TO PATRIOTS

4^th May 1848
Le Représentant du Peuple
Translation by Paul Sharkey

 

TOMORROW SEES THE OPENING OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.

How do the elected members from the departments come to us?

What sort of a reception will the representatives from around France get from the people of Paris?

The only answers are with distrust and scorn. I search for brothers but all I come across are plotters! Civil war is no longer in prospect: it is upon us. No longer is it feared as the ghastliest of evils: it is accepted as a necessity. In countryside and city alike, people are manufacturing powder, casting bullets and readying weapons. The leaders send out their watchwords and issue their manifestos. No matter where you go all you hear is this deadly message: We must finish it!

The bourgeois has his mind made up to have done with the proletarian, who, for his part, has his mind made up to have done with the bourgeois. The worker wants to see an end of the capitalist, the wage-earner [an end] of the entrepreneur, the departments with Paris, the peasants with the workers. In every heart anger and hatred reign; in every mouth a threat. And what is the cause of such discord? The elections.

Universal suffrage has lied to the People.

The February Revolution was made through every party opposing the outgoing government, through the general disgust with a monarchy crowned by infamy, every mind making its contribution to the idea of a reform both political and social. The February Revolution, the outcome of eighteen months of parliamentary wrangling, reformist protests, economic criticisms, inevitably resulted in a republican organisation, in a closer amalgamation of the different classes in society. People were relying, and were entitled so to do, on the new representatives being an expression of the idea of revolution: instead we have the pandemonium of all counter-revolutionary notions. The whims of an electoral majority would have events reversed: men who under a Republic would never have had the right to vote are calling for a king in the name of the Republic and by virtue of their right of suffrage!…

The signal for this backsliding came from the provisional government. The files of Le National are there to show that.

Such was their grasp of revolution, such their fear of the people, these amateur republicans, these gentlemen democrats, that scarcely had they arrived in power than they sent out an appeal to every mediocrity in the land. The country then sent its mediocrities. They have succeeded beyond their hopes and already they are consumed with unease. They sense that their part has been played out. Which faction does not hold them in contempt? They are so small. So tiny, so wrong-headed that even the sharpest eye cannot distinguish between despotism and the Republican. I do not even think anybody hates them; yet they have bound France’s fate in chains!…

It is to you honest patriots who since February have stayed what you were even before February, it is to you that I address myself. The lives and deaths of ten million men may well hang on whatever determination you make.

Your anger is righteous, your outrage legitimate. Like you, I have wept with rage at the sight of the perfidious reaction under way, which adds cravenness to massacre. But, citizens, you will not avenge the memory of your brothers by means of bloody reprisals; passion has no place in the decisionmaking of a statesman. For amid the universal anarchy in which we find ourselves, in the absence of regulated authority and acknowledged principle, I can tell you this, citizens, EVERYBODY should think like a statesman.

But first reflect upon the situation in the land.

For the past seventy days, France has not worked. Do you know what it means, for a nation not to work! Imagine a man who no longer eats, no longer drinks, no longer digests: in whom the blood has stopped coursing, the heart beating, the lungs inflating, the heat throbbing; a man in whom the vital spark has petered out. That man lives no more; he is dead!

Behold the portrait of our nation!—No more work, no more production, no more commerce, no more consumption for us. Collective life goes un-renewed; taxes are not returned; the powers that be are no longer heeded; the public forces become demoralised; the bonds of society are loosened; just a few more days in this dire condition and all movement will cease and the body of the people will lapse into dissolution.

The Poland and Italy that we pledged to defend. Poland and Italy, those two sisters of France, now broken by the arms of their tormentors, in vain do they stretch out a desolated hand to us. We shall ride to the rescue neither of Italy nor of Poland.

Do you know why? We would need a hundred thousand soldiers, a hundred million francs, and we haven’t a hundred thousand centimes with which to equip and provision an army. We couldn’t even defend our own selves if a coalition of kings was to swoop upon us just as they did sixty years ago. And do you know the reason why? Because we no longer produce through toil that on which we might subsist until such time as we might have to go down fighting.

Patriots, irked by the reaction, would you murder your motherland! Would you drive a dagger into your mother?… Yet that’s what you’ll be doing if you revert to barricades. Another seventy years of stagnation and the game is up for the Revolution, the game is up for the people.

Have pity on France, pity on the proletariat, pity on the bourgeoisie itself, whose tortures you cannot even begin to imagine. Can you not see that it is its ruination that has it infuriated? Ruination, bankruptcy, hideous bankruptcy, followed by shame, and then impoverishment: this is what the exasperated bourgeoisie seeks by spilling the blood of the proletariat.

So are you willing, to avenge 150 of your brothers,⁴⁶⁴ to let the angel of death roam through the entire country? The death knell of the motherland! Is this the compensation you have in mind for the relatives of the victims?...

Your policy should be no such thing, citizens. Killing men is the worst way to combat principles. The only way to score a victory over an idea is with another idea. Now, that idea is something you already carry within yourselves, just as you have it within you to make it a reality.

What! You know how to be self-reliant, you know how to get yourselves organised for a fight and you do not know how to organise yourselves for the purposes of work?

What? A hundred thousand of you would join forces for an attack on the government and you couldn’t find it within yourselves, a hundred thousand of you, to join forces for an attack on privilege?

Destruction is the only thing that holds any charms for you: you lose all enthusiasm the moment creation is at stake!…

Citizens, the motherland is in danger!

I propose a provisional committee be set up to orchestrate exchange, credit and commerce between workers;

That said committee liaise with similar committees set up in the main cities of France;

That, under the aegis of these committees, a body representative of the proletariat be formed in Paris, imperium in imperio,⁴⁶⁵ in opposition to the bourgeoisie’s representation.

That a new society be founded in the heart of the old society;

That a labour charter be written into the agenda forthwith and its main articles set out with minimal delay;

That the groundwork for republican government be laid down and special powers delegated to the workers’ representatives.

Citizens, the republic has its back to the wall: the government can do nothing for you. But you can do everything for yourselves; this I swear in the presence of God and men!

Until such time as we have exhausted economic means, I will speak out against the use of violence. Let the needless bloodshed be upon the heads of the agitators!