mar 17, 1848 - Provisional Government establishes the Mobile Guards to skirmish w/ revolting workers in Paris
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“The February revolution had thrown the army out of Paris. The National Guard, that is, the bourgeoisie in its various social gradations, was the only power. However, alone it did not feel itself a match for the proletariat. Moreover, gradually and piecemeal it was obliged to open its ranks and allow armed proletarians to join, albeit after the fiercest resistance and after creating a hundred different obstacles. Consequently there remained only one way out: to set one section of the proletariat against the other.
For this purpose the Provisional Government formed twenty-four battalions of Mobile Guards, each composed of a thousand young men between fifteen and twenty. For the most part they belonged to the lumpenproletariat, which, in all towns, forms a mass quite distinct from the industrial proletariat. It is a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all sorts, living off the garbage of society, people without a definite trace, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu, varying according to the cultural level of their particular nation, never able to repudiate their lazzaroni character; during their youthful years – the age at which the Provisional Government recruited them – they are thoroughly tractable, capable of the greatest acts of heroism and the most exalted self-sacrifice as well as the lowest forms of banditry and the foulest corruption. The Provisional Government paid them 1 franc 50 centimes a day; that is, it bought them. It gave them their own uniform, thereby distinguishing them outwardly from the blouses of the workers. In part it assigned officers from the standing army to lead them and in part they themselves elected young sons of the bourgeoisie, who entranced them with rodomontades about dying for the fatherland and devotion to the republic.
Thus the Paris proletariat was confronted by an army of 24,000 youthful, strong, foolhardy men, drawn from its own midst. The workers cheered the Mobile Guard as it marched through Paris! They recognized in it their protagonists on the barricades. They regarded it as the proletarian guard in contrast to the bourgeois National Guard. Their error was pardonable.”
p. 386-7
[see through 389]
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Timeline for The Class Struggle in France & the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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