latter. As Professor Davis says, the fighting of June 1848 was "a case of the working quarters of Paris against nearly all the rest of France." Reinforcements hurried up from the provinces to assist the Paris bourgeoisie in making an end of the radicals. A republican government with leanings towards communism, which demanded high taxes for the carrying out of elaborate social reforms, which was even accused of contemplating a division of the land, was altogether abhorrent to the new generation of thrifty peasants.
The final revolutionary uprising of the Parisian workers took place in 1871. The disasters and humiliations of the war with Germany contributed largely to the immediate outbreak. But the seizure of power by the Communists represented the final act in the prolonged drama of civil war. For the last time the Faubourg Saint Antoine attempted to control the destiny of France. The response of the provinces was swift and pitiless. The peasant soldiers who formed the bulk of MacMahon's army stormed Paris and gave Jacobinism its death-blow. The revolt which had lasted for almost a century came to an end; the working-class population of Paris could no longer withstand the hostility of the rest of France. The descendants of the men who had led the way in burning up title-deeds and displaying contempt for the seigneurs' property rights in the days of the Revolution proved most zealous in upholding the existing order against a new revolutionary dispensation.
So far as there is any lesson in the attitude of the peasants during the French revolutionary era, it is not favorable to the ultimate triumph of communism. The peasants remained good radicals only so long as they were quite landless and destitute. As soon as they gained secure possession of their little farms they became as respectable, as conservative, as tenacious of the rights of property as any great land-owner or millionaire. A comparison between what has happened in France and what is likely to happen in Russia is necessarily vague and imperfect. But, unless the Bolsheviki prove more successful apostles of communism than the Jacobins, it seems likely that a period of private land-ownership will make the Russian moujiks as conservative as their French brethren.
