18 SEPTEMBER 1841, Page 2

France is again shaken with political convulsions, though not of

the most alarming kind. In the remoter provinces the resurvey of the taxes has given occasion to new violences and fresh bloodshed ; while the capital itself has been torn with what seem to be aimless excesses; and lastly, the weapon of the assassin has again been levelled at the life of a royal personage, this time at one of Loris PHILIPPE'S sons. The Duke of AUMALE has just returned with a regiment of which he is Colonel, from Africa ; when he is met, after the fashion in France, with a bouquet presented by young ladies, a pistol pre- sented by an assassin, and a fete. The Duke was not hurt ; for his Lieutenant-Colonel's horse was his proxy in receiving the dona- tive of the new MEUNIER, whose name is PAPPART. The motive to the crime is a mystery. PAPPART is said to belong to some secret society, and to be their tool ; while others represent him as a disbanded soldier of the Duke's regiment, who owed a grudge to the Lieutenant-Colonel. Probably the miserable fool was merely speculating in notoriety on his own account : but be that as it may, it is not the less a fact, that persons are seen about the streets, nay, mixed with the troops by hundreds, who are suspected of be- longing to secret societies ; that there have been nightly riots in Paris ever since Friday ; and that at the very time when the King was gratifying the military tastes of his soldiers by an ostentatious fête at Neuilly in his triple character of father, king, and head of the army, the mounted police were charging bands of rioters in the Place du Chatelet, and troops were marching to reinforce Cler- mont Ferrand, where an insurrection raged for two clear days. There is an appearance of chronic anarchy about these repeated sanguinary frivolities, which cannot but cause the gravest alarm in all who wish well to France—so great a nation at the mercy of such petty accidents