XLVII. to Dupont de l'Eure to read out the names. They were CHAP. those of Dupont himself, Lamartine, Arago, Crémieux, Marie, and Ledru-Rollin. They were accepted by the mixed multitude. And Lamartine immediately set off to exercise his authority at the Hôtel de Ville. LedruRollin, however, tarried a little. He saw something informal in the list, and he read it over again from the tribune, adding the name of Garnier Pagès, and he met with equal acclamations; and then Ledru, with others, hastened after Lamartine to the great centre of popular authority. Meantime the King and his family had directed their flight first to St. Cloud, then to Trianon, and subsequently to Dreux, the place of the family sepulture. There learning that the regency had been set aside, the royal fugitive travelled in disguise to the coast near Honfleur. He at first hoped to embark at Trouville, but difficulties intervening, the King, under the guidance of the English consul, ventured in disguise over to Havre, and thence embarked on board an English packet, which conveyed him safely across the Channel. Claremont was offered by the Queen as the place of residence for the exiled family, and here the dethroned monarch did not long survive. Nothing can more clearly show than his fall how much stronger situations and insurrections are than men. Louis-Philippe smiled with pity in 1830 on the imbecility and blindness with which Charles the Tenth rushed on his fate. Yet eighteen years later he himself showed the same blindness, the same ignorance of the danger before him, and of the spirit of the people which he governed. Human prudence failed the one as completely as divine right blinded the other. LouisPhilippe thought himself both right and safe as long as he scrupulously kept within the letter of constitutional law, without perceiving that he totally nullified its spirit. Neither he nor M. Guizot perceived the danger of their position, and that in case of an émeute XLVIII. CHAP. the monarch's unpopularity would array the National Guard as well as the people against them, and that in the face of this the army would be reluctant to act. To be sure, the government was always able to prevent an émeute. And there indeed was their only chance. But a variety of circumstances deceived the government into allowing full play and space for the commencement of the insurrection, which, once aroused and in conflagration, it was no longer possible by human means to suppress. CHAPTER XLVIII. THE SECOND REPUBLIC. 1848-1852. THUS did the National Guard, the students, and the people, excited by the Liberal minority of parliament, overthrow the King, his government and his functionary following, supported by the class of the highest tax-payers, who had the monopoly of the electoral power. Nothing can be more erroneous than to characterise the revolution of 1848 as a victory of the people over the bourgeoisie. It was the middle classes especially who murmured against the government, and rendered powerless the arms in its hands, for it was the presence and the voice of the National Guard in the émeute which deprived the soldiers of all enthusiasm, the generals of all hope, the King of all courage. Had the monarchy been one of the middle classes, it would not have perished so pusillanimously. But it was a monarchy founded by a group of notables, a pseudoaristocracy, and carrying on its government by them alone, thus becoming estranged from any of the great divisions which a nation naturally forms. It has been the fashion of late years to make the bourgeoisie the target for speculative abuse, the scapegoat of political ill; and Louis-Philippe's reign and fate have been the occasion for showers of vituperation upon the middle classes. His was styled their peculiar monarchy, the monarchy of the middle classes, and they CHAP. XLVIII. XLVIII. СНАР. are taunted with not having maintained it. But monarchy is not the natural or favourite regimen of the middle classes. It is that of the highly born, and highly placed, the fastidiously reared, the intellectually educated. But the class whose brain is devoted to industry, and making pecuniary profit of its dealings with other men-this class is essentially republican in its habits, its aspirations, its ideas. In a highly aristocratic and wealthy society, indeed, that portion of the middle class which cater to it, or profit by it, take, of course, like the cameleon, the colour of the substance or support on which it lives; and so the middle classes in many countries were and may still be aristocratic. But this is passing. At last and at length the wide public has become the best patron and the best chapman; and the industrial capitalist, who first doffed his hat to his rich customer, turns to bestow his attention, if not his courtesy, upon the people. The middle classes are thus by nature definitively republican. It was a monarchy, surrounded by republican institutions, they looked to, and were promised in 1830, and the promise being broken, they withdrew their confidence and support. If the well-provided and well-educated classes be monarchic, rational constitutional limited monarchists, if the spirit and tendencies of the middle and industrious classes be republican, what are the people, what the labourers, the earners, not of luxuries, but bread, the prolétaires, as the French call them? Politicians themselves would make believe that such are the only republicans. They are no such thing. If you restrict the state to a city, register its impoverished classes, give them bread at their homes, and places at the theatres, they will in return fill the Forum on stated occasions, and gratefully perform the part of a political mob. But republicans they are not. They much prefer a great personality to any universal or written principle. They will, like the Romans, when fed with the Panem and Circenses, or, XLVIII. like the Sans-culottes of the Terrorists, clamour and fight CHAP. for those who feed and flatter them. But to be governed by peaceable, humane, intelligent, and superior citizens, is what the people will not long tolerate. A dictator to drive a nail is their idea of superior government. Be the nail war, or agrarian law, or universal suffrage, or equality, that is an humbling of the great to the common level-for such causes as these a people will fling up their caps. But their mode of doing it is to do it by a dictator. Riots, of course, lead the way, and anarchy follows. But an absolute ruler is the necessary heir of anarchy. To him the people always tend when they take matters into their own hands. They show no respect to a legally-formed monarchy unless they are still in the infant state of feudal serfism. They cannot comprehend, much less support, a republic. But despotism, that is, absolute power exercised, or pretended to be exercised, in their peculiar interest, that is the true popular regimen, the inevitable euthanasia of democracy. If this account of the spirit and political tendencies of different classes be true, it fully explains the failure of the three systems of government essayed between 1815 and 1852. The elder Bourbons established a monarchy, which, if fairly conducted, might have had the support, for a very long period, of the middle class. as well as of all above them. The tendency downwards was indeed inevitable, but by gratifying it to a certain degree, and taking advantage of the natural oscillations of political feeling, it might have endured. But the court, the squires, and the clergy, would be contented with nothing less than restoring the past. They would have a monarchy such as the intelligent classes of the day could not tolerate, and thus arrayed the best and most natural support of monarchy against them. The second attempt, that of Louis-Philippe, might have succeeded too, no longer as a monarchy of the upper and intelligent classes, but as a nominal monarchy and a |