He abdicated in favor of his grandson, the Comte de Paris, with the Duchesse d'Orléans for regent, and the duchess was left in the Tuileries when the king, taking off his grand cordon and his uniform, depositing his sword on a table, arrayed himself with his wife's assistance in a bourgeois costume and took his departure for Saint-Cloud. The duchess, with her two sons, was escorted to the Chamber, where the president declared that her regency should be proclaimed by that body, and Lamartine was in the midst of a speech advising the constitution of a provisory government for that purpose when he was interrupted by the invasion of a revolutionary mob shouting: "A bas la Régence! Vive la République! A bas les corrompus!" The little Comte de Paris was seized by the throat by one of these demonstrative citizens, and only saved from being choked by the intervention of a national guardsman. The provisional government proclaimed the Republic; before the Hôtel de Ville, Lamartine, in a burst of eloquence, repelled the proposition of the mob to adopt the red flag and secured the adoption of the tricolor, and the provinces, following the lead of the capital, seemed to accept the Republic. But a stable administration of the city and the nation seemed more unattainable than ever. The new government had to suppress popular uprisings in the streets of Paris in March, in May, and in June; the new Assemblée Nationale, elected by universal suffrage,--nine millions of electors, instead of 220,000, as under the late monarchy,--made haste to organize a new government consisting of a single president, to be elected, and a single legislative body. The new president, elected by an overwhelming majority, was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of the Emperor. He was given power to nominate all the innumerable employés of the government, to negotiate treaties, and to organize the army, but he could not take command of the latter nor dissolve the Assemblée, and he was not eligible for re-election. The two chief powers of the government were not long in coming into collision; the legislative body, divided into numerous factions, lacked decision and initiative, and it lost in popular favor by the law of the 31st of May, 1850, which struck three millions of electors from the lists by restricting the suffrage to those only who could prove a continuous residence of three years in the canton. The President, seizing his opportunity, demanded the repeal of this law (November 4, 1851), and on the 2d of December following, by a series of summary nocturnal arrests, succeeded in putting all the chiefs of the various parties in the Assemblée, and all his most formidable opponents, under lock and key. "I have broken out of the way of legality," said he, "to re-enter that of the right;" and the nation, by 7,437,216 votes against 640,737, accepted the new constitution which he proposed for it, the renewal of his power for ten years, the abolition