Part 78 (1/2)
”At whom? At what?”
”At what is going on. It is true I was wrong to laugh.”
”At the same time you talked?”
”Yes.”
”Of whom?”
”Of the President.”
”What did you say?”
”Indeed, what may be said with justice, that he had broken his oath.”
”And then?”
”That he had not the right to arrest the Representatives.”
”You said that?”
”Yes. And I added that he had not the right to kill people on the boulevard....”
Here the condemned man interrupted himself and exclaimed,--
”And thereupon they send me to Cayenne!”
The judge looks fixedly at the prisoner, and answers,--”Well, then?”
Another form of justice:--
Three miscellaneous personages, three removable functionaries, a Prefect, a soldier, a public prosecutor, whose only conscience is the sound of Louis Bonaparte's bell, seated themselves at a table and judged. Whom? You, me, us, everybody. For what crimes? They invented crimes. In the name of what laws? They invented laws. What penalties did they inflict? They invented penalties. Did they know the accused? No.
Did they listen to him? No. What advocates did they listen to? None.
What witnesses did they question? None. What deliberation did they enter upon? None. What public did they call in? None. Thus, no public, no deliberation, no counsellors, no witnesses, judges who are not magistrates, a jury where none are sworn in, a tribunal which is not a tribunal, imaginary offences, invented penalties, the accused absent, the law absent; from all these things which resembled a dream there came forth a reality: the condemnation of the innocent.
Exile, banishment, transportation, ruin, home-sickness, death, and despair for 40,000 families.
That is what History calls the Mixed Commissions.
Ordinarily the great crimes of State strike the great heads, and content themselves with this destruction; they roll like blocks of stone, all in one piece, and break the great resistances; ill.u.s.trious victims suffice for them. But the Second of December had its refinements of cruelty; it required in addition petty victims. Its appet.i.te for extermination extended to the poor and to the obscure, its anger and animosity penetrated as far as the lowest cla.s.s; it created fissures in the social subsoil in order to diffuse the proscription there; the local triumvirates, nicknamed ”mixed mixtures,” served it for that. Not one head escaped, however humble and puny. They found means to impoverish the indigent, to ruin those dying of hunger, to spoil the disinherited; the _coup d'etat_ achieved this wonderful feat of adding misfortune to misery. Bonaparte, it seems, took the trouble to hate a mere peasant; the vine-dresser was torn from his vine, the laborer from his furrow, the mason from his scaffold, the weaver from his loom. Men accepted this mission of causing the immense public calamity to fall, morsel by morsel, upon the humblest walks of life. Detestable task! To crumble a catastrophe upon the little and on the weak.
CHAPTER XIV.
A RELIGIOUS INCIDENT