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now made that he should be able to select a general to whom he might delegate this power. Such a measure, dividing the military command and enabling the Chamber to have its own general and its own army, might have proved very efficacious, but it would probably have involved France in civil war, and the President was resolved that, if the Chamber voted it, the coup d'état should immediately take place. The vote was taken on November 17, 1851. St.-Arnaud as Minister of War opposed the measure on constitutional grounds, dilating on the danger of a divided military command, but during the discussion Maupas and Magnan were in the gallery of the Chamber, waiting to give orders to St.-Arnaud to call out the troops and to surround and dissolve the Chamber if the proposition was carried.

It was, however, rejected by a majority of 108, and a few troubled days of conspiracy and panic still remained before the blow was struck. The state of the public securities and the testimony of the best judges of all parties showed the genuineness of the alarm. It was not true, as the President stated in the proclamation issued when the coup d'état was accomplished, that the Chamber had become a mere nest of conspiracies, and there was a strange audacity in his assertion, that he made the coup d'état for the purpose of maintaining the Republic against monarchical plots; but it was quite true that the conviction was general that force had become inevitable; that the chief doubt was whether the first blow would be struck by Napoleon or Changarnier, and that while the evident desire of the majority of the people was to re-elect Napoleon, there was a design among some members of the Chamber to seize him by force and to elect in his place some

member of the House of Orleans. On December 2, the curtain fell, and Napoleon accompanied his coup d'état by a decree dissolving the Chamber, restoring by his own authority universal suffrage, abolishing the law of May 31, establishing a state of siege, and calling on the French people to judge his action by their vote.

It was certainly not an appeal upon which great confidence could be placed. Immediately after the coup d'état the army, which was wholly on his side, voted separately and openly in order that France might clearly know that the armed forces were with the President and might be able to predict the consequences of a verdict unfavourable to his pretensions. When nearly three weeks later the civilian Plébiscite took place martial law was in force. Public meetings of every kind were forbidden. No newspaper hostile to the new authority was permitted. No electioneering paper or placard could be circulated which had not been sanctioned by Government officials. The terrible decree that all who had ever belonged to a secret society might be sent to die in the fevers of Africa was interpreted in the widest sense, and every political society or organisation was included in it. All the functionaries of a highly centralised country were turned into ardent electioneering agents, and the question was so put that the voters had no alternative except for or against the President, a negative vote leaving the country with no government and an almost certain prospect of anarchy and civil war. Under these circum

1 See Lord Palmerston's statements on this subject in Ashley's Life of Palmerston, ii. 200-211. Tocqueville, however, utterly denies that the majority of the Assembly had any sympathy with these views (Tocqueville's Memoirs (Eng. trans.), ii. 177). Maupas in his Mémoires gives a very detailed account of the conspiracy on the Bonapartist side. It appears that the 'homme de confiance' of Changarnier was in his pay.

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stances 7,500,000 votes were given for the President and 500,000 against him.

But after all deductions have been made there can be no real doubt that the majority of Frenchmen acquiesced in the new régime. The terror of Socialism was abroad, and it brought with it an ardent desire for strong government. The probabilities of a period of sanguinary anarchy were so great that multitudes were glad to be secured from it almost at any cost. Parliamentarism was profoundly discredited. The peasant proprietary had never cared for it, and the bourgeois class among whom it had once been popular were now thoroughly scared. Nothing in the contemporary accounts of the period is more striking than the indifference, the almost amused cynicism, or the sense of relief with which the great mass of Frenchmen seem to have witnessed the destruction of their constitution and the gross insults inflicted upon a Chamber which included so many of the most illustrious of their countrymen.

We can hardly have a better authority on this point than Tocqueville. No one felt more profoundly or more bitterly the iniquity of what had been done; but he was under no illusion about the sentiments of the people. The constitution, he says, was thoroughly unpopular. 'Louis Napoleon had the merit or the luck to discover what few suspected the latent Bonapartism of the nation. . . . The memory of the Emperor, vague and undefined, but therefore the more imposing, still dwelt like an heroic legend in the imaginations of the people.' All the educated, in the opinion of Tocqueville, condemned and repudiated the coup d'état. Thirty-seven years of liberty have made a free press and free parliamentary discussion necessary to us.' But the bulk of the

nation was not with them. The new Government, he predicted, 'will last until it is unpopular with the mass of the people. At present the disapprobation is confined to the educated classes.' 'The reaction against democracy and even against liberty is irresistible.''

There is no doubt some exaggeration on both sides of this statement. The appalling magnitude of the deportations and imprisonments by the new Government seems to show that the hatred went deeper than Tocqueville supposed, and on the other hand it can hardly be said that the educated classes wholly repudiated what had been done when we remember that the French Funds at once rose from 91 to 102, that nearly all branches of French commerce made a similar spring,2 that some twenty generals were actively engaged in the conspiracy, and that the great body of the priests were delighted at its success. The truth seems to be that the property of France saw in the success of the coup d'état an escape from a great danger, while two powerful professions, the army and the Church, were strongly in favour of the President. Over the army the name of Napoleon exercised a magical influence, and the expedition to Rome and the probability that the new government would be under clerical guidance were, in the eyes of the Church party, quite sufficient to justify what had been done.

Nothing, indeed, in this strange history is more significant than the attitude assumed by the special leaders and representatives of the Church which teaches that it were better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all of the many millions upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, so

1 Tocqueville's Memoirs, ii. 2 Ashley's Life of Palmerston, ii. 208.

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far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul . . . should commit one venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth.' 1

Three illustrious churchmen-Lacordaire, Ravignan and Dupanloup-to their immortal honour refused to give any approbation to the coup d'état, or to express any confidence in its author. But the latest panegyrist of the Empire boasts that they were almost alone in their profession. By the advice of the Papal Nuncio and of the leading French bishops, the clergy lost no time in presenting their felicitations. Veuillot, who more than any other man represented and influenced the vast majority of the French priesthood, wrote on what had been done with undisguised and unqualified exultation and delight. Even Montalembert rallied to the Government on the morrow of the coup d'état. He described Louis Napoleon as a Prince 'who had shown a more efficacious and intelligent devotion to religious interests than any of those who had governed France during sixty years;' and it was universally admitted that the great body of the clergy, with Archbishop Sibour at their head, were in this critical moment ardent supporters of the new government.2 Kinglake, in a page of immortal beauty, has described the scene when, thirty days after the coup d'état, Louis Napoleon appeared in Notre Dame to receive, amid all the pomp that Catholic ceremonial could give, the solemn blessing of the Church, and to listen to the Te Deum thanking the Almighty for what had been accomplished. The time came, it is true, when the policy of the priests was changed, for they found that Louis Napoleon was more liberal and less clerical than they imagined; but in estimating the feelings with which

1 Newman.

2 See Ollivier, L'Empire Libéral, ii. 510–512.