The contemplated Republic was changed by this adroit piece of juggling into the old Imperial Government, rejuvenated with feudality. The "Additional Act" lost Bonaparte the Republican Party and made malcontents in almost all the other parties. License reigned in Paris, anarchy in the provinces; the civil and military authorities contended with each other; here men threatened to burn the manors and murder the priests; there they hoisted the White Flag and shouted, "Long live the King!" Finding himself attacked, Bonaparte retreated; he withdrew the nomination of the mayors of communes from his commissaries-extraordinary and restored that nomination to the people. Alarmed at the multiplicity of negative votes against the "Additional Act," he abandoned his _de facto_ dictatorship and convened the Chamber of Representatives by virtue of that Act which was not yet accepted. Blundering from rock to rock, he was scarcely delivered from one danger before stumbling against another: the sovereign of a day, how was he to establish an hereditary peerage which the spirit of equality repelled? How to govern the two Chambers? Would they yield a passive obedience? What would be the relations of the Chambers with the proposed assembly of the Champ de Mai, which had no real object, since the "Additional Act" was brought into operation before the suffrages had been counted? Would that assembly, consisting of thirty thousand electors, not believe itself to be the representatives of the nation? This Champ de Mai, so pompously announced and celebrated on the 1st of June, resolved itself into a simple march-past of troops and a distribution of colours before a despised altar. Napoleon, surrounded by his brothers, the State dignitaries, the marshals, the civil and judicial bodies, proclaimed the sovereignty of the people in which he did not believe. The citizens had imagined that they themselves would frame a Constitution on that solemn day, the peaceful middle class expected that then would be declared Napoleon's abdication in favour of his son, an abdication concocted at Bâle between the agents of Fouché and of Prince Metternich: and there was nothing but a ridiculous political trap! The "Additional Act," for the rest, stood forth as an act of homage to the Legitimacy; save for a few differences, and, in particular, excluding "the abolition of confiscation," it was the Charter. * Those sudden changes, that confounding of all things, announced the last struggles of despotism. Nevertheless, the Emperor could not receive the death-stroke from within, for the power which was combating him was as debilitated as himself; the revolutionary Titan, whom Napoleon had floored of old, had not recovered his native energy; the two giants were now aiming useless blows at one another; it was nothing more than the contest of two shadows.