France -- History -- Coup d'état, 1851; France -- History -- Second Republic, 1848-1852; Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, 1808-1873
Thus, then, did this man one fine morning seize by the throat the
Constitution, the Republic, the Law, and France; he stabbed the future
in the back; under his feet he trampled law, common sense, justice,
reason, and liberty; he arrested men who were inviolable, he
sequestered innocent men; in the persons of their representatives he
seized the people in his grip; he raked the Paris boulevards with his
shot; he made his cavalry wallow in the blood of old men and of women;
he shot without warning and without trial; he filled Mazas, the
Conciergerie, Saint-Pelagie, Vincennes, his fortresses, his cells, his
casemates, his dungeons, with prisoners, and his cemeteries with
corpses; he incarcerated, at Saint-Lazare, a wife who was carrying
bread to her husband in hiding; he sent to the galleys for twenty
years, a man who had harboured one of the proscribed; he tore up every
code of laws, broke every enactment; he caused the deported to rot by
thousands in the horrible holds of the hulks; he sent to Lambessa and
Cayenne one hundred and fifty children between twelve and fifteen; he
who was more absurd than Falstaff, has become more terrible than
Richard III; and why has all this been done? Because there was, he
said, "a plot against his power;" because the year which was closing
had a treasonable understanding with the year which was beginning to
overthrow him; because Article 45 perfidiously concerted with the
calendar to turn him out; because the second Sunday in May intended to
"depose" him; because his oath had the audacity to plot his fall;
because his plighted word conspired against him.
The day after his triumph, he was heard to say: "The second Sunday in
May is dead." No! it is probity that is dead! it is honour that is
dead! it is the name of Emperor that is dead!
How the man sleeping in the chapel of St. Jerome must shudder, how he
must despair! Behold the gradual rise of unpopularity about his great
figure; and it is this ill-omened nephew who has placed the ladder. The
great recollections are beginning to fade, the bad ones are returning.
People dare no longer speak of Jena, Marengo, and Wagram. Of what do
they speak? Of the Duc d'Enghien, of Jaffa, of the 18th Brumaire. They
forget the hero, and see only the despot. Caricature is beginning to
sport with Caesar's profile. And what a creature beside him! Some there
are who confound the nephew with the uncle, to the delight of the
Elysee, but to the shame of France! The parodist assumes the airs of a
stage manager. Alas! a splendour so infinite could not be tarnished
save by this boundless debasement! Yes! worse than Hudson Lowe! Hudson
Lowe was only a jailor, Hudson Lowe was only an executioner. The man
who has really assassinated Napoleon is Louis Bonaparte; Hudson Lowe
killed only his life, Louis Bonaparte is killing his glory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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