on the side of the powers; it was this which the _coup
d'etat_ called "Jacquerie." We repeat, a touch of red spectre was
useful.

This Jacquerie had two aims; it served the policy of the Elysee in two
ways; it offered a double advantage: first, to win votes for the
"plebiscite;" to win these votes by the sword and in face of the
spectre, to repress the intelligent, to alarm the credulous, compelling
some by terror, others by fear, as we shall shortly explain; therein
lies all the success and mystery of the vote of the 20th of December;
secondly, it afforded a pretext for proscriptions.

The year 1852 in itself contained no actual danger. The law of the 31st
of May, morally extinct, was dead before the 2nd of December. A new
Assembly, a new President, the Constitution simply put in operation,
elections,--and nothing more.

But it was necessary that M. Bonaparte should go. There was the
obstacle; thence the catastrophe.

Thus, then, did this man one fine morning seize by the throat the
Constitution, the Republic, the Law, and France; he stabbed the future
in the back; under his feet he trampled law, common sense, justice,
reason, and liberty; he arrested men who were inviolable, he
sequestered innocent men; in the persons of their representatives he
seized the people in his grip; he raked the Paris boulevards with his
shot; he made his cavalry wallow in the blood of old men and of women;
he shot without warning and without trial; he filled Mazas, the
Conciergerie, Saint-Pelagie, Vincennes, his fortresses, his cells, his
casemates, his dungeons, with prisoners, and his cemeteries with
corpses; he incarcerated, at Saint-Lazare, a wife who was carrying
bread to her husband in hiding; he sent to the galleys for twenty
years, a man who had harboured one of the proscribed; he tore up every
code of laws, broke every enactment; he caused the deported to rot by
thousands in the horrible holds of the hulks; he sent to Lambessa and
Cayenne one hundred and fifty children between twelve and fifteen; he
who was more absurd than Falstaff, has become more terrible than
Richard III; and why has all this been done? Because there was, he
said, "a plot against his power;" because the year which was closing
had a treasonable understanding with the year which was beginning to
overthrow him; because Article 45 perfidiously concerted with the
calendar to turn him out; because the second Sunday in May intended to
"depose" him; because his o