The Sun.
London, England, 1848-12-28 00:00:00

,PIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.

FROM THE MORNING PAPERS OF THIS DAY.
CHRONICLE.—The great drama of the French
Presidential Election ended, as such dramas should,
with an "effect." The characters, tragical and
humorous, who have been developing the intricate
plot of the past two months, crowded the stage in the
last scene. Cavaignac, the wrongful possessor, divests
himself of the splendours no longer his own, in a
neat, sentimental speech. Louis Napoleon, the
rightful heir—the twenty-years' wanderer over the
face of the earth—comes to the front of the boards,
wearing a grave expression, and attired (say the
French journals) in an elegant suit of black. He
lifts his hand to the sky, as heroes do on the like
occasions, pronounces a cabalistic sentence, and
straightway M. Armand Marrast, who does
the heaey business of the Republic, pro-
nounces him united with Liberty, his blushing
fiancee. Then follows a general shaking of hands.
Republicans of the Ere embrace Republicans of the
Morrow, the President of the Republic accolades the
ex-President of the Council, and so down goes the
curtain. From all we see and hear, we are justified
in concluding, that the hero and the heroine, since
the conclusion of the piece, have been living the
life which it is only decorous to attribute to the
dramatis persona of a drama which has terminated
happily. Even the National, the unquiet demon
who has striven, through five long acts, to prevent
their union, grumbles half involuntary congratula-
tions. The household of the newly .wedded pair
seems prudently organized; there is no rumour as
yet of the smallest bickering, or of undue assumption
of superiority on either part. It appears quite pos-
sible, that the bride may live to be a widow, and to
inscribe laudatory epitaph on the tombstone of
the man who has been so pertinaciously repre-
sented to her as a fortune-hunter, and an inevitable
domestic tyrant. It is even so. Louis Napoleon may
become a Republican saint, and be worshipped on the
Sans- culottides. Is it fair to anticipate the argument
of that formidable personage, the devil's advocate,
who, in the practice of the Roman Catholic Church,
regularly opposes the pretensions of candidates for
canonization ? He may be supposed to urge the case
of the French people against the French Republic.
He may hint that Louis Napoleon's five millions of
constituents had something else in their heads, at the
moment of voting, than the election of a decent
republican official. He may insinuate, that they were
intolerably disgusted at finding they !'ad got Cato,
after supposing they had given their suffrages to
Caesar. He may ask, why the President troubled the
democratic Israel at all—why he stirred up all the
anti-Republicanism from Marseilles to Lille for
the sake of manifesting his devotion to the ,
Republic f The nation did not place him in
his present position as a field for the
display of Spartan self-corm-nand. It will not always
do—the agent of the evil spirit may a'sert—to take
men at their word. And in this last respect the
devil's prompting may, perhaps, be correct. A cynic
might pass one of these December nights pleasantly
enough, if the malicious Diable Boitenx himielf
would unroof for him some nine or ten edifices in
Paris—the Palace of the National Assembly, where
France speaks of Liberty and Equality, in public ;
and a few hack shops in the Boulevards, or the Rue
de Rivoli,.where she talks of Louis Napoleon and
reviving credit, in private. The Invalides might
teach something : the conversation of the old soldiers
probably turns, at this moment, on the brother and
nephew of their new Imperial Governor. St. An-
toine, where the democratic and social Republic
mutters its execrations, has no doubt its lesson. So
has the sombre dwelling of M. Thiers. And so
has the Elys6e National. But what proceeds there,
is the question. Its inmate is just now passing
through a great crisis in the public life of conspicuous
men. It must be owned that history pronounces dif-
ferent judgment on such periods, according to the
temper she is in. Sometimes she condemns in dig-
nified tone, the personage who has seized opportunity
by its scanty hair ; sometimes, in her melting moods,
she will even excuse the deed, or, at the least, shut
her eyes when it comes before her. Ought we to
add, that she occasionally neglects to do justice to
the self-denial of him who lets the chance go by ?
The goVess, as the epigrammatist significantly said,
is a lady : she may, perhaps, sympathise with the
weakness which the charge of the calumnious French-
man imputes to her sex—that when there is a feeble
Element, so far from thanking the man who refuses to
take advantage of it, they are terribly apt to call him
a fool. But there is, on the other hand, much to be
urged against the suggestion that in Louis Napoleon's
circumstances honesty is the worst policy. To have
preserved one's self-respect is something ; and it is
else something to have had the ball at one's foot, and
yet to have declined propelling it. That they re-
mained deaf to unmistakeable hints, conveyed in the
thunderous whisper of five million voices, what will
be said of few men to the end of time. It is true
that the French President is no Washington, that he
should reject the diadem with great indignation. But,
if he has not deserved so well of the Republic, he
has certainly been nearer the Monarchy. And the
Frenchman's refusal will not lose, but rather gain, 1
by contrast with that of the American, when it is
considered that the former has far less to fall back
upon. His antecedents recal nothing that resembles
Bunker's Hill. His retreat, when his four years of
office are expired, will be no Mount Ver-
non—no bourne for Democratic pilgrims. He
will be a danger escaped. But his honour will be
the brighter, and his name the more unblemished.
And his period of office will ever be memorable as
synchronising with the fall of sectarian tyranny and
the restoration of debilitated order and damaged com-
merce. It must be owned, however, that no political
prophet is likely to be right in vaticinations based on
the present aspect of French affairs. All is calm—
but it is the sort of calm which proves and promises
nothing. The new Ministry merely recognises the
past contest. Each section of Louis Napoleon's sup.
porters has its representative, though, of course, these
representatives have been selected with as much
restriction on free choice as is implied in the necessity
of their not being too much out of harmony with the
*taus quo. M. Odilon Barrot, at the head, represents
good faith, and, perhaps, symbolizes the particular
species of distinction which the President wishes to
attach to his own memory, and that of his temporary
supremacy.
ADVERTISER.—It is gratifying to find, that so
far as the new state of things has proceeded in France
there has occurred nothing to warrant evil forebod-
ings for the future. Louis Napoleon, in his new and
responsible office of President of the Republic, has
demeaned himself much better than his warmest
friends could have expected. He has been guilty of
no grave error of judgment; neither has he said or
done anything since his instalment in the Presiden-
tial chair, Of which his foes can make a handle. None
were more strenuously opposed than ourselves to the
candidateship of the Prince. We opposed him solely
because we did not deem him the " man" which
the " hour" demanded. We feared that he was
not the peison either to consolidate the Republic,
or to preserve the tranquillity of the country,
menaced as it has unceasingly been for many
month past. We supported Cavaignac for no
ether reason, than that, judging from his past
services, and the character he bears, we believed him
to be, of all others, the person best fitted to uphold
order and preserve domestic tranquillity. The French
nation willed it otherwise. They chose the man whom
we should wish to see rejected, and rejected the man
whom we were anxious to see selected. From that
moment our opposition to Louis Napoleon ceased ;
and right glad shall we be should we never have oc-
casion to enrol ourselves again in the ranks of his
opponents. At all events, he will receive no opposi-
tion from us unless his acts shall be of a nature calcu-
lated to peril the internal tranquillity of France, or
involve Europe in the evils of war. In the election
of Cavaignac Prance would have had a guarantee for the maintenance of domestic order, and Europe
for the presarvation of asogeneral peace. Let as
hope, that though
insurednot
iTinguine that these
results will be
by
show
election of
Louis Napoleon, the event
evwenthust the y are.
We are gratified to find that
remembering, es all
fears have proved to be without foundatiil.ll.TlOUT
, that evena a
something to be able to say, is
must do, the antecedents of the Prince
fortnight should elapse without anything disastrous
or ominous arising out of his Presidency. For hie
own sake, as well as for the sake of France and Ee.
rope, we trust that we shall have to record the same
state of matters, week after week, during his entire
term of office. There is no rock on which he is in so
much danger of making shipwreck, as on that of
foreign war. This, we fear, is a peril to which he is
much exposed. His temptations are great to embark
in warlike enterprises. The associations connected
with the memory of his uncle, the military spirit
which so extensively prevails in France, and the
struggles now going on in various parts of the
country, between popular principles and those of
a despotic kind—are all circumstances likely to
operate on a mind constituted as his is known to
be, and to precipitate France into hostilities with
some other power. It is, indeed, asserted in some
of the Paris papers, with as much confidence as if
the fact were notorious to all, that the Government
of Louis Napoleon have already determined on an
armed intervention in Italy on behalf of the Pope.
We are unwilling to believe it. We fervently hope
it is not correct. Such a course would be opposed
to those principles of non-intervention which the
Provisional Government, and the Government of
Cavaignac, not only recognised, but on which they
so scrupulously acted. Louis Napoleon has also
assumed the reins of power amid protestations of
his determination to abstain from interfering in the
affairs of other countries. If it be true, that an
armed force is to be sent to Italy, to reinstate
Pius IX. in the sovereignty of the Roman States, it
will be a flagrant breach of faith with those of the