the
Fronde warfare between Orleanists and Legitimists; with communistic
conspiracies in southern France; with alleged Jacqueries [#2 Peasant
revolts] in the Departments of Nievre and Cher; with the advertisements
of the several candidates for President; with "social solutions"
huckstered about by the journals; with the threats of the republicans to
uphold, arms in hand, the Constitution and universal suffrage; with the
gospels, according to the emigrant heroes "in partibus," who announced
the destruction of the world for May 2,--imagine that, and one can
understand how the bourgeois, in this unspeakable and noisy confusion
of fusion, revision, prorogation, constitution, conspiracy, coalition,
emigration, usurpation and revolution, blurts out at his parliamentary
republic: "Rather an End With Fright, Than a Fright Without End."

Bonaparte understood this cry. His perspicacity was sharpened by the
growing anxiety of the creditors' class, who, with every sunset, that
brought nearer the day of payment, the 2d of May, 1852, saw in the
motion of the stars a protest against their earthly drafts. They had
become regular astrologers The National Assembly had cut off Bonaparte's
hope of a constitutional prolongation of his term; the candidature of
the Prince of Joinville tolerated no further vacillation.

If ever an event cast its shadow before it long before its occurrence,
it was Bonaparte's "coup d'etat." Already on January 29, 1849, barely
a month after his election, he had made to Changarnier a proposition to
that effect. His own Prime Minister. Odillon Barrot, had covertly, in
1849, and Thiers openly in the winter of 1850, revealed the scheme
of the "coup d'etat." In May, 1851, Persigny had again sought to win
Changarnier over to the "coup," and the "Miessager de l'Assemblee"
newspaper had published this conversation. At every parliamentary storm,
the Bonapartist papers threatened a "coup," and the nearer the crisis
approached, all the louder grew their tone. At the orgies, that
Bonaparte celebrated every night with a swell mob of males and females,
every time the hour of midnight drew nigh and plenteous libations had
loosened the tongues and heated the minds of the revelers, the "coup"
was resolved upon for the next morning. Swords were then drawn, glasses
clinked, the Representatives were thrown out at the windows, the
imperial mantle fell upon the shoulders of Bonaparte, until the next
morning again drove away the spoo