When, upon Duprat's
interpellation, the National Assembly went over to the order of the day,
this did not happen simply because Girardin's motion to declare
itself "satisfied" reminded the party of Order of its own systematic
corruption: the bourgeois, above all the bourgeois who has been inflated
into a statesman, supplements his practical meanness with theoretical
pompousness. As statesman, he becomes, like the Government facing him, a
superior being, who can be fought only in a higher, more exalted manner.
Bonaparte-who, for the very reason of his being a "bohemian," a princely
slum-proletarian, had over the scampish bourgeois the advantage that he
could carry on the fight after the Assembly itself had carried him with
its own hands over the slippery ground of the military banquets, of the
reviews, of the "Society of December 10," and, finally, of the penal
code-now saw that the moment had arrived when he could move from the
seemingly defensive to the offensive. He was but little troubled by the
intermediate and trifling defeats of the Minister of Justice, of
the Minister of War, of the Minister of the Navy, of the Minister
of Finance, whereby the National Assembly indicated its growling
displeasure.
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