ck to France, until, by this time, if had acquired the right
of citizenship in one-half of her Departments--the state of siege. A
wondrous discovery this was, periodically applied at each succeeding
crisis in the course of the French revolution. But the barrack and
the bivouac, thus periodically laid on the head of French society, to
compress her brain and reduce her to quiet; the sabre and the
musket, periodically made to perform the functions of judges and of
administrators, of guardians and of censors, of police officers and of
watchmen; the military moustache and the soldier's jacket, periodically
heralded as the highest wisdom and guiding stars of society;--were not
all of these, the barrack and the bivouac, the sabre and the musket, the
moustache and the soldier's jacket bound, in the end, to hit upon the
idea that they might as well save, society once for all, by proclaiming
their own regime as supreme, and relieve bourgeois society wholly of the
care of ruling itself? The barrack and the bivouac, the sabre and the
musket, the moustache and the soldier's jacket were all the more bound
to hit upon this idea, seeing that they could then also expect better
cash payment for their increased deserts, while at the merely periodic
states of siege and the transitory savings of society at the behest of
this or that bourgeois faction, very little solid matter fell to them
except some dead and wounded, besides some friendly bourgeois grimaces.
Should not the military, finally, in and for its own interest, play
the game of "state of siege," and simultaneously besiege the bourgeois
exchanges? Moreover, it must not be forgotten, and be it observed
in passing, that Col. Bernard, the same President of the Military
Committee, who, under Cavaignac, helped to deport 15,000 insurgents
without trial, moves at this period again at the head of the Military
Committees now active in Paris.

Although the honest, the pure republicans built with the state of siege
the nursery in which the Praetorian guards of December 2, 1851, were to
be reared, they, on the other hand, deserve praise in that, instead of
exaggerating the feeling of patriotism, as under Louis Philippe, now;
they themselves are in command of the national power, they crawl before
foreign powers; instead of making Italy free, they allow her to
be reconquered by Austrians and Neapolitans. The election of Louis
Bonaparte for President on December 10, 1848, put an end to the
dictat