15.: To Citizens Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin - Frédéric Bastiat, The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. Vol. 1: The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics [2011]
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The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. Vol. 1: The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics, translated from the French by Jane and Michel Willems, with an introduction by Jacques de Guenin and Jean-Claude Paul-Dejean. Annotations and Glossaries by Jacques de Guenin, Jean-Claude Paul-Dejean, and David M. Hart. Translation editor Dennis O’Keeffe (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2011).
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15.
To Citizens Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin
[vol. 7, p. 246. According to Paillottet, this
article was originally published in the third issue of
Jacques Bonhomme, dated 20-23 June 1848.]
Dissolve the national workshops. Dissolve them with all the care that humanity requires, but dissolve them.
If you want a reborn confidence, dissolve the national workshops.
If you want production to revive, dissolve the national workshops.
If you want shops to empty and fill, dissolve the national workshops.
If you want factories to reopen, dissolve the national workshops
If you want the countryside to become peaceful, dissolve the national workshops.
If you want the National Guard to have some rest, dissolve the national workshops.
If you want the people to bless you, including one hundred thousand workers out of the one hundred and three thousand in these workshops, dissolve the national workshops.
If you have not concluded that the stagnation of business followed by the stagnation of employment, followed by poverty, followed by starvation, followed by civil war, followed by desolation will become the Republic’s funeral procession, dissolve the national workshops.
If you have not decided to ruin the finances, crush the provinces, and exasperate the peasants, dissolve the national workshops.
If you do not want the entire nation to suspect you of deliberately having the specter of riots hanging over the National Assembly, dissolve the national workshops.
If you do not want to starve the people after having demoralized them, dissolve the national workshops.
If you do not want to be accused of having imagined a means of oppression, fright, terror, and ruin which exceeds anything the greatest tyrants have ever invented, dissolve the national workshops.
If you do not have the ulterior motive of destroying the Republic by making it hated, dissolve the national workshops.
If you do not want to be cursed in the present and if you do not want your memory to be reviled from generation to generation, dissolve the national workshops.
If you do not dissolve the national workshops, you will draw down onto the country every plague simultaneously.
If you do not dissolve the national workshops, what will happen to the workers when you have no more bread to give them and private production is dead?
If you retain the national workshops with sinister intent, posterity will say of you, “It was doubtless by cowardice that they proclaimed the Republic, since they killed it by treason.”
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