This confused incongruous ballot affirmed at least the republican idea. Paris, trampled upon by the Empire and the Liberals, clung to the Republic, who gave her promise for the future. But even before her vote has been proclaimed she heard coming forth from the provincial ballot boxes a savage cry of reaction. Before a single one of her representatives had left the town, she saw on the way to Bordeaux a troop of rustics, of _Pourceaugnacs_, of sombre clericals, spectres of 1815, 1830, 1848, high and low reactionists, who, mumbling and furious, came by the grace of universal suffrage to take possession of France. What signified this sinister masquerade? How had this subterranean vegetation contrived to pierce and overgrow the summit of the country? It was necessary that Paris and the provinces should be crushed, that the Prussian Shylock should drain our milliards and cut his pound of flesh, that the state of siege should for four years weigh down upon forty-two departments, that 100,000 Frenchmen should be cut off from life or banished from their native soil, that the black brotherhood should conduct their processions all over France, to bring about this great conservative machination, which from the first hour to the last explosion, the revolutionists of Paris and of the provinces had not ceased to denounce to our treacherous or sluggish governors. In the provinces the field and the tactics were not the same. The conspiracy, instead of being carried on within the Government, circumvented it. During the whole month of September the reactionists hid in their lurking-places. The Government of National Defence had only forgotten one element of defence--the provinces, seventy-six departments. Yet they were agitating, showed life; they alone held in check the reaction. Lyons had even understood her duty earlier than Paris; in the morning of the 4th September she proclaimed the Republic, hoisted the red flag, named a Committee of Public Safety.--Marseilles and Toulouse organized regional commissions.--The Defenders understood nothing of this patriotic zeal, thought France disjointed, and delegated to put it right again two Liberal relics very much tainted, Cremieux and Glais-Bizoin, together with a former governor of Cayenne, the Bonapartist Admiral Fourichon.