_III.--Before the Exile_


It was not until the writer saw, in 1848, the triumph of all the enemies
of progress that he knew in the depths of his heart that he belonged,
not to the conquerors, but to the vanquished. The Republic lay
inanimate; but, gazing on her form, he saw that she was liberty, and not
even the sure fore-knowledge of the ruin and exile that must follow
could prevent his espousal with the dead. On June 15 he made his protest
from the tribune, and from that day he fought relentless battle for
liberty and the republic. And on December 2, 1851, he received what he
had expected--twenty years of exile. That is the history of what has
been called his apostasy.

Throughout that strange period before his exile, the frightful phantom
of the past was all-powerful with men. Every kind of question was
debated--national independence, individual liberty, liberty of
conscience, of thought, of speech, and of the Press; questions of
marriage, of education, of the right to work, of the right to one's
fatherland as against exile, of the right to life as against penal law,
of the separation of Church and state, of the federation of Europe, of
frontiers to be wiped out, and of custom-houses to be done away--all
these questions were proposed, debated, and sometimes settled.

In these debates the author of this memoir took his part and did his
duty, and was repaid with insults. He remembers interjecting, when they
were insisting on parental rights, that the children had rights, too. He
astounded the assembly by asserting that it was possible to do away with
misery. On July 17, 1851, he denounced the conspiracy of Louis
Bonaparte, unveiling the project of the president to become emperor. On