But since that lamentable and fatal day when the priests wrought upon Louis XIV. to decree the expulsion of the Huguenots, who were the _élite_ of his kingdom, France had been undergoing a course of political demoralization, which had made a constitutional government of the country almost impossible. Recent events had exaggerated the criminal class. Twenty years of intoxicating victory had made all moderate success, all gradual prosperity, seem tame and flat; and the reduction of the army had set afloat great numbers of people indisposed to peaceful industry. Under the Restoration, we may almost say, political conspiracy had become a recognized profession. The new king, pledged to make the freedom of the press "a reality," soon found himself face to face with difficulties which Bourbons had invariably met by mere repression. Republicans and Legitimists were equally dissatisfied. Legitimists could only wait and plot; but Republicans could write, speak, and draw. A considerable proportion of the young, irresponsible, and adventurous talent was republican, and there was a great deal of Bohemian character available for that side. It was a time when a Louis Napoleon could belong to a democratic club. Caricature speedily marked the "citizen king" for her own. Napoleon had employed all his subtlest tact during the last ten years of his reign in keeping alive in French minds the base feudal feeling, so congenial to human indolence and vanity, that it is nobler to be a soldier than to rear a family and keep a shop. In his bulletins we find this false sentiment adroitly insinuated in a hundred ways. He loved to stigmatize the English as a nation of shop-keepers. He displayed infinite art in exalting the qualities which render men willing to destroy one another without asking why, and in casting contempt on the arts and virtues by which the waste of war is repaired. The homely habits, the plain dress, the methodical ways, of Louis Philippe were, therefore, easily made to seem ridiculous. He was styled the first _bourgeois_ of his kingdom--as he was--but the French people had been taught to regard the word as a term of contempt.