Messrs. Bourgeois &
Small-Trader believed they had gained their point. The absentees, the
next morning, were Messieurs. Bourgeois & Small-Trader.
During the night of December 1 and 2, the Parisian proletariat was
robbed of its leaders and chiefs of barricades by a raid of Bonaparte's.
An army without officers, disinclined by the recollections of June, 1848
and 1849, and May, 1850, to fight under the banner of the Montagnards,
it left to its vanguard, the secret societies, the work of saving the
insurrectionary honor of Paris, which the bourgeoisie had yielded to the
soldiery so submissively that Bonaparte was later justified in disarming
the National Guard upon the scornful ground that he feared their arms
would be used against themselves by the Anarchists!
"C'est Ic triomphe complet et definitif du Socialism!"' Thus did Guizot
characterize the 2d of December. But, although the downfall of the
parliamentary republic carries with it the germ of the triumph of
the proletarian revolution, its immediate and tangible result was
the triumph of Bonaparte over parliament, of the Executive over the
Legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of phrases.
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