Abstract

The Reforms in France

This article focuses on recent reforms, known as the Senatus-Consultum, in France. These reforms are in reality a restoration of the parliamentary regime, and. therefore, until the peasantry take a different part in politics from what they do now, of middle-class government. The approaching termination of the struggle between the French Emperor and the Liberals is chiefly valuable as an illustration of the great advances the French have made within the last eighteen years in the political art. Parliamentary institutions, as they are called are middle-class contrivances. They have never got any hold in France on the minds either of the peasantry or workingmen. The burden of dealing with questions of social reform, which are still, as they were in 1848, the serious question of French politics, and which troubled the Republic even more than they troubled the monarchy of Louis Philippe, is now thrown back once more on the shoulders of the bourgeoisie.