I have." "Then does not your Majesty think of raising the nation ?" "Nonsense: you're dreaming of the way they did things in Spain, or here in France, in '91. How can you talk of raising a nation whose nobles and priests have been destroyed by the Revolution, and whose Revolution has been destroyed by me?" There was nothing, he felt, left to appeal to. Again, on his return from Elba, wisdom said, "Wait on French soil, and crush the invaders at Paris and Lyons ;' but this would have necessitated an appeal to the nation and a pledge that all war except defensive war should cease, and, as Colonel Charras says, in words which seem almost prophetical of the events of last July, "to re-establish his despotism he could not do without the prestige of victory; he thought to find it on the frontier, so thither he hastened." A third time, when, after Waterloo, Napoleon was among the remnant of his troops at Laon, it was still free to him to show himself not only "the child of the Revolution," but its legitimate offspring and its protector. He still shrank instinctively from doing so: bolder, indeed, than his nephew, he did go to Paris; but, with the invincible dislike of all his race to true freedom of government, he went there merely to see if there was a chance of carrying on the war without making any real political concessions. So it was that, after Sedan, the nephew passed out of history: no amount of plotting can restore the man who showed himself fool as well as knave, who fell-not, like his uncle, under the blows of banded Europe--but because he had allowed himself to be wholly deceived, both as to the quality and composition of his own army and as to the dispositions of neighboring powers. France never can forgive such a result of twenty years of personal government. But that the ex-Emperor should disappear out of history is natural enough; the marvel is that he ever became one of the makers of history. His success was due to the vitality of the Napoleonic idea, nourished as it was after the restoration by writers of all kinds notably by the veteran statesman who now, more than any one else, has made a return to Imperialism impossible. For this total revolution in literature it is hard to give a sufficient reason. Before the restoration, literature, when not venal, was After the strongly anti-Bonapartist.* Bourbons were restored, writers began to extol Napoleon as industriously as before they had decried him. This change was owing partly to French feeling against the mode of his removal: it was a great humiliation; as Madame de Staël said (deploring the return from Elba), "It's all over with liberty if he succeeds, and with the national independence if he is beaten." The nation felt that the peace of 1815 had compromised its independence; and, in writing down the king who had been brought in by foreign armies, literary men were acting as the mouthpiece of France. But this is not all; wounded vanity did much. Under the Empire mind had been powerless, unless as in the case of Lacepède and other savans it had submitted to be the humble tool of force: when Sièyes said, "I'll be the head and that little Corsican shall be the arm," he had quite unwittingly spoken the truth; for, in Napoleon's system, the head was nothing and the arm everything. Great, then, was the disappointment when under Louis XVIII., and still more under his successor, the head seemed almost as powerless as before. The heart (if such a word may be used of the hollow system of Popery) came into play; and, unless a man was dévót, or seemed to be so, ability of any kind served him little. Add to this the wilful blindness of the Bourbons, who (it was soon seen) "had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing." Their petty despotism disgusted the nation; while the "Memoirs of St. Helena" and a crowd of similar writings made out, with a sophistry so barefaced that we should fancy that it could never have deceived even Frenchmen, that the Emperor had always acted as a dutiful son of the revolution, according to the programme which himself had laid down, that "liberty, equality, and prosperity shall be insured. Will the nephew ever venture to assert, as the uncle did in 1816, that his government was a constitutional and temperate monarchy, and that the French people under it were the freest people in Europe? However this may be, there is no doubt that the claim thus made by Napoleon I. told immensely on the thought of the na tion, and through it on the masses. Claiming to have saved the revolution by moderating its violence, the exile of St. Helena persistently called himself its soldier and its martyr. His wars (he said) had been undertaken to spread its civilizing influence; and the consciousness of this had made kings and princes so determined on his overthrow. We, of course, can see through the hollowness of all this: but the French writers of that day, finding France humiliated, and knowing that she had been glorious, actually came to believe, or at any rate fostered the belief, that in the days of her glory she had been free, since undoubtedly in the days of her humiliation she was fettered. No wonder the rest were deceived, since a man of consummate ability, M. Thiers, whose honesty is proved by his having refused office during some seventeen years of "personal government," could write such a marvellous romance as that which he gave to the world under the title of "The Consulate and the Empire." Thus, by a combination of causes we may partly account for the change in the mind of France; and this change told upon the more or less educated masses. When Thiers wrote as he did; when Victor Hugo-whom a strange Nemesis after wards urged to write "Napoleon the Little"-sang the great man's praises in "Lui," and, throwing moral sanctions to the winds, declared that “Tu domines notre siècle, ange ou démon qu'importe?" when Beauchèsne, in "L'Écolier," pathetically described the day-dreams of the boyish enthusiast; and, yet more, when Béranger sang his Vieux drapeau," and his "Serrez vos rangs, Gaulois et Francs," and, above all, his "Souvenirs du Peuple," no wonder men forgot the real Napoleon and accepted the ideal which was so persistently put before them. Béranger was a true prophet when he sang "On parlera de sa gloire Sous le chaume bien longtemps; It is not easy to trace how this feeling had so penetrated downwards, and had so thoroughly laid hold of the lowest stratum, the wholly uneducated peasantry, that the first time the vote by universal suffrage was taken, many peasants thought they were voting for the old Emperor. That it did so is one more proof how soon a nation with great "recuperative powers' loses the memory of disasters. The cruel conscriptions which drove mere boys to die in Spain under the fire of Wellington's seasoned troops-the retreat from Russia, after which "the man of Smorgoni" was for a time as unpopular as "the man of Sedan," were forgotten. The heroic defence of Champagne and the glories which preceded it were alone remembered. This will account for the growth of the Imperial idea in the more fighting parts of France, especially in Alsace and Lorraine, which have always contributed much more than their share to the army. How it was in La Vendée we cannot pretend to say. Napoleon there had been as ruthless in his way as the "blues;" he had ordered that every family which could not prove that all its members were at home and quiet should lose its property, this being divided between the "good subjects" and the occupying troops. Nor can we understand how the Southern peasants should have welcomed the nephew when they had hated the uncle. It was against them chiefly that the odious garnisaires had to be employed; and we all know how they showed their feeling in 1814 by several times nearly tearing the Emperor to pieces when he was on the way to Elba, frightening him so that he disguised himself as an English officer. North eastern France was Bonapartist because it was anti-Prussian, and the Emperor had thoroughly humiliated Prussia. For this special hatred of Prussia there is ample reason. The Prussian character is not lovable; even at the best it is singularly domineering and cantankerous; and during the invasions of French territory (not to speak of the bloodthirsty pursuit after Waterloo) the Prussians had shown themselves (as unhappily they too often have during this war)* worse than Cossacks. This special hatred of Prussians comes out continually in the ErckmannChâtrian series. The contrast between the bitterness with which the fights at Ligny and Wavre and the final conflict at Waterloo are described is remarkable; *Witness the cruel exactions, at Compiègne (Pall Mall Gazette, 11th March) and elsewhere, during the armistice and after the conclusion of peace. it may almost be said to be prophetic of the merciless way in which too much of the fighting has been carried on within the past few months. "No quarter" is the word on both French and Prussian side; and scornful hatred lurks in every phrase of the graphic account of those savage conflicts which at last left the French nominally victorious. The English, on the other hand, are "jolly fellows, well shaved, and with the get-up of bons bourgeois." We do not think that, even before the Crimean war, French mothers ever taught their children to hate us; whereas, mon fils tu haïras les Prussiens, was a daily lesson among the peasants of the Northeast.* To account for the Napoleonism of the peasants in other parts, we must add to the feeling that Napoleon had glorified France, on the part of those who (we said) were only too ready to forget how he had also humiliated and ruined her, the persistent dread of the spectre rouge on the part of the vast class of little landowners, and thirdly, the influence of the priests. Both these had been made use of by the uncle. Whenever he wanted an excuse for despotism, he always got up a Jacobin plot. This was the pretence for that famous 18th Brumaire, by which "model and prototype of all coups d'état," as M. Barni calls it, he destroyed the constitution which he had sworn to defend. When, as First Consul, he arrested a number of those who remained true to the Republic-among them Jourdain, the hero of Fleurus-and threatened to banish them to Cayenne, the pretext was "the infernal machine" (very probably "got up," like so many more recent conspiracies), which was denounced as a Jacobin invention. Jacobinism was his apology for forming (at the beginning of the Empire) eight State prisons, and for exercising the most rigorous censorship both of the press and of the stage. *The hatred is reciprocated. Germany does not forget French occupation. An eminent German remarked to us the other day that more than a dozen Prussian towns are still paying the interest of the money borrowed to pay the first Napoleon's exactions. He remarked, too, on the cruelties which the French practised; and said that Germany remembers Davoust at Hamburg, and his turning out 26,000 people on New Year's day to perish in the cold, because they could not show that they had a sufficient stock of siege provisions. 66 How the priests helped him may be judged from the amusingly profane addresses made to him on his accession to empire by the different bishops. The Bishop of Aix wrote: "Like another Moses, Napoleon has been summoned by God from the deserts of Egypt." "God seems to have said (wrote the Bishop of Orleans), 'My heart hath chosen a new ruler to rule My people; My almighty arm shall help him in his glorious work, and I will strengthen his throne. He shall reign over the seas, and the rivers shall become his servants.'" In the eyes of other bishops and capitular bodies the new emperor is another Mattathias sent by the Lord," "a new Cyrus," "Scripture hath given us, in the reign of Jehoshaphat, a prophetic outline of his reign." This, the fitting reward of the Concordat, was the incense offered up by a servile clergy on the eve of his coronation; and it matches well with the Catechism, published by authority, and in use in all French churches in 1811.* After repeated injunctions as to the special duty cf reverence for the Emperor and his house, the question is asked, "Are there not yet other motives to bind us strongly to our Emperor?"-" Yes; for it is he whom God raised up in troublous times to re-establish the public worship of the holy religion of our fathers and to be its protector. He has restored and preserved public order by his profound and energetic wisdom; he defends the State by his powerful arm; he is become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration which he has received from the Sovereign Pontiff, chief of the Universal Church." ↑ How the Pope, of whose meanly cruel treatment by Napoleon the Count d'Haus *Yet the clergy, as might be predicted from the fulsomeness of their homage, only flattered Napoleon for their own ends. They soon showed their ingratitude. Pradt, Archbishop of Mechlin, invented the epithet, Jupiter-Scapin. Talleyrand did his best to pull down the falling Empire. The peasantry whom they had taught were less fickle. A curiosity in the history of catechisms is that in use in Spain while Napoleon was extolled as God's image on earth in the neighboring country. Therein young Spaniards were taught as follows: "Tell me, my child, who are you?"—" A Spaniard, by the grace of God." "Who is the enemy of our happiness?"-"The Emperor of the French." "How many natures hath he?""Two; the human and the diabolical."--Mignet, vol. ii. 336. sonville gave such a graphic account in the Revue des Deux Mondes of two years ago, really felt on the subject, we need not inquire; with Napoleon the case was simple enough: "he wanted a clergy (says Madame de Staël) as he wanted chamberlains and courtiers, and all the old things over again." As for his being the restorer of religion, no praise was ever less merited; he told Cabanis: "This concordat of ours is la vaccine de la religion; in fifty years it will have killed it out like a moral small-pox." On the other hand, before the Concordat was signed there was full liberty of worship, and nearly eight millions of people were in full practice of Catholicism. His Concordat was needless, except for his own purposes; at the outset, indeed, the Assembly had borne heavily on the clergy: to force them to take oaths and then to persecute those who refused was to show an ignorance of the first principles of toleration; and one of the few things which we have to find fault with in MM. Erckmann-Châtrian's excellent novels is the way in which the "refractory priests" are spoken of, and in which the harsh treatment they underwent is justified, because they disturbed the peace of families, and intrigued for "royalist restoration." But by the Constitution of the year III. Church and State had been separated, and freedom of worship restored to every one. There was no need, therefore, for any effort on Napoleon's part to secure what the Constitution had already secured; he was, as usual, working simply for himself: "I did not despair" (he writes from St. Helena) "of sooner or later getting full control of the Pope; and then what a lever for moving the world, what a help towards keeping men's minds in hand!" With the Pope and the Italian clergy, indeed, Napoleon never had the least success; but in France the large salaries which he gave to the bishops produced the effect he anticipated; and at last, even in La Vendée, a good deal of the old feeling died out. The noblesse of course still spoke of him as a mere locum tenens: for them he was always "the General Bonaparte, Lieutenant-in-Chief of the Forces of his Majesty King Louis XVII." But the peasantry were gradually taught to accept him as the friend of religion, and not simply as a temporary police magistrate who was necessary to keep down their hated enemies the "Reds." Of this his nephew reaped the reward, and he moreover was able to come forward as the defender of the Papacy under circumstances in which his conduct gratified not only the peasants, but every sincere Romanist in France, while it caused one more breach in the already divided Republican camp. If the occupation of Rome was actually initiated by honest Republi cans, they never (not even when they made Louis Napoleon Prince-President) were guilty of a more fatal mistake. They shared the reward of all trimmers; supporting "order" at the expense of principle, they lost the confidence of the best men of their party; while the Prince-President, assuming to be the champion of that "order" which after all they had only defended with half heartedness, gained all the credit of the act, and won thereby the support of the Ultramontanists. Of this support his subsequent vacillation could not deprive him, because the Ultramontanes were sure that, whatever he might do in other countries, in France he would not relax those fetters which the Papacy finds so essential in securing the acceptance of its newly formulated dogmas and repressive encyclicals. When we say this, we by no means assert that the ex-Emperor had the full confidence of the clergy: that confidence it is not the policy of Rome to accord to any one. Now again, as in 1848, she has shown that on occasion she can be as revolutionary as Garibaldi himself, if there is an end to be gained by being so. Napoleon is lost; despite the ridiculous outcry of London imperialist papers like La Situation, his cause is hopeless; therefore Rome hastens to give him up, and to affirm that he is rightly punished for having supported Victor Emmanuel. But so long as he was a power in Europe, he received support enough to keep him popular among the priest-ridden classes, because he was less dangerous than those who would be sure to succeed him. A Republican government would without doubt have given up the Roman occupation; while the Orleanists, who would come to the surface if the Republic failed, are, as the real friends of religious liberty, the most unacceptable of all to the Ultramontane party. Guizot, the Orleanist statesman par excellence, ventured to doubt whether it is not an abuse of tolelation to allow full scope to such irreconcilable foes to liberty as the Jesuits; there fore it was better to uphold Napoleon, and to trust to the influence of the Empress, rather than to provoke a change which was sure to be for the worse. But we have said enough to account somewhat for the growth of the Napoleonic idea, after the first Emperor had done his best by the failures, and still more by the littleness of his later years to crush it. France, moreover, had been humiliated in 1815, and Louis Philippe kept her at peace without giving an outlet for enterprise in foreign colonization. If Algeria had been less of a mere military settlement; or if, instead of Algeria, France had laid hold of a colony better suited for Furopeans to thrive in, the Orleans line might still have been on the throne. But the nation was slow to realize the amount of waste which had accompanied the wars of the Empire. France did not like to keep quiet and repair the ugly gaps left in her prosperity; she wanted to make a grand figure before the world. Louis Philippe thought that by combined repression and corruption he could check this restlessness; and so he, a constitutional king, was led into a career of unconstitutional conduct-the proximate, though not the remote, cause of the revolution of 1848. The facilis descensus from a republic to a despotism was seldom more inevitable than amid the chaos of parties which succeeded the Provisional Government. France wanted prestige: who more likely to give it to her than the nephew of the man who won Jena and Austerlitz ? France wanted protection against the "Reds," "the enemies of order and property:" surely the very man to secure this to her was l'homme providentiel, who could sway the army as one man, and who, though he professed to believe in universal suffrage, and to have a high regard for the working man, was known to be hand in glove with the great financiers and capitalists? As Victor Hugo puts it in his little history of the coup d'état, "tous les hommes du passé, depuis tel banquier juif qui se sentait un peu Catholique jusqu'à tel évêque qui se sentait un peu juif," all combined to work up the Napoleonic idea, and to induce the masses to accept what was the best government for stock-jobbers and Court tailors and highly paid functionaries of all sorts. It was the Nemesis of 1793 which produced the coup d'état : of December 1851 but for the recollection of the Reign of Terror, of that wild carnival of cruelty and rapine, such an outrage would have been impossible. Men of substance argued that what had been might be again; and therefore they threw in their lot with the saviour of society, even while they abhorred the means which he employed for its salvation. tional susceptibility, then, and a half unconscious desire to wipe off old scores, combined with Popish influence and the dread of the "Reds," helped to give tangibility to this long-cherished Napoleonic idea, by bringing about the second Empire. Na A few words, now, on the causes and the history of its decay. These, as usual in political and social matters, are complex and seemingly conflicting. First, those who looked for prestige were not satisfied with the declaration, l'Empire c'est la paix, even explained away though it was by the many wars undertaken in the last twenty years. France fighting side by side with England in the Crimea and in China, was not the same as France carrying her eagles into almost every European capital. This feeling forced on the war which resulted in the sudden peace of Villafranca-the suddenness of which peace proved (to the French Emperor's detractors) that Magenta and Solferino were not such very decided victories, after all. It always seemed in Napoleon III.'s undertakings, that he was stopped at a certain point, just as if he had not really been the master of France, but was only free to use her resources within the range of his tether. This may be due to the financial complications in which he and his creatures were always mixed up, or to that indecision of character which, while it gave him for a time a reputation for profound wisdom, did him immense harm by making men suspect him of deep plotting when he was simply at a loss how to reconcile conflicting ideas, and by exciting profound distrust on occasions where pity would have been the more appropriate feeling. Herein he paid the penalty (almost always exacted in all ranks of life) of seeing both ways. The notion which couples moral obliquity with crookedness of vision is confined to the vulgar; but comparatively few can can avoid distrusting the mental power of looking at once in several directions. The ex-Emperor had his English experience; his political education was |