anger
of the destruction of the world, simultaneous with the carrying on of
the pettiest intrigues and the performance of court comedies by the
world's saviours, who, in their "laisser aller," recall the Day of
Judgment not so much as the days of the Fronde; the official collective
genius of France brought to shame by the artful stupidity of a single
individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks
through the general suffrage, seeking its true expression in the
prescriptive enemies of the public interests until it finally finds it
in the arbitrary will of a filibuster. If ever a slice from history is
drawn black upon black, it is this. Men and events appear as reversed
"Schlemihls," [#1 The hero In Chamisso's "Peter Schiemihi," who loses
his own shadow.] as shadows, the bodies of which have been lost. The
revolution itself paralyzes its own apostles, and equips only its
adversaries with passionate violence. When the "Red Spectre," constantly
conjured up and exorcised by the counter-revolutionists finally does
appear, it does not appear with the Anarchist Phrygian cap on its head,
but in the uniform of Order, in the Red Breeches of the French Soldier.

We saw that the Ministry, which Bonaparte installed on December 20,
1849, the day of his "Ascension," was a ministry of the party of Order,
of the Legitimist and Orleanist coalition. The Barrot-Falloux ministry
had weathered the republican constitutive convention, whose term of life
it had shortened with more or less violence, and found itself still at
the helm. Changamier, the General of the allied royalists continued to
unite in his person the command-in-chief of the First Military Division
and of the Parisian National Guard. Finally, the general elections had
secured the large majority in the National Assembly to the party of
Order. Here the Deputies and Peers of Louis Phillipe met a saintly crowd
of Legitimists, for whose benefit numerous ballots of the nation had
been converted into admission tickets to the political stage. The
Bonapartist representatives were too thinly sowed to be able to build an
independent parliamentary party. They appeared only as "mauvaise queue"
[#2 Practical joke] played upon the party of Order. Thus the party
of Order was in possession of the Government, of the Army, and of the
legislative body, in short, of the total power of the State, morally
strengthened by the general elections, that caused their sovereignty to
appe