France -- History -- Coup d'état, 1851; France -- History -- Second Republic, 1848-1852; Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, 1808-1873
And shall we not applaud thee, O Truth! when, in the eyes of Europe and
of the world, before the people, in the face of God, while he appealed
to honour, the sanctity of an oath, faith, religion, the sacredness of
human life, the law, the generosity of all hearts, wives, sisters,
mothers, civilization, liberty, the republic, France; before his
valets, his Senate and his Council of State; before his generals, his
priests, and his police agents,--thou who representest the people (for
the people is truth); thou who representest intelligence (for
intelligence is enlightenment); thou who representest humanity (for
humanity is reason); in the name of the enthralled people, in the name
of exiled intelligence, in the name of outraged humanity, before this
mass of slaves who cannot, or dare not, speak, thou dost scourge this
brigand of order.
Let some one else choose milder words. I am outspoken and harsh; I have
no pity for this pitiless man, and I glory in it.
Let us proceed.
To what we have just related add all the other crimes, to which we
shall have occasion to return more than once, and the history of which,
God granting us life, we shall relate in detail. Add the numberless
incarcerations attended with circumstances of ferocity, the overgorged
prisons,[1] the sequestration of property[2] of the proscribed in ten
departments, notably in La Nievre, in L'Allier, and in Les
Basses-Alpes; add the confiscation of the Orleans property, with the
slice allotted to the clergy. Schinderhannes never forgot to share with
the cure. Add the mixed commissions, and the commission of clemency, so
called;[3] the councils of war combined with the examining magistrates,
and, multiplying the instances of abomination, the batches of exiles,
the expulsion of a part of France out of France (the department of the
Herault, alone, furnishing 3,200 persons, either banished or
transported); add the appalling proscription,--comparable to the most
tragic devastations in history,--which for an impulse, for an opinion,
for an honest dissent from the government, for the mere word of a
freeman, even when uttered before the 2nd of December, takes, seizes,
apprehends, tears away the labourer from the field, the working-man
from his trade, the house-holder from his house, the physician from his
patients, the notary from his office, the counsellor from his clients,
the judge from his court, the husband from his wife, the brother from
his brother, the father from his children, the child from his parents,
and marks its ill-omened cross on every head, from the highest to the
lowest. Nobody escapes. A man in tatters, wearing a long beard, came
into my room one morning at Brussels. "I have just arrived," said he;
"I have travelled on foot, and have had nothing to eat for two days."
Some bread was given him. He ate. "Where do you come from?"--"From
Limoges."--"Why are you here?"--"I don't know; they drove me away from
my home."--"What are you?"--"A maker of wooden shoes."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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