This is not clemency granted, it is clemency implored.

This formula: "Ask us for your pardon," means: "Grant us our pardon." The murderer, leaning over his victim and with his knife raised, cries: "I have waylaid you, seized you, hurled you to the earth, despoiled and robbed you, passed my knife through your body, and now you are under my feet, your blood is oozing from twenty wounds; _say you repent_, and I will not finish you." This _repentance_ exacted by a criminal from an innocent man, is nothing else than the outward form which his inward remorse assumes.
He fancies that he is thus safeguarded against his own criminality.
Whatever expedient he may adopt to deaden his feelings, although he may be for ever ringing in his own ears the seven million five hundred thousand little bells of his plebiscite, the man of the _coup d'etat_ reflects at times; he catches vague glimpses of a tomorrow, and struggles against the inevitable future.

He must have legal purgation, discharge, release from custody, quittance.

He exacts it from the vanquished, and at need puts them to the torture, to obtain it.

Louis Bonaparte knows that there exists, in the conscience of every prisoner, of every exile, of every man proscribed, a tribunal, and that that tribunal is beginning his prosecution; he trembles, the executioner feels a secret dread of his victim; and, under pretext of a pardon accorded by him to that victim, he forces his judges to sign his acquittal.
Thus he hopes to deceive France, which, too, is a living conscience and a watchful tribunal; and that when the hour for passing sentence shall strike, seeing that he has been absolved by his victims, she will pardon him.