This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: ... the president I There was an agreeable spontaneity about the Revolution of 1848 which it shares with the best earthquakes. On the morning of Febuary 22 Louis Philippe-wasjsoagf_the_French: before sunset on February 24 France was a Republic. The King's r ----, . wMum------ f-y niimsters were tolerably unpopular. But then M. Guizot rather cultivated his unpopularity; and besides it was one of the advantages of constitutional government that one's ministers could be unpopular without imperilling the dynasty. There was a faintly nauseous atmosphere of financial scandal. But revelations have always titillated rather than scandalised French opinion, and it was hardly possible to govern a nation with a lively imagination and a peasant tradition of rapacity without giving cause for some deviation from financial probity. The edifice of the middle-class monarchy was not impressive; but it had an air of bow-windowed security which seemed to promise an indefinite future. An incautious minister had just commented on the stillness of affairs: it was the same calm which deluded Mr. Pitt into promising the House of Commons fifteen years of peace six months before his country went to twenty-three years of war, which led Mr. Hammond of the Foreign Office to observe to his Secretary of State that there was not a cloud in the sky as the black wrack of 1870 was driving up towards France. But the world seemed very still in France by the grey light of February 1848. There was peace in Europe; but its blessings are rarely appreciated until after an outbreak of war. French opinion was a little restless. The domestic felicity of an elderly King was becoming almost exasperating to a generation whose appetite for sensation had been pleasantly...