11'
 
 BONAPARTISM 
 
 SIX LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 
 
 Br 
 
 H. A. L. FISHER 
 
 FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 AND OF THE TWO ST, MAHY WINTON COLLEGES 
 
 OXFORD 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 1908
 
 HENRY FROWDE, M.A. 
 
 PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVEESITY OF OXFORD 
 
 LONDON, EDINBURGH 
 
 KEW YORK AND TORONTO
 
 --■-■' ■■-J '--- f '~-~0 UNiVEH:-lTY Ct (.:ALlh\)KNlA 
 
 f^^ SANTA BARBARA OOLLEGB UBiwAM 
 
 67660 
 
 PKEFACE 
 
 Last December the University of London honoured me 
 with an invitation to give a short course of lectures upon 
 a subject connected with my special studies. The lectures 
 were delivered in University College during the month of 
 June and, in accordance with the desire of the University, 
 are now given to the public. 
 
 I make no apologies for my choice of a subject, though 
 to some an essay upon both the First and the Second Empire 
 may seem to be lacking in the essential quality of dramatic 
 unity. But though divided from one another by more than 
 a generation, these two Bonapartist Governments were to 
 a large extent inspired by the same principles, rested upon 
 the support of the same intellectual and social forces, 
 appealed to the same appetites, flattered the same vanities, 
 and shared in the same kind of ruin. In the interval of 
 French history filled up by the two Bourbon dynasties and 
 the second Republic, Bonapartist ideals were not entirely 
 extinguished. The wounds received on the field of Waterloo 
 were dangerous but not mortal. The party revived with 
 some aspects of its creed transfigured and adapted to the 
 new political environment, and if in the process of recovery 
 or survival mythology played no little part, the story is all 
 the more instructive to the student of human weakness and 
 superstition. In foreign affairs, again, there is a strong 
 bond of continuity between the poHcy, or rather between 
 the results of the policy, pursued by the uncle and the nephew. 
 The German Empire and the Italian Kingdom are the results, 
 not indeed alone of their conscious efforts, but of a sum of 
 tendencies, of which the greater and more conspicuous part 
 was either the designed or the undesigned effect of their 
 joint action. The Itafian Bisorgimento begins with the 
 
 A 2
 
 4 PREFACE 
 
 wonderful year of battles when the young Bonaparte, leading 
 the tattered army of the French democracy, drove the 
 Austrians out of Milan, and set up his Cisalpine Republic 
 in the teeming and indolent plain of Lombardy. Its work 
 was accomplished in 1870, when the French garrison was 
 withdrawn from Rome under the pressure of a German 
 invasion of France. That invasion in turn was the climax 
 of many converging movements, political, social, intellectual, 
 upon which the shock administered by Napoleon I to the 
 archaic fabric of the German Empire acted with a decisive 
 and liberating power. The triumph of Bismarck was rendered 
 possible not only by the fierce envy of the Boulevards for 
 the Prussian glory on the field of Sadowa, nor yet by the 
 indiscretions of Benedetti or of Gramont, but by a certain 
 brilliant simplification of German political geography carried 
 out under the Consulate by Talleyrand as a consequence of 
 the victories of Marengo and Hohenlinden, which had 
 restored French supremacy in the valley of the Po, and 
 brought the French boundary to the waters of the Rhine. 
 Nor is it without ironical significance that the annus mirabilis 
 of modern history which witnessed the completion of 
 German and Italian unity, the destruction of Bonapartism 
 and the humiliation of France, was marked by the sessions 
 of the Vatican Council. The decree of Papal Infallibility was 
 the cordial which the Roman Church administered to itself 
 in the hour of defeat, its defiance of the modern world, its 
 protest against the sacrilege of Italian patriotism. It was 
 the culmination of a quarrel old at least as the days of 
 Luther and, so far as France was concerned, made bitter 
 and almost irreparable by the work of the Constituent 
 Assembly ; and among many other seeds of division it 
 contained the fatal germ which was destined to dissolve the 
 Napoleonic Concordat. 
 
 H. A. L. FISHER. 
 
 Nov. 1st, 1907.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I. The Bequest of the Revolution 
 
 II. The Napoleonic State . 
 
 III. Napoleon and Europe . 
 
 IV. The Growth of a Legend 
 
 V. The Rise of the Second Empire 
 
 VI. The Downfall 
 
 PAGE 
 
 7 
 25 
 43 
 
 64 
 
 80 
 100
 
 BONAPARTISM 
 
 There is no mystery about the origins of Bonapartism. 
 It is the child of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French 
 Revolution, deriving its force and vitality not only from 
 the genius of the greatest soldier and administrator of 
 history, but also from the passions and achievements of the 
 most tempestuous decade of French annals. Bonaparte 
 came, as he said, to close the ' Romance of the Revolution ', 
 to heal the wounds, to correct the extravagances, to secure 
 the conquests. It was his boast that he did not belong to 
 the race of the * ideologues ', that he saw facts through plain 
 glass, and that he came to substitute an age of work for 
 an age of talk. The Revolution had ended in the violent 
 and irregular tyranny of a faction ; he would create a 
 methodical government based upon popular consent, and 
 conceived in the interests not of any particular faction 
 but of France as a whole. He would restore peace and 
 confidence, build up commercial credit, retrieve military 
 prestige, and mend the educational machine which had 
 been broken in the torment. 
 
 The forces which he directed and the conditions under 
 which he worked were determined by the Revolution. 
 That great movement, beginning as a protest against 
 privilege, aristocracy, and obscurantism, had with many 
 crimes and much devotion refashioned France. Its in- 
 spiring ideas had been liberty, equality, popular sovereignty, 
 and the general conception that there were certain natural 
 and indestructible rights of man which it was the mission 
 of France not only to fix and secure in her own insti- 
 tutions, but also to spread throughout Europe. It had, in
 
 8 BONAPARTISM I 
 
 other words, not only been a revolt against the old order 
 in France, the feudal system, the monarchy, the corpora- 
 tions, but it had also assumed the character of a war of 
 propaganda, a war for the acquisition of natural frontiers, 
 for the propagation of natural rights. Almost from the 
 very first French democracy, in spite of pacific professions, 
 was associated with war. Mirabeau, who wished for peace, 
 saw clearly that the rosy prospects of '89 idealism were 
 unlikely to be realized, and informed a deputation of 
 Quakers that it was a civic duty to bear arms in defence 
 of one's country. The armies of the Revolution were 
 animated by ambitions old and new, ambitions for the 
 Rhine frontier, ambitions for the destruction of monarchy 
 and feudalism. The tree of liberty was the symbol of their 
 progress. Free promotion, limitless horizons of plunder 
 and advancement, the sense that a great epoch in the 
 world's history had been reached, gave exhilaration to their 
 spirits. From countless memoirs and private letters we 
 can see with the eye of faith these armies of the Revolution 
 as they rollick along singing the Marseillaise, hghting their 
 pipes at the altar candles, looting the homes of the van- 
 quished peoples, and making manifest in their victorious 
 progress the sentiments and principles of the first republic 
 in Europe. All through the nineteenth century there has 
 been a military side to the French democratic tradition. 
 
 It is one of the commonplaces of history that the passion 
 for equality is stronger in France than the love of liberty. 
 Liberty involves taking trouble ; and any large delegation 
 of political liberties imposes a burden which in default of 
 tradition, training, or the spirit of self-sacrifice, individuals 
 or communities may be unwilling to bear. Equality, on the 
 other hand, is so closely connected both with the democratic 
 passion of envy and with the philosophic notion of distri- 
 butive justice, and the principles of equality were so glaringly 
 violated by the social contrivances of the Ancien Regime, 
 that it became at once and has ever since remained the 
 cardinal axiom of the Revolution. Wherever the principle 
 of liberty conflicts with that of equality, it is the principle
 
 I BONAPARTISM 9 
 
 of liberty which has to yield. Nevertheless it is well to 
 recognize that, whatever may have been the revolutionary 
 practice, a considerable space was given to civil and political 
 liberty in revolutionary theory. Arbitrary imprisonment 
 was abolished ; public trial was decreed ; the jury of 
 accusation and the jury of judgement were introduced for 
 the first time to a nation which had been habituated to 
 a secret and tyrannical procedure copied from the Inquisi- 
 tion. A law passed in 1790 declared la liberie de travail, 
 a measure as fatal to the revival of the tyranny of the 
 mediaeval guild as it is to that of the modern trade union ; 
 and the abolition of caste in the realm of economics was 
 accompanied by an equal measure of liberty in the sphere 
 of conscience. To the Roman doctrine of authority and 
 persecution the Revolution replied that man was free to 
 believe what he chose about God and the universe. 
 
 Political freedom, if it is to be real, depends upon the 
 capacity and inclination to exert political rights. The 
 Constitution of 1791, the first Constitution of the French 
 Revolution, made profuse grants of political freedom. 
 The whole government of the country was placed in the 
 control of popularly-elected bodies. Even the bishops and 
 the judges were to be elected. The framers of this constitu- 
 tion asked too much of the French citizen, who was unversed 
 in politics, often illiterate, and in any case unable to spare 
 the time required for the adequate discharge of the functions 
 imposed upon him. The management of local and general 
 politics soon fell into the hands of the professional politicians 
 of the clubs ; and as the violence and bitterness of the 
 Revolution increased, the number of men who cared to 
 take part in public affairs steadily diminished. Freedom 
 and terrorism are antagonistic terms ; and at no period of 
 French history has civil courage been at a lower ebb than 
 during the ten years in which the mouths of professional 
 politicians were full of the large word of Liberty. There 
 were other causes at work hostile to the growth of freedom. 
 Of these perhaps the two most important were the absence 
 of a wholesome spirit of local autonomy in the Ancien Regime,
 
 10 BONAPARTISM I 
 
 and the hostility of the Revolution to all forms of corporate 
 life. 
 
 t)e Tocqueville has explained in his famous book that 
 the centralization of modern France dates back to the 
 Ancien Regime. Then indeed the centralization was unscien- 
 tific, impeded by the privileges of the Church, the nobiUty, 
 and the Parliaments ; but nevertheless, despite all its many 
 technical imperfections, destructive of local efifort, save in 
 those few provinces which by reason of their historic assem- 
 blies or estates were known as pays d'Etats. The evils 
 attendant upon such a system were visible to discerning 
 eyes, and in the reign of Louis XVI some attempt was 
 made to devolve responsibility upon local bodies. It is 
 open to argument that if in 1776 the King had accepted 
 Turgot's plan of devolution, France might have been spared 
 the great catastrophe. But the opportunity was not seized, 
 or rather it was seized too late. The Revolution overtook 
 the country before the provincial assemblies had got into 
 full working order, and when once the revolutionary passions 
 had been unloosed local government became impossible. 
 The aristocracy was driven from France, and it is difficult 
 to work a system of local government without the governing 
 classes. The prestige of Paris, the long habit of deference 
 to the agents of a centralized administration, combined with 
 the pressure of foreign war, but hastened a reversion to the 
 tradition which had been temporarily snapped, and in the 
 Deputes en mission and the Committee of Public Safety we 
 can trace the process by which the central authority of the 
 State recovered its tyranny. Nothing is more remarkable 
 than the passive acquiescence with which the provinces 
 received the dictates of Paris. The Girondins had filled 
 France with their eloquence, had made the war, and shaken 
 down the throne ; when they felt power slipping from them 
 in Paris they appealed to the provinces, and what was the 
 response? There was hardly an echo in answer to their call. 
 Every year of disturbance made it clearer that the policy 
 of devolution recommended by Turgot and carried out 
 with modifications by Necker and Brienne was impracticable
 
 I BONAPARTISM 11 
 
 in the altered condition of France. There was scarcely 
 a village in the country — save perhaps in the royalist 
 districts of the west — in which society had not been torn 
 to pieces by angry faction. Those rents were slow to heal. 
 The reports which flowed in to Napoleon from the provinces 
 in 1800 showed clearly that the machinery of local govern- 
 ment had broken down, and that there was no class suffi- 
 ciently impartial, instructed, and public-spirited to restore 
 its efficiency. 
 
 The hostility of the Revolution to corporate life is to be 
 explained partly on theoretical and partly on historical 
 grounds. Theoretically a corporation is not a person ; and 
 it was part of the revolutionary creed to substitute natural 
 for artificial relations. Then there was a feeling that cor- 
 porations limited individual liberty. The guilds limited 
 the liberty of an individual to take up a craft suited to his 
 capacity ; the Church limited the liberty of the priest or 
 nun to marry ; and the lands which passed into the dead 
 hand of the Church were withdrawn from free commercial 
 circulation. Further, the existence of industrial or rehgious 
 corporations circumscribed the liberty of the State, and 
 therefore the liberty of the individuals, whose collective 
 will was embodied in the resolutions of the central govern- 
 ment. ' It ought no doubt ' (so runs a passage from a law 
 passed in June, 1791) ' to be permitted to all citizens to 
 assemble, but citizens of certain professions ought not to 
 be allowed to assemble for their pretended common interests. 
 There is no longer any corporation in the State. There is 
 only the particular interest of each individual and the 
 general interest. No one is permitted to inspire into citizens 
 an intermediary interest, to separate them from the public 
 interest by a corporate spirit.' The State, that is to say, 
 was conceived as a mass of isolated, free, homogeneous units, 
 each unit a citizen, each citizen an ultimate source of 
 sovereign authority, the exercise of which would be fatally 
 impeded by artificial groups. But whatever strength may 
 be attached to these theoretical conceptions, we can hardly 
 doubt that the most important influence was of a practical
 
 12 BONAPARTISM I 
 
 nature. The advocates of revolutionary reform rightly saw 
 that the great corporations, the Parliament, the Church, 
 the guilds, represented vested interests which were at 
 variance with the general scheme of revolutionary policy. 
 In particular the position of the Church challenged attack. 
 It possessed vast wealth, in return for which it made an 
 altogether inadequate contribution to the State. Not only 
 had it failed to contrive an equitable distribution of its 
 resources among its own members, but it had inverted the 
 most elementary rules of distributive justice. The hard 
 work of the parish was done at a starvation wage, while 
 the cities were crowded with fashionable idlers drawing 
 handsome salaries from ecclesiastical sinecures. Then there 
 were the charges for which Voltaire's incessant and brilliant 
 raillery had secured a general credence, charges of privilege, 
 intolerance, and obscurantism. There were memories of the 
 murdered Calas, of the opposition to the grants of civil rights 
 to Protestants, of great books burned under clerical influence 
 by the Parliament of Paris. It was determined to bridle 
 a power the hostility of which was clearly apprehended ; 
 and the attack on the corporations was quickened by financial 
 need. The Revolutionary State, which desired to govern 
 all things on its new plan, was on the verge of bankruptcy ; 
 and it was essential to discover fresh and elastic sources of 
 revenue. The lands of the Church presented the first and 
 most obvious expedient to the embarrassed financiers of 
 the Constituent Assembly ; then followed the property of 
 charitable corporations, hospitals and the like. The State 
 undertook to pay the clergy and to subsidize the hospitals 
 from its own funds. By so doing it would extend its control 
 and diminish the chances of an insidious clerical attack 
 upon the principles of democracy. 
 
 The attack upon the corporations produced somewhat 
 unexpected results in the industrial sphere. It was decreed 
 in March, 1791, that any workman could enter any trade 
 and work either at home or in workshops either for himself 
 or for an employer. This law for the first time introduced 
 into France the principle of free industrial competition,
 
 I BONAPARTISM 13 
 
 without, however, the accompaniment of any of the safe- 
 guards which free competition necessitates. The feeHng of 
 the Revolution was adverse both to the right of pubhc 
 meeting and to the right of workmen's combinations for the 
 purpose of raising wages, and this aversion to the free group- 
 ing of men in industrial unions was intensified by the 
 excesses of the revolutionary societies. The Jacobin Club 
 was a warning which neither Napoleon nor the governments 
 which succeeded him have ever felt themselves strong 
 enough to neglect. It was held in France that the right of 
 association must be closely controlled by the State, and even 
 so strong a socialist as Proudhon was a systematic opponent 
 of the legalization of collective bargaining. The right of 
 pubhc meeting was deemed to be inconsistent with order, 
 the right of using collective pressure upon individual work- 
 men was deemed to be inconsistent with liberty. 
 
 The principle of equality was realized by the destruction 
 of feudal rights and privileges, the abolition of tithes, the 
 submission of all members of the State to a common scheme 
 of justice and taxation. Primogeniture and entails went 
 the way of tithes and feudal dues, and the liberty of bequest 
 was almost abolished with a view to securing an equal 
 partition of the inheritance. All the picturesque inequalities 
 of the Ancien Regime were swept away, speedily, ruthlessly, 
 effectually ; so effectually that even now an orator addressing 
 a political meeting may find himself forced to apologize for 
 an inadvertent use of the word Messieurs. But to this rule 
 there was one significant exception. By a law passed in 
 August, 1790, the Courts were forbidden ' to interfere in any 
 manner with the operations of administrative bodies ', or 
 ' to take cognizance of any manner of administrative acts '. 
 The agents of the government were protected by a peculiar 
 kind of privilege. They could not be sued in a law court 
 for any action relating to their official duties ; nor could any 
 matter affecting the administration be made the subject 
 of a public inquiry. The government was thus both judge 
 and party in any case which might arise out of the wrongful 
 action of one of its agents. An official could only be called
 
 14 BONAPARTISM I 
 
 to account with the authorization of his official superior 
 and before a tribunal which sat in secret and was itself 
 composed of government officials. 
 
 The causes which led the revolutionary assemblies to 
 adopt a rule, apparently so repugnant to the most elementary 
 conceptions of liberty and equality, were grounded partly on 
 inherited tradition, partly on considerations of acute prac- 
 tical need, and partly on a fashionable theory of government. 
 The belief that poUtical salvation was to be found in a clear 
 distinction between executive, legislative, and judicial 
 functions was common to all the men of the Revolution, and 
 it seemed to be a corollary of the sacred principle that the 
 law courts should not meddle with political machinery. 
 But here, as in so many other quarters, the theory of the 
 Revolution was efficacious because it represented not only 
 the urgent needs of the present, but a mass of accumulated 
 instinct, the inheritance of centuries of secretive and central- 
 ized despotism. It was an ancient maxim of the monarchy 
 that the servants of the Crown should be shielded from 
 the intrusive criticism of the law courts, because the King 
 was above the common law, because his accounts must not 
 be divulged, because he was specially interested in the doings 
 of his own agents. The point had been debated hotly in 
 the seventeenth century, and the exemption of the adminis- 
 tration from judicial control was one of the constant points 
 in the various and versatile programmes of the Fronde. But 
 though in 1648 the Parliament of Paris won a victory for 
 Justice, the effects were speedily obliterated by the recovery 
 of the Crown. From the days of Richelieu to the outbreak of 
 the Revolution it was an unquestioned principle of French 
 government that administrative causes were reserved to 
 the judgement of the royal intendant and the royal council. 
 Even the Parliament of Paris, which during the eighteenth 
 century called in question so many points of the royal 
 prerogative, never protested against this most dangerous 
 immunity of the servants of the Crown. To this long- 
 standing tradition of government there was added during 
 the Revolution a passionate sense of the omnipotence of the
 
 I BONAPARTISM 15 
 
 State. It was felt that the pubhc service must always 
 override private interest, that if a question arose with 
 regard to a government contract, or a tax, or liability to 
 mihtary service, or the administration of roads, canals, and 
 other public works, it was a matter upon which the adminis- 
 tration itseK should have the deciding voice ; and this 
 feeling was intensified by the stress of war. The anxieties of 
 national defence made it seem supremely important to 
 obviate any friction which might impede the swift propulsion 
 of the government works. If we think of the long train of 
 waggons, of the canteens and tents, and all the million details 
 which go to the equipment of an army in the field ; if we 
 remember that a whole nation was up in arms, that the 
 frontier of France from Bayonne to Dunkirk was in defence ; 
 and if we then reflect that all the gigantic economic supply 
 needed for the support of these armies was based upon 
 a series of contracts any one of which might be the subject 
 of litigation ; we shall be able to appreciate the position 
 taken up by the French government — that all questions 
 arising out of army contracts should be referred to army 
 officials. The individual citizen might suffer injustice; but 
 the great machine of the Republic moved on. 
 
 The principle of popular sovereignty, of government 
 founded on the general will, was the cardinal point in 
 Rousseau's philosophy of the State, and was unquestioned 
 by the men who drafted the Constitutions of the Revolution. 
 From the first moment, however, the principle received an 
 apphcation which led to a profound divergence between 
 the parliamentary history of England and France. In- 
 fluenced partly by a distrust of the Crown, partly by the 
 analogy of America, and partly by the great reputation of 
 Montesquieu, who in a famous passage declared that the 
 secret of English liberty consisted in the separation of the 
 executive, legislative, and judicial functions, the Constituent 
 Assembly determined that the ministers of the Crown were 
 to be excluded from the Legislature. The protests of 
 Mirabeau, one of the few men who understood the workings 
 of the English system, were overborne, and the separation
 
 16 BONAPARTISM I 
 
 of the executive and legislative functions has remained 
 a governing political conception in the mind of France. 
 The head of the executive was deemed to be a representative 
 of the general will, no less than the assembly which was 
 elected to pass the laws ; and by a curious revenge of 
 history an immense power was conferrisd upon him by the 
 very forces which began by dislocating the whole adminis- 
 trative machine. It cannot be t(X) frequently remembered 
 that the power of generalization in politics is a source both 
 of weakness and of strength to those who make the genera- 
 lizations. The men who move the world must think in 
 large categories ; but to think in large categories does not 
 of itself move anything. The men of imagination who 
 frame laws in general terms must be assisted by the men of 
 routine whose experience enables them to translate the 
 law into a working regulation. In England the two func- 
 tions are combined. In France, ever since the Revolution, 
 they have been kept apart.^ An English law is full of 
 concrete detail, and may not even contain any explicit 
 statement of the principle upon which it is based. A French 
 law is abstract in form, a declaration of general prin- 
 ciples rather than of particular precepts, and this tradition, 
 springing from that peculiar constitution of revolutionary 
 statesmanship which made it so destructive of existing 
 institutions, that is to say, its belief in the infinite capacity of 
 homogeneous human nature to be ameliorated by abstract 
 ideas, has immensely strengthened the executive at the 
 expense of the legislature. The reason is obvious. It is 
 the function of the executive to fill in by decrees and regula- 
 tions the sketchy outlines of the law. A large sphere of 
 action, which under the EngUsh system belongs to Parlia- 
 ment, under the French system belongs to the bureaucracy. 
 Besides the body of law derived from the parliamentary 
 source, there is another body of law equally important 
 
 * ' Le rfeglement n'est qu'une application particuliere de la loi ; la loi est 
 la r^gle generale faite par ceux qui ont le droit et le pouvoir.' — Cambaceres, 
 Eclaircissements, quoted by Vandal, V Avenement de Bonaparte. Vol. II, 
 p. 167.
 
 I BONAPARTISM 17 
 
 which is derived from the administration, enforced by the 
 administration, interpreted by the administration. In 
 theory the doctrine of popular sovereignty is upheld ; but 
 the control of the legislature is necessarily diminished. No 
 one who examines the history of the relations between the 
 C!onvention and the Committee of Public Safety, and those 
 between the Legislature and the Directory, can fail to be 
 impressed by the fact^ that during the last six years of the 
 Revolution there was a steady tendency to strengthen the 
 independence and enlarge the sphere of the executive. 
 
 A less surprising but even more important feature of the 
 Revolution is its attitude towards private property. The 
 Revolution was strongly and consistently individualistic. 
 SociaUst theory had played no part in its preparation, and 
 sociahst theories played no part in its scheme of reconstruc- 
 tion. All the statesmen of the Revolution thought it 
 necessary to emphasize their adhesion to that article in the 
 Declaration of Rights which declares that property is an 
 inviolable and sacred right, and when in 1796 a sociahst 
 movement made itself apparent in Paris ^ it was promptly 
 and ruthlessly crushed. The reasons which gave to the 
 Revolution this conservative and reassuring quality were 
 three in number. In the first place, the holders of property 
 in France were numerous. Whereas the agrarian history 
 of England during the eighteenth century may be summed 
 up in the phrase ' elimination of the yeomanry ', the course 
 of events in France had been exactly the opposite. Here 
 there was a large and a steadily increasing body of free 
 peasant proprietors ; while side by side with this free 
 peasantry there was a great mass of peasant holdings, 
 burdened by feudal dues and tithes, but otherwise similar 
 to the free properties. There was in fact in the country 
 a large peasant proprietary, whose interests were passionately 
 bound up with the ownership of the soil. Nor were the 
 conditions so favourable to the growth of socialistic ideas in 
 the towns as they afterwards became. Socialism is the 
 remedy which suggests itself when other remedies have 
 failed ; when there is a marked divorce between capital and
 
 18 BONAPARTISM I 
 
 labour ; when the economic pressure upon the workmen 
 becomes too severe to be borne, and when the relation 
 between the efforts put out and the rewards received seems 
 to be the product of a wicked and envious caprice. The 
 French industrial system had not in 1789 been developed 
 to the point at which the common ownership of the means 
 of production appears as a natural and hopeful expedient. 
 The factory system was, in its origin, the organization of 
 industry trammelled by mediaeval restrictions ; the banking 
 system was in a rudimentary stage of development ; while 
 the communication of ideas was restricted by the absence 
 of a cheap press, and by a singular lack of mobility. A 
 third reason for the individualistic tendency of the revo- 
 lution is the fact that the men who wielded political power 
 belonged to the property-holding classes. M. Jaures, the 
 eloquent leader of the socialistic wing in the present Chamber 
 of Deputies, attacks the Convention as a bourgeois assembly, 
 and a study of the composition of the assemblies of the 
 Revolution reveals the fact that they were composed for 
 the most part of professional men, lawyers, doctors, teachers, 
 men of the middle class consumed with envy of the nobility, 
 but filled with a prosaic passion for rents and dividends. 
 But even had this been otherwise, it would have been clear 
 that the institution of private property had not yet received 
 the improvements of which it was capable. The amend- 
 ment of the law of succession, the abohtion of feudal rights 
 and entails, and the destruction of the old industrial fetters, 
 were changes sufficiently sweeping for one generation to 
 accomplish ; and while respectable men found in such 
 reforms as these the promise of a golden age, the collapse of 
 the administration opened golden prospects of irregular 
 plunder to the predatory class. Men are not at pains to 
 reconstruct the basis of society if they think that they can 
 get justice without it ; and if there were no punishment for 
 burglary, what thief would clamour for ' common goods ' ? 
 All this, hov/ever, was consistent with a steady growth of 
 what is now called State Socialism. In the stress of war 
 ibhe free-trade theories of the physiocrats, which had resulted
 
 r BONAPARTISM 19 
 
 in the liberal tarifE of 1791, were abandoned, and the State 
 reverted to the old doctrine of protection which has con- 
 tinued, save for a spell of thirty-two years, to dominate 
 the French fiscal system. The price of articles of con- 
 sumption was fixed by law, and the functions of education 
 were taken over by the State. A comparison of the Con- 
 stitution of 1791, with its large concessions to local liberty, 
 its rage for popular election, its suspicion of executive 
 strength, with the practice and doctrine which prevailed 
 under Robespierre and under the Directory, is an illuminating 
 commentary upon the way in which the logic of history or 
 the wickedness of man perverted an ideal of individual 
 liberty into a cowed and spiritless acceptance of collective 
 control. 
 
 The effervescence of all these new ideas and principles in 
 a society which retained many mediaeval characteristics 
 caused the great French civil war. The old France believed 
 in the monarchy, the aristocracy, the Church ; the new 
 France believed in equality and Voltaire. The old France 
 was composed of men belonging to every rank and station 
 in life, from the frivolous noble who loitered in the corridors 
 of Versailles, to the busy husbandman who drove his plough 
 across the stiff clays of Poitou or the sandy wastes of Brit- 
 tany. It contained staunch, heroic, uncompromising loyalists 
 like La Roche Jacquelin, wise moderates of the middle class 
 like Malouet, and innumerable simple and pious souls, who, 
 rather than take the sacrament from a priest who had 
 compounded with the enemy, would follow their proscribed 
 shepherd into the woods and wastes and brave the anger 
 of a government which rarely practised the virtue of cle- 
 mency. The new France numbered some devout Catholics, 
 but saw in the priests who refused to accept the Civil Consti- 
 tution of the clergy the friends of the foreigner and the 
 enemies of the State. By the end of the Revolution the list 
 of (^migr^s amounted to 145,000; and to these must be 
 added some 300,000 relatives and friends, who by reason of 
 their aristocratic connexions were deprived of all political 
 rights, and subjected to police supervision. When we 
 
 B 2
 
 20 BONAPARTISM I 
 
 consider that in addition half the priesthood of France were 
 in rebellion against the ecclesiastical regulations of the State, 
 and that among the number who had been driven across the 
 frontier were politicians like Lafayette and Mallet du Pan, 
 writers like Chateaubriand, generals like Dumouriez, we 
 can calculate the loss which France would have sustained 
 had she been unable to recover the loyal service of any 
 part of this great Conservative connexion. The loss cannot 
 be measured by an estimate of the quality displayed by the 
 Emigres of Coblentz, Those Emigres were a body of which 
 the country was well quit ; but they constituted a small 
 fraction of the great mass of men whose leaning was rather 
 towards a monarchy than a republic. 
 
 It was Napoleon's function in history to fuse the old 
 France with the new. In the miraculous Italian campaigns, 
 which first brought him reputation, he learned to vanquish 
 armies, to carve and fashion states, to draw up constitutions, 
 to treat with foreign powers, to study the psychology of 
 nations. The very clearness of his conception of the chasm 
 which divided the old world from the new saved him from 
 the phantasms of the doctrinaires. He saw in Italy a people 
 indolent, gifted, unwarlike, devoid of the serious spirit in 
 affairs, debased by centuries of servitude, and he judged her 
 to be unfit for liberty. The illusion of Republican optimism, 
 if he ever possessed it, was dissipated by the contact with 
 reality. He reported the Venetians to be unprincipled, 
 cowardly, untrained for freedom. 'You little know these 
 people,' he wrote to Talleyrand of the Italians, ' They do 
 not deserve to have forty thousand French killed for them. 
 I see by your letters that you are always starting from 
 a false hypothesis. You imagine that a superstitious, 
 cowardly, pantaloon people can be made to do great things 
 by Liberty. In four or five years Italy may have some 
 passable troops, especially if they employ the Swiss, for it 
 would want a very able legislator to give them the taste 
 for arms. It is a very enervated and a very cowardly 
 nation. Since I have been in Italy I have not been helped 
 by the love of the people for liberty and equahty, or at
 
 I BONAPARTISM 21 
 
 least it has been a very feeble auxiliary ; but the good 
 disciphne of our army, the respect we have always had for 
 religion, which has carried me even to the point of cajoling 
 its ministers, justice, and a great activity and promptitude 
 in repressing malcontents and punishing declared opponents, 
 such have been the real auxiliaries of the Army of Italy, 
 These are the facts. What has been said in proclamations 
 and printed speeches is romance.' A great opportunist, 
 Napoleon was not the man to shape his course by the com- 
 pass of revolutionary dogmatism. He found it convenient 
 to spare the Piedmontese Monarchy, though the Directory 
 had sworn enmity to crowned heads, to partition the Vene- 
 tian Republic, to treat with Naples and with the Pope. For 
 sentimental philosophies, for the policy of unselfish propa- 
 ganda, he showed virile and cynical contempt, ' Never,' 
 he wrote to the Directors, * has the French Republic adopted 
 the principle of making war in the interests of other people. 
 I should Hke to know on what principle of philosophy or 
 morals 40,000 Frenchmen ought to be sacrificed against the 
 clear wish of the nation and the obvious interests of the 
 Republic, I know that it costs nothing to a handful of 
 talkers to wish for a universal republic. I should like those 
 gentlemen to come and make a winter campaign ' ; and 
 again, * It is the soldier who founds a republic and it is the 
 soldier who maintains it.' If then he establishes republics 
 in Northern Italy it is to be clearly understood not only that 
 the republican constitutions are to be shaped and controlled 
 by France, but that the republics are not to be exploited in 
 the interests of an intolerant radical faction. The union of 
 all classes appeared to him to be one of the aims of wise 
 statesmanship, and a result only likely to be obtained where 
 liberty was strictly curbed. ' To exclude all the nobles 
 from public functions,' he wrote to the Provisional Govern- 
 ment of the Ligurian Republic, 'would be a revolting injus- 
 tice ', and the comprehensive policy which he prescribed to 
 Genoa was destined to govern his career in France, Indeed 
 his contempt for the constitutions of Republican France 
 grew with his experience and his appetite for command.
 
 22 BONAPARTISM I 
 
 ' In spite of our pride,' he wrote to Talleyrand, ' our thousand 
 and one brochures, our blind, loquacious harangues, we are 
 very ignorant in the science of political morality. The 
 government ought to be considered as the true representa- 
 tive of the nation. It should rule according to a constitu- 
 tional charter and organic laws. If the legislative power were 
 charged not with action but with supervision, were impassive, 
 without rank in the Republic, without eyes or ears for what 
 is going on around, it would have no ambition and would not 
 inundate us with thousands of haphazard, absurd, self -annul- 
 ling laws, with the result that we are a lawless nation in 
 spite of three hundred folios of statute.' He had begun 
 dimly to adumbrate the doctrine of the strong executive 
 founded upon the plSiscite which was to be the pillar of 
 Bonapartism ; and had come to the conclusion that legis- 
 lative assembhes should be merely supervisory, that they 
 should have no power to change the constitution or to 
 interfere with the executive. His thought too had developed 
 in the matter of rehgion. He discerned it to be a force which 
 it was politic to harness and drive. * It is not enough,' he 
 wrote to the Republican Government of Genoa, * to refrain 
 from attacking religion, you must go further and provide 
 no reason for disquietude to the most timorous conscience.' 
 On another occasion he said that superstition was more 
 powerful than liberty, and that the sovereignty of the 
 people and freedom was the poUtical code of the Gospel. 
 On August 3, 1797, he wrote a letter to the Pope asking for 
 a bull which should instruct the priests to preach obedience 
 to the Government, and suggested that measures might be 
 taken which should reconcile the constitutional priests in 
 France, and recall the majority of the French people to the 
 principles of religion. Two grand features in his adminis- 
 tration, the Constitution and the Concordat, were already 
 taking shape in his mind. 
 
 But his eye was not fixed on France alone. He learned all 
 the pieces on the diplomatic chessboard, discovered the 
 weakness of Imperial Austria and the brittle fabric of the 
 Italian states. The treaty which he concluded at the end
 
 1 BONAPARTISM 23 
 
 of the war at Campo-Formio, secured for France the Rhine 
 frontier and the control of the Cisalpine Republic, and 
 prepared the way for a reconstruction of Germany. Ancona 
 and the Ionian Islands, stepping-stones to the magical 
 East, whose appeal had already begun to work on Bona- 
 parte's imagination, were left in French hands. ' The isles 
 of Corfu, Zante, and Cephalonia,' he wrote August 16, 1797, 
 * interest us more nearly than the whole of Italy , . . The 
 Empire of the Turks is crumbling J the possession of these 
 isles will enable us to support it, as long as support will be 
 possible, or to take our share in the spoil.' * With Malta,' 
 which as he points out might easily be seized, ' and Corfu, 
 France would be mistress of the Mediterranean.' Then it 
 would be necessary to take Egypt, * a country which has 
 never belonged to a European nation.' ' With armies like ours,' 
 he proceeds, * for whom all religions are equal, Mahome- 
 dans, Copts, Arabs, idolaters, &c., all that is quite indifferent 
 to us. We shall respect them all alike.' Endless possi- 
 bilities of romantic conquest revealed themselves to this 
 young general who in a breathless succession of triumphs 
 had brought the stiff, old-fashioned Hapsburg Empire to its 
 knees. He was no longer content with the old frame on 
 which Fleury and Chauvelin had embroidered their political 
 designs. From Paris, in whose cynical atmosphere great 
 reputations withered, his mind turned to the spacious East. 
 As he had emulated Charlemagne in Italy, so he would rival 
 the exploits of Alexander in Egypt. Here was the key 
 which would unlock the dominion of India ; the starting- 
 point from which Syria might be invaded, and the Ottoman 
 Empire brought down about its tottering foundations ; here 
 too was the vulnerable spot in England's armour. His 
 mind was filled with dreams and realities. Yet the Egyptian 
 expedition, doomed as it was to fail owing to the lack of 
 naval control, did not prove disastrous to his fortunes. 
 France, condemned by reason of the absence of her supreme 
 general to experience a succession of stunning reverses, 
 followed with eager eyes the romantic course of the army 
 of Egypt. She learned of the Mamelukes vanquished in a
 
 ^4 BONAPARTISM 1 
 
 brilliant charge by the Pyramids, of a French government 
 estabhshed in Cairo, of Bible readings under the stars in 
 the holy places of Palestine ; of a Turkish army routed at 
 Aboukir. The battle of the Nile, the repulse from Acre, 
 cast no shadow on the romance of this wonderful Odyssey. 
 When Bonaparte landed at Frejus, having escaped the 
 vigilance of English cruisers, a thrill of delight and relief 
 passed through France. He had been long expected. 
 Fievee, who was living a retired life in a remote corner of 
 the Bourbonnais, records the following fact in his memoirs : 
 * Every peasant I met in the fields, the vineyards, and woods, 
 stopped and asked me if there was news of General Bona- 
 parte, and why he did not come back to France. No one 
 inquired after the Directory,'
 
 II 
 
 It was part of France's good fortune that the man who 
 came to save her was himself a homeless adventurer, sprung 
 not of French but of Italian stock, and attached to no 
 creed, party, or faction of the State. He was a man who 
 assessed the temperament of the French with the critical eye 
 of a foreigner, and found it guilty of many irrelevant and 
 disastrous emotions. For his part, he was not amused by 
 useless sentiments, and imported a cold and wholesome 
 dose of inhumanity into the conduct of affairs, which had 
 so long been perturbed by short sleep, disordered nerves, 
 and the passion of a vainglorious and undisciplined race to 
 play the beau role on the theatre of humanity. Knowing by 
 experience what artillery could do against a mob, he was 
 proof against the panic-struck idolatry which had abased 
 one French legislature after another, and made Paris horrible 
 to Europe. His guns had quelled the rioters of Vendemiaire ; 
 he had punished Italian insurgents at Pa via, and stamped 
 out the sudden furies of Cairo. For him the canaille had no 
 terrors. He knew how to abate their strength and win 
 their hearts. In cheap bread lay the supreme talisman of 
 statesmanship. 
 
 The needs of France were such that only the highest 
 powers of technical administration were adequate to meet 
 them. Ten years of anarchy had broken up the roads, 
 disorganized the hospitals, interrupted education, and 
 thrown all the charitable institutions of the country out 
 of gear. Forty-five of the departments were reported as 
 being in a state of chronic civil war. Robber bands two, 
 three, eight hundred strong, scoured the country, pillaged 
 the stage-coaches, broke into the prisons, flogged or slew 
 the tax-collectors. The greater part of the clergy was in 
 open rebellion against the State. No one obeyed the law. 
 Conscripts refused to serve ; the mobile columns who were
 
 26 BONAPARTISM II 
 
 entrusted with the duty of policing the disturbed regions 
 had to forage for themselves and lived on rapine. Com- 
 mercial credit had disappeared, for the currency had been 
 depreciated, the State had declared partial bankruptcy, 
 and English cruisers had long since interrupted foreign 
 trade. Such had been the violence of the Revolution that 
 almost all the talent and virtue of the country had been 
 driven out of pubhc life. The Government was in the 
 hands of a small knot of regicides, second-class revolu- 
 tionaries, whose names carried no prestige and whose 
 characters did not bear scrutiny. The bureaucracy was 
 immense, but stained with the habit of pillage and corruption ; 
 the local officers were reported to be ignorant and venal, 
 and many mayora were unable to sign their name. The 
 navy, which during the American war had proved itself 
 a match for Rodney, had been completely ruined by the 
 democratic prejudice against the gunners and officers, and 
 if other branches of the public service had not been disor- 
 ganized to the same conspicuous extent there were none 
 which reached an adequate standard of efficiency. 
 
 A general sense of imeasiness pervaded the country. 
 The 1,200,000 men who had acquired during the Revolution 
 the lands of the Church or the Emigres moved restlessly in 
 their beds, for they knew themselves to hold under a title 
 which the Church regarded as sacrilegious and would use 
 all her moral influence to overthrow. In the debates of the 
 Paris Jacobins the red spectre of SociaUsm had raised itself, 
 and had begun to terrify the shopmen. 
 
 Napoleon brought to the task of government exactly 
 that assemblage of qualities which the situation required, 
 an unsurpassed capacity for acquiring technical information 
 in every branch of government, a wealth of administrative 
 inventiveness which has never been equalled, a rare power 
 of driving and draining the energies of men, a beautiful 
 clearness of intellect which enabled him to seize the sahent 
 features of any subject, however tough, technical, and 
 remote, a soldierly impatience of verbiage in others com- 
 bined with a serviceable gift of melodramatic eloquence in
 
 II BONAPARTISM 27 
 
 himself; above all, immense capacity for relevant labour. 
 He could work eighteen hours at a stretch, could turn his 
 mind at once from one subject to another entirely remote 
 from it, and a few minutes were enough to put him in pos- 
 session of the material facts. * I am always working,' he 
 said once to Roederer, ' at dinner, at the theatre. At night 
 I get up to work. Last night I got up at two o'clock, put 
 myself in an arm-chair before my fire, to examine the field- 
 states sent in yesterday by the minister of war. I found 
 twenty mistakes.' His cross-examination was quick and 
 searching ; none could tear his secret from the specialist 
 with the dexterity of this man, who knew every process 
 in the making of guns and the administration of armies, 
 whose visual memory was such that it could bear the print 
 on it of the face of France with its network of roads and 
 rivers, towns and bridges, with aU the minute detail relevant 
 to mihtary purposes, the effective force of the several 
 regiments, the stock of arms and ammunition at their 
 command. No subordinate could hope to escape his vigi- 
 lance. ' In column twenty- two of your account,' he writes 
 from the camp of Boulogne to Burbe-Marbois, minister of 
 the Public Treasury, ' I see that among the holders of ter- 
 minable annuities, you are paying one person of 1701, two 
 of 1702, and more than 2,600 persons before 1720. This 
 means that among the terminal annuitants there are 2,600 
 persons more than eighty-five years old. An account of 
 these 2,600 persons must be printed, and of all the annuitants 
 up to 1725 ; this account must be sent round to the prefects 
 to verify the existence of these individuals, and to assure that 
 they are the same persons as those to whom the annuity was 
 credited.' This capacity for minute technical knowledge 
 was combined with an imaginative grasp of aU the human 
 forces which law and administration affected. He looked 
 beyond the clever, sophisticated people in Paris, for whom 
 Voltaire represented the sum of human wisdom, out into 
 the fields and the teeming villages. He saw the peasants, 
 penurious and greedy of the land, as Balzac has painted 
 them, deeply suspicious of the nobility, dreading above all
 
 28 BONAPARTISM II 
 
 things the restoration of tithes and feudal dues, but romantic, 
 superstitious, uneasy in their conscience, and attached by 
 a thousand subtle ties of sentiment and association to the 
 rites of the Catholic Church. He saw the small bourgeoisie 
 in the provincial towns, prosaic, respectable, timid, whose 
 incapacity for poHtical initiation had been sufl&ciently 
 evidenced by their inglorious self-effacement during the 
 storm, and he knew that they desired a master who would 
 quell the red politicians, make peace with Europe, and send 
 up the price of Government stock. He realized the feelings 
 of the men who had served in the Revolutionary armies or 
 in one or other branch of the Revolutionary administration, 
 the feelings of the men who had compromised themselves 
 fatally by joining some Radical club, the feelings of all the 
 embarrassed tradesmen in town and country who had 
 managed to rid themselves of their burden of debt owing 
 to the depreciation of Revolutionary paper. He reckoned 
 up the tens of speculators who had made fortunes out of 
 army contracts, the thousands who profiting by the laxity 
 of the administration had escaped the tax-collector, and 
 he understood that, whatever disgust might have been felt 
 for the Republic, France was still wedded to the cause of 
 the Revolution. 
 
 He was not a religious man, in any orthodox sense, but 
 he saw what power an autocracy such as that of the Turk 
 or the Tsar gained by the control of religious forces, and 
 knowing the rehgious sentiment to be profound and inde- 
 structible, he was determined to exploit it. ' Religion,' he 
 said long afterwards, ' is a part of destiny. With the soil, 
 the laws, the manners, it forms that sacred whole which is 
 called La Patrie, and which one must never desert. The 
 principal charm of a religion consists in its memories.' 
 It followed from this that all improvised substitutes 
 for Christianity were destitute of the distinctive power 
 which a religion should possess — the power of awaking his- 
 toric echoes. Theophilanthropy was a bad comedy ; atheism 
 a malady worse than fanaticism and destructive of national 
 ethics ; the mistake of the well-meaning philosophers of
 
 II BONAPARTISM 29 
 
 the Revolution was that, like Du Pont de Nemours, who 
 rewrote the Lord's Prayer in detestably dull French for 
 the benefit of Theophilanthropist congregations, they had 
 no conception of religion, as a popular, if you like as a vulgar 
 force. * Rehgion,' as he observed afterwards to Wieland, 
 * is not made for philosophers. ... If I had to make a religion 
 for philosophers it would be very different from that which 
 I supply to the credulous.' 
 
 It was the task of statesmanship not to criticize the exist- 
 ing social forces in the light of philosophic dogma, but to 
 recognize their strength and to use them for its own purpose 
 — above aU things to find and to follow the line of least 
 division. In Italy Napoleon had learnt that a variance 
 between Church and State is a malady which it is the duty 
 of a strong man to cure, and coming to the head of affairs 
 in France he made the fusion of opposites the cardinal 
 feature in his system. Merhn and Muraire were called to 
 preside in the Court of Cassation, though the first of these 
 eminent jurists had condemned his learned brother to be 
 proscribed and deported at Fructidor. Emigrants served 
 in the household, the senate, and the armies ; Girondins, 
 Jacobins, and royalists sat together in the law courts, in the 
 departmental councils, and in the Council of the State ; the 
 priests poured out into the sunlight from their dungeons, 
 and in virtue of one of the eariy acts of the new government 
 were permitted to enjoy the free observance of Sunday. 
 ' On pent se dMester et correspondre ; quand il s'agit de mon 
 service on doit mettre has toutes les passions.^ Impartiality 
 was the sovereign maxim of government. Everything was 
 pardoned to the efficient and the docile. 
 
 The State which Napoleon founded was an autocracy 
 based upon the plebiscite. Despotic power was as essential 
 to his own purposes and to the needs of France as was the 
 support of the nation duly and patently expressed. ' Con- 
 fidence,' according to the famous dictum of Sieyes, * must 
 come from below, power from above.' We may call the 
 government of the Consulate and the Empire a tyranny if 
 we please, but compared with the government which
 
 30 BONAPARTISM II 
 
 preceded it, it was a reign of freedom. It bridled the press, 
 stamped out political debate, shook itself free from con- 
 stitutional checks, and here and there, when political 
 interests were involved, harshly interfered with the course 
 of justice and the freedom of the subject. But it substituted 
 a regular, scientific, civilized administration for a condition 
 of affairs which bordered upon anarchy. It cleansed the air 
 of spite and suspicion, and made life safe and easy for the 
 ordinary householder who was content to let the great 
 world of politics go its own way. 
 
 The corner-stone of the central administration was the 
 First Consul, assisted by the Council of State, a body to 
 whom was entrusted the initiative in legislation and the 
 supreme appellate jurisdiction in administrative causes. 
 Here at last was a band of men eminent in technical know- 
 ledge, deliberating in secret, drawn from all parties, and 
 consequently enabled to bring to the consideration of the 
 great problems of French government the calm, dispas- 
 sionate, trained intelligence which their solution demanded. 
 Here was the great central laboratory of Government. It 
 was in the Legislative Committee of the Council that the 
 codes were debated article by article, it is from the admini- 
 strative decisions of the Council that the first firm and 
 coherent body of French administrative law was formed. 
 Later on, during the Empire, the Council of State became 
 a political school for the young officials. A selected number 
 of young men destined for the public service were permitted 
 to attend the debates and to derive from them instruction 
 in the problems and methods of government. In the 
 Council then was the real motive power of the great machine. 
 The other institutions of the Consulate were devised to 
 mask the transition from liberty to despotism. A small 
 body of a hundred Tribunes permitted to debate but not 
 to vote, a Legislative Assembly permitted to vote but not 
 to debate, a Senate named by the head of the State, endowed 
 with the function of safeguarding the principles of the 
 Constitution and of naming the Tribunes and the legis- 
 lators from lists submitted to them, after the popular will
 
 n BONAPARTISM 31 
 
 had been strained through an elaborate succession of sieves — 
 such were the hollow compliments paid to the democratic 
 principle. By degrees portions of the disguise, becoming 
 inconvenient, were modified or suppressed. The Tribunate, 
 which shone with the last glowing embers of Revolutionary 
 eloquence, was first mutilated, then abolished ; the dumb 
 legislature sank more and more into insignificance, and the 
 legislative will of the Sovereign made itself increasingly 
 manifest in decrees and senatus consulta. At the close of 
 the Empire every source of friction had been carefully 
 ehminated from the working of the central machine. 
 
 The omnipotence of the State was no new idea in French 
 poUtics ; it was the old tradition of the monarchy, old as 
 the close of the fifteenth century, illustrated as much by 
 the industrial legislation of Colbert as by the domiciliary 
 visits of the Terror. But under the Ancien Regime the 
 action of the central authority was cumbrous and impeded 
 by all kinds of obstacles. Royal ordinances had to be 
 confirmed by local Parliaments, royal officials were com- 
 pelled to accept local franchises. The variety of local 
 custom, of weights and measures, the privileges of the 
 Church, the aristocracy and the guilds, obstructed the 
 smooth and efficient working of the administrative machine. 
 The Revolution swept away the obstacles and Napoleon 
 repaired the machinery. In the Department the will of 
 the Government was represented by the prefect, in the 
 District by the sub-prefect, in the Commune by the mayor. 
 Communal and Departmental Councils met indeed to vote 
 the Budget and to ventilate local grievances, but they were 
 themselves the creatures of the Government. The period 
 during which they were permitted to talk was limited by 
 law, and it was well understood that their function was 
 to smooth rather than to arrest the powerful machinery 
 which was set in motion from Paris. 
 
 This highly centralized Government was actuated by the 
 paternal theory of the State. To a mind so logical and 
 comprehensive as Napoleon's no influence which might 
 affect the psychology, the physique, or the conduct of the
 
 32 BONAPARTISM II 
 
 nation was indifferent. The physiocrats, impressed by the 
 complicated trammels with which the unwise economists 
 of the Ancien Regime had throttled French trade and 
 industry, cried out for laissez faire. To a man who thought 
 in terms of armies, battalions, regiments, companies, of 
 a nation wheeling about with obedient exactitude at the 
 word of command, such a doctrine seemed anarchic and 
 absurd. The State must form morals, control rehgion, 
 manufacture a public opinion congenial to its institutions 
 by the censorship of letters, regulate the distribution of 
 private fortunes by its law of inheritance, fashion the minds 
 of children by a great educational monopoly, and stimulate 
 the particular types of effort which it desired to honour 
 by means of Orders, prizes, and scholarships. It must be 
 armed with powers of expropriation for purposes of public 
 utility, and it must strike the imagination of material and 
 prosaic men by its roads and canals, its avenues and streets, 
 its harbours, bridges, and forts. The protection of national 
 industry against foreign competition was part of the general 
 scheme. The food supply of a capital which might some 
 day be forced to stand a siege was subjected to severe 
 regulation, and the butchers and bakers of Paris were com- 
 pelled to become members of state corporations enjoying 
 an official monopoly of supply upon conditions determined 
 by the Government. 
 
 It was a corollary that every form of religious denomina- 
 tion should be controlled by the State. The separation of 
 Church and State which had been carried out in 1795 was 
 rather an unforeseen result of the logic of facts than a 
 premeditated scheme congenial to the general tendencies 
 of the French mind. Neither the philosophers who specu- 
 lated nor the politicians of the Constituent Assembly who 
 legislated upon the subject had conceived it to be in any 
 way desirable that the Roman Catholic Church should be 
 dissociated from the French State. The conception of the 
 lay state observing strict neutrality in the sphere of religion 
 accorded neither with the Catholic tradition of the country 
 nor with the deep-rooted idea of governmental omnipotence
 
 II BONAPARTISM 33 
 
 which was the legacy of the monarchy to the Revolution. 
 The word laicite now so frequently on the hps of French- 
 men, was then unknown, nor had a single thinker or poli- 
 tician of eminence questioned the expediency of Church 
 establishment. The civil constitution of the clergy of 1791 
 offended the Catholic conscience on many points. In 
 particular it enacted that bishops should be chosen by the 
 electoral assembly of their Department, and debarred them 
 from soliciting canonical institution from the Pope. But 
 one thing it did not intend to do ; it did not intend to 
 weaken, rather it was its purpose in every way to strengthen 
 the hnks which bound the Roman Catholic religion to the 
 State. Three things, however, were not foreseen by the 
 framers of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The first 
 was the bankruptcy of the Government ; the second, the 
 schism in the French Church ; the third was the rapid 
 progress of aggressive infidelity among the men who wielded 
 pohtical power under the Terror. These politicians argued 
 that they had very little money, that the Constitutional 
 priests who alone had a claim upon the state chest were a 
 minority of the Roman Church, and that, after all. Catholic 
 priests, whether they had taken the oath to the Constitu- 
 tion or no, might be assumed to favour the counter- 
 revolution. The law of separation passed in 1795 legalized 
 a situation which had existed in fact under the Terror ; 
 but it was the fortuitous result of exceptional conditions 
 rather than the well-considered policy of France, 
 
 Bonaparte, to whom loose spiritual forces were repugnant, 
 determined to annul these decisions. ' The people,' he said, 
 must have a religion, and that religion must be in the hands 
 of the Government. The French Clergy is now led by fifty 
 emigrant bishops in the English pay. Their infiuenee must 
 be destroyed, and for this the authority of the Pope is 
 necessary.' It was true that many positions advanced by 
 Catholic theologians seemed to him to be contrary to public 
 policy. It was an obvious antinomy that when the civil 
 government had condemned a criminal to death, the priest 
 should give him absolution and promise him Paradise ;
 
 34 BONAPARTISM II 
 
 it was absurd that theological prejudice should obstruct 
 a clear hygienic improvement like cremation. But, to 
 one who viewed the political situation as a whole, the 
 arguments for a treaty with the Church were overwhelming. 
 The Concordat with the Papacy concluded in 1801 healed 
 the schism in the Church, provided the requisite sanction 
 for the land settlement of the Revolution, and restored the 
 connexion of the Church and State. It was supplemented 
 by a series of provisions known as the organic articles, 
 which were designed to police the Church and to regulate 
 its relations with the Holy See. It was for the State to 
 settle the number of persons who might receive ordina- 
 tion in any given year, to supervise the seminaries in which 
 religious instruction was given, to sanction the gathering 
 of Church Councils, and the reception of Papal Bulls. 
 Cathedrals and churches were declared to be the property 
 of the State, but placed at the disposition of the bishops ; 
 and the Church, whose ministers received small salaries from 
 the government, was forbidden by law to acquire landed 
 property. Religion, in other words, was to promote the 
 ends of Napoleon's policy. The cure was expected to 
 advocate conscription from the pulpit, to read out the 
 army bulletins, and to inculcate veneration for the person 
 of the Emperor. He was discouraged from indulging in 
 theological discussions, urged to preach the simple virtues 
 of passive obedience and Christian resignation, to teach 
 the imperial catechism, and to abjure the exciting topics 
 of dogmatic theology or ecclesiastical politics. Since a pro- 
 longed tenure of his cure might win him political power 
 with his parishioners, it was well that the cure should be 
 frequently moved from parish to parish. Nor was any- 
 thing judged more likely to lead to trouble than the con- 
 fabulation of bishops. These dignitaries of the Church, 
 whose modest stipends and bare, ill-furnished residences 
 contrasted curiously with the sumptuous parade of the 
 great prelates of the monarchy, were forbidden to corre- 
 spond with each other or with Rome, to open a Church 
 school or hold a Church Synod, without permission of the
 
 II BONAPARTISM 35 
 
 Government. The argus eye of the Minister of Cults 
 scrutinized every episcopal charge, glanced at the seminarist 
 as he bowed his head over his theme, and followed the 
 country priest into his rustic pulpit. 
 
 Having undertaken the task of policing the soul, the 
 State did not shrink from the duty of fashioning the mind. 
 For secondary education it provided the lycee, a public 
 school organized upon a military plan, and for young men 
 who had passed from the lycee there was the University 
 of France, holding, like the butchers and bakers of Paris, 
 a monopoly of a certain product warranted wholesome. 
 In every lycee there was the same programme of studies, 
 the same hours, the same books in the library, the same 
 military uniform. ' There will never,' said Napoleon, ' be 
 a fixed political state of things in this country until we 
 have a body of teachers instructed on established principles. 
 So long as the people are not taught from their earliest 
 years whether they ought to be republicans or royalists, 
 Christians or infidels, the State cannot properly be called 
 a nation.' There was an end, therefore, of the bold curiosity 
 of the eighteenth century, which played so nimbly over the 
 whole surface of human belief. The political and moral 
 sciences were the alcohol which went to the brains of 
 rhetoricians and journalists, the cause of disorder and in- 
 convenient curiosity. History too, unless properly written 
 under government direction, was a dangerous instrument 
 of education. Mathematics, on the other hand, were safe 
 and useful, medicine indispensable ; the physical sciences, 
 abstract or applied, brought glory to the human intellect 
 and had a direct bearing on the national well-being. The 
 University of France, created on March 17, 1808, was 
 intended to include all the educational agencies in the 
 Empire, and to form citizens attached to their religion, 
 their country, and their family. No one could open a 
 school or teach in public without being a graduate of the 
 University, which was to create and administer the public, 
 and to authorize and supervise the private schools. The 
 programme of university studies being designed to train 
 
 c 2
 
 36 BONAPARTISM II 
 
 citizens of a particular type, was as much a matter of state 
 concern as the sanitation of the barracks or the inspection 
 of ammunition and gun mountings. But this educational 
 control was limited to the needs of the upper classes. The 
 whole field of primary education was still left to voluntary 
 effort, for it is a sound instinct of despotism to neglect 
 the education of the masses. 
 
 Democracy was defined to be ' a career open to talent ', 
 and in this sense it might be contended that the Napoleonic 
 state was democratic. The principle of social equality 
 which had been the most precious conquest of the Revolution 
 was secured, not indeed with logical completeness, but 
 more fully than in any other European country, in the 
 institutions of the Consulate and Empire. The fiscal system, 
 based upon the principle of a balance between direct and 
 indirect taxes, was roughly adjusted to taxable capacity. 
 The law of inheritance continued to favour equality, and 
 the great truth was discovered that the value of institutions 
 depends upon the degree to which they assist the free 
 development of human powers and the adequate remunera- 
 tion of human merit. In the army, where efficiency was 
 strictly and instantly tested, no other plan was possible 
 than promotion according to merit, and a system of govern- 
 ment scholarships was designed to make an educational 
 ladder for needy members of the middle class. But the 
 elimination of caste, though a primary condition of social 
 equality, is not in itself sufficient to secure an adequate 
 measure of equal opportunity. The Napoleonic state 
 ,starved education. The civil code, impregnated with the 
 dogmatic individuahsm of the jurisconsults of the eigh- 
 teenth century, permitted neither collective bargaining nor 
 the formation of trade unions, and exposed the working 
 classes to the ruthless operation of unfettered competition. 
 In the great struggle between labour and capital the 
 sympathy of Napoleon and of Napoleon's lawyers was on 
 the side of capital. To capital he gives a majority on the 
 industrial committee which is to decide trade disputes. 
 An article of the civil code upon the hiring of servants and
 
 II BONAPARTISM 37 
 
 workmen lays down the proposition that the master has to 
 be beheved on his affirmation as to the amount of the wages 
 paid during the last year and as to the sums given on account 
 during the current year. The mere play of economic forces 
 results in the establishment of privileged positions which 
 law recognizes and confirms. Indeed, an absence of all dis- 
 tinctions was in Napoleon's view contrary to human nature. 
 ' I defy you,' he said to Berthier, ' to show me a republic 
 ancient or modern in which there have been no distinctions. 
 You call them baubles ; well, it is with baubles that men are 
 led. I do not believe that the French love liberty and 
 equality. The French have not been changed by ten years 
 of revolution. They are like the Gauls, proud and fickle ; 
 they have only one sentiment, honour.' To feed that senti- 
 ment he created in the teeth of sharp opposition the Legion 
 of Honour. Then came the creation of a new nobility, and 
 the restoration of entails. But in truth no one of these 
 institutions greatly modified the spirit or structure of French 
 society. The Legion of Honour, a personal distinction, 
 incapable of bequest, and conferred upon all sorts and con- 
 ditions of men for all sorts and conditions of service, did not, 
 as was feared, create an order. Rather it was the apt recog- 
 nition of the principle of equal justice. The new nobility, 
 devoid of historic tradition or official status, without func- 
 tions to perform either in local or central government, and 
 surrounded both in town and country by the strong senti- 
 ment of equality, had little influence, save to enlist vulgar 
 ambition in the service of the Empire ; and though the 
 introduction of entails would in time have led to the forma- 
 tion of large properties, the qualification for an entail was 
 founded upon wealth, and consequently open to all whose 
 industry was sufficient to secure them an adequate fortune. 
 The * sacred right of freedom ' as it is described in 
 the Constitution of 1799 was not compatible with the 
 restless energy of Napoleon. The civil liberty of the 
 individual was to some extent assured by the institution 
 of the jury of judgement or petty jury, by the publicity of 
 trials, by the right to enter any trade, craft, or profession,
 
 38 BONAPARTISM II 
 
 and publicly to conform to any type of religious belief. 
 It was, however, abridged in many important respects. 
 There was no machinery analogous to that set up by the 
 English Habeas Corpus Act, to protect a man from illegal 
 imprisonment or to secure for him a speedy trial. A com- 
 pany of more than twenty persons could not meet together 
 without a police permit. No citizen could be certain that 
 his house would not be broken into at night, his papers seized, 
 his person hurried off to a place of security until the police 
 had satisfied their curiosity. The life of Fouche, Duke of 
 Otranto, is a sufficient commentary upon the enormous 
 power wielded by the police. Nothing can be more deplora- 
 ble than that a minister of police should be the most impor- 
 tant factor in the internal government of a country. But 
 Fouche's position was no symptom of misrule, but rather the 
 inevitable result of the Revolution. Inquisitorial vigilance 
 was necessary for peace. Was there not a recrudescence of 
 the Vendee in the summer of Waterloo ? 
 
 Under the Empire state prisons were formed to receive 
 political prisoners, and the lettres de cachet, which it had 
 been one of the boasts of the Constituent Assembly to 
 abolish, were practically restored. Liberty of thought was 
 as insecure as personal freedom. By a decree of June 17, 
 1800, the number of political journals was suddenly reduced 
 to thirteen. The censorship of plays was as recklessly 
 exercised as the censorship of newspapers. A piece by 
 Alexandre Duval which had some royalist references was 
 inadvertently passed by the censor and put upon the Paris 
 stage. Bonaparte caused it to be withdrawn, and, upon 
 a hint from the minister, the author took a year's holiday in 
 Russia. No pamphlet was too small, no play too bad, for the 
 meticulous interference of the police. The best writers, 
 Chateaubriand, Mme. de Stael, de Bonald, and de Maistre, 
 lived in exile, and the price which France paid for order was 
 the silence of poetry and the death of criticism. 
 
 ' A free people is above all a people which respects persons 
 and property. That is the whole spirit of our code.' 
 Judged by its respect for the property of French citizens,
 
 II BONAPARTISM 39 
 
 the system of Napoleon did not belie the hopes of those 
 who saw in him the saviour of society from anarchy or 
 socialism. The Code fortified the principle of private 
 property not only by assisting its diffusion, but also by the 
 care with which it prevented the acquisition of land by 
 religious or industrial corporations. The State, however, 
 limited the rate of interest, retained the penalty of con- 
 fiscation, and claimed the right to expropriate individuals 
 with due compensation on grounds of public utility. So 
 long as the Napoleonic regime lasted, bourgeois and peasant 
 alike felt themselves to be sheltered from the quadruple 
 menace of the sociahsts, the royaUsts, the clericals, and the 
 Jews. 
 
 The army had been based upon conscription during the 
 Revolution, and Napoleon made conscription the corner- 
 stone of the State. The economics of the army have recently 
 been unveiled — the bad clothing, the arrears of pay, the 
 flat dishonesty of the administration, which made the most 
 exorbitant demands upon the courage of the soldier, and 
 then disappointed him of his reward. Yet when did the 
 army fail Napoleon ? From Moscow to Lisbon, from the 
 border of Denmark to the Straits of Messina, French soldiers 
 proved themselves possessed of the fire and dash which first 
 gave to the sons of freedom their incalculable momentum. 
 
 The system of law and justice organized by Napoleon has 
 been equally permanent — the hierarchy of courts, the appeal 
 to the Council of State in administrative cases, the five 
 Codes. This is not the place for a detailed examination of 
 the principles of Napoleonic law. It is well, however, to 
 notice that the civil code alone was drawn up during the 
 Consulate, that it is nearer both in time and spirit to the 
 revolutionary law than are the codes which were compiled 
 in a more perfunctory manner under the darker shadows of 
 imperial despotism. It represents, in fact, a fair judicial 
 compromise between the democratic ideas of the revolu- 
 tionary assemblies and the jurisprudence of the monarchy, 
 whereas the later codes are practically reissues of ordinances 
 passed under the Kings with some amendments. Again, it
 
 40 BONAPARTISM II 
 
 is worth remarking that the law of persons as defined in the 
 civil code reflects three characteristic opinions of Napoleon — 
 his persuasion of the inferiority of woman to man, his strong 
 belief in paternal authority, and his view of the importance 
 of divorce as a bulwark of family life. The spirit of the 
 codes may perhaps be represented as an enlightened applica- 
 tion of immemorial traditions to an altered condition of 
 affairs. We may imagine that if it could be evoked in some 
 bodily shape from the lifeless texts and commentaries, it might 
 make some such allocution as this to the shades of the men 
 who had framed the laws of the Revolution, and prepared the 
 way for the legists of the Empire : ' You were right to 
 recognize divorce, despite the opposition of the priests, for 
 it is essential that unhappy marriages should admit of 
 dissolution, but you were wrong to make divorce so easy, 
 for you weakened the family and lessened the sense of 
 responsibihty under which marriages should be contracted. 
 Again, your rigid democratic arithmetic has led to some 
 results which conflict with public pohcy and tend to deprave 
 private morals. Equality is all very well, but you allow 
 bastards to inherit equally with lawful children, and you 
 deprive the owner of property of any power of testation, by 
 enjoining a strict subdivision of nine-tenths of his inheritance 
 into as many equal shares as he has children lawful or un- 
 lawful. We, on the contraiy, make a distinction between 
 children bom in and out of wedlock, for we cannot allow a 
 democratic sum to work out to the perdition of morals. 
 Again, we think it hard that a father should have no power 
 of manifesting any individual preference in his will. We 
 hardly think this consistent either with the idea of private 
 property or with the conception of hberty. We are even so 
 lax as to imagine that the very power of giving some extra 
 reward to a compHant son may fortify the authority of the 
 parent, as it may reasonably be supposed that the distribu- 
 tion of red ribbons and other forms of patronage increases the 
 influence of the First Consul. Consequently, while we aim 
 at equahty in our land system, we slightly enlarge the 
 liberty of the testator and conversely slightly diminish that
 
 II BONAPARTISM 41 
 
 portion of the inheritance which must be carved into equal 
 shares. We make a cautious return to the older state of 
 the law which we know to have prevailed in the north of 
 France, and if our system is shghtly less favourable to 
 equahty than the law of the revolution, it is more congenial 
 to the spirit of liberty and to the tradition of French juris- 
 prudence. Again, in your charming enthusiasm you went 
 so far as to decree that legal procedure was wicked, and 
 that society could get on without lawyers. Indeed you 
 made it illegal for litigants to seek for professional advice, 
 so deep was your conviction that a patriotic heart and a 
 sound head were sufficient to state, traverse, or decide an 
 action. Our view is different. We observe that your rule 
 was never obeyed even when it was most dangerous to 
 dispute your authority. It only meant that litigants paid 
 higher fees than ever for counsel surreptitiously given and 
 received. Procedure seems no doubt technical to laymen, 
 and the procedure of French Courts may be capable of 
 simplification ; but it is not, as you imagine, the predatory 
 apparatus of a bandit profession, but a series of rules the 
 total effect of which is to equahze the chance of litigants 
 and to minimize the room for caprice. The rules of civil 
 procedure have for the most part been determined by the 
 greatest of French jurists, the Chancellor d'Aguesseau, in the 
 reign of Louis XV. It is our purpose to take his work as 
 the basis of our code. We notice, however, that in the 
 philanthropic zeal which distinguished the legal work of 
 men imbued by the elevated spirit of Montesquieu and 
 Beccaria, the lawyers of the Revolution introduced from 
 England the double jury and decided that a criminal trial 
 should be oral and public. After much hesitation, and 
 despite a great bulk of legal opinion, we have decided to 
 retain the petty jury, or jury of judgement, but in the 
 interests of executive authority we cannot permit the lax pro- 
 cedure with which the English appear to be content. The 
 genius of our ancient jurisconsults evolved a system which 
 cannot be improved on for the exploration and punishment 
 of crime. It was formulated in 1670, and to this system we
 
 42 BONAPARTISM II 
 
 make a partial return. We intend to suppress the grand 
 jury, to allow the deposition of witnesses to be taken secretly 
 in the absence of the prisoner, and to permit the juge d'in- 
 struction to decline to hear witnesses for the defence. But 
 while this preparatory inquiry, ancient, we admit, and 
 inquisitorial, is necessary for the full exploration of the case, 
 we concede some of your improvements at a later stage. 
 We allow the accused when the trial comes on to produce 
 witnesses, to be assisted by counsel, to be heard in his 
 own defence, to be tried in open court, and condemned or 
 acquitted by a jury. It is true that our juries will be nomi- 
 nated by the prefect and that the prefect may act as juge 
 dHnstruction, but we cannot permit the guilty to escape, 
 and our experience of its performances during the revolution 
 has taught us to view the jury with some distrust. Again, 
 you legislators of the Constituent Assembly, though wise 
 enough to retain capital punishment, erred on the side of 
 humanitarian indulgence. The Empire does not so err. 
 We believe in confiscation ; we restore the penalty of 
 branding. We inflict a death penalty not only for murder 
 and arson, but for theft and brigandage, corruption and 
 false witness, where these offences can be shown to imperil 
 life. We mutilate the parricide before sending him to the 
 death which he deserves. We punish state crimes due to 
 " false poUtical ideas, the spirit of party, or ill-understood 
 ambition ", by deportation for life. If we may be allowed to 
 express ourselves in general terms, we cannot subscribe to 
 the doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of man which has 
 been preached by some of the most eloquent of your philoso- 
 phers. On the contrary, we find man to be credulous and 
 often criminal, and if the truth be told, the eruption of new 
 and powerful passions during the revolution which your 
 wisdom has adorned has contributed not a little to debase 
 morality and to evoke the necessity of some strong counter- 
 vailing medicine.'
 
 Ill 
 
 To those who concentrate their attention upon the civil 
 work of Napoleon, upon the chaos which he found and 
 the order which he created, and above all upon the endu- 
 rance of his settlement of church and army, law and adminis- 
 tration, through a century of fevered change, it seems easy 
 to forget that the medal has a dark as well as a shining face. 
 The house of empire was built upon foundations some of 
 which were of granite, others of treacherous sand. Napoleon 
 appealed not only to the sound instincts of the French 
 people, the Latin love of order and symmetry, the passion 
 of the peasant for his httle plot of land, of the bourgeois 
 for his little investment in the funds, to the strong sense 
 of family discipline, to the immemorial sentiment of religion 
 and the fierce conviction of equality, but to other instincts also 
 of inferior value. No government has exploited so systemati- 
 cally the national thirst for military glory. None has 
 appealed more successfully to the material passions, or has 
 presumed with such hardihood and success upon that adminis- 
 trative timidity of the French, part inertia, part egotism, 
 which is content to surrender the conduct of affairs in 
 exchange for a quiet life. 
 
 The wars of Napoleon may be regarded from many 
 points of view. We may, if we choose, consider them as 
 wars of propaganda containing the precious seed of revolu- 
 tionary philosophy to scatter it broadcast through Europe. 
 Or again, we may consider them as wars of aggrandizement 
 deliberately undertaken to extend the boundaries of France 
 and to minister to the ambition of her ruler. It has been 
 held by a long series of inquirers that the true way to look 
 at the great drama of the Napoleonic period is to conceive 
 of it as centred round a duel between France and England ; 
 a duel in which England, representing the old idea, is the 
 implacable aggressor, France representing the new forces
 
 44 BONAPARTISM III 
 
 of democracy, the spirited and resourceful defender, who, 
 finding it impossible to strike her enemy at the heart, is 
 compelled to cut off the supplies to the stomach, an operation 
 which is found to involve the conquest of Europe. According 
 to this view, the conquests of Napoleon were not intentional — 
 not, as so often imagined, the results of a disordered ambition, 
 but an inevitable consequence of the fact that England 
 was an island, that she was at war with France, and would 
 never consent to a durable peace so long as France was in 
 possession of Belgium. Hence arises a great duel between the 
 sea and the land, between England, who claims to blockade 
 the continental coast, and France, who poses as the champion 
 of the liberty of the seas. By the inexorable logic of history, 
 Napoleon the Pacific is compelled to fight Austria and 
 Prussia, to oust the Bourbons from Naples, to annex the 
 states of the Church, to attempt the subjugation of the 
 Iberian Peninsula, to leave the bones of a noble army 
 bleaching in the Russian snows, because it is his duty as 
 the heir of the Revolution to defend the prize which the 
 armies of the Revolution had won. Others lay special stress 
 upon the power exerted over Napoleon's mind by historical 
 memories. They regard his policy as moulded, not perhaps 
 entirely, but to a greater extent than is often allowed for, 
 by the tradition of Julius Caesar and Diocletian, of Charle- 
 magne and Alexander. In his Egyptian and Sjrrian cam- 
 paigns, in his plans for the conquest of India and the partition 
 of Turkey, in the scheme sketched out once in conversation, 
 but perhaps never seriously intended, for marching from 
 Moscow to the Steppes, Napoleon is directly inspired by 
 Alexander ; just as in his assumption of the Iron Crown, in 
 his settlement of Germany, in his general conception of an 
 empire covering Western Europe and co-extensive with 
 Latin Christianity, he is concerned to exhibit himself as 
 the successor of Charlemagne. Thus his conquests and 
 their organization may be regarded as the ultimate triumph 
 of that classic spirit which acts sub-consciously on men of 
 the Latin race, and was so potent and decisive a factor in 
 the rhetorical education of the French Revolution. Or
 
 Ill BONAPARTISM 45 
 
 again, it may be shown how, intermingled with this classical 
 conception of empire, there was a family pohcy derived 
 from the deep instincts of the Corsican clan. Napoleon, 
 ' the miraculous child ', carves his way to fortune, but he 
 does not arrive alone. His mother, his brothers and sisters, 
 his wife's relations, his yncle, his sister's husband, crowd 
 forward to seize the best places. They become kings and 
 queens, princes and princesses, high dignitaries of state, 
 some entrusted with grave responsibiHties, hke Joseph, the 
 eldest brother, successively King of Naples and Spain ; 
 others kept merely for show, Uke the feeble Borghese, the 
 husband of the lovely PauUne, who holds court in Turin. 
 A family poUcy was no new idea in France. Shoots from 
 the Bourbon tree had been made to sprout in Spain, in 
 Naples, in Parma, after prolonged efforts of diplomacy and 
 notable passages of war. But here was a family union 
 covering a wider area of Europe, organized on a stricter 
 plan as part of a fighting coalition against England. An 
 obscure Corsican family had improved upon the old endemic 
 brigand tradition of their mountainous island. They had 
 boarded the state coach, turned out the drivers, and made 
 off with the valuables. In 1810, before Napoleon's second 
 marriage, brothers were ruling in Holland, Spain, and 
 Westphalia ; Northern Italy was under a step-son ; Southern 
 Italy under a brother-in-law ; Tuscany under a sister. 
 Baden, Wurtemburg, and Bavaria had been compelled to 
 marry into the house of parvenus. Then came the birth 
 of an heir, and with it preparations for a more closely -jointed 
 European state. Holland and the Hanseatic regions were 
 incorporated in France, while provision was made for the 
 viceroy of the Italian kingdom in a small German princi- 
 pality. A way was prepared for the union of Italy. It 
 was settled that the King of Rome was to rule the whole 
 peninsula, while Pope and Cardinals, the Archives of the 
 Vatican, and the directing machinery of the Roman Church, 
 were to be transferred to Paris. 
 
 No estimate does justice to Napoleon which fails to 
 recognize in him a disinterested passion for practical improve-
 
 46 BONAPARTISM III 
 
 ment. He was one of those rare men who assume that 
 everything they come across, from a government to a sauce- 
 pan, is probably constructed on wrong principles and capable 
 of amendment. One day Chaptal found his master in 
 high glee, for he had just effected a saving of thirty-five 
 thousand francs a year upon his household budget at 
 Malmaison. ' I asked him,' writes the famous chemist, ' on' 
 what objects he had effected his economies. " On coffee," 
 he replied. " They used to consume a hundred and fifty-five 
 cups of coffee a day ; every cup cost me two sous, which 
 came to fifty-six thousand five hundred and seventy-five 
 francs a year. I have suppressed the coffee and granted 
 my household seven francs and sixpence by way of com- 
 pensation. I shall spend twenty-one thousand a hundred 
 and sixty-five francs, and save thirty-five thousand," ' The 
 same incisive energy was shown in his plans for civil improve- 
 ment. When he visited a town, he would throw out plans 
 for avenues and parks, clarify the municipal finance, con- 
 solidate the charitable endowments, cross-question the 
 traders and manufacturers of the region, and leave the 
 whole place thrilling with new ideas and the bustle of change. 
 So, too, wherever new conquests were organized. Napoleon 
 took care to introduce the leading principles upon which 
 the French state had been refashioned. Feudalism was 
 abolished, equality was proclaimed, toleration and industrial 
 freedom took the place of monopoly in Church and trade. 
 After no great interval of time the Codes followed the 
 eagles, equalizing property, legalizing divorce and civil 
 marriage, and substituting for barbarous forms of criminal 
 procedure the open trial and the jury. Skilled Frenchmen, 
 trained in the finest school of administration which Europe 
 has known, taught the secret of orderly account-keeping, 
 enlightened finance, and the lucid drafting of laws. Hun- 
 dreds of intelligent men who had lived under slow and 
 secretive despotisms now for the first time understood 
 the beauty of methodical design in government. Wherever 
 a French state was founded the old social barriers dis- 
 appeared. ' Take care,' wrote Napoleon to his youngest
 
 in BONAPARTISM 47 
 
 brother, Jerome, ' to compose the majority of your Council 
 of commoners. See to it that the third estate has most of 
 the government posts. ... This will go to the heart of 
 Grermany, and perhaps annoy the other class. Do not mind 
 that. The declared principle is to choose talents wherever 
 they can be found. ' To many a German and Italian Napoleon 
 seemed to be the sword of the modern idea. Goethe and 
 Hegel, Von MiiUer the historian of Switzerland, Pasolini, 
 one of the future Hberators of Italy, viewed him as a great 
 world spirit whose mission it was to destroy that which 
 was old and evil, and to establish that which was new and 
 good. ' Be a constitutional king,' wrote Napoleon to the 
 new sovereign of Westphalia, ' it is necessary that your 
 subjects should enjoy a degree of liberty, equality, and 
 well-being unknown to the people of Germany. This 
 will be a more powerful barrier against Prussia than 
 the Elbe, or fortresses, or French protection. What 
 people would wish to revert to Prussian despotism when 
 it has once tasted the benefits of a wise and liberal govern- 
 ment ? ' 
 
 A liberal government ? In what sense can the term 
 ' hberal ' be applied to these parasitic governments of the 
 Grand Empire ? Among the many wise sayings of Napoleon 
 there is one so wise that if it had guided his dealings with 
 ahen states as it inspired his policy within the borders of 
 France, there might have been no cataclysm. It is this : 
 ' The strength of a people depends upon its history ', which 
 means that you cannot rule a nation unless you adjust your 
 political contrivances to suit the peculiar temperament 
 which has been fashioned by historic forces. In his recon- 
 struction of France Napoleon built upon the permanent 
 elements of the national psychology. He gave France what 
 she wanted, and his work has outlasted three Revolutions. 
 The felicitous political compromise which he devised for 
 Switzerland was another case of a political plan carefully 
 adjusted to somewhat peculiar conditions. The problem 
 was to reconcile the conflicting ideals of a democratic unitary 
 state on the one hand, and jealously guarded cantonal
 
 48 BONAPARTISM III 
 
 liberties on the other ; and the Act of Mediation solved it 
 to the satisfaction of the Swiss. In Poland, again, a con- 
 stitution was framed upon lines suggested by circumstances 
 in the national history. But elsewhere there was little 
 pretence of deference to the consecrated force of historical 
 association. The constitutions given to the dependencies 
 of the Empire are variations on one despotic archetype. 
 They are devised not to direct but to resist the spontaneous 
 tide of popular opinion. Everywhere there is the same 
 model despotism, with its nominated council of state serving 
 as the laboratory of legislation and government, its legis- 
 lature deprived of initiative, deliberating in secret and in 
 silence, and liable to reproof or suspension on the slightest 
 sign of animation or volition. Freedom of election "had 
 been tried in France during the Revolution, and without 
 success. How could it be expected that people so far 
 inferior to the French as were the Italians, the Germans, 
 and the Spaniards, should avail themselves wisely of this 
 dangerous privilege ? What sane man would entrust a vote 
 to the priest-ridden peasantry of the Lombard plain, to 
 the idle Lazzaroni of Naples, or to those valorous, debased 
 Hessians whose matted hair and harsh features sent a shudder 
 down the spine of the French traveller ? Experience had 
 already shown what even Robespierre had surmised, that 
 the peoples of Europe were not burning to cast off their 
 chains, and the lessons of experience were improved by 
 the resources of egotism. ' I know more,' observed Napoleon, 
 * in my little finger than is known by all the heads in Italy 
 put together ' — a gratifying conviction for which a con- 
 venient and ingenious embodiment was devised at the 
 Consul ta of Lyons in 1802. Here it was arranged that the 
 voting power of the new Italian republic should be distri- 
 buted among three bodies, a college of proprietors, a college 
 of savants, and a college of merchants and manufacturers. 
 The members of these bodies were to be elected for life, to 
 meet at least once in two years for a period not exceeding 
 fifteen days, to submit to a small body of twenty-one persons 
 styled the Censura a list of candidates for the legislature
 
 m BONAPARTISM 49 
 
 and the judicial bench, from which the Censura was to 
 make the final selection. It was once a doctrine professed 
 by Burke that all great public collections of men possess 
 a marked love of virtue and an abhorrence of vice. No 
 thesis could be more antipathetic to the views of Napoleon, 
 or to the spirit embodied in the constitution which he 
 devised for Northern Italy. It was his object not to provoke 
 but to avert * great public collections of men '. The college 
 of Possidenti was to meet at Milan, the College of Dotti at 
 Bologna, the College of Commercianti at Brescia, while the 
 grand electoral tribunal was to give a last solemn shake to 
 the electoral sieve at Cremona. Since the First Consul took 
 the precaution to nominate the legislature and never per- 
 mitted a fresh election, that shake caused no tremor in the 
 body politic. The Italian legislature was equally nugatory. 
 One August day when Napoleon was enjoying the salt 
 breezes of Boulogne, a dispatch came from Milan announcing 
 that a chamber of Italian nominees had been protesting 
 against certain cardinal items in the imperial programme, 
 notably against the large sums of money allocated for 
 the support of French troops. * My cousin,' replied the 
 Emperor to Prince Eugene, ' you will have received a decree 
 in which I have adjourned the legislative body. When 
 these legislators have a king to themselves, he may be 
 amused at these games of prisoner's base, but as I have 
 no time, and they are all passions and faction, I shall not 
 summon them again.' 
 
 So much, then, for the political liberty of the Italian. 
 The guarantees for civil hberty were equally precarious. 
 At Comalba, in the department of Serio, there was a certain 
 Madellena Vastali, who, like the nun of Kent, passed as a 
 saint and secured a considerable following among credulous 
 and reactionary neighbours. She had ecstasies and visions, 
 and professed to have received the stigmata. A parish 
 priest acknowledged her claims and assisted in spreading 
 her influence, proclaiming that a waxen image of the 
 Virgin had made an inclination of respect towards the 
 vessel of the Divine purpose. A government whose clerical
 
 60 BONAPARTISM III 
 
 policy was viewed with bitter suspicion in Rome did not 
 permit miracles to occur with impunity. Prophetess and 
 priest were arrested by the Director of Police, cast into 
 a dungeon in Bergamo, where they might have time to 
 reflect upon the relation between miracles and the penal 
 code. Then the Viceroy was informed of the occurrence and 
 asked for directions. Eugene was a mild, punctual, obedient 
 servant, who knew something of his master's mind. He 
 directed that the prophetess should be shut up for six 
 months in a house of correction, sentenced the priest to 
 a similar term of imprisonment, and forthwith deprived 
 him of his living. There was neither formal inquiry nor 
 public trial. There was no witness heard in the defence, 
 nor any consultation held , save with the Minister of Public 
 Worship and the Director of Police. 
 
 The working of Parliamentary government implies the 
 responsibility of ministers to a popularly elected chamber, 
 freedom of speech, and adequate guarantees for personal 
 liberty. No one of these conditions was reaUzed in any of 
 the numerous states of the French Empire. Since the first 
 few decades of the counter-reformation the free movement 
 of human curiosity and human intelUgence has never been 
 so closely restrained over so large a surface of Europe. 
 The lectures of university professors, the newspapers and 
 books, the slightest pamphlet, the heaviest tome, were sub- 
 jected to a vigilant censorship. Wherever the eagles flew, 
 there followed a swarm of poUce spies opening letters, 
 defaming reputations, spoiling careers, robbing private life 
 of its security, and tainting the stream of public activity. 
 That an atmosphere of apprehension might be created 
 among the Germans, a bookseller was court-martialled and 
 put to death in Nuremburg for selling a pamphlet which 
 denounced the conduct of the French soldiers in Bavaria. 
 It was an unlawful act to criticize the Emperor, to mahgn 
 the French, to pass the faintest animadversion on the 
 conscription, the blockade, or the taxes. As free reporting 
 was dangerous, the Government provided its own bilingual 
 organs, full of dull, innocuous pabulum, some laws and
 
 in BONAPARTISM 51 
 
 decrees, the account of a state reception or a treatise on 
 Forestry, tricked out with items of Paris inteUigence and 
 the last imperial bulletins from the seat of war. The 
 political news was for the most part calculated to mislead, 
 for the Emperor who cheated at cards had no scruple in 
 suppressing or falsifying facts. On a scale unparalleled in 
 history he erected mendacity into an art of empire. 
 
 Yet sterihzing as censorship must necessarily be, these 
 French governments provided a real form of education to the 
 Germans and ItaHans who were caught up in the admini- 
 stration of pubhc affairs. If the Empire demanded political 
 servihty, it shattered the obdurate crust of habit and sub- 
 stituted wide ideals of efficient combination for narrow, 
 slovenly, lethargic provincialism. ' You have,' said Napoleon 
 in a valedictory address to the Italians at Lyons, ' nothing 
 but special laws, henceforward you must have general laws. 
 Your people has only local habits, it is necessary that it 
 should take on national habits. Lastly, you have no army. 
 The powers which may become your enemies have strong 
 armies ; but you have what can produce strong armies, 
 a numerous population, a fertile country, and the example 
 of the first people in Europe.' In these penetrating and 
 profound remarks. Napoleon diagnosed the remedy and 
 prescribed the medicine. His net was widely and cunningly 
 spread. Stendhal reports in 1818, that if you met an intelli- 
 gent elderly man in the streets of Milan, it was safe to 
 assume that he had served in the French administration. 
 
 It was the peculiarity of the Napoleonic Empire that it 
 was built up with a view to conquest, that the ring of 
 dependent states were the satellites of Mars. We have 
 only to examine the conditions under which they worked 
 to assure ourselves that it is not their interest which is 
 consulted, but the interest of the Master of the Legions. 
 The military contributions with which they were burdened 
 rendered it impossible to carry out any educational schemes 
 on a large scale. Half the domain from which the budget 
 of the dispossessed princes was nourished was appropriated 
 to the French Emperor and allotted to French generals, 
 
 D 2
 
 62 BONAPARTISM III 
 
 French favourites, or members of the French Civil Service. 
 The new state was subjected to the conscription, and com- 
 pelled to furnish a quota of troops often quite out of pro- 
 portion to its population, to feed the wars of the Empire. 
 In the wake of the conscription came a penal code imposing 
 severe and elaborate penalties upon deserters and recalci- 
 trant conscripts, and full of ingenious thumbscrews for 
 extorting the required tribute of human flesh. The con- 
 tinental blockade was another attendant circumstance of 
 French government little calculated to commend it to the 
 favour of the commercial and manufacturing classes. Add 
 to this the free quartering of French soldiery, the manifold 
 extortions of generals and officers, the removal of objects 
 of art and value from local museums to Paris, the heavy 
 duties imposed on German and Italian wares at the French 
 frontier, and it will readily be seen that administrative 
 efficiency was purchased at a high price. The literature 
 of invective which accumulated round the head of Malchus, 
 the capable financier who procured resources for the govern- 
 ment of Westphalia, the popular fury which caused the 
 death of Prina in Milan, are evidence of the hatred which 
 Napoleonic finance succeeded in inspiring. The downfall 
 of the Empire was acclaimed all over Holland, Germany, 
 and Belgium as a welcome and necessary relief from a 
 tyranny too hard to be borne. 
 
 It may, however, be argued that these were merely 
 temporary hardships, the result of the accident of war, 
 rather than an essential ingredient in the Napoleonic system. 
 But it is difficult to believe that Napoleon had any per- 
 manent plan for the settlement of Europe. There was 
 never so restless a diplomatist. He would change the 
 boundaries of states and open up new horizons from month 
 to month, like a child who amuses itself with bricks, now 
 making a castle, now a temple, now a farm-house, and 
 now a wall. This manipulation of human souls and terri- 
 tories was of course no new feature in European politics. 
 There had been the partition of Poland, then schemes for 
 the partition of Bavaria, and finally in 1803 a great
 
 Ill BONAPARTISM 53 
 
 readjustment of German territories carried out in Paris as 
 a consequence of the conquest of the Rhine frontier by 
 France. But never did territorial changes follow one 
 another with such bewildering rapidity, or from motives so 
 difficult to descry, as during the last years of the Empire. 
 The sense that everything was provisional, that nothing 
 was intended to last, entered as a paralysing force into the 
 calculations even of Napoleon's best subordinates. 
 
 It may be asked again whether the Napoleonic con- 
 quests were inspired by the idea of nationality. That the 
 growth of nationalities was one of the results of Napoleon's 
 work is obvious to any student of modern history. In 
 Germany, for instance, Napoleon carried out a great and 
 salutary simphfication of political geography. In 1803 the 
 number of German principalities was reduced from 250 to 
 39 and a Protestant majority secured in the diet. Two 
 years later Bavaria and Wurtemburg received important 
 additions of territory, and then in 1806 the Holy Roman 
 Empire was abolished and a confederation formed in its 
 place under the protectorship of France. The elimination 
 of Austria from the German system was an essential step 
 towards the union of Germany, and though it is true that 
 the skill of Metternich procured for Austria a dominant 
 influence in the German confederation after the fall of 
 Napoleon, the spell of a thousand years had been broken, 
 and the formation of a united Germany without the Habs- 
 burgs became one of the permanent political ideas in the 
 German mind. And apart from the direct influence which 
 was thus exerted, there was the negative influence of the 
 reaction. The war of liberation was an act of the whole 
 German people, an event entirely different in character 
 from the wars which had been waged by German sovereigns 
 for their own dynastic interest in the eighteenth century. 
 From every quarter, from poets and historians, from philo- 
 sophers and men of action, came the cry that the German 
 nation must be liberated from the Latin yoke. Even in 
 the realm of law, where the French influence had been 
 most beneficial, there was a pronounced reaction against
 
 54 BONAPARTISM III 
 
 a Code which was declared to be alien to the Teutonic 
 genius and to the historic traditions of the race. But at 
 the same time some Germans wisely apprehended the lesson 
 of Bonapartism. ' Democratic principles in a monarchical 
 government seems to me,' wrote the Prussian statesman 
 Hardenburg, ' to be the formula appropriate to the spirit 
 of the times.' 
 
 It is one of the ironies of history that Napoleon I pre- 
 pared the way for Bismarck, that the French made Germany, 
 as the English made France, and as the Spanish kingdoms 
 were the outcome of the long crusade against the Moors, 
 It is, however, a wild paradox to assert that Napoleon had 
 any intention of educating a German nation. The con- 
 federation of the Rhine was an old device of French diplo- 
 macy, carried out with resources far in excess of those which 
 Mazarin had been able to command, but essentially identical 
 in aim with the Rhenish federation of the seventeenth 
 century. Its object was to create in Germany a clientele 
 of princes whose armies and treasuries would be at the 
 disposal of the French Emperor. That these states should 
 develop an independent or liberal life was the last thing 
 which Napoleon intended. On the contrary, the more 
 despotic the power of the prince the more regularly could 
 the Emperor rely upon a punctual remittance of conscripts. 
 The subject kings were accordingly encouraged to dispense 
 with constitutional- machinery, and so to recompense them- 
 selves for their subservience in foreign policy by autocracy 
 at home. ' Monsieur L'Abbe,' said Napoleon to Dalberg, 
 the subservient prince-primate, ' I will tell you a secret. 
 The small people in Germany wish to be protected against 
 the big people ; the big people wish to govern according 
 to their fancy. Now as I only want men and money from 
 the Confederation, and as it is the big people and not the 
 small people who can supply me with these two requisites, 
 I leave the big people in peace, and the others must get 
 on as best they can.' II faut depayser VAllemagne was 
 the motto of the policy. The kingdom of Prussia was 
 marked out for special humiliation, mutilated of its West-
 
 Ill BONAPARTISM 55 
 
 phalian and Polish provinces, condemned to pay a crushing 
 war indemnity and to support the burden of a French 
 army of occupation. It was one of Napoleon's constant 
 regrets that he had been too lenient to the Power which 
 wiped out the memory of Jena on the field of Waterloo. 
 
 Italy was the land of Napoleon's ancestors, and Italian 
 was the language which came most readily to his lips. 
 Under his rule, for the first time since the Lombard inva- 
 sions, the whole Italian Peninsula was governed on a single 
 plan. From the Alps to the Straits of Messina lawyers were 
 administering the French codes, engineers were building 
 roads and bridges, financial agents were making cadastral 
 surveys, administrators were applying the wealth of the 
 monasteries to secular uses, lighting towns, and enforcing 
 the conscription. The three great obstacles to Italian unity 
 — the foreign dynasties, the Papacy, the spirit of locality — 
 were for the moment broken in the great movement of 
 the French Empire. Marengo had sealed the fate of 
 Austria in Lombardy, Austerlitz had cleared the Habsburgs 
 out of Venice, a swift and easy campaign drove the Bour- 
 bons from Naples. In 1809 the states of the Church were 
 carved into departments and incorporated in the French 
 Empire. Here, then, in the army, in the codes, in the 
 common system of administration, the foundations of a 
 modern Italy were laid. And here the memory of Napoleon 
 was not easily forgotten. Italians knew once more that 
 the race of Michael Angelo had not exhausted its power 
 of breeding prodigious men. They took on fresh courage, 
 conceived new hopes, and were schooled to new virtues. 
 The ablest sons of Italy entered the Civil Service, and 
 threw themselves with zest into all the thrilling problems 
 of a modern administration. The armies of the Empire 
 opened out careers of manly adventure to men whose idle- 
 ness had been spiced with verses, gossip, and flirtation. 
 Chateaubriand disliked Napoleon, but this is what he says 
 of the French work in Naples : ' These new monarchies of 
 a mihtary dynasty brought life into a country which had 
 been distinguished by the dying languor of an old race.'
 
 56 BONAPARTISM III 
 
 And again : ' We brought to Rome the germ of administra- 
 tion. Napoleon is great because he restored, enlightened, 
 and administered Italy in a superior way,' It should be 
 remembered that Italy was spared some of the worst afflic- 
 tions of the great war. It was not the main road to Austria 
 or Russia, and the kingdom of Naples, owing to its geo- 
 graphical position, was immune from the military visitation 
 which brought such financial disaster to the kingdom of 
 Westphalia. With true insight into Italian character. 
 Napoleon took care that some compensation should be 
 afforded for the disappearance of the Princes. He sent 
 Prince Borghese to hold court at Turin, while Eugene 
 represented the Empire in Milan, Elise in Florence, and 
 Murat in Naples. It was a design that the heir to the 
 Empire should reside in Rome. But a closer study of 
 Napoleon's correspondence reveals the fact that Italy was 
 not an end but a means. The possession of this convenient 
 peninsula opens out the route to Vienna, Constantinople, 
 and Cairo. The successive acquisitions of territory were 
 determined not by a consideration of the interests of the 
 Italians, but by a strict calculus of their utility to the 
 diplomatic and military scheme of the Master of France. 
 The Italian Republic was formed after Marengo to give 
 Napoleon the control of the Valley of the Po and to bring 
 France to Ancona, the convenient port for the Dalmatian 
 coast. The annexation of the Papal States did not present 
 itself as the consequence of any lofty view as to the in- 
 compatibility of spiritual functions and temporal govern- 
 ment, though this is urged more than once in the Imperial 
 Correspondence. Rather it was due to the fact that every 
 sovereign of Italy must join the continental blockade or 
 fall. When twelve duchies were created out of the Venetian 
 territory to serve as an endowment for French generals, 
 the Italians felt aggrieved and their complaints were 
 forwarded to Paris. What did Napoleon reply ? ' The 
 duchies ought to be the exclusive recompense of my soldiers. 
 Doubtless I have treated Venice as a conquered country, but 
 how have I obtained Venice except by conquest? You must
 
 Ill BONAPARTISM 57 
 
 not depart too far from this idea. When the fruits of victory 
 have been realized, I shall behave as a good sovereign if they 
 behave as good subjects. I forbid you ever to encourage 
 a hope that an Italian or a Venetian may be promoted to 
 any of the duchies.' Nor was it from a sympathy with 
 the principle of nationality that Napoleon encouraged the 
 aspirations of the Poles. ' I wish in Poland,' he said to 
 Narbonne, 'acampandnot aforum. . . . The whole problem 
 consists in exciting the national fibre of the Poles without 
 awakening the hberal fibre.' In other words, the Polish 
 chivalry must be launched against Russia, and yet no 
 encouragement must be given to that ancient spirit of 
 freedom and anarchy which was the characteristic of the 
 old Polish Constitution. 
 
 The Grand Empire was in fact a coalition against England, 
 rather than a contrivance designed for the benefit of the 
 peoples who were swept into it. The Belgians, an unwar- 
 like, ultramontane population of manufacturers and peasants, 
 who during the early period of the Consulate had enjoyed 
 the benefits bestowed by a wise and equable administra- 
 tion, were alienated by the conscription, by the blockade, 
 and above all by the treatment which the French govern- 
 ment meted out to the Pope. They had revolted against 
 the centralizing policy of Joseph II, but here was a system 
 of centralization stricter than the Austrian, and involving 
 among its incidents injury to the Catholic conscience and 
 the ruin of Antwerp. For the Dutch, whose life-blood was 
 free trade, the results of the continental system were even 
 more distressing, and bitter memories were left of the 
 Napoleonic Administration. This proud, obstinate, and 
 simple race had, until the storm of the French Revolution 
 burst upon it, conserved the aristocratic federalism of its 
 great age. It had ceased to be a home of scholars or a 
 laboratory of thought, its commerce had dwindled, and its 
 colonies were torn from it during the war. In no quarter 
 were national interests more deliberately sacrificed to the 
 military needs of the Empire. Louis, the Emperor's brother, 
 who was charged with the government of the country in 1806,
 
 58 BONAPARTISM III 
 
 conceived it to be his primary duty to forward the interests 
 of his Dutch subjects. He was not a man of robust health 
 or tenacious will, he had little personal charm, and he never 
 learnt to pronounce the Dutch language, but he was con- 
 scientious, well-meaning, and far above the general level 
 of ability. If he had been left to himseK he would have 
 carried out great improvements in HoUand, and his dynasty 
 would have struck root. But he was reminded that he 
 was a French prince above all things, and that his policy 
 was subject to the general convenience of the Empire. 
 ' Holland in reahty is only a part of France. We may 
 define the country by saying that it is the alluvion of the 
 Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt — that is to say of the 
 great arteries of the Empire, The nulhty of its customs, 
 the disposition of its agents, and the spirit of its inhabitants, 
 which tends always to a fraudulent commerce with England 
 — all this imposes on us the duty of interdicting to it the 
 commerce of the Rhine and the Weser.' A series of brutal 
 reproofs conceived in this spirit drove Louis from the 
 throne which he could no longer occupy with self-respect, 
 and in 1810 Holland was incorporated in the Empire. 
 
 * You know history,' said Napoleon to Villemain ; ' are you 
 not struck with the resemblances between my government 
 and that of Diocletian — its close far-reaching network, these 
 all-pervading imperial eyes, the omnipotence of the civil 
 authority in a military empire ? ' The French empire was 
 no doubt conceived upon the Roman model, and followed 
 the main lines of the Roman political geometry. Europe 
 again witnessed a vast area Submitted to a common law, 
 administered by a great centrahzed bureaucracy, and 
 obedient to the will of a single master. Poles and Illyrians, 
 Dutchmen and Germans, Italians and Belgians, worked 
 under the common yoke. It was part of the settled policy 
 to accelerate a fusion of the heterogeneous races. A con- 
 tingent of skilled lUyrian seamen were ordered to Toulon, 
 Dutch officers were stationed in France, while Frenchmen 
 took over their commands in Holland. Whenever a new 
 country was annexed, lists would be prepared of natives
 
 Ill BONAPARTISM 59 
 
 suitable for the Senate, or the Legislature, or the Council of 
 State and its satellite bodies. * London,' said Napoleon, 
 * is the corner of the world, Paris is the centre.' Representa- 
 tives from Piedmont, Tuscany, and Rome, from Belgium, 
 Holland, and the Hanseatic departments in Germany, might 
 be seen in the capital assisting in the task of imperial 
 administration. The spread of the French language was 
 actively encouraged, not only by means of the Press and the 
 schools, but also by traveUing companies of comedians. 
 ItaHan and German mothers who were ambitious for their 
 sons sent them to France to learn the law and the language 
 of the conqueror. German professors began to dissert 
 upon the codes, the printing presses of Italy began to turn 
 out works upon the art of war, which had again become 
 interesting. Only in Spain was there entire insensibility 
 to the civiHzation of the Empire and a complete abhorrence 
 of French rule. 
 
 The foundations of Empire were unsound. Each acquisi- 
 tion of territory was a move in the game of conquest, each 
 new dependency a fresh plate in the armour of a warlike 
 Empire. Thus it was the principal mission of Holland to 
 contribute seamen and naval arsenals; of Venice, endow- 
 ments for French marshals ; of all and every state, forts and 
 tribute and conscripts. Of such an empire as this despotism 
 was the soul and delation the shadow. Political interference 
 thwarted the administration of justice, and abased the 
 honour of the law. A mayor of Antwerp, an elderly and 
 respected man, was brought before the assize court of Brussels 
 on a charge of embezzlement. The accuser was the French 
 commissioner of police, and the motive of the charge a private 
 grudge arising from a woman's quarrel. After a long trial, 
 and in spite of the ingenuity of an unscrupulous prosecution, 
 the mayor was honourably acquitted, amid the plaudits of 
 his fellow-citizens. But the illuminations of Antwerp were 
 premature, and the lovers of justice were to learn that 
 though the good sense of a Belgian jury might foil the malevo- 
 lence of a French police officer, it was of no account in the 
 eyes of the Master of Europe. Napoleon, campaigning in
 
 60 BONAPARTISM III 
 
 Germany, heard of the occurrence, viewed it as a French 
 disaster, and ordered the old man to be tried a second time 
 before a different court and in another region. The prefect 
 of the department protested and resigned ; the Senate of 
 France murmured and obeyed. Under the authority of 
 a senatus-consult the innocent man was haled off to a prison 
 in Douai, and there expired, his end hastened by shame, 
 maltreatment, indignation, and surprise, before the servility 
 of the local jury could be put to the proof. 
 
 Where the pocket of the administration was touched, the 
 chances of a litigant were desperate. A government creditor 
 might as well expect to recover the whole of his debt from 
 the imperial administration, as a deserter from the colours 
 to receive the Legion of Honour from one of Davout's 
 military tribunals. Great interests were systematically 
 neglected and misunderstood, the interest of commerce on 
 the one hand, of religion on the other. ' Commerce dries 
 up the soul, the merchant has neither faith nor country ' ; 
 and to this distrust of commerce as a source of patriotic 
 indifference or a bond of international amity Napoleon 
 added an ignorance of its proper function and anatomy. 
 That trade routes could be altered at will and the current 
 of economic demand forcibly diverted from one channel to 
 another, was part of the imperial philosophy which regarded 
 commercial exchange as something sterile and light in the 
 balance when compared with the solid interests of the farm 
 and the factory. The magnet of Empire could entice the 
 wealth of the East to Trieste ; tariff walls could shut the 
 Rhine provinces from Germany, build up the manufacturing 
 power of the mainland, and liberate Europe from its depen- 
 dence on colonial supplies. In the sphere of religion the 
 old doctrine of Gallicanism was revived, as if a national 
 principle could be adapted to a cosmopolitan Empire and 
 a mutinous Church. 
 
 The permanence of the Napoleonic fabric depended on 
 the degree to which the policy of the Emperor could be 
 adjusted to the real interests of France. But, as Talleyrand 
 saw in 1808, the policy of Napoleon was becoming increasingly
 
 Ill BONAPARTISM 61 
 
 dissociated from the opinion and the tradition of France. 
 The element of hyperbole and extravagance, the scheme of 
 Oriental conquest sheathed in the treaty of Tilsit, the rash 
 and fatal plunge into Spain, opened the eyes of thinking 
 men to the real character of Napoleon's conduct of affairs. 
 And meanwhile, both in the army and in the administration, 
 the momentum and the loyalty were being slowly impaired. 
 It has been remarked by Chaptal how, as the despotic habit 
 grew upon him. Napoleon became increasingly impatient of 
 able and independent men. The spirit of free and vigorous 
 criticism which had marked the early debates in the Council 
 of State was silenced under the stiff etiquette of the Empire. 
 Good wholesome advice was systematically neglected ; the 
 conduct of foreign affairs passed from Talleyrand to Cham- 
 pagny, and the tjrpical servant of the later imperial time is 
 Maret, the Duke of Bassano, a fluent and obedient scribe. 
 As the spirit of servility grew, the administration became 
 filled up with men of royalist antecedents and leanings, 
 unaffected by the momentum of the Empire and unconcerned 
 at its fall. The spirit of moderation and good sense which 
 had been overcome by the brilliant romance of the early 
 victories revolted against the extravagance which marked 
 the later designs. If the wish of France could have been 
 translated into words, it would have been for a continuation 
 of the Empire without the restless egotism of Napoleon. And 
 yet, when the Empire fell, the imagination of the world was 
 touched by the sudden catastrophe of so much greatness. 
 Here, in the field of action, were events more wonderful than 
 the Arabian Nights, the matter for a thousand poems, 
 histories, and romances. Aliens felt the spell as well as 
 natives ; those whose eyes had once beheld the conqueror 
 in his famous little three-cornered hat, treasured the vision 
 of him as the chief prize of memory. A German Jew, a 
 native of the Grand Duchy of Berg, saw the Emperor once in 
 1811 as he rode into Diisseldorf, and long afterwards, having 
 risen to fame for his bitter and passionate lyrics, thus 
 described the great experience of his boyhood : * It was in 
 that very avenue of the court garden at Diisseldorf. As
 
 62 BONAPARTISM III 
 
 I pressed through the gaping crowd, thinking of the doughty 
 deeds and battles which Monsieur Le Grand had drummed 
 to me, my heart beat the "general march" — yet at the 
 same time I thought of the police regulation, that no one 
 should dare ride through the avenue under penalty of a fine 
 of five thalers. And the Emperor with his retinue rode 
 directly through the avenue. The trembling leaves bowed 
 towards him as he advanced, the sunbeams quivered, 
 frightened, yet curious, through the green leaves, and in the 
 blue heaven above there swam visibly a golden star. The 
 Emperor wore his invisible-green uniform and the little 
 world-renowned hat. He rode a white steed, which stepped 
 with such calm pride, so confidently, so nobly — had I then 
 been Crown Prince of Prussia I would have envied that 
 steed. Carelessly, almost lazily, sat the Emperor, holding 
 his rein with one hand, and with the other good-naturedly 
 patting the horse's neck. It was a sunny, marble hand, 
 a mighty hand — one of those two hands which bound fast 
 the many-headed monster of anarchy, and ordered the war 
 of races — and it good-naturedly patted the horse's neck. 
 Even the face had that hue which we find in the marble of 
 Greek and Roman busts ; the traits were as nobly cut as in 
 the antique, and on that face was written, " Thou shalt have 
 no Gods before me ". A smile, which warmed and soothed 
 every heart, flitted over the lips — and yet all knew that those 
 Hps needed but to whistle — et la Prusse ri'existait plus ; 
 those lips needed but to whistle — and the entire clergy would 
 have stopped their ringing and singing ; those lips needed but 
 to whistle — and the entire Holy Roman Empire would have 
 danced. And those lips smiled and the eye smiled too. It 
 was an eye clear as heaven ; it could read the hearts of men, 
 it saw at a glance all the things of this world, while we others 
 see them only one by one and by their coloured shadows. 
 The brow was not so clear, the phantoms of future battles 
 were nestling there ; there was a quiver which swept over 
 that brow, and those were the creative thoughts, the great 
 seven-mile-boot thoughts, wherewith the spirit of the 
 Emperor strode invisibly over the world — and I beheve that
 
 Ill BONAPARTISM 63 
 
 every one of those thoughts would have given to a German 
 author full material wherewith to write, all the days of his 
 life. 
 
 * The Emperor rode quietly straight through the avenue. 
 No policeman opposed him ; proudly, on snorting horses 
 and laden with gold and jewels, rode his retinue ; the drums 
 were beating, the trumpets were sounding ; close to me the 
 wild Aloysius was muttering his general's name ; not far 
 away the drunken Gumpertz was grumbling, and the people 
 shouted with a thousand voices, " Long live the Emperor ! " ' ^ 
 
 * Heine ReisebUder, tr. C. G. Leland.
 
 IV 
 
 The Bourbon dynasty who were recalled to France in 
 1814 owed this sudden favour of fortune to no merit of their 
 own. Their party was almost extinct, their persons dim 
 and forgotten, and as the Tsar of Russia marched through 
 the eastern provinces of France he discovered no trace of 
 loyalty to the white flag. Twenty-five years crowded with 
 brilliant events and far-reaching changes had passed since 
 Louis, Count of Provence, and his brother D'Artois had fled 
 across the frontier to escape the furies of the Revolution ; and 
 in the new and vivid hfe of the Empire all that concerned 
 the old world of the monarchy had seemed archaic, irrelevant, 
 and trifling. But France was weary of battle, and unwilling 
 to embark upon an unknown ocean of political experiment. 
 It was no hour for a constituent assembly, with Russians and 
 Austrians encamped in Paris, and so long as Napoleon was 
 alive and near at hand an imperial regency failed to offer 
 gurantees of stability and peace. It was necessary, as 
 Talleyrand observed, that the new regime should be founded 
 on a principle, and the Bourbons relied on the principle of 
 legitimacy. Their restoration under adequate conditions 
 would be a solemn pledge given to Europe that France was 
 tired of adventure and would keep the peace. It was hoped 
 that in a constitutional charter that troubled nation would 
 at length be composed to rest. 
 
 The psychological current in European literature was 
 setting strongly towards romance. The Middle Ages, which 
 Voltaire could never understand because their superstition 
 revolted his clear intelligence, began to exercise a fascination 
 now that the practical evils of mediaevalism were satisfac- 
 torily abolished. Chateaubriand, the leader of the French 
 Romantic Movement, portrayed in brilliant colours the 
 aesthetic charms of the Christian cult, and startled the 
 intelligence of well-bred ladies and gentlemen by the observa-
 
 IV BONAPARTISM 65 
 
 tion that the heroes and heroines of Racine were the products 
 of Christian sentiment. The splendours of Church architec- 
 ture, the beauty of Church music, the ordered charm of 
 Christian ritual, and the simple majesty of Christian litera- 
 ture, such was the theme of his eloquent essay, so con- 
 temptible to the profound apologist, but so effective with a 
 generation of romantic and intelligent infidels. The same 
 pen addressed itself to commending the exiled dynasty which 
 was now restored to France by foreign bayonets. To the 
 romance of the triumphant Empire the greatest living artist 
 in the French language opposed the pathos of exile, a romance 
 of bread eaten in sorrow by men who loved France and of 
 whose devotion France has proved herself unworthy. 
 
 Sentiment failed to cluster round the fabric of the new 
 dynasty. Louis XVIII was old, corpulent, and gouty, 
 incapable of bestriding a horse, and destitute of any power 
 of appeal to the soul of his people. His brother and heir, 
 the Count of Artois, was a narrow-minded bigot, whose 
 sinister influence gave matter for bitter suspicions. The 
 dynasty had been put upon the French throne by foreign 
 armies. Its success was connected with contracted frontiers 
 and national humiliation, and its conduct gave good ground 
 for thinking that it viewed the charter with dislike and would 
 at some near date restore the Emigres to their land and the 
 Church to its old position of endowed and intolerant pre- 
 dominance. With astonishing speed discontent spread 
 through the country. In every village half-pay officers 
 might be found, grumbling at the reduction of a great army 
 to a peace establishment and at the restoration of the exiles 
 to their former military rank. Was it true that these 
 inglorious men who cheapened the Legion of Honour, who 
 closed the shops on Sunday, were intending to bring back 
 the old regime, to steal the land from the peasant, and to 
 restore the noble and the priest ? A violent current of 
 suspicion ran through France that such indeed was their 
 design. 
 
 From his exile in Elba Napoleon had taken note of the 
 new features on the horizon, of the recrudescence of the
 
 66 BONAPARTISM IV 
 
 revolutionary hatred of priest and noble among the peas- 
 antry, of the chagrin of the old soldiers, of the power of 
 the Liberal opposition in Paris ; and recognizing the altered 
 mood of France, he determined to accommodate himself 
 to it. In his miraculous progress from Frejus to Paris he 
 spoke everywhere as the Tribune of the people, as the 
 champion of the revolution settlement, as a professor of 
 Liberalism and peace. At Lyons he dissolved the Chamber 
 of Peers, banished the emigres, proscribed the royal flag 
 and the white cockade. ' I come to deliver France from 
 the emigrants. I am sprung from the Revolution. I am 
 come to save the people from the slavery into which the 
 priests and the nobles would plunge them. Let them 
 beware, or I will string them up on the lantern.' Entering 
 Paris on March 20, 1815, he said to Mole that he found the 
 hatred of the priests and the nobility as violent and as 
 universal as it was at the beginning of the Revolution. 
 Yet however strong the Revolutionary forces might have 
 been, his tradition, instinct, and political tact taught him 
 that he must not rest upon the support of the mob. On 
 the other hand, the public opinion of the capital forbade 
 a return to absolutism. Every minister, every official, 
 told Napoleon the same tale ; that there must be guarantees 
 for civil Hberty, that the representatives of the nation must 
 vote the taxes and the laws, that the ministers must be 
 responsible to popular control, and that the Press must 
 be free. The Bourbons had alienated the intellectual class 
 because it was suspected that they intended to overthrow 
 the charter, and France wished that the charter should be 
 fairly tried. Napoleon bowed to the force of opinion, and 
 after permitting the question of constitutional reform to be 
 debated in a committee, summoned Benjamin Constant, the 
 leader of the opposition to the Bourbons, and charged him 
 with the duty of drawing up the charter of the liberal 
 empire. 'The nation,' he observed, 'wishes, or believes 
 that it wishes, a tribune and assemblies. The government 
 of the Bourbons, being feeble and antagonistic to the national 
 interests, has accustomed these interests to defend them-
 
 IV BONAPARTISM 67 
 
 selves and to contest authority. The taste for political 
 debates appears to have returned.' 
 
 Constant was a brilliant publicist, and had educated the 
 political world of Paris in the theory and practice of con- 
 stitutional government. No one had been a more formidable 
 opponent of the Bourbons, no one had attacked the des- 
 potism of the Empire with more point and force than this 
 mercurial politician, half dreamer, half viveur, who had 
 served his rhetorical apprenticeship in the short-lived 
 tribunate. The capture of Constant was the first overt 
 token of the alliance between the forces of Bonapartism 
 and Liberalism which was destined to exert so powerful an 
 influence on the history of Europe. His constitution was 
 not a revolutionary document, for it made place for an 
 hereditary peerage, and on Napoleon's demand was cliris- 
 tened Vacte additionnel aux constitutions de Vempire. But 
 it was a Hberal document. It broadened the electorate, 
 freed the Press, dethroned the Roman Catholic Church 
 from its position as a state religion, and secured the per- 
 manent control of the executive by the legislature. In the 
 preamble, the history of the Empire was thrown into a new 
 perspective and accommodated to the startling revolution 
 in policy which the new mood of France had forced upon 
 Napoleon. It was represented that the work of the Empire 
 had been addressed to the formation of a European federa- 
 tion into which it was proposed to introduce liberal prin- 
 ciples. Unfortunately the continuance of war had rendered 
 it necessary to adjourn the blessings of liberty, and the 
 blindness of the monarchs and aristocrats of Europe resulted 
 in the destruction of this great civilizing project. What 
 had been done could not now be undone. The federation 
 was a thing of the past and could not be reconstituted 
 without a European war, which it did not belong to the 
 intention of the Emperor to provoke. It was necessary, 
 then, to acquiesce in the settlement which the overwhelming 
 power of the coalition had imposed on France. Henceforth 
 the Empire would stand for peace. On a smaller scale, but 
 with undiminished and undeviating zeal, the Emperor 
 
 £ 2
 
 68 BONAPARTISM IV 
 
 would carry out those liberal projects from which the 
 obstinate rage of English Tories had necessarily diverted 
 him. His name should stand for the ideas of 1789, for peace 
 and liberal institutions. 
 
 On June 18, 1815, towards midday, Chateaubriand strolled 
 out of the ancient town of Gand by the Brussels gate, a copy 
 of Caesar's Commentaries in his hands. He had left his 
 sovereign, a crumpled, dejected, inglorious old gentleman, 
 quietly awaiting in some obscure lodging the issue of the 
 campaign which was to decide the fortunes of his house. 
 The sky was overcast, and still as with the premonition of 
 advancing storms. Suddenly a sound was heard. The 
 wanderer stopped, hesitated whether to go forward or return, 
 then waited to listen again. The cry of a moorhen in the 
 reeds broke the silence ; then a bell sounded from a neigh- 
 bouring church. He stepped forward, but had hardly advanced 
 thirty paces when the rolling sound began again, now sharp 
 and brief, now drawn out at unequal intervals. It was a roar 
 of battle, not of thunder. 'I crossed the road,' he writes, ' and 
 leant against a poplar at the corner of a field of barley, my 
 face turned towards Brussels. A southerly wind brought the 
 noise of artillery nearer to me. This great battle, still unnamed, 
 whose echo I heard at the foot of a poplar, whose unknown 
 funerals a village bell had sounded, was the battle of Waterloo.' 
 Chateaubriand depicts in his memoirs the stream of emotions 
 which passed through his being as he listened to the faint 
 report of that tremendous tragedy. If the English won, his 
 master would be restored to power ; if they lost, he would be 
 compelled to return to exile. * Was it,' he asks, * a new 
 Cre^y, a new Poictiers, a new Agincourt, which the most 
 implacable enemies of France were about to enjoy ? If they 
 triumphed, was not our glory lost ? If Napoleon won, what 
 became of our liberty ? Though Napoleon's success meant 
 lifelong exile to me, the thought of my country filled my heart. 
 My prayers were for the oppressor of France, that he might 
 save our honour and rescue us from the dominion of the 
 foreigner.' 
 
 There is no force in history more powerful than sentiment,
 
 IV BONAPARTISM 69 
 
 and the defeat of Waterloo strengthened rather than 
 weakened the sentiment of France for Napoleon. It might 
 have been supposed that the cause of French imperialism 
 was finally shattered by the wanton temerity and reckless 
 egoism which had involved France in this hideous sacrifice. 
 For a second time the country was given to understand 
 that allegiance to Napoleon brought in its train foreign 
 invasion and the loss of frontiers ; and if chastisement can 
 ever cure a people of political infatuation France should 
 assuredly have been cured of her infatuation for Napoleon. 
 It seemed as if the story were now finally wound up. 
 Napoleon himself was far away in a lonely island in the 
 Atlantic, his infant son was under Austrian tutelage, his 
 elder brother an exile, his wife the paramour of an 
 Austrian general, and the other members of his family under 
 close pohce supervision. There was reason enough to 
 suppose that Bonapartism was dead. So shrewd a judge as 
 Metternich believed that Bonapartism was impossible with- 
 out Bonaparte. 
 
 Napoleon judged otherwise. From his distant rock in 
 the Atlantic he surveyed the course of European politics, 
 and reckoned that a time would come when France, weary 
 of unintelligent despotism, would revert to the principles 
 upon which his government had been founded. ' The 
 Battle of Waterloo,' he said, ' has been as fatal to the 
 liberties of Europe as the battle of Philippi was fatal to 
 those of Rome ' ; and during the period of Metternich's 
 influence there was sufficient truth in the proposition to 
 nourish his hopes and to inspire his energies. He applied 
 himself to the task of accommodating the history of his 
 own career to the political tendencies which he judged to 
 have a future before them. In this way he would serve 
 the interests of the future head of his house. 
 
 The story of the St. Helena captivity has been generally 
 treated as an episode of little historical but of much personal 
 interest, and a library has collected around the relations of 
 Napoleon and that honourable, pedantic, and unfortunate 
 man, Sir Hudson Lowe. This is not the point of view from
 
 70 BONAPARTISM IV 
 
 which to approach one of the important passages in European 
 history. Napoleon at St. Helena possessed a rare oppor- 
 tunity, of which he took full advantage, of presenting him- 
 self in a favourable and pathetic light to the consideration 
 of France and of Europe. * Our situation here may even 
 have its attractions,' he said to Las Cases ; ' the universe 
 is looking at us, we remain the martyrs of an immortal 
 cause. Millions of men weep for us, and glory is in mourning. 
 Adversity was wanting to my career. If I had died on the 
 throne amidst the clouds of my omnipotence, I should have 
 remained a problem to many men. To-day, thanks to my 
 misfortune, they can judge of me naked as I am.' It was 
 then his design, in the first place, to excite compassion by 
 the tale of his sufferings at the hands of a brutal government 
 and an inhuman jailer. That, as Las Cases admitted, was 
 la 'politique de Longwood, and of the various ruses to which 
 Napoleon descended it is not the most discreditable. But 
 there were other more serious objects to be attained. During 
 the Hundred Days Napoleon had begun, as we have seen, 
 to arrange the retrospect of his life in such a way as to 
 harmonize with the requirements of French hberalism. He 
 had found France in a state of anarchy and given her institu- 
 tions appropriate to her need. That had been the work of 
 the Consulate. Then turning his attention to obscurantist 
 Europe, he had planned and partially carried out a federation 
 of states, modern, enlightened, based on the principle of 
 social equality, and revolving round France as the earth 
 moves round the sun. That was the work of the Empire. 
 Then he entered on a final stage, and in accordance with his 
 original intentions had, upon his return from Elba, relaxed 
 the severity of his autocratic rule. Moscow and Leipzig 
 had shattered his beneficent plans for Europe, Waterloo 
 had ruined the liberal empire in France, but at St. Helena 
 it would be possible to explain his intentions, to overcome 
 criticism, to reveal the full majesty of his design. He was 
 specially concerned to exhibit four propositions which the 
 malignity and blindness of opponents had too often obscured. 
 He stood for the Revolution, he defended the principle of
 
 IV BONAPARTISM 71 
 
 nationality, he never deviated from his love of peace, he 
 respected the influence of religion in society. In the won- 
 derful conversations which were taken down by Las Cases 
 and O'Meara, this is the theme of his apology. 
 <^\vi the first place, then, he is the representative of the 
 ideas of '89, the Messiah of the Revolution, whose name would 
 remain for ever the war-cry of democracy. , ' I desired,' he 
 said, ' to introduce a system of general equality. I sought 
 to establish a government which, though hard, should be 
 a popular government.' 'It is,' he observed to O'Meara, 
 ' because of this system of equality that your government 
 detests me so much.' He had introduced equality before 
 the law, recompensed merit, lowered the cost of education, 
 opened the museums, governed in the interests of the whole 
 community. The imperial government was a kind of 
 repubhc founded on common interests and designed to pacify 
 faction. * I did not usurp the throne ; I found it in the 
 gutter, and the French people put it on my head.' Nor was 
 his aristocracy a violation of the democratic principle : 
 ' Every Frenchman could say under my reign, " I shall be 
 a minister, a marshal of France, a grand officer of the Empire, 
 duke, count, baron, if I deserve it ; even king". The point 
 of departure is no obstacle ! ' Anticipating that objection 
 would be taken to his creation of a nobility, he was at special 
 pains to defend it, as calculated to reconcile France with 
 Europe, to fuse the old France with the new, and assist in 
 effecting the disappearance of feudalism in Europe by 
 attaching to the idea of nobility the conception of services 
 rendered to the State. He argued again that he had not 
 been unfaithful to liberty, the passion of his youth. Much 
 obloquy had been cast on him for his state prisons, but the 
 eight ' Bastilles ', as they were termed, contained only 243 
 prisoners for an empire of forty million souls, agitated by 
 foreign war and freslily issued from a terrible revolution. 
 The annual inspections, made by Councillors of State who 
 reported to the Privy Council of the Empire, precluded the 
 possibility of arbitrary detention. The prisons were, in fact, 
 not the contrivance of despotic caprice, but an act of libera-
 
 72 BONAPARTISM IV 
 
 lism and beneficence. Again, while his system of criminal 
 justice secured to France as complete a measure of individual 
 liberty as was enjoyed even by Englishmen, his desire for reli- 
 gious liberty was shown by his generous treatment of Protes- 
 tants and Jews : the Hundred Days had proved his sympathy 
 for the freedom of the Press. He denied that the Senate was 
 servile, or that his institutions were calculated to encourage 
 servility. The suppression of the Tribunate was defended 
 as ' an important economy '. It was true that he had con- 
 centrated authority in his own hands ; but when the right 
 moment came he had always intended to unbend the bow. 
 Education was, he explained, the necessary basis for consti- 
 tutional liberties, and in 1799, when he rose to power, the 
 French nation was uneducated. ' The men who reproach 
 me with not having given enough liberty to the French are 
 ignorant of the fact that in 1804 ninety-six Frenchmen out of 
 a hundred could not read.' It is true that he had prolonged 
 his dictatorship for fourteen years, but ' the peril was always 
 the same, the struggle bitter, and the crisis imminent '. 
 But if peace had come, if the Russians had been conquered 
 in 1812, 'I would have associated my son in the Empire, 
 my dictatorship would have ended, and my constitutional 
 reign would have begun '. Then local government would 
 have been established, and all the filaments of centralized 
 rule would have been sympathetically relaxed. ' I worked 
 in order that I might arrive at a plan. I asked for twenty 
 years ; Destiny only gave me thirteen. I regarded myself 
 as the Constituent of France.' 
 
 In the course of 1820 he dictated to Montholon the sketch 
 of a constitution for the reign of Napoleon II. In this 
 curious and important document liberty of the Press is 
 guaranteed ; the judges are irremovable ; and every 
 Frenchman is permitted to bring an action before the 
 ordinary courts against any agent of the administration. 
 The Chambers were granted the right of amendment and 
 of legal initiative, as well as complete control of foreign and 
 domestic policy. If the Emperor dissolved the Chamber, 
 another assembly was to meet within twenty days. To
 
 IV BONAPARTISM 73 
 
 prevent the corruption of the assembly by the Court, it was 
 provided that every deputy who accepted an office must 
 resign his seat. The force of national movements in Spain 
 and Germany had overthrown the Empire ; but this, as 
 Napoleon explains, was an error. Indeed the principle of 
 nationality could claim no more convinced champion than 
 the man whom the nations of Europe had thrown to the 
 ground. ' There are,' he said, ' in Europe more than thirty 
 million Frenchmen, fifteen million Italians, thirty million 
 Germans. I wished to make of each of these peoples a single 
 nationality.' In Germany the difficulties were greatest, and 
 the time required for the task of union was necessarily long. 
 Napoleon had contented himself with simplifying ' the 
 monstrous complication ' of German political geography. 
 Italy presented an easier and more attractive problem, and 
 here the beneficent plan had been conceived with distinct- 
 ness. He had always projected the unity of Italy, even when 
 he partitioned Venice in 1797 and betrayed that free and 
 famous city to the tender mercies of despotic Austria. 
 * The Venetians, the Lombards, the Piedmontese, needed to 
 be decomposed, and reduced into elements, to become 
 Italians ' ; and so, too, the annexation of parts of Italy to 
 the French Empire had been prompted by the desire ' to 
 supervise, guarantee, and advance the natural education of 
 the Italians '. Napoleon was only awaiting the birth of 
 a second son to proclaim the unity and independence of 
 Italy. Ireland would have been separated from England 
 and erected into an independent republic ; the kingdom of 
 Poland would have been restored, and would have served as 
 a barrier against the deluge of northern barbarism. Spain 
 and England were already endowed with political unity and 
 independence ; but in neither of these two countries was there 
 social unity. Accordingly it was necessary to fashion the 
 moral unity of these aristocratic regions, and to regenerate 
 them by a drastic course of social reform. He would have 
 abolished the English House of Lords, reformed theCommons, 
 proclaimed liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty, and 
 summoned Sir Francis Burdett to draw up a constitution.
 
 74 BONAPARTISM IV 
 
 So by degrees he would have fashioned a United States of 
 Europe broad based upon the General Will. 
 
 Peace was necessary for the regeneration of Europe, and 
 Napoleon had always wished for peace. England, on the 
 other hand, seeing that peace would make France a miracle 
 of civilization and the metropolis of the world, had resolved 
 the death of France. It was the English Cabinet which 
 broke the Peace of Amiens and involved Europe in another 
 decade of struggle. ' What a misfortune for Europe ! The 
 two great Powers, united together, would have fought for 
 the diffusion of liberal ideas and the emancipation of peoples.' 
 But the malignity and jealousy of Pitt had ordered it other- 
 wise. Yet he bore no animus to the English. Speaking of 
 what he would have accomplished in a successful invasion 
 of the island, he added with sublime benignity, ' We should 
 have demanded no sacrifices, no contributions. We should 
 have presented ourselves not as conquerors but as brothers.' 
 
 His foreign policy, then, had for its aim the reorganization 
 of Europe on liberal lines. For France he desired nothing 
 beyond the line of her natural frontiers, the Rhine, the Alps, 
 the Pyrenees. It was true that he had planted French 
 princes in Spain, in Italy, in certain parts of Germany. But 
 what did that matter ? Politics were stronger than blood ; 
 the new thrones, founded on democratic and enlightened 
 institutions, would have become the possession of the 
 peoples. The aim of the Russian war had been to deprive 
 England of her last ally and to work the deliverance of 
 Poland. Moderate as ever, he would have insisted on no 
 hard terms in the event of victory. Russia should have 
 been compensated at the expense of the Turks, and England 
 should have kept Malta and her supremacy over the seas. 
 He vehemently contested the sincerity of the overtures 
 which were made at Dresden, at Frankfort, and at Chatillon. 
 
 Finally, he was the friend of religion. He observed that 
 the Catholic religion gave through the ceremony of conse- 
 cration a religious, almost a sacred character to the sovereign, 
 and that considerations of high policy recommended con- 
 secration and amity with the Pope. He looked back with
 
 IV BONAPARTISM 75 
 
 unfeigned satisfaction on the Concordat and on his poHcy 
 of religious toleration. But while he was the friend of reli- 
 gion, he could not permit the Church to invade the territory 
 of the State. The Jesuits, being a political order, should be 
 aboHshed, while the interests of religion suffered from the 
 temporal policy and the autocracy of the Pope. Divining 
 the evil, he had prescribed a remedy. The Papal States 
 had been confiscated, and the Pope, transferred to Paris and 
 subjected to the control of ecclesiastical councils, would have 
 lost an ascendancy dangerous to the spiritual interests of 
 the Church. Specially did he pride himself on having 
 reopened the era of Church Councils. ' I should have had 
 my religious sessions, as I had my legislative sessions ; my 
 councils would have been the representation of Christianity ; 
 the Popes would have only been their presidents ; I should 
 have opened and closed the assemblies, approved and pub- 
 lished their decisions as did Constantine and Charlemagne.' 
 Such was the spirit of the St. Helena conversations. As 
 fragment after fragment passed across the ocean and sank 
 into the popular mind, the legend took on the captivating 
 form which it was designed that it should assume. The 
 harsh features of the Napoleonic despotism were forgotten. 
 Men thought of Napoleon as the soldier of the Revolution, 
 as the misunderstood idealist whose liberal plans for France 
 and Europe were shattered by a cruel destiny. The liberal 
 middle class, who wished to shake down the autocracy of 
 the Bourbons and to recover the Rhine frontier, began to 
 regard him not as the man of Brumaire, but as the man of 
 the Additional Act, as the suffering Prometheus of St. Helena. 
 When in 1821 Las Cases explained to General Lamarque 
 the liberal intentions of the Emperor, and added that he saw 
 in him one of his future marshals, that embodiment of 
 militant liberalism was at once converted. The St. Helena 
 conversations persuaded Armand Carrel, the brilliant oppo- 
 sition publicist, that Napoleon was a Liberal ; and as a 
 Liberal and a friend of the people he was celebrated in a 
 hundred songs. The long histories of Thibaudeau and 
 Thiers expounded to an admiring and receptive public the
 
 76 BONAPARTISM IV 
 
 liberal and progressive elements which may undoubtedly 
 be found in his policy. But nowhere were the main features 
 of the legend presented with such an eye to their political 
 relevance as in a small volume entitled Napoleonic Ideas, 
 which appeared in the course of 1839. It was an able 
 volume, clear, concise, well written, insisting upon the main 
 principles with which by a singular transformation of 
 historic truth the name of Napoleon had now become 
 identified, the defence of liberal ideas, of nationaHties, of 
 religion. But its ability is not the essential point. It was 
 the work of Louis Bonaparte, the Emperor's nephew, and, 
 since the death of the Duke of Reichstadt, the head of the 
 House of Bonaparte. 
 
 The political situation in France aided the coalition 
 between the Bonapartists and the Liberals. The country 
 had failed to find peace in the constitutional settlement 
 which had been imposed upon it in 1815. The Restoration 
 monarchy was unpopular, partly because it was brought in 
 by foreign armies and partly because it was suspected of 
 disloyalty to the Constitution and of sinister designs against 
 the land sales of the Revolution. Even the leaders of clerical 
 opinion found in the Concordat which the Legitimist govern- 
 ment had accepted from Napoleon, matter for violent dis- 
 agreement with the Crown. The most eloquent voice in 
 the French Church during the critical period preceding and 
 following the Revolution of 1830 was that of Lammenais, 
 one of the founders of democratic ultramontane journalism. 
 With the logic belonging to the temperament of fanaticism, 
 Lammenais argues that the connexion of Church and State 
 was fatal to spiritual freedom, and that the French State was 
 founded upon the negation of God. Apprehending, what was 
 indeed not difficult to detect, that the cause of Catholicism 
 had been seriously injured by its connexion with the 
 monarchy and the aristocrats, and convinced of the truth 
 that the Gospel contained a liberating message to the hewers 
 of wood and the drawers of water, Lammenais and his friends 
 formulated the programme of Catholic democracy. His 
 paper was condemned by the Curia, but his influence
 
 IV BONAPARTISM 77 
 
 remained, and the fall of the Bourbons of the elder 
 branch was saluted with joy from a thousand pulpits. 
 
 The French nation had remained Napoleonic without 
 being conscious of the fact. The machine of government was 
 that same administrative engine which Napoleon had con- 
 structed, and no party in the State, with the exception of the 
 aristocrats, really desired any measure of decentralization. 
 The Government interfered with the elections and used its 
 influence to promote the success of official candidates. 
 The spectre of federalism which had ruined the Girondin 
 party was sufficient to crush any attempt at enlarging the 
 sphere of local liberty. The despotism of Bonaparte 
 remained, and the only difference was that it was exploited 
 by the Emigres. There was a high tariff against foreign 
 goods, the agents of the administration were protected 
 from prosecution in the ordinary law-courts, and the interests 
 of education were completely neglected. The ill-fated 
 dynasty succeeded in nothing that it did. It sent an army 
 into Spain in 1823, and put back upon his throne one of the 
 worst despots in Europe. But no glory was gained from 
 the Spanish expedition, and much odium was collected 
 from the prohibition of divorce and from the laws respecting 
 sacrilege and the observance of Sunday. The spirit of the 
 opposition is reflected in the songs of Beranger, with his 
 loose, easy, high-spirited humour, his idealization of war, 
 licence, and irreligion. 
 
 The July Monarchy, which was founded in 1830 on the 
 support of the middle classes and as the result of a popular 
 revolution, failed to reconcile the French people. Its policy 
 abroad was inglorious, and in an age of swift economic 
 progress it was stationary at home. No government of 
 France has ever been so prosaic, so corrupt, and so timorous 
 as this government of Louis Philippe, which was served by 
 the greatest historian of his generation. The conquest of 
 Algeria was an achievement of which France might have been 
 proud, and it was hoped that the exploits of the Algerian 
 army might compensate for the wise policy of non-inter- 
 vention which had left the Liberals of Belgium, Poland, and
 
 78 BONAPARTISM IV 
 
 Italy unsuccoured in their hour of need. This, however, 
 did not prove to be the case. There was only one subject 
 which inflamed the imagination of France during the July 
 Monarchy. It was the theme of poetry, from the pens of 
 Lamartine and Hugo ; of innumerable memoirs and histories 
 and anecdotes; it was Napoleon. In 1840, when the bones 
 of the great Emperor were brought back from St. Helena 
 to find their resting-place in Paris, the sentiment of the 
 people was so stirred that some onlookers remarked that the 
 Second Empire was already made. Made it was in the 
 imagination of the French peasantry, for whom Napoleon 
 still lived as the restorer of altars, and the most glorious 
 memory of the national wars. Even the members of the par- 
 liamentary opposition, whose horizon hardly stretched beyond 
 the franchise, quivered at the name and unconsciously served 
 the tradition. In the fiery Egyptian debates which shook 
 the authority of the Government from 1839 to 1841, the 
 shade of Napoleon rose again and again to confront the 
 counsels of prudence, and was only beaten in the divisions. 
 Mehemet Ali was an Albanian adventurer who sought to 
 carve himself an empire after the manner of Orientals ; 
 but to the fevered imagination of the Palais Bourbon he 
 appeared to be the disciple of Napoleon, the man who was 
 destined to undo the disaster of the Nile and the repulse at 
 Acre, and to restore to France the dominion of Egypt, which 
 the sword of Napoleon had prepared for her. To leave the 
 finest surviving soldier of the First Empire without support 
 was treason to a great memory and the repudiation of 
 a brilliant past ; and in Paris, where tongues are quick and 
 passions lively, the avoidance of a war on behalf of Mehemet 
 was denounced as a national humiliation. In truth, the 
 Government could neither touch the heart nor amuse the 
 idle fancy of France. ' La France s'ennuie ' was the fatal 
 criticism passed by Lamartine on the rule of the Bourgeois 
 King, who, in lieu of glory and adventure, had provided 
 for his country a diet of timid common sense. In the eyes 
 of the artisans the crimes of the Government were of a darker 
 hue. It had shot down the Lyons silk weavers in 1834 ;
 
 IV BONAPARTISM 79 
 
 whenever or wherever revolution or Socialism had burst 
 out, it had shown no weakness or delay. Sensible of failing 
 repute, the Government attempted to cure Bonapartism by 
 homoeopathic methods, as if an idea or sentiment can be 
 extinguished by encouraging great men to give it artistic 
 expression. At last a movement for parliamentary reform 
 brought on the crisis, and in February, 1848, the monarchy 
 of the younger branch went down, so suddenly, and with so 
 little lamentation or defence, that the marvel is that a tree 
 so feebly rooted should so long have defied the gathering 
 storm.
 
 Louis Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon, was the 
 third son of Louis, the ex-King of Holland, and his wife 
 Hortense Beauharnais. He was born in 1808, recollected 
 having seen his illustrious uncle before the Battle of Waterloo, 
 and was carefully educated in the Napoleonic cult. Lord 
 Malmesbury, meeting him at his mother's house in Rome 
 in 1829, found him already persuaded that it was his destiny 
 to rule over France. He was then twenty-one years of age, 
 a finished but reckless horseman, giving little indication of 
 ability or knowledge, but high-spirited, and surrounded by 
 a nimbus of madcap generals who had served under the 
 great Napoleon. His mother's house in Rome was a centre 
 of nationalist politics, and in 1831 Louis Bonaparte, together 
 with Charles Napoleon, his elder surviving brother, took 
 part in the rising in the Romagna which came to so swift 
 and unsatisfactory a conclusion. The French Revolution 
 of 1830 prompted him to enter into relations with the 
 Republican chiefs in Paris, and in the following year, by the 
 death of the Duke of Reichstadt, he became heir to the 
 imperial claims. Henceforward he began to study politics, 
 and impressed Chateaubriand as ' studious, instructed, full 
 of honour, and naturally grave, awaiting in the silence of 
 exile the liberation of his country '. The Revolution of 
 1830 had been partially led by Bonapartists, and Louis 
 Bonaparte was convinced that but for an untimely accident 
 it would have resulted in the re-establishment of the imperial 
 dynasty. On two separate occasions he attempted to appeal 
 from the government of France to the people and the army. 
 In 1836 he was taken red-handed at Strasburg, having failed 
 to suborn the garrison. In 1840, an enterprise carried out 
 with a similar lack of circumspection failed ignobly at 
 Boulogne. These disastrous miscarriages were sufficient to 
 ruin a reputation. Louis Bonaparte had not only grossly
 
 V BONAPARTISM 81 
 
 miscalculated the elementary conditions of success, but he 
 had appeared in a ridiculous and melodramatic light as 
 a hare-brained adventurer. Nevertheless there is something 
 impressive in the pertinacity of his fatalism, and in the skill 
 with which, when placed upon his trial in 1840, he contrived 
 to define his political position. ' One last word, gentlemen. 
 I represent before you a principle, a cause, and a defeat. 
 The principle is the sovereignty of the people ; the cause, 
 that of the Empire ; the defeat, Waterloo. You have recog- 
 nized the principle, you have served the cause, you wish 
 to avenge the defeat.' He maintained that he desired not 
 to bring about an imperial restoration, but to convoke 
 a national congress which should decide upon the political 
 destinies of France. 
 
 The sentence passed upon the adventurer was imprison- 
 ment in the castle of Ham. The Government of Louis 
 Philippe had been over-generous to him after the affair of 
 Strasburg, and even now was not ungenerous. It permitted 
 him to receive visitors, to keep a valet, to walk in the 
 garden, and to ride in the castle court. Imprisonment gave 
 time for study, and Lord Malmesbury, who visited Ham 
 in 1845, was struck by the fact that, despite five years of 
 close confinement, his mind was full and active, and his 
 conviction of ultimate success as firm as ever. He composed 
 a pamphlet on the extinction of pauperism by means of 
 a scheme for the reclamation of waste land by state-aided 
 agricultural colonies. He wrote a protectionist treatise on 
 the sugar question, contributed articles to a local newspaper 
 on military reform, and was full of a project for a Nicaraguan 
 canal. Divining with no little per.spicacity the trend of 
 public opinion, he talked to Louis Blanc with a sympathetic 
 air of the prospects of Socialism, advertised himself as the 
 friend of the poor and as the possessor of various patents 
 for the relief of poverty. His uncle had, as he had already 
 explained in his work on Napoleonic ideas, designed to 
 introduce liberal changes into his Government. He would 
 complete his uncle's work by a well-connected scheme of 
 social reform. In 1847 he escaped from prison in the guise
 
 82 BONAPARTISM V 
 
 of a workman, and reappeared in London in time to enroll 
 himself as a special constable during the Chartist riots. 
 His appearance was not impressive. His legs were short, 
 his eye dull, his face curiously inexpressive. His mother 
 had described him as soft and obstinate, and his friend 
 Mrs. Gordon told Louis Blanc that he had upon her the 
 effect of a woman. To many he appeared dreamy, reserved, 
 opaque. He was known to be given to dissipation, and yet 
 so destitute was he of the dash and animation which belonged 
 to the French temperament that scandal doubted his 
 parentage and invented for his father a Dutch admiral. 
 
 The Revolution of February, 1848, which shook down the 
 throne of Louis Philippe, provided an incomparable oppor- 
 tunity to a political adventurer. A servile war had followed 
 upon a political agitation for parliamentary reform, a revolt 
 of the ' have-nots ' against the ' haves ' which threatened 
 property and all the foundations of civihzed life. As early 
 as 1846, Heine, strolling through the Quartier St. Marceau, 
 was struck with the ferocious literature which appeared to 
 be the pabulum of the Paris workman. There were cheap 
 reprints of the most sanguinary speeches of Marat and 
 Robespierre, as well as the literature of Socialism, of which 
 Louis Blanc's Organisation du travail was the most influential 
 manifestation. The terror which the social revolution 
 inspired cannot easily be overestimated. In the country 
 districts many a peasant was well content that Louis 
 Philippe should go, but thought it intolerable that France 
 should be governed by the reds of Paris. The assembly 
 which was sent to the capital to draft a constitution was 
 conservative to the backbone, and the fear of Socialism 
 which seized every peasant proprietor in France gave Louis 
 Napoleon the opportunity for which he was waiting. At 
 the first tidings of the Revolution he had crossed the Channel, 
 but then, learning that his presence was inconvenient, dis- 
 creetly returned to London. His name began to work 
 miracles. Twice he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, 
 but twice refused to take his seat ; then being chosen by 
 five departments he accepted the mandate, and showed him-
 
 V BONAPARTISM 83 
 
 solf to the men who were drawing up the constitution of the 
 Second RepubHc. His first speech, delivered, it was said, 
 with a German accent, was hesitating and bad. ' I thought,' 
 said Thouret, ' this man was dangerous ; after hearing him 
 I withdraw my amendment.' 
 
 The man was dangerous. The Constituent Assembly- 
 devised a Republican constitution which could only lead 
 to a dictatorship. On the one hand, there was to be a 
 legislature, elected by universal suffrage ; on the other hand, 
 a president deriving his authority independently from the 
 same ultimate and original source of sovereign power. 
 Since the President would control the centralized admini- 
 strative mechanism and the armed forces of the country, 
 he would during his four years of office be in a position 
 of commanding pre-eminence. When the question of the 
 presidency was submitted to the electorate, Louis Bona- 
 parte was returned at the head of the poll with more than 
 five million votes. Some of the peasants who voted for 
 him believed that he was the great Napoleon himself. 
 Every one at least knew his name, He obtained the suffrage 
 of all who dreaded the red spectre of Socialism, the Legiti- 
 mists and Orleanists, the Bonapartists and the Catholics. 
 He stood as the candidate of the peasantry and the army, 
 as the heir of a great tradition, as the pledge of vague, 
 unmeasured aspirations. ' How should I not vote for this 
 gentleman,' said a peasant to Montalembert, ' I whose nose 
 was frozen at Moscow ? ' Lamartine the poet, orator, and 
 historian, who had saved France in the crisis of 1848, polled 
 no more than eighteen thousand votes. Cavaignac had 
 crushed the Socialists in Paris during the days of June 
 and had earned a tribute of gratitude from all who value 
 order and liberty ; Ledru-RoUiti represented the principle 
 of social democracy ; but all the Republican votes together 
 did not exceed two million. Bonaparte had easily eclipsed 
 his rivals. To understand his success, we must think, as 
 Treitschke reminds us, of the songs which the peasant women 
 of France had sung at their looms, and of the cottage 
 walls hung with cheap lithographs of the triumphs and 
 
 F 2
 
 84 BONAPARTISM V 
 
 the paladins of the Napoleonic wars. The situation created 
 in the spring of 1849 was extraordinary. The first assembly 
 which met under the new Republican constitution was a 
 body of men which did not even wish for a republic. Uni- 
 versal suffrage had returned a Monarchist majority, and 
 the Republicans were compelled to the conclusion that the 
 errors of universal suffrage should be corrected by force. 
 The constitution provided that a three-fourths majority 
 was necessary to decree constitutional revision, and, with 
 the exception of a small minority, every one wished to 
 revise the constitution — the Prince President, that he might 
 prolong his term of office; the Legitimists and Orleanists, 
 that they might crown their respective candidates ; the 
 social democrats, that they might extend the popular 
 principle. Yet opinion was too sharply divided to admit 
 of the requisite majority, and in order to reform the con- 
 stitution it became necessary to violate it. 
 
 With a greater supply of commanding energy the Prince 
 President might easily have wrecked his cause, and at this 
 great crisis of his fortunes he was helped by his principal 
 defect, a certain irresolute languor of will. He was silent 
 and reserved in Paris, and his rare attempts to intervene 
 in the current of parliamentary politics were favourably 
 contrasted in the public mind with the febrile activities of 
 the Assembly. Every month added to his reputation and 
 detracted from that of his adversaries. The Assembly, 
 stricken with the fear of democracy, muzzled the Press, 
 prohibited public meetings, and disfranchised three million 
 citizens. The President, on the other hand, toured through 
 the country, protested that he was the friend of the work- 
 man, and that nothing would induce him to violate the 
 forms of the Constitution. Being possessed of control over 
 the army and the executive, he was in reality master of 
 France, and the conduct of the legislature had equipped 
 him with apologies should he decide to use force. He 
 could say, as he said to his friend Lord Malmesbury, that 
 he had tried in vain to form a coalition ministry and to 
 effect a fusion of parties, and that parliamentary agitation
 
 V BONAPARTISM 85 
 
 stood in the way of social reform. From an assembly 
 which had disfranchised three million voters and voted 
 itself a gratuity of twenty-five francs a day, he could appeal 
 to the democracy of France. Yet he hesitated with a not 
 unnatural hesitation. He felt solitary. When he first 
 came to France in 1848 he was not known to fifty persons, 
 and he had a talent for distrusting and for inspiring dis- 
 trust. The Coup d'Etat, executed on December 2, 1852, 
 the anniversary of Austerlitz, was imparted only to five 
 confidants. 
 
 Uncle and nephew established themselves in the govern- 
 ment of France by a Coup d'Etat, but whereas the days 
 of Brumaire were bloodless, the days of December left 
 memories which France has not yet expunged from the 
 tablets of her heart. The plot of Brumaire was so clumsily 
 contrived that it nearly miscarried ; the plot of December 
 was a miracle of craft and force such as would have approved 
 itself to the judgement of Cesare Borgia. Yet Brumaire 
 was forgiven in the greatness of the achievements to which 
 it was the prelude, while the bloodstain of December proved 
 to be indelible. We must not take our history from Victor 
 Hugo or Gambetta, from UHistoire cfun Crime or Napoleon 
 le Petit or Les Chdtiments, but the state of mind of which 
 these famous pieces of invective were the product was part 
 of the spiritual current in French history. 
 
 A cry of execration rose up in England. 
 
 If you be fearful, then must we be bold, 
 
 Our Britain cannot salve a tyrant o'er. 
 
 Better the waste Atlantic roll'd 
 
 On her and us and ours for evermore. 
 
 What ! have we fought for freedom from our prime 
 
 At last to dodge and palter with a public crime? 
 
 So wrote Tennyson, addressing the legislators of England. 
 
 The ' public crime ' was condoned in France. There it 
 was felt that the President stood between the State and 
 anarchy ; that his severities had crushed a vast socialistic 
 conspiracy, and that there was no alternative but to register 
 his will. The 'pUbiacite made him President for ten years
 
 86 BONAPARTISM V 
 
 and confirmed the principles of an autocratic constitution 
 framed upon the avuncular model. The President was 
 given sole power over army and navy. It was he who 
 exercised all the patronage, named the members of the 
 Council of State and the Senate, had the sole right of 
 initiating, sanctioning, and promulgating laws, of summon- 
 ing, proroguing, and dissolving the legislature. In the fullest 
 and most absolute sense he was the master of France. 
 The legislature of 251 members, though elected for six 
 years by universal suffrage, was not only debarred from 
 initiating laws ; it was forbidden to debate the Address, 
 to interpellate ministers, to overthrow a ministry. It was 
 indeed permissible to proffer amendments, but these the 
 Council of State was not obliged to accept and was in the 
 habit of systematically disregarding. No measure which 
 could be taken to reduce the importance of the body was 
 left unexplored. There was no tribune ; no reporting, save 
 for dry and condensed official summaries in the official 
 paper. The aspect of the Palais Bourbon had indeed 
 changed. The profession of the rhetorician was gone. 
 How could his spirit play as he rose from his seat to address 
 three government officials seated in their gold braid above 
 the thin and dispirited assembly ? Montalembert, the great 
 Zouave of Catholicism, approved the Coup d'Etat as neces- 
 sary to save France from the abysm ; but the restrictions 
 upon the exercise of his rhetorical talents drove him into 
 opposition. 
 
 It is never wise to forget the ugly features of such a 
 despotism as that which Napoleon now set up in France — 
 the debasement of the bar and the bench, the oppression 
 exercised by the officials, the cynical immorality of the Court, 
 the absence of large and generous principles in public life. 
 In palliation it may be said that the country itself seemed 
 to care little for parliamentary forms or the freedom of 
 the Press, and was unmoved by the unscrupulous pressure 
 exerted by the Government at elections. The Chamber was 
 for the most part inexperienced and docile, for the eminent 
 Bonapartists sat in the Senate and the more laborious
 
 V BONAPARTISM 87 
 
 members of the party were summoned to the Council. As 
 the great issues were removed from the sphere of legislative 
 responsibility, personal jealousies filled the vacuum. ' The 
 present regime,' wrote De Tocqueville, ' is the paradise of 
 the envious and the mediocre.' The intellect of France 
 had been warned off the course, the politicians took refuge 
 in letters, and only in the veiled references of the savants of 
 the Institute could the most cultured city in the world taste 
 the subtle delight of delicate and forbidden criticism. 
 
 The substitution of the Empire for the Presidency was 
 the work of less than a year, prefaced by many petitions 
 and brought to a head by a triumphal progress through 
 France. On October 9, 1852, at a banquet given by the 
 Chamber of Commerce at Bordeaux, Louis Bonaparte pro- 
 claimed the Empire, adding the significant words, ' L' Empire 
 c'est la Paix \ The French nation, being consulted for the 
 third time, for the third time by an overwhelming majority 
 ratified its belief in Bonapartism. On December 1, 1852, 
 the Prince President was proclaimed Emperor under the 
 title Napoleon III. 
 
 The programme of the Empire was not the improvisation 
 of a vulgar adventurer, but the result of long reflection 
 on the Napoleonic tradition and on the best means of 
 adapting it to the needs of France. ' The name Napoleon,' 
 so ran the message of October 31, 1849, ' is a complete 
 programme in itself ; it stands for order, authority, religion, 
 the welfare of the people within ; without, for national 
 dignity.' Napoleon professed himself to be the elect of 
 the people, and ready to abandon his prerogatives at their 
 desire. It was necessary that he should begin his career 
 as Emperor by depriving the country of that exercise of 
 political liberty which in his judgement had been so fatal 
 to France ever since the Battle of Waterloo ; but by degrees 
 he would limit his prerogatives and admit the nation to 
 a share in government. Like his uncle, he had come not 
 to suppress but to adjourn the reign of political freedom 
 and to educate the French people in the art of combining 
 self-government, progress, and order.
 
 88 BONAPARTISM V 
 
 The Napoleonic idea, as he had already explained, stood 
 not for war but for peace. ' I have,' he said at Bordeaux, 
 October 9, 1852, ' like the Emperor, conquests to make. 
 Like him, I wish to draw into the stream of the great popular 
 river those hostile side-currents which tend to lose them- 
 selves without profit to any one. ... I wish to conquer 
 to religion, to morality, to prosperity, that part of the 
 population, still so numerous, which in the midst of a country 
 of faith and belief scarcely knows the precept of Christ, 
 which in the heart of the most fertile country in the world 
 can scarcely enjoy the prime necessities of its produce. 
 We have immense districts of virgin soil to clear, roads to 
 open, harbours to dig, rivers to render navigable, canals 
 to finish, our network of railways to complete. Opposite to 
 Marseilles there is a vast kingdom waiting to be assimilated 
 to France. Our great ports of the West must be brought 
 near to the American continent by the rapidity of the com- 
 merce we have yet to create. We have everjrvvhere ruins 
 to restore, false gods to overthrow, truths to establish in 
 triumph. That is how I should understand the Empire, 
 if the Empire is to be re-established.' 
 
 A despotism requires a despot. Napoleon III possessed 
 the capacity of delineating spacious projects in elevated 
 language ; but his physical constitution, never of the 
 strongest, failed him in the middle of his career, and with 
 the advance of illness his will became increasingly infirm. 
 He was a man of kindly feelings, courteous, at times charm- 
 ing, but neither in public nor in private morals free from 
 grave reproach. The epicurean temperament is not favour- 
 able to the growth of deep affections, and OUivier, who 
 knew Napoleon well, reports that few sovereigns have been 
 so impersonal as he. A certain stoic courage, a coolness 
 in the hour of danger, were the complemental merits which 
 balanced the absence of high vehemence and warm imagina- 
 tion. He had a certain gift of political perspective, and 
 could paint on the canvas of the future with a bold sweep 
 of the brush ; but his figures had no anatomy, and were 
 like the creations of the dilettante artist who has excused
 
 V BONAPARTISM 89 
 
 himself from the tough and technical discipline of his craft. 
 His judgement was unsteady, his head full of untested, 
 fanciful, and contradictory poHcies ; his capacity unequal 
 to the execution of his opaque and fluctuating designs. 
 Having obtained power by a conspiracy, he was compelled 
 to conspire in order to maintain it, and being unable, partly 
 through the haziness of his intelligence and partly through 
 the infirmity of his will, to apprehend the essential discord 
 of opposing ideals, he harboured the strangest miscellany 
 of convictions, despotic, revolutionary, philanthropic, and 
 liberal. A crooked vein of diffidence shot through the stiff 
 substance of his fatalism, and as he distrusted himself and 
 even openly expressed regrets and misgivings, so he dis- 
 trusted those around him. The diplomatists of the Empire 
 frequently found that their master was diplomatizing behind 
 their back, and that their counsels were thrown aside in 
 obedience to some cross-current of unofficial influence. 
 Such a master is not well served. In a centralized state 
 the malady of the commanding will spreads through every 
 vein of the body politic.^ 
 
 There is a curious sketch of a novel written in the 
 Emperor's hand and discovered among his papers at the 
 Tuileries in 1870. A certain M. Benoist, an honest grocer, 
 goes to America in 1847, and after a voyage from the 
 Hudson to the Mississippi returns to France in 1868. Only 
 distant echoes had reached him of what was going on in 
 his native country. Some French exiles had told him that 
 his country was groaning under the iron heel of despotism, 
 and that, having left it flourishing under Louis Philippe, 
 he would find it impoverished and abased. He returns full 
 of these sinister apprehensions, and is confronted with a 
 series of surprises. ' What are these hideous black vessels ? ' 
 he asks, as he puts into the port of Brest. He is told that 
 
 * Thus Persigny was for the English, Momy for the Russian, and Drouyn 
 for the Austrian alliance. Walewsky, though foreign ministt^r at the time, 
 was kept in ignorance of the pact made at Plombiiires between Napoleon 
 and Cavour. Persigny and Pelissier, successively ambassadors at the 
 Court of St. James, astonished Prince Albt^rt by their frank criticisms of 
 their master's policy. — Ollivier, iii, pp. 121-6.
 
 90 BONAPARTISM V 
 
 they are the new ironclads, the invention of the Emperor. 
 He sees a crowd pressing towards the Mairie, and learns 
 to his astonishment that his enslaved country possesses 
 a legislature, and that the legislature is elected by universal 
 suffrage. The electric telegraph, the network of railways, 
 the embellishment of Paris, strike him at once as great and 
 impressive strides in civilization. He finds that the cost 
 of life has been lowered owing to a wise treaty of commerce, 
 that imprisonment for debt is abolished, that the penal 
 code is no longer defaced by the barbarous penalty of 
 branding, that strikes have been legalized, that provision 
 is made for the aged poor and for infirm priests, and that 
 the pay of the army is augmented, These and other im- 
 provements have been effected without violence or tjo'anny. 
 He expects to hear that the prisons are full of authors, 
 and learns that he is in error, and that in Imperial France 
 there are neither riots nor political prisoners nor exiles. 
 
 This represents the strong side of the Emperor's policy. 
 He had a genuine feeling for the people, and was shrewd 
 enough to see that a programme of social and economic 
 reform might compensate the country for the severe repres- 
 sion of the Republican and Orleanist parties. Clerical 
 prejudice has minimized the admirable work done by 
 Duruy, his Minister of Education ; but on all hands it is 
 allowed that Napoleon gave a great impetus to the construc- 
 tion of railways, which Thiers had denounced as the costly 
 luxury of the rich ; that by the foundation of the Credit 
 Foncier he brought capital into agriculture ; that he drew 
 attention to the necessity of improving out of the public 
 funds the condition of workmen's dwelHngs in town and 
 country ; that he founded benefit societies and almshouses ; 
 and that his visit to Algeria was productive of great improve- 
 ments in the finance of the colony and in the relations of the 
 French to the native population. It is he and Baron 
 Haussmann who have made the clean, airy, brilliant Paris 
 which we know. It was a drastic, unpopular, salutary 
 process, affronting old prejudices, and disturbing pleasant, 
 familiar ways of life. Who would not prefer the picturesque
 
 V BONAPARTISM 91 
 
 old rookery built under Louis Quinze, and hallowed by long 
 family memories, to the new Boulevard, bright and staring, 
 planned by a big, loose- jointed, harsh-featured man with 
 long whiskers and a German name ? 
 
 The first four years of the Empire were marked by steady 
 material progress. The Emperor had been recognized by 
 foreign powers, and in conjunction with England had carried 
 to a successful conclusion a war for the preservation of the 
 integrity of Turkey. At the Congress of Paris held at the 
 conclusion of the Crimean Campaign, Napoleon appeared 
 as the arbiter of Europe. He then stood at the summit of 
 his fortune. He had represented the Crimean War correctly 
 enough as conceived in the traditional vein of French 
 diplomacy. It was to the advantage of France that Russia 
 should not be the predominant influence in Constantinople, 
 for to rule in Constantinople was to rule in the Mediterranean, 
 and the Mediterranean was as much a French as an English 
 interest. He had defended the rights of the Latin Church in 
 the East, and accumulated a treasury of merit with the 
 Vatican from which he intended to make long drafts. 
 After an unpopular and ignoble peace France had emerged 
 once more warlike and victorious, the leader of a crusade, 
 the champion of the Latin Church, the defender of the sacred 
 places of Palestine. The brilliance of the Imperial Court, 
 the sohcitude which the Emperor displayed for the con- 
 dition of the people, combined with the peace and order 
 which his government had secured, seemed to promise a 
 prolonged period of uncontested and beneficent rule. His 
 marriage with a beautiful Spanish lady had been welcome 
 to the Catholic party, and the birth of a son was an additional 
 touch to his prosperity. If Napoleon III had been content 
 to act upon the maxim which he enunciated at Bordeaux 
 and to keep the peace, it is probable that his dynasty might 
 still be reigning in France. Unfortunately for himself, he 
 was so far possessed of the Napoleonic tradition as to 
 desire to reverse the treaties of 1815 and to promote the 
 cause of nationalities. He told Lord Cowley early in his reign 
 that * he was determined not to fall as Louis Philippe had
 
 92 BONAPARTISM V 
 
 done by an ultra-pacific policy ; that he knew well that the 
 instincts of France were military and domineering, and that 
 he was resolved to gratify them '. Revolutionary schemes 
 of foreign poUcy floated like storm-driven clouds across the 
 surface of his unquiet spirit. Among Lord John Russell's 
 papers there is a document purporting to be a translation of 
 a series of questions issued by Napoleon III on the possibility 
 of a French expedition conquering and holding Australia. 
 He threw out hints to Spain, that he might view without 
 displeasure an invasion of Portugal, if Catalonia were ceded 
 to France. He pressed England not once but twice to 
 make the restoration of Poland a sine qua non of peace with 
 Russia. Against the advice of Thouvenel, his ambassador 
 at Constantinople, and despite the unconcealed opposition of 
 Persigny, his envoy in London, he pressed for the union of 
 Moldavia and Wallachia under a foreign prince, who might 
 shape an independent Roumanian nation. On a visit to 
 Osborne he took occasion to suggest to Prince Albert a vast 
 redistribution of power on the southern and eastern shores of 
 the Mediterranean. Spain might take Morocco, England 
 might annex Egypt, Austria might find compensation for 
 certain losses in Europe by the acquisition of part of Syria. 
 By a hint here and a hint there he sowed in the minds of the 
 diplomats of Europe the conviction that he was determined 
 to upset the map and enlarge the boundaries of France. 
 In his own cloudy intelligence there was always one burning 
 question, the liberation of Italy. The problem was fatally 
 bound up with the destinies of his house, for Italian policy 
 marked the first stage in the road which led to the cataclysm 
 of the Empire. 
 
 The Italian question was one of peculiar delicacy. The 
 unity of Italy demanded not only the expulsion of Austria 
 from Lombardy and Venice, but the expulsion of the 
 Bourbons from Naples and Sicily and the abohtion of the 
 temporal power of the Papacy. The question was intimately 
 bound up with French party feeling. The Radicals, led by 
 Prince Napoleon, the Emperor's nephew, were vehemently 
 attached to the cause of Itahan liberation, and were prepared,
 
 V BONAPARTISM 93 
 
 largely through the influence of Manin, and his friend Henri 
 Martin the historian, to accept hberation at the hands of 
 the Piedmontese monarchy. The Clericals, on the other 
 hand, would not hear of any interference with the papal 
 dominion, and, in deference to their -washes, Napoleon, when 
 President of the RepubUc, had dispatched a French force 
 to crush the Roman democracy, and to restore the Pope to 
 his former power. He could not, then, without contradicting 
 his earlier pohcy, consent to the evacuation of Rome by the 
 French troops who had been dispatched to defend the Pope 
 against the surging tide of Itahan democracy. Nor again 
 could the imperial government acquiesce in the expulsion of 
 the Bourbons from Naples without grave offence to the 
 Legitimist party, and Napoleon specially desired to seduce 
 the Legitimists from their allegiance to the white flag. The 
 problem, therefore, before the French Emperor was by no 
 means simple. He wished to expel Austria from North Italy, 
 to aggrandize Piedmont, and to indemnify France for her 
 assistance by the annexation of Savoy. But while throwing 
 this sop to the Nationalist and Radical parties of France, he 
 must take care not to offend the Clericals and Legitimists. 
 He conceived, therefore, of an Italy liberated from Austria 
 and constituted as a federation under the nominal suzerainty 
 of the Pope, an Italy containing as its main elements the 
 kingdom of Naples, the Papal States, and a Piedmont 
 stretching from the Alps to the Adriatic. It is significant 
 of his divided will that he retained Walewsky at the head of 
 his Foreign Office, though he knew him to be of the Clerical 
 persuasion and opposed to the advancement of Piedmont. 
 This was an idle dream. Napoleon underrated the strength 
 of the national feeling in Italy, and overrated the power of 
 France to contain it within bounds. His whole course of 
 action was calculated to secure for France the minimum of 
 advantage and for himself the maximum of odium. He 
 encouraged Count Cavour to lay before the Congress of Paris 
 in 1856 a reasoned statement of the abuses prevaihng in the 
 Papal States, with a view to exciting the indignation of 
 Europe against an indefensible anachronism. Then, two
 
 94 BONAPARTISM V 
 
 years later, meeting the great statesman very secretly at 
 Plombieres, he pledged himself to assist Piedmont if she 
 were attacked by Austria, and to extend her borders to the 
 Adriatic. The war broke out in 1859, and directly led to 
 the unification of Italy under Victor Emmanuel. 
 
 The land of Dante owes more than it is willing yet to ac- 
 knowledge to the Third Napoleon, He gave the shock which 
 set the revolutionary forces in motion ; he raised the wind 
 and reaped the whirlwind. The formation of a united Italian 
 kingdom was, as he bitterly confessed, no political gain to 
 France, but this was only one of the inconveniences which 
 resulted from his descent upon the Lombard plain. The 
 war had been vehemently opposed in his own family and at 
 his own council board. The Empress, with the fervour of 
 a Spanish Catholic, resisted an undertaking calculated to 
 humiliate the Pope ; while in the eyes of the official world 
 it was the height of imprudence to encourage the revolu- 
 tionary elements in Italy. England might afford to be 
 revolutionary abroad and conservative at home ; in France 
 such a combination was justly regarded as a dangerous 
 paradox. The Catholic soldiery distrusted the policy of 
 the enterprise. ' The descendants of Brennus,' observed 
 Merimee, ' are hardly in the humour to take the capital, even 
 if it were only guarded by their ancient enemies the geese,' 
 The French Emperor had succeeded in alienating everybody 
 and in creating round himself a deep atmosphere of distrust. 
 He had suddenly made peace with the Austrians when the 
 Piedmontese believed themselves to be on the brink of 
 a crowning triumph. He had first encouraged, then essayed 
 to damp the revolutionary movement in the Central Provinces. 
 Finally, as the price of his consent to their annexation, he 
 had exacted Nice and Savoy from Piedmont. Fiery was 
 the wrath, deep and legitimate the suspicion, with which 
 Italian patriots regarded his vacillating course. Excitement 
 recks not of perplexities, and Italy never trusted him again. 
 
 Even before the outbreak of the Italian war. Napoleon 
 had not altogether pleased the Clericals. He had declined 
 to relax the irksome tutelage of the Organic Articles ; the
 
 V BONAPARTISM 95 
 
 civil marriage was maintained ; nor would he permit to the 
 Catholics that measure of educational control for which their 
 political leaders were striving. But now he had completely 
 lost the clerical allegiance. He had permitted one of his 
 publicists to write against the temporal dominion of the 
 Pope ; he had sanctioned the incorporation of the Romagna, 
 which was one portion of that dominion, in the Italian king- 
 dom, and had permitted Edmond About to cover the papal 
 administration with his brilliant and pointed ridicule. The 
 conquest of Naples by Garibaldi, and the defeat of a papal 
 force led by a French officer at Castelfidardo, filled the 
 Catholic and royalist world with passionate indignation ; and 
 a new Vendee organized itself under the shadow of the 
 Vatican. And while he had thus lost the support of the 
 great conservative connexion in France, his diplomacy 
 had excited grave distrust among the Powers of Europe. 
 England sympathized with the cause of Italian liberation, 
 but could not forgive the exaction of Savoy and Nice as the 
 price of French assistance. Palmerston revised his favour- 
 able estimate, and discovered in Napoleon a profound and 
 inextinguishable desire to humiliate and punish this country ; 
 the Prince Consort was full of anxieties for the Rhine. The 
 extension of the French boundary to the Alps seemed to 
 betoken ulterior designs of the darkest nature. What if 
 the Emperor should be meditating the recovery of the 
 great ' natural ' frontier which the ambition of his uncle had 
 lost to France ? Every Radical orator under Louis Philippe 
 had clamoured for the reversal of the humiliating treaties 
 which the sovereigns of Europe had imposed upon the 
 restored monarchy of France. The man who had seized 
 Nice and Chambery would strike next at Antwerp. There 
 was good ground for suspicion. The Regent of Prussia, who 
 detested the Italian revolution, and had mobilized his army 
 in 1859, believed in French designs on Belgium and the 
 Rhine, and steadily pushed on his military preparations. 
 
 As the Italian war alienated the Clericals, so the treaty 
 of commerce with England in 1860 estranged the manufac- 
 turers. Napoleon had been convinced by the logic of free-
 
 96 BONAPARTISM V 
 
 trade economics, and believed that by a series of commercial 
 treaties he would be able to secure a great extension of 
 French industry and commerce. His motives, however, were 
 not purely scientific. He reckoned that a treaty with 
 England would tend to dispel any clouds of dissatisfaction 
 which might have collected over Savoy. He was aware 
 indeed that, with the exception of the wine-growers of the 
 South, industrial opinion was totally unprepared for such 
 a reduction of duties as that which was embodied in the 
 famous treaty of commerce which he drew up in concert 
 with Richard Cobden. Nevertheless he carried through 
 the negotiations secretly, swiftly, and in defiance of public 
 opinion. He knew that he wanted the goodwill of England, 
 and he believed that France would come to admit that 
 a lowering of the tariff wall between the two great countries 
 was all to her advantage. When Cobden told him of the 
 statue to Peel with its inscription, ' He bettered the lot of 
 the labouring and suffering classes by lowering the price 
 of the necessaries of life', the Emperor said that that was 
 the reward which he coveted most, but that unfortunately in 
 France they made revolutions and did not know how to 
 make reforms. 
 
 Having estranged the Clericals and the manufacturers. 
 Napoleon turned to the support of the Liberals. It had 
 been part of his original design to relax the tension of 
 despotism when his power was thoroughly established, and 
 by degrees to associate the representatives of the people in 
 the task of government ; and this idea was now commended 
 to him not only by his own failure of physical health, but 
 also by the desire of concihating an important body of 
 political opinion. 
 
 He had now undertaken two campaigns in Europe, as 
 well as minor expeditions to China and Syria, and was, 
 with part of his mind at least, prepared for a spell of 
 Olympian quiet. The chief military lesson of the Itahan war 
 had been the need for administrative decentralization, and 
 Marshal Randon, with the concurrence of the Emperor, 
 had plotted out a scheme somewhat on the plan from which
 
 V BONAPARTISM 97 
 
 Rood and Moltke derived such splendid results for Prussia. 
 But meanwhile, the finances of France had been gravely 
 embarrassed by the Crimean and Italian wars. Two miUiards 
 of francs had been added to the debt ; the deficit was 
 chronic and retrenchment imperative. Considerations of 
 economy had to be weighed against a project of military 
 reform which involved fresh outlays. Doubt and hesitation 
 began to invade the Emperor's mind. Could not the army 
 wait ? Was this scheme really urgent ? Would not fresh 
 military expenditure be construed as a menace to the peace 
 of Europe ? It was at this moment that the King of Prussia 
 had embarked upon a struggle with the Prussian chamber 
 over the very question of army reform ; and Napoleon, his 
 mind already filled with a preordained plan of gracious 
 concessions to the liberal spirit, had no desire to throw 
 a gratuitous apple of discord into the parliamentary arena. 
 He shrank from an unpleasant passage of arms with his 
 subjects. He had no Bismarck at his elbow to bid him 
 spurn the professors of economy and peace and freedom. 
 So putting aside the heroic but expensive measure which he 
 judged to be essential to military efficiency, he turned his 
 attention to the composition of a life of Julius Caesar, The 
 good tidings of this pacific employment would compose the 
 disquieted spirits in Europe, show that the imperial sword 
 was sheathed, and that the liberal reign had begun. 
 
 The book was to be a symptom of a new era. Napoleon 
 was serious in his belief that, having nursed the Empire 
 through the perils of childhood, he could afford to relax 
 his vigilance. By a scheme of gradual concessions he would 
 educate France in the right use of political liberty, let fresh 
 air into the Constitution, devolve and distribute the crushing 
 weight of parental responsibility. He would proceed 
 cautiously, watch the effect of his graduated bounty, enjoy 
 the harvest of confidence and popularity which ripens under 
 the sunshine of unsolicited generosity. The spectacle of 
 an autocrat spontaneously disarming would be a touching 
 demonstration of careless strength and liberal wisdom. 
 There was nothing in such a course incompatible with the
 
 08 BONAPARTISM V 
 
 root ideas of Bonapartism ; it had been foreshadowed in 
 the Additional Act, in the St. Helena conversations, in the 
 manual of Napoleonic ideas with which Louis Bonaparte 
 made his literary name. On the 22nd of November, 1860, 
 the imperial historian read a decree to his Cabinet and 
 Privy Council which altered the autocratic constitution of 
 1852 in certain material respects. The Senate and the 
 legislative body were permitted to vote and debate an 
 annual address in response to the speech from the throne, 
 and though responsible government was still withheld, it 
 was at least intended that the Chambers should know 
 what the Government was doing. By the Constitution of 
 1852, ministers of the Crown were excluded from the Cham- 
 bers. It was now provided that certain ministers without 
 portfolio should be charged with the duty of explaining 
 and defending the measures of the Government in the 
 legislature. Finally, the publication of full shorthand 
 reports of Parhamentary debates was sanctioned. By these 
 concessions the Emperor revived Parliamentary life in 
 France. He invited the Chambers every year to traverse 
 the whole surface of Imperial policy, permitted a running 
 criticism of the executive, and enormously increased the 
 power of the Opposition in the country by allowing parlia- 
 mentary oratory to be fuUy reported. 
 
 At the beginning of the Empire Guizot had prophesied 
 that it would soon lose its influence over the intellectual 
 classes in France. Writing to Reeve on the 25th of December, 
 1851, he says : ' The upper classes who are interested in 
 politics. Legitimists, Orleanists, or Republicans, will not op- 
 pose the Empire now, because they fear Socialism and the 
 Jacquerie. But that will pass away, and then the recollection 
 of affronts received, of liberty lost, ill-will and disdain, and 
 party spirit, everything which renders the upper classes 
 ungovernable, will reappear '. This prophecy was now about 
 to be fulfilled. During the first years of the Empire the 
 undoubted services rendered by the Government, its suppres- 
 sion of anarchy, the glory which it had achieved in the 
 Crimean war, and the expansion of industry and commerce
 
 V BONAPARTISM 99 
 
 which had followed as the result not only of increased 
 security, but also of the improvement in the railway system, 
 the steamship service, and the mechanism of credit, had 
 silenced the voice of detraction. But now, when the 
 Emperor was busy over the excavation of Alesia, and dis- 
 cussing minute points of antiquarianism with learned men, 
 the storm began to beat up against the fabric which seemed 
 so imposing. The Orleanists did not forgive the decree 
 which had confiscated the private estates of the Orleanist 
 princes ; the Legitimists were full of passionate anger at the 
 expulsion of the Bourbon house from Naples ; Liberal 
 Catholics like Dupanloup combined with narrow ultra- 
 montanes Hke Pie, Bishop of Poictiers, to denounce the 
 Emperor in pamphlets and episcopal charges ; while a Liberal 
 opposition in the legislative chamber was now invited to 
 criticize the unsatisfactory finances, and to clamour for a 
 larger measure of pubUc liberty and public control than 
 that which the Emperor had accorded. The story of the 
 Empire during its last decade is a story of continuous 
 decline, of unwise and ruinous diplomacy, of increasing 
 feebleness in domestic policy, and of a series of concessions 
 to the Liberals which had the effect of exposing its own fatal 
 weaknesses to the unfriendly eye of a critical and restless 
 nation. 
 
 02
 
 VI 
 
 The Italian War was the turning-point in the history 
 of the Second Empire. Up to 1860 everything seemed to 
 have succeeded with the man who twelve years before 
 could not boast of fifty acquaintances in France. But now 
 the sky was overcast. The Emperor had wished to drive 
 the Austrians out of Italy, and the white-coats were still en- 
 camped in Venice ; he had striven to prevent the absorption 
 of the central ItaUan states in the Piedmontese monarchy, 
 only to find that his efforts were powerless. It was in vain 
 that he had tried to prevent Garibaldi from quitting Sicily, 
 in vain that a French fleet had been dispatched to the 
 harbour of Gaeta to protect the Bourbon King of Naples ; 
 Garibaldi had crossed the Straits of Messina, and the French 
 sailors had been compelled to act as passive spectators 
 during the last scene in the squalid tragedy of the Neapolitan 
 Bourbons. Having obtained power with the aid of the 
 Catholic suffrage, the Emperor of the French had posed 
 as the protector of the papal interests. All the papal 
 territory save the patrimony of St. Peter had been incor- 
 porated in the new kingdom of Italy. It is true that 
 a French force still guarded the city of Rome, but would 
 a man whose diplomatic course had been marked by so 
 many surrenders, refrain at the call of policy from making 
 one more final surrender to the spirit of the Italian Revolu- 
 tion ? The diplomacy of Napoleon had been woven without 
 the knowledge and against the judgement of the men who 
 were officially responsible for the conduct of French foreign 
 affairs. It pleased nobody. In the eyes of the Radicals he 
 had not gone far enough. In the eyes of the Clericals and 
 Royalists he had gone much too far. 
 
 The decree of November 24, 1860, opened the floodgates 
 of Parliamentary debate by permitting the discussion of the 
 address. Italy became at once the burning question of the
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 101 
 
 day. ' To follow the discussions of the legislative body,' 
 says OUivier, the leader of the Opposition, ' one would 
 beheve there was no other question in the world but Italy.' 
 The Liberals placed upon their programme the withdrawal 
 of the French troops from Rome, and argued that Italy was 
 the natural ally of France, that Italian unity should be 
 accepted without apprehension or reserve, and that the 
 necessary corollary of Italian unity was that Rome should 
 be the political capital of the new kingdom. The Conser- 
 vatives replied that the real ally of France was not Italy 
 but Austria, that Italian unity had been effected by a course 
 of cynical guile and broken faith and revolutionary violence. 
 In the great and passionate discussions all the old hatreds 
 of France blazed up again. It was a contest between the 
 men of the French Revolution and the men of the Ancien 
 Regime. ' We know you,' cried Jules Favre, the Radical 
 barrister, to Keller the eloquent champion of the Catholic 
 cause, ' your fathers were at Quiberon, ours were at Waterloo.' 
 Meanwhile another question had arisen, which proved to 
 be fraught with great calamity to the Empire. This was the 
 question of Mexico. The idea of recovering in the Far West 
 some part of the political influence which had been lost to 
 France during the Seven Years' War had entered into the 
 combinations of the Great Napoleon. Finding it necessary 
 after the peace of Amiens to acquiesce, at least for a time, 
 in the loss of Egypt, the First Consul had plotted a vast 
 scheme of compensation on the other side of the Atlantic. 
 A French expedition was sent to break the black power in 
 San Domingo, Louisiana was acquired by purchase from 
 Spain, and negotiations were begun with a view to the 
 acquisition of the Floridas. French officers began to gossip 
 in the mess-room of an expedition up the Mississippi from 
 St. Louis, and of how a French attack launched from the 
 great lakes might drive the English out of Canada and 
 undo the work of Chatham and Wolfe. All this scheming 
 came to nothing, for war broke out on the Continent, and the 
 waterways of the Atlantic were barred by the English navy. 
 Louisiana was hastily sold to the United States, the negotia- 
 
 UNIVER-SITY OF CALlF(^R>ilA 
 .^ A u ^ p u A R A CJOLLEGB LIBEARY
 
 102 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 tion for the Floridas was dropped, and the dream of a 
 French empire in the West had to be indefinitely postponed. 
 
 The attention of Louis Bonaparte had been attracted to 
 the Latin States of America by an offer of the presidentship 
 of Ecuador, which reached him during his imprisonment 
 in the fortress of Ham, and had stimulated the preparation 
 of a pamphlet upon the advantages of a Nicaraguan canal. 
 The scheme for a canal faded away, but the dream of 
 opposing some barrier to the progress of Anglo-Saxon 
 Protestantism in the western hemisphere continued to 
 haunt Napoleon's mind ; and in the troubled condition of 
 Mexico he discovered a pretext for intervention, a hope of 
 aggrandizement, and a prospect of appeasing the Catholic 
 resentments which had been stirred up by his recognition of 
 the Kingdom of Italy. 
 
 Mexico, after achieving its independence in 1821, had 
 been the prey of chronic disturbance. It had waged an 
 unsuccessful war with the United States in 1848, and in 
 1857 it was divided between two contending parties, one 
 clerical and conservative, led by Miramon ; the other anti- 
 clerical and liberal, led by a very remarkable Indian, Benito 
 Juarez. Juarez was sober, disinterested, incorruptible, but 
 he had deeply offended the Catholic party by confiscating 
 the property of the Church, by decreeing civil marriage, and 
 by suppressing the religious congregations. There can be 
 little doubt that he represented the will, not only of the 
 six million Indians, who formed two-thirds of the Mexican 
 population, but also of a considerable section of the more 
 enlightened Creoles. In Spain, however, and in France, it 
 was represented by the envoys of Miramon, and in particular 
 by a certain General Almonte, that Mexican society was 
 monarchical in law and religion, in habits and ideas. It 
 was pointed out with no little verisimilitude that a Latin 
 country educated in the Spanish tradition could not in so 
 short a space of time have discarded all the influences of 
 her early training, and that while the object of Juarez was 
 to assimilate Mexico to the United States, it was the aim of 
 American diplomacy to keep Mexico in a state of weakness,
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 103 
 
 turbulence, and division, until the moment should have 
 arrived when it might safely be brought under the Stars and 
 Stripes. An opportunity had fortunately presented itself 
 of spoiling the illegitimate ambitions of the Anglo-Saxon 
 heretics. The Americans were involved in a civil war and 
 would be powerless to interfere. It would be possible, there- 
 fore, to found in Mexico a Roman Cathohc monarchy which 
 should shield the interests of the Latin and Catholic world 
 in the West from Teutonic aggression. Such a monarchy 
 would protect Cuba, the PhiHppines, and the Antilles, would 
 gratify the French and Itahan Clericals, and maintain the 
 balance of power in the world. 
 
 The Empress Eugenie was a Spaniard, and listened with 
 wilHng ears to the romantic project. Visions of wonderful 
 gold-mines in the wastes of the Sonora fired the brain of 
 the poet Lamartine, and other men of baser clay, who were 
 not poets, saw in the embarrassments of a feeble govern- 
 ment the prospect of pecuniary advantage. A Swiss banker, 
 by name Jecker, had speculated in the fortunes of Miramon 
 by the advance of seven miUion francs at a usurious rate, 
 and Morny, the Emperor's half-brother, was promised thirty 
 per cent, of the takings, if the French government should help 
 the foreign money-lender to wring his debt out of the Mexicans. 
 
 The financial embarrassments of the Mexican government 
 provided a reasonable pretext for interference. In Septem- 
 ber, 1860, a consignment of silver, chiefly the property of 
 British subjects, was seized on its way to the coast by order 
 of Juarez, and two months later a force under Miramon 's 
 direction appropriated some funds which were deposited in 
 a warehouse belonging to the British Embassy. Both parties 
 pleaded necessity, and each party protested that he would 
 make repayment as soon as he had conquered the country. 
 At the beginning of 1861 Juarez obtained a decisive victory 
 over his opponent, but nevertheless repayment was not 
 made. Faced by grave financial embarrassment, a Mexican 
 congress in July, 1861, voted a law suspending for two 
 years the payment of the foreign debt. 
 
 The country which was most concerned in the solvency
 
 104 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 of Mexico was England, and the English government 
 determined to take measures to protect the interest of its 
 creditors. Accordingly, on October 3, 1861, a convention 
 was signed in London between Great Britain, France, and 
 Spain, by which it was arranged that contingents should be 
 sent to Mexico with instructions to occupy certain positions 
 on the coast, to protect the foreign residents in the country 
 and to enforce the just claims of the foreign creditors. 
 The three Powers, in other words, had combined to concert 
 a debt-collecting expedition to Mexico, and it would have 
 been well for France if she had confined her energies to 
 the collection of debts. 
 
 It soon became apparent that the three signatories to 
 the convention were animated by divergent aims. England 
 was prudent enough to recognize that it was not her busi- 
 ness to make war in Mexico, to alter the form of the Mexican 
 government, or to regenerate the morals of the Mexican 
 people. She was aware that the United States of America 
 entertained a strong objection to the political interference 
 of European nations in the American continent, and she 
 had no desire to challenge the attachment of the American 
 people to the Monroe doctrine. Spain was more closely 
 interested in the fate of Mexico, but jealous of France and 
 unwilling to take a large military risk for a difficult and 
 doubtful object. Napoleon alone was determined that the 
 expedition should lead to the foundation of a Mexican 
 Empire under French influence. 
 
 Mexico is a country of 750,000 square miles separated 
 from France by 5,000 miles of ocean, and specially pro- 
 tected from hostile attack by a belt of malarious country 
 lying between the ports of arrival and the highlands of 
 the interior. To one who scanned the map there was 
 clearly a prospect of much rude, perplexed, and scattered 
 fighting, not to speak of wastage by disease, if the Mexicans 
 should prove so perverse as to prefer material progress to 
 the restoration of priestly control. The faintest exercise 
 of political judgement should have informed Napoleon that 
 his design would certainly encounter a firm resistance from
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 105 
 
 America, and that its success would entirely depend upon 
 the condition of the public mind in Mexico, as to which 
 he was imperfectly informed. Considerations of prudence, 
 however, weighed light in the balance against the magical 
 pohcy out of which, as from a fairy hoard, an emperor 
 was to be given to Mexico, a brilliant lustre to be conferred 
 on French arms, a timely rebuff administered to the Yankee, 
 and the Pope cured of his ill humour ; not to speak of 
 those fabled gold-mines in the romantic wastes of the 
 Sonora, and other little speculations which it is not necessary 
 to enumerate. General Almonte was sent over to Mexico 
 to prepare the way for a fresh revolution, and the appear- 
 ance of this avowed Monarchist in the French camp was 
 a sign that the Emperor was bent on hostiHties. The 
 commanders of the EngHsh and Spanish contingents refused 
 to be accomplices in this new development of policy. They 
 had been sent across the ocean to collect debts, not to 
 overturn the political situation in Mexico. They had 
 signed a convention with Juarez, had recognized his govern- 
 ment, and they saw that the French pecuniary claims were 
 framed to drive him not to solvency but to desperation. 
 They withdrew their forces, leaving six thousand French 
 troops to carry out a task the vast proportions of which 
 were as yet but dimly discerned. In the Boulevards of 
 Paris the wits spoke of ' Duke Jecker's war ' ; and indeed 
 there was something of high comedy in the suggestion 
 that the governor of a state should be compelled to pay 
 the bill for the guns and cartridges which had been used 
 against him in a civil war. But there was little comedy 
 in the heart of the affair. The opening event of the Mexican 
 campaign was a resounding defeat of the hitherto unvan- 
 quished imperial army. On May 4, 18G1, a French force 
 attacking the fortified town of Puebla was decimated by 
 its Mexican defenders. It was the first note of warning, 
 the Baylen of the Second Empire. 
 
 The news of this catastrophe spurred Napoleon to fresh 
 efforts. A force of 23,000 men was sent across the 
 Atlantic, and a few brilhant actions resulted in the capture
 
 106 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 of Puebla and the city of Mexico. To sanguine minds 
 it seemed as if the task was already half accomplished 
 and success secure. A provisional government was set 
 up with General Almonte at its head, and on July 10, 
 1863, an assembly of 215 Mexican notables, all of the 
 proper political complexion, invited the Austrian arch- 
 duke Maximilian to assume the Mexican Crown. The 
 invitation was not spontaneous, and the choice of the 
 Mexican congress, like that of an English Chapter, was 
 guided from above. Maximilian was the brother of Francis 
 Joseph of Austria, and the husband of Charlotte, daughter 
 of Leopold, King of the Belgians. He was tall and hand- 
 some, full of ambition and energy, and had earned the 
 name of Hberality as a proconsul in Lombardy while Milan 
 was still an Austrian capital. In every respect he seemed 
 to Napoleon to be the right man for Mexico, and to provide 
 an unexpected and happy issue out of many European 
 perplexities. The choice of a Habsburg prince would please 
 the Catholic world, which had found in the French expedi- 
 tions to China and Syria no adequate compensation for 
 the support which had been given to the sacrilegious govern- 
 ment of Piedmont. The goodwill of England was valuable, 
 and Maximilian's father-in-law was the trusted friend of 
 Queen Victoria. Most important of all, the choice of a 
 Habsburg archduke would tend to conciliate Austria, and 
 Napoleon needed Austrian friendship. A plan was forming 
 in his mind by which, in return for Eastern compensations, 
 Venice might be ceded to the clamorous patriots of Italy. 
 
 From the very first the Mexican enterprise had aroused 
 deep misgivings in the French chamber. ' If we go to 
 Mexico,' said Jubinal, a supporter of the Government, 'to 
 impose a form of polity on an independent nation, what 
 becomes of the grand principle of non-intervention ? What 
 right have we to attack a poor little people beyond the sea, 
 among whom we seem to hear the distant echo of those 
 principles which have founded our great nation ? ' It was 
 pointed out that the cost of the expedition would far exceed 
 the amount of the debt, and that Juarez did not refuse
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 107 
 
 payment, but had merely asked for delay. A weighty 
 warning came in March, 1862, from the general who had 
 commanded the Spanish contingent. Prim assured Napoleon 
 that he knew Mexico well, that there was very little 
 monarchical sentiment in the country, and that although 
 it would be easy to conduct Maximilian to the capital and 
 to crown him emperor, he would find no support in the 
 native population, and would be helpless as soon as the 
 French army should leave the country. 
 
 This prediction was exactly reahzed. On his arrival in 
 Mexico in May, 1864, Maximilian experienced nothing but 
 a series of bitter disappointments. He had been told that 
 the country was pacified ; he discovered that there were 
 two centres of rebeUion, one in the north under Juarez, 
 another in the south under Porfirio Diaz, and that the 
 French army, though brave and efficient, was unable to 
 police more than a small area in the country. He had 
 hoped to find administrative order, he discovered chaos and 
 confusion. His treasury was empty, and until the last 
 embers of resistance had burned themselves out it would 
 be impossible to collect a sufficient revenue to meet the 
 current expenditure. He was compelled, therefore, to live 
 upon loans and subsidies from France, and to hope that 
 in time his uncertain native troops might be drilled into 
 an efficient army. Perceiving that the Clericals were in- 
 capable, and finding that the restoration of church lands 
 would add to the financial confusion of the country, he 
 attempted to form a Liberal administration. In so doing, 
 he lost the support of the Church without obtaining the 
 goodwill of the Liberal party. At last, in 1865, with the 
 end of the American Civil War, Franco received the warning 
 which the exercise of ordinary political forethought might 
 have expected from the first. She was informed in plain 
 language from Washington that the French troops must 
 be withdrawn. Napoleon replied that he was willing to 
 evacuate the country if the Federal Government would 
 consent to recognize Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico. 
 The request was refused. Secretary Seward bluntly in-
 
 108 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 formed the French that they must quit the country and 
 that the United States would never recognize a governor 
 who had been imposed upon the people of Mexico against 
 their will. 
 
 Then came the final tragedy. The French troops em- 
 barked, and Maximilian, acting partly on the advice of 
 Marshal Bazaine and partly on counsels from Vienna, 
 determined to remain. He was alone, for his wife had left 
 him to beg for aid among the European courts. He had 
 incurred the vehement hostility of the Republicans by an 
 ill-judged enforcement of martial law, and was soon to 
 discover the bitter truth which Bazaine had carefully 
 shrouded from his eyes, that the whole country was against 
 him. At Queretaro, after standing a brief siege, he was 
 betrayed into the hands of his enemies, condemned by 
 court martial, and shot. His wife, the Empress Charlotte, 
 had been spared the news of this calamity. Rebuffed by 
 Napoleon, and learning that no help was to be expected 
 from Belgium or from Austria, she lost the balance of 
 her reason in the palace of the Vatican. She had gone 
 to Rome to entreat the Pope to reconcile the Mexican 
 clergy to the Empire ; and in all history there is no more 
 striking example of retribution than the collapse of this 
 poor suppliant in the Vatican, a visible symbol of the 
 tragical policy of unwisdom which the Vatican had com- 
 mended and pursued. The Mexican catastrophe made 
 a profound impression upon the mind of France. The 
 country had squandered men and money upon a fantastic 
 enterprise and had been ordered out of Mexico by the 
 United States. She had invited a foreign prince to under- 
 take an impossible task, and then, at the call of her own 
 convenience, had left him to die like a dog. The speakers 
 for the Government threw the blame of the disaster upon 
 Marshal Bazaine, the French commander, who had repre- 
 sented that all was well, and by whose counsels Maximilian 
 had waited behind ; the Opposition retorted that if Bazaine 
 had been fully trusted the Empire of Mexico would have 
 been saved. The name of this arrogant and stupid soldier
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 109 
 
 became one of the war-cries of party, and among the mis- 
 fortunes which followed from the Mexican expedition there 
 was perhaps none graver than the spurious reputation 
 which the rhetoric of the opposition press and of the opposi- 
 tion deputies conferred upon the man whose treachery and 
 ineptitude lost the great army of Metz in the Franco- 
 Prussian war. 
 
 The Mexican adventure was not the only disaster which 
 had befallen French diplomacy. It had been part of the 
 imperial tradition to sympathize with the cause of Polish 
 nationahty, and in 1831 Louis Napoleon had considered, 
 and only under family directions consented to decline, a 
 proposal to put himself at the head of the Polish rising. 
 When, therefore, in 1863 the woes of Poland were again 
 pressed upon the notice of the world, Napoleon felt bound 
 to take strenuous action. ' I have changed my views 
 on many points,' said he, ' but I think on Poland as I 
 thought in 1831.' Feeling in Paris was deeply stirred. The 
 Conservatives defended the Polish insurrection because it 
 was led by nobles, the Catholics because it was favoured 
 by priests, the Revolutionaries because it was a revolution. 
 Nothing could have done more to retrieve the waning 
 popularity of the Second Empire than a chivalrous war on 
 behalf of Poland. Nor could anything be more calculated 
 to damage its reputation than a failure to obtain from the 
 Court of the Tsar any concessions to the Polish claims. 
 Yet a war was quite out of the question. Neither England 
 nor Austria was in the Quixotic mood, as the Tsar well knew, 
 and France could not go into the quarrel single-handed. 
 It was in vain that Napoleon attempted to bring moral 
 pressure to bear upon Russia through the collective action 
 of England, Austria, and France, that he imparted to 
 Austria a scheme by which, in exchange for the cession of 
 Gallicia, she should receive Silesia from Prussia, who might 
 be compensated by a serious reform of the German Con- 
 federation. He only earned the deep indignation of the 
 Russian Emperor. Alexander intended to manage his own 
 affairs, and had secured himself by a military convention
 
 110 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 signed with Prussia. A new man had risen above the 
 horizon of European pohtics, a rough Pomeranian squire, 
 who after serving in some diplomatic posts had now become 
 the head of the Prussian Cabinet. The Russo-Prussian 
 convention was the work of Otto von Bismarck, and the 
 first of a long series of diplomatic triumphs. It was a 
 measure of far-reaching importance, for it secured Prussia 
 from Muscovite interference during the great task which 
 lay before her. 
 
 Napoleon had helped Italy to become a nation without 
 apparently perceiving that another power in Europe might 
 wish to become a nation as well. Germany had not for- 
 gotten the war of liberation in 1813, or the great national 
 movement of 1848, when, by one of the chief calamities of 
 modern history, she had failed to unify herself on liberal 
 lines, largely owing to the refusal of the King of Prussia 
 to accept the imperial crown from a parliament at Frank- 
 fort. But the movement towards national unity had only 
 been temporarily checked. Bismarck, who in the wonder- 
 ful year of revolutions had opposed the Pan-German Liberals 
 because their scheme seemed to him to be fraught with 
 danger to the Prussian monarchy, had learnt, as Prussian 
 delegate to the diet at Frankfort, that Austria must be 
 eliminated from the German system, not by persuasion but 
 by blood and iron. The movement must come not from 
 the centre or the south, but from Prussia. It must be 
 achieved not by talk but by deeds, not by ideals but by 
 arms ; it must be led by the Prussian monarchy ; its 
 instrument of success must be the Prussian army, and its 
 end the unification of the German state under Prussian 
 control. It was first necessary to quarrel with Austria, 
 and in the question of the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein 
 Bismarck discovered the pretext for an Austrian war. 
 
 The French Emperor had no clear idea either of the 
 significance of the Schleswig-Holstein question or of the 
 drift of affairs in Germany. He believed that Prussia was 
 his friend, and that in the event of a war between Prussia 
 and Austria, France would be able to step in to rectify her
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 111 
 
 own defective frontiers and to claim Venetia for Italy. 
 Even should Prussia succeed in driving Austria from 
 Germany and in founding a North ^Jerman confederation, 
 the balance of power would, in his judgement, have been 
 readjusted in a manner favourable to France. Instead of 
 one great federal state of 75,000,000 inhabitants, stretching 
 from Roumania to the Rhine, he would be confronted with 
 three states, one of which might be detached and bound to 
 the chariot of France. Napoleon the First had made 
 a Rhenish confederation and had experienced the loyalty of 
 the South German states. His nephew, remembering this 
 example, was impressed by the belief that a South German 
 federation would lean upon the support of France. It was 
 part of his philosophy of history to anticipate the growth 
 of large national aggregates, part of his fatalism to regard 
 himself as an instrument designed by Providence to forward 
 the process, part of his self -approval that, having adopted 
 the principle of nationalities in Italy, he should continue to 
 give it effect all over the world. When England pressed him 
 to intervene on behalf of Denmark in the Schleswig-Holstein 
 question, he answered with an uncertain sound. First he 
 would not, then he would ; ultimately he acquiesced in the 
 Prussian triumph. To Italy, debating whether she should 
 accept the proffered friendship of Prussia, he gave counsel 
 that it would be well to arm. He saw nothing but profit 
 to France in a joint attack of Prussia and Italy upon the 
 house of Habsburg. * The ghost of Venice,' to borrow the 
 phrase of an Italian diplomat, * was wandering about the 
 corridors of the Tuileries.' Napoleon realized the difficulties 
 which beset the young Italian kingdom, he knew that all 
 the forward spirits in Italy, led by Garibaldi and Mazzini, 
 were pressing forward for Venice and Rome. He saw that 
 there would be no rest in the land till the tricolour waved 
 over the lagoons, and with that curious vein of obstinate 
 persistence which shot through all his many vacillations, 
 he determined to help the young Italian kingdom to obtain 
 Venetia. He felt this course to be all the more incumbent 
 upon him since he, a CathoUc sovereign, could never concede
 
 112 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 upon the point of Rome. Yet some means must be found 
 to settle the Roman question. Diplomacy discovered, not 
 a remedy, but a palliative. A convention was struck with 
 Italy in September, 1864, which arranged that the French 
 troops should retire from Rome within two years, that the 
 King of Italy should protect the Roman patrimony against 
 republican incursions, and that the capital of the Italian 
 kingdom should be removed from Turin to Florence, a 
 pledge that it should not be moved further south still, and 
 a sedative to Clerical nerves. The convention satisfied 
 nobody. The Catholics cried out that the Pope was aban- 
 doned, the Republicans that the honour of Italy was sold, 
 and both parties gathered themselves together to renew the 
 strife. The Pope declined to recognize the convention, 
 and issued a syllabus protesting against all the poHtical 
 ideas of nineteenth-century Liberalism. The Emperor pro- 
 hibited the pubUcation of the syllabus ; the situation 
 became more and more tense, both in Italy and in France, 
 but if the Hapsburgs could be made to cede Venice, then 
 perchance the air might cool. 
 
 Bismarck saw the value of Italy. 'If Italy did not exist,' 
 he said, ' it would be necessary to invent it.' He knew 
 Napoleon, divined his cloudy ambitions, and in the October 
 of 1865 came expressly to Biarritz to sound his mind and 
 to secure his neutrality. With the frank, spontaneous 
 charm which made him so dangerous an antagonist, the 
 genial diplomatist unveiled in a series of informal conversa- 
 tions the seductions of the Prussian alliance. Prussia 
 wanted to fortify her position in Germany at the expense 
 of Austria. Of course, if France would permit her to do so, 
 France should find it to her advantage. She might take 
 Belgium, or a piece on the Rhine, or Luxemburg. Suum 
 cuique was the device of the HohenzoUerns. Nothing was 
 put upon paper ; no pledges were exchanged. The French 
 foreign minister mocked at the indiscretions of this Teutonic 
 Gascon ; but Bismarck saw that the seed sown from a full 
 sack had fallen on fruitful soil. He knew that the Emperor 
 was open to temptation, and that, as Piedmont had bought
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 113 
 
 him with Savoy, so Prussia might buy him again with some- 
 thing else. All that Bismarck touched turned to gold. He 
 gained the Italian Alliance, fended off Russia, forced on 
 a war with Austria, and beat his antagonist in a campaign 
 of seven weeks. 
 
 The wonderful victory of Sadowa fell like a thunderbolt 
 on the political world in Paris. Napoleon had expected a 
 long war, a hard war, a war which would exhaust all three 
 combatants and result in an immense accession of strength 
 to France. He had pictured himself intervening in a late 
 stage of the hard-fought struggle with a kind of Olympian 
 benevolence, and dictating the terms of a European peace. 
 He would give Venice to Italy and wipe out the memories 
 of ViUa Franca and Chambery ; he would take Belgium or 
 Luxemburg for himself, and thereby efface Waterloo and 
 the humiliating treaties of 1815. He knew how well the 
 Austrians had fought at Magenta and Solferino. Who could 
 have thought that a single battle would place the whole 
 empire of the Habsburgs at the feet of Prussia ? The event 
 was so sudden that it found him utterly unprepared. We 
 should not blame him too severely. Prince Hohenlohe, 
 the Bavarian statesman, was equally disconcerted in his 
 prognostics. 
 
 One course promised success. If, while the Prussian 
 armies were still in Bohemia, France should mobilize an 
 army corps, she would be able in all probability to force 
 Bismarck to accept her terms, and might obtain territorial 
 compensation to balance the augmented strength of Prussia 
 and to pacify the jealous feeling at home. The question 
 was debated in the council, but Mexico had drained away 
 men and money, and the Emperor, who was suffering from 
 a painful attack of his distressing malady, allowed himself 
 to be dissuaded from the energetic course. Instead of 
 mobilizing an army, he sent an ambassador. He did enough 
 to show Bismarck his ill-will, and too little to influence the 
 terms of the treaty. The result of this mismanagement was, 
 that while Prussia annexed all Germany north of the Main, 
 and Venetia was ceded to Italy, France went empty-handed. 
 
 FISHUB H
 
 114 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 A cry of rage and jealousy rose up in the country. * It is 
 France which has been conquered at Sadowa,' said Marshal 
 Randon. ' It is a misfortune,' cried Thiers, ' such as France 
 has not experienced for four hundred years.' The opposition 
 press painted in sombre colours a France humiliated, power- 
 less, and degraded, and even the most prudent of the Em- 
 peror's councillors advised that concessions should be made 
 to the state of public feeling. ' National sentiment,' wrote 
 Magne to Napoleon, July 20, 1866, ' would be profoundly 
 wounded if at the end of the account France had obtained 
 nothing from her intervention but to have attached to her 
 flanks two dangerous enemies with their power enormously 
 increased.' It was on all hands admitted that a war would 
 be impolitic, but even Prince Napoleon the Nationalist 
 advised the search for compensations. It was expected 
 that the gratitude of Prussia for the neutrality of France 
 would come to the rescue of her embarrassed government. 
 No expectations could have been more futile, no worse 
 advice could have been given or accepted. Compensations 
 might be obtained in one way and in one way only, at the 
 point of the sword. To seek them at all was, indeed, as 
 Ollivier puts it, * blasphemy against the principle of nationali- 
 ties ' ; but in this desperate hour Napoleon was persuaded 
 against his better judgement thus to blaspheme. First he 
 asked for the Rhenish Palatinate and Hesse, then for 
 Belgium, then for Luxemburg. The request for South 
 German territory was communicated by Bismarck in 1870 
 to the public Press, and spread a wild feeling of indignation 
 against the French. By an astute piece of diplomacy, 
 Benedetti, the French ambassador in Berlin, was persuaded 
 to copy out in his own hand a draft secret treaty containing 
 among other provisions the stipulation that France should 
 be permitted to seize Belgium. The treaty was shown to 
 the Bavarian prime minister in October, 1866, and quickened 
 the conclusion of an offensive and defensive treaty between 
 Bavaria and Prussia. Nor did this exhaust its utility. 
 When war broke out in 1870, it was published to the world 
 as evidence of the criminal ambitions of the French and
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 115 
 
 with a view to turning the current of English feeUng against 
 the plotter in the Tuileries. 
 
 In the exasperated state of French opinion any spark 
 might light a conflagration. Thiers had openly pronounced 
 in the Sadowa debates that if Prussia crossed the Main 
 France should draw the sword to prevent the unity of 
 Germany. A strong hand and a clear brain were needed 
 to cope with the situation. Prussia had created her vic- 
 torious army in the teeth of the popular chamber and in 
 defiance of constitutional forms, and what autocracy had 
 done in Prussia autocracy might do in France. But in 1868 
 the power of Napoleon was neither autocratic nor uncon- 
 tested. Ever since the first concessions of 1860, he had 
 gone upon the principle of admitting the legislative chambers 
 to a larger and larger share of influence in the government. 
 In November, 1860, the Corps Legislatif was given the right 
 to criticize the imperial poUcy ; then in December, 1861, to 
 discuss, and if necessary to reject, the items of the budget ; 
 then in January, 1867, the right of questioning the ministers 
 who might be commissioned by the Emperor to take part 
 in particular debates. In the following year many of the 
 restrictions upon the Press were removed, and the Govern- 
 ment became the object of much brilliant, coarse, and 
 imaginative defamation. Meanwhile, the parliamentary 
 opposition had steadily grown in strength. In the days of 
 the autocracy five members alone, the representatives of 
 Lyons and of Paris, had had the courage to oppose the 
 Man of December. In 1863 the opposition numbered 35, 
 in 1869 it had swollen to 100, and, despite all the government 
 pressure, had polled half the electorate of France. It was 
 a bitter, passionate, jealous opposition. Part of it, led by 
 OUivier, believed in a future for the Liberal Empire ; part 
 were determined to wreck the dynasty. All the young men 
 of promise belonged to it, and all the leaders of the broken 
 causes. It could count on the exuberant southern genius 
 of Thiers, on the plausible and fluent oratory of Favre, on 
 the acute and vigilant intelligence of Jules Simon. The 
 Empire, indeed, had enlisted the service of some able men 
 
 H 2
 
 116 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 of the second class, notably Rouher, Billault, and Fould the 
 Jew financier. But it is the Nemesis of despotism that it 
 trains bureaucrats rather than statesmen, and that young 
 talent is not attracted to its service. Youth follows the 
 magnet of the future, and the future appeared in the guise 
 of Liberalism. The programme of the Liberals was seductive 
 in its sweep and simplicity. They claimed liberty in its 
 largest sense — liberty of elections, of public meetings, of 
 the Press, of the municipalities, and the repeal of all excep- 
 tional legislation against personal freedom. They demanded 
 that the popular chamber should exercise a real control 
 over the budget, that the legislature should be chosen by 
 the people, and not by the prefects. In the end they obtained 
 the substance of their desire, but long before the end came 
 pure autocracy was a thing of the past. A request for fresh 
 loans and for the sale of the state forests had been refused 
 in 1865, and every item of military expenditure was jealously 
 challenged. It may be urged that the Chamber had every 
 right to be scrupulous. The Government had an unclean 
 financial conscience. Millions had been poured out on the 
 luxuries of the imperial court, on establishments for the 
 imperial relations, on bribing the Press and manipulating 
 the elections and subsidizing the favourites. In 1868 Thiers 
 showed that the Empire had incurred an annual floating 
 debt of 270,000,000 francs, and Rouher confessed that loans 
 amounting to 450,000,000 francs had been secretly raised by 
 the Government without consulting the legislature. A fit of 
 financial nervousness seized the country, similar to that great 
 paroxysm of anxiety which shook France from end to end 
 in 1789. It was fatal to a grand scheme of military reform. 
 In 1866 the Chambers threw out a plan for universal military 
 service, and three years later they refused an appropriation 
 for the garde mobile, and helped to compromise the success 
 of the only scheme of army reform which was before the 
 country. The plan was far from perfect ; it made no 
 improvements in armament and mobilization, but it was all 
 that the military advisers of Napoleon had to offer, and if war 
 was really regarded as a probable contingency the Govern-
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 117 
 
 ment should have used every weapon in their armoury 
 rather than permit any part of this plan to miscarry. 
 
 Meanwhile a new enemy had appeared upon the field. 
 The Socialists had been crushed by the fusillades of 1848 
 and the great proscription of 1852 ; but so long as there is 
 a sharp division between capital and labour, Sociahsm will 
 continue to appeal to the working classes. The Empire 
 bestowed great material benefits on France : it doubled the 
 output of wealth, covered the country with a network of 
 railways, more than quintupled the steam force utilized by 
 industry, and stimulated the application of scientific know- 
 ledge to industrial processes. In twenty years the number 
 of patents taken out by inventors was doubled. But this 
 rapid economic development was purchased by the concen- 
 tration of capital, by the elimination of small businesses, 
 and by much temporary displacement of labour as every 
 department of industry in turn became invaded by machinery. 
 Money wages rose, but there was a more than corresponding 
 rise in house rents and in the prices of some of the staple 
 articles of food. An intermittent explosion of strikes marked 
 the sharp discord between the employer and his man, and 
 the emergence of all the ugly problems which attend an 
 industrial revolution. The discipline of the factory was 
 proclaimed on the one hand to be tyrannical, on the other to 
 be essential to the well-being of the business. To the workmen 
 who demanded shorter hours the masters replied that the 
 profit was made in the last few minutes. Large towns bred 
 their peculiar problems, and the workshops of Lyons and 
 Paris harboured, like the catacombs of Rome, a secret and 
 proscribed religion. Socialism had its sacred books, its 
 historical memories, its martyrs who had wasted under the 
 burning suns of an African exile. The pamphlets of '48 were 
 thumbed and rethumbed in many a poor garret ; the fiery 
 exhortations of Proudhon found a place on the shelf with 
 Blanc's more cogent plea for the organization of labour. By 
 degrees, as their sentences expired — for of the twenty-six 
 thousand prescripts of 1852 eighteen thousand were under 
 forty — batches of exiles returned with rage and bitterness in
 
 118 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 their hearts. Whatever their fellow-workmen might desire, 
 these men meant to overturn the despot who had broken 
 their lives, and to take revenge on the men of the middle 
 class who had mown them down at the barricades and grown 
 fat upon their ruin. * The vanquished of June,' said a writer 
 in U Opinion Nationale, a workmen's organ, of April 10, 1869, 
 * do not discuss with their murderers : they wait.' Hatred 
 and need want no stronger preceptors, and the Socialism of 
 the French working-classes was the result of economic facts 
 rather than the consequence of any fine-spun theory. Still 
 behind all the debated questions there was a vague pervasive 
 idea that the existence of a wage-earning proletariat was an 
 offence against eternal justice which society must correct. 
 Reforms, not in themselves incompatible with the continued 
 institution of private property, such as the legalization of 
 trade unions or the extension of credit facilities to co-opera- 
 tive societies, were claimed as steps towards ' a society 
 founded on common right '. And for the more thoughtful 
 leaders of the labouring class a new outlook and a fresh 
 assurance of success was afforded by a doctrine which came 
 from Germany, hammered with the hard steel of German 
 science. The prophets of the new Socialism were Karl 
 Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle. Obeying the main intellectual 
 current of their age, and working on the poignant experience 
 afforded by capitahstic production, these two Jewish writers 
 discovered in the tendencies of history a preceptive philo- 
 sophy and a practical programme. The Revolution of 1789 
 had broken the ascendancy of the feudal aristocracy, and 
 led to the triumph of the middle class, the owner of capital 
 and the exploiter of labour. For these, too, an inexorable 
 fate was preparing an inevitable doom. It was an iron law 
 of wages that while interest and profit steadily swelled the 
 remuneration of labour was kept about subsistence point. 
 By an automatic social process the accumulation of capital 
 becomes concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, and the 
 number of men and women ground down to a bare level 
 of subsistence waxes greater and greater. Nature, however, 
 after her mysterious fashion, was working out the remedy
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 119 
 
 for the ills which she so mysteriously creates. An awful zig- 
 zag of lightning would suddenly reveal the hideous outline 
 of the sombre, storm-laden landscape. The toilers in their 
 millions would rise, shake off the incubus, and appropriate 
 to the use of humanity the land and the instruments of 
 production. Humanity would enter into its own, the war 
 of classes would cease, and the slave-drivers of the factory 
 would perish of their own suicidal egoism. These fatalistic 
 doctrines, shorn of their scientific apparatus, and with many 
 pitiless and savage corollaries, swiftly sped through the 
 leaders of the labour movement. In 1864 an International 
 Association of workmen had been organized in England, and 
 this body soon fell under the influence of the new SociaHsm. 
 ' The country,' said OUivier, * is calm on the surface, but 
 below, in every mind, there is a mysterious anxiety. By 
 degrees an impression is penetrating through the masses 
 that we are traversing a dangerous crisis and that the 
 Empire is going to its doom.' Prosper Merimee shared the 
 same impression. * We are ill,' he wrote, ' we are not 
 governed. The prefects receive no direction.' 
 
 In 1869 things seemed to be pointing to the dissolution 
 of the Empire. The Emperor, the Empress, the Court, and 
 the Ministers, were the object of incessant attacks from the 
 half-liberated Press. Henri Rochefort published a little red 
 paper called La Lanterne which sold like wildfire on the 
 boulevards of Paris, for its impudent and brilliant scurrility. 
 A young orator from the South, Leon Gambetta, threw 
 a wild defiance at the crime of December in the course of 
 a political trial, and became the popular hero of France. 
 It was a strange moment, in face of the rising tide of 
 Socialism, the open disaffection of Paris, and the heavy 
 Government losses in the elections of 1869, to select for 
 further concessions to the Opposition. But Napoleon was 
 ill and weary, and not unwilling to devolve some of his 
 responsibilities. In response to a demand coming from 116 
 deputies he agreed to submit to the Senate a measure for 
 the revision of the Constitution. He proposed to establish 
 a responsible ministry still depending on the Emperor but
 
 120 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 subject to impeachment by the Senate, and to give to both 
 branches of the legislature enlarged powers over legislation 
 and finance. These constitutional proposals were placed 
 before the people, ' The Empire,' so ran the ministerial 
 circular, ' addresses a solemn appeal to the nation. In 1852 
 it asked for power to secure order. It now asks in 1870 for 
 power to establish liberty.' Seven million votes testified the 
 assent of France to the Liberal Empire, and there are some 
 who still beheve that, " but for the momentary aberration 
 of judgement which led to the Franco-Prussian war, the 
 principle of Liberalism might have saved the Empire of 
 Napoleon.^ There is some reason to question this decision. 
 A government is only strong if it adheres to its guiding 
 principle. The guiding principle of Bonapartism was 
 autocracy founded on popular consent, safeguarding social 
 order and social equality. An autocrat does not easily 
 abdicate to a parliamentary ministry, does not easily adapt 
 himself to the delicate mechanism of constitutional forms. 
 And in France, though there was still no little personal 
 attachment to Napoleon, the faith in the Empire had declined. 
 Who could be enthusiastic for a government with such 
 a record of humiliation and failure ? Could the Liberals 
 forgive the harsh tyranny of the earlier years ? Could they 
 trust a nephew of Napoleon to unlearn the traditions of his 
 house ? Could they believe that the interests of Liberalism 
 would be safe in the hands of a regency controlled by the 
 Empress and her ultramontane camarilla? Could they 
 forget that France had been cheated out of her Republic 
 in 1793 by foreign war, in 1814 by alien Powers, in 1830 
 by the adroit manipulation of the Orleanist faction ? The 
 Empress at least was under no delusion. She saw that the 
 dynasty depended on prestige, and that its prestige required 
 to be refreshed ; and whether or no it be true that Bismarck 
 determined to force on a war with France in the summer of 
 1870, she and her party were eager for the fray. They 
 believed that a war would save the dynasty, and that a war 
 
 ^ The thesis is well argued by Henri Barton, V Evolution constitution- 
 nelle du Second Empire, Paris, 1900.
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 121 
 
 alone could save it. And perhaps some justification is 
 afiforded for this opinion by the fact that when the news of 
 Sedan was telegraphed to Paris the Empire fell suddenly, 
 without noise, without a hand to help it, or a voice raised 
 in its defence. 
 
 It was one of Benjamin Constant's wise maxims that 
 a constitutional monarchy differs from a republic in form, 
 but from an absolute monarchy in substance. The plebiscite 
 of May 8, 1870, by ratifying the transformation of the 
 absolute Empire into a constitutional monarchy had effected 
 a fundamental change in the government of France. A people 
 endowed with universal suffrage, parliamentary institutions, 
 and an executive responsible to the legislature, possesses all 
 the substance of sovereignty. Republican institutions can- 
 not add to its power, and may easily abridge its liberties. If 
 man were a creature of reason, if names were not as potent 
 as things, if bloodshed had no power to create or rancour 
 to prolong the spirit of political partisanship, the Republicans 
 might in time have been brought to accept the Liberal 
 Empire. Those who regret its disappearance believe that 
 it would have rallied at least the larger and more moderate 
 section of the party, and would in the end have healed the 
 social wounds which had been kept open by ninety years 
 of political unrest. They see the impassable gulf which now 
 divides the Royalists from the Republic, and argue that the 
 Liberal Empire would have offered political shelter to 
 Royalists and Republicans alike. Reft of its autocratic 
 significance, Bonapartism would have come to represent the 
 great central party of common sense and prudent com- 
 promise. It would have retained the loyalty of the Church 
 while keeping at arm's length the pretensions of the Vatican ; 
 it would have provided careers for turbulent ambition, and 
 destroyed the revolution by the gradual process of absorbing 
 it. Time alone was wanting, as to the uncle, so to the 
 nephew ; but Time, acting through Wellington and Moltke, 
 would not wait for the political consolidation of France, 
 and the Liberal Empire which was to reconcile all antagon- 
 isms was twice shattered before it could mould a tradition
 
 122 BONAPARTISM VI 
 
 and while its healing potencies were yet unrealized. The 
 collapse of the audacious compromise, twice repeated, left 
 the nation with all its old hostilities unappeased. The 
 Church fell away from the State. Was not Darboy, that 
 Archbishop of Paris who was murdered in the Commune, 
 the last of the Gallican prelates ? 
 
 The prophetic ghosts of history may be examined, but 
 we cannot lay them. In our view Bonapartism was a spent 
 force before Count Bismarck changed the Ems telegram. 
 It had done its work, and France will never call upon it 
 to do work again. The Second Empire was accepted 
 because it offered an escape from anarchy and socialism, 
 because it stood for social equality, vigorous, efficient 
 government, a courageous outlook on the world, and the 
 ascendancy of a dazzling name. But these foundations 
 had crumbled away during the eighteen years of chequered 
 fortune which succeeded the Coup d'Etat. The memory of 
 the days of June had grown dim ; vacillation and failure 
 had marked the conduct of public affairs ; the name of 
 Bonaparte had lost its magic even in the barracks. The 
 plebiscite of May 8 served to show that, though the peasant 
 vote remained soHd, the larger towns were breaking away 
 from the Empire. Yet when the telegrams flowed in to the 
 Tuileries at the end of that anxious day, a keen spasm of 
 relief shot through the Court at the greatness of the majority. 
 It seemed as if the Empire had refreshed its credentials and 
 was started on a new term of certificated power. Cool 
 analysis would have shown how uncertain was the ground 
 for confidence. The vote was taken upon the latest phase 
 of Imperial policy, not upon the cardinal issue of the con- 
 tinued existence of the dynasty. Some cast their votes 
 for Napoleon out of hatred for the autocracy which he 
 proposed to discard ; others because fear of revolution out- 
 balanced disaffection to the Empire ; others again, in the 
 hopes that the blasts of freedom might bring the Imperial 
 fabric to the ground. The pessimists, remembering some 
 Imperial utterances during the Hundred Days, beUeved 
 that a Napoleon could never be loyal to free institutions,
 
 VI BONAPARTISM 123 
 
 and that a successful war would end the liberties of France. 
 The war came, bringing with it not success but such revela- 
 tions of incompetence and such crushing disasters as have 
 never been equalled in modern history. In every department 
 of public affairs the government was shown to be a hollow 
 sham. Its diplomacy was a tissue of miscalculations, for it 
 precipitated a conflict with Prussia when a few weeks' delay 
 might have procured the Austrian alliance ; its military 
 preparation was inadequate and confused ; its plan of cam- 
 paign based upon a grave misapprehension of the leading 
 military and political conditions. Such defects do not 
 condemn France. They show that the government had 
 failed to enlist the intelligence or to discipline the labours 
 of a brilliant and energetic nation. The Second Empire, 
 for all its widely-advertised beneficence, was no school of 
 public morality, and the heritage of hopes and beliefs which 
 had made its fortunate youth was squandered in the Franco- 
 Prussian war beyond retrieve. Bonapartism can never 
 stand again as the symbol of science and energy in affairs, 
 still less as the taUsman of victory, for though Frenchmen, 
 in speaking of the Bonapartes, may remember the glories 
 of Lodi and Marengo, they do not forget the disaster of 
 Sedan, the shame of Metz, or the loss of Alsace-Lorraine.
 
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