The police, directed by Fouché, informed the world, by means of solemn proclamations, that it would thenceforward serve only to spread philosophy, that it would act only in accordance with virtuous principles. Bonaparte re-established, by decree, the National Guard of the Kingdom, the mere name of which used formerly to make his head swim. He found himself compelled to annul the divorce pronounced under the Empire between despotism and demagogy and to favour their renewed alliance: from this hymen was to spring, on the Champ de Mai, a liberty wearing the red cap and the turban on its head, the mameluke's sabre in its belt and the revolutionary axe in its hand, a liberty surrounded by the shades of those thousands of victims sacrificed on the scaffolds or in the burning campaigns of Spain and the icy deserts of Russia. Before success, the mamelukes were Jacobins; after success, the Jacobins were to become mamelukes: Sparta was for the moment of danger, Constantinople for that of triumph. Bonaparte would, indeed, have liked to recover possession for himself alone, but that was impossible for him; he found men prepared to dispute it with him: first, the earnest Republicans, delivered from the chains of despotism and the laws of the Monarchy, desired to retain an independence which is, perhaps, but a noble error; next, the madmen of the old faction of the Mountain: these latter, humiliated at having been nothing more under the Empire than the police-spies of a despot, seemed resolved to resume on their own account that liberty of doing everything of which, during fifteen years, they had yielded the privilege to a master. But not the Republicans, nor the Revolutionaries, nor the satellites of Bonaparte were strong enough to establish their separate power, or mutually to subjugate each other. Threatened from without by an invasion, pursued from within by public opinion, they understood that, if they became divided, they were lost: in order to escape the danger, they adjourned their quarrel; some brought their systems and illusions to the common defense, others their terror and perversity. None was in earnest in this compact; each, once the crisis passed, resolved to turn it to his profit; all sought beforehand to make sure of the results of victory. In that awful _trente-et-un_ three enormous gamblers kept the bank by turns: liberty, anarchy and despotism, all three cheating and striving to win a game which was lost for all.