John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[86] as reportedly by the newspapers, but owing to the continuance of the state of siege at Vienna, and of the civil war in Hungary, he gave up his proposed trip to those regions, and returned to Paris, where he arrived December 6 or 7, 1848.

The first letter after his arrival is dated December 10th, and the second December 14th. They relate to the parties, the candidates, and to the election of Louis Napoleon as the first president of France under the new constitution over Cavaignac the provisional president, Ledru-Rollin, candidate of the revolutionary party, and Raspail, the candidate of the extreme socialists, by an overwhelming majority in the proportion of five votes to two. Dana attributes this extraordinary result to the refusal of the provisional government, backed by the bourgeoisie, the commercial classes, the clergy, and the office-holders to protect the natural rights of the laboring classes.

From the first he declared:

I have no faith in the sincerity of Louis Napoleon's adherence to the Republic. His history is marked with examples of falsehood too glaring to allow any confidence to be placed in his protestations even were he a man of sufficient intellect and character to be capable of genuine sincerity. There is no doubt that he would much rather be Emperor than President. ...

He pointed out that while the new constitution, with all its defects, established a republic, and guaranteed liberty, order, and the opportunity of progress as no other French constitution had ever done, it had also established a centralized government which might be “a good arrangement for a despotism, but not for a free country.” It, however, failed to make provision for the right to labor, and thus ignored one of the principal contentions of the revolution, and yet he thought that neither the Legitimists,