POSTSCRIPT.
SATURDAY.
The following is the message from the President of the Republic read in the Senate on Thursday.
" Senators—The nation has clearly manifested its wish for the reestablish- ment of the Empire. Confident in your patriotism and your intelligence, I have convoked you for the purpose of legally deliberating on that grave question, and of incrusting you with the regulation of the new order of things. If you should adopt it, you will think, no doubt, as I do, that the constitution of 1852 ought to be maintained ; and then the modifications recognized as in- dispensable will in no way touch its fundamental basis. i
"The change which is nprepaiution will bear chiefly on the form; and yet the resumption of the Imperial system is for France of immense signi- fication. In fact, in the reestablishment of the Empire, the people finds a guarantee for its interests, and a satisfaction for its just pride : that rees- tablishment guarantees the interests of the people, by insuring the future, by closing the (era of revolutions, and by again consecrating the conquests of '89. It satisfies its just pride, because in restoring with liberty and re- flection that which thirty-seven years ago the entire of Europe had over- turned by the force of arms, in the midst of the disasters of the country, the people nobly avenges its reverses without making victims, without threaten- ing any independence, and without troubling the peace of the world.
"I do not dissimulate, nevertheless, all that is redoubtable in at this day
accepting and placing on one's head crown of Napoleon : but my appre- hensions diminish with the idea that, representing as I do, by so many titles, the cause of the people and the national will, it will be the nation which, in elevating me to the throne, will herself crown me.
"Given at the Palace of St. Cloud, Nov. 4, 1852."
Previous page
