XIV. CHAP. ful presence of M. Faucher he came away sobbing, and people who knew the truth supposed him to be for ever disgraced and ruined; but he went and told his sorrows to the President. The President of course instantly saw that the man could be suborned. He and made admitted him into the plot, and on the 27th of October appointed him Prefect of Police. He is suborned Prefect of Police. Persigny, properly Fialin, was in the plot. He was descended, on one side, of an ancient family, and, disliking his father's name, he seems to have called himself for many years after the name of his maternal grandfather. He began life as a non-commissioned officer. As he himself said, † his instinct was 'to serve ;' and at first he served the Legitimists, but chance brought him into contact with Louis Bonaparte, and he very soon became the attached friend of the Prince, and his partner in all his plans and adventures. If Morny was merely taking up the Bonaparte cause as one of many other money speculations, Persigny could truly say that he had made it for years his profession, and had even tried as well as he could to raise it to the dignity of a real political principle. But the part intrusted to Persigny on this occasion, though possibly an important one, was not of a conspicuous sort. It is said that, the firmness of the Prince Louis Bonaparte being distrusted by his comrades, Persigny, who was of a sanguine, hopeful nature, was to remain constantly at the * This, I think, was the account which he gave upon his trial in 1840 He was tried by the description of Fialin dit Persigny. + Before the Chamber of Peers, 1840. XIV. Elysée in order to receive the tidings which would be CHAP. coming in during the period of danger, and prevent them from reaching the President in such a way as to shake him and cause despondency. At all events, it would seem that the hand of Persigny was not the hand employed to execute the measures of the Elysée; and to this circumstance he owes it that he will not always have to stand in the same sentences with Morny, and Fleury, and Maupas, and St Arnaud, formerly Le Roy. ance for the Na It was necessary to take measures for paralysing Contriv the National Guard; but the force was under the paralysing command of General Perrot, a man whose honesty tional could not be tampered with. To dismiss him sud- Guard. denly would be to excite suspicion. The following expedient was adopted; The President appointed as Chief of the Staff of the National Guard a person named Vieyra. The past life and the then repute of this person were of such a kind, that General Perrot, it seems, conceived himself insulted by the nomination, and instantly resigned. That was what the brethren of the Elysée wanted. On Sunday the 30th General Lawæstine was appointed to the command. He was a man who had fought in the great wars, but, now in his grey hairs, he was not too proud to accept the part designed for him. His function was, not to lead the force of which he took the command, but to prevent it from acting. It was unnecessary to admit either Lawæstine or Vieyra to a complete knowledge of the plot, because all that they were to do was to frustrate the assembly of the CHAP. National Guard by withholding all orders and preventing the drums from beating to arms. XIV. The army. Its indig nation at M. Baze's proposal. Of course the engine on which the brethren of the Elysée rested their main hopes was the army; and it was known that the remembrance of humiliating conflicts in the streets of Paris had long been embittering the temper in which the troops regarded the people of the capital. Moreover, it happened that at this time the Legislative Assembly had been agitated by a discussion which inflamed the troops with fresh anger against civilians in general, but more especially against the Parisians, against the representatives of the people, and against statesmen and politicians of all kinds. A portion of the Chambers, foreseeing that the army might be used against the freedom of the Legislative Body, had desired that the Assembly should avail itself of a provision in the Constitution which empowered it, not only to have an armed force for its protection, but to have that force under the order of its own nominee. This was a scheme which shocked the mind of the army. In France, of late years, the Minister of War had always been a soldier, and an order from him (though it was in reality the order of a member of the civil Government) was habitually regarded by military men as the order of a General having supreme command. A proposal to change this system by giving to the Assembly a direct control over a portion of the land-forces could be easily represented to the soldiery as a plan for withdrawing the French army from the control of its Gene XIV. rals, and placing it under the command of men whom CHAP. the soldiers called 'lawyers.' Seen in this light, the project so exasperated the feelings of the troops, that if it had been carried they would probably have been stirred up at once to effect by force a violent change of the Constitution. The measure was rejected; but anger is not always appeased by the removal of the kindling motive; and the soreness created by the mere agitation of the question had been so well kept up by the means employed for the purpose, that the garrison of Paris now came to look upon the people with a well-defined feeling of spite. Selection of regiments and of officers Paris. Care had been taken to bring into Paris and its neighbourhood the regiments most likely to serve the purpose of the Elysée, and to give the command for the to generals who might be expected to act without Army of scruples. The forces in Paris and its neighbourhood were under the orders of General Magnan. Magnan. At the time of Louis Napoleon's descent upon the coast near Boulogne, Magnan had had the misfortune to be singled out by the Prince as a person to whom it was fitting to offer a bribe of £4000. He had also had the misfortune to be detected in continuing his intercourse with the officer who had thought it safe to come with a proposal like that into the presence of a French general. Magnan did not conceal his willingness to go all brethren, it appears, wished to bring him completely into the plot, but his panegyrist (not seeing, perhaps, the full import of his disclosure) causes it * lengths, and the *This is inferred from what follows. XIV. CHAP. to be known that the General, though ready to act against Paris and against the Assembly, declined to risk his safety by avowedly joining in the plot. 'He expressly requested,' says Granier de Cassaignac, 'not to be apprised until the moment for taking the necessary dispositions and mounting on horseback.'* In other words, though he was willing to use the forces under his command in destroying the Constitution, and in effecting such slaughter as might be needed for the purpose, he refused to dispense with the screen afforded by an order from the Minister of War. In the event of the enterprise failing he would be able to say, 'I refused to participate in any 'plot. The duty of a soldier is obedience. Here 'is the order which I received from General St 'Arnaud. I did no more than obey my commanding 'officer.' Meeting of twenty generals at Mag nan's house. On the 27th of November, however, this Magnan assembled twenty generals whom he had under his command, and gave them to understand that they might soon be called upon to act against Paris and against the Constitution. They promised a zealous and thoroughgoing obedience; and although every one of them, from Magnan downwards, was to have the pleasing shelter of an order from his superior officer, they all seem to have imagined that their determination was of the sort which mankind call heroic; for their panegyrist relates with pride that when Magnan and his twenty generals were entering into this league and covenant against the * Granier de Cassaignac, vol ii. |