The old political leaders, amazed and confounded, submitted to the national choice, yet stood aloof from a man without political experience, who had always been an exile when he had not been a prisoner.  Most of them had supposed that Bonapartism was dead; but the peasantry in the provinces still were enthralled by the majesty and mighty prestige of that conqueror who had been too exalted for envy and too powerful to be resisted.  To the provincial votes chiefly Louis Napoleon owed his election as President,—­and the election was fair.  He came into power by the will of the nation if any man ever did,—­by the spontaneous enthusiasm of the people for the name he bore, not for his own abilities and services; and as he proclaimed, on his accession, a policy of peace (which the people believed) and loyalty to the Constitution,—­Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, the watchwords of the Revolution,—­even more, as he seemed to represent the party of order, he was regarded by such statesmen as Thiers and Montalembert as the least dangerous of the candidates; and they gave their moral support to his government, while they declined to take office under him.

The new President appointed the famous De Tocqueville as his first prime minister, who after serving a few months resigned, because he would not be the pliant tool of his master.  Louis Napoleon then had to select inferior men for his ministers, who also soon discovered that they were expected to be his clerks, not his advisers.  At first he was regarded by the leading classes with derision rather than fear,—­so mean was his personal appearance, so spiritless his address, so cold and dull was his eye, and so ridiculous were his antecedents.  “The French,” said Thiers, long afterward, “made two mistakes about Louis Napoleon,—­the first, when they took him for a fool; the second, when they took him for a man of genius.”  It was not until he began to show a will of his own, a determination to be his own prime minister, that those around him saw his dangerous ambition, his concealed abilities, and his unscrupulous character.

Nothing of importance marked the administration of the President, except hostility to the Assembly, and their endless debates on the constitution.  Both the President and the Assembly feared the influence of the ultra-democrats and Red Republicans,—­socialists and anarchists, who fomented their wild schemes among the common people of the large cities.  By curtailing the right of suffrage the Assembly became unpopular, and Louis Napoleon gained credit as the friend of order and law.

As the time approached when, by the Constitution, he would be obliged to lay down his office and return to private life, the President became restless, and began to plot for the continuance of his power.  He had tasted its sweets, and had no intention to surrender it.  If he could have been constitutionally re-elected, he probably would not have meditated a coup d’etat, for it was in accordance