f itself as an idealistic
effort; and with the Directory, which was open and professed corruption,
this banner became a reality; the proprietors are changed, but property
is saved. And, indeed, to raise upon so many ruins a stable edifice,
there was need of real force; and this was found in that strange
adventurer of incomparable genius, upon whom fortune had imperially
smiled, and he was the only one who possessed the virtue of putting an
end to this gigantic fable, because there was in him neither shadow nor
trace of moral scruples.

In this furor of events strange things happened. The citizens armed for
the defense of their country, victorious beyond its frontiers over
surrounding Europe, into which with their conquest they carried the
revolution, transformed themselves into a soldiery to oppress the
liberty of their country. The peasants who, at a moment of imperious
suggestion, produced over the feudal estates the anarchy of 1789, now
having become soldiers, or small proprietors, or small farmers, and
having remained for a moment the advance sentinels of the revolution,
fell back into the silent and stolid calm of their traditional life,
which, without risks and without movements, served as a sure basis for
the so-called social order. The petty bourgeois of the cities, and the
former members of the guilds rapidly developed, in the camp of economic
struggle, into free traffickers in manual labor. The freedom of trade
required that every product become easily merchantable, and thus it
triumphed over the last obstacle, by enforcing the demand that labor
also become for it a free commodity.

All changed at this moment. The state, which for centuries so many
million deluded ones had regarded as a sacred institution or a divine
mandate, allowed its sovereign to be beheaded by the prosaic means of a
technical machine, and thereby lost its sacred character. The state,
also, was becoming a technical appliance, which substituted bureaucracy
for hierarchy. And as the ancient titles no longer assured their
possessors the privilege of exercising diverse functions, this new state
could become the prey of all those who wished to seize upon it; it found
itself, in a word, put up at auction, with the provision that the
successful aspirants must be the solid guarantors of the property of the
new and the old proprietors. The new state, which had need of its
Eighteenth Brumaire to become an orderly bureaucracy, supported upon
victor