allation, he succeeded in raising
this sum to its double: Odillon Barrot had wrung from the constitutive
assembly a yearly allowance of 600,000 francs for so-called
representation expenses. After June 13, Bonaparte hinted at similar
solicitations, to which, however, Barrot then turned a deaf ear. Now,
after May 31, he forthwith utilized the favorable moment, and caused
his ministers to move a civil list of three millions in the National
Assembly. A long adventurous, vagabond career had gifted him with the
best developed antennae for feeling out the weak moments when he could
venture upon squeezing money from his bourgeois. He carried on regular
blackmail. The National Assembly had maimed the sovereignty of the
people with his aid and his knowledge: he now threatened to denounce its
crime to the tribunal of the people, if it did not pull out its purse
and buy his silence with three millions annually. It had robbed three
million Frenchmen of the suffrage: for every Frenchman thrown "out of
circulation," he demanded a franc "in circulation." He, the elect of
six million, demanded indemnity for the votes he had been subsequently
cheated of. The Committee of the National Assembly turned the
importunate fellow away. The Bonapartist press threatened: Could the
National Assembly break with the President of the republic at a time
when it had broken definitely and on principle with the mass of the
nation? It rejected the annual civil list, but granted, for this once,
an allowance of 2,160,000 francs. Thus it made itself guilty of the
double weakness of granting the money, and, at the same time, showing
by its anger that it did so only unwillingly. We shall presently see
to what use Bonaparte put the money. After this aggravating after-play,
that followed upon the heels of the abolition of universal suffrage,
and in which Bonaparte exchanged his humble attitude of the days of
the crisis of March and April for one of defiant impudence towards the
usurping parliament, the National Assembly adjourned for three months,
from August 11, to November 11. It left behind in its place a Permanent
Committee of 18 members that contained no Bonapartist, but did contain
a few moderate republicans. The Permanent Committee of the year 1849 had
numbered only men of order and Bonapartists. At that time, however, the
party of Order declared itself in permanence against the revolution;
now the parliamentary republic declared itself in permanence against