THE DEFEAT OF JUNE, 1848 A fter the July Revolution, when the liberal banker Laffitte led his companion, the Duke of Orléans, in triumph to the Hotel de Ville, he let fall the words: "From now on the bankers will rule."Laffitte had betrayed the secret of the revolution.
It was not the French bourgeoisie that ruled under Louis Philippe, but one faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with them -- the so-called financial aristocracy.It sat on the throne, it dictated laws in the Chambers, it distributed public offices, from cabinet portfolios to tobacco bureau posts.
The industrial bourgeoisie proper formed part of the official opposition, that is, it was represented only as a minority in the Chambers.
Its opposition was expressed all the more resolutely the more unalloyed the autocracy of the finance aristocracy became, and the more it imagined that its domination over the working class was insured after the revolts of I832, 1834, and 1839, which had been drowned in blood.Grandin, a Rouen manufacturer and the most fanatical instrument of bourgeois reaction in the Constituent as well as in the Legislative National Assembly, was the most violent opponent of Guizot in the Chamber of Deputies.Leon Faucher, later known for his impotent efforts to climb into prominence as the Guizot of the French counterrevolution, in the last days of Louis Philippe waged a war of the pen for industry against speculation and its train bearer, the government.Bastiat agitated in the name of Bordeaux and the whole of wine-producing France against the ruling system.
The petty bourgeoisie of all gradations, and the peasantry also, were completely excluded from political power.Finally, in the official opposition or entirely outside the pays legal [electorate], there were the ideological representatives and spokesmen of the above classes, their savants, lawyers, doctors, etc., in a word, their so-called men of talent.
Owing to its financial straits, the July Monarchy was dependent from the beginning on the big bourgeoisie, and its dependence on the big bourgeoisie was the inexhaustible source of increasing financial straits.
It was impossible to subordinate the administration of the state to the interests of national production without balancing the budget, without establishing a balance between state expenditures and revenues.And how was this balance to be established without limiting state expenditures -- that is, without encroaching on interests which were so many props of the ruling system -- and without redistributing taxes -- that is, without shifting a considerable share of the burden of taxation onto the shoulders of the big bourgeoisie itself?
On the contrary, the faction of the bourgeoisie that ruled and legislated through the Chambers had a direct interest in the indebtedness of the state.The state deficit was really the main object of its speculation and the chief source of its enrichment.At the end of each year a new deficit.
After the lapse of four or five years a new loan.And every new loan offered new opportunities to the finance aristocracy for defrauding the state, which was kept artificially on the verge of bankruptcy -- it had to negotiate with the bankers under the most unfavorable conditions.Each new loan gave a further opportunity, that of plundering the public which invested its capital in state bonds by means of stock-exchange manipulations, the secrets of which the government and the majority in the Chambers were privy to.
In general, the instability of state credit and the possession of state secrets gave the bankers and their associates in the Chambers and on the throne the possibility of evoking sudden, extraordinary fluctuations in the quotations of government securities, the result of which was always bound to be the ruin of a mass of smaller capitalists and the fabulously rapid enrichment of the big gamblers.As the state deficit was in the direct interest of the ruling faction of the bourgeoisie, it is clear why the extraordinary state expenditure in the last years of Louis Philippe's reign was far more than double the extraordinary state expenditure under Napoleon, indeed reached a yearly sum of nearly 400,000,000 francs, whereas the whole average annual export of France seldom attained a volume amounting to 750,000,000francs.The enormous sums which in this way flowed through the hands of the state facilitated, moreover, swindling contracts for deliveries, bribery, defalcations, and all kinds of roguery.
The defrauding of the state, practiced wholesale in connection with loans, was repeated retail in public works.What occurred in the relations between Chamber and government became multiplied in the relations between individual departments and individual entrepreneurs.
The ruling class exploited the building of railways in the same way it exploited state expenditures in general and state loans.The Chambers piled the main burdens on the state, and secured the golden fruits to the speculating finance aristocracy.One recalls the scandals in the Chamber of Deputies when by chance it leaked out that all the members of the majority, including a number of ministers, had been interested as shareholders in the very railway constructions which as legislators they had carried out afterward at the cost of the state.
On the other hand, the smallest financial reform was wrecked through the influence of the bankers.For example, the postal reform.Rothschild protested.Was it permissible for the state to curtail sources of revenue out of which interest was to be paid on its ever increasing debt?
The July Monarchy was nothing other than a joint stock company for the exploitation of France's national wealth, whose dividends were divided among ministers, Chambers, 240,000 voters, and their adherents.
