where is it? What has
M. Bonaparte done with it? It is where the public platform is. Twenty
newspapers extinguished in Paris, eighty in the departments,--one
hundred newspapers suppressed: that is to say, looking only to the
material side of the question, innumerable families deprived of bread;
that is to say, understand it, citizens, one hundred houses
confiscated, one hundred farms taken from their proprietors, one
hundred interest coupons stolen from the public funds. Marvellous
identity of principles: freedom suppressed is property destroyed. Let
the selfish idiots who applaud the _coup d'etat_ reflect upon
this.

Instead of a law concerning the press a decree has been laid upon it; a
_fetfa_, a _firman_, dated from the imperial stirrup: the regime of
admonition. This regime is well known. Its working is witnessed daily.
Such men were requisite to invent such a thing. Despotism has never
shown itself more grossly insolent and stupid than in this species of
censorship of the morrow, which precedes and announces the suppression,
and which administers the bastinado to a paper before killing it
entirely. The folly of such a government corrects and tempers its
atrocity. The whole of the decree concerning the press may be summed up
in one line: "I permit you to speak, but I require you to be silent."
Who reigns, in God's name? Is it Tiberius? Is it Schahabaham?
Three-fourths of the republican journalists transported or proscribed,
the remainder hunted down by mixed commissions, dispersed, wandering,
in hiding. Here and there, in four or five of the surviving journals,
in four or five which are independent but closely watched, over whose
heads is suspended the club of Maupas,[1] some fifteen or twenty
writers, courageous, serious, pure, honest, and noble-hearted, who
write, as it were, with a chain round their necks, and a ball on their
feet; talent between two sentinels, independence gagged, honesty under
surveillance, and Veuillot exclaiming: "I am free!"

[1] The Prefect of Police.

VI

NOVELTIES IN RESPECT TO WHAT IS LAWFUL

The press enjoys the privilege of being censored, of being admonished,
of being suspended, of being suppressed; it has even the privilege of
being tried. Tried! By whom? By the courts. What courts? The police
courts. And what about that excellent trial by jury? Progress: it is
outstripped. The jury is far behind us, and we return to the government
judges. "Repression is more ra