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blows. The four grenadiers closed round him to protect him while the officers
made a way for him through the tumult. It was Gardanne who succeeded in
carrying him out of the Hall. The only thing now, thought Siéyès, was flight : the
only hope now, said Bonaparte to his friends, was force. In the Hall of the Five
Hundred a decree of outlawry was put to the vote. In a few minutes the
successor of Caesar and Cromwell would be outlawed and done for.
Bonaparte mounted his horse and confronted his troops. To arms, he
shouted. The soldiers replied with cheers but no more. This was the most typical
scene of the famous two days. Distraught and trembling with rage Bonaparte
looked around him. The hero of Arcole had not succeeded in carrying with him a
single battalion. Had Lucien not arrived a t that moment all would have been
lost. It was Lucien who got the soldiers moving and saved the situation, while
Murat unsheathing his sword led the Grenadiers to the assault of the Five
Hundred.
Caesar and Cromwell at that moment Montron was to protest that the
General had misplayed his part. Montron ( A Talleyrand on horseback, he was
called by Roedeor) was all his life convinced that the hero of the pages of
Plutarch had at St. Cloud for a moment trembled with fear, and that any little
obscure citizen, any one of the lawyers of the Parliament, might without danger
to himself during those two famous days have frustrated the destiny of
Bonaparte and saved the Republic.
CHAPTER SIX
PRIMO DE RIVERA AND PILSUDSKI: A COURTIER AND A
SOCIALIST GENERAL
Bonaparte solved the problem of capturing the State by using his army as
though it were a legal weapon in the field of parliamentary procedure. He set an
example which still exercises much influence on all those who, like Kapp, Primo
de Rivera, and Pilsudski, pretend to conciliate the use of violence with respect for
the law and seek to make a parliamentary revolution by force of arms. The tactics
of the eighteenth Brumaire were not those of military sedition. Their main
concern was to keep within the law; therein lay Napoleon s innovation in the
technique of the coup d Etat. This contemporary problem is in evidence in the
operations of Kapp, of Primo de Rivera, and of Pilsudski, and its presence
accounts for the importance, even today, of the eighteenth Brumaire. Bonapartist
tactics are still an imminent danger to parliamentary States. What was Kapp s
illusion? That of being a Siéyès to von Luttwitz and thus making the coup d Etat.
Similarly, Ludendorff s tactics, when in 1923, he joined forces with Hitler and
Kahr to march on Berlin, were those of the eighteenth Brumaire. What was his
objective? The same as Kapp s: the Reichstag, the Constitution of Weimar. And
so with Primo de Rivera and Pilsudski: the one aimed to strike at the Cortes, the
other at the Diet. Even Lenin himself, in the first stages, in the summer of 1917,
began to adopt Bonapartist tactics. The main reason for the failure of the
insurrectional tactics of July 1917 was that the Central Committee of the
Bolshevik Party and Lenin himself were opposed to an insurrection after the first
Soviet Congress. Their sole objective was a parliamentary one, namely, to win a
majority in the Soviets. Until the eve of the coup d Etat, Lenin, then hiding in
Finland after the July Days, thought only of securing a majority in the second
Soviet Congress which was to meet in October. A mediocre tactician, he sought
parliamentary security before giving the signal for insurrection. Like Danton
and like Cromwell, observes Lunacharski, Lenin is a born opportunist.
The method of Bonaparte was to observe all forms, not for their own sake,
but for the exigencies of the moment. The fundamental rule of Bonapartist tactics
is to choose Parliament as the best ground on which to combine the use of
violence with respect for the law. Such was the essence of the eighteenth
Brumaire. Kapp, Primo de Rivera, Pilsudski and, in certain respects, even Hitler,
were men of law and order, reactionary men whose aim in seizing the power was
to increase their prestige, their power and authority; bent on justifying their
seditious motive by claiming to be not the enemy but the servant of the State.
What they feared most was to be outlawed. When making their plan, they could
never forget how Bonaparte paled when he heard that he had been outlawed.
Parliament was the goal of their tactics; through Parliament they wished to
overthrow the State. Legislative power alone, so favorable to the game of
compromise and intrigue, could help them to include a fait accompli in the
constitutional order. Then revolutionary despotism
Parliament, either accepts the fait accompli and makes it constitutional by
transforming the coup d Etat into a change of Ministry, or the conspirators
dissolve Parliament and give a new Assembly the task of legalizing
revolutionary action. But a Parliament that undertakes to legalize a coup d Etat is
merely signing its own death warrant. In the history of revolution there is no
exception to the rule that an assembly which has once legalized revolutionary
action is the first victim of that action. The aim being to increase the State s
prestige, power and authority, the Bonapartist method of achieving it is merely
Constitutional reform and curtailment of Parliamentary prerogatives. For a
Bonapartist coup d Etat, the only guarantee of legality lies in a constitutional
reform which limits public and parliamentary rights. Liberty is its chief enemy.
Bonapartist tactics must at all costs remain within the field of the law.
They rely on the use of violence only to hold their position on this field or to fight
their way back on to it if they have been forced to retreat. What action did
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