Added to these evils, there was a failure of the potato crop and a monetary crisis.  The annual deficit was alarming.  Loans were raised with difficulty.  No one came to the support of a throne which was felt to be tottering.  The liberal Press made the most of the difficulties to fan the general discontent.  It saw no remedy for increasing evils but in parliamentary reform, and this, of course, was opposed by government.  The Chamber of Deputies, composed of rich men, had lost the confidence of the nation.  The clergy were irrevocably hostile to the government.  “Yes,” said Lamartine, “a revolution is approaching; and it is a revolution of contempt.”  The most alarming evil was the financial state of the country.  The expenses for the year 1847 were over fourteen hundred millions, nearly four hundred millions above the receipts.  Such a state of things made loans necessary, which impaired the national credit.

The universal discontent sought a vent in reform banquets, where inflammatory speeches were made and reported.  These banquets extended over France, attended by a coalition of hostile parties, the chiefs of which were Thiers, Odillon Barrot, De Tocqueville, Garnier-Pages, Lamartine, and Ledru-Rollin, who pointed out the evils of the times.  At last, in 1848, the opposition resolved on a great banquet in Paris, to defy the government.  The radicals sounded the alarm in the newspapers.  Terror seized all classes, and public business was suspended, for revolution was in the air Men said to one another, “They will be fighting in the streets soon.”

The place selected for the banquet was in one of the retired streets leading out of the Champs Elysees,—­a large open space enclosed by walls capable of seating six thousand people at table.  The proposed banquet, however, was changed to a procession, extending from the Place of the Bastille to the Madeleine.  The National Guard were invited to attend without their arms, but in uniform.  The government was justly alarmed, for no one could tell what would come of it, although the liberal chiefs declared that nothing hostile was meant.  Louis Blanc, however,—­socialist, historian, journalist, agitator, leader among the working classes,—­meant blood.  The more moderate now began to fear that a collision would take place between the people and the military, and that they would all be put down or massacred.  They were not prepared for an issue which would be the logical effect of the procession, and at the eleventh hour concluded to abandon it.  The government, thinking that the crisis was passed, settled into an unaccountable repose.  There were only twenty thousand regular troops in the city.  There ought to have been eighty thousand; but Guizot was not the man for the occasion.