LETTER VII.
Alarm created by the Trial of the Lyons Prisoners.—Visits from a Republican and from a Doctrinaire: reassured by the promises of safety and protection received from the latter.
We have really had something very like a panic amongst us, from the rumours in circulation respecting this terrible trial, which is now rapidly approaching. Many people think that fearful scenes may be expected to take place in Paris when it begins.
The newspapers of all parties are so full of the subject, that there is little else to be found in them; and all those, of whatever colour, which are opposed to the government, describe the manner in which the proceedings are to be managed, as the most tyrannical exercise of power ever practised in modern Europe.
The legitimate royalists declare it to be illegal, inasmuch as the culprits have a right to be tried by a jury of their peers—the citizens of France; whereas it appears that this their chartered right is denied them, and that no other judge or jury is to be permitted in their case than the peers of France.
Whether this accusation will be satisfactorily answered, I know not; but there certainly does appear to be something rather plausible, at least, in the objection. Nevertheless, it is not very difficult to see that the 28th Article of the Charter may be made to answer it, which says,—
"The Chamber of Peers takes cognizance of high-treason, and of attempts against the safety of the state, which shall be defined by law."
Now, though this defining by law appears, by what I can learn, to be an operation not yet quite completed, there seems to be something so very like high-treason in some of the offences for which these prisoners are to be tried, that the first clause of the article may do indifferently well to cover it.
The republican journals, pamphlets, and publications of all sorts, however, treat the whole business of their detention and trial as the most tremendous infringement of the newly-acquired rights of Young France; and they say—nay, they do swear, that crowned king, created peers, and placed ministers never dared to venture upon anything so tyrannical as this.