A weary people will applaud anyone, they want some peace; they sacrificed everything in the June Days and they lost everything. They wish to heal their wounds, to mourn the victims, and to earn a bit of bread. Poor, heroic people, no matter into whose treacherous hands your destiny fell, you will not hear a reproach from my breast.

If you could see how melancholy, how sad it has become since the June Days. It is dreadful to walk along the streets; there where life teemed, where a huge "Marseillaise" resounded among the other songs from morning to night, there is quiet now; the paper seller dares not shout, the pale, saddened worker sits before his door, a woman in tears beside him--they speak in an undertone and look around. Toward nightfall everything disappears, the street is empty, and a gloomy patrol with loaded rifles marches suspiciously around its quarter. The workman's blouse has almost disappeared from the boulevards. The National Guard attempted to ban it from the Tuileries Garden, as was done under Louis Philippe. The people bear this--they are defeated and know their conqueror. They know that the bourgeois will stop at nothing; they know that in comparison with the bourgeoisie when it is victorious and is defending the rights of capital and the inviolability of property, the Cossacks and the Croats are lambs of gentleness. The people suffer it, but a gloomy anger and melancholy has collected in their souls. . . .

France was not ready for a republic . . . But the provisional government, invested with a terrible dictatorship and supported on Paris, might really have stood at the head of the movement and led the people, educating it with institutions, and not subjecting it to the bloody upheavals by which it is being formed today. This demanded that it have the faith and energy of the Committee of Public Safety and, note, only its faith and its devotion; the conditions were such that it was not at all necessary for the provisional government to condemn itself to the severe, punitive role that surrounded the dictatorship of '93 with a bloody nimbus. I am convinced that almost all the members had a certain desire for good, especially in the first days, when one would have had to be a freak or a monster not to share the general enthusiasm. In addition to Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc and Albert were not only republicans, but socialists too. But they did not have enough of that revolutionary nerve that the royalist Mirabeau and the montagnard Danton possessed; they did not have that restless spirit that tore apart the old, that broke it up without turning back, that was impudent and angry in relation to the past, and found satisfaction in destruction. Louis Blanc is more radical than Ledru-Rollin, but, removed in the Luxembourg, he became a preacher of socialism and lost influence on the government.