I. excited men, with whom it was not easy to deal. While CHAP. the Assembly deliberated on the election of the Bonaparte upon whom the eyes of the country were fixed, his name was borne upon the lips of the mob to the portals of the Chamber, and they called him Consul, Emperor! As he increased in strength his enemies dwindled to shadows;1 or, as his enemies will have it, he rose upon the failure of all who were opposed to him. They pelted him with mud as they retired one by one from the social anarchy which their quarrels and their incapacity had created; vilified every member of his party; represented him as conducting a Bonapartist propaganda with Russian money, and as resorting to the most dishonest courses in order to fill the maws of his greedy lieutenants. But they could not impede his course; and when at length his name stood before the country as candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, matters had been brought to such a pass among the Orleanists and Legitimists that these rallied to his cause as a refuge against a Jacquerie,' not the less ardently because Proudhon had proclaimed that the advent of Louis Napoleon meant the tempest and the thunderbolt. Republican and Orleanist writers have laboured hard to associate the Bonapartists with the bloody days of June, and to show the agents of Louis Napoleon instigating the discontented working-men to open revolt. Some of the lower Bonapartist organs issued recklessly throughout the summer of 1848 held up the repre 1 'When M. Lamartine called for the proscription of Louis Napoleon, he uttered the condemnation and opprobrium of his own Government. It could only be because M. Lamartine had been so dangerously weak that Louis Napoleon had become so dangerously strong. It was because M. Lamartine had caused people in de- BOOK VII. sentatives of the people to public odium, and helped to inflame the minds of the rich against the poor; but the party-the cause was that of order, and Louis Napoleon appeared as the governor who was to save society from the excesses of the Socialists. The blunder of the Executive in the banishment of the tenants of the National workshops in the army fairly exasperated the populace, and put an end to the patience of the bourgeoisie. The cries of the unemployed masses were against the Assembly, M. de Lamartine, and M. Thiers, as the blunderers who had brought Paris and the Republic to shame and want; and day by day, they clung with a deeper faith to the name of Napoleon, as that of the strong man who would give a settled direction to public affairs once more, and represent a firm Government under which work and commerce would return to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Marais. The persistency with which Republican and Orleanist historians and journalists have endeavoured to explain the rise of the fortunes of Louis Napoleon on the failure of the Republic in 1848 as the triumph of a mean and immoral act, and their own discomfiture as the fate of men of Quixotic virtue and patriotism, gives the impartial reader a very poor idea of their penetration or their candour. Even M. Delord's pages, cleverly as he has arranged them to produce a contrary effect, impress the historical student with the irresistible force which carried Louis Napoleon to the Presidency, when once his name was upon men's lips. He alone of the Bonapartes represented the Napoleonic legend to the people. This legend alone stirred the national heart. M. Berryer, chairman of a central Legitimist committee, which had affiliated local committees in all the departments, might talk openly in the Assembly about his King Henry V.; nobody feared him nor his organisation. M. Thiers might come and go between the Place de la Concorde and Claremont; no Republican sought to molest him. These leaders of the elder and junior Bourbon causes could make no way. The collapse of Orleanism was complete, and through the varying phases of the Revolution it never had strength to raise a single hand. Legitimacy, if regarded as the more chivalrous and respectable Monarchical cause, was to the people as much a part of the past as the chairs and tables, the helmets and weapons of the Hôtel Cluny. When Louis Napoleon took up his quarters at the Hôtel du Rhin in the Place Vendôme, there were only two powerful parties in France, viz. the Republican party and the Bonapartist party. The former included men of rare ability, patriots as unselfish as Hampden, heroes ready for any sacrifice for their country's sake, dreamers prepared to turn society upside-down in the most righteous spirit; but no administrators, no steady practical men-no leaders, but a host eager to lead. Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin, François Arago, Garnier-Pagès, Louis Blanc, Crémieux, Marrast, Cavaignac-these are the names of honourable citizens, but in none of them was the stuff of a leader of men; to none would the country, which was imploring order and security, that the wheels of industry might spin again, confide its destinies. It would have neither an Orleanist regency nor Legitimacy under the Count of Chambord; for these settlements it knew would not last one round of the seasons. What remained? This question was to be answered by the Deputy at the Hôtel du Rhin, who had been returned by five departments, and who had already very notable people of various political parties on his list of visitors. Forethem were MM. Odilon and Ferdinand Barrot. most among CHAP. I. BOOK VII. CHAPTER II. PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLEON IN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLEON arrived in Paris, and took up his quarters at the Hôtel du Rhin, in the Place Vendôme, on September 25, 1848, and on the following day he made his first appearance in the Assembly. He was received in profound silence; he was in the midst of enemies who were seeking his destruction. The significance of his appearance, accompanied as it was by irrepressible shouts of Long live Louis Napoleon! Long live the Emperor !'-shouts that had been heard in the provinces as well as in the capital, and were intended as the people's answers to M. Ledru-Rollin's emissaries and the intrigues of MM. Berryer, Thiers, and the party of the 'National'-could not be misunderstood.1 It meant confusion to the followers of Sobrier and Crémieux, to the red sashes of Caussidière, to the porte-blouse of Félix Pyat, and to the hordes of idlers of whom Louis Blanc at the Luxembourg had craved the permission to call them brothers. It silenced the lute of Lamartine, 1 On the morrow of the official notification of the election of Prince Louis for the Department of the Seine, the Prefect of Police, Ducoux, wrote to the President of the Council: "The Bonapartist party is, beyond dispute, the strongest and the most numerous. The Republic would be in imminent peril, I am convinced, if this party were in the hands of sincere and resolute men. The army and the people, resolutely appealed to by an audacious chief, would pass under the banner of the Napoleon family.'-Histoire de la seconde République française. Par Hippolyte Castille. Vol. iv. II. who had been prodigal of his eloquence in vain against CHAP. the Bonapartes. It marked the beginning of the decline of Eugène Cavaignac. It promised an end to processions by torchlight; to the planting of trees of Liberty stolen from private gardens; to chariots of Agriculture and golden-horned oxen, and fasces and Goddesses of Plenty in white muslin paraded past empty mills and bankrupt shops. It announced the close of the ignoble orgies of those mischievous hordes whom Ledru-Rollin had called into the streets, and of whom he had said sardonically: 'I must follow them, since it is I who lead them.' In sullen disappointment many ambitious representatives beheld the heir of Napoleon quietly make his way to the tribune. There was yet one hope left for them. He might prove the numskull his enemies had described; he might show himself to be deserving of the contempt and ridicule which General Cavaignac's party had poured upon him. But as the Prince entered with his old friend M. Vieillard, and bowed and shook hands with the few who greeted him, his enemies saw with consternation that he was not in the most distant degree like the caricatures of the 'Charivari.' He had the manners of the French gentleman of the old régime— a winning manner that almost made a friend with an inclination of the head. His aspect was military, and there were grave lines in his face, marks of years of brave study and of patient suffering. His bearing was quiet, composed, and easy under the gaze of his enemies; and when he mounted the tribune, his firm voice, and his resolute but not aggressive attitude, at once proved to MM. de Lamartine, Thiers, Cavaignac, Marrast, Molé, Ledru-Rollin, and other notables that the heir of Napoleon was something more than a lay figure arranged in the legendary cocked hat and grey capote. He at once attacked his calumniators. |