Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/62

 now hear me, in whom I should be so happy as to have kindled the moral glow of this idea in its depth as I feel it and have described it to you, then I should already have reaped a rich harvest and a rich reward for my lecture.

Before all things, gentlemen, your hearts must remain strangers to despondency and doubt, to which a view of the events of history not sufficiently wide for this idea may easily lead.

Thus for example it is distinctly not true that the French Republic was destroyed by the Coup d' Etat of December 1851.

That which could not last in France, that which really perished at that time was not the Republic, but that Republic which, as I have already shown you, abolished universal suffrage by the electoral law of the 30th of May 1850, and introduced a disguised census for the exclusion of the working men. That was therefore the Bourgeois Republic, which desired to impress the stamp of the Bourgeoisie, the domination of capital, on the Republicanised State. This it was which enabled the French usurper, with the pretence of restoring universal suffrage, to destroy the Republic, which would otherwise have found an impregnable bulwark in the breasts of the French working men.

That then which really could not last in France, and was destroyed at that time was not the Republic, but the Bourgeois Republic; and thus it is established according to the true view of history, exactly as in this example, that the period on which we entered in February 1848, tolerates no longer any State which, no