She had suffered much, and was bewildered by fears of anarchy on one side and of tyranny on the other.

If she looked doubtfully at this dark, mysterious, unmagnetic man, she remembered it was only for four years, and was as safe as any other experiment; and the author of those two ridiculous attempts at a restoration of the empire, made at Strasbourg and at Boulogne, was not a man to be feared.
The overthrow of monarchy in France had, however, been taken more seriously in other countries than at home.

It had kindled anew the fires of republicanism all over Europe: Kossuth leading a revolution in Hungary, and Garibaldi and Mazzini in Italy, where Victor Emmanuel, the young King of Sardinia, was at the moment in deadly struggle with Austria over the possession of Milan, and dreaming of the day when a united Italy would be freed from the Austrian yoke.
The man at the head of the French Republic was surveying all these conditions with an intelligence, strong and even subtle, of which no one suspected him, and viewed with satisfaction the extinguishment of the revolutionary fires in Europe, which had been kindled by the one in France to which he owed his own elevation! The Assembly soon realized that in this prince-president it had no automaton to deal with.

A deep antagonism grew, and the cunningly devised issue could not fail to secure popular support to Louis Napoleon.

When an assembly is at war with the president because _it_ desires to restrict the suffrage, and _he_ to make it universal, can anyone doubt the result?
He was safe in appealing to the people on such an issue, and sure of being sustained in his proclamation dissolving the Assembly.
The Assembly refused to be dissolved.