onal life, down to its most insignificant motions;
from its common life, down to the private life of each individual;
where, due to such extraordinary centralization, this body of parasites
acquires a ubiquity and omniscience, a quickened capacity for motion
and rapidity that finds an analogue only in the helpless lack of
self-reliance, in the unstrung weakness of the body social itself;--that
in such a country the National Assembly lost, with the control of
the ministerial posts, all real influence; unless it simultaneously
simplified the administration; if possible, reduced the army of
office-holders; and, finally, allowed society and public opinion to
establish its own organs, independent of government censorship. But the
Material Interest of the French bourgeoisie is most intimately bound
up in maintenance of just such a large and extensively ramified
governmental machine. There the bourgeoisie provides for its own
superfluous membership; and supplies, in the shape of government
salaries, what it can not pocket in the form of profit, interest, rent
and fees. On the other hand, its Political Interests daily compel it to
increase the power of repression, i.e., the means and the personnel
of the government; it is at the same time forced to conduct an
uninterrupted warfare against public opinion, and, full of suspicion, to
hamstring and lame the independent organs of society--whenever it does
not succeed in amputating them wholly. Thus the bourgeoisie of France
was forced by its own class attitude, on the one hand, to destroy the
conditions for all parliamentary power, its own included, and, on the
other, to render irresistible the Executive power that stood hostile to
it.

The new Ministry was called the d'Hautpoul Ministry. Not that General
d'Hautpoul had gained the rank of Ministerial President. Along with
Barrot, Bonaparte abolished this dignity, which, it must be granted,
condemned the President of the republic to the legal nothingness of a
constitutional kind, of a constitutional king at that, without throne
and crown, without sceptre and without sword, without irresponsibility,
without the imperishable possession of the highest dignity in the State,
and, what was most untoward of all--without a civil list. The d'Hautpoul
Ministry numbered only one man of parliamentary reputation, the Jew
Fould, one of the most notorious members of the high finance. To him
fell the portfolio of finance. Turn to the Paris stock quo