mphatic effort of their
own to be rid of that government. If Louis Philippe, in 1848, would have
allowed Marshal Bugeaud to use the force at his command in Paris, the
Republic improvised in February of that year would have been strangled
before birth, to the extreme satisfaction of an enormous majority of the
French people. This was afterwards overwhelmingly shown by the election
of Louis Napoleon, when General Cavaignac, with all the advantage of the
control of the machinery of government at Paris, could secure only a
relatively insignificant popular vote at the polls against the
representative of the imperial monarchy. I spent the winter in Paris two
years afterwards as a youth, during my first tour in Europe, and I there
heard an American resident of Paris, well known at that time in the
world of French politics, Mr. George Sumner, a brother of the senator
from Massachusetts, relate in the _salon_ of M. de Tocqueville a curious
story of the days of February, which strikingly illustrates the
disposition of the French provinces at that time to take whatever Paris
might send them in the way either of administration or of revolution.

The king refused to let the Marechal Duc d'Isly restore order (as there
is no doubt he could easily and quickly have done), on the ground that
he had received the Crown from the National Guard in Paris, and that he
would not allow it to be defended by the line against them. The recently
published letters of his very popular son, the Duc d'Orleans, prove
that, had that prince been then living, he probably would never have
allowed this scruple to stand in the way of averting a social and
political catastrophe. But the duc was in his untimely grave, and the
control of events fell most unexpectedly into the hands of a few men who
had no concerted plan of action, and, indeed, hardly knew whether they
were awake or dreaming. 'They proclaimed a republic,' said Mr. Sumner,
'because they did not know what else to do;' but they were in a state of
utter bewilderment at first, as to how they should get the republic
accepted by the provinces. A happy thought struck M. Armand Marrast. In
those days the French railway system was little developed. Most of the
mails from Paris were carried through the country by malles-postes and
diligences, and every evening an immense number of these coaches left
the central bureau for all parts of France. M. Marrast sent into all the
quarters of Paris and impounded, in on