XIV. ported, there were some thousands of Frenchmen CHAP. who were made to undergo sufferings too horrible to be here told. I speak of those who were enclosed in the casemates of the fortresses and huddled down between the decks of the Canada and the Duguesclin. These hapless beings were, for the most part, men attached to the cause of the Republic. It would seem that of the two thousand men whose sufferings are the most known, a great part were men whose lives had been engaged in literary pursuits; for amongst them there were authors of some repute, editors of newspapers, and political writers of many grades, besides lawyers, physicians, and others whose labours in the field of politics had been mainly labours of the intellectual sort. The torments inflicted upon these men lasted from two to three months. It was not till the second week in March that a great many of them came out into the light and the pure air of heaven. Because of what they had suffered they were hideous and terrible to look upon. The hospitals received many. It is right that the works which testify of these things should be indicated as authorities on which the narrator founds his passing words.* But unless a man be under some special motive for learning the detailed truth, it would be well for him to close his eyes against those horrible pages; for if once he looks and reads, the recol * Le Coup d'Etat,' par Xavier Durrieu, ancien Representant du Peuple. 'Histoire de la Terreur Bonapartiste,' par Hippolyte Magen. XIV. CHAP. lection of the things he reads of may haunt him and weigh upon his spirit till he longs and longs in vain to recover his ignorance of what, even in this his own time, has been done to living men.* The Causes rendering free election impossible. XVIII. At length the time came for the operation of what was called the Plebiscite. The arrangements of the plotters had been of such a kind as to allow France no hope of escape from anarchy and utter chaos, except by submitting herself to the dictatorship of Louis Bonaparte; for although the President in his Proclamation had declared that if the country did not like his Presidency they might choose some other in his place, no such alternative 6 * I have not ventured to speak of the numbers of these hapless sufferers further than to use the phrase, the two thousand men whose sufferings are the best known;' but the highly qualified writer referred to in the foot-note, p. 298, conceived himself warranted in venturing upon the following words :— 'All that is known is, that about three thousand two hundred 'have since disappeared from Paris; they may have been killed ' in the Boulevards, and thrown into the large pits in which 'those who fell on that day were promiscuously interred; they may have been among the hundreds who were put to death in 'the courtyards of the barracks, or in the subterraneous passages of the Tuileries; they may be in the casemates of Fort 'Bicêtre, or in the bagnes of Rochefort, or they may be at sea on their way to Cayenne. We have already 'stated that the number of persons undergoing or sentenced by 'these cruelties is believed to exceed ten thousand. A hun'dred thousand more are supposed to be in the vaults and case' mates which the French dignify with the name of prisons, ' often piled, crammed, and wedged together so closely that they can scarcely change their positions.' 'Edinburgh Re'view,' vol. xcv. p. 319.-Note to 4th Edition. 6 XIV. was really offered. The choice given to the elec- CHAP. tors did not even purport to be anything but a choice between Louis Bonaparte and nothing. According to the wording of the Plebiscite, a vote given for any candidate other than Louis Bonaparte would have been null. An elector was only permitted to vote 'Yes,' or vote 'No;' and it seems plain that the prospect of anarchy involved in the negative vote would alone have operated as a sufficing menace. Therefore, even if the collection of the suffrages had been carried on with perfect fairness, the mere stress of the question proposed would have made it impossible that there should be a free election: the same central power which, nearly four years before, had compelled the terrified nation to pretend that it loved a republic, would have now forced the same helpless people to kneel, and say they chose for their one only lawgiver the man recommended to them by Monsieur de Morny. Having the army and the whole executive power in their hands, and having preordained the question to be put to the people, the brethren of the Elysée, it would seem, might have safely allowed the proceeding to go to its sure conclusion without further coercing the vote; and if they had done thus, they would have given a colour to the assertion that the result of the Plebiscite was a national ratification of their act. But, remembering what they had done, and having blood on their hands, they did not venture upon a free election. What they did was this: XIV. CHAP. they placed thirty-two departments under martial law; and since they wanted nothing more than a sheet of paper and a pen and ink in order to place every other department in the same preThe election dicament, it can be said without straining a word, that potentially, or actually, the whole of France was under martial law. under martial law. Violent measures taken for coercing the election. Therefore men voted under the sword. But martial law is only one of the circumstances which constitute the difference between an honest election and a Plebiscite of the Bonaparte sort. Of course, for all effective action on the part of multitudes, some degree of concert is needful; and on the side of the plotters, using as they did the resistless engine of the executive government, the concert was perfect. To the adversaries of the Elysée all effective means of concerted action were forbidden by Morny and Maupas. Not only could they have no semblance of a public meeting, but they could not even venture upon the slightest approach to those lesser gatherings which are needed for men who want to act together. Of course, in these days, the chief engine for giving concerted and rational action to bodies of men is the Press. But, except for the uses of the Elysée, there was no Press. All journals hostile to the plot were silenced. Not a word could be printed which was unfavourable to Monsieur Morny's candidate for the dictatorship. Even the printing and distributing of negative voting-tickets was made penal; and during the ceremony which was called an election,' several persons were actually XIV. arrested, and charged with the offence of distri- CHAP. buting negative voting - tickets, or persuading others to vote against the President. It was soon made clear that, so far as concerned his means of taking a real part in the election, every adversary of the Elysée was as helpless as a man deaf and dumb. In one department it was decreed that any one spreading reports or suggesting fears tending to disquiet the people, should be instantly arrested and brought before a court-martial.* In another, every society, and indeed every kind of meeting, however few the persons composing it might be, was in terms prohibited; † and it was announced that any man disobeying the order would be deemed to be a member of a secret society within the meaning of the terrible decree of the 8th of December, and liable to transportation.‡ In the same department it was decreed, that every one hawking or distributing printed tickets, or even manuscripts, unless authorised by the mayor or the juge de paix, should be prosecuted; and the same prefect, in almost mad rage against freedom, proclaimed that any one who was caught in an endeavour to 'propagate an opinion' should be deemed guilty of exciting to civil war and instantly handed over to the judicial authority.§ In another department the sub-prefect announced * Arrêté du Général d'Alphonse, Commandant l'état de siège dans le Departement du Cher, Article 4. + Arrêté du Préfet de la Haute Garonne, Articles 1, 2, 3. |