they had long had the means in their power of regaining their liberty, but that they would have preferred the opportunity which the trial would have afforded of disseminating their republican ideas, had not the peers, by their late decree, resolved to separate one class of prisoners from another, disposing of the cases of those from Lyons in the present session, and leaving the rest without trial for another year in prison. They had preferred, therefore, to spend the parliamentary recess in the country, or in a trip to Belgium; but they threatened to surrender in the following session, and compel the peers to try them. The opposition journals broadly asserted that the escape had been connived at by the police, as a convenient mode of getting rid of a very heavy section of an investigation which had already exhausted the patience of the government, the peers and the public. These were the inventions of party spirit; and events had now occurred which impressed all that was sound in the public mind of France with horror at the atrocities which might result from the fanaticism of political regenerators.

The usual preparations had been made in Paris for celebrating the great political festival annually observed in honour of the three days of July 1830. Classes of men, who had no wish for a republic, were of opinion that the government created by these three days had been far from fulfilling the promises, which were then made, or maintaining the principles which were then proclaimed; and to republicans it could not but be grating to witness splendid pageants arranged by government in memory of certain events, while they themselves were prosecuted

and punished for propagating opinnions in which they held all the value of these events to have consisted. Amid the preparations for the festival, reports were rife that an attempt was to be made upon the life of the king. One report said, that he was to be waylaid on the road from Neuilly to Paris ; another that the attempt was to be made at a particular spot in Paris, and the information communicated to the police distinctly made mention of an infernal machine as being one instrument of the intended assassination. In the middle of July a number of persons were apprehended, but nothing was ascertained to lead to a belief in the existence of actual danger. On the 28th of July, the second day of the festival, the king reviewed a large body of troops and national guards. As he was riding along the Boulevard du Temple, surrounded by the crowded citizens, and attended by his high civil and military servants, an explosion, like a discharge of musquetry, took place from the window of an adjoining house. The effect was terrific. Marshal Mortier, general de Verigny, an aide-de-camp of marshal Maison, a colonel, and several grenadiers of the national guard of Paris, besides mere lookerson, among whom was a child, were shot dead upon the spot, some of them having received two and three bullets. A still greater number, military and civilians, of all ranks, were wounded; more than one of them was wounded mortally, while others had to suffer amputation. The number of persons killed and wounded was between 30 and 40, of whom 14 were killed. Yet the object of this indiscriminate slaughter failed; the king escaped unhurt; his horse was wounded.

The instant the explosion took

place, the police, guided by the smoke, rushed into the house from which it had proceeded. They seized the assassin in the act of letting himself down by a rope from a back window of the apartment. He was himself severely wounded by the bursting of some of the barrels of his machine, and his wounds had delayed his escape. The machine consisted of between twenty and thirty gun barrels arranged horizontally, side by side upon a frame, the back part of which could be raised or lowered, according to the angle required to reach the space in the street below which was to be swept. Each barrel was loaded with several bullets, and a heavy charge of powder. A train of gunpowder connected the touch-holes, and the explosion of one discharged them all. Five of the barrels had burst, and wounded the assassin severely in the head. The window, at a little distance from which the machine was placed, stood open, but the machine itself had been screened from observation by Persian blinds, which were not withdrawn till the moment of the explosion. It was conjectured that to the instant of time required to open the blinds, and which perhaps had not been taken into calculation, the king owed his escape; for the discharge took place immediately behind him, one of the bullets wounding his horse. The assassin turned out to be a Corsican, of the name of Fieschi, who had gone through many varieties of disreputable service: for, after having been a vaga. bond soldier, he had stood in the pillory for fraud and forgery-he had suffered two years imprisonment for theft-he had swindled his landlord-had been a distributor of radical newspapers-and

had ended in becoming a spy of the police in watching the proceedings of political societies, although his connexion with the police had terminated before he became a murderer. He made no attempt to deny his guilt; he acknowledged no motive except dislike of the king; he, at first, denied that any other person had been privy to his design. The inquiries of the police, however, discovered other three obscure persons who had been connected with him, and as he subsequently alleged, concerned in the plot, but no thread was found by which to connect it with any formidable conspiracy, or any political party.

All parties joined in expressing their abhorrence of so atrocious an attempt. The rejoicings of the revolutionary anniversary were suspended; the tri-coloured flag was veiled in crape; the victims of the massacre were buried with the honours of a public funeral, which the king and his family attended; and pensions were voted by the Chambers to those of the lower orders who had been wounded, and the relations of those who had been killed. The government then directed its attention to draw political strength from an event, than which none could have occurred better fitted, if it were well used, to induce public opinion to give the constituted authority additional protection against dangers of so appalling a kind. The investigation and trial of the crime was entrusted to the Chamber of Peers by an ordinance of the 29th of July. In the first moments of alarm, when it was thought, and not unnaturally, that the blow had come from confederates of the republicans who had been denouncing the king and setting the peers at defiance, the editors of several of the public

tical propensities were apprehended; but it was found necessary to liberate them, as not a trace of any relation between them and Fieschi could be established, or was even suggested. One connexion, however, subsisted between the press and the crime. The press, it was said, indulged daily in lucubrations which tended to destroy all respect for established institutions, for the kingly office, or the royal person: it thus prepared the minds of men to hate all these things, and to have no horror at destroying them; and when offences of this kind were prosecuted, juries were subject to influences which disabled them, as the law at present stood, from giving due protection to the interests of the community. It would therefore be right to bring the press under a more severe and direct responsibility; and the alarm which the attempt on the life of the king had excited, and the odium thrown by that attempt on all opinions with which it might be thought to be even remotely connected, presented a favourable opportunity for strengthening the government where it was weakest, and where its demands for additional protection were always regarded with the greatest jealousy.

While the state trials were proceeding in the peers, the greater part of the Chamber of Deputies had quitted Paris for the provinces. They were immediately summoned back to their duties; and the prime minister himself, on the 4th of August, presented to the Chamber three different bills, conferring on the government, he said, such powers as were necessary to preserve the country from a return of the dangers which menaced her existence by attacking the king of

great justice, that France, during the last five years, might be said to have enjoyed the utmost prosperity in a state of constant alarm, to have combatted in the midst of peace. Her course had been one of progress and of danger. She enjoyed within herself every means of prosperity, and yet her first care had been almost invariably devoted to her own safety. The members of that Chamber had been obliged to exert all their energies in support of order, and yet order had not been completely established. Parties, though vanquished, still existed in secret; each day disclosed the evil worked by them, and the disastrous traces of their passage. An inveterate hatred of social order, a determination to overthrow it at any sacrifice, a degree of exasperation produced by defeat and baffled hope, an insatiable thirst of vengeance, were still to be found in the ranks of a minority, which, though vanquished, was not submissive. A prompt and effectual remedy could alone prevent the prolongation of such a state of things. If the factious were permitted to attack the powers of society-to protest in the open face of day against the principle of the government-to make a public manifestation of their adhesion to a government which France had rejected;-the existence of society would be nothing more than a protracted revolutionary crisis, and the respect due to the laws, or the fear that might stand in lieu of that respect, would disappear. Such were the evils reserved for France, if not stifled in their birth. Some of these evils had been already called into being; for never had government been attacked in its principle, in its form, and in the

person of its sovereign, with more inveterate audacity, and hitherto with greater impunity, than the government of the charter of 1830. The first of the three bills had for its object to modify the existing legislation in regard to the press, on the ground that it had been found altogether insufficient to repress the offences of the press; and the following nine articles, which formed the first chapter of the bill, assuredly amounted to a very slow modification, and fully came up to the frank declaration of the minister of justice, that the government was resolved that neither a Carlist press nor a republican press should exist. The 8th article was intended to prevent the fines inflicted on convicted newspapers from being paid by subscription :

"Art. 1. Every offence against the person of the king, whether by one of the means mentioned in article 1 of the law of the 17th of May, 1819, or any other mode of publication, is an attempt against the safety of the state. Whoever shall be found guilty of the same shall be punished with detention, and a fine varying from 10,000 francs to 50,000 francs. 2. Whoever shall by the same means have endeavoured to turn into ridicule the person and the authority of the king, shall be condemned to imprisonment for a term varying from six months to five years, and to a fine varying from 500 to 10,000 francs. The offender shall moreover be deprived of the whole or part of the rights mentioned in article 42* of the penal code, for

The rights there mentioned are, the right of electing or being elected-the right of holding any public or administrative office-of serving as a jurymanof giving evidence in courts of justice of acting as a tutor or eurator to minors,

the entire duration of his penalty and for a term equal to that of the imprisonment to which he may have been condemned. 3. In discussing the acts of government, it is forbidden to introduce the name of the king, either directly, indirectly, or by allusion. The author of an offence herein shall be punished with imprisonment, for a term varying from one month to one year, and with a fine varying from 500 francs to 5,000 francs. 4. Any attack by one of the same means against the principle and the form of the king's government, as established by the constitutional charter of 1830, any direct or indirect provocation to change them, is an attempt against the safety of the state. Whoever shall be found guilty of it shall be punished with detention, and a fine varying from 10.000 francs to 50,000 francs. 5. Whoever shall have publicly manifested his adhesion to another form of government, either by assuming the qualification of a republican, or by expressing a wish, hope, or threat, for the destruction of the monarchical or constitutional order, shall be condemned to imprisonment for a term varying from six months to five years, and to a fine varying from 500 francs to 10,000 francs. 6. Whoever shall have publicly attributed the right to the throne of France, either to one of the members of the family condemned to perpetual exile by the law of the 10th of April, 1832, or to any other than Louis Philippe I. and his descendants-whoever shall have expressed a wish, hope, or threat for the restoration of the fallen government, shall be condemned to imprisonment for

with the exception of his own children by the advice and consent of the family.