FOREIGN NEWS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume II, Issue 59, 21 February 1852, Page 3

FOREIGN NEWS.

FIIANCE.

The slow march of events in the French Republic has been somewhat expedited by a misunderstanding of no recent date, which, after

many attempts at conciliation or compromise, has finally broken out between the President and his Ministers. The question is a grave one, and the difficulties attendant upon it, no doubt gave rise to those rumours of projected coups d'etat with which the public for the last three or four months havebeen rendered familiar. The President, who owes his present high position not only to the immense popularity of his name, but to the operation of that right of universal suffrage, which was solemnly established as one of the main principles of the Revolution of 1848, by JM. de Lamartine and his coadjutors, and without which his popularity would have gone for little, is naturally anxious, now that his term of office draws towards completion, that his claim to re-election" should be submitted to, and decided by, the same wide constituency which placed him where he is, but there are, unluckily for him, and as we cannot but think, still more unluckily for the French nation, two great difficulties in the way. The first difficulty was created by M. Marrast, and the other parents of the unworkable constitution under which France has groaned and grumbled since 1848. Taking the United States of America as their model, these republican doctrinaires limited the tenure of the Presidential office to four years, as in America; aud, to impede the ambition, either of the Bonaparte family, or the daring and unscrupulous Algerine generals, fostered amid the razzias of the African war, they prohibited the re-election of any President until after an interval of four years. This is the first difficulty, and M. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte will not speedily overcome it. The second is the creation of the Legislative Assembly, who, in a moment of terror at the growing popularity of the doctrines of the Communists and Red Republicans, and in the fanaticism of a blind and unreflecting reaction, deprived of the suffrage, in contravention of the constitution from which they themselves derived their only power and authority, a full half of the French people. The President, to secure his own purposes, desires to restore the suffrage, thus unwarrantably and unconstitutionally restricted ; and, though well contented that the new Assembly should be elected by the small, is anxious that the President should be elected by the large, constituencies. His Ministers, to whom he has proposed to make the question a Cabinet one, have refused compliance, and have, one and all, sent in their resignations. At the present moment he is, therefore, virtually without a Ministry; and rumours of a coup d'etat, as the only possible solution of the difficulty, are once more raised ; —this time with more pertinacity than ever. It would seem, as we observed a week or two ago, that the French people, taking them as a body, have more sympathy for a violent than for a legal and peaceful extrication from this knot of embarrassments, and that sooner or later the popular prediction of, and faith in a coup d'etat will work out its own fulfilment. By presenting itself to the mind of the President as the sole mode of procedure, it may, perhaps, at no distant day, assume sufficient mastery over him to urge him to the commission of acts from the consequences of which he will find it impossible to recede. Between a republican constitution, founded upon a model which does not accord with the circumstances or feelings of France, and a monarchical assembly, which has no faith in any particular individual, and only knows that it dislikes the present occupant of the supreme power, more thoroughly than any other person,—Messrs. Lamartine, Marrast, and Ledrti Rollin excepted,—the part to be played by the actual President is enough to tax all his wisdom and his courage. With empire as the prize of success, and imprisonment, exile, or even a worse fate, as the punishment' of failure, he walks in a round of perils and perplexities. He is like a man on the brink of a precipice, with a yawning gulph beneath his feet, whose only safety is in the chance of a leap across the chasm. If he do not leap, he will probably be pushed over the brink, and dashed to pieces; and if he do leap, he may not have strength to carry him over. Yet leap he must, unless by dexterously allowing his opponents to rush over the precipice themselves by the very impetus with which they would urge him downwards, he should contrive to hold on, until they have, by falling in the chasm, ruined themselves. One thing is clear ;—'the Legislative Assembly has no hold upon the affections or respect of the French people, whether in the mass, or as it is represented by the public opinion of the educated classes, There is scarcely a man of any

solid and enduring principle in it, except M de Lamartine and General Cavaignac, and their reputations are somewhat shattered. Its leaders are either impracticable, though, perhaps, respectable men, like M. Berryer, or wily adventurers like M. Thiers, who have some head and no heart, and who never advocated any cause that they did not damage, and afterwards ruin. They all want honesty, and it is in this particular that the actual President, whatever his general defects of character may be, stands on an elevation so eminently superior to every one of them. Some stirring scenes are evidently to be enacted in Paris within the next few months. The car of revolution, stopped for awhile, will roll on again with fresh velocity. Louis Napoleon, however, has faith in himself, and in his position ; and with his popularity, that is more than half the battle.— lllustrated News, Oct. 18.