The Situation in Paris

* Cologne, 30 January. When yesterday morning, through a special supplement, we announced the imminent outbreak of a storm in Paris, howling original electors for the first chamber wrote beneath our flysheet: That’s a lie! Don’t try to scare us! and similar bourgeois fulminations. The wretches saw in our special supplement a mere election manoeuvre, as if the first chamber and the second chamber into the bargain and the whole Prussian movement on top of it could induce us to falsify the history of the European revolution!

Stupp is an elector for the first chamber! The rentier von Wittgenstein is an elector for the first chamber! Chancellor von Groote is an elector for the first chamber! And yet the revolutionary monster in Paris dares to roar anew! Quelle horreur!

In today’s issue we said, among other things, about the situation in Paris:

“The danger of a popular insurrection is for the moment removed by the vote of the Chamber against the urgency of the club ban, i.e., against the club ban altogether. But a new danger looms: the danger of a coup d’état ... If the ministry intends to defy the vote of the Assembly, nothing remains for it but – a coup d’état ... The dissolution of the National Assembly, and the preparation of the monarchist restoration by military force, that is what lurks behind the National’s fear of the ministry remaining in office ... That the coup d’état is drawing ever closer is shown by the incidents between Changarnier and the officers of the Mobile Guard ... The situation appears to become complex; but in fact it becomes very simple, as simple as it always is on the eve of a revolution. The conflict between the Assembly and the President together with his ministers has erupted ... Monarchical restoration or – red republic, that is now the only alternative in France ... The honest republic is collapsing at all corners, and after it, even if only after a few little intermezzos, only the red republic is still possible.”

In the special supplement we announced the crisis for the 29th. The reports from Paris of the 29th that follow below will show our readers how accurate our reports were and how strikingly correct our depiction today of the French situation was.