resist the Inquisition, to brave the state for
one's faith, to draw the sword for one's country, to defend one's
worship, one's city, one's home, one's house, one's family, and one's
God, was called _vagabondism_; in the language of Louis Bonaparte, to
struggle for freedom, for justice, for the right, to fight in the cause
of progress, of civilisation, of France, of mankind, to wish for the
abolition of war, and of the penalty of death, to take _au serieux_ the
fraternity of men, to believe in a plighted oath, to take up arms for
the constitution of one's country, to defend the laws,--this is called
_demagogy_.

The man is a demagogue in the nineteenth century, who in the sixteenth
would have been a vagabond.

This much being granted, that the dictionary of the Academy no longer
exists, that it is night at noonday, that a cat is no longer called
cat, and that Baroche is no longer called a knave; that justice is a
chimera, that history is a dream, that the Prince of Orange was a
vagabond, and the Duke of Alva a just man; that Louis Bonaparte is
identical with Napoleon the Great, that they who have violated the
Constitution are saviours, and that they who defended it are
brigands,--in a word that human probity is dead: very good! in that
case I admire this government It works well. It is a model of its
species. It compresses, it represses, it oppresses, it imprisons, it
exiles, it shoots down with grape-shot, it exterminates, and it even
"pardons!" It exercises authority with cannon-balls, and clemency with
the flat of the sabre.

"At your pleasure," repeat some worthy incorrigibles of the former
party of order, "be indignant, rail, stigmatize, disavow,--'tis all the
same to us; long live stability! All these things put together
constitute, after all, a stable government."

Stable! We have already expressed ourselves on the subject of this
stability.

Stability! I admire such stability. If it rained newspapers in France
for two days only, on the morning of the third nobody would know what
had become of M. Louis Bonaparte.

No matter; this man is a burden upon the whole age, he disfigures the
nineteenth century, and there will be in this century, perhaps, two or
three years upon which it will be recognised, by some shameful mark or
other, that Louis Bonaparte sat down upon them.

This person, we grieve to say it, is now the question that occupies all
mankind.

At certain epochs in history, the whole human race,