Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 401, March 1849Various
Science
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 401, March 1849
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
These scenes of systematic tumult have
necessarily increased in force, since the boiling spite of
disappointment has flowed over in hot reality, in place of the
affected and acted indignation: the rage and agitation no longer know
the least control. The affair of the abolition of the clubs had
scarcely lent an excellent pretext for this violence, when the
suppression of the insurrection, and the arrests consequent upon the
discomfiture of the conspiracy on the 29th of January, gave a wide
field for the exercise of the system of denunciation commonly pursued.
To be beforehand with accusation by counter-accusation, has been
always the tactics of the party: when the party-chiefs find themselves
involved in the suspicion of subversive attempts, they begin the
attack. The _Montagnards_ have burst forth, then, to declare that the
military precautions were a systematic provocation on the part of the
ministry and General Changarnier, to incite the population of Paris to
civil discord; that the only conspiracy existed in the government
itself, to suppress liberty and overthrow the republic--at least to
cast a slur upon the only true republicans, and have an excuse for
tyrannical oppression towards them. They closed their eyes to the fact
that the insurrection, of the proposed reality of which no doubt can
remain, spite of these angry denegations, would have produced a crisis
to which the real reactionary anti-republicans looked as one that
_must_ produce a change in the detested government of the country,
should the moderate party triumph in the struggle, as was probable;
and that by the suppression of the insurrection the crisis was
averted, and the republic evidently consolidated for a time, not
weakened. With their usual inconsistency, and want of logical
deduction, at the same time that they accused the minister of a
useless and provocative display of the military force, they denounced
the conspiracy as real, but as proceeding from "infamous royalists,"
and not anarchist Red republicans. And then, to follow up this
pell-mell of self-contradictions--while, on the one hand, they denied
any insurrectionary movement at all, and, on the other, attributed it
to royalists--they called, in their language at the rostrum, the
commencement of the street demonstration on the morning of the 29th of
January--which could not be denied, and which had come down as usual
from the faubourgs, ever ripe for tumult--"the sublime manifestation
of the heroic people." Propositions couched in furious language, for
"_enquêtes parlementaires_," and for the "_mise en accusation des
ministres_"--every possible means of denunciation and intimidation
were employed, to increase the agitated hurly-burly of the Assembly,
and subvert, as far as was possible, the few frail elements of order
and of confidence that still subsisted in it. In marking thus, in
hasty traits, the position of parties in the Assembly, called together
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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