The France of Bonaparte the Little, revelling at the birth of a 
son* of a Montijo, lavishing the treasures of a nation on a 
ludicrous pageantry, “all clinquant, all in gold, like heathen 
gods,”.” that France is terribly contrasting with the France tortured 
at Cayenne, smarting at Lambessa, lingering at Belle-[le,* and 
rotting in the Bagne—with the France starving in the Crimea and 
the France in France reeling on the brink of bankruptcy. 

In the letter of Citizen Tassilier, literally translated from the ori- 
ginal,° the reader will find the genuine and soul-stirring story of the 
French citizens transported to Cayenne. The press of true-born 
British flunkeyism, it is true, trumpets into the ears of the drowsy 
world in most hyperbolical flourish the great news of the boundless 
magnanimity and rather superhuman clemency of the sausage- 
hero of the camp of Satory * proclaiming a general amnesty“ and 
deafening the first screams of his testy baby by the shouts of 
thousands of Frenchmen given back to their families and to liberty. 

But turning away from the paid exaltation of the sycophant, let 
us harken to the unbribed language of facts. Boustrapa offers the 
men he has tortured during four years, to tear asunder their 
chains, on the condition of their consenting to brand themselves 

* Prince Eugéne, titled King of Algeria (born March 16, 1856).— Ed. 

published in The People’s Paper, No. 206, April 12, 1856.— Ed. 

with indelible infamy, and to pass through the furcae Caudinae of 
the lower empire.*”% If they will declare loyal submission to the 
empire, that is, sanctify the coup d’état, and abnegate the 
Republic—if they will sell their souls, Boustrapa is ready to sell 
them their lives. 
“Already,” says the Moniteur, 
appeal has been made.” 

* “at the inauguration of the empire, this generous 

Thus, the Moniteur itself? avows that the general amnesty, now 
puffed as a stupendous novelty, is but a repetition of a stale farce 
played off four years ago. The genius of corruption flatters 
himself that his victims are now brought down to his own level, 
that they are sufficiently broken in to accept as a grace in 1856 
what they indignantly resented as an affront in 1852. 

The Moniteur decks its “generous appeal” to meanness with 
wisely calculated forgeries and falsifications. It pretends that after 
the events of June 1848, 11,000 persons having been condemned 
to transportation to Algiers, the clemency of the President left 
only 306 in Africa. Now, with the same Moniteur in our hand, we 
assert that from the 11,000 prisoners made in June 1848, there 
remained in November 1848, at the time when the Assemblée 
Constituante discussed the execution of the decree of transporta- 
tion, only 1,700; that 1,500 of them were sent to Belle- Ile, and on 
the 8th March, 1849, under the ministry of O. Barrot, 700 out of 
these 1,500 were directed to Bona, in Africa. It is then this last 
figure of 700 that the grace of Boustrapa has reduced to 306, and 
not as his lying Moniteur has it, the enormous number of 11,000, 
and that small grace itself was only a trick played off against the 
assembly. However, we are obliged to thank the Moniteur for 
having reminded France of the atrocious infamies committed by 
Cavaignac and the Bourgeois. Republic.* 

As to the transported and exiled of December, the same 
Moniteur computes their number at 11,201, and affirms that this is 
now reduced to 1,058. Now, the coup d’état made more than 
11,000 victims in the sole departments of the Lower Alps, Hérault, 
Var and Nievre, and at this very moment there remain at least 
12,000 victims doomed to exile or deportation. It is notorious that 
the coup d'état has affected more than 50,000 persons. It should be 
further remarked that the “generous appeal” of the Moniteur is 
URNS addressed to those deported to Algiers and other 

, Le Moniteur universel, No. 80, March 20, 1856.— Ed. 

foreign possessions, the slightest allusion being avoided to the 
condemned of Angers, the incarcerated for participation in secret 
societies, to those thrown into the Bagne by the ambulant war 
councils of 1851, to the prisoners of Belle-Ile, to the students 
locked up for hissing the paid white-washers of Boustrapa, etc. By 
way of compensation, the Moniteur announces an unsophisticated 
and unconditional amnesty for poachers, smugglers, forgers, 
thieves, deserters, convicts, and id genus omne.* It is quite in 
keeping with the character of the Lower Empire and_ the 
precedents of the Brummagem” Bonaparte, that the birth of a son 
should prove a holiday for all the lower relations of the father. 

From the victims of the coup d’état we pass now to its tools, from 
the men who opposed it to the slaves that executed it, from the 
soldiers of liberty to the army of the Crimea. If it 1s a great 
historical sign that Bonaparte, in midst of the fresh delusions of a 
new fangled dynasty, and the supreme triumph of his admittance 
into the embalmed air of rancid legitimacy, still wants to be 
acknowledged by his wretched victims, and, therefore, hypocriti- 
cally bids for their adhesion to the empire,‘ it is a trait of historical 
irony, not less notable that at the very time the head and the 
members of the society of the 10th December*” are feasting the 
success of the coup d’état in pompous profusion at Paris, the army 
that imposed this disgusting rule upon France is expiating its 
crime in the Crimea by denudation, starvation, agony and death in 
their most dismal and hideous forms. 

In the first period of the Oriental campaign, from November 
1854, to March 1855, the upstart of December was extolled as a 
second providence and in every tune was sung the admirable 
military administration of the empire of all the glories, in contrast 
to the scandalous sufferings that befell the English army from 
intentional treason at home and“ the natural working of a 
superannuated system. But, as in every other feat of the Lower 
Empire, what was taken for a substance, was but a theatrical 
phantasmagoria calculated for immediate stage effect. During two 
years Bonaparte had been exclusively bent on preparing for war. 
He had strained every nerve of the immense power of centralised 

“Le Moniteur universel, No. 81, March 21, 1856. Id genus omne means “all 

France to provide for the first movement of his army.* Indeed, it 
is not to be wondered at, that even the wretched adventurer of 
Strassburg and Boulogne should not succeed, during the first two 
years of his misrule, in breaking down the admirable organisation 
of the French army, bequeathed by the first revolution. It is a 
miracle that he has contrived that point in the first two years of 
actual warfare. Having lavished more wealth on a_ Bat- 
rachomyomachia *° of his own, than the Great Napoleon in fifteen 
years of his Iliad,’ he finds at the beginning of the third year the 
resources of France drained, her military administration broken 
up, and her very army dwindling away from misery. The cancer 
that eats up the French army is the organic principle of the Lower 
Empire—theft and embezzlement; and but two years were needed 
to make its work appear on the surface. 

The wretched state of the French army was for a long time 
carefully concealed not only in the French but also in the English 
press.*?” Now-a-days it has become a secret running the streets and 
encumbering the thoroughfares. It has become a truth no longer 
controverted after Bonaparte’s own Moniteur has given it the lie 
direct.© For the present purpose it will suffice to quote from the last 
letter of the Times’ Sebastopol correspondent: — 

“The French army, however, numerous as they may show it to be on paper, is 
dwindling sadly; scurvy and fever are playing havoc in its ranks: I recently stated 
its daily loss at 170 men ... now the French admit the daily mortality in their army 
to be 120 men, and in some days considerably more. The right wing of the army, 
in the Baidar valley, suffers the most.... When the mild weather sets in, a great 
increase of disease is to be anticipated.... The sick returns of the French will be 

terrible.... The French army is being expended at least as rapidly as it was by shell 
and shot during the severest part of the siege.” 

Insufficiency of shelter, want of covering, and the scarcity of 
food* are pointed at as the principal causes of their trials. Having 
described the rigour of the weather, “tubs of water in the huts 
having frozen to a depth of 3 inches,” and the prevalence of 

The Times, No. 22324, March 25, 1856.— Ed. 

snow-storms which “allowed few huts to remain in which the snow 
did not make its appearance in great quantities,” the correspon- 
dent puts the question what the French army must have suffered 
in tents not huts carefully fitted out, not double tents well dug out, 
but single and unprotected tents. He concludes by stating that “it 
is really painful to meet the French convoys of sick,” and that 
Marshal Pélissier is more anxious to hide them from the English 
army than to mitigate their sufferings. 

We add another quotation from The Morning Advertiser, the very 
paper that shared with The Morning Post the infamous privilege of 
hailing Bonaparte’s advent in 1851 and of still trumpeting Lord 
Palmerston as the truly English minister: — 

“There are 3,000 sick in the French camp of the Chernaya—the ambulances 
are choked and the medical staff decimated by disease and exhaustion—the 
commissariat has broken down, and is unable to feed the troops—the men are 
actually begging biscuits from the soldiers at the outposts—scurvy from the want of 
vegetables, and typhus from the want of meat, rage with indomitable virulence — 
and the contrast between the two armies is the source of open discontent on the 
part of the French soldiery. The transports are insufficient to convey the sick to 
Constantinople—the hospitals there have more than 12,000 patients in them—the 
epidemic is a positive pestilence—and the mortality frightful—the troop-ships 
arriving from the east at Marseilles are loaded with the dregs of fever, and the 
vessels and the typhoid patients are consigned to the lazaretto at Frioul.” * 

What is to be done with this withering army?° are they to be 
soothed by recitals of the Arabian tale of the King of Algiers’ 
“nativity”? or by the description of the embroidered and 
gold-laced uniforms of the cautious hero’s pampered guards? It 
should be recollected that French soldiers have no stomach for 
undergoing injuries like English privates. Proof, if proof be 
wanted, the several attempts made in the French army to shoot 
General Pélissier, a fact recorded by the Gazette de Mulan,‘ 
Radetzky’s Moniteur. Nor must it be imagined that the army of the 
line in France remains a dull spectator of the Crimean tragedy. 
The razzias of the Paris police are beginning to affect the 
barracks. The Zouaves ordered to Paris to chafe public en- 

thusiasm by their exhibition are already removed from the capital, 
they having become suspicious. Two other regiments returned 
from the Crimea have also been banished into the provinces. The 
antagonism between the guard and the line is daily growing more 
embittered, Bonaparte being about to create at this very moment 
new guard regiments in sufficient numbers to enable this 
privileged corps to keep the garrison of Paris, exclusive of the 
regiments of the line. Having bribed the army into antagonism to 
the country, he is now trying to bribe an army within the army—a 
rather dangerous experiment this. 

The Finances—we would not call them the heels of this strange 
Achilles, he being rather tall at his heels—require a separate 
article for a full exposition. For the present it may suffice to state * 
that the funds falling somewhile hence, it was consequently 
expected the announced conclusion of peace, and the birth of 
another Bonaparte could not fail to send them up. Such an issue 
was not quite left to chance. Not only the Government gave orders 
to freely use the public chests at its disposal for the purchase of 
public funds, but the crédit mobilier, and similar mushrooms of 
Bonapartist credit were, during two consecutive days, largely 
employed in buying stock. All these manoeuvres notwithstanding, 
on the very news of the “nativity,” instead of rising, the funds 
went down, and continue to go down. Bonaparte, in great rage 
now, prohibited the sale on Change of any but governmental 
quoted papers, and had then the principal stockjobber summoned 
to the Préfecture de Police. 

When the statuary of Pallas Athene tumbled down in the 
Parthenon, such an accident told fatal tidings to the Republic of 
Athens. Bonaparte’s bust, tottering on its pedestal in the 
Synagogue,’ where the marketable value of governments is settled, 
and the peoples’ history discounted, presages the downfall of the 
Empire of Agio. 

Written about April 1, 1856 Reproduced from The _ People’s 
205, April 5, 1856 (signed: K. M.) and 
Tribune, No. 4676, April 14, 1856, re-