most dearly prized historic treasures in ashes, and monuments gone,
Paris, scarred and defaced, had quiet at last; and the organization of
the third republic proceeded.

The uncertain nature of the republican sentiment existing throughout
France at this critical moment is indicated by the character of the
Assembly elected by the people. More than two-thirds of the members
chosen by France to organize her new republic were _monarchists_!

The name monarchist at that time comprehended three distinct parties,
each with a powerful following, namely:

The LEGITIMISTS, acting in the interest of the direct Bourbon line,
represented by the _Count of Chambord_, the grandson of Charles X.,
called by his party _Henry V_.

The ORLEANISTS, the party desiring the restoration of a limited
monarchy, in the person of the _Count of Paris_, grandson of Louis
Philippe.

The BONAPARTISTS, whose candidate, after the death of the Emperor Louis
Napoleon in 1873, was the young _Prince Imperial_, son of Napoleon III.
[Napoleon II., the Duke of Reichstadt, had died in 1832.]

M. Thiers had not an easy task in harmonizing these various despotic
types with each other, nor in harmonizing them all collectively with
the republic of which he was chief. He abandoned the attempt in 1873,
and Marshal MacMahon, a more pronounced monarchist than he, succeeded
to the office of president, with the Duc de Broglie at the head of a
reactionary ministry. It began to look as if there might be a
restoration under some one of the three types mentioned. The Count of
Paris generously offered to relinquish his claim in favor of the Count
of Chambord (Henry V.), if he would accept the principles of a
constitutional monarchy, which that uncompromising Bourbon absolutely
refused to do.

In the meantime republican sentiment in France was not dead, nor
sleeping. Calamitous experiences had made it cautious. Freedom and
anarchy had so often been mistaken for each other, it was learning to
move slowly, not by leaps and bounds as heretofore.

Gambetta, the republican leader, once so fiery, had also grown
cautious. A patriot and a statesman, he was the one man who seemed to
possess the genius required by the conditions and the time, and also
the kind of magnetism which would draw together and crystallize the
scattered elements of his party.

It was the stimulus imparted by Gambetta which made the government at
last republican in fact as well as in name; and as