Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 393, July 1848Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 393, July 1848
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
The national guards took up arms to demand the revocation and
the departure of the obnoxious commissary. The commissary, in
opposition, acted the self-same part of which a despotic king
has since been so violently accused by the republican journals.
As Ferdinand of Naples is said to have excited the dregs of the
populace, the lazzaroni, to aid him in a reactionary movement in his
favour, so did even the republican commissary after the self-same
system. He caused the mob to be roused to his assistance, as to that
of the only true democratic friend of the people; he called upon
them to take up arms and combat in his defence: the lazzaroni mob of
the departments was the weapon he wielded to overcome the resistance
of the majority to his will. In most instances the recalcitrant part
of the provincial populations prevailed. In several of the larger
towns, as in Bordeaux, Bourges, and many others, the commissary was
obliged to take to flight: in some the palace of the little tyrant
was stormed, he himself was made prisoner, and was taken to the
railroad, and "packed off" back to that Paris which had sent him.
In a very few instances only the influence of the commissary gained
the day: in still less was he again returned, to be enforced upon
the department from which he had been driven; and in one case he was
sent back by the powers that were, only to be again ignominiously
expelled.
In the department of the Ariège, at the town of Foix, a journal,
founded under the auspices of the commissaries of the government,
and professing the most violent ultra-republican doctrines, was
publicly burnt by the magistrates and most influential persons of
the place, to show their contempt and abhorrence of the principles
and actions of the authority set over them. Other instances of
the general opposition, either to the commissaries themselves or
to the agents they had appointed and supported, on account of
their violence, their tyrannical measures, and their anarchical
principles, are too numerous to quote; and, generally speaking, the
feeling was so strong, that the _Messieurs les Commissaires_, or
rather, _les Citoyens Commissaires_, were obliged to give way before
the expression of popular indignation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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