Even in the very first days of the new Republic of 1848 the popular discontent broke out afresh. Clubs were formed all over the city; the most violent harangues were made against the bourgeoisie; the words "communism" and "socialism" began to replace "fraternity"; numerous failures occurred in all the business quarters, and all the strangers left the city. Crowds paraded the streets crying, "_À bas les aristos!_" the last being a new word invented to designate the bourgeoisie, and the latter, strengthened by the workmen in blouses, to the number of a hundred thousand men, made a counter-demonstration, singing the _Marseillaise_. In 1850, on the eve of the _Coup d'État_, "a profound discouragement prevailed among the bourgeoisie. The sudden fall in public securities, the rise in the premium on gold, the significant increase in the purchase of foreign bonds, the departure of the numerous strangers who had come to Paris to pass the season, the diminution, more marked even than in the preceding month, in all industrial and commercial transactions,--such were the symptoms of that confidence which was to effect the conciliation of the electors." The events of the first three or four days of December, 1851, justified only too well these apprehensions, and have been but too frequently related by indignant historians. "It was a sinister and inexpressible moment," says the author of _Napoléon le Petit_,--"cries, arms lifted toward Heaven, the surprise, the terror, the crowd flying in every direction, a hail of bullets, from the pavements even to the roofs, and in a minute the dead strewing the street, young men falling, their cigars still in their mouths, ladies in velvet dresses killed by the musketry, two booksellers shot on the threshold of their shops without even knowing what was wanted of them, bullets fired into cellar-windows and killing no matter whom, the _Bazar de l'Industrie_ riddled with shell and balls, the Hôtel Sallandrouze bombarded, the _Maison-d'Or_ mitrailleused, Tortoni taken by assault, hundreds of corpses on the Boulevard, a stream of blood in the Rue Richelieu!"