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The whole result of the plebiscitum in France, showed upwards of seven millions of affirmative, and one million and a half of negative votes; the exact numbers being 7,257,379 and 1,530,000. Besides this was the Algerian vote, about 41,000 against something more than 19,000. The Imperialist party sidered it a triumph, inasmuch as it expressed a more loyal state of public opinion than did the parliamentary election of 1869. The Republicans exulted in pointing out that the eight million voices which hailed Napoleon to the Empire in 1852 were no longer to be counted as representing the acquiescence of France after experience of eighteen years of personal rule. But it was the vote of the army which really troubled the Emperor, and in spite of the calm face he put upon it, the certainty of a growing defection in that cherished quarter rankled in him, till it led, along with other influences, to those sinister results which will have hereafter to be recorded. Meanwhile he took care to deny the impression it had made upon him. In a letter addressed to Marshal Canrobert, and by him communicated to the troops of the army of Paris, he said, "Rumours so ridiculous and exaggerated have been spread in reference to the vote of the army, that I feel myself prompted to request you to assure the generals, officers, and privates under your command that my confidence in them has never been shaken. I ask you to inform General Lebrun, especially, that I congratulate him and the troops under his command on the admirable firmness and cool selfcommand of which they have given proof during the last few days in the suppression of those riots which are troubling the capital."

Many thought he betrayed his uneasiness unwisely in taking any notice at all of these rumours. The riots in question occurred after the plebiscitum was over, on the evening of Monday the 9th, and again on the following day. On the first evening barricades were formed in the Faubourg du Temple, and its neighbourhood, but a body of mounted Chasseurs and Gardes de Paris succeeded without much difficulty in clearing the streets. On the Tuesday the rioting was rather more formidable. On this occasion the mob succeeded in forming four barricades; one in the Rue Fontaine du Roi, another in a little street leading to the church of St. Joseph, and two in the Rue St. Maur. They were taken, however, easily enough by the military, and no more attempts were made to renew them.

On the 21st the formal announcement of the result of the plebiscitum was made to the Emperor, in the Salle des Etats of the Louvre, a hall conspicuous as having been the scene of the principal state assemblages since the institution of the Second Empire. The renewal of the Empire's life, as it were, by the recent contact with its mother earth, was to be solemnized with all due ceremonies. The Place du Carrousel was lined with soldiers, and crowded with carriages bringing ministers, marshals, ambassadors, senators, deputies, civic functionaries, high dignitaries, and councillors of state, to greet the sovereign whose rule and policy had just received. the sanction of his people's approval. He himself stood on a dais,

surrounded by the whole of the imperial family. The moment he entered the hall, a shout of acclamation arose and was prolonged until M. Schneider as President of the Corps Législatif advanced to deliver his speech on behalf of that body.

"It is eighteen years," said the President, "since France, worn out by subversion, eager for security, confident in your genius and the Napoleon dynasty, transmitted to your hands, with the Imperial Crown, the authority and power which public necessity required. The expectation of the nation has not been deceived. . . . After twenty years' reign the people, now in its absolute independence, and under conditions which attest the progress and virility of our public customs, has pronounced its approbation with a degree of unanimity the force of which cannot be questioned. In welcoming the Empire by more than seven millions of suffrages, France says to you, 'Sire, France is with you; go on confidently in the path of all realizable progress, and establish liberty, based on respect for the laws and the constitution. France places the cause of liberty under the protection of your dynasty and of the great bodies of the State.""

The Emperor, in his reply, began by thanking the nation which for the fourth time during twenty-two years had given him “a striking token of its confidence." The ratification by the people of a constitutional reform had been, his Majesty said, the sole object of the plebiscitum, but the discussion had been carried farther, and "the adversaries of our institutions" had raised the question between the Revolution and the Empire. The country had solved the question "in favour of the system which guaranteed order and liberty." The government, thus strengthened, would show its force by its moderation. It would not deviate from its liberal course; respecting all rights, it will protect all interests without keeping in mind dissentient votes and hostile manoeuvres. But it will also know how to make respected the national will which has been so energetically manifested, and will maintain it in itself and above all controversy." The Emperor went on,-" Freed from the Constitutional questions which divide the best minds, we must have but one object in view. To rally round the Constitution which has just been sanctioned by the country, by the honest men of all parties; to ensure public security; to calm party passions; to preserve the social interests from the contagion of false doctrines; to find by the aid of the highest intellects the means of increasing the greatness and prosperity of France; to diffuse education; to simplify the administrative machinery; to carry activity from the centre, where it superabounds, to the extremities where it is wanting; to introduce into our codes of law, which are monuments, the improvements justified by experience; to multiply the general agencies of production and riches; to promote agriculture and the development of public works; and finally, to consecrate our labour to this problem, always resolute, and always seeking to find the best reparation of the burdens which press upon the taxpayers-such is

our programme. In realizing it, our nation, by the free expansion of its powers, will advance the progress of civilization." In conclusion the Emperor said, "We must at the present time more than ever look fearlessly forward to the future. Who, indeed, could be opposed to the progressive march of a dynasty founded by a great people in the midst of political disturbances, and which is fortified by liberty?" Loud cheering followed the delivery of this new imperial manifesto, and was continued until the imperial party quitted the hall.

The partial reconstruction of the Ministry followed close upon the plebiscitum. Three places in the Cabinet of the 2nd of January, vacant by the resignations of Count Daru, M. Buffet, and the Marquis de Talhouet, had to be filled, and it was thought decorous to wait until the national will had pronounced upon the Constitution as the Emperor had remodelled it. The new arrangement was as follows; the Duc de Gramont, Minister of Foreign Affairs; M. Mege, Public Instruction; M. Plichon, Public Works. A new post of Vice-President of the Council was created, which Ollivier took to himself.

Of the new appointments none was so significant at the time, none was destined to such fatal associations in men's memories, as that of the Duc de Gramont to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Gramont had been Ambassador at the Court of Austria, was a pliant courtier of Napoleon III., a friend of personal government, and had no sympathies whatever with parliamentary rule; moreover, his anti-Prussian proclivities were well known, and the news of his appointment, together with the mutinous vote of a portion of the French army, awoke even at that period a feeling of uneasiness at Berlin. Baron Werther, the Prussian Ambassador at Paris, however, reported that, having sounded Gramont's sentiments in a personal interview, he had received from him the most pacific assurances.

Violent and precipitate in action as his after-conduct proved the new Minister to be, he was but the means of forcing a political card which the Emperor had already in his hand, and which the army vote tempted him to contemplate with more attention than he had yet ventured to give it. A more cautious statesman at the Foreign Office would have discerned and corrected the misrepresentations of the shallow diplomatic agents who had been for a long time past commissioned to study the opinions, feelings, and material resources of the minor German States, and who reported on the authority, not of the multitude or of the middle classes, but of the "best society" generally, that dislike of Prussia was everywhere combined with a desire to rely on the protection of France, and that the armed interference of the latter power to prevent Prussia's further aggrandizement would be hailed with delight, and met with efficient co-operation. Marshal Leboeuf, the Minister of War, gave his master no less erroneous impressions of the existing state of preparation of the French army than did Gramont of the state of political feeling in Germany. Had that master been what he was a few years before, he would hardly have been satisfied with accept

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ing the second-hand statements of his officials. So it seems, however, that about this time, in his hours of meditation, a new vision of the future took shape. Should occasion arise for that war with Prussia which French politicians had been thinking about ever since Sadowa, the active employment of his vast military forces would, in all probability, lead to triumphs gratifying to the nation, and would be the best possible means of restoring good humour to the army itself, the class of his subjects with whose support he and his dynasty could least dispense. And besides and beyond this, to lead him on, there was the ignis fatuus of the Rhine frontier, for which popular statesmanship and sentiment had entertained an inveterate hankering ever since its brief possession by the Great Napoleon. The mechanical improvement in the weapons of offensive warfare had been for some time past a subject of intense personal interest to the Emperor. He had reason to believe that the last inventions would render his armies nearly invincible. If speculations such as these were tending to arouse the Emperor from his habitual irresolution, there was assuredly nothing in the apparent result of his experiment in the path of political constitutionalism to make him satisfied with the "situation" at home. The excitement of the plebiscitum and the appointment of the new Ministers were followed not by a frank and cordial rally of strength to the Government, but by another period of distrust, suspicion, and petty quarrels. M. Ollivier, who had not concealed his uneasiness when the first town votes were announced on the 8th of May, allowed his confidence full play again when the Legislative body resumed its sittings. He was not really trusted by any party, his impulsiveness and want of consistency made it impossible to know with whom he meant to act. At the same time all parties were languid and dispirited. The political situation was not thoroughly understood by the moderates either of the Right or Left. The extremes on each side alone were conscious of their aims. Nay, the Radicals themselves were divided in their shades of opposition. M. Ernest Picard tried to rally round him a force which should take rank as the Constitutional Left; or, to use his own hair-splitting expression, "the right wing of the army of the Left." M. Gambetta, one of the Paris deputies, repaired to Belleville, the head-quarters of the "Irreconcileables," and traced the programme of a new political Radicalism, which should preserve the name though not the essence of the local disaffection. repudiated all anarchy, he would have no recourse, he declared, to violence, or riots, or conspiracies; assassins he would deliver with merited scorn to the rigour of the law-his party, he said, should learn to govern themselves before pretending to govern others; it was needful that it should reconcile itself with France, should teach France to have confidence in it again, should show that it did not menace either the moral interests or the material interests, or the social security of the nation. Respect should even be entertained for that universal suffrage which had played the Emperor's game; "for," said Gambetta, "it matters little to

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France whether it is governed by this man or by that, provided it be well governed"—All this was moderate doctrine for a so-called "Irreconcileable." If Gambetta, in the political inclinations of the time, stood at the "left" of Ernest Picard, he was assuredly very much to the right of the noisy disorderly crew who owned Rochefort and Flourens as their inspirers. Of this Gambetta we may here pause to say a few more words. He was a young man, not above thirty-two years of age, of Genoese extraction, but born in the south of France. Gifted with great powers of eloquence and an ardent temperament, he had made within the last two years a considerable reputation at the bar, having first attracted notice when he spoke as counsel for the accused under the Government prosecution of 1868. He was returned to the Corps Législatif as one of the Paris deputies in the following year, and immediately distinguished himself by his uncompromising attacks on the imperial policy, and his advocacy of democratic principles. He had more statesmanship, however, than Rochefort, Flourens, and the rest of the Belleville clique, and did not commit himself to any rash alliance with them; more courage and consistency than Ollivier, lately at the head of the party to which he belonged; more fire and enterprise than Ernest Picard.

When the Corps Législatif resumed its sittings, the disruption of parties and uncertainties of their mutual relations were daily more and more conspicuous. The Right Centre, led by Baron Jerome David, seemed merely waiting for an opportunity to overthrow the Ministry. M. Buffet and his friends of the Left Centre admitted that they were giving the Cabinet their support solely in hope of obtaining from it the electoral law, which ought to precede the impending dissolution of the Chamber. M. Ernest Picard's new section of Liberals professed themselves disposed to accept the Empire and the Napoleonic dynasty, but without abating any of the demands on behalf of public freedom which the "Left" in general had advocated for the last thirteen years. The Cabinet seemed to exist on little more than sufferance, or the mutual interest of the various sections of the Chamber in keeping it as the figure-head of the State. It was not a dignified position; but M. Ollivier's vanity or shortsightedness seemed to render him satisfied with it.

At the sitting of the 3rd of June an amendment brought forward by M. Duvernois authorizing reports of the sittings of the Councilsgeneral, and another making the sittings themselves public, were adopted by majorities against the Ministry. On the following day M. Bethmont made an interpellation on a matter connected with these Councils, which brought on an animated debate. During its course M. Ollivier alluded to the check which the Ministry had experienced the day preceding, and called on the Chamber to vote for the order of the day "pur et simple;" "Otherwise," he said, we shall believe we have lost its confidence." Upon this Baron Jerome David protested against making a matter of the kind a