Marx brilliantly comments on the role of the army in the bourgeois state, the militarization of Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire–and on the character of all military regimes since–that followed the January, 1858 assassination attempt by Italian revolutionary Felice Orsini.

‘The Rule of the Pretorians’ by Karl Marx from the New-York Daily Tribune. No. 5270. March 12, 1858.

Paris, Feb. 22, 1858

“When is Gérard the lion-killer to be named Minister of Public Instruction?” Such is the cant phrase current in the faubourgs of Paris since the appointment of Gen. Espinasse of Dobrudja memory as Minister of the Interior and Public Safety. In Russia, it is well known, a general of cavalry presides over the Holy Synod. Why not Espinasse over the French Home-Ministry, since France has become the home of Pretorians only? By such apparent incongruities the rule of the naked sword is proclaimed in most unmistakable terms, and Bonaparte wants France to clearly understand that the imperial rule does rest not on her will but on 600,000 bayonets. Hence the Pretorian addresses cut out by the colonels of the different regiments, after a pattern supplied from the Tuileries-addresses in which the slightest allusion to the so-called “will of the people” is anxiously shunned; hence the parceling out of France into five pashalics hence the transformation of the Home-Ministry into an appendage of the Army. Here the change is not to stop. About 60 prefects are said to be on the eve of being disgraced, and to be replaced, for the most part, by military men. Prefectorial administration is to devolve upon half-pay colonels and lieutenant-colonels. The antagonism between the Army and the population is to be organized as the guarantee of “Public Safety,” viz: the safety of the hero of Satory and his dynasty.

A great modern historian has told us that, disguise the fact as you like, France, since the days of the Great Revolution, has been always disposed of by the army. There have certainly ruled different classes under the Empire, the Restoration, Louis Philippe, and the Republic of 1848. Under the first the peasantry, the offspring of the revolution of 1789, predominated; under the second, the great landed property; under the third, the bourgeoisie; and the last, not in the intention of its founders but in fact, proved an abortive attempt at dividing dominion in equal shares among the men of the legitimate monarchy and the men of the monarchy of July. Still, all these regimes rested alike on the army. Has not even the Constitution of the Republic of 1848 been elaborated and proclaimed under a state of siege–that is, the rule of the bayonet? Was that Republic not personated by Gen. Cavaignac? Was it not saved by the army in June, 1848, and again saved in June, 1849, to be finally dropped by the same army in December, 1851? What then forms the novelty in the regime now openly inaugurated by Louis Bonaparte? That he rules by the instrumentality of the army? So did all his predecessors since the days of Thermidor. Yet, if in all the bygone epochs the ruling class, the ascendency of which corresponded to a specific development of French society, rested its ultima ratioa against its adversaries upon the army, it was nevertheless a specific social interest that predominated. Under the second Empire the interest of the army itself is to predominate. The army is no longer to maintain the rule of one part of the people over another part of the people. The army is to maintain its own rule, personated by its own dynasty, over the French people in general.

It is to represent the State in antagonism to the society. It must not be imagined that Bonaparte is not aware of the dangerous character of the experiment he tries. In proclaiming himself the chief of the Pretorians, he declares every Pretorian chief his competitor. His own partisans, with Gen. Vaillant at their head, demurred against the division of the French Army into five Marshalships, saying that if it was good for the cause of order, it was not so for that of the Empire, and would one day end in civil war. The treacheries of Napoleon’s Marshals, with Berthier at their head, were ransacked by the Palais Royal, which feels extremely vexed at the new turn of Imperial policy.

The future conduct of the five Marshals, who hate each other cordially, at a critical juncture, may be best judged from their past. Magnan betrayed Louis Philippe; Baraguay d’Hilliers betrayed Napoleon; Bosquet betrayed the Republic, to which he owed his advancement, and to the principles of which he is known to be partial. Castellane has not even awaited a real catastrophe to betray Louis Bonaparte himself. During the Russian War, a telegraphic dispatch reached him to this effect: “The Emperor is dead.” He instantly drew up a proclamation in favor of Henri V. and sent it to be printed. The Préfet of Lyons had received the real dispatch, which ran thus: “The Emperor of Russia is dead.” The proclamation was hushed, but the story got abroad. As to Canrobert, he may be an Imperialist, but then he is but a fraction, and, above all, lacks the capability of being a whole number. The five Marshals themselves, feeling the arduous task they were called upon to undertake, hesitated so considerably at accepting their respective commands that nothing could be settled with their consent; which seeing, Bonaparte wrote out himself the names of their separate destinations, gave the note to Mr. Fould to be filled up and sent to the Moniteur, and thus they were all gazetted at last, whether they would or not. Bonaparte, on the other hand, dared not complete his plan by Pelissier’s nomination of Marshal- General. Of his pentarchy of Marshals, we may say what Prince Jérôme Napoleon is stated to have answered to Fould, sent by Bonaparte to present his uncle with his nomination to the first place in the Council of Regency. After having declined the offer in most impolite terms, the ex-King of Westphalia, as Paris gossip has it, bowed Mr. Fould out with the words, “Du reste, your Council of Regency is so framed as for you all to have but one object; that, namely, of arresting each other as promptly as possible.” We repeat that it is impossible to suppose Louis Bonaparte ignorant of the dangers with which his new-fangled system is fraught. But he has no choice left. He understands his own situation and the impatience of French society to get rid of him and his Imperial mummeries. He knows that the different parties have recovered from their paralysis, and that the material basis of his stock-jobbing regime has been blown up by the commercial earthquake. Consequently, he is not only preparing for war against French society, but loudly proclaims the fact. It tallies with his resolution to take up a warlike attitude against France that he confounds the most heterogeneous parties. Thus, when Cassagnac, in the Constitutionnel, denounced Mr. Villemain as a “provoker of hatred” to the Empire, and accused the Journal des Débats of “complicity” in the attentat “through its silence,” this was at first considered to be an act of foolish zeal on the part of the man whom Guizot has described as the roi des drôles. Soon, however, it oozed out that the article had been imposed upon the Constitutionnel by Mr. Rouland, the Minister of Public Instruction, who had himself corrected the proofs of it. This explanation, by the by, was given to Mr. De Sacy of the Débats by Mr. Mirès, the proprietor of the Constitutionnel, who did not choose to bear the responsibility of the article. The denunciation of all parties as his personal enemies enters, therefore, into the game of Bonaparte. It forms part of his system. He tells them, in so many words, that he indulges no delusion as to the general aversion his rule is the subject of, but that he is ready to encounter it with grape and musketry.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (for Marx) wrote hundreds of articles in English for the New York Daily Tribune which ran from 1841 and was closely associated with Horace Greeley and, until the founding of the Republican Party, progressive Whigs. Marx contributed from August 1851 to March 1862 as the Tribune’s London correspondent. One of the largest papers in the U.S., Marx’s work was read widely, including by Lincoln who was a subscriber. The Tribune was an important outlet for Marx’s political ideas in the years of European reaction between the failure of ’48 and the International. Marx would break with the paper in 1862 over its increasing conservatism and compromising attitude towards the abolition of slavery during the Civil War. The ten years of political writings for the Tribune in the 1850s, often covering European wars, empires and politics, show Marx’s evolving understanding of imperialism, particularly his work on India and China.

PDF of full issue: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1858-03-12/ed-1/seq-3/