quirements. It was a coterie of bourgeois with republican
ideas-writers, lawyers, officers and civil employees, whose influence
rested upon the personal antipathies of the country for Louis Philippe,
upon reminiscences of the old Republic, upon the republican faith of
a number of enthusiasts, and, above all, upon the spirit of French
patriotism, whose hatred of the treaties of Vienna and of the alliance
with England kept them perpetually on the alert. The "National" owed
a large portion of its following under Louis Philippe to this covert
imperialism, that, later under the republic, could stand up against it
as a deadly competitor in the person of Louis Bonaparte. The fought the
aristocracy of finance just the same as did the rest of the bourgeois
opposition. The polemic against the budget, which in France, was closely
connected with the opposition to the aristocracy of finance, furnished
too cheap a popularity and too rich a material for Puritanical leading
articles, not to be exploited. The industrial bourgeoisie was thankful
to it for its servile defense of the French tariff system, which,
however, the paper had taken up, more out of patriotic than economic
reasons the whole bourgeois class was thankful to it for its vicious
denunciations of Communism and Socialism For the rest, the party of the
"National" was purely republican, i.e. it demanded a republican instead
of a monarchic form of bourgeois government; above all, it demanded
for the bourgeoisie the lion's share of the government. As to how this
transformation was to be accomplished, the party was far from being
clear. What, however, was clear as day to it and was openly declared at
the reform banquets during the last days of Louis Philippe's reign, was
its unpopularity with the democratic middle class, especially with the
revolutionary proletariat. These pure republicans, as pure republicans
go, were at first on the very point of contenting themselves with the
regency of the Duchess of Orleans, when the February revolution broke
out, and when it gave their best known representatives a place in the
provisional government. Of course, they enjoyed from the start the
confidence of the bourgeoisie and of the majority of the Constitutional
National Assembly. The Socialist elements of the Provisional Government
were promptly excluded from the Executive Committee which the Assembly
had elected upon its convening, and the party of the "National"
subsequently utilized th