The country population of France heard with indifference of the fall of Louis Philippe, and possibly approved the proclamation of the second Republic.

But the communism of 1848 roused every landowner against Paris.

The peasant proprietors filled the benches of the National Assembly with Conservatives or Reactionists who would save them from plunder; fear became for once the cause of courage, and dread of loss of property sent thousands of peasant proprietors to Paris, that they might crush by force of arms the socialist insurrection of June.
Perjury, fraud, and cruelty disgraced the _coup d'etat_ of 1851.

But, as Liberals now see, the second Empire, hateful though it was to every man who loved freedom or cared for integrity, did not owe the permanence of its power to cunning or to violence.

It was the dread of the Red Spectre which drove the landowners of France into Imperialism; they may have liked parliamentary liberty, it was a pleasant luxury, but they loved their land and property, it was their life-blood, and by Socialism their land and property was they believed menaced.
As to the Coercion Act, no sensible man, be he Radical or Tory, need trouble himself.