4th December 1851, by means of which he terrorised France for many years. Notwithstanding, as to numbers it was quite insignificant compared with the slaughter which followed the taking of Paris by the bourgeois 192 troops at the time of the fall of the Commune 1n 1871.
This successful stroke had really no relation to any foregoing reactionary dictatorship. It even professed to be founded on democratic feeling, though as a matter of fact it was the expression of the non-political side of bourgeois life—the social and commercial side—the ideal of the shopkeeper grown weary of revolutions and anxious to be let alone to make money and enjoy himself vulgarly. Accordingly France settled down into a period of “law and order,” characterised by the most shameless corruption and repulsive shoddy splendour. She got at last into full swing of the rule of successful stock-jobbery, already established in England, and carried it on with less hypocrisy than ourselves, and consequently with more open blackguardism.
To sustain this regime various showy military enterprises were undertaken, some of which it was attempted to invest with a kind of democratic sentiment. It was also of some importance to make at least a show of giving employment to 193 the working classes of France. This principally took the form of the rebuilding of Paris and the restoration, or vulgarisation, of the mediæval cathedrals and public buildings, in which France is richer than any other country; so that this apotheosis of middle-class vulgarity has left abiding tokens of its presence in a loss that can never be repaired. Yet in spite of this militarism and the attempt to gain the support of the proletarians by gifts of “bread and pageants,” discontent of various kind sprang up and steadily increased. Moreover, the new birth of Socialism was beginning to bear fruit; the Communistic propaganda got firm hold of the city proletariat of France. Socialism was steadily preached in Paris at La Villette and Belleville, the latter, originally laid out and built upon as an elegant suburb for rich bourgeois, having proved a failure, and become a purely workman’s quarter in consequence.