ial supporters of
the ambuscade, those soilers of the ermine,--Baroche, Suin, Royer,
Mongis, Rouher, and Troplong, deserters from the law,--all those names
which signify nothing more than the utmost contempt which man can feel.

If he did not crush his victims between two boards, like Christiern II;
if he did not bury people alive, like Ludovic the Moor; if he did not
build his palace walls with living men and stones, like Timour-Beg, who
was born, says the legend, with his hands closed and full of blood; if
he did not rip open pregnant women, like Caesar Borgia, Duke of
Valentinois; if he did not scourge women on the breasts, _testibusque
viros_, like Ferdinand of Toledo; if he did not break on the wheel
alive, burn alive, boil alive, flay alive, crucify, impale, and
quarter, blame him not, the fault was not his; the age obstinately
refuses to allow it. He has done all that was humanly or inhumanly
possible. Given the nineteenth century, a century of gentleness,--of
decadence, say the papists and friends of arbitrary power,--Louis
Bonaparte has equalled in ferocity his contemporaries, Haynau,
Radetzky, Filangieri, Schwartzenberg, and Ferdinand of Naples: he has
even surpassed them. A rare merit, with which we must credit him as
another impediment: the scene was laid in France. Let us do him this
justice: in the times in which we live, Ludovic Sforza, the
Valentinois, the Duke of Alva, Timour, and Christiern II, would have
done no more than Louis Bonaparte; in their time, he would have done
all that they did; in our time, just as they were about to erect their
gibbets, their wheels, their wooden horses, their cranes, their living
towers, their crosses, and their stakes, they would have desisted like
him, in spite of themselves, and unconsciously, before the secret and
invincible resistance of the moral environment, of that formidable and
mysterious interdiction of an entire epoch, which rises in the north,
the south, the east, and the west, to confront tyrants, and says no to
them.

III

WHAT 1852 WOULD HAVE BEEN

But, had it not been for this abominable 2nd of December, which its
accomplices, and after them its dupes, call "necessary," what would
have occurred in France? Mon Dieu! this:--

Let us go back a little, and review, in a summary way, the situation as
it was before the _coup d'etat_.

The party of the past, under the name of order, opposed the republic,
or in other words, opposed the future.