Marxist Moments

Look Familiar?

 

Paris, 1830 to 1848:

 

Under [King] Louis Philippe it was not the French bourgeoisie as a whole which ruled but only one fraction of it – bankers, stock market barons, railway barons, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a section of landed proprietors who had joined their ranks – the so-called financial aristocracy.  It sat on the throne, it dictated laws in parliament and made official appointments from the ministries to the tobacco bureaux…

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          As a result of its financial difficulties the July monarchy was from the very beginning dependent upon the big bourgeoisie, and this dependence became the inexhaustible source of increasing financial difficulties. It was impossible to subordinate the state administration to the interests of national production without balancing the budget, without balancing state expenditure and state revenue. And how was it to establish this balance without damaging interests which were, every one of them, pillars of the ruling system, and without organizing the redistribution of taxes, which meant shifting a considerable part of the tax burden on to the shoulders of the big bourgeoisie?...

 

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…The fact that the state deficit served the direct interests of the ruling fraction of the bourgeoisie explains why the extraordinary state expenditure in the last years of Louis Philippe’s reign was more than double the extraordinary state expenditure under Napoleon [I], indeed almost reaching the annual sum of 400 million francs, while France’s total average exports rarely reached 750 million francs. The enormous sums of money which thus flowed through the hands of the state gave rise, moreover, to crooked delivery contracts, bribery, embezzlement and roguery of all kinds. The wholesale swindling of the state through loans was repeated on a retail basis in public works. The relationship between parliament and government was reproduced in the relationship between individual administrative departments and individual entrepreneurs.

          In the same way that it exploited government spending in general and government loans in particular, the ruling class exploited the construction of railways. Parliament heaped the main burdens on the state and secured the golden fruit for the speculating financial aristocracy. We recall the scandals in the Chamber of Deputies when by chance it came to light that all members of the majority, including a number of ministers, were stockholders in the same railway projects which, as legislators, they subsequently had carried out at state expense. ..

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The July monarchy was nothing more than a joint-stock company for the exploitation of France’s national wealth, whose dividends were divided among ministers, parliament, 240,000 voters and their adherents…

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          While the financial aristocracy made the laws, controlled the state administration, exercised authority in all public institutions and controlled public opinion by actual events and through the press, the same blatant swindling, the same mania for self-enrichment – not from production but by sleight-of-hand with other people’s wealth – was to be found in all spheres of society, from the Court to the Café Borgne [a synonym for the low dives of Paris]. The same unbridled assertion of unhealthy and vicious appetites broke forth, appetites which were in permanent conflict with the bourgeois law itself, and which were to be found particularly in the upper reaches of society, appetites in which the wealth created by financial gambles seeks its natural fulfilment, in which pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], in which money, filth and blood commingle. In the way it acquires wealth and enjoys it the financial aristocracy is nothing but the lumpenproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society.

 

Drawn from Karl Marx: The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850

(Surveys from Exile: Political Writings vol. 2, Penguin 1973.)

Louis Philippe (1773-1850) was King of France from the July Revolution of 1830 to the February Revolution of 1848. His reign, succeeding the last Bourbon monarchy, of Charles X, ushered in the rule of France by the haute bourgeoisie, marking the emergence of capital as the dominant power for good and all.

Any resemblance between that reign and modern Great Britain in the 21^st century is purely coincidental…