ts, and a gorgeous Easter
Mass in Notre Dame celebrated the reestablishment of the Catholic
faith by Napoleon, the heir of the Revolution.

[Footnote 175: The services seem to have been not very dissimilar to a
modern Ethical Society meeting. The notorious Festival of the 20th
Brumaire was a Fete of Liberty not of Reason, the mistake being due to
a careless transcription in the _proces-verbal_ of the Convention. A
living representative of Liberty was chosen as less likely to tend to
idolatry than an image of stone. See _La Revolution Francaise_, 14th
April 1899, _La Deesse de la Liberte_.]

It is not within the scope of the present work to deal with the later
annals of Paris. Superficial students of her modern history have
freely charged her with political irresponsibility and fickleness; no
charge could be less warranted by facts. For a thousand years her
citizens were loyal and faithful subjects of a monarchy, and endured
for a century and a half an infliction of misgovernment, oppression
and grinding taxation such as probably no other European people would
have tolerated. With touching fidelity and indomitable steadfastness
they have cherished the principles of the Great Revolution, in whose
name they swept the shams and wrongs of the _ancien regime_ away.
There is a profounder truth than perhaps Alphonse Karr imagined in his
famous epigram, _Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose_. Every
political upheaval of the nineteenth century in Paris has been at
bottom an effort to realise the revolutionary ideals of political
freedom and social equality in the face of external violence or
internal corruption and treachery. Twice the hated Bourbons were
reimposed on the people of Paris by the bayonets of the foreigner:
twice they rose and chased them away. A compromise followed--that of a
citizen king, Louis Philippe of Orleans, once a Jacobin doorkeeper and
a soldier of the Revolution, who had fought valiantly at Valmy and
Jemappes--but he too identified himself with reactionary ministers,
and became a fugitive to England, the bourne of deposed kings. The
Second Republic which followed grew distrustful of the people and
disfranchised at one stroke 3,000,000 citizens: one of the causes of
the success of the _coup d'etat_ of Napoleon III. was an astute edict
which restored universal suffrage.

During the negation of political rectitude and decency which
characterised the period of the Second Empire, a little band of
Repu