now dismissed it in order to declare his
own name independent of the parliament of the party of Order.

There was no want of plausible pretexts for this dismissal. The Barrot
Ministry had neglected even the forms of decency that would have allowed
the president of the republic to appear as a power along with the
National Assembly. For instance, during the vacation of the National
Assembly, Bonaparte published a letter to Edgar Ney, in which he seemed
to disapprove the liberal attitude of the Pope, just as, in opposition
to the constitutive assembly, he had published a letter, in which
he praised Oudinot for his attack upon the Roman republic; when the
National Assembly came to vote on the budget for the Roman expedition,
Victor Hugo, out of pretended liberalism, brought up that letter for
discussion; the party of Order drowned this notion of Bonaparte's under
exclamations of contempt and incredulity as though notions of Bonaparte
could not possibly have any political weight;--and none of the Ministers
took up the gauntlet for him. On another occasion, Barrot, with his
well-known hollow pathos, dropped, from the speakers' tribune in the
Assembly, words of indignation upon the "abominable machinations,"
which, according to him, went on in the immediate vicinity of the
President. Finally, while the Ministry obtained from the National
Assembly a widow's pension for the Duchess of Orleans, it denied every
motion to raise the Presidential civil list;--and, in Bonaparte, be it
always remembered, the Imperial Pretender was so closely blended with
the impecunious adventurer, that the great idea of his being destined to
restore the Empire was ever supplemented by that other, to-wit, that the
French people was destined to pay his debts.

The Barrot-Falloux Ministry was the first and last parliamentary
Ministry that Bonaparte called into life. Its dismissal marks,
accordingly, a decisive period. With the Ministry, the party of Order
lost, never to regain, an indispensable post to the maintenance of the
parliamentary regime,--the handle to the Executive power. It is readily
understood that, in a country like France, where the Executive
disposes over an army of more than half a million office-holders, and,
consequently, keeps permanently a large mass of interests and existences
in the completest dependence upon itself; where the Government
surrounds, controls, regulates, supervises and guards society, from its
mightiest acts of nati