On Saturday, March 4, all Paris crowded to the Boulevards to witness the funeral cortege of the victims.  There were neither military nor police to keep order; yet the crowd was on its good behavior, and strict decorum was maintained.  There were about three hundred thousand persons in the procession, and as many more on the sidewalks.  As they marched, mourners and spectators all sang the Chant of the Girondins ("Mourir pour la Patrie”) and the “Marseillaise.”

Two things distinguished this revolution of February from all other French revolutions before or after it,—­the high character and self-devotion of the men placed at the head of affairs, and the absence of prejudice against religion.  The revolution, so far from putting itself in antagonism with religious feeling, everywhere appealed to it.  The men who invaded the Tuileries bowed before the crucifix in the queen’s chamber.  Priests who were known to be zealous workers among the poor were treated as fathers. Cures blessed the trees of liberty planted in their parishes.  Prayers for the Republic were offered at the altars, and in country villages priests headed the men of their congregations who marched up to the polls.

[Illustration:  ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE.]

CHAPTER VII.

LAMARTINE AND THE SECOND REPUBLIC.[1]

[Footnote 1:  For the subject-matter of this chapter I am largely indebted to Mrs. Oliphant’s article on Lamartine in “Blackwood’s Magazine.”]

The Provisional Government hastily set up in France on Feb. 24, 1848, consisted at first of five members; but that number was afterwards enlarged.  M. Dupin, who had been President of the Chamber of Deputies, was made President of the Council (or prime minister); but the real head of the Government and Minister for Foreign Affairs was Alphonse de Lamartine.  He was a Christian believer, a high-minded man, by birth an aristocrat, yet by sympathy a man of the masses.  “He was full of sentimentalities of vainglory and of personal vanity; but no pilot ever guided a ship of state so skilfully and with such absolute self-devotion through an angry sea.  For a brief while, just long enough to effect this purpose, he was the idol of the populace.”  With him were associated Cremieux, a Jew; Ledru-Rollin, the historian, a Red Republican; Arago, the astronomer; Hypolite Carnot, son of Lazare Carnot, Member of the Directory, father of the future president; General Casaignac, who was made governor of Algeria; Garnier-Pages, who a second time became, in 1870, member of a Provisional Government for the defence of Paris; and several others.