At the election of the Constituent Assembly of 1848 and the Legislative Assembly of 1849, rumours developed about electoral fraud. Each time, the urn was a central element in the narrative. The press, the main vehicle of this fraudulent discourse, related that the urns that were used for the first mass voting in the Seine must have been carried off or overturned. Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Minister of the Interior, architect of the universal direct suffrage of 1848, was himself not beyond question. But these fraudulent narratives were largely imaginary. They expressed the people’s uneasiness towards and defiance of the exercise of political sovereignty—which had just been granted to them and the effects of which were the cause for concern. The urn, a central element of the electoral scene, became the focus of many fantasies