第45章

The election law still needed one thing to complete it, a new press law.This was not long in coming.A proposal of the government, made many times more drastic by amendments of the party of Order, increased the caution money, put an extra stamp on feuilleton fiction (answer to the election of Eugene Sue), taxed all publications appearing weekly or monthly up to a certain number of sheets, and finally provided that every article of a journal must bear the signature of the author.The provisions concerning the caution money killed the so-called revolutionary press;the people regarded its extinction as satisfaction for the abolition of universal suffrage.However, neither the tendency nor the effect of the new law extended only to this section of the press.As long as the newspaper press was anonymous, it appeared as the organ of a numberless and nameless public opinion; it was the third power in the state.Through the signature of every article, a newspaper became a mere collection of literary contributions from more or less known individuals.Every article sank to the level of an advertisement.Hitherto the newspapers had circulated as the paper money of public opinion; now they were resolved into more or less bad solo bills, whose worth and circulation depended on the credit not only of the drawer but also of the endorser.The press of the party of Order had incited not only for the repeal of universal suffrage but also for the most extreme measures against the bad press.However, in its sinister anonymity even the good press was irksome to the party of Order and still more to its individual provincial representatives.As for itself, it demanded only the paid writer, with name, address, and description.In vain the good press bemoaned the ingratitude with which its services were rewarded.The law went through; the provision about the giving of names hit it hardest of all.The names of republican journalists were rather well known; but the respectable firms of the journal des Debats , the Assemblee Nationale , the Constitutionnel , etc., etc., cut a sorry figure in their high protestations of state wisdom when the mysterious company all at once disintegrated into purchasable penny-a-liners of long practice, who had defended all possible causes for cash, like Granier de Cassagnac, or into old milksops who called themselves statesmen, like Capefigue, or into coquettish fops, like M.Lemoinne of the Debats.

In the debate on the press law the Montagne had already sunk to such a level of moral degeneracy that it had to confine itself to applauding the brilliant tirades of an old notable of Louis Philippe's time, M.Victor Hugo.

With the election law and the press law the revolutionary and democratic party exits from the official stage.Before their departure home, shortly after the end of the session, the two factions of the Montagne, the socialist democrats and the democratic socialists, issued two manifestoes, two testimonia paupertatis [certificates of pauperism] in which they proved that while power and success were never on their side, they nonetheless had ever been on the side of eternal justice and all the other eternal truths.

Let us now consider the party of Order.The Neue Rheinische Zeitung had said: "As against the hankering for restoration on the part of the united Orléanists and Legitimists, Bonaparte defends his title to his actual power, the republic; as against the hankering for restoration on the part of Bonaparte, the party of Order defends its title to its common rule, the republic; as against the Orléanists, the Legitimists, and as against the Legitimists, the Orléanists, defend the status quo, the republic.All these factions of the party of Order, each of which has its own king and its own restoration in petto, mutually enforce, as against their rivals' hankering for usurpation and revolt, the common rule of the bourgeoisie, the form in which the special claims remain neutralized and reserved -- the republic....And Thiers spoke more truly than he suspects when he said: 'We, the royalists, are the true pillars of the constitutional republic.'"This comedy of the republicans malgre eux [republicans in spite of themselves], the antipathy to the status quo and the constant consolidation of it; the incessant friction between Bonaparte and the National Assembly; the ever renewed threat of the party of Order to split into its separate component parts, and the ever repeated conjugation of its factions;the attempt of each faction to transform each victory over the common foe into a defeat for its temporary allies; the mutual petty jealousy, chicanery, harassment, the tireless drawing of swords that ever and again ends with a baiser Lamourette [15] -- this whole unedifying comedy of errors never developed more classically than during the past six months.