* Paris. When the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” on 29 June, with the exception
of the English Northern Star, was the only European paper that had the
courage and insight to judge the June revolution correctly,
it was not refuted but denounced.
The facts subsequently confirm our view, even for
the most dim-sighted eye, insofar as interest does not rob all power of sight.
At that time the French press also disgraced itself. The resolute
Paris papers had been suppressed. The “Réforme”, the only radical journal that Cavaignac allowed to continue existing, stammered apologies for the high-minded June fighters and begged the victor for an alms of humanity for the vanquished. Naturally, no one listened to the beggar. It required first the full course of the June victory, the month-long diatribes of the provincial papers not fettered by the state of siege, the manifest resurrection of the Thiers party, to bring the “Réforme” to its senses. – On the occasion of the amnesty project of the extreme left, it remarks in its issue of 18 October:
“The people, when they came down from the barricades, punished no one. The people! then it was the ruler, the sovereign, the victor; people kissed its feet, its hands, saluted before its blouses, acclaimed its noble feelings. And rightly so. It was magnanimous.
Today the people has its children, its brothers in the dungeons, on the galleys and before the courts-martial. After it had exhausted the patience of hunger, after it had seen a whole population of place-hunters, whom it had picked up from the street, calmly pass it by and climb up into palaces, after it had given the Republic credit for three long months, it one day lost its head amid its famished children and its wasting fathers and hurled itself into the battle.

It has paid dearly. Its sons have sunk beneath the bullets and those who remained were divided into two parts. The one part was thrown before the courts-martial, the other was packed off for deportation, without investigation, without the right of defence, without trial! This method is foreign to every country, even the country of the Kabyles.
Never during its twenty-year duration had the monarchy ventured anything similar.
At that time the journals that speculate in dynasties, intoxicated by the smell of corpses, bold and quick to insult the dead (cf. the “Kölnische Zeitung” of 29 June), spat out all the slanders of venomous malice, quartered the people, before the judicial investigation, in its honour, and dragged the vanquished, dead and living, before the exceptional courts; they denounced them to the frenzy of the National Guards and the army, they made themselves the brokers of the hangman, the lackeys of the pillory. Lackeys of insane vengefulness, they invented crimes; they poisoned our ill-starred days and refined insult and lie!” (Cf. the N.Rh.Z. of 1 July on the French “Constitutionnel”, the Belgian “Indépendance” and the “Kölnische Ztg.”)
“The ‘Constitutionnel’ kept open shop with hideous mutilations and unworthy atrocities. It knew very well that it was lying, but that just happened to suit its trade and its politics, and, tradesman and diplomat at the same time, it sold ‘according to the crime’ as otherwise one sells ‘by the yard’. This fine speculation was bound to come to an end one day. The contradictions rained down: not the name of a single galley convict on the files of the courts-martial, on the bulletins of deportation; there was no longer any means of degrading despair, and one fell silent, after the profit had been pocketed.”