Imperialism had made a great show, reproducing, so far as it could, the glamour of the First Empire. Judge how potent that First Empire must have been, when mere imitation of it could thus hypnotize France and delude Europe! But Imperialism, generated by a crime and vitalized by corruption and deceit, was not _all_ France. Honest France, excluded in the beginning, could not, would not, be lured in later. Napoleon would have conciliated, but the men whom he needed to conciliate would not even parley. To offset Victor Hugo and patriots of his rigid defiance, the Emperor had the outward acquiescence of Prosper Mérimée, the worldly courtier; of Alfred de Musset, the weak-willed, debauched poet; and of such as they. But he had the conscience of France against him; to offset _that_ he leagued himself with Jesuits and Clericals. Having exhausted the expedients of force, he had tried the arts of flattery; he had intimidated, he had blandished; he had made vice easy and attractive, in order that, though he could not win over the stubborn to his cause, their character might be softened through voluptuousness. Whosoever could be corrupted--let us give him full credit--he did corrupt in masterful fashion; but conscience, in France as elsewhere, is incorruptible. Despite his complicated machinery for gagging conscience, protests began to be made boldly. One such protest, uttered towards the end of 1868, rang throughout France; and well it might, so audacious was the eloquence of the protester. Several newspapers had opened a subscription for a monument to Baudin, a Republican killed in the _coup d’état_. The proprietors of these newspapers were arrested. One of them, Delescluze, had for his advocate Léon Gambetta, a vehement young lawyer from the South. Before the judge, and the prosecuting attorneys, and the police--all myrmidons of the Emperor--he arraigned the Empire, closing with these words: “Here for seventeen years you have been absolute masters--‘masters at discretion,’ it is your phrase--of France. Well, you have never dared to say, ‘We will celebrate--we will include among the solemn festivals of France--the Second of December as a national anniversary!’ And yet all the governments which have succeeded each other in the land have honored the day of their birth; there are but two anniversaries--the 18th Brumaire and the 2d of December--which have never been put among the solemnities of origin, because you know that, if you dared to put these, the universal conscience would disavow them!” Gambetta’s invective did not save his client from prison, but his arraignment of the Empire echoed throughout France.