And here I am again, voting alongside the red republic. However, this is not my fault.

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 386 to 388 (in French)
September 3rd, 1848

This letter was written the day before the debate to establish the constitution of the Second French Republic started. The text infers that the political situation is tense, that freedom of the press has been suspended and that the government had requested the parliament to declare the state of emergency.

Frédéric Bastiat voted against the state of emergency and thus found himself in opposition to the government, alongside what he calls “the red republic”. This is the point of today’s quote, which desserves to be completed with the sentence immediately following it, viz. “One should not look at with whom, but why one is voting”. Once again, this conveys the intellectual honesty of Frédéric Bastiat and his disgust for politician or partisan politics. This letter also allows us to see how much of a liberal Frédéric Bastiat was indeed. He mentions in passing that he would rather witness yet another revolution than the imposition of a dictatorship by the legitimists (the faction in France who wanted to reestablish the Bourbon dynasty on the throne) and announces that he would accept the wishes of public opinion, hoping that it would be possible to convince the people about the right course of action through debate and not through enforcement.