onaparte! etc., etc., etc. This is all
true, and yet what has been, was what was to be. Let us say again,
under the shadow of that monstrous victory vast and definitive progress
is taking place. The 2nd of December succeeded, because in more than
one point of view, I repeat, it was good that it should succeed. All
explanations are just, but all are vain. The invisible hand is mingled
in all this. Louis Bonaparte committed the crime; Providence brought
about the result.

In truth, it was essential that _order_ should come to the end of
its logic. It was essential that people should learn, and should learn
for all time, that, in the mouths of the men of the past, that word
_order_ signifies false oaths, perjury, pillage of the public cash-box,
civil war, courts-martial, confiscation, sequestration, deportation,
transportation, proscription, fusillades, police, censorship,
degradation of the army, disregard of the people, debasement of France,
a dumb Senate, the tribune overthrown, the press suppressed, a political
guillotine, murder of liberty, garroting of the right, violation of
laws, sovereignty of the sword, massacre, treason, ambuscades. The
spectacle that we have before our eyes is a profitable spectacle. What
we see in France since the 2nd of December is the debauch of order.

Yes, the hand of Providence is in it. Reflect, too, upon this: for
fifty years the Republic and the Empire have filled men's imaginations,
the one with its souvenirs of terror, the other with its souvenirs of
glory. Of the Republic men saw only 1793, that is to say, the terrible
revolutionary necessity,--the furnace; of the Empire they saw only
Austerlitz. Hence a prejudice against the Republic, and prestige for
the Empire. Now, what is the future of France to be? is it the Empire?
No, it is the Republic.

It became necessary to reverse that situation, to suppress the prestige
of that which cannot be restored, and to suppress the prejudice against
that which must be. Providence did it: it destroyed those two mirages.
February came and took away from the Republic its terror; Louis
Bonaparte came and deprived the Empire of its prestige. Henceforth,
1848, fraternity, is superimposed upon 1793, terror; Napoleon the
Little is superimposed upon Napoleon the Great. The two grand things,
one of which alarmed and the other dazzled, are receding. We perceive
'93 only through its justification, and Napoleon only through his
caricature; the foolish fe