XIV.

CHAP. this, that those who are charged have made away with the means by which the truth might be best established. In this stress, Justice is not so dull and helpless as to submit to be baffled. Wisely deviating in such a case from her common path, she listens for a moment to incomplete testimony against the concealer, and then, by requiring that he who hid away the truth shall restore it to light, or abide the consequence of his default, she shifts the duty of giving strict proof from the accuser to the accused. Because Prince Louis and his associates closed up the accustomed approaches to truth, therefore it is cast upon them either to remain under the charge which Paris brings against them, or else to labour and show, as best they may, that they did not cause batches of French citizens to be shot by platoons of infantry in the night of the 4th and the night of the 5th of December.*

*

I find that what I, in my caution, thus speak of as a 'ques'tion,' has been recorded as a proved fact by a gentleman who was in Paris at the time of the coup d'état, who was gifted more than most men with the power of seeking for truth in an impartial spirit, and who enjoyed great opportunities of informing himself concerning the events which had been passing in the French capital. His narrative asserts, in plain unqualified terms, that hundreds' were 'put to death in the courtyards of the barracks, or in the subterraneous passages of the 'Tuileries.' Still, the writer did not see the prisoners shot with his own eyes, and I persist in my inclination to treat it as a 'question,' whether these alleged executions did or did not take place in the nights of the 4th and 5th of December.-Note to 4th Edition.

XII.

The whole number of people killed by the CHAP. troops during the forty hours which followed upon

XIV.

as to the

the number of

people

In killed.

the commencement of the massacre in the Boule- Uncertainty vards, will never be known. The burying of bodies was done for the most part at night. searching for a proximate notion of the extent of the carnage, it is not safe to rely even upon the acknowledgments of the officers engaged in the work, for during some time they were under an impression that it was favourable to a man's advancement to be supposed to be much steeped in what was done. The colonel of one of the regiments engaged in this slaughter spoke whilst the business was fresh in his mind. It would be unsafe to accept his statement as accurate or even as substantially true; but as it is certain that the man had taken part in the transactions of which he spoke, and that he really wished to gain credence for the words which he uttered, his testimony has a kind of value as representing (to say the least of it) his idea of what could be put forward as a credible statement by one who had the means of knowing the truth. What he declared was that his regiment alone had killed two thousand four hundred men. Suppossing that his statement was anything like an approach to the truth, and that his corps was at all rivalled by others, a very high number would be

CHAP. wanted for recording the whole quantity of the

XIV.

Total loss of the army in killed.

slaughter.*

In the army which did these things, the whole number of killed was twenty-five.†

Effect of

the massacre upon the people of Paris.

XIII.

Of all men dwelling in cities the people of Paris are perhaps the most warlike. Less almost than any other Europeans are they accustomed to overvalue the lives of themselves and their fellowcitizens. With them the joy of the fight has power to overcome fear and grief, and they had been used to great street-battles; but they had not been used of late to witness the slaughter of people unarmed and helpless. At the sight of what was done on that 4th of December the great city was struck down as though by a plague. A keeneyed Englishman, who chanced to come upon some of the people retreating from these scenes of slaughter, declared that their countenances were of a strange livid hue which he had never before seen. This was because he had never before seen the faces of men coming straight from the witnessing of a massacre. They say that the shock of being within sight and hearing the shrieks broke down the nervous strength of many a brave though

* The number of regiments operating against Paris was between thirty and forty, and of these about twenty belonged to the divisions which were actively employed in the work.

+ Including all officers and soldiers killed from the 3d to the 6th of December. The official return, 'Moniteur,' p. 3062.

tender man, and caused him to burst into sobs as СНАР. though he were a little child.

Before the morning of the 5th the armed insurrection had ceased. From the first, it had been feeble. On the other hand, the moral resistance which was opposed to the acts of the President and his associates had been growing in strength: and when the massacre began on the afternoon of the 4th of December, the power of this moral resistance was in the highest degree formidable. Yet it came to pass that, by reason of the strange prostration of mind which was wrought by the massacre, the armed insurrection dragged down with it in its fall the whole policy of those who conceived that by the mere force of opinion and ridicule they would be enabled to send the plotters to Vincennes. The Cause of those who intended to rely upon this scheme of moral resistance was in no way mixed up with the attempts of the men of the barricades, but still it was a Cause which depended upon the high spirit of the people; and it had happened that this spirit -perplexed and baffled on the 2d of December by a stratagem and a night attack-was now crushed out by sheer horror.

For her beauty, for her grandeur, for her historic fame, for her warlike deeds, for her power to lead the will of a mighty nation, and to crown or discrown its monarchs, no city on earth is worthy to be the rival of Paris. Yet, because of the palsy that came upon her after the slaughter on the Boulevard, this Paris-this beauteous, heroic Paris

XIV.

CHAP.

XIV.

Upon their

habit of ridiculing Louis Napoleon.

-this queen of great renown, was delivered bound into the hands of Prince Louis Bonaparte, and Morny, and Maupas or De Maupas, and St Arnaud formerly Le Roy. And the benefit which Prince Louis derived from the massacre was not transitory. It is a maxim of French politics that, happen what may, a man seeking to be a ruler of France must not be ridiculous. From 1836 until 1848 Prince Louis had never ceased to be obscure except by bringing upon himself the laughter of the world; and his election into the chair of the Presidency had only served to bring upon him a more constant outpouring of the scorn and sarcasm which Paris knows how to bestow.* Even the suddenness and perfect success of the blow struck in the night between the 1st and the 2d of December had failed to make Paris think of him with gravity. But it was otherwise after three o'clock on the 4th of December; and it happened that the most strenuous adversaries of this oddlyfated Prince were those who, in one respect, best served his cause; for the more they strove to show that he, and he alone, of his own design and malice had planned and ordered the massacre,+ the more completely they relieved him from the disqualification which had hitherto made it impossible for him to become the supreme ruler of

* A glance at the 'Charivari' for '49, '50, and the first eleven months of '51, would verify this statement. The stopping of the 'Charivari' was one of the very first exertions of absolute power which followed the night of the 2d of December.

+ It will be seen (see post) that I question the truth of this charge against him.