These irremovable judges kiss his boot, and set about investigating _l'affaire des troubles_. They swear fidelity to him, to boot. Then he perceives, in a corner, the clergy, endowed, gold-laced, with cross and cope and mitre, and he says:-- "Ah, you are there, Archbishop! Come here. Just bless all this for me." And the Archbishop chants his _Magnificat_. VI WHAT THE MINISTERS, ARMY, MAGISTRACY, AND CLERGY HAVE DONE Oh! what a striking thing and how instructive! "_Erudimini_," Bossuet would say. The Ministers fancied that they were dissolving the Assembly; they dissolved the government. The soldiers fired on the army and killed it. The judges fancied that they were trying and convicting innocent persons; they tried and convicted the irremovable magistracy. The priests thought they were chanting hosannahs upon Louis Bonaparte; they chanted a _De profundis_ upon the clergy. VII THE FORM OF THE GOVERNMENT OF GOD When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself. Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide. When they have weighed sufficiently long upon men, Providence, like the sultan to his viziers, sends them the bowstring by a mute, and they execute themselves. Louis Bonaparte is the mute of Providence. CONCLUSION--PART FIRST PETTINESS OF THE MASTER--ABJECTNESS OF THE SITUATION I Never fear, History has him in its grip. If perchance it flatters the self-love of M. Bonaparte to be seized by history, if perchance, and truly one would imagine so, he cherishes any illusion as to his value as a political miscreant, let him divest himself of it. Let him not imagine, because he has piled up horror on horror, that he will ever raise himself to the elevation of the great historical bandits. We have been wrong, perhaps, in some pages of this book, here and there, to couple him with those men. No, although he has committed enormous crimes, he will remain paltry. He will never be other than the nocturnal strangler of liberty; he will never be other than the man who intoxicated his soldiers, not with glory, like the first Napoleon, but with wine; he will never be other than the pygmy tyrant of a great people. Grandeur, even in infamy, is utterly inconsistent with the calibre of the man. As dictator, he is a buffoon; let him make himself emperor, he will be grotesque. That will finish him. His destiny is to make mankind shrug their shoulders. Will he be less severely punished for that reason? Not at all. Contempt does not, in his case, mitigate anger; he will be hideous, and he will remain ridiculous. That is all. History laughs and crushes. Even the most indignant chroniclers will not help him there. Great thinkers take satisfaction in castigating the great despots, and, in some instances, even exalt them somewhat, in order to make them worthy of their rage; but what would you have the historian do with this fellow? The historian can only lead him to posterity by the ear.