The

too, there were many who regretted the times when commissaries and contractors grew wealthy in a single year, and when a hardy speculation or a glorious campaign supplied wherewithal to found and endow a family. The peasantry of France, too, were Buonapartists almost to a man, as far as they had any political predilections at all. It was Napoleon who had reorganised society after the horrors of the revolution. If it was Napoleon who had taken their sons and brothers as conscripts, it was he also who had led them on to renown, and often to wealth and distinction. He wrote his name indelibly on the very soil in every department of France; his is literally the only name known in the agricultural provinces and among the ignorant and stationary cultivators of the land. demagogues who agitated France and the ruffians who ruined her before his time, as well as the monarchs who have ruled her since, have passed away and left no trace, but Napoleon is remembered and regretted everywhere; his is the only fame which has survived the repeated catastrophes of sixty years, and floats uningulfed on the waters of the deluge. Many of the peasantry have never realised his death. Many even believe, incredible as it may seem, that it is he himself who now rules France. The overwhelming majority which elected Louis Napoleon to the Presidency surprised no one who has had an opportunity of conversing with the peasantry in the less visited districts of the country.

The third party was the Orleanists, or adherents of

the existing dynasty. They were powerful, and comprised many sections.

numerous and They included

a great majority of the middle ranks, nearly the whole of the commercial classes, and five-sixths of the practical, sober, and experienced politicians of the land. Besides those who were attached to the government by long connection, by old habit, by services rendered or benefits received, the Orleans dynasty rallied round it all the friends of constitutional liberty, all admirers of the English system, all who hoped by means of the charter -imperfect and mutilated as it was-and of the two Chambers-restricted as was the suffrage, and corrupt as was often the influence brought to bear upon the elections-gradually to train France to a purer freedom, and a higher degree of self-government; to tide over the period of national boyhood and inexperience, and navigate the vessel of the state through the rocks and shoals which menaced it, into smoother waters and more tranquil times;—all the moneyed men, too, to whom confusion, uncertainty, and change are fraught with impoverishment and ruin; all that class, so numerous, especially in Paris, who lived by supplying the wants of travellers and foreign residents; all whose idol was order, by whatever means it might be enforced, and at whatever price it might be purchased, and who saw no chance of peace or stability save under Louis Philippe's rule; and, finally, all belonging to that vast and indescribable section of every nation, who owned no allegiance, who worshipped no ideal, who sacrificed to no principle, whom Dante has scorched with his withering

contempt, as neither good nor bad, but simply, and before everything, selfish. The strength of this party lay in its wealth, in its political experience, in its cultivation of the material interests of the country, in the sympathy of England, and in all those nameless advantages which long possession of the reins of power, under a government of centralisation, never fails to confer.

Lastly, came the Republicans, divided, like the Orleanists, into many sections. There were the republicans on principle-stern, honest, able, and uncompromising, of whom Cavaignac may be taken as the living, and Armand Carrel as the departed, type. They had clear, though often wild, conceptions of liberty— an intelligible, though an impracticable, political theory; they worshipped a noble, though generally a classical, ideal, for which they were as ready to die and to kill, as any martyr who was ever bound to the stake. They belonged to the same order of men as the Cromwells and the Harrisons of England, and the Balfours of Scotland, with the difference, that their fanaticism was not religious, but political. Still they were, for the most part, estimable for their character, respectable in talents, and eminently formidable from the concentrated and resolute determination of their zeal.-There were the republicans by temperament-the young, the excitable, and the poetic, who longed for an opportunity of realising the dreams of their fancy, whose associations of freedom and renown all attached themselves to the first phase of the old revolution, and whose watchword "the year 1793." Such are to be found in nearly

was

all countries.

Their mental characteristic belongs rather to the time of life, than to the nation or the age. Still they have played a prominent part in all French convulsions. The Ecole Polytechnique has an historical fame. Then there were the Socialist republicans, whose hostility was directed less against any dynasty or form of government, than against the arrangements of society itself; who conceived that the entire system of things was based upon a wrong foundation, and who saw, in the overthrow of existing powers, the only chance of remodelling the world after their fashion. Of these Louis Blanc was the leader; and among his followers were hundreds of thousands of the operative classes, soured and maddened with privations, thirsty for enjoyment, and intoxicated with the brilliant and beautiful perspective so eloquently sketched out before them-but, for the most part sincere, well-meaning, ignorant, and gullible, and easily dazzled and misled to wrong by the lofty and sonorous watchwords which their mischievous guides knew so well how to pronounce. -Lastly, there were the wretches who in troubled times come at the heels of every party, to soil its banner, to disgrace its fortunes, to stain its name-who profit by its victory, and slink away from it in defeat. The idle, who disdained to labour; the criminal, who lived by plunder; the savage, whose element was uproar; men who hated every government, because they had made themselves amenable to the laws of all; thieves and murderers, whom the galley and the prison had disgorged—all those obscene and

hideous constituents stalked forth from their dens to swell the ranks of the republicans, and to pillage and slay in the name of the republic.

Such were the political parties, in the midst of whose noisy and furious hostility France was called upon to constitute a strong and stable government, on the morrow of that amazing catastrophe, which, on the 24th of February 1848, had upset a constitution, chased away a dynasty, and left society itself in a state of abeyance, if not of dissolution. The provisional authorities—partly self-elected, partly voted in by acclamation, partly foisted in by low and impudent intrigue— had proclaimed a republic, without waiting to give the nation time to express its volition in the matter, and without any intention of deferring to this volition even when expressed. To establish and consolidate a republican form of government was thus the task assigned to the country; a task which the existence of the several parties we have enumerated would alone have sufficed to make perplexing and difficult enough. But impediments far more serious were behind. All things considered, the problem was probably the hardest ever set before a nation :-to reconstruct society on a stable foundation, with all the usual elements of society absent or broken up, without a monarch, without an aristocracy, without a religion, with no principle unquestioned, with no truth universally admitted and reverenced, with no time-honoured institution left standing amid the ruins. She had to do all this, and more, in spite of nearly every obstacle which the past and the