Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/221

 of the nineteenth century, it suffered a complete internal transformation, but was by no means eliminated from political life. At the very moment that the development of capitalist technology was inexorably undermining its economic function, the general suffrage right and universal military service were still giving to the petite bourgeoisie, thanks to its numerical strength, an appearance of political importance. Big capital, in so far as it did not wipe out this class, subordinated it to its own ends by means of the applications of the credit system. All that remained for the political representatives of big capital to do was to subjugate the petite bourgeoisie, in the political arena, to their purposes, by opening a fictitious credit to the declared theories and prejudices of this class. It is for this reason that, in the decade preceding the war, we witnessed, side by side with the gigantic efforts of a reactionary-imperialistic policy, a deceptive flowering of bourgeois democracy with its accompanying reformism and pacifism. Capital was making use of the petite bourgeoisie for the prosecution of capital's imperialistic purposes by exploiting the ideologic prejudices of the petite bourgeoisie.

Probably there is no other country in which this double process was so unmistakably accomplishing itself as in France. France is the classic land of financial capital, which leans for its support on the petite bourgeoisie of the cities and the towns, the most conservative class of the kind in the world, and numerically very strong. Thanks to foreign loans, to the colonies, to the alliance of France with Russia and England, the financial upper crust of the Third Republic found itself involved in all the interests and conflicts of world politics. And yet, the French petit bourgeois is an out-and-out provincial. He has always shown an instinctive aversion to geography and all his life has feared war as the very devil—if only for the reason that he has, in most cases, but one son, who is to inherit his business, together with his chattels. This petit bourgeois sends to Parliament a radical who has promised him to preserve peace—on the one hand, by means of a league of nations and compulsory international arbitration, and, on the other, with the co-operation of the Russian Cossacks, who are to hold the German Kaiser in check. This radical deputé, drawn from the provincial lawyer class, goes to Paris not only with the best intentions, but also without the slightest conception of the location of the Persian Gulf, and what is the use, and to whom, of the Bagdad Railway. This radical-"pacifistic" bloc of deputies gives