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CHAPTER XIII.
THE MILITARY COMMISSIONS AND THE MIXED COMMISSIONS
Justice sometime meets with strange adventures.
This old phrase assumed a new sense.
The code ceased to be a safeguard. The law became something which had
sworn fealty to a crime. Louis Bonaparte appointed judges by whom one
felt oneself stopped as in the corner of a wood. In the same manner as
the forest is an accomplice through its density, so the legislation was
an accomplice by its obscurity. What it lacked at certain points in
order to make it perfectly dark they added. How? By force. Purely and
simply. By decree. Sic jubeo. The decree of the 17th of February was a
masterpiece. This decree completed the proscription of the person, by
the proscription of the name. Domitian could not have done better. Human
conscience was bewildered; Right, Equity, Reason felt that the master
had over them the authority that a thief has over a purse. No reply.
Obey. Nothing resembles those infamous times.
Every iniquity was possible. Legislative bodies supervened and instilled
so much gloom into legislation that it was easy to achieve a baseness in
this darkness.
A successful coup d'état does not stand upon ceremony. This kind of
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