XIV. been seized by a small knot of men slyly acting in CHAP. concert, and when the Parliamentary and judicial authority which might restrain their violence had been all at once overthrown, the Church of France, surviving in the midst of ruined institutions, became suddenly invested with a great power to do good or to do evil. She might stand between the armed man and his victim; she might turn away wrath; she might make conditions for prostrate France. Or, taking a yet loftier stand, she might resolve to choose -and choose sternly-between right and wrong. She chose. The priesthood of France were, upon the whole, a zealous, unworldly, devoted body of men; but already the Church which they served had been gained over to the President by the arrangements which led to the siege and occupation of Rome. Therefore, although the priests perceived that Maupas, coming privily in the night-time, had seized the generals and the statesmen of France, and had shut up the Parliament, and driven the judges from the judgmentseat, still it seemed to them that, because of Rome, they ought to side with Maupas. So far as concerned her political action in this time of trial, they suffered the Church of France to degenerate into a mere subdepartment of the Home Office. In the rural districts, when the time for the Plebiscite came, they fastened tickets marked 'Yes' upon their people, and drove them in flocks to the poll. Every institution in the country being thus suborned or enslaved or shattered, the brethren of the France dismanned. CHAP. Elysée resolved to follow up their victory over XIV. France. In the sense which will presently appear they resolved to disman her. It had resulted, from the political state of France during several years, that great numbers of the most stirring men in the country had belonged to clubs, which the law called 'secret societies.' A net thrown over this class would gather into its folds whole myriads of honest men ; and indeed it has been computed that the number of persons then alive who at one time or other had belonged to some kind of 'secret society,' amounted to no less than two millions. If French citizens at some period of their lives had belonged to societies forbidden by Statute, it was enough (and, after a ́ lapse of time, much more than enough) that the penalties of the law which they had disobeyed should be enforced against them. But it was not this, nor the like of this, that was done. Prince Louis Bonaparte and Morny, with the advice and consent of Maupas, issued a retro-operative decree, by which all these hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen were made liable to be instantly seized, and transported either to the penal settlements in Africa, or to the torrid swamps of Cayenne.* The decree was as comprehensive as a law would be in England if it enacted that every man who had ever attended a political meeting might be now suddenly transported; but it was a hundred times less merciful; for, in general, to be banished to Cayenne was to be put to a slow, cruel, horrible death. Morny and * Decree of 8th December, inserted in the 'Moniteur' of the 9th. XIV. Maupas pressed and pressed the execution of this CHAP. almost incredible decree with a ferocity which must have sprung in the first instance from terror, and was afterwards kept alive for the sake of that hideous sort of popularity which was to be gained by calling men Socialists, and then fiercely hunting them down. None will ever know the number of men who at this period were either killed or imprisoned in France, or sent to die in Africa or Cayenne; but the panegyrist of Louis Bonaparte and his fellow-plotters acknowledges that the number of people who were seized and transported within the few weeks which followed the 2d of December, amounted to the enormous number 26,500 of twenty-six thousand five hundred.* France perhaps could have borne the loss of many tens of thousand of ordinary soldiers and workmen without being visibly weakened; but no nation in the world-no, not even France herself is so abounding in the men who will dare something for honour and liberty, as to be able to bear to lose in one month between twenty and thirty thousand men, seized from out of her most stirring and most courageous citizens. It could not be but that what remained of France when she had thus been stricken should for years seem to languish and to be of a poor spirit. This is why I have chosen to say that France was dismanned. But besides the men killed and the men transported, there were some thousands of Frenchmen who were made to undergo sufferings too horrible to be here told. I speak of those who were enclosed in * Granier de Cassaignac. men trans ported. France dismanned. CHAP. Elysée resolved to follow up their victory over XIV. France. In the sense which will presently appear they resolved to disman her. It had resulted, from the political state of France during several years, that great numbers of the most stirring men in the country had belonged to clubs, which the law called 'secret societies.' A net thrown over this class would gather into its folds whole myriads of honest men ; and indeed it has been computed that the number of persons then alive who at one time or other had belonged to some kind of 'secret society,' amounted to no less than two millions. If French citizens at some period of their lives had belonged to societies forbidden by Statute, it was enough (and, after a' lapse of time, much more than enough) that the penalties of the law which they had disobeyed should be enforced against them. But it was not this, nor the like of this, that was done. Prince Louis Bonaparte and Morny, with the advice and consent of Maupas, issued a retro-operative decree, by which all these hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen were made liable to be instantly seized, and transported either to the penal settlements in Africa, or to the torrid swamps of Cayenne.* The decree was as comprehensive as a law would be in England if it enacted that every man who had ever attended a political meeting might be now suddenly transported; but it was a hundred times less merciful. for, in general, to be banished to Cayenne was to b put to a slow, cruel, horrible death. Morny an * Decree of 8th December, inserted in the 'Moniteur' of the 9th. |