Do I mean thereby that the Republic would not have come?
Not so.

The Republic, we repeat, is the future; it would have come, but step by step, successive progress by progress, conquest by conquest, like a river that flows, and not like a deluge that overflows; it would have come at its own hour, when all was ready for it; it would have come, certainly not more enduring, for it is already indestructible, but more tranquil, free from all possibility of reaction, with no princes keeping watch, with no _coup d'etat_ behind.
The policy which obstructs the progress of mankind--let us insist on this point--excels in producing artificial floods.

Thus it had managed to render the year 1852 a sort of formidable eventuality, and this again by the same contrivance, by means of a dam.

Here is a railway; a train will pass in an hour; throw a beam across the rails, and when the train comes to that point it will be wrecked, as it was at Fampoux; remove the beam before the train arrives, and it will pass without even suspecting the catastrophe recently lurking there.

This beam is the law of the 31st of May.
The leaders of the majority of the Legislative Assembly had thrown it across 1852, and they cried: "This is where society will be crushed!" The Left replied: "Take away your beam, and let universal suffrage pass unobstructed." This is the whole history of the law of the 31st of May.
These are things for children to understand, but which "statesmen" do not understand.
Now let us answer the question we just now proposed: Without the 2nd of December, what would have occurred in 1852?
Revoke the law of the 31st of May, take away the dam from before the people, deprive Bonaparte of his lever, his weapon, his pretext, let universal suffrage alone, take the beam off the rails, and do you know what you would have had in 1852?
Nothing.
Elections.
A sort of peaceful Sundays, when the people would have come forward to vote, labourers yesterday, today electors, to-morrow labourers, and always sovereign.
Somebody rejoins: "Oh, yes, elections! You talk very glibly about them.
But what about the 'red chamber' which would have sprung from these elections." Did they not announce that the Constitution of 1848 would prove a "red chamber ?" Red chambers, red hobgoblins, all such predictions are of equal value.