Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/956

Rochefort forward as their candidate for the seventh circonscription of Paris, and on the second ballot he polled 14,780 votes, against 18,267 recorded in favour of his adversary, M. Jules Favre. In the following November he was proposed as a candidate for the first circonscription of Paris. On this occasion he venturned into France, and on crossing the Belgian frontier he was arrested, but was set at liberty a few hours afterwards, and received from the Emperor a sauf-conduit to be in force till after the elections. M. Rochefort, now the idol of the Parisian populace, declared that he should merely take the oath of allegiance to the Empire, in order to overthrow it for a Republic. He was elected Deputy by 17,978 votes, against 13,445 given to his opponent, M. Carnot. in the Chambers he took his seat beside M. Raspail, and rendered himself notorious by the coarseness of his personal attacks on the Emperor. In Dec, 1869, he started the Marseillaise, a newspaper, the character of which is sufficiently indicated by its title. It was not, like "La Lanterne," written entirely by the editor, but was the work of several hands. The attacks in this journal on Prince Pierre Bonaparte led to the assassination by the latter of Victor Noir, one of M. Rochefort's subordinates. The paper was seized Jan. 11, 1870. The Chambers authorised its prosecution, and on Jan. 22 M. Rochefort and two other writers in the paper were sentenced to six months' imprisonment with fines. On Feb. 7, M. Rochefort was arrested at a public meeting at La Vilette, on which occasion there was immense excitement and much rioting in Paris. He was confined in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie. On the proclamation of the Republic in Sept., 1870, M. Rochefort was released, being conveyed on the shoulders of the mob from his prison to the Louvre. He was placed at the head of a department of State, but quarrelled with everybody, and soon resigned his appointment, after which, it was reported, he served as a simple gunner in the artillery during the siege of Paris. Subsequently, during the brief triumph of the Commune, he edited an infamous journal, the Mot d'Ordre. On May 19, 1871, while endeavouring to escape in disguise from Paris, he was arrested at Méaux and taken to Versailles. He was placed on his trial before a court-martial, Sept. 20 and 21, 1871, charged with inciting to civil war, with complicity in the destruction, by the Commune, of private property and public monuments, and with the publication of false news and attacks on the established govern ment in the Mot d'Ordre. A verdict of guilty was returned, and he was sentenced to imprisonment for life. He was incarcerated first in Fort Boyard, from whence he was transferred (June, 1872) to the citadel of Saint-Martin-de-Ré. The French Government permitted M. Rochefort to leave the fortress in which he was immured, and to go to Versailles, Nov. 6, 1872, for the special object of marrying the mother of his illegitimate children, and thus legitimising them according to French law. Madame Rochefort, who was then extremely ill, died a few weeks afterwards. Subsequently, M. Rochefort was transported to the penal settlement of New Caledonia. In 1874 he, with Grousset, Gourde, Balliére, and two other Communist prisoners, succeeded in escaping from the island. They left as stowaways on board a vessel bound for Newcastle, New South Wales, reached Sydney in safety, and sailed soon afterwards for Europe. On June 16, 1874, M. Rochefort arrived at Queenstown, where, but for the intervention of the Royal Irish Constabulary, he would have met with rough treatment at the hands