Page:Ernest Belfort Bax - A Short History of the Paris Commune (1895).djvu/9

Rh rhetorical froth and so many gallons of good black ink were expended, has since been realised. They have it now, all for which they strove. And what good has come of all the centralising bureaucratisation that the patriotic "forty-eighter" orated, struggled, gushed, and wept for by turns as the goal of human aspiration? These precious "united" nationalities are now groaning under the united and independent military and administrative budgets of their respective beloved fatherlands. One would think, if one is to risk one's skin at all in a revolutionary enterprise, it were better to save it for something more worth having than the sorry result for which most of the Continentals of '48 were so eager to risk theirs!

In 1848 the present constitutional basis of Europe was established, and since then the middle-class "advanced" movements have become more and more moderate as the class itself has become politically dominant and settled down. The revolt of even the small middle-classes has, since '48, disappeared, its main object having been attained, such changes as the poorer section of the class demand, with few exceptions, having been striven for by peaceful and constitutional methods. In 1848, in short, the bourgeoisie, which had long been economically dominant, put the finishing touch to its political emancipation.

Yet the '48 Revolution, though predominantly a middle-class concern is signalised by the first appearance of the proletariat in conscious opposition to the middle-class—to wit, in the German Communist League and the Paris insurrection of June in that year. The former of these movements was the beginning of Socialism; the latter, though, as above said, a conscious class-movement, was in its form and general character rather a survival of the original revolt of the French proletariat during the great Revolution than the beginning of any new departure on