The death of General Bréa, killed by two acknowledged Bonapartists, Luc and Lhar; that of Archbishop Affre, due to an accident and not to an assassination, were, to my aunts, premeditated crimes, whose expiation demanded the death of thousands of men belonging to “the most ignoble and abject populace.”
My aunt Constance still trembled as she told me of her emotion when she had read the words of the President of the Chambers, mounting the tribune to say: “All is finished!”
It would have been folly to endeavour to convert my aunts to a more enlightened feeling of humanity. I gave up trying to do it. I read the National in secret, Marguerite giving it to me after my aunts and great-grandmother had read it in turn, and I suffered every day with renewed sorrow at the violence of the reaction, the sentences of the Council of War, at the persecutions, the denunciations, the state of the public mind, which my father wrote to me had become so Cæsarian that it would throw us into the arms of Napoleon, who had been too delicately brought up by England to subdue us.
The night session, when the prosecution of Louis Blanc and Caussidière was voted, delighted my aunts. They would not even read Louis Blanc’s justification, much changed though it was in the National, for I compared it later with the text of the Democratie Pacifique, which my father sent to me. In my aunts’ opinion, and in that of all the middle class, Louis Blanc was “the founder, the responsible author of the monstrous national workshops.”
Now, Louis Blanc proved in court, what his partisans had known for a long time, that the national workshops had been established not only without his participation, but against his will, and that he had not visited them even once.
The obstinacy of holding to a preconceived opinion against absolute proof, admitting no discussion, seemed to me at that time the most extraordinary thing in the world. I endeavoured several times to read Louis Blanc’s protestation to my aunts; they would not listen to it, not wishing to hear it, or to be convinced by it, and they continued to call him the “sinister man of the national workshops.”
I confess that this obstinacy irritated me, and that my affection for my dear aunts suffered from it.
Louis Napoleon was elected in five departments at the supplementary elections. The terms he used in thanking his electors, for different reasons, provoked both my father and my grandmother, and my aunts as well, whose disgust for “Badinguet” increased daily.
“The Democratic-Republic shall be my religion,” said Louis Napoleon, “and I will be its priest.”
My grandfather would certainly have made a wry face at this speech, had he not always had the habit of saying, concerning all the manifestations of him whom he called his “beloved Pretender”: