a clever pamphlet caused him to be ultimately elected president of the society. In 1842, he first became a member of the Chamber, and frequently spoke in a manner to excite attention, from his coolness and aplomb. But although a certain ability and energy cannot be denied to M. De Morny, no one supposed him to be specially cut out for a parliamentary life, or for a great minister of state. To every man acquainted with Parisian society in the five years-from 1843 to 1848it was well known that M. De Morny was more deeply engaged on the turf, at the Jockey Club, at the gambling-table, and in the foyers of the opera, than in parliamentary business. His coolness, courage, and quick faculties no one doubted. He was an excellent judge of horseflesh, understood ecarté well, and could criticise an opera or ballet with accurate science; but no one believed him to know anything about, or to care anything for, parliamentary government.

It was for this reason, as much as for the brotherhood in blood (both being born of the same mother), that M. Buonaparte chose this daring and conscienceless counsellor as his principal minister. The new chief of the Home Office had graduated in tenderness and humanity in Africa; had studied the doctrine of chances in the Jockey Club and in the betting-rooms. He was, therefore, prepared to play double and quits-to go for what the French call a martingale, and to stand the hazard of a desperate cast of the political dye. At a quarterpast six in the morning of the 2nd December, the arrests of the chief men of the state being effected, M. de Morny, having remained at the Jockey Club playing at cards till two, entered the Hotel of the Ministry of the Interior, as it is called in France, or, as we should say in England, the Home Office, accompanied by 250 Chasseurs de Vincennes. This afforded a palpable indication that he meant to take the place by storm, if M. de Thorigny, the tenant in possession, showed the smallest wavering in favour of law. A letter was instantly sent or handed by M. de Morny to M. de Thorigny, written by the President, thanking him for

his services, and informing him that M. de Morny, his brother in blood and his companion in crime, was now minister. Thus was the man who laboured for M. Buonaparte for a month summarily and in an instant dismissed. Then began the hideous reign of violence, of illegality, and of terror, the like of which, whether for hypocrisy, for force, for fraud, and for tyranny combined, France has never seen; no, not even in the Reign of Terror-for then there was neither hypocrisy nor dissembling— till the close of 1851.

From his own mere motion-out of the workings of his own bad and vicious will-aided by De Morny, his brother, and Minister of the Interior; by Le Roy St. Arnaud, a man of indifferent character and desperate fortunes, and Minister of War; and by De Maupas, Prefect of Police, said also to be a son of Hortense and a brother of the President, M. Buonaparte accomplished his coldblooded and desperate coup. He

a

restored for a moment-and for the Presidential election merely mockery of universal suffrage; he dissolved and broke up the Chamber; he seized on the members and arrested the deputies. By the vilest of treachery, and by the story of conspiracy, he possessed himself of the persons of five generals, and transported them to Ham.

Had he the shadow of law or authority to do any one of these things? No-clearly not. Could he dissolve the Assembly, or prorogue it? Unquestionably not. On this point the 51st article of the Constitution is explicit. Speaking of the attributions of the President, it says, Il ne peut dissoudre ni proroger l'Assemblée Nationale, ni suspendre en aucune manière l'empire de la Constitution et des lois. Therefore, by this article the dissolution of the Assembly, the dissolution of the Council of State, the restoration of universal suffrage, the arrest of two hundred and odd deputies, and all the other atrocities committed in houses and in the open streets, were clearly illegal. On the same morning on which these scenes of violence were enacting, more than fifty provincial a half-a-dozen Parisian journals pressed, the Mu of Paris was ill

lly supmission

Paris itself was declared in a state of siege. These deeds were as contrary to the Constitution, as the dissolution and dispersion of the Assembly. By the 106th article of the Constitution, the following provision is made: Une loi déterminera les cas dans lesquels l'état de siège pourra être déclaré, et reglera les formes et les effets de cette mesure.' Now, a law presupposes the exist. tence of the legislative power, whereas the legislative power had been antecedently destroyed. In the state of siege, established on the 24th June, 1848, the Legislative Assembly was sitting, and the jurisdiction and competence of councils of war were limited to the fautors and authors of the insurrection; but in the state of siege decreed by the sicvoleo, sicjubeo of M. Buonaparte, no other superior or concurrent authority existed. Circumstances give to every political movement and fact their colour and effect, and these were the circumstances incident to the state of siege declared on the 2nd December, 1851.

If there had been a great, an awful, or a wholly overruling necessity for placing the capital in this state, as in the bloody insurrection of June, there might be not merely a palliation but a triumphant defence for the momentary subversion of the laws and the liberties of a great people, and for the making a salutary and terrible example; but here was no such necessity. Paris was polluted with massacre, and saturated with blood; peaceable citizens were shot down like mad dogs, and their walls and windows battered, for no better reason than this, that M. Buonaparte declared-and falsely and fraudulently declared-there was a conspiracy against him. Of this where are the proofs? Did any one of the five generals conspire on the night of the 1st December, or on the morning of the 2nd, when they were captured? No: they were, every one of them, instead of being engaged in conspiracies, gently reposing in their beds, enjoying a fancied security in their own homes and at their own hearths, while they were being conspired against by the head o State-armed myrmidons of power.

nch army, generally ment, and brave, ex

hibited on this occasion such

a

mixture of ferocity, mingled with levity and recklessness, as can only be accounted for by the stimulus of wine and the seductive influence of money. The moral sense and the citizen feeling of the soldier were drowned in wine and brandy, and then, under the guid ance of chiefs gained over to M. Buonaparte, the soldiers were let loose on defenceless citizens. I can understand that, after the events of 1830, and February, 1848, the chiefs of the French army, and the French army itself, hungered and thirsted to vindicate its character against insurgents of any kind whatever. The French army felt that it had not been properly handled or commanded in 1830,-still less in February, 1848. But the character of the army, for discipline, steadiness, and obedience, had been retrieved in the sanguinary days of June, under the command Cavaignac, Changarnier, Bedeau, Lamoricière, Duvivier, Negrier, Damesme, and Brea, so that there was no need again, without an overwhelming necessity, to give it a baptismal regeneration by the profuse shedding of French blood.

of

A Socialist conspiracy, on an extended scale, was put forward as the pretext of the remorseless razzias executed on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of the last month,—a conspiracy which had been studiously kept before the public from the day of the delivery of the Presidential speech on the 2nd of November, just one month before; but the proofs of this conspiracy are altogether wanting. My own opinion, from a careful consideration and examination of France for the last one-andtwenty years, (for Socialism dates so far back, though it was then known under another name,) is, that the plague of Socialism and Red Republicanism have, during the last three years, been grossly exaggerated, with the deliberate design and the perfidious purpose of preparing the way for the mute and inglorious despotism that now prevails.

To the mass of the small proprietors in France the doctrines of Socialism are odious and distasteful; the vast majority of working men, both in town and country, are un

tainted with them; and I myself doubt that, from one end of the country to the other, a million of Socialists could be polled if they were to be numbered by heads. Assuredly in the capital, supposing all the Socialists summoned for a given purpose on the 2nd of December, I do not believe that five thousand Socialist fighting men could be mustered on all the barricades. No doubt the forçats and repris de justice in Paris are a very numerous and desperate body. But these are robbers, burglars, thieves, whose appetites are whetted for plunder and not for the propagation or defence of theories of societies or of government. Such men pillage, rob, and glut themselves with debauchery and crapulous enjoyments, but they are not over prone to fighting. If any of them were on the barricades in the three days of the last month of December, they went there not of their own accord, but incited by agents provocateurs of the police.

In fact, the Socialist conspiracy denounced in Presidential speeches, writings and addresses, so languished that agents provocateurs belonging to the police dressed in plain clothes incited the people to mutiny. Six of these men were shot in the mêlée, and at the last moment it was discovered that they were of the brigade of M. de Maupas, so that it should appear that even the four hundred or five hundred émeutiers who ranged themselves behind barricades had to be stimulated and goaded on by police and mouchard abettors, who were themselves forced to mingle in the fray, and to pay the penalty of such infamous complicity and such double treasons by the sacrifice of their own worthless and ignominious lives. Does this look like a conspiracy on the part of the Socialists or Reds? In fact, the leaders amongst the Socialists and Reds were all safely in prison on the morning of the coup, and I do not believe that, from the beginning to the ending of the provoked émeute, five hundred Faubouriens took part in the struggle, and not two hundred of these were armed. The total number of persons killed and wounded on both sides does not amount to 800, and by far the greater part of these were casual wayfarers in the streets,

or curious and harmless spectators either at windows, at balconies, or passengers on the trottoir, who were incited by an appetite for news, or a desire to witness street-fighting.

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To appear at the windows,' says one of the correspondents of the Times, was certain death.' Were persons looking out of windows then engaged in a conspiracy, or was poor Mr. Paris, the chemist, who was proceeding from his shop in the Rue de la Paix to his shop in the Faubourg Montmartre, engaged in a conspiracy? In fact, of conspiracy there was none, and of serious fighting there was none on the part of the people. The only conspiracy was on the part of the tenant of the Elysée. He alone had need of a conspiracy, for his was a system, not based on the liberty, or the independence, or the wants of a great nation. A ruler whose system is based on a policy of personal aggrandizement and of selfish desires merely, has need of imposture, misrepresentations, conspiracies, and crimes to conceal and cover his guilt, and to varnish it over with the plea of the tyrant-necessity. Enormous lying was therefore had recourse to. Department after department was placed in a state of siege, under the pretext that Socialism was everywhere rampant and arming. On this theme the Constitutionnel and the Patrie harped day by day with nauseous iteration, till at length the half of France was under martial law and the sharp dominion of the sword. Yet, in six days from the coup-d'état, the Var, the Basses Alpes, the Higher and Lower Rhine, and all the worst departments, were tranquil. If there had been a general con spiracy-if ten, or even five per cent. of the working people had been tainted with subversive Socialist doctrines, could tranquillity have been so suddenly restored, even with the aid of 380,000 bayonets distributed over the whole of France? Even admitting-which I freely do-that the leaders of the army had studied street and town warfare, barricade fighting, the assault of houses and fortified carrefours, with a deadly and dogged resolve to be victorious, yet the people of France are so brave and martial-the very lowest populace of town and country have

so many expedients in the art of attack and defence-that if they had resolved to resist, they might have occupied the army for months and possibly even have worn outcertainly have cruelly harassed-the most disciplined force. The fact,

however, that the resistance had ceased within a week in the very worst localities, affords proof positive that the men in insurrection were but mere marauders, recruited from the very dregs of the population. Whenever a considerable portion of the nation seriously combats for a principle in France, it is no easy matter to put it down. The wars of Religion, of the League and the Fronde, the Legitimist war of La Vendée, which tasked all the energies of so great a general as Hoche, is a proof of this. Could there have been a considerable portion of the population engaged, or any great principle at stake, in a struggle which was over in four or five days? No, there was no conspiracy, unless within the walls of the Elysée.

I fully admit that it were desirable that the Socialism or Communism of Louis Blanc, and the Red Republicanism or Jacobinism of Ledru Rollin, both of which have done such mischief to France, should be put to the rout, and for ever driven from the soil. But with the professors of this Socialism there was no stand-up fight, for they never put themselves en evidence. These men will choose their own time and place and occasion, if they should be minded to make a struggle. As to the moderate republican, parliamentary and constitutional parties, they did but protest-they did not fight. The constitutional party, whether composed of monarchists like M. de Broglie and M. O. Barrot,

or

of moderate republicans, like Dufaure, Passy, De Tocqueville, De Beaumont, Lamartine, Cavaignac, Bedeau, and Lamoricière reserves itself for future contingencies. It knows itself to be indomitable, and its triumph to be ultimately certain; whether that triumph be deferred for three, six, or even twelve months. What are twelve months in the life of a nation, or even of a party which has any vitality or the seeds of stability. Oh, but it is said, the

President has forestalled 1852. 'He has put to rout,' says that model of a courageous man (who, in 1848, first hid himself, and subsequently fled to Belgium)—' he has put to rout all the revolutionists, all the Socialists, all the bandits of France and of Europe; and in thus acting, he has done an incomparable service to the cause of good order and of Roman-catholicism.' Ah, M. Montalembert, we are not yet, while I write, within a week of the beginning-much less at the end-of 1852. Before the coming year passes, or has half run its course, you and I may see stranger things than either of us have yet witnessed. You call the remorseless razzias of the soldiery, on the 2nd December, the revenge of the army against the revolution of February. But did you not, as well as the army, take the oath of fidelity to the Constitution-a Constitution sprung from the very loins of that revolution? Revenge is an act of passion, not of justice; and certainly, a portion of the army in the interests of M. Buonaparte has, to use the expressive language of Scripture, made their arrows drunk with blood-I blush to say, the blood of their unarmed and unresisting fellow-citizens. M. de Montalembert would, however, forgive M. Buonaparte even greater crimes than he has perpetrated, because the idol of his idolatry has restored the Pope to his subjects-because he has revived councils and synods-because he has placed education in the hands of the Jesuits, and everywhere deferred, not to the wishes of the Gallican clergy, like the good Archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Sibour, but to the violent, narrow-minded, and intolerant bigots of the ultramontane Church. What pleases M. de Montalembert is, that M. Buonaparte is determined to tread out the last liberty of the country, and to instal the clergy in the place of the Constitution. The Bishop of Chalons says, God is with the President, and the Bishops of Strasburgh and Angers tell him he is God's own instrument. But notwithstanding these impostures, practised in the sacred name of religion on the credulity of the French people, history will pronounce its award on the clerical adulators and their perjured