The Sun.
London, England, 1870-09-06 00:00:00

LONDON, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 0, 1870.

ANOTHER transformation scene at Paris ! About
midnight, between Saturday and Sunday, at an ex-
traordinary sitting of the Corps L6gislatif the
frightful intelligence, suppressed for hcurs, was
announced by the Minister of War, General
the Count DE PALIKAO. According to his
promise, that he would speak the plain truth
right out, the responsible Minister made a clean
breast of it. And thereupon came the last and crown-
ing, or, strictly speaking, discrowning, scene of trans-
formation. The Napoleon dynasty was abolished ; a
Republic was proclaimed; a Provisional Government
formed. The Dictatorship was temporarily placed
in the strong right hand of the Governor of Paris,
General TROCHU, under the title of President. The
Ministry for Foreign Affairs was confided to the
most gifted member of the Left, M. JULES FAVRE.
The Ministry of the Interior was apportioned
to the LEDRU ROLLIN of the emergency—M.
GAMBETTA. Two of the veteran members of the
fa,nous LAMARTINE Government of 1848, the Demo-
cratic Cabinet of the Trots Mois au Pouvoir, are, by
a strange turning round of events, again installed in
power as members of the present Provisional
Government meaning M. GARNIER-PAGES
and M. CREMIEUX, again Minister of Justice.
It was M. CREMIEUX to whom Lord BROUGHAM
applied, asking to be naturalised as a citizen of
France—au incident suggestive of one of JOHN
LEECH'S most famous political cartoons, in which
the noble and learned Lord was represented
in every imaginable guise as a Citizen of the
World. The ex-Chancellor and his caricaturist are
both gone long ago to their graves, and here is M.
CILEMIEUX two-and-twenty years afterwards, again
Minister of Justice in a suddenly improvised Re-
publican Provisional Government !
After flourishing in great splendour for eighteen
years, the French Empire has again disappeared.
NAPOLEON the GREAT had reigned under one title
or another for fourteen or fifteen years, but it was
only after-a series of stupendous struggles to subvert
the enormous fabric of his Government by
the various powers of Europe, combined
together in coalition after coalition, that his
downfall was effected. Confronted by the
united armies of England, and Prussia, and
Austria, and Russia, to say nothing of lesser Powers
in great numbers and variety, the Master at one time
of the chief part of the Continent tins only
eventually' borne down, after displaying
prodigies of valour in the- most wonderful
of all his campaigns, strategically. He roso again
to supreme power through his miraculous
reconquest of France on his return from Elba--and
was then finally subdued by the united strength of
the Allied Powers again directed against him in their
final coalition. With the Second Empire it has
been altogether otherwise. NAPOLEON 111. in seven
weeks has had the Imperial sceptre torn from
his grasp, and his Imperial army, led
by the most dauntless of his Marshals,
shattered into fragments and rolled in the dust, not
by a coalition of Powers,. but by a single Power, and
that the least of the great Powers until yesterday.
Prussia has come, and seen, and conquered. Flying
from victory to victory, the black eagle has
closed this astonishing series of conquests by a
triple discharge of thunderbolts from its talons at
Sedan—Sedan at once, for the Second Empire, its
Pavia, its Ulm, and its Fontainebleau. It was
more overwhelming to the vanquished than the
Battle of Spurs. It was more disastrous than MACK'S
capitulation. It was more precipitate, and there-
fore less dignified, than either of the Great
NAPOLEON'S abdications. NAPOLEON 111. falls
almost without a sign, without an utterance. He
has been like a dumb man all through the campaign
—at any rate during the latter portion of it he has
been entirely dumbfounded. Once or twice, it is
true, ho has broken this otherwise uninterrupted
silence; but he has done so by uttering words
that it seems more respectful to his mis-
fortunes, now, that the world should, if possible
cover with oblivion. The " baptism of fire," for
example, at Saarbriick. The " Dead or Victorious"
mot at Metz. One cannot, moreover, but recall to re-
membrance much earlier expressions of the Em-
PEROR'S that it is almost painful now to think of,
reading them, as we do now, by the light
of recent events and in the glare of the
new Paris- Revolution. Such - a phrase, for
instance, as that one, kept long dangling before
France, about " Crowning the Edifice." The utter
collapse of the whole Edifice, under the recent
Crowning of it with Constitutionalism, is assuredly
something pitiable. The manner in which the catas-
trophe has been so rapidly brought about is difficult
still in any adequate way to realise.
As the closing incidents of this last astounding
bouleversement, Marshal MACMAHON is reported
to be dead from his wounds ; Marshal CAN-
ROBERT is numbered among the wounded ;
the EMPEROR NAPOLEON is on his road to Wil-
lielmshohe, near Cassel—the EMPRESS EUGENIE is on
her way through Braine-le-Comte to rejoin her Impe-
rial husband at his newly-selected place of retire-
-111107,t the PRINCE IMPERIAL, it is reported, is
1
lying ill at Naniur—amid in the meanwhile the
victorious KING with the CROWN PRINCES of PRUSSIA
and SAXONY at the head of their united forces, we
find spoken of in one of our latest telegrams as in full ,
march upon Paris.

ALREADY Paris has been several to nes.assailed by
hostile armies ; again and again it has capitulated.
Thrice within the present century it has yielded
itself up to a force advancing against it and claiming
possession of it as the capital of the fair and -beauti-
ful country thus signally reconquored. 'Nice Paris
was entered in triumph by the allied •armies—tisot