Directly threatened not only in its rule but in its very existence by the February Revolution, the Bank tried from the outset to discredit the republic by making the lack of credit general.It suddenly stopped the credits of the bankers, the manufacturers, and the merchants.As it did not immediately call forth a counterrevolution, this maneuver necessarily reacted on the Bank itself.The capitalists drew out the money they had deposited in the vaults of the Bank.The possessors of bank notes rushed to the pay office in order to exchange them for gold and silver.
The Provisional Government could have forced the Bank into bankruptcy without forcible interference, in a legal manner; it would have had only to remain passive and leave the Bank to its fate.The bankruptcy of the Bank would have been the deluge which in an instant would have swept from French soil the finance aristocracy, the most powerful and dangerous enemy of the republic, the golden pedestal of the July Monarchy.And once the Bank was bankrupt, the bourgeoisie itself would have had to regard it as a last desperate attempt at rescue, if the government had formed a national bank and subjected national credit to the control of the nation.
The Provisional Government, on the contrary, fixed a compulsory quotation for the notes of the Bank.It did more.It transformed all provincial banks into branches of the Banque de France and allowed it to cast its net over the whole of France.Later it pledged the state forests to the Bank as a guarantee for a loan contracted from it.In this way the February Revolution directly strengthened and enlarged the bankocracy which it should have overthrown.
Meanwhile the Provisional Government was writhing under the incubus of a growing deficit.In vain it begged for patriotic sacrifices.Only the workers threw it their alms.Recourse had to be had to a heroic measure, to the imposition of a new tax.But who was to be taxed? The Bourse wolves, the bank kings, the state creditors, the rentiers , the industrialists That was not the way to ingratiate the republic with the bourgeoisie.That would have meant, on the one hand, to endanger state credit and commercial credit, while on the other, attempts were made to purchase them with such great sacrifices and humiliations.But someone had to fork over the cash.
Who was sacrificed to bourgeois credit? Jacques le bonhomme , the peasant.
The Provisional Government imposed an additional tax of 45 centimes to the franc on the four direct taxes.The government press cajoled the Paris proletariat into believing that this tax would fall chiefly on the big landed proprietors, on the possessors of the milliard granted by the Restoration.But in truth it hit the peasant class above all, that is, the large majority of the French people.They bad to pay the costs of the February Revolution; in them the counterrevolution gained its main material.
The 45-centime tax was a question of life and death for the French peasant.
he made it a life and death question for the republic.From that moment the republic meant to the French peasant the 4 centime tax, and he saw in the Paris proletariat the spendthrift who did himself well at his expense.
Whereas the Revolution of 1789 began by shaking the feudal burdens off the peasants, the Revolution of 1848 announced itself to the rural population by the imposition of a new tax, in order not to endanger capital and to keep its state machine going.
There was only one means by which the Provisional Government could set aside all these inconveniences and jerk the state out of its old rut -- a declaration of state bankruptcy.Everyone recalls how Ledru-Rollin in the National Assembly subsequently described the virtuous indignation with which he repudiated this presumptuous proposal of the Bourse Jew, Fould, now French Finance Minister.Fould had handed him the apple from the tree of knowledge.
By honoring the bills drawn on the state by the old bourgeois society, the Provisional Government succumbed to the latter.It had become the hard-pressed debtor of bourgeois society instead of confronting it as the pressing creditor that had to collect the revolutionary debts of many years.It had to consolidate the shaky bourgeois relationships in order to fulfill obligations which are only to be fulfilled within these relationships.Credit became a condition of life for it, and the concessions to the proletariat, the promises made to it, became so many fetters which had to be struck off.The emancipation of the workers -- even as a phrase -- became an unbearable danger to the new republic, for it was a standing protest against the restoration of credit, which rests on undisturbed and untroubled recognition of the existing economic class relations.Therefore, it was necessary to have done with the workers.
The February Revolution had cast the army out of Paris.The National Guard, that is, the bourgeoisie in its different gradations, constituted the sole power.Alone, however, it did not feel itself a match for the proletariat.Moreover, it was forced gradually and piecemeal to open its ranks and admit armed proletarians, albeit after the most tenacious resistance and after setting up a hundred different obstacles.There consequently remained but one way out: to play off part of the proletariat against the other.
