedience to the government and imprisoned its representatives. Credit was annihilated, the treasury was empty, public stock had fallen to eleven per cent, waste was rife in the administration, the most odious brigandage infested France, and the provinces of the west were in a constant state of insurrection. Finally, the old regime approached again with alarming speed, for the axe of the lictor no longer protected the cap of liberty.

Everybody talked of liberty and equality, but each party wished them only for itself. We want equality, said some, but we do not wish to grant the rights of citizenship to the relatives of nobles and of emigrants, and we propose to leave 145,000 Frenchmen in exile. We want equality, said others, but we do not wish to give offices to conventionalists. Finally, we want liberty, but we are for maintaining the law which condemns to death those whose writings tend to recall the old regime; we are for maintaining the law of hostages, which destroys the security of 200,000 families; we are for maintaining the impediments which nullify the liberty of worship, etc., etc. Such contradictions between professed principles and their practical application tended to introduce confusion into ideas and things. It must have been so as long as there was not a national power which, by its stability and conscious strength, was exempt from passion and able to give protection to all parties without losing any of its popular character.

{end of quotes}

7.2 How Napoleon III Came to Power

7.2.1 Jean Sigmann, 1848: the Romantic and Democratic Revolutions in Europe, tr., Lovett F. Edwards, George Allen & Unwin, London 1973.

{p. 228} The crushing victory won on 10 December 1848 by Louis Napoleon was primarily due to the peasantry. But the workers too had a considerable share in it; with their five-and-a-half million votes, the "nephew of the little corporal" defeated the candidate of the bourgeoisie, the republican General Cavaignac (one-and-a-half million), leader of the executive and "prince of the blood" since his triumph in June and also crushed that of the Left-wing parliamentarian Ledru-Rollin (370,000), the socialist Raspail (37,000) and Lamartine (17,000) the symbol of a dead hope.

Universal suffrage had put an end to the revolution in April. Was it now to substitute the Empire or the Monarchy for the Republic? To this alternative the day of 13 June 1849 gave an answer of which the people dimly perceived the anachronism.

{endquote}

7.2.2 Documents in the Political History of the European Continent 1815-1939. Selected and edited by G. A. Kertesz, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1968:

{p. 98} 43. Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1848

Although Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon I, tried to return to France repeatedly after the February Revolution, and in fact was elected several times to the Assembly, the Government and the National Assembly prevented his return until September. He was then allowed to take his seat in the National Assembly (a), and became a candidate in the presidential elections in December, winning them with an overwhelming majority. Part of his programme is included under (b). The two selections provide an interesting contrast to the documents in section VII.

Source: The Political and Historical Works of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (London, Illustrated London Library, 1852), vol. i, pp. 96-7, 101-5.

(a) Louis Napoleon's Speech on taking his Seat in the Assembly, 27 September 1848.

Citizen representatives:

I cannot longer remain silent after the calumnies directed against me. I feel it incumbent on me to declare openly, on the first day I am allowed to sit in this hall, the real sentiments which animate and have always animated me. After being proscribed during thirty-three years, I have at last recovered a country and my rights of citizenship. The Republic has conferred on me that happiness. I offer it now my oath of gratitude and devotion, and the generous fellow-countrymen who sent me to this hall may rest certain that they will find me devoted to the double task which is common to us all, namely, to assure order and tranquillity, the first want of the country, and to develop the democratical institutions which the people has a right to claim. During a long period I could only devote to my country the meditations of exile and captivity. Today a new career is open to me. Admit me in your ranks, dear colleagues, with the sentiment of affectionate sympathy which animates me. My conduct, you may be certain, shall ever be guided by a respectful devotion to the law. It will prove, to the confusion of those who have attempted to slander me, that no man is more devoted than I am, I repeat, to the defence of order and the consolidation of the Republic.

{p. 99} (b) Louis Napoleon's Programme, November 1848.

Fellow Citizens:

In order to recall me from exile, you elected me a representative of the people. On the eve of your proceeding to the election of chief magistrate of the republic, my name presents itself to you as a symbol of order and security.

These testimonies of a confidence so honourable are due, I am aware, much more to the name which I bear than to myself, who have as yet done nothing for my country;- but the more the memory of the Emperor protects me, and inspires your suffrages, the more I feel myself called upon to make known to you my sentiments and principles. There must not be anything equivocal in the relations between us.

I am not an ambitious man, who dreams at one time of the Empire and of war; at another of the adoption of subversive theories. Educated in free countries, and in the school of misfortune, I shall always remain faithful to the duties which your suffrages, and the will of the Assembly, may impose upon me.

If I am elected President, I should not shrink from any danger, from any sacrifice, to defend society, which has been so audaciously attacked. I should devote myself wholly, without reserve, to the confirming of a republic, which has shown itself wise by its laws, honest in its intentions, great and powerful by its acts.

I pledge my honour to leave to my successor, at the end of four years, the executive powers strengthened, liberty intact, and a real progress accomplished.

Whatever may be the result of the election, I shall bow to this will of the people; and I pledge beforehand my co-operation with any strong and honest government which shall re-establish order in principles as well as in things; which shall efficiently protect our religion, our families, and our properties - the eternal basis of every social community; which shall attempt all practicable reform, assuage animosities, reconcile parties, and thus permit a country rendered anxious by circumstances, to count upon the morrow.

To re-establish order is to restore confidence - to repair, by means of credit, the temporary depreciation of resources - to restore financial positions and revive commerce.

{p. 158} 74. Decree dissolving the National Assembly, 2 December 1851

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, having been elected president in 1848 (cf. No. 43(b)) worked hard at making himself and his policies popular in the country and, indeed, by 1851, was assured of substantial support not only among the population, but also in the National Assembly. Many thought that only his continuance in the presidency could assure the maintenance of internal peace and order, but re-election of a president after his four-year term was prohibited by the 1848 constitution.

Petitions for the revision of this provision were received in large numbers durng 1851 (many of them organized by the prefects), and the National Assembly voted by a large majority in favour of such revision, but it was short of the constitutionally required two-thirds majority. Louis Napoleon and his entourage therefore decided on a coup d'etat which, after several postponements, took place in the early hours of 2 December 1851. The first step was the dissolution of the National Assembly.

Source: The Political and Historical Works of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (London, Illustrated London Library, 1852), vol. ii, p. 354.

In the name of the French people the President of the Republic decrees:

I. The National Assembly is dissolved. 2. Universal suffrage is re-established. The law of the 31st of May is abrogated. 3. The French people is convoked for their votes from the 14th December to the 21st December following. 4. The state of siege is decreed throughout the first military division. 5. The Council of State is dissolved. 6. The Minister of the Interior is charged with the execution of the present decree.

75. Proclamation and Decree on the Plebiscite, 2 December 1851

The dissolution of the National Assembly (No. 74) was justified by Louis Napoleon in the proclamation that follows (a). In it, he also indicated the main constitutional changes he wanted to introduce and announced the holding of a plebiscite to ascertain the will of the people. The terms of the plebiscite are contained in his decree (b)

Source: Annual Register, 1851, pp. [254-5, 201].

1 In this law the Assembly, against the wishes of the president, re-introduced resirictions on the suffrage.

{p. 159} (a) Proclamation of 2 December 1851.

Frenchmen,

The present situation cannot last much longer. Each day the situation of the country becomes worse. The Assembly, which ought to be the firmest supporter of order, has become a theatre of plots. The patriotism of 300 of its members could not arrest its fatal tendencies. In place of making laws for the general interest of the people it was forging arms for civil war. It attacked the power I hold directly from the people; it encouraged every evil passion; it endangered the repose of France. I have dissolved it, and I make the whole people judge between me and it. The Constitution, as you know, had been made with the object of weakening beforehand the powers you entrusted to me. Six millions of votes were a striking protest against it, and yet I have faithfully observed it. Provocations, calumnies, outrages, found me passive. But now that the fundamental part is no longer respected by those who incessantly invoke it, and the men who have already destroyed two monarchies wish to tie up my hands in order to overthrow the Republic, and to save the country by appealing to the solemn judgment of the only sovereign I recognize in France - the people.

I, then, make a loyal appeal to the entire nation; and I say to you, if you wish to continue this state of disquietude and uneasiness that degrades you and endangers the future, choose another person in my place, for I no longer wish for a place which is powerless for good, but which makes me responsible for acts that I cannot hinder, and chains me to the helm when I see the vessel rushing into the abyss. If, on the contrary, you have still confidence in me, give me the means of accomplishing the grand mission I hold from you. That mission consists in closing the era of revolution, in satisfying the legitimate wants of the people, and in protecting them against subversive passions. It consists especially in the power to create institutions which survive men, and which are the foundation on which something durable is based. Persuaded that the instability of power, that the preponderance of a single Assembly, are the permanent causes of trouble and discord, I submit to your vote the fundamental bases of a constitution which the assemblies will develop hereafter. ...

{p. 165} 78. The Re-Establishment of the Empire, November-December 1852

After Louis Napoleon took power as president for ten years in 1851, it was clear that it would not be long before he assumed the imperial dignity. In November 1852 a senatus consultum (a) was passed proposing this modification of the constitution, and was approved by a large majority in a plebiscite (b).

Source: Annual Register, 1852, pp. [263-4, 267] (with emendations).

(a) Senatus Consultum, 7 November 1852.

1. The imperial dignity is re-established. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte is Emoeror of the French under the name of Napoleon III. 2. The imperial dignity is hereditary in the direct descendants, natural and legitimate, of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte ... 8. The following proposition shall be submitted to the people for acceptance in the form determined by decrees: 'The people desires the re-establishment of the imperial dignity in the person of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, with the succession in his direct descendants natural and legitimate or adopted; and gives him the right to regulate the order of succession to the throne in the Bonaparte family ...'

(b) Decree on the Re-establishment of the Empire, 2 December 1852.

Seeing the senatus consultum, dated 7 November 1852, which submitted to the people the following plebiscite:

[text in paragraph 8 of No. 78(a)];

{p. 166} Seeing the declaration of the Legislative Body, which proves that the operations of the vote have been everywhere freely and regularly accomplished;

That the general summing up of the votes on the plebiscite has given seven millions eight hundred and twenty-four thousand one hundred and eighty-nine (7,824,189) bulletins bearing the word 'Yes';

Two hundred and fifty-three thousand one hundred and forty-five (253,I45) bulletins bearing the word 'No';

Sixty-three thousand three hundred and twenty-six (63,326) invalid bulletins: We have decreed and decree as follows:

1. The senatus consultum of the 7th of November, 1852, ratified by the plebiscite of the 21st and 22nd of November, is promulgated and becomes the law of the State. 2. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte is Emperor of the French under the name of Napoleon III.

79. Senatus Consultum amending Article 42 of the Constitution, 2 February 1861

The first of the liberalization measures which, though still with restrictions, enabled the public at large to be informed of the debates of the Chambers.

Source: F.-A. Helie, Les constitutions de la France (Paris, Duchemin, 1880), p. 1272 (trans. Ed.).

Article 42 of the Constitution is amended as follows:

The debates in the sessions of the Senate and the Legislative Body shall be taken down in shorthand and inserted, in full, in the official gazette of the following day.

In addition, reports of these sessions, compiled by editorial secretaries under the authority of the president of each Chamber, shall be put at the disposal of all newspapers each evening. ...

{p. 167} 80. Senatus Consultum amending articles 4 and 12 of the Senatus Consultum of 25 December 1852, 31 December 1861

This is another important liberalization measure. Before it, the budget had to be debated and voted as a whole: under the new arrangement it became possible to discuss the estimates of each ministry separately. At the same time, the control of the Legislative Body over supplementary or extraordinary estimates was extended.

Source: F.-A. Helie, Les constitutions de la France (Paris, Duchemin, 1880) pp. 1274-5 (trans. Ed.).

I. The estimates of expenditure shall be presented to the Legislative Body set out in sections, chapters and articles. The estimates of each ministry shall be voted by sections. The appropriations voted for each section shall be allocated to its chapters by a decree of the Emperor made in the Council of State. 2. Special decrees, made in the same form, may authorize transfers from one chapter to another within the estimates of the same ministry. 3. Supplementary or extraordinary appropriations may only be granted by law ...

81. Imperial decree concerning the Relations of the Government with the Senate and the Legislative Body, 19 January 1867

The importance of this decree is that it enables members of the two Chambers to raise questions in public session, asking for an explanation by the minister concerned. In this way grievances could be aired, and actions of the executive criticized. While it is true that

{p. 168} the general debate on the address in reply was abolished as part of this reform, the possibility of raising specific matters amply compensated for the loss.

Source: F.-A. Helie, Les constitutions de la France (Paris, Duchemin, 1880) p. 1283 (trans. Ed.).

1. Members of the Senate and of the Legislative Body may address interpellations to the Government. 2. All requests for interpellations must be in writing and signed by at least five members. Such requests must explain the subject of the interpellation in summary form; they are to be sent to the president who communicates them to the minister of state and sends them to committees for examination. 3. If two committees of the Senate or four committees of the Legislative Body are of opinion that the interpellations may take place, the Chamber shall set a day for the debate. 4. After the close of the debate, the Chamber may resolve the return to the order of the day, or to communicate with the government. 5. Return to the order of the day always has priority. 6. Communication to the Government must always be couched in the following terms: 'The Senate or the Legislative Body brings the subject of the interpellations to the attention of the Government.' - In this case an extract of the debate is sent to the minister of state ... 8. Articles 1 and 2 of our decree of 24 November 1860 which order that the Senate and the Legislative Body shall each year, at the beginning of the session, vote an address in reply to our speech, are abrogated.

82. The Liberal Empire, 21 May 1870

After further measures of liberalization in 1869, the Emperor submitted, on 23 April 1870, a senatus consultum to the people, who were asked to approve the new constitution contained in it. The document that follows consists of the proclamation making public the result of the plebiscite and introducing the new constitution, the most important new provisions of which are included in summary form.

Source: F.-A. Helie, Les constitutions de la France (Paris, Duchemin, 1880), pp. 1323-7 (trans. Ed.).

{p. 169} Napoleon, by the grace of God and the national will Emperor of the French, to all present and to come, greeting.

In view of our decree of 23rd of April last which convoked the French people in its electoral assemblies to accept or reject the following proposition:

'The people approves the liberal reforms of the Constitution introduced by the Emperor, with the consent of the great bodies of the State, since 1860 and it ratifies the senatus consultum of the 20th of April l870';

In view of the declaration of the Legislative Body which states that the operations of the vote have been everywhere freely and regularly accomplished; and that the general summing up of the votes on the proposition has given 7350,142 bulletins bearing the word 'Yes'; 1,538,825 bulletins bearing the word 'No'; and 112,975 invalid bulletins;

We have sanctioned and sanction, we have promulgated and promulgate as the constitution of the State the senatus consultum adopted by the Senate on the 20th of April 1870 the text of which is as follows: -

Senatus Consultum Establishing the Constitution of the Empire.

[The following are some of the more important changes from the Constitution of 1852, the provisions of which, if not expressly superseded, remain in force:

The Senate and the Legislative Body as well as the Emperor now have the initiative in introducing legislation;

A Council of Ministers is established; the ministers are responsible; they may be members of the Senate or the Legislative Body;

The Constitution can be altered only by the people on the proposal of the Emperor.]

{end of quotes}

8. Assessments of Napoleon III

Having connected up the various revolutionary movements, we must now re-focus on Joly and his historical context.

It will be seen that the Bolsheviks win hands-down; it's no contest. But those claiming the Protocols a forgery, must pin the despotism on Napoleon III rather than the Bolsheviks.

8.1 David L. Kulstein, Napoleon III and the Working Class: A Study of Government Propaganda Under the Second Empire, The California State Colleges, [Sacramento?], 1969.

{p. 37} Louis Napoleon also attempted to gain the support of the socialist P.-J. Proudhon. In September, 1848, he arranged a meeting with Proudhon and the republican Joly to discuss the political and social problems faced by France.

{footnote 130: Alfred Darimon, A travers une revolution (1847-1855) (Paris, 1894), 68 ff. Darimon was Proudhon's secretary.}

{p. 42} A bitter satire on the press during the Second Empire by the republican journalist Maurice Joly, despite its exaggerations, also contains much that is true.

{footnote 17: Maurice Joly, Dialogues aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu ou la politique de Machiavel au XlXe siecle (Brussels, 1864), 139 ff. The publication of this "revolutionary book" gained Joly a sentence of fifteen months in prison. ... The famous antisemitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a paraphrase of Joly's work. Konrad Heiden, Der Fuerrer (New York, 1944), 1 ff.}

{end of quotes}

Natalie Isser's book The Second Empire and the Press (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1974) is similar in style to Kulstein's.

The material in Theodore Zeldin's book The Political System of Napoleon III (Macmillan, London 1958) is covered by other authors quoted below.

It is strange that Kulstein, who devotes many pages to Joly's account, should need to quote a book about Hitler, to claim that the Protocols is a paraphrase of Joly. In fact the parallel passages in Joly's Dialogues comprise 16.45% of the Protocols, by word-count. However, even in the parallel passages, the meaning is often different.

Kulstein, presumably Jewish himself, makes no mention of the specifically Jewish role in the revolutionary movement.

8.2 James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, Maurice Temple Smith Limited, London 1980.

{p. 340} Napoleon III and "Imperialism"

The drama of deradicalizing the masses through a new type of journalism unfolded most vividly in the France of Napoleon III. In ways that contemporaries never understood - and historians have only begun to investigate - Napoleon turned revolutionary nationalism abroad into a means of political repression at home, and transformed revolutionary Saint-Simonian social ideas at home into a means of economic expansion abroad.

One cannot speak of the third Napoleon without speaking of the first; for the new Napoleon rode to power in large measure on the reputation of the old. Napoleon III was elected president of the Second French Republic by an overwhelming vote in December 1848, and was awarded dictatorial powers three years later by an even more staggering vote. The Napoleonic legend had continued to cast its spell over many revulutionary intellectuals.

The original French Revolution brought Napoleon I to power, and the original professional revolutionaries of the early nineteenth century came together largely to overthrow him. Revolutionary thinking about power was, thus, influenced from the beginning by this supreme man of power. He set the agenda for a generation by shattering all the old

{p. 341} political legitimacies: by politicizing the Enlightenment ideal of universal rationality (the metric system, the Code Napoleon); and by imposing it all on a backward world. Above all, he fed the romantic imagination with an aesthetic fascination with power - and with the possibilities of changing the map and the life of Europe.

Whether they came from the armies that fought with Napoleon (French Philadelphians, Polish Philomats, and most Italian Carbonari) or against him (Russian Decembrists, Spanish comuneros, German Tugendbund), the early revolutionaries were youthful soldiers who spoke French and thought in the grand Napoleonic manner. There was, then, a hidden model or "superego" for the original revolutionaries. Bonaparte was Prometheus unbound, a parvenu in power; and the young revolutionary was almost always both a restless Promethean and an outsider in search of power.

The most important revolutionary ideologies of the restoration era - Saint-Simonianism and Hegelianism - were born under the Napoleonic star. They continued to attract intellectuals who sought to provide purpose for (and thus gain access to) power. This politicization of the intellect intensified under Napoleon. Saint-Simon first began writing specifically in order to perfect and complete the Napoleonic reforms. His long and unsuccessful campaign to reach Napoleon directly gave him a permanent predilection for seeking out a power capable of putting his ideas into force. Hegel was enraptured by the Napoleonic conquest of Germany, and saw the hand of providence in the completion of his Phenomenology at the time of the Battle of Jena. His final political vision appears to have been a synthesis of Prussian reform with Napoleonic universality.

The rational reintegration of society preached by Hegel and Saint-Simon was inconceivable without the strange combination that Napoleon introduced into the world: a despot ruling in the name of liberation. However un-Napoleonic may have been the final hopes that Saint-Simon placed in the working class and Hegel in the Prussian state, the impulse to look for some universal secular transformation of society came as much from the concrete fact of Napoleon as from the abstract rhetoric of the revolution.

The Napoleonic legacy thus helped create the original revolutionary ideologies; and the Napoleonic legend helped in more subtle ways to revive and intensify the revolutionary impulse in the 1840s. The boredom with the politics and style of Louis Philippe would not have been so acute in a land that did not have a Napoleon to remember. The insecure Louis Philippe, in search of some genealogy of legitimacy, cultivated an identification with Napoleon. He returned the ashes of Napoleon to Paris for reburial in the Invalides, and erected his statue in the Place Vendome.

There had long been a body of Frenchmen who considered themselves reform Napoleonists as distinct from militaristic Bonapartists. In the 1840s their ranks were swelled by others whose political hopes focused on Napoleon's nephew, the future Napoleon III, who had been

{p. 342} active in the Italian revolutionary movement and had vainly tried twice to have himself proclaimed emperor in the late 1830s. This new Napoleon wrote in 1839 the influential Des Idees Napoleoniennes {excerpted below}, which called for a new supra-political authority avoiding all doctrine and seeking only concrete benefits for the masses.

This influential work, which sold 500,000 copies in five years, reflected the ideas of the Saint-Simonians whom Napoleon had befriended during his English exile of the late 1830s. He followed them in preferring administrative solutions over ideological or political ones and in his early interest in a possible canal through Nicaragua to further the "mystic marriage of East and West."

The young Saint-Simon had progressed from early dreams of becoming a new Charlemagne to his final appeal for justice to "the poorest and most numerous class." Napoleon III in like fashion turned from writing a life of Charlemagne in the early forties to a new vision of increasing production and ending unemployment in his work of 1844: Extinction of Pauperism.

Napoleon III did not share Napoleon I's fatal opposition to ideology. Unlike the first Napoleon, who came back from Egypt and Italy as a man of war, the third Napoleon returned to France from London as a man of ideas. He adopted as his own the Proudhonist proposal for workers' associations and benefits, and transformed the Saint-Simonianism of his youth into an authoritarian industrialism and an anticlerical positivism that greatly strengthened the French state (and, incidentally, helped to gain for many surviving Saint-Simonians lucrative positions in banking, industry, and government service). In this respect Bismarck was his imitator, transforming Hegelianism, the ideological system hitherto prevalent among German revolutionaries, into a new and conservative German nationalism. The roots of this neo-Hegelianism lay in the tract of 1857 calling for the building of a monument to Hegel, but warning that none would be adequate "until the German nation would build its state into the living temple of purest realism." When Bismarck became premier of Prussia five years later he capitalized on the passion of Hegelian intellectuals for political relevance by enlisting many of them in the tasks of German state-building. Many came to believe that Hegel's vision of a rational ordered society giving birth to a neo-Hellenic flowering of high culture might soon become reality in the new Germany Bismarck was building.

The principal "Napoleonic idea" was the cooptation of French revolutionary rhetoric by the patriotic press, which Napoleon III controlled brilliantly. The problem of the press was inescapable for anyone trying to restore order to France. Triumphant in elections, Napoleon faced the challenge of a free press:

{quote} ... the great question of the century ... the greatest difficulty for constitutional order, the greatest danger for weak governments, the decisive proof of strong ones. {endquote}

Initially, Napoleon III reacted negatively to the challenge. But his harsh press laws of 1852 were gradually relaxed. He provided a general am-

{p. 343} nesty for the press in 1859, and soon entered the lists of chauvinistic journalism with his own anticlerical, quasi-socialist L'Opinion Nationale.

Napoleon created the "national opinion" that he purported to describe. So thoroughgoing was his control of the press that one critic complained before the legislature in 1862: "There is one journalist in France ... the Emperor." In addition to controlling the news agency Havas and flooding the market with sloganized pamphlets (L'Empire c'est la paix, Le salut c'est la dynastie), Napoleon bought off opposition newspapers, streamlined the official Le Moniteur, and added a readable evening edition in 1864. This Petit Moniteur was published in editions of 200,000 and sold at a depressed price of six centimes - thereby undercutting all other competitors, who had to pay a minimum tax of five centimes on each issue. The satirist Maurice Joly, in his Politics of Machiavelli in the Nineteenth Century of 1864, described the technique as "neutralizing the press by the press itself."

{In footnote 102 on p. 612, Billington writes, "Cited from Joly, Dialogues aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu ou la politique de Machiavel au XlXe siecle, Brussels, 1864, cited in Kulstein, 42-3. The famed anti-Jewish tract, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was to a large extent a paraphrase of Joly's work." Kulstein's work is excerpted above. Billingon's 677-page book on the revolutionary movements entirely "writes out" the Jewish connection, documented above by Disraeli and Talmon. So it is not surprising that he endorses Kulstein's book against Napoleon III, and the claim that the Protocols was plagiarised from Joly's Dialogues.}

Napoleon was a master of cooptation and public relations. He often offered prominent radical personalities jobs while stealing their slogans. He sponsored banquets and even associations for workers, and sought to channel their growing search for solidarity. Housing projects, mutual aid societies, and other meliorative programs were introduced and lauded with publicity on his imperial tours. Unlike Fazy in Switzerland, who introduced worker benefits out of long conviction and after careful study, Napoleon simply adopted what his monitoring of public opinion convinced him was expedient.

Historians have reached radically different verdicts on the motives and even on the results of the emperor's program. Essentially, he seems to have prepared the way for the characteristic political formula of the Third Republic: the combination of revolutionary rhetoric and practical reliance on a permanent centralized administration left over from the first Napoleon.

Napoleon continued his support of the Italian nationalist movement abroad, and espoused other, more remote national revolutionary causes. However, the suspicion soon grew that he was attempting to reroute abroad the popular impulses towards social revolution that had appeared at home in 1848 and 1851. "Emperor of the French" rather than of France, he increasingly seemed to use overseas adventure for dornestic prestige: war in the Crimea in 1854-56, conquest of South Vvietnam in 1862, and the disastrous attempt to conquer Mexico in 1866-67. All of this called forth a new word of rebuke from his erstwhile journalistic friends: imperialism. This, the last of the great isms to find a name, was used to describe the rapid expansion of European power overseas in the last two decades of the nineteenth century; but the term began with journalistic questioning of Napoleon III in the final "liberal period of his reign.

Napoleon's scourge during these final years was the last great polemic innovator of revolutionary journalism in the Francocentric era: Henri de Rochefort. His remarkable career illustrated both the vulnerability of Napoleon as a leader and the ultimate victory of his chauvinist ideal.

Rochefort came out of the same low culture that had created the

{p. 344} terms chauvinism and jingoism; he was a vaudeville writer and a pupil of both Blanqui and the chansonnier Beranger. He served his journalistic apprenticeship on Figaro before launching in the late 1860s his radical La Lanterne and La Marseillaise and contributing to Victor Hugo's new Le Rappel of 1869. Rochefort's was the direct voice of proletarian ribaldry: a Daumier in prose with just a suggestion of Rabelais, promising to "register the misery of the laborers" alongside "the toilets of the Tuileries." The very title of his first journal dispensed with the romantic past and invoked the plebeian image of a gaslight atop an iron support on a Parisian street corner. "The Lantern," Rochefort bluntly explained, "can serve simultaneously to illuminate honest men and to hang malefactors." His principal target was Napoleon, whom he assaulted with an unprecedented barrage of animal metaphors. His journal soared to an unprecedented printing of 500,000, and its easily concealed, pocket-sized format gave it European-wide distribution. When forced to flee to Brussels, Rochefort resumed publication of The Lantern with a model declaration of revolutionary independence from cooptation by Napoleon:

{quote} The role of the government is in effect to amnesty me as soon as possible; but my role is not to let them ... It is original, it is even burlesque. ... {quote}

Although Napoleon succeeded in having the weekly shut later in 1869, Rochefort simply transferred his energies to a daily, La Marseillaise, which one of his collaborators called "a torpedo launched at high speed against the metal plates of the imperial navy," and a future leader of the Paris Commune called a "machine of war against the Empire." If France was still the "light of the world" 1ll for foreign revolutionaries, his journal was the main beacon.

Rochefort and his associates "proposed to rally the entire European socialist party to establish through the journal permanent relations between all the groups." Such plans were fanciful, but his format was widely imitated. Students in distant St. Petersburg (including Marx's principal Russian correspondent, Nicholas Danielson) tried to set up a journal with the same title and format.

Within France, Rochefort's appeal was so great that it had to be combatted not just with repression, but also with rival attractions. Girardin moved into the vacuum, and, as we have seen, he became in the late years of Napoleon's reign a leading troubador of nationalism and foreign war. Taking over the moribund La Liberte in the late 1860s, he lifted its circulation from 500 to 60,000 through a journalistic revolution that was "perhaps as significant as that of 1836 of which it was in any case the natural consequence and prolongation." The new mass audience that he thus created found its excitement no longer in The Three Musketeers and the gossip columns of La Presse, but in images of actual combat in the real world - telegraphic dispatches of distant military adventures, bulletins of a rising and falling stockmarket, and athletic contests that La Liberte was the first to cover regularly in its new section, le monde sportique.

{p. 345} Rochefort himself was eventually seduced by the new chauvinism - despite having served ten years in New Caledonia for supporting the Paris Commune and having founded a new journal of revolutionary opposition to moderate republicans (appropriately named The Intransigent) on Bastille Day 1880. He swung to the Right late in the decade to support General Boulanger, moved further to the Right a decade later during the Dreyfus case, and left The Intransigent altogether in 1907 to spend the last six years of his life writing for the conservative, nationalist La Patrie. ...

The most dramatic and fateful event of the watershed year, 1871,

{p. 346} was, however, the rise and fall of the Paris Commune. It triggered the swing to the Right throughout Europe - and opened up new horizons for the revolutionary Left.

The Paris Commune

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the largest urban insurrection of the nineteenth century - and precipitated the bloodiest repression. It was a watershed in revolutionary history: the last of the Paris-based revolutions, bringing to an end the French domination of the revolutionary

The Paris uprising was the first example of mass defiance of the new military-industrial state in modern Europe. The Commune created - however briefly - an alternative, revolutionary approach to the organization of authority in modern society. Successful subsequent revolutionaries in Europe followed the communard example of making revolution only in the wake of war. Whereas the revolutions of 1789, 130, and 1848 had occurred in times of peace, those that rocked Russia in 1905 and 1917, and brought other communist regimes into power in China, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam in the 1940s, were the direct outgrowth of foreign wars.

The Commune left a legacy of legends as well as lessons. It provided the Russian Revolution with holy relics (Lenin was buried with a communard flag, and the spaceship Voskhod was equipped forty years later with a ribbon from a banner of the Commune), and with holy images ( the classic icon of class conflict in Eisenstein's October - bourgeois ladies jbbing fallen workers with pointed parasols - was taken from a mural in the Paris museum of the Commune).

Myths of the Commune abounded among anarchists as well as Social Democrats. In the period prior to World War I; among Chinese cultural revolutionaries of the 1960s no less than Russian political revolutionaries fifty years earlier; among the New Left as well as the Old in the Western world.

Insofar as all later revolutionaries were to find unity among themselves, it was in the singing of the great hymn that emerged from the martyrdom of 1871: the Internationale.

The simple fact of the Commune was that a revolutionary alliance ruled Paris for seventy-two days in the spring of 1871. It began as a patriotic protest against capitulation to the Prussian siege of Paris by a provisional French government formed after the defeat and flight of Napoleon III in September 1870. But the Commune soon became a vehicle for proletarian protest against the modern centralized state. An internal social revolution became a means of restoring pride to the

{p. 347} nation after the state had suffered defeat in a foreign war.

{end of quotes}

8.3 Andre Maurois, A History of France, University Paperbacks, Methuen, London 1964

{p. 400} WHY THE SECOND EMPIRE DID NOT LAST:

THE AUTHORITARIAN EMPIRE

THE sequence of events leading from the Second Republic to the Second Empire was roughly parallel to that which, at the century's beginning, had led from the Directory to the First Empire. The Constitution of January 1852 created in fact, if not in name, a consul in the Bonapartist sense of the word, meaning a dictator. This 'president', elected for ten years, held the executive power and had the sole right to make treaties and war; he proposed all legislation and appointed all officials; neither he nor his ministers were responsible to the Chambers. Said the Prince: 'I am quite willing to be baptized in the waters of universal suffrage, but I do not intend to live out my life with wet feet.' Three major bodies were to assist the President: the Council of State, which framed the laws; the Legislative Body (elective, but selected from a list of official candidates) which voted the laws; and the Senate, which was made up of one hundred and fifty members appointed for life by the President and acting as watchdogs of the Constitution - watchdogs who in fact watched very little. No provision was made for the case of a conflict between the President and the Legislative Body. 'I view as a serious evil', said Montalembert, the Catholic orator and one of the few courageous men in this Assembly, 'the annihilation of all control and the debasement of the only elective body existing in the French Government ...' The 1852 Constitution applied in full rigour the Bonapartist doctrine that despotism, in order to win acceptance, must present itself as a people's dictatorship and a temporary expedient. 'Freedom', as Louis Napoleon put it, 'has never helped in the establishment of a lasting political structure; freedom crowns such a structure when time has made it strong.' Surely he had never read the history of the United States. No more than that of the Second Republic was the 1852 Constitution practicable. 'A Constitution which does not afford a State the means of change does not afford it the means to maintain itself.'

The emperor was already beginning to hatch out of the prince-presidential shell; the eagle was replacing the republican pike on flagstaffs, and people called it the 'Eagle's first flight'. Whenever the President travelled

{p. 401} through the provinces, Persigny, more Bonapartist than this Bonaparte, had his claque cry out: 'Long live the Emperor!' The Prince lectured the masses on the excellences of a Government which would keep France as she had been 'after regeneration by the 1789 Revolution and organization by the Empire'. Soon he was able to announce: 'The burst of enthusiasm which has made itself felt throughout France in favour of restoring the Empire forces on the President the duty of consulting the Senate with regard to this matter.' The outcome of this consultation was a foregone conclusion; the Senate ordered a plebiscite on the re-establishment of the imperial dignity in the person of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, and seven million eight hundred and thirty-nine thousand yeas made the Prince-President into the Emperor Napoleon III. (The King of Rome had been Napoleon II, just as the Dauphin of the Temple had been Louis XVII.) There were two hundred and fifty-three thousand nays and two million abstentions, particularly in the provinces which had remained monarchical. The only fear which might have held the French back from so dangerous a course would have been that of a fresh crop of Napoleonic wars, but Napoleon III had reassured them. 'The Empire means peace', he kept repeating, and not without meaning what he said. Of course a man bearing his name should, he thought, do great deeds; but if Napoleon I had brought France victories, Napoleon III could bring her peace, prosperity, industrial progress, the welfare of her people and perhaps, later on, freedom. 'I grant that, like the Emperor, I have many conquests to make. Like him, I want to win over to civilization the hostile parties. I want to win over to religion, morality, and comfort that portion of the population - still so numerous - which ... in the very bosom of the earth's most fertile soil, can barely obtain the prime necessities ...' His Government was to be that of cheap bread, great public works, holidays and leisure. He would have sincerely liked to be a good tyrant; sadly enough, there are no good tyrants.

At the time of his becoming emperor, Napoleon III was almost forty-five years old; he was a large, heavy man, not without dignity. His long moustache and goatee lent him a most novel appearance, in its day much imitated; his grey eyes seemed lustreless, without a spark, but on occasion they could flash like lightning. In France he had long seemed out of place; having lived there only as a child and later as a prisoner, he had no French friends outside his little band of faithful followers. A cosmopolitan prince, he spoke 'German like a Sviss, English like a Frenchman and French like a German' ...

{p. 404} Well intentioned but poorly counselled, Napoleon III began at a disadvantage. The Empire, which strove to combine a popular vote (the plebiscite) with hereditary power, was a hybrid regime; it had won the affectlons of the French in Napoleon I's time because France was then emerging from a frightful upheaval; exhausted by internal strife, bled white by the Terror, the country cried aloud for a peacemaker. Such was not the case in 18S2. Throughout Europe, men's minds were generally turning towards parliamentary govemment and freedom of thought. In France, the middle-class businessmen and peasants, terrified at socialism ever since the June Days of 1848, as well as at the sudden revelation of the strength of the working class, had wanted a sword and voted for the Empire. Through disgust and discouragement the workers had remained passive. But with few exceptions, the country's best minds and the student population were never reconciled to the regime; the coup d'etat was regarded as a crime; even the Empress herself remarked: 'It will be a millstone round his neck all his life.' Rebuffed by those whom he would have liked to allure, the Emperor could rely only on the interests which had created him and, like the Saint-Simonians, seek social progress through material prosperity. As we shall see, he succceded fairly well but prosperitv has never compensated for freedom.

The early days of the regime were rather briliant. In foreign policy, reasonable French pcople had feared that his theories might lead the Emperor to take a warlike attitude; would he demand the abrogation of the 1815 treaties, insist upon the natural frontiers, fly to the aid of

{p. 405} oppressed national groups? Quite the opposite - he did everything he could to reassure the rest of Europe. Not that he renounccd his great forebear's ambitions; but he knew that he must prevent the formation of a coalition in order to have any chanlce of achieving them, and that to do this he must remain on friendly terms with England, whose hatred had overthrown the First Empire. Now the British Government of that day was resolved to defend the Ottoman Empire against Russia; Napoleon III proposed an alliance against the Czar. The ensuing conflict meant to him a means of increasing his prestige by winning England to his cause, by appeasing the French liberals - who were the enemies of autocratic Russia and the friends of Poland - and, finally, by pleasing the Catholics, since the excuse for French intervention was the protection of the Holy Places. The Crimean War was far from easy, and at first the other side was victorious. 'This new Empire', wrote Victor Hugo, 'begins with 1812.' The campaign, however, ended in the fall of Sevastopol and a total Franco-British victory; the Zouaves at Malakoff and MacMahon with his famous, 'Here I am, here I stay', won their places amid the legendary heroes of the French army. The peace conference was held at Paris, thus confirming France's new-born prestige; the French Minister of Foreign Aflairs, Napoleon I's illegitimate son, Count Walewski, presided. France obtained no material advantage, but she had at last broken the league of the sovereigns against the Revolution and had even, she believed, gained the friendship of England and of Prussia. As Austria was from then on isolated, Napoleon III's schemes for the liberation of Italy had entered the realm of the possible. Unfortunately, despite his illusions, he really possessed the friendship of neither England nor Prussia. Yet on the morrow of the Crimean War, having humbled Russia, France's only rival on the Continent, he could believe himself Europe's most potent sovereign.

France's internal prosperity seemed to match her apparent success abroad; the early achievements of authoritarian regimes often seem propitious, some years being required to make clear the dangers inherent in the lack of freedom. Napoleon III was sincerely concemed about the welfare of poor people; under his reign, charitable associations, day nurseries and mutual-aid societies grew in number; in many of the larger cities, working-class quarters were erected which were unbeautiful but an improvement on the hovels they replaced. Today such paternalism would seem offensive; then it was thought effective. Napoleon was even considering the establishment of workmen's retirement pensions; in 1864 he

{p. 406} finally did away with the ban on workers' associations and acknowledged the right to strike. The conditions under which labour lived were still dreadful; the working day was twelve hours; in l'Assommoir and Germinal, Zola showed his readers the ravages of alcohol and promiscuity. Yet we must grant that the Empire did more to cure these evils than had the regimes before it, and it was able to do this because France's financial position was excellent. Never before had the couultry grown rich so quickly. Up to that time, private banks (Rothschild, Hottinguer, Mallet) had underwritten state loans and managed portfolios; a new breed of financiers - Pereire, Fould and later Germain - had the idea of turning to the public at large and soliciting that public's savings for investment. Thus were established the Credit Mobilier (which did not succced), the Credit Foncier and, ultimately, the Credit Industriel et Commercial, the Credit Lyonnais and the Societe Generale. First the lower middle class and then the peasants acquired the habit of investing in securities, and by this means large-scale, corporate capitalism developed.

Savings canalized by these banks, paid for France's economic development; the State encouraged railway construction and granted the systems a guarantee of the interest on their indebtedness. In 1842, France possessed only 336 miles of track (as against about 3600 in the United States and 1650 in England); in 1860 she had 591; in 1870, 11,000. Transatlantic navigation companies were organized. Everywhere the regime fostered industrlal concentration; iron and coal mines were given as concessions to powerful corporations. The managers of banks, transport companles and mines were chosen from among a small number of families; a capitalist oligarchy, in good part Protestant or Jewish, gradually replaced the numberless family businesses of an older France and thereby confirmed the socialists in their regard for Marx's teaching, which had foretold this centralization. In conformity with Saint-Simon's notions great public works were undertaken to beautify the city of Paris, where poverty-stncken enclaves lay side by side with shiny newness; that city's prefect, Haussmann, a ruthless and arrogant man but a wonderful administrator, took on the task of supplying the capital with those broad avenues which the increased traffic and the tourists brouht in by the new railways made imperative. The Emperor in person had laid out the plan to transform the Paris of the Old Regime into the city of today. Certain writers found fault with the rectilinear boulevards. 'This is Philadelphia; it is Paris no longer', wrote Theophile Gautier; he had never seen Philadelphia, and the Parisians of today are grateful to Hauss-

{p. 407} mann for having spared their city congestion without having deprived it of its beauty. In 1855, a World's Fair attracted tlvc millil n visitors ho marvclled at France's industrial pow-er. Technically, and from the point of view of national wealth, the Empire had imposing results to its credit. Its Council of State and its prcfects were bcyond disputc ctficient, they vcre all too skilled at rcpression, but they were zcalous administrators.

Yet, in spite of the success of its prosperity policy, the Empire waa not a stable regime; it lacked that mysterious virtue, legitimacy. The adventurer seemed successful, but he remained none the less an adventurer; a muzzled public opinion was not convinced. A government which knows it is recognizcd as legitimate by the majority in the country has no fear of freedom; the imperial Government was so little sure of itself that it would not even allow the publication of the debates in a wholly domesticated Legislative Body. The newspapers, subject to censorship and to prior admonition, were cautious and pro-Government; even private conversations were subject to police surveillance: 'Only the Govermnent speaks, and no one belicves what it says.' The public got along as best it could; books by authors in exile (Victor Hugo, Edgar Quinet, Emile Deschanel, Louis Blanc) came in as contraband and won all the more readers because they were forbidden. The Orleans monarchists and the legitimists, although unable to agree among themselves and unite under one banner, joined in their fault-finding and constituted a so-called liberal group, extraordinary because of the abilities of such leaders as Thiers, Guizot, Montalelllbert, Dupanloup and Berryer. The French Academy was the stronghold of this intellectual Fronde; solemn addresses before it supplied opportunity for slightly veiled attacks against the Empire. 'Let's elect Lacordaire', said Victor Cousin, 'since we can't elect the Pope as a joke on the Empire.' However a few writers, such as Sainte-Beuvc, Merimee and Nisard, had attached themselves to the regime, allured by the Empress and the Princess Matilda; Sainte-Beuve went into the Imperial Senate, and the students clamorously upbraided him for it. As for the republicans, those who were not living in exile sought refuge in seclusion; whenever the exiles started plotting (which they did without skill and in vain, for they had lost contact with France and were fighting battles long out of date), new deportations at once afflicted their friends inside the country. When, in 1857, elections took place to renew the Legislative Body, the lack of all freedom of the press or of assembly, and the shameless placarding of official candidacies, discour-

{p. 408} aged the opposition. The requirement that every deputy should swear a personal oath to the Emperor kept out most of the republicans; between 1857 and 1863 the opposition in the Legislative Body consisted of only five members, among these being Emile Ollivier - who many regarded as a new Thiers - Jules Favre and Ernest Picard. In 1859 Napoleon felt strong enougn to grant a full and absolute amnest; Victor Hugo and Louis Blanc refused it; said Hugo: 'Until the end I shall share freedom's exile. When she returns, I shall return.'

The whole opposition was weak, and the Emperor could have overlooked a handful of malcontents had he not alienated two powerful conservative groups which until that time had supported him. A new phase in imperial policy was precipitated by a plot orgallized by the Italian carbonari, who could not forgive the Emperor Napoleon III for having forgotten the commitments of their 'brotber', Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. In his youthful days he had espoused the ause of Italian lndependence, but once he had come to power, he had reversed bis opinions and dispatched the Rome expedition in defence of the Pope's temporal power. In 1858 Orsini and three other Italian patriots hurled bombs at the Emperor's carriage, killing or wounding more than a hundred persons. This attempted assassination was followed by very harsh repressive measures, but it had surprising results in that it modified Napoleon III's Italian policy in the direction which Orsini desired. From his cell, the condemned man had written the Emperor beseeching him to give the Italians their freedom; were he to do this, his name wolld be loved and respected; were he not, the attempts would continue. In both the Empress and the Emperor this letter aroused fear and compassion; there was some question of a pardon for Orsini, who had suddellly becone a hero; then the hero was guillotined, but the cause for which he died triumphed. The Emperor had a secret interview with Cavour, Minister of the King of Piedmont (and Castiglione's uncle); it was agreed that France would help the Italians to drive out the Austrians and in return for its help, would obtain Savoy and the County of Nice.

This nationality policy, a favourite fancy of the Emperor's, seemed generous since France was going to help people of the same race, beld apart by force, to unite; in fact it vas fraught with daner. To establish new major States in Europe was to pave the way for fresh wars and, as far as France was concerned, to set up rivals, perhaps even enemies; for gratittude ls never a collective virtue. The Italian war began in 1859; the Austrian army was defeated by the French at Magenta and Solferino.

{p. 409} All Italy and especially the Romagna, rose against tbe Pope, whereupon the Empress and the French clerical party protested. Napoleon hesitated and temporized; and when, counter to his expectations, Prussia too sided against Italy, be signed an armistice with Austria - thus alienating the Italians - and then advised the Pope to yield - which alienated the French