Norfolk Gazette And Publick Ledger

IMPORTANT POLITICAL PAPER.

The following is a translation from a printed paper circulated in France.--Its authenticity may be relied on.--Phil. Gazette.

BONAPARTE—AT THE PERIOD OF THE 4TH MAY, 1815.

The system of the Journals of Bonaparte has experienced no essential change.—They are still governed by the same spirit of falsehood, audacity and perfidy, though conducted with a view to a different result. Formerly, every endeavor was made to deceive France respecting the intentions of foreign countries, to which it is now found suspicion can be no longer attached. The present object, therefore, is to mislead foreign countries with respect to the situation and intention of France. It is wished to prove that the dictatorship of Bonaparte has the sanction of popular enthusiasm, that a powerful and numerous party supports the throne of that adventurer, and that he may hope to render the war of which he is the cause, national on the part of France. The shameful impostures, however, which are published for this purpose, only prove the infamy of those despicable beings from whom they proceed.

All France is impressed with the conviction of the approaching downfall of Bonaparte. Every day by which his existence is prolonged forms a subject of astonishment for the people, and for Bonaparte himself. He knows that he has been deceived by some factious men as to the feelings of the country; the public opinion calls for the best of kings, and rejects him as the most odious of tyrants; that the sound part of the army, which in more numerous than is supposed, is prepared to desert him; that the veterans of democracy, who recalled him from his exile, are already sapping his power, while they feign to serve him; and that even among his servile dependents, he who appears the most faithful may perhaps be an assassin in disguise.

The anxiety which torments him, which devours him. and which would be sufficient to complete his ruin, —independently of the hand of man or of the direct agency of Providence, is manifested in all the acts of his ephemeral government; uncertain in his plans, his means or his resources, he promises, appoints, caresses and threatens, and according to the nature or the object of his alarms, he is either an absolute master, forcing all to submit to his caprices, or a furious demagogue, endeavoring to stir up the passions of the populace, to excite in favor of despotism, the seditions of liberty. The instability of his dictatorship is so evident to all eyes, that avarice will not rely on it for success, that ambition fears to place hope in it, and that even baseness hesitates. for the first time to perform for it one additional act of shame. This is no longer to be doubted. It is to the universal conviction of which I speak that we are indebted for the timid and forced moderation of the tyrant's measures; the world well know, that Bonaparte never pardons when be has power to punish.

The partisans of Bonaparte who serve him for himself. are then reduced to a small number of disgraced men, who have either compromised by great crimes or been degraded by great ignominies, and who cannot attach their wretched existences to any other Order of things. It is to preserve fortune and privileges to these execrable villains that the nation is forced to oppose the efforts of Europe and to lavish the blood of her citizens; it is in the name of glory that the country is devoted to the interests of four or five miserable beings, whom Scylla would not have made executioners.

Bonaparte can henceforth deceive nobody in France, for of all the parties which have survived our civil discords, the most credulous already perceive his perfidy. A few of those irritable, impassioned, and above all, credulous men, because they are generally generous and sensible, a few of these men, I say, who have been dreaming during twenty years of an imaginary republic, and who have pursued their illusions through all governments and all anarchies, felt their hopes revive at the cry of liberty which the mob in the train of Bonaparte raised on his passage to Paris. They forgot that Bonaparte is the great enemy of liberty, the assassin of the republic, and the first violator of those sacred rights of which they had so dearly paid the purchase.-- They forgot that Bonaparte spoke also of liberty when he destroyed the national representation of St. Cloud. They forget that it was in the name of the French republic that Bonaparte had established the most insolent despotism of which mankind had ever supported the yoke. - They forgot that Bonaparte had attempted to suppress all the sentiments which united the citizens to the country, to extinguish all the lights of civilization, to paralyze every means of education.-.. They forgot that Bonaparte had proscribed every liberal and philosophic idea, under the title of ideology; that he consecrated the most destructive principles of despotism in books avowed by. his ministers'; that he promised feudal privileges to his Sebiris, and gave sovereignties to his Satraps--They forgot that heaven and hell are not more distant than those two most extremes of all the series of ideas which occupy the human mind--Bonaparte and liberty-They forget that the very word liberty, so cruelly proscribed under the iron reign of the usurper, only gladdened our ears for the first time, after twelve years of humiliation and despair, on the happy restoration of Louis XVIII. Ah! miserable impostor, would you have spoken of liberty had not Louis XVIII. brought back liberty & peace. Louis XVIII. loves liberty and gives it you.-- The ruffian who has for a few days deprived him of his throne has not had the perfidious address to deceive you even for these few days. He has not had the skill to spare you a single regret.--. You may see by the liberty which he offers you in his weakness, and amidst the terrors which assail him, what you have to expect should treason succeed in confirming his hateful power!-- This man, who is obliged to admit that he possesses only the authority of a dictatorship, imposed on the country by some soldiers, has dared to prescribe to you a constitution; and that constitution, who would believe it, is merely an additional act to constitutions which he formerly abrogated on the establishment of the empire, after he had violated them during four previous years. Besides the additional act, the servile copy of the contract which he tore in the face of the world, is merely a frame impudently formed, within which he has succeeded in placing two or three fundamental institutions, which deliver up France to his worthless peerage! Good heaven! the peers of Bonaparte! they are made hereditary, and you are told it beforehand: And you too have children/

And you soldiers! you have friends, relations, a country; you will not sacrifice them to the fatal glory of a foreigner who is great only in consequence of your sufferings, and whose imperial purple has been stained with your blood." You are Frenchmen, soldiers, you despise treachery; a noble blush over-spreads your foreheads at the names of Excelmans and la Bedoyere; I have beheld sacred tears start from your eyes on the recollection of your king. You will justify the French army before the tribunal of history which awaits your vindication.

We may now state in a few words what is the actual situation of the whole of France with respect to Bonaparte.

The Royalists never will be for him.
The Republicans are no longer for him.
The army regrets having been for him.
The Bonapartists no longer dare to acknowledge that they are for him.