Finally, the general elections had
secured the large majority in the National Assembly to the party of
Order. Here the Deputies and Peers of Louis Phillipe met a saintly crowd
of Legitimists, for whose benefit numerous ballots of the nation had
been converted into admission tickets to the political stage. The
Bonapartist representatives were too thinly sowed to be able to build an
independent parliamentary party. They appeared only as "mauvaise queue"
[#2 Practical joke] played upon the party of Order. Thus the party
of Order was in possession of the Government, of the Army, and of the
legislative body, in short, of the total power of the State, morally
strengthened by the general elections, that caused their sovereignty to
appear as the will of the people, and by the simultaneous victory of the
counter-revolution on the whole continent of Europe.
Never did party open its campaign with larger means at its disposal and
under more favorable auspices.
The shipwrecked pure republicans found themselves in the legislative
National Assembly melted down to a clique of fifty men, with the
African Generals Cavaignac, Lamorciere and Bedeau at its head.
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