“The Government pretends to believe in a Chamber elected by universal suffrage, and yet dares not trust the votes of the electors; but mark my words, this tampering with an election is for the last time.  What will succeed the Empire, I know not.  God grant it may not be our country’s ruin!  But the state of things under which we live cannot last long.  It is incumbent on honest men to lay before the emperor the state of the country, which his ministers do their best to keep from him.  For a long time I kept silent,—­it was no use to knock one’s head against a wall; but now we have revolution staring us in the face, as the alternative with the Empire.”

As the little man said this, we are told that the fire in his eyes gleamed through his spectacles; and as he walked about the room, he seemed to grow taller and taller.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Blackwood’s Magazine.]

The new constitutional ministry, into whose hands the emperor proposed to resign despotic power and to rule thenceforward as constitutional sovereign, had for its chief M. Emile Ollivier; Marshal Le Boeuf (made marshal on the field of Magenta) was the Minister of War.

The debates in the Chamber were all stormy.  The opposition might not be numerous, but it was fierce and determined.  It scoffed at the idea of France being free when elections were tampered with to sustain the Government; and finally things came to such a pass that the emperor resolved to play again his tromp-card, and to call a plebiscite to say whether the French people approved of him and wished to continue his dynasty.  They were to vote simply Yes or No.

There was not such open tampering this time with the vote as there had been in the election of the deputies, but all kinds of Government influences were brought to bear on prefects, maires, and other official personages, especially in the villages.  The result was that 7,250,000 Frenchmen voted Yes, and one and a half million, No.  But to the emperor’s intense surprise and mortification, and in spite of all precautions, there were 42,000 Noes from the army.  It was a terrible discovery to the emperor that there was disaffection among his soldiers.  Promotion, many men believed, had for some years been distributed through favoritism.  The men had little confidence in their officers, the officers complained loudly of their men.  A dashing exploit in Algeria made up for irregularities of discipline.  Even the staff officers were deficient in geography, and the stories that afterwards came to light of the way in which the War Department collected worthless stores, while serviceable ones existed only on paper, seem almost incredible.  Yet when war was declared, Emile Ollivier said that he went into it with a light heart, and Marshal Le Boeuf was reported to have told the emperor that he would not find so much as one button missing on his soldiers’ gaiters.