France -- History -- Coup d'état, 1851; France -- History -- Second Republic, 1848-1852; Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, 1808-1873
Add Africa; add Guiana; add the atrocities of Bertrand, of Canrobert,
of Espinasse, of Martimprey; the ship-loads of women sent off by
General Guyon; Representative Miot dragged from casemate to casemate;
hovels in which there are a hundred and fifty prisoners, beneath a
tropical sun, with promiscuity of sex, filth, vermin, and where all
these innocent patriots, all these honest people are perishing, far
from their dear ones, in fever, in misery, in horror, in despair,
wringing their hands. Add all these poor wretches handed over to
gendarmes, bound two by two, packed in the lower decks of the
_Magellan_, the _Canada_, the _Duguesclin_; cast among the convicts
of Lambessa and Cayenne, not knowing what there is against them, and
unable to guess what they have done. One of them, Alphonse Lambert, of
the Indre, torn from his death-bed; another, Patureau Francoeur, a
vine-dresser, transported, because in his village they wanted to make
him president of the republic; a third, Valette, a carpenter at
Chateauroux, transported for having, six months previous to the 2nd of
December, on the day of an execution, refused to erect the guillotine.
Add to these the man-hunting in the villages, the _battue_ of
Viroy in the mountains of Lure, Pellion's _battue_ in the woods of
Clamecy, with fifteen hundred men; order restored at Crest--out of two
thousand insurgents, three hundred slain; mobile columns everywhere.
Whoever stands up for the law, sabred and shot: at Marseilles, Charles
Sauvan exclaims, "Long live the Republic!" a grenadier of the 54th
fires at him; the ball enters his side, and comes out of his belly;
another, Vincent, of Bourges, is deputy-mayor of his commune: as a
magistrate he protests against the _coup d'etat_; they track him
through the village, he flies, he is pursued, a cavalryman cuts off two
of his fingers with his sword, another cleaves his head, he falls; they
remove him to the fort at Ivry before dressing his wounds; he is an old
man of seventy-six.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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