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( a house was broken open , and all the inhabitants , twenty or thirty in number , butchered by the troops , ) and availed themselves of the excuse for seizing the persons and papers of all the leading members of the Societe des Droits de IHomme . Not one of those leaders was even suspected of being concerned in either of the two insurrections , but the opportunity was thought a good one for laying , under colour of law , the clutches of the government upon
the correspondence of the society . It is now a year that these distinguished persons have been kept in prison ; and that time has been employed in manufacturing , from the papers which government got into its possession , evidence of a plot . The next desideratum was , to bring the prisoners before a tribunal which would be sure to convict them . Paris juries had been tried , and found
not sufficiently docile . They had always scouted the miserable attempts to hunt down innocent men on charges of treason and conspiracy ; and memorable had been the exposure , on more than one such occasion , of the malignant and fraudulent artifices of the government . There was , however , a resource . In servile imitation of the English constitution , the Chamber of Peers had been , by the French charter , invested with the power of trying ministers for treason or malversation on the prosecution of the Chamber of
Deputies . This provision Louis Philippe , following a questionable precedent of Louis the Eighteenth ' s reign , has applied to the case of persons who are not ministers , nor prosecuted by the Chamber of Deputies ; and has brought the pretended authors of the pretended republican conspiracy of Paris , along with the presumed authors of the real trades' union revolt at Lyons , before
the Chamber of Peers ; that is , before a body named by the gpvernment , and mostly holding places under it . Nothing can denote more complete ignorance of France than the daily speculations in our liberal newspapers as to the embarrassmeuts which the Chamber of Peers is supposed to have brought upon itself by consenting to be made the tool of the government in this matter , and the loss it is likely to sustain in public estimation . The Chamber of Peers is so liappily situated ,
that it cannot possibly suffer any loss of public estimation ; any change on that score must be to its advantage . It is as completely insignificant as our House of Lords would be if it were a body of mere pensioners , not hereditary , containing as little talent as at present , and scarcely any fortune . The Chamber of Peers , previously to this trials was heartil y despised . It may now attain the more honourable , and , to a Frenchman especially , far more enviable position of being hated . By showing that it has still the power ( in spite of the imbecility inherent in its constitution ) ojf making itself formidable as an instrument of tyranny in the
hai } cU of the other two branches of the legislature , it may have a ctatuc ? , jyhich . it certainly had not before , of regaining a certain art of QQff ( ri 4 * l * t * Mi « Th # Monster Trial is its last throw for
political importance .
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396 The MoiuUr Trial .
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A .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1835, page 396, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2646/page/32/
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