The Arcades Project - Operi

Protestantism . .. did away with the saints in heaven so as to be able to abolish
their feast days on earth. The Revolution of 1789 understood still better what it
was about. The reformed religion had held on to Sunday; but for the revolutionary
bourgeois, that one day of rest coming every seven days was too much, and
they therefore substituted for the seven-day week the ten-day week < 1a decade > ,
so that the day of rest recurred but every ten days. And in order to bury all
memory of the ecclesiastical holy days ... , they replaced the names of saints, in
the republican calendar, with the names of metals, plants, and animals." Paul
Lafargue, "Die christliche Liebestatigkeit" [Die neue Zeit, 23, no. 1 (Stuttgart),
pp. 145-146]. [g2,2]
"In the first days of the Revolution, the question of the poor assumed . .. a very
distinct and urgent character. Bailly, who initially had been elected mayor of Paris
for the express purpose of alleviating the misery of the . .. workers, packed them
into masses and cooped them up-some 18,000 people-like wild animals, on the
hill of Montmartre. Those who stormed the Bastille had workers with cannons
emplaced there, lighted match in hand . . . . Had the war not drawn the unemployed
and destitute laborers from town and countryside . .. into the army, and
shuttled them off to the borders, . .. a popular uprising would have spread across
the whole of France." Paul Lafargue, " Die christliche Liebestatigkeit" [Die neue
Zeit, 23, no. 1 (Stuttgart), p. 147]. [g2,3]
"'Our century, in which the sovereign is everywhere except on the throne." Balzac,
Preface to Un Grand Homme de province it Paris; cited in Georges BatauIt, Le
Pontife de la dfmtagogie: Victor Hugo , pp. 230-231. [g2a,1]
On the writings of Napoleon III: A set of commonplaces developed with sustained
solemnity ... , a perpetual clashing of antitheses, and then suddenly a striking
formulation that captivates by its air of grandeur or seduces by its generosity . .. ,
along with ideas which are so confused that one can no longer distinguish them in
the depths where they're apparently buried, but which, at the very moment one
despairs of ever finding them, burst forth with the sound of trumpets." Pierre de
Ia Gorce, Napoleon III et sa politique (Paris), pp. 4, 5; cited in Batault., Le Pontife
de la demagogic, PI'. 33-34. [g2a,2]
Transition from the Napoleonic military regime to the peacetime regime of' the
Restoration. Engravings titled The Soldier-Laborer, The Soldier-Reapers, Gene,'osity
of a French Soldier, The Tomb of the Brave. Cabinet des Estampes. [g2a,3J
"When, around 1829, M. de Saint-Cricq, director of Customs, announced the
commercial shutdown, . .. we were incredulous. It was so serious that it caused
the July Revolution. On the eve of February 1848 during the harsh winter that
preceded it, the shutdown returned, and with it unemployment. 1wenty years
later, in 1869, here it is again. No one has any desire for enterprise. The current
government, with its Credit Mobilier and other companies, all so advantageous to