Assembly, together with a secret conspiracy with the absolute foreign
powers against the revolutionary Roman republic. In the same way, and
with a similar maneuver, did Bonaparte prepare his stroke of December 2
against the royalist legislature and its constitutional republic. Let
it not be forgotten that the same party, which, on December 20, 1848,
constituted Bonaparte's ministry, constituted also, on December 2, 1851,
the majority of the legislative National Assembly.

In August the constitutive assembly decided not to dissolve until it
had prepared and promulgated a whole series of organic laws, intended
to supplement the Constitution. The party of Order proposed to the
assembly, through Representative Rateau, on January 6, 1849, to let
the Organic laws go, and rather to order its own dissolution. Not
the ministry alone, with Mr. Odillon Barrot at its head, but all
the royalist members of the National Assembly were also at this time
hectoring to it that its dissolution was necessary for the restoration
of the public credit, for the consolidation of order, to put an end to
the existing uncertain and provisional, and establish a definite state
of things; they claimed that its continued existence hindered the
effectiveness of the new Government, that it sought to prolong its life
out of pure malice, and that the country was tired of it. Bonaparte
took notice of all these invectives hurled at the legislative power,
he learned them by heart, and, on December 21, 1851, he showed the
parliamentary royalists that he had learned from them. He repeated their
own slogans against themselves.

The Barrot ministry and the party of Order went further. They called all
over France for petitions to the National Assembly in which that
body was politely requested to disappear. Thus they led the people's
unorganic masses to the fray against the National Assembly, i.e., the