, Fouche Minister of Police (a
boon to the Revolutionists), Davoust appointed Minister of War. Decrees
upon decrees were issued with a rapidity which showed how laboriously
Bonaparte had employed those studious hours at Elba which he was supposed
to have dedicated to the composition of his Memoirs. They were couched
in the name of "Napoleon, by the grace of God, Emperor of France," and
were dated on the 13th of March, although not promulgated until the 21st
of that month. The first of these decrees abrogated all changes in the
courts of justice and tribunals which had taken place during the absence
of Napoleon. The second banished anew all emigrants who had returned to
France before 1814 without proper authority, and displaced all officers
belonging to the class of emigrants introduced into the army by the King.
The third suppressed the Order of St. Louis, the white flag, cockade, and
other Royal emblems, and restored the tri-coloured banner and the
Imperial symbols of Bonaparte's authority. The same decree abolished the
Swiss Guard and the Household troops of the King. The fourth sequestered
the effects of the Bourbons. A similar Ordinance sequestered the
restored property of emigrant families.

The fifth decree of Lyons suppressed the ancient nobility and feudal
titles, and formally confirmed proprietors of national domains in their
possessions. (This decree was very acceptable to the majority of
Frenchmen). The sixth declared sentence of exile against all emigrants
not erased by Napoleon from the list previously to the accession of the
Bourbons, to which was added confiscation of their property. The seventh
restored the Legion of Honour in every respect as it had existed under
the Emperor; uniting to its funds the confiscated revenues of the Bourbon
order of St. Louis. The eighth and last decree was the most important of
all. Under pretence that emigrants who had borne arms against France had
been introduced into the Chamber of Peers, and that the Chamber of
Deputies had already sat for the legal time, it dissolved both Chambers,
and convoked the Electoral Colleges of the Empire, in order that they
might hold, in the ensuing month of May, an extraordinary assembly--the
Champ-de-Mai.

This National Convocation, for which Napoleon claimed a precedent in the
history of the ancient Franks, was to have two objects: first, to make
such alterations and reforms in the Constitution of the Empire as
circumstances should rende