Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat* seems the judgment pretty 
generally passed in Europe on the French usurper, whom, but a 
few weeks ago, the numberless sycophants of success in all 
countries, and of all languages, concurred to magnify into a kind . 
of sublunary providence. Now, all at once, on the first approach of 
real danger, the demi-god is supposed to have run mad. To those, 
however, who are not to be carried away by first impressions, 
nothing will appear more evident than that the hero of - 
Boulogne is to-day what he was yesterday—simply a gambler. If 
he stakes his last card and risks all, it is not the man that has 
changed, but the chances of the game. There had been. attempts 
on Bonaparte’s life before without producing any visible effect on 
the economy of the Empire. Why did the quicksilver which 
exploded on the 14th of January** not only kill persons, but a 
state of things? It is with the hand-grenades of the Rue Lepelletier 
as it was with the greased cartridges dealt out at Barrackpore.” 
They have not metamorphosed an empire, but only rent the veil 
which concealed a metamorphosis already accomplished. 

The secret of Bonaparte’s elevation is to be found on the one 
hand in the mutual prostration of the antagonist parties, and on 
the other in the coincidence of his coup d’état with the entrance of 
the commercial world upon a period of prosperity. The commer- 
cial crisis, therefore, has necessarily sapped the material basis of 
the Empire, which never possessed any moral basis, save the 

temporary demoralization of all classes and all parties. The 
working classes reassumed their hostile attitude to the existing 
Government the very moment they were thrown out of employ- 
ment. A great part of the commercial and industrial middle classes 
were placed by the crisis in exactly the same position which 
spurred Napoleon to hasten his coup d’état; it being well known 
that the fear of the debtors’ prison at Clichy put an end to his 
vacillations. The same motive hurried the Paris bourgeois to the 
barricades in 1848, and would make him regard a _ political 
convulsion at this moment as a godsend. It is now perfectly 
understood that, at the hight of the panic, the Bank of France, on 
Government order, renewed all bills due—an accommodation 
which, by the by, it was again compelled to afford on the 31st of 
January; but this suspense in the liquidation of debts, instead of 
restoring commercial activity, has only imparted a_ chronic 
character to panic. Another very large portion of the Paris middle 
classes, and a very influential one too—the petits rentiers, or men 
of small fixed incomes—have met with wholesale ruin, consequent 
upon the enormous fluctuations of the Bourse, which were 
fostered by, and contributed to enrich, the Imperial dynasty and 
its adventurous retainers. That portion, at least, of the French 
higher classes which pretends to represent what is called French 
civilization never accepted the Empire, except as a necessary 
makeshift, never concealed their profound hostility to the 
“nephew of his uncle,’* and of late have seized upon every 
pretext to show their anger at the attempt to transform a mere 
expedient, as they considered it, into a lasting institution. Such was 
the general state of feeling to which the attempt of the Rue 
Lepelletier afforded an occasion of manifesting itself. This 
manifestation, on the other hand, has roused the pseudo 
Bonaparte to a sense of the gathering storm, and compelled him 
to play out his last card. Much has been said in the Moniteur as to 
the shouts and cries and the “public enthusiasm” ” lavished on the 
Imperial party at their exit from the Opera. The value of this 
street enthusiasm is shown by the following anecdote emanating 
from a chief actor in the scene and the authenticity of which is 
vouched for by a highly respectable English paper: 

“On the night of the 14th a person high in the Imperial household, but not that 
night on service, was crossing the Boulevards, when he heard the explosions, and 

saw people running toward the Opera. He ran thither also, and was present at the 
whole scene. Being recognized directly, one of the persons most nearly concerned 

in all that had occurred said, ‘Oh, Mr.—, for God’s sake, find some one belonging 
to the Tuileries, and send off for fresh carriages. If you can find none, go 
yourself.’ The person thus addressed set to work immediately to find some of the 
household servants, which was no easy task—all, from high to low, chamberlains to 
footmen, having, with one or two admirable exceptions, taken to their heels with 
incredible alacrity. However, at the end of a quarter of an hour, he laid hands on a 
messenger, and sent him post-haste to the palace with the necessary orders. About 
five and twenty minutes or half an hour had elapsed, when he returned to the Rue 
Lepelletier, and made his way back to the peristyle of the theater with great 
difficulty, on account of the crowd. The wounded were still lying about on all sides, 
and apparently disorder reigned everywhere. At a little distance the gentleman 
alluded to espied M. Pietri, the Prefect of Police, and called to him, in order to 
attract his attention, and prevent him from going away until he could rejoin him. 
When he did so, he instantly exclaimed, ‘Let me implore of you to get the street 
closed without loss of time. The fresh carriages will be here soon, and they cannot 
drive up to the door. Besides, see what confusion ensues. Let me entreat of you, 
get the streets cleared.’ M. Pietri looked at him with surprise. “The street cleared!’ 
he echoed; ‘why, the street is cleared; it was cleared in five minutes.’ His 
interlocutor stared at him. ‘But, then, what is all that crowd? What is that dense 
mass of men that one cannot elbow one’s way through?’ “Those are all my people,’ 
was M. Pietri’s reply; ‘there is not a stranger at this moment in this portion of the 
Rue Lepelletier; all those you see belong to me.” 

If such was the secret of the street enthusiasm paraded by the 
Moniteur, its paragraphs on the “spontaneous illuminations of the 
Boulevards after the attempt”* could certainly not mislead the 
Parisians who had witnessed that illumination, which was limited 
to the shops of the tradespeople employed by the Emperor and 
the Empress. Even these individuals were not backward in saying 
that half an hour after the explosion of the “infernal machine,” 
police agents paid them a visit, to suggest the propriety of 
instantly illuminating, in order to prove how enchanted they were 
at the Emperor’s escape. 

Still more the character of the congratulatory addresses and the 
public protestations of devotion to the Fmperor bears witness to 
his complete isolation. There is not a single man who signed them 
who does not, one way or the other, belong to the Administration, 
that ubiquitous parasite feeding on the vitals of France, and put in 
motion like a mannikin by the touch of the Minister of the 
Interior.” The Moniteur was obliged, day after day, to register 
these monotonous congratulations, addressed by the Emperor to 
the Emperor, as so many proofs of the unbounded love of the 
people for the coup d’état‘ Some efforts were, indeed, made to 

January 17, 1858; see also the following issues.— Ed. 

obtain an address from the Paris population, and for that purpose 
an address was carried about by the agents of the police; but as it 
was found that the mass of signatures would not be sufficiently 
imposing, the plan was abandoned. Even the Paris shopkeepers 
dared to decline signing the address, on the pretext that the police 
was not the proper source for it to emanate from. The attitude of 
the Paris press, as far as it depends on the public, and not on the 
public purse, entirely responded to the attitude of the people. 
Either, like the unfortunate Spectateur, it muttered some half- 
suppressed words on hereditary rights, or, like the Phare de la 
Loire, quoted semi-official papers as its authorities for the reported 
enthusiasm, or, like the Journal des Débats, kept its congratulations 
within the rigid bounds of conventional courtesy, or limited itself 
to reprinting the articles of the Moniteur. In one word, it became 
evident that if France was not just yet prepared to take up arms 
against the Empire, it was certainly resolved to get rid of it on the 
first occasion. 

“According to my informants,” writes the Vienna correspondent of The London 

Times, ‘““who have recently arrived from Paris, the general opinion in that city is, that 
the present dynasty is nodding to its fall.” #465 

Bonaparte himself, till then the only man in France believing in 
the final victory of the coup d’état, became at once aware of the 
hollowness of his delusions. While all public bodies and the press 
were swearing that the crime of the Rue Lepelletier, perpetrated 
as it was by Italians solely, but served to put in relief the love of 
France for Louis Napoleon, Louis Napoleon himself hastened to 
the Corps Législatif,*” there publicly to declare that the conspiracy 
was a national one, and that France consequently wanted new 
“repressive laws” to keep her down.? Those laws already 
proposed, at the head of which figure the lois des suspects,’ are 
nothing but a repetition of the identical measures employed in the 
first days of the coup d’état. Then, however, they were 
announced as temporary expedients, while they are now pro- 
claimed as organic laws. Thus it is declared by Louis Napoleon 
himself, that the Empire can be perpetuated only by the very 
infamies through which it was produced; that all its pretensions to 
the more or less respectable forms of a regular Government must 
be dropped, and that the time of the sullen acquiescence of the 

February 2, 1858.— Ed. 

1858, published in Le Moniteur universel, No. 19, January 19, 1858.— Ed. 

nation in the rule of the Society of the perjured usurper has 
definitively passed away. 

Shortly before the execution of the coup d’état, Louis Napoleon 
contrived to gather from all departments, and principally from the 
rural districts, addresses leveled at the National Assembly, and 
expressive of unlimited confidence in the President. This source 
being now exhausted there remained nothing but to appeal to the 
army. The military addresses, in one of which the Zouaves 
“almost regret not to have had an opportunity to manifest in a 
striking manner their-devotion to the Emperor,”* are simply the 
undisguised proclamation of pretorian rule*” in France. The 
division of France into five great military pashalics, with five 
marshals at their head, under the supreme control of Pelissier as 
marshal general,*”' is a simple consequence of that premise. On 
the other hand, the installation of a Privy Council, which is at the 
same time to act as Council during the eventual Regency of a 
Montijo, composed of such grotesque fellows as Fould, Morny, 
Persigny, Baroche and the like, shows France at the same time 
what ‘sort of regime the newly-installed statesmen have in store for 
her. The installation of this Council, together with the family 
reconciliation, denoted to the astounded world by Louis 
Napoleon’s letter in the Moniteur, by virtue of which Jerome, the 
ex-King of Westphalia, is nominated President of the State 
Councils in the Emperor’s absence’—all this, it has been justly 
remarked, “looks like the pilgrim about to set out on a perilous 
journey.” *° On what new adventure is the hero of Strasbourg then 
to embark?*”* Some say that he means to relieve himself by a 
campaign in Africa; others that he intends an invasion of England. 
As to the first plan, it reminds one of his former notion of going 
to Sevastopol *”; but now, as then, his discretion might prove the 
better part of his valor.“ As to any hostility against England, it 
would only reveal to Bonaparte his isolation in Europe, as the 
attempt of the Rue Lepelletier revealed his isolation in France. 
Already the threats held out to England in the addresses of the 
soldiery have put the final extinguisher upon the Anglo-French 

No. 26, January 26, 1858.— Ed. 

alliance, long since struggling in articulo mortis.* Palmerston’s Alien 
bill*’* will only contribute to exasperate the already wounded 
pride of John Bull. Whatever step Bonaparte may take—and he 
must try to restore his prestige in some way or other—will only 
precipitate his ruin. He approaches the end of his strange, wicked 
and pernicious career.