red, murdered, massacred, and I am ignorant of it! Men have
been arbitrarily imprisoned, tortured, banished, exiled, transported,
and I scarcely glimpse the fact! My mayor and my cure tell me: "These
people, who are taken away, bound with cords, are escaped convicts!" I
am a peasant, cultivating a patch of land in a corner of one of the
provinces: you suppress the newspaper, you stifle information, you
prevent the truth from reaching me, and then you make me vote! in the
uttermost darkness of night! gropingly! What! you rush out upon me from
the obscurity, sabre in hand, and you say to me: "Vote!" and you call
that a ballot.

"Certainly! a 'free and spontaneous' ballot," say the organs of the
_coup d'etat_.

Every sort of machinery was set to work at this vote. One village
mayor, a species of wild Escobar, growing in the fields, said to his
peasants: "If you vote 'aye,' 'tis for the Republic; if you vote 'no,'
'tis against the Republic." The peasants voted "aye."

And let us illuminate another aspect of this turpitude that people call
"the plebiscite of the 20th of December." How was the question put? Was
any choice possible? Did he--and it was the least that a _coup d'etat_
man should have done in so strange a ballot as that wherein he put
everything at stake--did he open to each party the door at which its
principles could enter? were the Legitimists allowed to turn towards
their exiled prince, and towards the ancient honour of the
_fleurs-de-lys_? were the Orleanists allowed to turn towards that
proscribed family, honoured by the valued services of two soldiers, M
M. de Joinville and d'Aumale, and made illustrious by that exalted
soul, Madame la Duchesse d'Orleans? Did he offer to the people--who are
not a party, but the people, that is to say, the sovereign--did he
offer to the people that true republic before which all monarchy
vanishes, as night before day; that republic which is the manifest and
irresistible future of the civilized world; the republic without
dictatorship; the republic of concord, of learning, and of liberty; the
republic of universal suffrage, of universal peace, and of universal
well-being; the republic, initiator of peoples, and liberator of
nationalities; that republic which after all and whatever any one may
do, "will," as the author of this book has said elsewhere,[1] "possess
France to-morrow, and Europe the day after." Did he offer that? No.
This is how M. Bonaparte put the matter: the