Читать книгу The Times Great Victorian Lives - Ian Brunskill - Страница 22

IT IS WITH regret we announce the death of the Emperor Napoleon yesterday. Although the fate of the illustrious patient’s general health and the critical nature of the operation performed on him naturally excited uneasiness as to the ultimate result, yet there was little apprehension of immediate danger. Indeed he had slept so soundly through the night and awakened comparatively so strong in the early morning that it had been decided to undertake a further operation at noon. He sank, however, suddenly, and in a very short time all was over.

In the singular career of the late Emperor, as in that of most remarkable men, there are breaks which divide it into distinct periods, without injuring the general dramatic unity. He was born seemingly to greatness. Apparently it threatened to elude him. He struggled after it in the face of adverse circumstances from the time he attained to years of discretion. He partly achieved it, partly had it thrust upon him, and after a success which should have satisfied his wildest dreams, he ended his active life an exile, as he had begun it. It would not be enough to say that Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was born in the purple. His cradle was at the Tuileries Palace, in the closest vicinity to the Throne. He was the youngest son of Louis, King of Holland, and of Hortense Beauharnais, the Empress Josephine’s daughter. His father was Napoleon’s third brother; but the descendants of Joseph were excluded from the succession by their sex, and those of Lucien by the disfavour under which that stern Republican had fallen; so that, at the date of Louis Napoleon’s birth, the 20th of April, 1808, the heir-apparent was sought among the scions of the younger branch. Whether, in the event of the Emperor’s dying without a son, preference would have been given to Louis Napoleon over his elder brother Napoleon Louis, and what reasons might have determined such a choice, it would now be useless to inquire. Suffice it to know that the Emperor evinced a strong predilection in favour of this younger son of his step-daughter, Hortense. ‘His name,’ we are told, ‘was written down at the head of the family register of the Napoleon dynasty.’ His baptism was put off for more than two years and a half, till the 10th of November, 1810, when the Emperor and his newly-married Empress, Maria Louisa, soon to be a mother, held him at the font; and although the birth of the King of Rome, five months later, disappointed the hopes of his immediate succession, the infant of Hortense still held for several years a most important position in his uncle’s household, and was treated with all the honours due to an heir presumptive. He was seven years old when he stood by his uncle’s side at the great gathering on the Champ de Mai during the Hundred Days, and, after Waterloo, he clung to his uncle’s knees when the Emperor left La Malmaison, struggling against separation, as if instinct had told him that with the Emperor his own fortunes and those of the House were overshadowed.

The young Prince, reduced, with his mother, to a private station, spent eight years then at the Augsburg Gymnasium; then six more as a student under domestic tutors at the Castle of Arenenberg, in the canton of Thurgau, on the Lake of Constance, became proficient in history and mathematics, skilful in fencing, horse-manship, and swimming, and curious about military affairs; joining the ranks of the Swiss Militia, and making the acquaintance of the Federal General Dufour. Next to the pale reminiscences of Court pageantries in his early childhood, nothing, perhaps, so powerfully contributed to form the character of the future Emperor as the influence of the mother in whose house he grew up as an only child. The marriage of Hortense with Louis Bonaparte was, by his confession, ‘forced and ill-assorted.’ Seven months before the birth of their third son the Royal couple parted never to be re-united. It was not without contention that the ex-King of Holland, now Duke of Saint Leu, made good his claims to his elder son, leaving the younger in the undisputed possession of the mother. Chagrined as she seemed with her retirement at Arenenberg, Hortense, however, not unfrequently spent the winter in Italy, chiefly at Rome. It was not under the ascendancy of such a mother that the aspiring youth could learn resignation to a humble lot. Louis Napoleon was taught to look for a change with as full a confidence as he would expect daylight at the close of the natural period of darkness. It little mattered when, where, or by what means the turn in his fortunes might come. Enough that an opening would be made. The Man was there; he would not have to wait long for the Hour.

The July Revolution in Paris was hailed as the dawn, but it was only a momentary and deceitful twilight. The Prince’s advances met with no favour from the men at the head of the movement in France, but a chance soon offered itself in Italy. The outbreak in the Roman States in February, 1831, found both the sons of Hortense in arms under the Italian tricolour. There was a bloodless campaign – a mere promenade under Sertognani from Foligno to Otricoli; then a journey to Forli, where the elder brother died of the measles on the 17th of March. Louis Napoleon, attacked by the same complaint at Ancona, was tended by his mother, smuggled away to Marseilles and Paris, and hence, after vain endeavours to obtain a restingplace, conveyed, a convalescent, to Arenenberg. On the downfall of the Italian cause, the Prince was seized with enthusiasm for Polish independence. He travelled through Germany on his way to Warsaw, but the tidings of the final catastrophe met him in Saxony, and for four years, from 1832 to 1836, he was forced back to his life of expectant leisure on the Bodensee. While, in all probability, the future candidate for power, at the early stage of his career, sought only for distinction as a soldier and a patriot, more than one short cut to fortune seemed to present itself to him. At Foligno and Forli he was emphatically hailed as ‘the Prince;’ Polish Generals tempted him with the proffered command of their legions; at the London Conference his name, it is said, was brought forward as a candidate for Belgian Royalty, and he was even, it would be difficult to say with what truth, put down among the suitors for the hand of Maria da Gloria of Portugal. Any ambitious views of that nature he, however, invariably disclaimed. To struggling nations he would only bring a volunteer’s sword; and as to France, ‘the hope to be able to serve her as a citizen and soldier was in his eyes worth more than all the thrones in the world.’

His devotion to France, however, was stimulated by other considerations than those of disinterested patriotism. The Duke of Reichstadt had died at Schönbrunn, and the Prince was now the acknowledged head of the Napoleon dynasty. Notwithstanding the greatest dissimilarity of mind and heart, his intense admiration for his uncle led him to a strange identification of himself with the great conqueror. His landing at Cannes, and ‘the flight’ of the Imperial Eagle from steeple to steeple, till ‘it folded its wings on the towers of Nôtre Dame,’ were, he thought, feats only to be tried again to meet with the same success. Nor was he altogether out of his reckoning. From 1831 to 1848 Bonapartism in France had made common cause with Republicanism. The First Empire, it was argued, had been an era of war and despotism; but it had peace and freedom in reserve. There was no limit to which ‘Napoleonic ideas’ could not be stretched; no degree of perfectibility incompatible with their full development. Of these ideas the young enthusiast at Arenenberg made himself the high priest and interpreter with an earnestness of faith of which he was, possibly, the first dupe. Those ideas, it must be borne in mind, were not altogether peculiar to the Prince. They were the great delusion of the age. The memory of the First Napoleon was no sooner released from the pressure under which the senseless reaction of the Bourbons vainly attempted to hold it than it was idealized into a myth. Napoleon was no longer the man of the Dix-huit Brumaire, of the Levée en masse. What men remembered of him were the Code Civil, the Alpine roads, the Legion of Honour. His name was, above all things, associated with the liberal Acte Additionel of 1815. He was the man with whose good intentions the courtyard of the villa at Longwood was paved. It was from this Prometheus bound that the young Pretender professed to hold his commission. He came to repair and to fulfil; he stood forth as the redeemer of the great man’s dying pledges, the executor of his last will and testament. Louis Philippe, who dreaded the Pretender and honoured him with the crown of proscription was all the time playing into his hands. From beginning to end the July Monarchy laboured at the apotheosis of Imperialism. Aware of the nature of the people’s complaint, their rulers hoped to overcome it by ministering to it homeopathically. They inoculated the virus already creeping in the nation’s veins. From the restoration of the bronze statue on the top of the Vendˆme column in 1831 to the laying of the granite coffin beneath the dome of the Invalides in 1840, France was being turned into a vast Napoleonic monument. The Press teemed with little else but Napoleonic literature. The attack on the Strasburg barracks in 1836, and the landing at Boulogne in 1840, were only egregious blunders in so far that they took France by surprise. There was neither preparation nor opportunity. Nations are not easily roused in cold blood. Popular movements must be in a great measure dependent on time and place. It was not because the Prince had any reason to believe that he would be particularly welcome in Alsace or in Picardy that he made choice of a city on the Rhine or of a seaport on the Channel. It was because those places happened to be each at a different period nearest at hand – the one nearest to him as he came up from Switzerland, the other opposite to him as he steamed from the English coast. The precedent at Cannes bewildered him. He acted in obedience to that blind idolatry of his uncle, to that servility of imitation, which, as may be seen in the sequel, marred not less than it made him. Strasburg and Boulogne were in every respect poor parodies of the Return from Elba. They were also clearly a rehearsal of the Coup d’Etat on a small scale. In 1836 and in 1840 Louis Napoleon had forgotten all his disclaimers of 1831. He no longer aspired to the glory of a mere French citizen and soldier of France. He was already a full-grown Cæsar, not with the tricolor merely, but with the crown, sceptre, and eagle. His notions about the sovereignty of the people were sufficiently plain and consistent. The people were to be free – free to choose him. At Strasburg and Boulogne he evidently took the nation’s consent for granted. His appeal was to the soldiers; his faith was in them. Had the barracks realized his expectation, had his cry ‘Vivel’Empereur’ found an echo in the ranks, the plébiscite would have followed as a matter of course.

Those miserable failures at Strasburg and Boulogne darkened the prospects of Bonapartism apparently for ever. They deprived the Pretender of all initiative in revolutionary movements. Henceforth the Prince would have to watch the tide. The quarry might be his yet, but only when others had struck it down for him. Those very failures, however, were instrumental in revealing no less than in forming his character. Placed in the power of his enemies, after Strasburg, from the 30th of October to the 21st of November, 1836, and, after Boulogne, from the 4th of August, 1840, to the 25th of May, 1846, he gave proof of fortitude and dignity. In his intercourse with his captors, judges, and gaolers, he managed to have himself treated as a Monarch, though a vanquished one. He repaid Swiss hospitality by a spontaneous departure from Arenenberg in August, 1838, when the gallant Confederacy professed its readiness to run the risk of a quarrel with France for his sake. Neither his six years’ confinement in a State fortress – his ‘course of studies at the University of Ham,’ as he termed it, nor the two distinct periods of his not ungenial exile in London – 1838 to 1840, and 1846 to 1848, were lost upon him. Amid the gloom of a captive’s life, as among the dissipations of a small if not quite select society, the activity of his mind was uncommon. He studied England; he conceived for this country that quiet but steady attachment which seldom fails to spring up in the heart of those who spend a summer and winter among us. Among the French the Prince generally sought tools and accomplices; of the English he made friends and companions. He was stanch rather than choice in his connexions. The consciousness of the loftiness of his ends rendered him indifferent to the lowness of his means. The best instrument in the schemer’s hand was the most passive, hence, if necessary, the most unscrupulous. His knowledge of men seldom failed him, and commensurate with his knowledge was his indulgence to their foibles, and his sympathy with their moods. He accepted devotion with all its burdens and drawbacks. He was a friend à toute épreuve. A partisan might have to be disavowed, but no one was ever sacrificed; nor was the least act of kindness shown to the Pretender in adversity ever forgotten by the Sovereign in his prosperity.

Eighteen hundred and forty-eight came. The faintheartedness of a King and the infatuation of a Minister left France to her own mastery. Ahandful of dreamers and schemers pulled down the whole social edifice. From February to June of that year the disorganization, though less violent and bloody, was far more thorough than during the worst period of the Reign of Terror. In an evil day France had been taken by surprise. On the morrow she was appalled at the results of her own supineness and improvidence. On the third day she was anxious for reaction, on the look-out for a man who could save society. That task was morally fulfilled by Lamartine with a happy phrase; materially by Cavaignac with an awful massacre. By biding his time Louis Napoleon reaped the benefit both of the poet’s and of the soldier’s work. In February he made a tender of his services; but in April and in June he still declined the seats which were offered to him in the National Assembly. On the memorable 10th of April, as the world remembers, Prince Louis Napoleon was still doing duty as special constable in King-street, St. James’s. He ‘wished to undeceive those who charged him with ambition,’ but he ‘would know how to fulfil any duty which the people might lay upon him.’ He said this on the 15th of June; ten days later the revolution was crushed. On the 26th of September he crossed the Channel and made his first appearance in the Assembly. Clear as the ground was before him, actively as his friends exerted themselves in his behalf, he still felt his way cautiously, almost timidly. Republicanism was in the mouth of all; monarchic restoration in the hearts of most men. Lamartine, Cavaignac, any of the so-called Republicans du lendemain, would keep the seat warm for a Prince either of the elder or of the younger Bourbonbranch; but Louis Napoleon, if he took it, would be sure to keep it for himself. Hence there was, doubtless, considerable mistrust of and illwill towards him. Aware of this feeling, and with but little confidence in his debating powers, the Pretender limited himself to a defensive policy in the Assembly. His rare attempts to speak were neither brilliant nor successful. He sat down unmoved, in sullen, silent discomfiture, trusting to the prestige of his uncle’s name to plead his cause among the people. Whether dictated by choice or necessity, his course was the wisest. On the 10th of December, 1848, Cavaignac had a million and a half of the people’s votes for the Presidency of the Republic. Prince Napoleon had above six millions. Upon that vote the supreme power of the Pretender could have been legally and peacefully founded for ever. Up to the close of the year 1848 no good whatever was known about the newly-elected President. Ridicule is apt to kill the most honourable names in France, and the Prince’s name was only associated with the farces of Strasburg and Boulogne. The vast majority of the national representation, the whole wealth and worth of the country, were dead against him; yet the mass of the people had, with very little solicitation and hardly any exertion on his part, pronounced for him. Henceforth the President had possession – nine-tenths of the law – on his side.

For the best part of the next two years the President and the still hostile Assembly were busy with the task of killing the dead. Republicanism had no friends, and no quarter was to be given to it. All efforts were turned to the reestablishment of that compact, centralized administration which, in normal times, constitutes the strength and pride of France. The sword of the State was being tempered; no matter who might be destined to wield it, every one was interested in the keenness of its edge and the sharpness of its point. In the meanwhile, however, its hilt was in the President’s hand and every repressive measure tightened his grasp upon it. Louis Napoleon was sure that the ‘union of the two powers – legislative and executive – was indispensable to the tranquillity of the country.’ The Assembly perceived, too late, that the President was bringing his theory into practice. They strove to limit his powers, to circumscribe his influence; they attempted to curtail his expenditure; they set up a permanent committee; they proposed to take from him the command-in-chief of the Army, and to invest it with the President of the Assembly. Goaded into action by imminent danger, the so-called ‘old parties’ – Bourbonists and Orleanists – were accused of a design to hasten a Restoration, which, if not absolutely impossible, was, at least, premature. In their visits to Claremont after Louis Philippe’s death, and to Wiesbaden at the time of the Count de Chambord’s stay in that place, the friends of the exiled Princes were supposed to be negotiating a fusion between the two branches of the Bourbon family – a negotiation which remains unfinished to the present time. Changarnier, the General in command of the Army of Paris and of the National Guard of the Seine, was pointed out as the French Monk who was to enable the legitimate dynasty to come by its own again. There may have been much or little in these surmises, but Louis Napoleon knew how to make the most of them. The President fought his battles with indifferent success in the Chamber, but his very defeats paved the way for his victories in the country. Nothing could be more daring than his self-assertion; nothing more open than his plans of operation. The Bonapartist conspiracy embodied in the Société du Dix Decembre was carried on with the cards on the table. ‘In extreme dangers,’ said the President, ‘Providence not unfrequently trusts one man with the safety of all.’ At the reviews of St. Maur and Satory the soldiers hailed the President with that cry of ‘Vivel’Empereur!’ to which the garrisons of Strasburg and Boulogne had refused to respond years before.

From the beginning of 1851 everything was being made ready for a final conflict. Early in January Changarnier was removed from his command. In October and November the President laid his ultimatum–first before his Ministers, then before the Assembly. He proposed the repeal of the law of May 31, 1850, by which universal suffrage had been restricted. ‘That measure,’ said the President, ‘was tantamount to the disfranchisement of 3,000,000 electors.’ Had even the law really had such sweeping effects the President had but little to fear from an appeal to the people. Had even that law been in force in December, 1848, the balance of the votes would still have been decisive in his favour. Nothing, however, but the certainty of an overwhelming majority could allay his apprehensions. To insure it he resolved on the Coup d’Etat of the 2d of December. He laid a violent hand on his most dreaded opponents. He dispersed the less dangerous. He dissolved the Assembly and the Council of State. He abrogated the law of May 31, and re-established universal suffrage. He then called together the ‘Comitia of the nation.’ In the mean time he declared Paris in a State of Siege; he deluged its streets with blood; he terrorized France by wholesale transportation. He finally asked for a sanction or condemnation of his deed of violence. Seven millions and a half of Frenchmen against little above half a million gave sentence in his favour.

The Second Napoleon had thus his Deux Decembre, as the first had his Dix-huit Brumaire. The elevation of Louis Napoleon under any circumstances appeared so certain that one is almost tempted to fancy that wanton display of uncalled-for energy to have only been prompted by the nephew’s blind obligation to tread in his uncle’s footsteps. Every subsequent act of his, at any rate, was sheer repetition. From the 2d of December, 1851, to the same day and month of the following year, the Imperial Revolution went through the same phases which it exhibited from the 10th of November, 1799, to the 18th of May, 1804; only the more recent catastrophe was limited within a narrower cycle. There was the same impatient stir in the Departments; the same obsequious solicitations of the Senate; the same martial pageantries on the Champ de Mars; the same triumphal progress of the Cæsar. The Constitution was a paltry copy. The history on the coins was identical. Even the fortuitous coincidence of the assassin’s dagger and of the infernal machine was not wanting. It was only in the number of votes that the new generation outdid the old.

And now, at last, Louis Napoleon was back at the Tuileries. It would be to little purpose if we were to endeavour to realize his sensations, as, at the mature age of 44, the pale reminiscences of thirty-seven years since crowded upon him on the threshold of that lately desecrated palace. Verily, the man’s faith had its reward! That faith which never forsook him at the gloomiest periods of his career; that faith which, at a distance, raised a sneer at his expense, yet cast a magnetic spell over all who came within his reach – that faith proved to have been founded on unerring instincts. The Pretender’s claims were admitted. He had aimed no higher than his stubborn will could lift him. That intense yearning by which the uncle had been haunted all his lifetime had certainly fallen to the nephew, whatever other parts of the rich inheritance might have been denied to him. The words by which that undefinable feeling found utterance in the strain of the Italian poet apply with equal force to the two aspiring relatives. There was in both cases ‘the stormy, trembling joy of a great purpose, the longing of a heart fretting as it impatiently thirsted for empire, and attaining it at last, and grasping a prize for which it had seemed madness to hope.’

In the magnitude of the result people easily lost sight of the means by which it had been achieved. The cold shiver which had followed closely upon the revolutionary fever heat of 1848 had scarcely passed away three years later, and, under its fit, men were ready to go any length in the way of reaction. The cry was everywhere for strong Government; and, somehow, the Coup d’Etat, whatever might be the grounds of justice or expediency on which it was made to stand, was hailed as evidence of its author’s energy, and accepted as a pledge of social security. The hand which had displayed so much vigour in seizing the reins of government might surelybe relied uponto hold them with equal firmness. Even for men swayed by more rigid notions of right and wrong, the moral question how the supreme power had been obtained was absorbed in the other far more momentous problem – what uses it would be put to. The ends of Providence are often fulfilled in inscrutable ways; and it little mattered, after all, by what means another Napoleon had ascended the throne of France, if men could only ascertain how much of the good or the evil of the old Napoleonic era would be reproduced in the new.

We have already expressed our opinion that the nephew carried the worship of the uncle’s memory to the verge of superstition. He was, however, aware that there was a weak no less than a strong side to old Imperialism. He announced the coming not of the Caesarean but of the Augustan age. The Second Empire brought not a sword but peace. In the mind of the French people the mere reappearance of the Eagle, the revival of the name of Napoleon, constituted a victory over allied Europe. The Deux-Decembre had avenged Waterloo. France had broken through the dynastic arrangements of 1815, and her ancient enemies had not a word to say against her achievement. This negative homage being paid to her vanity, France had no longer an interest in the disturbance of the common tranquillity. Questions about natural frontiers, about oppressed nationalities might, indeed, arise; but moral ascendency could now, perhaps, accomplish more than the edge of the sword. France would be no less true to her mission because she put off its fulfilment by violent means till she was convinced of the inefficiency of all other arguments. There was, at the outlet, perfect harmony between the views of the French people and those of their new Sovereign with respect to foreign politics. There was faith in the undisputed, though pacific, ascendency of the Empire over the council of nations – in the necessity for a revision of existing Treaties, for a remodelling of the map of Europe, for the emancipation of enslaved nations, for the protection of minor States, of those especially which had shown the greatest devotion to the cause of Imperial France and had been involved in its downfall; of States like Belgium, Denmark, and Saxony; of nations like Italy and Poland. Over and above these general French sympathies, the Emperor brought with him, as peculiar to himself, a genuine regard for England, our own estimate of the true bases of national greatness, our notions of a free commercial policy. It is not a little remarkable that the first enterprise of real magnitude in which France was engaged, after panting for so many years to avenge Waterloo, should have been planned in concert with the very country upon which vengeance for that defeat was to be mainly wreaked. Yet the Crimean War of 1854 was waged not only in obedience to what the majority of the French people were inclined to consider as English views, but also in subservience to what they regarded as English interests. It was the Emperor’s own war, and Napoleon only brought it to a sudden end when we refused to mix up with the original quarrel those French schemes about Poland and the Rhine in which he found it difficult to withstand his people’s aspirations. Against the same rock were wrecked, in later times, 1864, all hopes of a cordial co-operation of the two great Western Powers in behalf of invaded Denmark. As to the immediate relations between the two nations, there is no doubt that against the half-smothered animosities of French Chauvinisim nothing availed us so much as the Emperor’s stout determination, not only not to be driven into hostilities but to strengthen the bonds of amity with us at any price. Neither the vapouring and blustering of the Press nor the famous address of the Colonels were able to shake the Emperor’s determination to maintain the cordial understanding between the two countries; and the conclusion of the Commercial Treaty and the abolition of passports in favour of English travellers must be traced to his sole initiative.

Equally sincere and unbounded was the Emperor’s sympathy with the land which had witnessed his earliest exploits – Italy; and he never, perhaps, spoke more in earnest, never did greater justice to the generosity of his impulses, than when in 1859, calling upon the Italians to be men, he offered his help to free their country from the Alps to the Adriatic. The scheme of the Unity of the Peninsula did not, indeed, appear practicable to him any more than to some of the wisest and noblest Italian Liberals; and he, doubtless, conceived that the independence of Italy, although it might imply the complete severance of that country from Austria, need not therefore exclude some bond of alliance between the freed nation and its deliverer – a bond of alliance which might easily have been strengthened into a compact of indirect allegiance. In all this, however, the welfare of Italy, as he understood it, was the object nearest to the Emperor’s heart; and, with a self-denial of which, in trying moments, he never failed to give evidence, and with respect to which his cold and deliberate nature stands forth in strong contrast with the wilful and headlong character of his uncle, he gave up his own opinions in deference to those of the Italians; he accepted ‘accomplished facts,’ and not only never willingly opposed the spread and growth of Italian nationality, but actually screened it from the attacks to which, in its helplessness, it would repeatedly have succumbed.

True, he extinguished the Roman Republic in 1849; he exacted the cession of Savoy and Nice in 1860; he accepted from Austria the temporary gift of Venetia in 1866, and he re-occupied Rome in 1867. All these, however, were not the spontaneous acts of the Emperor’s own mind. He was influenced by what he considered due to French susceptibilities; to the claims of the Great Nation to her ‘natural frontiers;’ to her jealousy of her immediate neighbours; to her assumption of paramount authority as universal arbitrator; finally, to her half-chivalrous, half-selfish pretentions as Eldest Daughter of the Church. By most of these considerations he was also and much more forcibly moved in the policy he pursued with respect to Germany. That the instinct of Union was at work across the Rhine as well as south of the Alps the Emperor was fully aware, and he was also convinced that what the German nation firmly and unanimously willed it was not in the power of French jealousy to gain-say. He had been somewhat awed by the attitude of Germany, both in the full tide of his success after Solferino and in the furtherance of his designs in behalf of Poland and Denmark. It was not by opposing German Union, but by taking advantage of German disunion, that the Emperor hoped to secure the command. When the Germans had torn each other to pieces, when the victor lay on the battle-field as exhausted as the vanquished, to snatch from their grasp that Rhenish frontier which would free France from all uneasiness in that quarter would prove, as the Emperor conceived, no more impracticable an undertaking than it had been to rectify the border-line on the Italian side. The conditions which were peremptorily laid down at Plombières need hardly be as much as hinted at Biarritz. In Italy it was the help of France that was solicited. In Germany all that was required of her was neutrality. Mere looking on would do as much for her in the second case as stout fighting had done in the first. In all these calculations the Emperor relied on ‘the irresistible logic of events.’ But events were too quick for him. Germany achieved her unity in 1861; and France came in too late to claim her share of the spoil.

Before Sadowa and Nikolsburg the Emperor’s European policy appeared faultless in the eyes of the vast majority of the French people. But the first check naturally prompted a review of its course from the outset, and encouraged that criticism which is always extremely easy after the event. The main difficulty for the Emperor lay between conceding too much or too little to the warlike and domineering spirit of the French nation. The French had hailed with satisfaction the Bordeaux announcement of October, 1852, that ‘the Empire was Peace;’ but they were no less delighted with the subsequent assurance that ‘not a gun should be fired in Europe without the assent of the Tuileries.’ France had no objection that ‘the universe should be tranquil,’ but only on condition that ‘she herself should be contented.’ The Third Napoleon was called upon to exercise by mere moral ascendency that sway over the European councils which the First failed to establish by might of arms; and for many years there is no doubt that he acquitted himself of the task with unparalleled success. But he pressed that success beyond its due limits; he fretted himself about Congresses and Conferences, the only object or result of which was to be the enhancement of his own importance. There is no doubt that he suffered the notion that it was at all times necessary to busy and, so to say, to amuse the French people to gain too strong a hold upon his fancy. The scheme of diverting public attention from domestic affairs by distant expeditions to China, Japan, Syria, and, finally, to Mexico, had little to recommend it on the score of originality. The rulers who preceded Napoleon III had found a vent for the superfluous activity of French enterprise in Algeria, and it was only unfortunate that the gradual pacification of that colony should have deprived the Second Empire of a convenient safety-valve so near home. Most of the Emperor’s Quixotic undertakings beyond sea proved, as was to be expected, barren of results, but one, as might have been feared, turned out fatal. The project of a Mexican Empire, the scheme of the exaltation of the Latin races on the American continent, would have been sheer failures, even if the Emperor’s belief that the breach in the United States was incurable had been correct; for a European Power has little chance of obtaining a footing anywhere across the Atlantic, except as a tool in the hands of some of the native factions, and these turn out mere quicksands under those who would build upon them. But the result of the Mexican experiment was not brought even to this test. The Americans recovered sufficient strength to make a stand for the Monroe doctrine; and France had to back out of her Mexican position with a hurry in which her very dignity was not consulted.

Independently of success, however, it may be fairly admitted that the general tendency of the Emperor’s foreign policy was moderate and pacific; but it would not be equally easy to clear it altogether from the charge of disingenuousness and irresolution. The Emperor’s diplomacy was unlike that of any other man. No Sovereign ever came to the Throne with so large a crowd of ready-made agents and advisers; none attained power by so long a series of underhand manoeuvres. Louis Napoleon had been for half his life a conspirator. Necessity, no less than habit, made him a plotter on the Throne. Bent uponbringing into his hands all legislative and executive authority, upon exacting from all and each of his subordinates the fullest responsibility to himself alone, the Emperor had, properly speaking, no Ministers, but simply Heads of Departments, blind and passive tools to be taken up or cast off at his own pleasure. But, behind his responsible Cabinet, behind his acknowledged Council of State, there was always a little knot of more trusted and devoted instruments, chosen chiefly among the faithful followers of the Pretender’s obscure fortunes, men upon whom, in the gloomy isolation of absolute power, he must needs rely for his knowledge of that public opinion to which he denied all free utterance, and among whom he must seek such executors of his will as would rather guess than question his motives – men who would allow him all the merit of success, and take upon themselves all the blame of miscarriage; men between whom and himself there must be such a bond of freemasonry as to give them the intimate consciousness of their employers unfailing support, even under the cloud of his affected displeasure or the storm of his formal disavowal. It was in obedience to these necessities, created no less by the origin than by the nature of his government, that the Emperor, in his relations with foreign States, was frequently induced to give preference to indirect and clandestine negotiation; to intrust to extra-official agents messages un-meet for the conveyance of regularly accredited Envoys; to reserve for unwitnessed interviews the transaction of affairs of which no tangible document should be allowed to remain. Not satisfied with these not very dignified acts, which for some time established his credit for consummate dexterity, the Emperor also seemed to stake his reputation on a suddenness of action commensurate with his maturity of deliberation. He was perpetually taking the world by surprise. A Government ushered in by a Coup d’Etat was carried on by a succession of Coups de Théâtre. Whether a declaration of war was to be conveyed in a New Year’s greeting to a foreign Ambassador, or peace to be announced in an after-dinner speech to a Provincial Magistrate; whether the revelation of the Imperial mind was to take the shape of a mysterious pamphlet, or whether his mind was to be intimated in a familiar letter-the aim as well as the result invariably was to give the Emperor’s policy a ‘sensational’ character. ‘The Emperor,’ as his flatterers observed, ‘allows himself no rest.’ Perpetual activity and almost actual ubiquity seemed to be as indisputable attributes of an Imperial Providence as omniscience and omnipotence. Wherever the Emperor might go he must be in pursuit of some hidden object; his simplest act must proceed from some farfetched motive. A morbid expectation was created to which it daily became more difficult to minister. The Emperor’s speech and his silence were invested with an equally awful significance. Such overweening assumption must, however, be borne out by deeds of corresponding magnitude. The mere prestige of moral ascendency is soon brought to the test of material success. The world grew tired of all that solemn emphasis and oracular ambiguity. It looked for the results of all that profound statescraft, and saw it foiled by Cavour’s superior cunning; thwarted by Bismarck’s steadier resolve; it saw it wrecked against the Pope’s passive obstinacy; it saw it everywhere frustrated by the combination of unforeseen circumstances, by a series of irresistible catastrophes. It heard it acknowledging the force of a fatal necessity by alluding to the presence of dark spots on the horizon. And it was, be it observed, not so much to error of judgment as to infirmity of purpose that the repeated failures of the Emperor were imputed. Hesitation and inconsistency were the bane of his political conduct. He would have been equally powerful to create a United or a Federal Italy. He might as easily have upheld as pulled down the Papacy. He might have checked all Germany in the Danish War of 1864. He might have backed one-half of it against the other half during the seven weeks’ campaign of 1866. He might have done much less in Mexico, or he could have gone much greater lengths against the United States. His fault consisted in an excess of caution and circumspection. He seemed everywhere to arrive one day too late, and only to make up his mind when he had missed his opportunity. His Ministers were twitted in the Legislature by emboldened opponents, who asserted that there ‘was not one fault left for the Imperial Government to commit,’ and thus challenged them, as it were, to remain in office without a vital change in their policy. Two courses were open to the Emperor Napoleon after Sadowa – to make up by brute force what he had lost by unsuccessful manoeuvre, or else to acquiesce in the inevitable, to put a cheerful countenance on a losing game, and even to claim credit for a consummation which he had been unable to prevent. For nearly two years the Emperor wavered between the two resolutions. To rush into war before Nikolsburg or after Prague was declared to be impossible, owing to the unreadiness of the French military forces. Yet to accept and even to applaud the rise of a rival nation close on the Rhine frontier, especially after all that had been said about territorial compensations, natural boundaries, and popular aspirations, was, perhaps, to inflict too sore a wound on French susceptibilities. Hence there began that tentative, faltering, fidgeting policy; those abortive negotiations at Berlin, at the Hague, at Munich, at Vienna; those mysterious journeys and ominous interviews, which at first bewildered and dismayed, and at last half-amused, half-wearied Europe. At Paris and at Lille, the Emperor talked of peace. At Luxembourg, Salzburg, Copenhagen, he sought allies and nursed pretexts for war. Unequal to single-handed action, France affected to look for confederates. The real object was, if not to win partisans, at least to gain time; but both purposes were defeated. France revealed her unprepared condition at the same time that she widened and completed her isolation.

War, except on the most hazardous conditions, was clearly out of the question. Could, then, the Emperor resolve on peace? Peace he could certainly have with the world if he could only have it with France. The Emperor Napoleon was not cast in the mould of heroic conquerors. He was cold, cautious, even to the extreme of moral timidity. He had no love for war, at least for war’s sake and on a large scale. He had a great respect for ‘the odds’ in any game. He never would launch France on an equal duel with Germany. The difficulty lay in preventing France from dragging him into such a war against his better judgment. All his sayings and doings since Sadowa had but one object – to humour, to soothe, to reassure French opinion. Faith in his infallibility, he conceived, was shaken in others as well as in himself; that his wonted good fortune had to some extent forsake him, that black spots were looming in the horizon, he had himself deemed it necessary to avow. It was now important for him to allay the apprehensions he had himself created, to restore the confidence which his words had undermined as much as his deeds.

The real question, however, lay in the estimate the Emperor could arrive at with respect to the state of public opinion. He had lived for many years away from the Throne; he was a man of the world, a cool, shrewd observer, and might form a correct judgment of whatever came before his eyes. But for the last twenty years he was labouring under the ‘curse of Kings.’ He had deprived France offree utterance. He must either take her at a rude guess or see her through the medium of that cumbrous scaffolding of official administration which he had reared between himself and the nation instead of the regular edifice of a responsible Government. Besides the France he had studied in the writings of M. Thiers, or in the Mémorial de Sainte Héléne, or that he had contemplated through the bars of his prison windows at Ham, he only knew the France which Messrs. De Morny, Persigny, or, at the utmost, Messrs. Billault and Rouher chose to describe to him; a France more Imperialist than the Emperor, more illiberal than the Deux Décembre. The only safety out of his embarrassing position could be found in his abdicating absolute power. Atonement for the errors of the past could best be made by relinquishing undivided responsibility for the future. To make up to the nation for its somewhat tarnished glory abroad it was before all things advisable to restore its liberties at home. His first movement upon having to acknowledge ‘the force of irresistible circumstances’ was to throw himself upon his people. The first result of the disaster of July, 1866, was the letter of January, 1867.

Between the ‘Elected of December,’ however, and the millions of his electors there was a conditional, though an irrevocable, compact. The French nation – or, at least, that part of it which constituted a majority resulting from the experiment of universal suffrage – had accepted its ruler on his own terms. The alternative lay between order and freedom, and he said ‘Order at all events; Freedom whenever it might be.’ As a President and as an Emperor, Napoleon always deemed the perfection of government to lie in the combination both of legislative and executive power in the same hand. His notions of a Constitution were those of the Consulate and the First Empire, and he seemed to forget that the concentration of all power in one hand had only been deemed advisable by the First Napoleon when he aspired to grasp France as a sword, and that the system had broken down, by confession of its original inventor, towards the close of his reign. With a new Empire which was to be ‘Peace’ there was no longer a necessity for the same strong military organization, and liberty should, therefore, have been compatible with it. But the tendency of the people, like that of their ruler, at the time was towards energetic repression. Society had to be saved. War to the bitter end was to be waged – not against foreign enemies, but against domestic parties. Even for such a war a Dictatorship was found indispensable. The State was constituted in the shape of a pyramid, with nothing between the electing masses at the base and the elected Autocrat at the point. Yet something like regret and misgiving seemed at times to assail the Sovereign in the awful solitude of his elevation. It was not for his own sake, not from personal ambition, he hinted, that so unbounded a power had been placed in his hands. He held it simply on trust. The people’s liberties were only in abeyance. Indeed, a show was made now and then of slackening the reins of Government. Imperialism was described as by its nature progressive. It was considered as a temporary structure – a means to an end; the application of force to the establishment of legal authority. When the end was attained, when order could be pronounced quite safe, the superstructure should be removed, and the ‘crowning of the edifice’ would follow.

It is difficult to say to what extent the Emperor deceived himself or others. But, whatever his intentions might be, they could not be carried into effect without far greater resolution than seemed at any time to be at his command. His rule had sprung from the masses; it was identified with the multitude. He had ascended the Throne as the ‘Working Man’s Friend; the Emperor of the Peasant.’ The millions who reigned through him were not as ready to resign their supremacy as he, perhaps, might have been. The Senate consisted of his own nominees; the Legislative Body was elected by constituencies over which his Administration was supposed to exercise almost absolute control. But there was in that Senate, in that Elective Assembly, in that Administration, in that vast mass of voters, a party, a vastly predominant party, which would stand up for Imperialism even against the Emperor. With such a Constitution as the Emperor framed mere legislative improvement must needs be illusory. It was impossible to get over the fact that in a State like the France of the present day the mass of the nation overrode its intelligence; the body crushed the soul. The reign of the upper and middle classes had come to an end in that country with the first and second revolution. It was now the turn of the multitude, and the only question was whether the Government should be in the hands of a mere mob or in that of a mob-delegated despot. With all its purple and gold the Imperial Government was heir to the communistic notions of the Red Republican régime. The Emperor’s mission was to tax the rich for the benefit of the poor. By his arbitrary control over the price of bread, by his promotion of public works, the Emperor was perpetually bringing back his authority to its original sources. Put that authority to the test of a hundred elections, and the suffrage would always give the same results.

This assurance of almost boundless popular support was a source of weakness no less than of strength. With the exception of a few ambitious statesmen, and still fewer more or less devoted friends of the fallen dynasties, there were no elements for wholesome legal opposition in France. Hence the various proposals of the Emperor for an extension of constitutional liberties could hardly find sufficient support from the enlightened classes to overcome the mutinous ill-will of the mob-majority. It required the personal influence of the Sovereign to force even such paltry measures as the Press and Public Meetings Bill through a Legislature otherwise too ready to endorse all other Imperial Acts of home and foreign policy.

A Government placed so widely above all check or hindrance had it certainly in its power to achieve much, and twenty years of Imperial rule have not been without most splendid results for the general welfare of France. Within its own boundaries the country had never known a period of greater material progress. Beyond them, till very recent times, it had exercised an ascendency grounded on a moral prestige more than commensurate with its actual strength. The recognition of the advantages of Prussia’s military system came most inopportunely for the Emperor to confirm a favourite saying of his, ‘That a nation’s influence is gauged by the number of soldiers it can bring into the field.’ The Army Bill was no doubt a disastrous measure for him, but he had been drifting into a most difficult dilemma. He had to choose between resigning himself to a condition of comparative weakness, which must infallibly be exposed sooner or later, and a measure that levied ‘a tribute of blood’ on the classes where he found his warmest supporters. The dilemma was a difficult one. The Emperor had, indeed, asserted his ascendency by a pretension of controlling circumstances which had passed almost unchallenged. He had biased the policy of Europe by merely indicating the attitude of France. But the state of affairs had been insensibly shifting, until he had become conscious of a pressure he was powerless to resist. He had been led by Cavour, and the astuteness of the Italian statesman had betrayed him into positions where his only safety lay in pressing onwards. Now he was being forced by Bismarck. As Germany grew strong Europe was threatened with a change of masters, and it seemed that in the future the impulses in European politics might come as probably from Berlin as from Paris. The Emperor’s sense of the change was indicated by his language. He affected to consider the disruption of the German Confederation as a weakening of Germany. One of those inspired pamphlets that appeared from time to time traced the parallel between the First and the Second Empires to the advantage of the latter. Napoleon III and his uncle had been revolving in identical historical cycles. But the pamphleteer stopped short in his comparisons. He neglected to point out that Sadowa, with its disclosures more than its successes, was the Moscow of that Second Empire which was paying the penalty of the domineering pretensions of the First. The Seven Weeks’ War demonstrated the results of that military system which France had forced upon Prussia after the crowning victory of Jena. Now the Emperor recognized that, thanks to the apathy or irresolution he had certainly not borrowed from his uncle, the regular standing armies of France had to count with a nation of civilian-soldiers, trained, armed, and organized. He felt there was truth in the invectives of those political opponents who, appealing to the pride of France, told him he had blundered away France’s commanding influence. It must be proved sooner or later whether he or they were in the right, and, with a belief in his destiny which had begun to falter, he set himself to prepare for the inevitable test.

At that time, too, he was already a prey to the painful malady to which he yesterday succumbed, and no doubt bodily suffering enfeebled the resolution which had once been believed indomitable. Radical and Republican pamphleteers and journalists gloated over his ailments in language that outraged decency and humanity. Rochefort’s Lanternes became a feature in Parisian life; the noble turned Socialist shot his daily flight of poisoned arrows, and respectable Paris laughed, as its wont is, forgiving the coarseness of the scurrility for the sake of the keenness of the sarcasm. It became clear that things were ripening for a crisis, unless the credit of the Emperor was to be saved by his death; yet none but fanatic Red Republicans, ready to believe in everything they longed for, could have fancied the end of the Empire so imminent.

The year ‘68 must have been one of great searchings of heart at the Court of the Tuileries. The interview of the German Emperors at Salzburg, although followed by all manner of satisfactory assurances, kept minds uneasy as to the new relations of France with her neighbours, and stimulated the audacity of those reckless men who fish for profit and popularity in troubled waters. Ugly omens multiplied towards the close of the year, urging the Emperor towards some decided if not desperate resolution. The incident in the Hall of the Sorbonne, when, at the distribution of prizes, young Cavaignac refused to receive his at the hands of the Imperial Prince, must have shaken the Emperor’s faith in the hold Imperialism had on the upper classes, while of a sudden the turbulent democracy discovered a martyr in Baudin, one of the victims of the Coup d’Etat, and even the eminent veteran Berryer contributed a letter and a subscription to the agitation.

The Emperor’s resolution was taken. He would use his personal power and what remained of his prestige to promulgate a scheme of comprehensive Constitutional reform. Judging by the course of events, we may well doubt whether the resolution would have served him had he taken it earlier. As it was, he was late then, as he had so often been before. It seemed as if he was graciously making a gift of the power he felt slipping through his fingers; and after all, the gift, such as it was, was in a degree illusory. For the future his Ministers were to be responsible to the Chambers; they were to be chosen by the party that commanded a parliamentary majority, they were to hold office by the votes of the House, as in England. But so long as the Empire maintained its traditional electoral machinery the Emperor assured himself an enormous working majority, happen what might. The masses of the rural voters were drilled by obsequious Préfets on their promotion, and the different circumscriptions were manipulated, so that in most instances the votes of the stolid and loyal country should swamp those of the feverish radical towns. In the towns, if the voters were not bribed, and bought with hard cash, they were delicately conciliated by the concession of serviceable public works – town-halls, lines of railway, free bridges. The Autocratic Empire had consolidated its popularity on a system of corruption; it would have been simply suicidal had it reformed and become pure all of a sudden. There had been another unlucky coincidence for the shaking Empire. The Assembly had been dissolved, and there had been a general election. Of course, the Government obtained its commanding majority; but, unfortunately, Paris and the great cities had returned Opposition members as a rule. The logical deduction was obvious – the intelligence of the country is opposed to Imperialism, and the Opposition represents a moral force out of all proportion to its numerical strength. It is notorious that in France, the inert masses are swayed to one side or the other, as they receive the impulse, and it became clear that any day an accident might derange the existing equilibrium. The various chiefs of the Opposition attacked, with the whole weight of their eloquence and their influence, the vicious electoral system that made politics a comedy and falsified opinion. Excited mobs in the town shouted for the Republic and Rochefort. The Emperor was being forced towards abdication or a Coup d’Etat. He decided again for the Coup d’Etat, but this time it was altogether a Constitutional one. Cæsar proposed a ‘senatus consultum,’ which resigned the power he had held in trust into the hands of the people, from whom it had flowed originally, and charged responsible Ministers with the exercise of the people’s authority. The stanch Imperialist Ministers shook their heads at this putting new wine into old bottles. Rouher, Duruy, Lavalette, and Baroche resigned. Prince Napoleon made a remarkable and characteristic speech, which gave some colour to the theory of certain political seers that, with the assent of the head of his house, he held himself in reserve in case of a political catastrophe that should prove fatal to his cousin. The Prince approved the measure in the main, although, in his opinion, it was not sufficiently thorough. He avowed that he was not one of those who believed the Empire incompatible with the most absolute liberty, and he boldly touched all those burning topics which the official orators had carefully shunned. It was remarked at the time that the daring speaker had a long interview immediately afterwards with his Imperial cousin, and it was understood that they separated on the most cordial terms. It is probable the Emperor, having lost self-confidence, was in painful uncertainty as to the direction in which unforeseen circumstances might hurry him. The Home Minister, M. Forcade de la Roquette, proclaimed the programme of the Court in language sufficiently precise. The Empire hoped to succeed in solidly founding liberty, where the Governments of the Restoration and of July had failed, ‘because its principle is stronger and more popular; because it rests upon the national will several times proclaimed, and because it defies surprises.’ At that moment it felt so strongly that its existing titles were discredited that already it was thinking of a fresh appeal to the democracy; while it was the suspicion of surprises in store that had suggested its present attitude. Weakened and compromised by the secessions, the last genuinely Imperialist Ministry resigned, and the Emperor had recourse to the flexible Liberals, as represented by Emile Ollivier and his colleagues.

We may judge him with tolerable confidence after the event, and, enlightened by results, we may estimate pretty fairly the formidable difficulties against which he precipitated himself. The fact remains that at that time men who would rather have been rid of the dynasty believed it so firmly established that the best and most patriotic course was to come to an understanding with it. Men patriotic or ambitious, like Ollivier, Buffet, and Daru, accepted office and undertook the execution of the new programme. Yet the signs of the times were thickening. Not the least significant was the retirement of Haussmann, whose magnificent schemes – half developed, and arrived at a stage where perseverance might have been the truest economy – had so terribly embarrassed the finances of the capital. It was an acknowledgment that the Empire had reached the limits of its lavish expenditure and pushed to an extreme the fatal principle of national workshops. Yet it was plain that if the men who had so long been subsidized became idle, needy, and discontented, the streets of the capital would be crowded with turbulent émeutiers, ready to swell the ranks of the Reds, and to force the hand of the Government when prudence and patriotism should alike suggest a cautious game. A sinister incident occurred on the very day when the Chambers met the new Ministers. Prince Pierre Bonaparte shooting Victor Noir at Auteuil threw a weapon into the hands of the Red Republicans which they were not slow to lay hold of. Rochefort’s language in his Marseillaise exceeded all measure. Noir was made a martyr, and the Empire was in more imminent danger on the day of his funeral than men suspected at the time. Had Rochefort been as daring in action as in speech, had his nerves not failed him before the starting of the funeral cortége, and had the impetuous Flourens taken his place at its head, it is hardly doubtful that there would have been a sauguinary collision in the Champs Elysées. The Empire would have triumphed for the day, for it was well prepared. But in its discredited condition a second carnage among the citizens of Paris could scarcely have failed to be a fatal defeat for it.

On the eve of the famous Plébiscite the position of the Olivier Ministry was more treacherous than ever, and the attitude of the Government was visibly ill-assured. The Ministry trembled between Liberalism and extreme Imperialism, and one of its genuinely liberal measures had terribly multiplied its difficulties by allowing full licence of language to all its most unscrupulous enemies. In throwing the rein to the Press, Olivier had said that they trusted it in future to the control of a healthy public opinion. It is hard to believe that either the Minister or the Emperor could have had any such confidence. Opinion had so long been stifled and gagged that it was debauched and thoroughly diseased. It was inevitable that the régime of repression should be followed by the reaction of excess, and the Empire suffered from the vice of its origin, and paid the penalty of the system by which it had hitherto succeeded. Now that writers could speak out, they reverted with justice to those crimes of the Coup d’Etat, when the President for motives they assumed to be purely selfish, had violated the oath of the Constitution, and abused the responsibilities he had solemnly accepted. They raked up the details of all those high-handed proceedings that had necessarily been received at the time in sullen silence. They denounced the sensational foreign policy that had been dictated by dynastical motives. They attacked the luxury and extravagances the people, and especially the middle classes, had been taxed for. They had facts enough at command, which needed scarcely to be distorted or overcoloured, to make up a damaging indictment. But they did not stop at facts. They made unsparing use of every calumny and falsehood perverted ingenuity could invent, and the condemnation of Pierre Bonaparte to a simple fine gave the demagogues of the democracy a standing text for philippics against the family with which he had so little in common. The virulent energy of the Opposition Press was swaying opinion; the organized agitation which was being fed with unfaltering activity might spread from the cities to the Conservative bourgeoisie of the towns, and from the towns to the loyal country people, who were drilled and directed by Préfets and Maires in the country. The Plébiscite was pressed on, lest delay should reduce the Government majority. Henceforth the Constitution, drawn in the most democratic sense, was only to be revised by the masses of the people on the initiative of the Sovereign. The Sovereign, in having his election confirmed by an overwhelming assent of his constituents, was to receive a retrospective act of oblivion for all the misdemeanours he had been charged with; he was to have a deed of indemnity for all the blood and the treasure the Empire had spent at home and abroad. The Emperor had urged on the step with feverish impatience, in opposition, it was understood, to the advice of the Achitophels by whom he had been wont to be guided. He waited the result with intense anxiety, although the vote was a foregone conclusion. With his superstitious cast of mind and his belief in destiny, he must have felt he had come to one of the turning points in his career, and no doubt he sought his horoscope in an analysis of the voting list, as soothsayers used to search for the omens on some solemn national ceremony. The omens were sinister, and although there were seven millions of ayes as against a million and a half of noes, the forebodings were confirmed which had induced him to tempt his fate. Not only was the vote against him in Paris and most of the great cities, in the centres of industry, intelligence, and political intrigue, but 50,000 of his soldiers were with the enemy. The shock was severe; what was Cæsar in the face of adverse circumstances if he could not count on the fidelity of the legions? Nothing could give more striking proof of the extreme impolicy of a measure which invited the soldiers to discuss the conduct of the master who relied upon their bayonets. As one blunder leads on to another, the Emperor, in his haste, advertised to the world his uneasiness at this military vote in a letter written to Marshal Canrobert and intended for publication to the Army, in which he made ostentatiously light of it. From that time the suspicions that his power was declining turned to convictions confirmed by electoral statistics. It appeared he could not even reckon on that backing from brute force, in the last resort, with which even his enemies had hitherto been inclined to credit him.

The Plébiscite had been presented to the country as a vote of peace, as the commencement of a new era of sound Constitutional progress, and as giving a fresh impulse to domestic prosperity. It is just possible it might have turned out so, had the voting answered the Emperor’s hopes or dreams. As it was, it could scarcely fail to prove a vote of war sooner or later. That jealousy of growing German influence must become a question more dangerous to the dynasty than ever, now that the Emperor’s power seemed to be tottering. Now that there was a Fronde in the Army, must there not be a foreign war to divert the minds of politicians of the canteen? Almost simultaneously with these events had come a change in the Cabinet, which had been nearly as freely commented on in Germany as in France. Daru and Buffet had retired from the enfeebled Ministry. After the Plébiscite, the former statesman had been replaced at the Foreign Office by the Duc de Gramont. We may be very certain that Napoleon, who had been given to hesitation in his best days, was hesitating now more painfully than ever over that question of a war with Germany.

But, taking the Gramont appointment in connexion with all that followed on it, we can scarcely doubt that at that time he inclined to war. Had it been his settled resolution, or even his ardent wish, to preserve peaceful relations, he could hardly have made so unfortunate a choice. Not only was the Duke by no means the man to direct the Foreign Office, where susceptibilities had become so sensitive, but his Prussian antipathies were notorious. Nor should the fact that he came straight from Vienna have been a recommendation in the circumstances. The suspicion that he might have been selected on account of his excellent relations in the Austrian capital would, doubtless, have strengthened the Emperor’s hands had he decided upon war, by giving Europe the idea that Austria was prepared to revenge Sadowa. But if it was desirable to preserve peace, nothing could have been more injudicious than to give Prussia a pretext for taking the initiative in war, by persuading her that she was threatened by a danger which promptitude might best avert.

It is idle to speculate on what might have happened had the Emperor decided to play the patriot at all hazards – to accept facts abroad, and try to induce his subjects to accept them; to stake the fortunes of his family on his domestic policy. We have the authority of M. Thiers for asserting that the Empress urged him to make war for the sake of her son, and the assertion seems not improbable. It is certain that a knot of the most Bonapartist of the Bonapartists unceasingly pressed war on him for the most strictly personal reasons. They deluded themselves with the idea of the military preponderance of France; they believed the victory to be assured beforehand; the blood and treasure it might cost were nothing to them so long as they were assured a fresh lease of prosperity. The Emperor cannot altogether have shared these delusions, although doubtless to some extent he was deceived and willing to be deceived. But the successes that had once been matter of congratulation were now crowding their consequences upon him. He was being driven to seek for safety in provoking Providence; he was paying the penalties of a political vie orageuse. The Coup d’Etat had cut him loose from relations that should have been his security in time of danger, had he held his throne by a more legitimate title. But his interests already were trending far apart from those of his subjects; the events of the night of the 2d of December had left him few conscientious advisers, and limited his choice of capable military instruments. He had able creatures and subordinates who were bound fast to him; but the most eminent politicians of France, the men who might have had the confidence of the country, were in opposition or retreat, while disinterested veterans like Changarnier and Trochu were banished from his councils of war. The interests of an individual and of something far smaller than a faction were to decide on the destinies of the country at the moment when its fortunes were trembling in the balance. But no man, even in that extremity, would have rushed blindly on ruin to escape the dangers which menaced him. Did the Emperor believe he could enter on the war with reasonable hopes of success? Leboeuf might have deceived him so far with that unhesitating answer –‘We are ready, and more than ready.’ But, after Leboeuf, there should have been no better judge of the situation than the Emperor himself. His master rolls might have been falsified, yet, all deductions made, he could roughly estimate the effective strength of his forces. At least, he knew the numbers Germany could put on foot in a given number of days, for the German military statistics were open to the world, and there was Stoffel at Berlin shrewdly noting everything and duly transmitting his Cassandra-like despatches to Paris. He must have been aware that, unless he could strike before those nine days of mobilization were accomplished, even Northern Germany would have a great numerical superiority in the field. The probability is that he taxed his ingenuity to combat the remonstrances of his common sense. In trying to deceive himself, he had plausible grounds to go upon. There was the reputation of those troops who had been the terror of Europe since the days of his uncle. They had only been repulsed by a combination of all the armies of Europe, when exhausted by unparalleled exertions. They had sustained that reputation in his own time, although he might have taken warning from the considerations which persuaded him to sign in haste the unlooked-for Peace of Villafranca. Then there were the chasse-pots, the mitrailleuses, and those new rifled cannon of bronze. Moral and armaments might compensate for lack of numbers, fortresses which could not be taken might be masked, and the French élan might carry him into Germany before the more sluggish Teutons had settled their plans or combined their operations. The communications once cut between the North of Germany and the South, he might hide his allies in the enemy’s country, and beat Prussia, as his uncle had done, with South German auxiliaries. It was the Emperor’s misfortune that he was doubly deceived, – that he was alike ill served in military affairs and in diplomacy. Had he been informed of the real spirit of Germany, he might have dismissed his notion of German alliances as the most extravagant of dreams; but his envoys to the minor German Principalities accepted the temper of the Courts as representing the spirit of the people. As is the manner of Frenchmen, they spoke no German. They reported that if France won a first success she might count on enlisting on her side South German jealousies of Prussia. It is less surprising that the Emperor received the fable at the time, since a man so intelligent as Edmond About repeats it confidently to this very moment. Moreover, as it appears now, the new Foreign Minister was persuaded that he had secured the adhesion of Austria. What he had to tell the Emperor probably confirmed such false reports as came from Courts like Würtemberg and Hesse Darmstadt.

Thus we may understand the Emperor’s mental attitude early in the year. It was with anything but a light heart that he looked forward to this war looming on his horizon, yet to a certain extent he had succeeded in persuading himself that the venture was not so very desperate. Did not Leboeuf answer for the army? Had not De Gramont and his colleagues reassured him as to German alliances? Meanwhile, men were speaking of peace, while a sense of coming troubles was spreading, and there were rumours of war in the air. The country, and even the obsequious Chamber, became dangerously susceptible. Stanch Imperialists like Baron Jerome David held strange language. The project of a railway over the Alps threatened to create a conflagration in Europe. For a time there was a lull, but the heavens were lowering. Ollivier’s voluble assurances in the debate on the Army Bill made most people uneasy; the barometer was falling fast, and men felt somehow by the movements of the ship of State that the hands which steered it were beginning to falter.

Early in July the squall of the Hohenzollorn-Sigmaringen candidate for the Spanish Crown blew up. The Emperor found himself suddenly forced towards the resolution over which he had been hesitating so long. Let us judge his conduct and that of his Cabinet as we may, it is idle to say they regulated their policy on considerations of the dignity of France. The dignity of France was saved, and more than saved, when the King of Prussia formally approved the withdrawal of the objectionable candidate. But for the sake of the Emperor, of the dynasty, and the Bonapartist place-holders, it was deemed necessary there should be a diplomatic triumph to compensate the humiliation of Sadowa, by offering French vanity a brilliant satisfaction. The Emperor himself doubted and hesitated; if France was to be flattered by a triumph, Germany must smart under a defeat. But, in place of grasping at the reprieve which was offered him, doing his best in the circumstances, and giving himself time for reflection, he was tempted to push his success, and try if he could insult Prussia without having previously beaten her. Probably his judgment was remonstrating all the time. But we may believe that prolonged suspense was wearing a nature which had been tried by reaction of ill-luck after an extraordinary flush of prosperity. The Emperor saw that safety lay in waiting, had waiting been possible; but he had no longer either the resolution or the time to hold by his old maxim – ‘Everything comes to him who waits.’ The matter was precipitately discussed with the brutal bluntness of the telegraph. The most momentous questions were decided by the readiest pen in Cabinet Councils held standing, and in feverish exaltation of spirits. Stories were invented and facts deliberately misrepresented by officials with the idea of provoking popular enthusiasm. On the 19th of July the die was cast, and war was declared by Ministers almost as thoughtless as the gamins who raised the cry of ‘A Berlin’ upon the Boulevards.

The war was declared, and the Emperor could have prevented or delayed it, but the French were never more unjust than when they subsequently insisted on holding him solely responsible. It was not only that seven millions of them, men like M. Guizot included, had voted the affirmative in the Plébiscite, but organs of all shades of opinion had been stimulating their jealousy of German unity, and the illustrious Thiers himself had published his gospel of war and revenge in his History of the Consulate and the Empire. Had it not been for the tone held by French writers for many years before, the Emperor would never have dreamt of the German war-path as the shortest way to regain his lost popularity; and it is matter of little consequence whether the cries on the Boulevards which followed the declaration of war came from his paid police agents or his enfranchised voters of the faubourgs.

Every one should be familiar with the history of the war, so far as it can be gathered from the conflicting testimony of the leading actors in it. The error of declaring it once committed, the Emperor became only secondarily responsible for the disasters which cost him so dearly. The moral and material efficiency Leboeuf had pledged himself for was lacking. A multitude of men who had been carried on the rolls were missing, and those who were actually under arms were never in the right place at the critical moment. The boasted Intendance system utterly broke down; magazines were found unfurnished, and supplies ran short. There was recrimination, disunion, and discontent among the leaders of the several corps d’armée. Time was lost when time was everything, and instead of France breaking ground with the swift advance that alone could have extenuated her precipitate declaration of war, her attenuated armies stood echeloned in a long line of observation along her assailable frontier. The plan attributed to the Emperor, of an aggressive movement that should sever Germany at once strategically and politically, had broken down before it could even be attempted. Had it been attempted it may be doubted whether it would not have proved more disastrous, if possible, than the one actually adopted.

The last pageants in which the unfortunate Emperor figured as the favourite of fortune were the arrival with the Army of Metz and the war rehearsal on the heights above Saarbrück, where his son received his ‘baptism of fire.’ While the world was expecting that, whatever might be the issue of the war, victory at first would incline to France, the Emperor was figuring as Commander-in-Chief of all the armies in the field. Had things gone well he would have accepted laurels of ceremony like the Grand Monarque when he travelled in his lumbering coach to see a town taken by one of his Marshals. But in reality, so far as the truth can be arrived at, it seems he only accompanied his troops in the capacity of spectator and adviser, perhaps as arbitrator in the last resort in some vexed question of combinations. Had all gone as well as in Italy, Cæsar’s chariot or charger would have moved along in the middle of his victorious columns, through triumphs and ovations, and over roads strewed with bloody laurels. The great object of the war would have been attained, and Louis the Younger would have been presented to France and Europe as the spoilt child of Victory and Fortune. It was the dream of some such result which led the Prince’s father to tempt this desperate game when he felt the odds were against him. His first proclamation, written in what should have been the flush of sanguine excitement, had somewhat chilled the more ardent spirits. He warned the troops of the formidable work that awaited them on their march in the country ‘bristling with fortresses.’ The anxiety that address shadowed out had more than realized itself. After the famous ‘Tout peut se rétablir’ that followed the defeats of Woerth and Forbach, nothing can be conceived more deplorable than the position of the Emperor. Conscious of an irretrievable error, and moving despondently in the shadow of the approaching end, among disorganized and half-mutinous troops, who in their looks or language made him responsible for their misfortunes, surrounded by Generals who had lost head and heart, and had no comfort to offer to their master, he could do nothing by staying where he was, while he was sure to be made answerable for the defeats which impended when these demoralized troops of his should again be opposed to the disciplined and victorious Germans. The only thing more miserable than the scenes that were passing around him was the news which came from the capital. Paris would only receive him victorious; therefore, Paris would never receive him again. This was where he had been landed by revolving in that vicious circle which had commenced with the coup d’etat. This was the end of the years of strong personal government when he had boasted himself omnipotent for good or evil. It was but a year or two since he had declared that France was the arbiter of Europe, implying that he had the power to enforce her judgments; it was but a year since he had confidently answered for domestic order. Now the Germans were in France, and Paris, as he knew, was on the brink of a revolution. For him and for his son there was no safe home in his wide dominions but the head-quarters of a beaten and retreating army. He had no choice left him when he turned back with Mac-Mahon in that Quixotic enterprise of releasing Bazaine. Mac-Mahon, with candid chivalrousness, has acquitted his master of responsibility for that wild bit of strategy, but the surrender at Sedan must have come as a relief from a situation that was growing intolerable.

Thenceforward the Emperor’s life has a personal rather than a political interest. The surrender of his sword to the King of Prussia symbolized nothing. He had ceased actually to be Emperor when Jules Favre had dared to demand his deposition three weeks before. The Palikao Ministry was Provisional rather than Imperial; it was understood that its precarious tenure of existence depended altogether on the news from the seat of war. With the capitulation of Sedan it ceased to be; the Empress sought safety in flight from Paris, not an hour too soon, and ‘the gentlemen of the pavement’ scrambled into authority over the fresh ruins of the personal power.

A howl of obloquy pursued the Emperor over the Belgian frontier to his seclusion at Wilhelmshöhe. It was not unnatural. The war was in great measure his; it had brought unspeakable suffering and bitter humiliation on the country, and his accomplices execrated him for not influencing them for their own good, in virtue of the authority their votes had vested in him. But dispassionate spectators regarded the fallen man with very different feelings. It was not only that such startling reverses might well have silenced harsh judgment, but the manner in which he bore them commanded involuntary respect and esteem. People who had called him a charlatan at the Tuileries confessed him to be a man when they saw him in the depths of misfortune. The wonderful result of his ambitions had been blighted so late in his life, that all hope was over for him; his pride was stung by the thought that his career had closed in humiliation; that posterity would denounce him as an impostor who had owed his rise and reputation to luck rather than genius; that the son, like the father, would begin life in proscription and exile, and find it the harder to repeat his father’s successes among opponents forewarned by his father’s example. With reflections so bitter gnawing at his mind, with his physical maladies conspiring to produce intense depression, he not only preserved his apparent serenity, but displayed invariably that dignified courtesy which denotes a mind too stable to be easily shaken. Nor was the effort merely a passing one. It has lasted from then till now. Beset by a mortal malady which would have made most men irritable and captious, the Emperor has shown himself invariably calm and strong. Nothing, perhaps, is so admirable in the life of this remarkable man as the silence he has consistently preserved with regard to those whose ill-advised counsels, incapacity, and self-interested falsehoods contributed so largely to his ruin. Ungrateful protégés, from whom he should have been sacred, have sought to make him their scapegoat, as he has been abused and calumniated by bitter enemies. He has neither remonstrated nor recriminated in person or by deputy. The wranglers might tell their stories as they would, they might be sure enough he would never contradict them. History will find much to reproach him with, but it is certain his contemporaries have been very unjust to him.

We have lingered long on the last year of his reign, pregnant as it was with events which have shifted the landmarks of history. We may dismiss his sojourn at Chislehurst in a line or two. His life passed there uneventfully and in apparent tranquillity. Silent, self-reserved, and self-controlled, he did not take the world into the secret of his regrets or remorse. If his party raised their heads again and bragged of a new revolution to their profit while France was struggling still in the social and financial chaos into which they had cast her, we have no reason to believe he gave them encouragement. Disappointed adventurers might talk and act madly when life was short. But the Emperor returned to England, whose life and people he had always liked, and lived like an English country gentleman, whose shattered health condemns him to retirement and the society of a few intimates. There were attached friends with him when he died, and if constancy should command friends few men deserved friends better.

It was unfortunate for his reputation that he was spared to live out his life. Had he succumbed some years ago to the first attacks of the disease he died of, he would have found eulogists enough to justify his policy by its brilliant success, and to deny that the Imperial system carried the inevitable seeds of dissolution. Had it collapsed after his decease they might have urged that the collapse was but a proof the more of his unrivalled genius, – that such a man could leave no successor to develope the ideas he had originated. As it is, it can hardly be doubted that his contemporaries will do him injustice, and that his memory will be, in a measure, rehabilitated by posterity. Unless absorbing ambition is to be pleaded as an excuse by Pretenders born in the people, we must judge his political morality severely. The Coup d’Etat was an offence almost more venial than the systematically relaxing and demoralizing nature of the rule that followed it. His best excuse was that he honestly believed himself and his system better adapted to the French than any other that could be substituted for it; and subsequent errors seem to have shown that he was not altogether wrong. In considering himself to the best of his lights, he did the best he could for his country. His foreign policy was generous and consistent, until personal motives compelled him to arrange a series of sensational surprises. His enlightened commercial ideas cost him some popularity among the Protectionist supporters of his dynasty. England at least had nothing to reproach him with, and the firmness with which he had held to her friendship assured him a friendly welcome when he sought refuge on her shores.

As might be presumed from the marvellous vicissitudes of his career, few men showed stranger or subtler contrasts in their nature. He owed his rise to the unflinching resolution with which he pursued a fixed idea; yet he hesitated over each step he took, and it was that habit of he sitation that ruined him in the end. His strong point was that no disappointment discouraged him, and so long as he felt he had time to wait, his patience was inexhaustible. Confined at Ham, in place of dashing himself against his prison bars, he turned quietly to his studies, and educated himself for the destinies in store for him. After the ridicule of his failures on the frontiers and in the Chamber of Deputies, he tried again as if nothing had happened. It was significant of the man that he succeeded in France in spite of ridicule, yet there may have been cool policy in the deeds that changed ridicule to terror on the 2d of December.

With his unquestionable ability and some extraordinary gifts, it must be confessed he owed much to fortune. She repeatedly did wonderful things for him when his circumstances were critical. He came to count with too great confidence on her favours when they were showering down on him, and he drew recklessly on his prestige instead of nursing it against gloomier days. It had been his aim to persuade his subjects that he was something more than mortal; when his mishaps proved his mortality, they resented the deception he had practised on them, and trampled their idol in the dust. It is not in our province now to speculate as to the influence of his rule on France, or to examine how far France is to be blamed for the vices and corruption of the Empire. If he misunderstood the people he governed when he treated them rather like children than men, we can only repeat, the fault was a venial one. Had he been born in a station beneath the influence of those ambitions that tempt men to become criminal, he would have lived distinguished and died esteemed. As it is, if the circle of his devoted friends has sadly dwindled since his fall and abdication, we trust for the honour of human nature that there are many who mourn him sincerely, in common gratitude.

The Times had been concerned for days with the former Emperor’s deteriorating condition. His death, following an emergency operation designed to break up his kidney stones, was announced on 10 January 1873. Five days later his supporters issued a manifesto, stating that ‘the Emperor is dead but the Empire is living and indestructible’. All hopes of reviving the Empire died when Napoleon’s son, Eugène Louis, the Prince Imperial, was killed in Zululand, fighting with the British army, on 1 June 1879. Following his detention in Germany, the deposition of the Bonaparte dynasty and the declaration of the Third Republic in September 1870, Napoleon and his family had retired to Camden Place at Chislehurst in Kent. It was here that he died. In 1881 the Empress Eugénie moved to Farnborough in Hampshire, where she constructed a flamboyant domed mausoleum for her late husband and her son in 1887. She herself was interred there after her death in 1922. As this obituary consistently suggests, British responses to Napoleon Ill’s policies as Emperor were at best ambiguous, and at worst suspicious and antipathetic. He and Eugénie had forged an amicable personal relationship with Queen Victoria, but many British critics, including this otherwise fair-minded obituarist, seem to have found the term ‘charlatan’ an appropriate description of both the Emperor and his régime.