w, those who have resisted me, those who are honor, right, and
law, them you will try,--and you will condemn them."

These irremovable judges kiss his boot, and set about investigating
_l'affaire des troubles_.

They swear fidelity to him, to boot.

Then he perceives, in a corner, the clergy, endowed, gold-laced, with
cross and cope and mitre, and he says:--

"Ah, you are there, Archbishop! Come here. Just bless all this for me."

And the Archbishop chants his _Magnificat_.

VI

WHAT THE MINISTERS, ARMY, MAGISTRACY, AND CLERGY HAVE DONE

Oh! what a striking thing and how instructive! "_Erudimini_," Bossuet
would say.

The Ministers fancied that they were dissolving the Assembly; they
dissolved the government.

The soldiers fired on the army and killed it.

The judges fancied that they were trying and convicting innocent
persons; they tried and convicted the irremovable magistracy.

The priests thought they were chanting hosannahs upon Louis Bonaparte;
they chanted a _De profundis_ upon the clergy.

VII

THE FORM OF THE GOVERNMENT OF GOD

When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the
thing itself.

Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide.

When they have weighed sufficiently long upon men, Providence, like the
sultan to his viziers, sends them the bowstring by a mute, and they
execute themselves.

Louis Bonaparte is the mute of Providence.

CONCLUSION--PART FIRST

PETTINESS OF THE MASTER--ABJECTNESS OF THE SITUATION

I

Never fear, History has him in its grip.

If perchance it flatters the self-love of M. Bonaparte to be seized by
history, if perchance, and truly one would imagine so, he cherishes any
illusion as to his value as a political miscreant, let him divest
himself of it.

Let him not imagine, because he has piled up horror on horror, that he
will ever raise himself to the elevation of the great historical
bandits. We have been wrong, perhaps, in some pages of this book, here
and there, to couple him with those men. No, although he has committed
enormous crimes, he will remain paltry. He will never be other than the
nocturnal strangler of liberty; he will never be other than the man who
intoxicated his soldiers, not with glory, like the first Napoleon, but
with wine; he will never be other than the pygmy tyrant of a great
people. Grandeur, even in infamy, is utterly inconsistent with the
calibre of the man. As di