455] ASPECTS OF THE PLEBISCITE 1 57 



be deceived into falling into the traps set by an ambitious 

 and scheming ruler, with the same ease with which this can 

 be achieved in the case of an unsuspecting and less informed 

 mass of voters. When Louis Napoleon, shortly after his 

 election to the presidency in 1848, set out to increase his 

 authority and to prepare for the prolongation of his rule and 

 for what followed, he realized that he would have to meet 

 the resistance of the Assembly and the opposition of his 

 officers of state, of the army, and of the population. His 

 chief concern was the Assembly. Hence, his first move 

 was to discredit the legislature in the eyes of the country.^' 

 Thus, in the early part of the year 1850, he promulgated a 

 law, presented by himself to the Assembly and passed by 

 that body, which modified the existing system of universal 

 suffrage by means of extraordinary demands of domicile. 

 He calculated, and correctly so, that a sudden and adroitly 

 worded public request from the President, demanding the 

 repeal of such a restriction, would surely place the execu- 

 tive before the land as the defender of popular rights and 

 would prove embarrassing to the Assembly which had 

 written it into the statute book. According to de La 

 Gorce,^* only five persons were initiated into the schemer's 

 ambitious plans : General Saint-Arnaud, Minister of War, 

 who would see in the dispersing of Parliament and in the 

 usurpation of power but an enterprise still more spectacular 

 than his former expeditions to Africa ; de Morny, hero of 

 the salon and the bourse, future Minister of the Interior; 

 de Maupas, prefect of police, very young, devoted to any 

 cause in which the gain would measure up to the risk ; 

 Moquard, secretary to the chief executive ; and de Persigny, 

 ami des manvais jours. These men being won for the 

 Napoleonic cause, the citizens of Paris awoke on the second 

 of December, 185 1, the anniversary of the battle of Auster- 

 litz and the crowning of the first Napoleon, to find the walls 

 placarded with proclamations informing them that "the 



" La Gorce, Histoire du second Empire, vol. i, pp. 3-4. 



'* Ibid., vol. i, pp. 4-5. 



