Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/96

 Rh doing a service to mankind to arise, and to speak out from this tribune—the greatest, perhaps, in Europe—some resounding words [mere words, indeed] of indignation against such acts. … When the Regent Espartero, who had rendered services to his country [which M. Thiers never did], intended bombarding Barcelona, in order to suppress its insurrection, there arose from all arts of the world a general outcry of indignation."

Eighteen months afterwards, M. Thiers was amongst the fiercest defenders of the bombardment of Rome by a French army. In fact, the fault of King Bomba seems to have consisted in this only, that he limited his bombardment to forty-eight hours.

A few days before the Revolution of February, fretting at the long exile from place and pelf to which Guizot had condemned him, and sniffing in the air the scent of an approaching popular commotion, Thiers, in that pseudo-heroic style which won him the nickname of Mirabeau-mouche, declared to the Chamber of Deputies: "I am of the party of Revolution, not only in France, but in Europe. I wish the government of the Revolution to remain in the hands of moderate men … . but if that government should fall into the hands of ardent minds, even into those of Radicals, I shall, for all that, not desert my cause. I shall always be of the party of the Revolution." The Revolution of February came. Instead of displacing the Guizot Cabinet by the Thiers Cabinet, as the little man had dreamt, it superseded Louis Philippe by the Republic. On the first day of the popular victory he carefully hid himself, forgetting that the contempt of the workingmen screened him from their hatred. Still, with his legendary courage, he continued to shy the public stage, until the June massacre had cleared it for his sort