Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/418

 the parterre, and in the boxes. Thus the city populations were being labored upon.

The so-called “Prince-President” sought to win the army by appearing at parades and maneuvers in a general's uniform, by showing the soldiers all possible favors, and by drawing to himself the most adventurous spirits among the officers. In the spring of 1851 he began also to prepare the prospective battlefield of the intended “coup d'état.” The bourgeois of Paris were made to apprehend that the city was full of the most dangerous elements from which every moment an attempt at a complete subversion of the social order was to be feared; that “society” was in imminent danger and must be “saved.” The “Prince-President,” so the word went forth, was ready to undertake that work of salvation, but the parliamentary power sought to bind his hands. However, he was doing what he could, and would first undertake to deliver Paris of the dangerous characters infesting it. One of the measures taken to that end consisted in the driving away from the city all foreigners who might be suspected of an inclination to take part in forcible resistance to the intended “coup d'état,” and in that category I too was counted.

A police agent, who described the threatening dangers in a pamphlet written for the purpose of terrifying the timid bourgeois, called me an especially daring revolutionist, who in his old fatherland had already committed the most frightful outrages. To illustrate this, he narrated the liberation of Kinkel, describing him with the most fabulous fabrications as an uncommonly detestable criminal. To these circumstances I owed my arrest and my exile from France, in spite of my modest and retired conduct during my stay there. It is indeed not at all improbable that if I had been in Paris at the time of the coup d'état I should have seen in the popular resistance to the Napoleonic usurpation the decisive