Chapter XXIII: Part 23

To revert from anecdotes of this class to the special theme of our article. Poetry is one thing, and verse-writing is another, and there may be very good verse-writers who would not condescend to be poetasters. In the present day there are a multitude of foolish persons who have discovered that _breeze_ rhymes with _trees_, and that there are as many syllables as they have fingers in a line of blank verse. So they flood the shilling magazines with their silliness, and some of them raise money enough to pay for the publication of a volume of their trash. Within a few days from this time of writing we have had occasion to look through about a score volumes of this class, and only one contained anything that could be called poetry--and that one came from San Francisco. Now, why cannot people with a faculty for verse write it sensibly, without trying to be poets? Why can they not give us something manly, something humorous? Lockhart and Maginn wrote fine verse, but would have smiled at the notion of being called poets. Barham never wrote a line of poetry, in the severe sense--but what immense amusement has the world received from the rhymed stories of Ingoldsby!

ART. V.--_The Downfall of Bonapartism._

(1.) _Documents Authentiques Annotés. Les Papiers Secrets du Second Empire._ 4e édition. "Fiat lux." Bruxelles: Office de Publicité. 1870.

(2.) _La Guerre de 1870: l'Esprit Parisien produit du la régime Impérial._ Par EMILE LECLERCQ. 5e édition. Bruxelles. 1870.

(3.) _Napoléon Ier, et son Historien, M. Thiers._ Par JULES BARNI. Paris, Germer-Baillière. 1869.

(4.) _Histoire de Napoléon Ier._ Par P. LANFREY. Paris: Charpentier. 1867-70. Vols. I. to IV.

(5.) _Napoléon le Petit._ Par V. HUGO. Bruxelles. 1852.

(6.) _Romans Nationaux._ Par ERCKMANN-CHÂTRIAN. Paris: Hetzel. 1868-70.

_Histoire d'un Paysan, ou la Révolution Française racontée
par un paysan._

_Le Conscrit._

_Le Blocus._

_La Guerre._

_L'Invasion._

_Waterloo, etc._

(7.) _Louis's own Account of the Fight at Dame Europa's School._ Literally translated from the French. London: J. Camden Hotten. 1871.

Imperialism has fallen; and with it France has for the present disappeared from among the great Powers. With Metz in foreign hands, she is much in the same position as that of Paris when the Prussians had turned upon her the guns of Mont Valérien. Her eastern frontier is wholly exposed; she must feel as Lombardy did while Austria held the Quadrilateral.

As far as material influence is concerned, France is become a second-rate state. She must confine her aim to doing what she has so often done before--influencing the world of ideas. She did this in the Middle Ages in a way which we seldom sufficiently appreciate; she did it in a less degree during the post-Reformation period, for then her own religious wars and the preponderance of Germany had thrown her somewhat into the shade; she did it most of all when the _Encyclopédistes_ began to claim for her a definite position as the world's teacher. This position she had not formally claimed before. Under the old _régime_ she had been slowly getting welded together; feudalism, carried out more 'logically' in France than elsewhere, had kept her provinces almost as distinct as so many little German kingdoms. Louis XI.'s policy, indeed, did for the French _noblesse_ much what the Wars of the Roses did for ours; and Louis XIV., by giving the higher classes a taste for Court life, drew them together and trained them to a community of habits and aims; but the mass of provincials were scarcely affected by this centralization of a single class. Louis XIV., however, did one thing more: he secured to Paris that fatal predominance which has ever since made her the arbitress of the national destinies. While saying '_l'état c'est moi,_' he so arranged that very soon the Parisians could say, _Paris c'est la France_. The great writers, too, lent their influence to glorify the capital: the town-loving spirit was strong in them all. Paris got more and more supreme, while at the same time the efforts of Government were divided between crushing out provincial independence and meeting the ruinous expenditure of a Court always luxurious and very often warlike. Hence a tendency in the old _régime_ to a more and more strictly personal government. Feudal liberties were crushed; feudal tyranny was aggravated. The provincial parliaments, and that of Paris into the bargain, gradually lost even the semblance of power; and the old system degenerated into despotism.

The Revolution, while superficially breaking up this system, left untouched those parts of it which some say are grounded on the peculiarities of French character. It intensified centralization, and it practised most oppressively that interference with the rights of the individual which is of the essence of personal government. The very men who so loudly proclaimed the principles of '89 were found most ready to act on rules which led them straight to the lawless tyranny of the Terror. Their 'ideas' were grand, but personal freedom was far too trifling a thing to be allowed to stand in their way for a moment. In one point the Revolution diverged from the old _régime_: it became intensely and deliberately propagandist--bent, _i.e._, on carrying forward, with the strength of the whole nation, the mission which the thinkers of Voltaire's day had assigned to themselves. We often find that the man who believes in nothing in particular is the most violent in opposing the beliefs of others. So it was with the leaders of the Revolution: they were mad to spread their doctrines over Europe; and their doctrines being those of Paris, Paris became (in Frenchmen's eyes) the recognized head, not of France only, but of the civilized world.

Imperialism was at first a reaction from despotic anarchy; the dread of another Terror made the French welcome with delight a man who seemed strong enough to be 'the saviour of society.' So it was again in 1849, when the Socialist struggle in which 13,000 Parisians perished so alarmed the successful 'bourgeois,' that to prevent its repetition they condoned the _coup d'état_. Ideas, it was said in 1795, were ruining France; the men of ideas had been beaten in the field; Imperialism therefore meant military glory as the basis of French prosperity. Frenchmen were content to believe that (as M. Louis Blanc said the other day at Bordeaux) 'glory and liberty are incompatible,' and deliberately to choose the former.

Of course the Imperialism of 1852 differs somewhat from that of 1804, but it is the same in its intense selfishness, and its thorough insincerity. Under the second Empire, there have been commercial treaties and alliances, and the working class has found good wages, so long as it has been content with political nothingness; but the two will be seen to be the same in principle. Each has the radical evil of depending on success in war, or peace, or both, for its stability; and this necessary instability makes them more hopeless as systems than the old _régime_, with all its corruptness, or even than the wild theories of the Republic.[211]

But it is needless to enlarge on the manifest causes which made a hereditary monarchy stable so long as it is not wholly intolerable. The same causes make the best of 'tyrannies' (in the Greek sense of the word) unstable. Men as 'logical' as Frenchmen are sure to feel that if such a government is not fulfilling the purpose of its creation, it had better cease to exist; and feeling with Frenchmen generally means action.

The first Napoleon had immense success on his side; he 'saved France,' in his own fashion, and so long as he was successful, very few Frenchmen cared to inquire into the soundness of the method employed. The third Napoleon had in his favour the remembrance of his uncle's success, and the fact that the _règne du bavardage_ had failed as completely in 1849 as it had done in the days of the Directory. Both were helped, too, by the systematic lying of their newspapers, which, amid the enforced silence of all who would not speak as they did, could say what they pleased without fear of contradiction. Both, too, were able administrators: Louis points out, in 'his own Account of the Fight at Dame Europa's School'--a bitter satire on the selfish insincerity of Imperialism--how hard he worked for years, and how by repressing them with one hand and giving them employment with the other, he controlled the terrible Paris _canaille_. This is, in fact, his solitary claim for forgiveness. But both fell when the moment of pressure came, and the fall of the nephew is irreparable: for him there can be no 'hundred days;' even the boundless capabilities of treachery which he found in Bazaine failed to do anything but seal his fate by convincing France that, whereas the uncle shed French blood like water in support of his selfish ambition, the nephew actually paltered with the enemy, and betrayed the strongest fortress in the country, in the vain hope of securing foreign support.

It is plain to the most superficial observer that of all the things which have collapsed in France since last July, none has collapsed so hopelessly as Imperialism. When the ex-Emperor rushed into war as the only way of staving off a revolution, France showed herself (as she so often has done at critical periods of her history) culpably passive. There were complaisant prefects who assured his Majesty that his people went with him heart and soul; there were crowds, hired or not, such as can always be collected in any great city, who shouted _Vive la guerre_ and _à Berlin_; but the peasantry still believed that the Empire meant peace; and when they afterwards found war come upon them, they fancied (so strong was their faith in Napoleon) that it was the Prussians who were the aggressors. Just in the same way on the eve of the Spanish war, in 1808, the servile Senate said: 'Sire, the will of the French people goes along with you. This Spanish war is just and necessary. Fathers envy their sons the glory of rushing to join your ranks, and of winning another Marengo and another Austerlitz.' And this farce was kept up at a time when the conscription had grown so odious that the Government had to imitate Louis XIV.'s _dragonnades_, and to quarter _garnisaires_ upon the families of those lads who had escaped to the woods, or had fled across the frontier.

France was passive in July, 1870, as she was more than once during the first Napoleon's career; the difference is, that the nephew's army, on which he was supposed to have lavished so much thought and money, and which, since the _coup d'état_, he had pampered into prætorian insolence, failed him utterly both for defence and offence; whereas the uncle always had something which he could trust to fight well, if not to win battles.

Since Sedan, France, no longer passive, has worked wonders; and every step in her work has made a relapse to the old state of things more impossible. 'The man of Sedan,' it was felt all along, could never return, except behind Prussian bayonets. Had he, on that last fatal day, cut his way at whatever loss through the encompassing host, and, throwing himself on Paris, raised a _levée en masse_ to the old cry of 'the country in danger,' matters might have turned out very differently, both for him and for France; but he could not have so acted without denying his own principles. His whole career had been an attempt to juggle with universal suffrage while practising the narrowest despotism, and now to appeal in real earnest to popular principles, and to give the pledges necessary to make that appeal a serious one, was an impossibility for the man who had eagerly snatched at the chances of war which the crafty Bismarck threw in his way, rather than honestly carry out the liberal measures which he had at last been forced to adopt. There is a point beyond which charlatanism cannot go. Thrice had the uncle felt that this kind of appeal is useless when it is contrary to a man's whole antecedents: once at Arcis-sur-Aube, when in the midst of the battle, Sebastiani said, 'Are these all your Majesty's forces?' 'Every man I have.' 'Then does not your Majesty think of raising the nation?' 'Nonsense: you're dreaming of the way they did things in Spain, or here in France, in '91. How can you talk of raising a nation whose nobles and priests have been destroyed by the Revolution, and whose Revolution has been destroyed by me?' There was nothing, he felt, left to appeal to. Again, on his return from Elba, wisdom said, 'Wait on French soil, and crush the invaders at Paris and Lyons;' but this would have necessitated an appeal to the nation and a pledge that all war except defensive war should cease, and, as Colonel Charras says, in words which seem almost prophetical of the events of last July, 'to re-establish his despotism he could not do without the prestige of victory: he thought to find it on the frontier, so thither he hastened.' A third time, when, after Waterloo, Napoleon was among the remnant of his troops at Laon, it was still free to him to show himself not only the 'child of the Revolution,' but its legitimate offspring and its protector. He still shrank instinctively from doing so: bolder, indeed, than his nephew, he did go to Paris; but with the invincible dislike of all his race to true freedom of government, he went there merely to see if there was a chance of carrying on the war without making any real political concessions.

So it was that, after Sedan, the nephew passed out of history: no amount of plotting can restore the man who showed himself fool as well as knave, who fell--not, like his uncle, under the blows of banded Europe--but because he had allowed himself to be wholly deceived, both as to the quality and composition of his own army and as to the dispositions of neighbouring powers. France never can forgive such a result of twenty years of personal government. But that the ex-Emperor should disappear out of history is natural enough; the marvel is that he ever became one of the makers of history. His success was due to the vitality of the Napoleonic idea, nourished as it was after the restoration by writers of all kinds--notably by the veteran statesman who now, more than any one else, has made a return to Imperialism impossible. For this total revolution in literature it is hard to give a sufficient reason. Before the restoration, literature, when not venal, was strongly anti-Bonapartist.'[212] After the Bourbons were restored, writers began to extol Napoleon as industriously as before they had decried him. This change was owing partly to French feeling against the mode of his removal: it was a great humiliation; as Madame de Staël said (deploring the return from Elba), 'It's all over with liberty if he succeeds, and with the national independence if he is beaten.' The nation felt that the peace of 1815 had compromised its independence; and, in writing down the king who had been brought in by foreign armies, literary men were acting as the mouthpiece of France. But this is not all; wounded vanity did much. Under the Empire mind had been powerless, unless, as in the case of Lacépède and other _savans_, it had submitted to be the humble tool of force: when Sièyes said, 'I'll be the head and that little Corsican shall be the arm,' he had quite unwittingly spoken the truth; for, in Napoleon's system, the head was nothing and the arm everything. Great, then, was the disappointment when under Louis XVIII., and still more under his successor, the head seemed almost as powerless as before. The heart (if such a word may be used of the hollow system of Popery) came into play; and, unless a man was _dévôt_, or seemed to be so, ability of any kind served him little. Add to this the wilful blindness of the Bourbons, who (it was soon seen) 'had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.' Their petty despotism disgusted the nation; while the 'Memoirs of St. Helena' and a crowd of similar writings made out, with a sophistry so barefaced that we should fancy it could never have deceived even Frenchmen, that the Emperor had always acted as a dutiful son of the revolution, according to the programme which himself had laid down, that 'liberty, equality, and prosperity shall be ensured.' Will the nephew ever venture to assert, as the uncle did in 1816, that his government was a constitutional and temperate monarchy, and that the French people under it were the freest people in Europe? However this may be, there is no doubt that the claim thus made by Napoleon I. told immensely on the thought of the nation, and through it on the masses. Claiming to have saved the revolution by moderating its violence, the exile of St. Helena persistently called himself its soldier and its martyr. His wars (he said) had been undertaken to spread its civilizing influence; and the consciousness of this had made kings and princes so determined on his overthrow. We, of course, can see through the hollowness of all this: but the French writers of that day, finding France humiliated, and knowing that she had been glorious, actually came to believe, or at any rate fostered the belief, that in the days of her glory she had been free, since undoubtedly in the days of her humiliation she was fettered. No wonder the rest were deceived, since a man of consummate ability, M. Thiers, whose honesty is proved by his having refused office during some seventeen years of 'personal government,' could write such a marvellous romance as that which he gave to the world under the title of 'The Consulate and the Empire.'

Thus, by a combination of causes we may partly account for the change in the mind of France; and this change told upon the more or less educated masses. When Thiers wrote as he did; when Victor Hugo--whom a strange Nemesis afterwards urged to write 'Napoleon the Little'--sang the great man's praises in 'Lui,' and, throwing moral sanctions to the winds, declared that

'Tu domines notre siécle, _ange ou démon qu'importe_?'

when Beauchèsne, in 'L'Ecolier,' pathetically described the day-dreams of the boyish enthusiast; and, yet more, when Béranger sang his 'Vieux drapeau,' and his 'Serrez vos rangs, Gaulois et Francs,' and, above all, his 'Souvenirs du Peuple,' no wonder men forgot the real Napoleon, and accepted the ideal which was so persistently put before them.

Béranger was a true prophet when he sang

'On parlera de sa gloire
Sous le chaume bien longtemps;
L'humble toit en cinquante ans
Ne connaîtra plus d'autre histoire.'

It is not easy to trace how this feeling had so penetrated downwards, and had so thoroughly laid hold of the lowest stratum, the wholly uneducated peasantry, that the first time the vote by universal suffrage was taken, many peasants thought they were voting for the old Emperor. That it did so is one more proof how soon a nation with great 'recuperative powers' loses the memory of disasters. The cruel conscriptions which drove mere boys to die in Spain under the fire of Wellington's seasoned troops--the retreat from Russia, after which 'the man of Smorgoni' was for a time as unpopular as 'the man of Sedan,' were forgotten. The heroic defence of Champagne, and the glories which preceded it, were alone remembered. This will account for the growth of the Imperial idea in the more fighting parts of France, especially in Alsace and Lorraine, which have always contributed much more than their share to the army.

How it was in La Vendée we cannot pretend to say. Napoleon there had been as ruthless in his way as the 'blues;' he had ordered that every family which could not prove that all its members were at home and quiet should lose its property, this being divided between the 'good subjects' and the occupying troops. Nor can we understand how the Southern peasants should have welcomed the nephew when they had hated the uncle. It was against them chiefly that the odious _garnisaires_ had to be employed; and we all know how they showed their feeling in 1814 by several times nearly tearing the Emperor to pieces when he was on the way to Elba, frightening him so that he disguised himself as an English officer.

North-eastern France was Bonapartist because it was anti-Prussian, and the Emperor had thoroughly humiliated Prussia. For this special hatred of Prussia there is ample reason. The Prussian character is not loveable; even at the best it is singularly domineering and cantankerous; and during the invasions of French territory (not to speak of the bloodthirsty pursuit after Waterloo) the Prussians had shown themselves (as unhappily they too often have during this war)[213] worse than Cossacks. This special hatred of Prussians comes out continually in the Erckmann-Châtrian series. The contrast between the bitterness with which the fights at Ligny and Wavre and the final conflict at Waterloo are described is remarkable; it may almost be said to be prophetic of the merciless way in which too much of the fighting has been carried on within the past few months. 'No quarter' is the word on both French and Prussian side; and scornful hatred lurks in every phrase of the graphic account of those savage conflicts which at last left the French nominally victorious. The English, on the other hand, are 'jolly fellows, well shaved, and with the get-up of _bons bourgeois_.' We do not think that, even before the Crimean war, French mothers ever taught their children to hate us; whereas, _mon fils tu haïras les Prussiens_ was a daily lesson among the peasants of the North-east.[214]

To account for the Napoleonism of the peasants in other parts, we must add to the feeling that Napoleon had glorified France, on the part of those who (we said) were only too ready to forget how he had also humiliated and ruined her, the persistent dread of the _spectre rouge_ on the part of the vast class of little landowners, and thirdly, the influence of the priests. Both these had been made use of by the uncle. Whenever he wanted an excuse for despotism, he always got up a Jacobin plot. This was the pretence for that famous 18th Brumaire, by which 'model and prototype of all _coups d'état_,' as M. Barni calls it, he destroyed the constitution which he had sworn to defend.

When, as First Consul, he arrested a number of those who remained true to the Republic--among them Jourdain, the hero of Fleurus--and threatened to banish them to Cayenne, the pretext was 'the infernal machine' (very probably 'got up,' like so many more recent conspiracies), which was denounced as a Jacobin invention. Jacobinism was his apology for forming (at the beginning of the Empire) eight State prisons, and for exercising the most rigorous censorship both of the press and of the stage.

How the priests helped him may be judged from the amusingly profane addresses made to him on his accession to empire by the different bishops. The Bishop of Aix wrote: 'Like another Moses, Napoleon has been summoned by God from the deserts of Egypt,' 'God seems to have said (wrote the Bishop of Orleans), "My heart hath chosen a new ruler to rule my people; My almighty arm shall help him in his glorious work, and I will strengthen his throne. He shall reign over the seas, and the rivers shall become his servants."' In the eyes of other bishops and capitular bodies the new emperor is 'another Matthias sent by the Lord,' 'a new Cyrus,' 'Scripture hath given us, in the reign of Jehoshaphat, a prophetic outline of his reign.' This, the fitting reward of the Concordat, was the incense offered up by a servile clergy on the eve of his coronation; and it matches well with the _Catechism_, published by authority, and in use in all French churches in 1811.[215] After repeated injunctions as to the special duty of reverence for the Emperor and his house, the question is asked, 'Are there not yet other motives to bind us strongly to our Emperor?'--'Yes; for it is he whom God raised up in troublous times to re-establish the public worship of the holy religion of our fathers and to be its protector. He has restored and preserved public order by his profound and energetic wisdom; he defends the State by his powerful arm; he is become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration which he has received from the Sovereign Pontiff, chief of the Universal Church.'[216]

How the Pope, of whose meanly cruel treatment by Napoleon, the Count d'Haussonville gave such a graphic account in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of two years ago, really felt on the subject, we need not inquire; with Napoleon the case was simple enough: 'he wanted a clergy (says Madame de Staël) as he wanted chamberlains and courtiers, and all the old things over again.' As for his being the restorer of religion, no praise was ever less merited; he told Cabanis: 'This concordat of ours is _la vaccine de la religion_; in fifty years it will have killed it out like a moral small-pox.' On the other hand, before the Concordat was signed there was full liberty of worship, and nearly eight millions of people were in full practice of Catholicism. His Concordat was needless, except for his own purposes; at the outset, indeed, the Assembly had borne heavily on the clergy: to force them to take oaths and then to persecute those who refused was to show an ignorance of the first principles of toleration; and one of the few things which we have to find fault with in MM. Erckmann-Châtrian's excellent novels is the way in which the 'refractory priests' are spoken of, and in which the harsh treatment they underwent is justified, because they disturbed the peace of families, and intrigued for 'royalist restoration.' But by the Constitution of the year III. Church and State had been separated, and freedom of worship restored to every one. There was no need, therefore, for any effort on Napoleon's part to secure what the Constitution had already secured; he was, as usual, working simply for himself: 'I did not despair,' (he writes from St. Helena) 'of sooner or later getting full control of the Pope; and then what a lever for moving the world, what a help towards keeping men's minds in hand!'

With the Pope and the Italian clergy, indeed, Napoleon never had the least success; but in France the large salaries which he gave to the bishops produced the effect he anticipated; and at last, even in La Vendée, a good deal of the old feeling died out. The _noblesse_ of course still spoke of him as a mere _locum tenens_: for them he was always 'the General Bonaparte, Lieutenant-in-Chief of the Forces of his Majesty's King Louis XVII.' But the peasantry were gradually taught to accept him as the friend of religion, and not simply as a temporary police magistrate who was necessary to keep down their hated enemies the 'Reds.' Of this his nephew reaped the reward, and he moreover was able to come forward as the defender of the Papacy under circumstances in which his conduct gratified not only the peasants, but every sincere Romanist in France, while it caused one more breach in the already divided Republican camp. If the occupation of Rome was actually initiated by honest Republicans, they never (not even when they made Louis Napoleon Prince-President) were guilty of a more fatal mistake. They shared the reward of all trimmers; supporting 'order' at the expense of principle, they lost the confidence of the best men of their party; while the Prince-President, assuming to be the champion of that 'order' which after all they had only defended with half-heartedness, gained all the credit of the act, and won thereby the support of the Ultramontanists. Of this support his subsequent vacillation could not deprive him, because the Ultramontanes were sure that, whatever he might do in other countries, in France he would not relax those fetters which the Papacy finds so essential in securing the acceptance of its newly 'formulated dogmas and repressive encyclicals. When we say this, we by no means assert that the ex-Emperor had the full confidence of the clergy; that confidence it is not the policy of Rome to accord to any one. Now again, as in 1848, she has shown that on occasion she can be as revolutionary as Garibaldi himself, if there is an end to be gained by being so. Napoleon is lost; despite the ridiculous outcry of London imperialist papers like _La Situation_, his cause is hopeless; therefore Rome hastens to give him up, and to affirm that he is rightly punished for having supported Victor Emmanuel. But, so long as he was a power in Europe, he received support enough to keep him popular among the priest-ridden classes, because he was less dangerous than those who would be sure to succeed him. A Republican government would without doubt have given up the Roman occupation; while the Orleanists, who would come to the surface if the Republic failed, are, as the real friends of religious liberty, the most unacceptable of all to the Ultramontane party. Guizot, the Orleanist statesman _par excellence_, ventured to doubt whether it is not an abuse of toleration to allow full scope to such irreconcilable foes to liberty as the Jesuits; therefore it was better to uphold Napoleon, and to trust to the influence of the Empress rather than to provoke a change which was sure to be for the worse.

But we have said enough to account somewhat for the growth of the Napoleonic idea, after the first Emperor had done his best by the failures, and still more by the littleness of his later years, to crush it.

France, moreover, had been humiliated in 1815, and Louis Philippe kept her at peace without giving an outlet for enterprise in foreign colonization. If Algeria had been less of a mere military settlement; or if, instead of Algeria, France had laid hold of a colony better suited for Europeans to thrive in, the Orleans line might have still been on the throne. But the nation was slow to realize the amount of waste which had accompanied the wars of the Empire. France did not like to keep quiet and repair the ugly gaps left in her prosperity; she wanted to make a grand figure before the world. Louis Philippe thought that by combined repression and corruption he could check this restlessness; and so he, a constitutional king, was led into a career of unconstitutional conduct--the proximate, though not the remote, cause of the revolution in 1848.

The _facilis descensus_ from a republic to a despotism was seldom more inevitable than amid the chaos of parties which succeeded the Provisional Government. France wanted _prestige_: who more likely to give it to her than the nephew of the man who won Jena and Austerlitz? France wanted protection against the 'Reds,' 'the enemies of order and property:' surely, the very man to secure this to her was _l'homme providentiel_, who could sway the army as one man, and who, though he professed to believe in universal suffrage, and to have a high regard for the working man, was known to be hand in glove with the great financiers and capitalists? As Victor Hugo puts it in his little history of the _coup d'état_, 'tous les hommes du passé, depuis tel banquier juif qui se sentait un peu Catholique jusqu'à tel évêque qui se sentait un peu juif,' all combined to work up the Napoleonic idea, and to induce the masses to accept what was the best government for stock-jobbers and Court tailors and highly paid functionaries of all sorts. It was the Nemesis of 1793 which produced the _coup d'état_ of December 1851: but for the recollection of the Reign of Terror, of that wild carnival of cruelty and rapine, such an outrage would have been impossible. Men of substance argued that what had been might be again; and therefore they threw in their lot with the saviour of society, even while they abhorred the means which he employed for its salvation. National susceptibility, then, and a half unconscious desire to wipe off old scores, combined with Popish influence and the dread of the 'Reds,' helped to give tangibility to this long-cherished Napoleonic idea, by bringing about the second Empire.

A few words, now, on the causes and the history of its decay. These, as usual in political and social matters, are complex and seemingly conflicting. First, those who looked for _prestige_ were not satisfied with the declaration, _l'Empire c'est la paix_, even explained away though it was by the many wars undertaken in the last twenty years. France fighting side by side with England in the Crimea and in China, was not the same as France carrying her eagles into almost every European capital. This feeling forced on the war which resulted in the sudden peace of Villafranca--the suddenness of which peace proved (to the French Emperor's detractors) that Magenta and Solferino were not such very decided victories, after all. It always seemed in Napoleon III.'s undertakings, that he was stopped at a certain point, just as if he had not really been the master of France, but was only free to use her resources within the range of his tether. This may be due to the financial complications in which he and his creatures were always mixed up, or to that indecision of character which, while it gave him for a time a reputation for profound wisdom, did him immense harm by making men suspect him of deep plotting when he was simply at a loss how to reconcile conflicting ideas, and by exciting profound distrust on occasions where pity would have been the more appropriate feeling. Herein he paid the penalty (almost always exacted in all ranks of life) of seeing both ways. The notion which couples moral obliquity with crookedness of vision is confined to the vulgar; but comparatively few can avoid distrusting the mental power of looking at once in several directions. The ex-Emperor had his English experience; his political education was far in advance of that of most of his subjects; he saw the weak points of each party, and saw too how each drew strength from the amount of truth which it had grasped. Could he have lived as president of a republic in which all these elements should have had free scope, France might have thriven morally during the last nineteen years, as much as she has thriven materially. But the French character, no less than his own designs, forbade this. Frenchmen cannot bear to 'give and take;' their _logique_ shows itself by forcing them into the streets to battle for their cause as soon as there is the feeblest chance of success; and, above all, his aim was, not to give France the best government, but to keep himself by all means at her head. Hence, lying and repression became his instruments. One party was played off against another. The _prolétaires_ kept in good humour by the Hausmannizing, not of Paris only, but of half the French cities, were told that the Emperor was really their friend; and so long as they got _panem et circenses_ they seem pretty generally to have believed it. The _parti prêtre_ was petted at home; and the control which the clergy was allowed to have over education more than compensated for the cutting off of the Romagna. The moneyed class, and all the crowd of little _rentiers_, who are almost forced to accept the existing order of things, saw by the vast growth of public credit and by the steady price of public securities, that the Empire was the millennium of men of means. The army, petted and spoiled, was full of dislike for civilians, and of chauvinist contempt for foreigners. The literary class alone feebly kept up the struggle; and its protest against the dictum 'la France c'est moi,' was chiefly confined to such far-fetched allusions as we find in 'Labiénus' and in the 'leaders' of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The French are brave; but those who did not accept the Empire were cowed by the _coup d'état_; and in such circumstances they are of all people the most patient under what they have come to believe inevitable.

But though nothing was done much was felt, and the mistakes and disappointments of later years soon brought the feeling to the surface. From the very first, nothing but the _coup d'état_ had thoroughly succeeded. The Crimean war ended too soon; it failed in its main object, that of crippling Russia, and it was from the outset distasteful to a large party because it drew France so close to England. The Austrian war wanted the dash and vigour of Marengo; and the Mexican campaign (so opposed by Thiers in 1864) showed that the ruler of France was afraid to move when the United States bade him stand still. Meanwhile Poland had been twice given up--and Poland is very dear to a large section of the French; the Confederate States had been abandoned, and Denmark had been left unhelped to the tender mercy of Prussia and Austria. Military _prestige_ had gone, despite the numbers and the ruinous cost of the army. All the while the occupation of Rome was a standing outrage on the feelings of the most thinking part of the nation; and, combined with it, by that strange inconsistency which marks all Napoleonic procedure, the creation of the kingdom of Italy alienated the Ultramontanes, and set them plotting, after their fashion, against the man whom it was still their interest outwardly to support.

Herein uncle and nephew are thoroughly at one. Both Lanfrey and the author of the 'Romans nationaux' remind us how constantly the first Napoleon displayed a cynical disregard for men's feelings, without apparently seeing that thereby he was giving irreparable offence. He looked on men as reasoning machines, and quite left out of account all the sentimental springs of action. Those whom he needlessly insulted would, he thought, recognise both his power to crush and also to benefit them, and therefore they would be his obedient servants. Such was the state of the Continent that he was scarcely disabused of this notion till he undertook to govern Spain. Italy submitted to exactions more galling though less ruinous than those which the Germans have been making upon France. Germany, thoroughly dissatisfied with its own serene highnesses and arch-dukes, and looking upon Napoleon as the true successor of Hoche and Moreau, and the others who had spread republican ideas through the Fatherland, was content to bear a great deal before she showed any signs of anger. Spain certainly set Continental Europe an example in this. Napoleon might prove beyond dispute that under his tutelage she would soon rise rapidly in position and wealth; but Spain had been cruelly outraged by the treatment to which her people as well as her royal family had been subjected; and Spain cared not a jot for either position or wealth compared with a successful revolt against French occupation. We know how wholly, in dealing with individuals, the uncle left the power of personal feelings out of account; the nephew, rarely forgetting this in regard to the individual, forgot it when dealing with classes. To the clergy for instance, he said, 'Italy must be reconstituted, and to that end the Pope must give up the Romagna and the Marches. You shall have our troops still in Rome, and I will arrange that you may control French education pretty much as you please.' The clergy, accepting what he gave, never even pretended to be grateful for the boon; they never forgave the 'spoliation of the Church;' and thus the ex-emperor's conduct, as usual, displeased both parties, and deprived him of any support except what it was manifestly men's interest to give him.

Then came the dread of Prussia, and the sudden attempt (almost as bad as deploying under fire) to reorganise that army for which so much money had been drawn that had really been expended on other objects. The severer conscription made the peasants restless; and the _plébiscite_ was called for much in that spirit of distrust which set David numbering the people. When it was found that a considerable percentage of the army had voted the wrong way, it was felt that the pyramid, hitherto propped up on its small end by bayonets, was tottering; and the war, of which we have lately seen the sad issue, was hurried on as the sole change of retrieving the fortunes of the dynasty.

It is not our business to gauge the complicity of the French people in the affair of Benedetti and Gramont.[217] France, as we said, showed herself culpably passive; Paris, say the French 'irreconcilables,' was culpably complaisant. We may be thankful that here in England we have not for centuries seen twenty years of such a debasing system as that which made Paris what it was till it was purified in the furnace of affliction. We fancy that the reaction against the despotism of the capital will be very strong. There is far more independent life left than most people imagine in the French provincial cities, far more than in our large towns; and they were increasingly indignant at the pre-eminence which the imperial system gave to Paris in everything. This exaltation of Paris is natural in a dynasty which has no roots in France itself. Paris had proved herself in 1790 capable of taking the lead and giving the law to all France; Paris, therefore, must be kept strong in order that all France might be of one mind. How different from the days of Henry IV., or of any of the old race! To the Corsican intruder the peasant of Beauce was just the same as the peasant of the Bourbonnais--merely a fighting machine. Hence the real depression of the provinces, despite of some exceptional improvements in Brittany and in the _landes_ of the Gironde. The first Napoleon's levies so reduced the relative strength of the country districts that Paris, in his time, gained a position which she has ever since held. Whatever form of government she chose the provinces echoed her choice. Disliking her, they still never thought of shaking off her yoke. That Paris, befooled by Béranger, by chauvinism, and by the popular fiction of imperialism, should have chosen such a President as she did, is a strange comment on all the bombastic nonsense which Victor Hugo talks about _Paris-cerveau_--Paris, the brain of the world. Paris now, conscious of her degradation, is avenging herself by heaping all sorts of abuse on the man of her choice--'the phlegmatic perjurer,' 'the silent Tartuffe,' as M. Leclercq calls him. But the choice was hers, and the degradation which resulted from the years of personal rule followed with peculiar rapidity owing to a want in the French character. The most 'logical' of nations is indeed terribly consistent; it always seems to want that happy power of stopping short before things have gone so far as to make a catastrophe inevitable.

The last years of the late emperor's reign were morally unhealthy beyond the average of the most immoral times since the Reformation. It is not that people were worse in their conduct: they were more cynical. They had got to laugh at everything, to despise all sanctions--even those shadowy ones which the first revolution substituted for the sanctions of religion. The years in which Cora Pearl and the rest of the demi-monde were the arbiters of fashion, in which Thérèse was the pet of drawing-rooms, and the younger Dumas the popular _littérateur_, saw the extinction of much that was noble in France, for they witnessed what we may call the apotheosis of epicureanism. Paris seemed to have lost all moral sense since the time that its government had ceased to have any. The efforts of Parisian talent resulted in nothing but ill-digested and unwholesome works. The upper classes did as the Court did--that crew of wholesale stock-jobbers, like the Duke of Morny, among whom, one who was a strange mixture of reckless extravagance and gross bigotry presided as mistress of the revels. The masses were sunk in ignorance, and lived a life--those Paris _ouvriers_ who have so often taken in hand to regenerate the world--which it would terrify the average English workman to contemplate. The middle class, the Famille Benoîton of the play, vegetated, made money, and reasoned on false premises. It was Babylon over again, as poor Prévost-Paradol styles it. Tongue-tied on all high subjects, the Parisians flung themselves mad with delight upon that class of ideas which soon brings thought down to its lowest level, 'Make money, never mind how, and live simply to gratify your meanest instincts,' that was everybody's maxim--_leur esprit s'était abâtardi_.

At the same time Paris still asserted that superiority over all the rest of the world which her writers had first claimed when they began to write up the first empire. Her writers kept on blowing one another's trumpets, and crying out that theirs was the great nation, and that to the people among whom primary education is more deficient than even in Spain was entrusted the mission of indoctrinating Europe with ideas. Grossly ignorant of their own shortcomings the French were, last July, quite incapable of forming a fair estimate of any other nation. Because Napoleon III. had always managed to mystify his people as to what he was going to do, therefore they fancied he had mystified Europe. Because he had met Bismark at Biarritz, and had been always fond of personal conference with princes, therefore they dreamed of Tilsit over again, and refused to see that on every point their master was either outwitted or else over-mastered by other statesmen. All the follies which come of boasting, of contempt for one's adversary, of unmeasured self-esteem, of confidence in one's power of doing anything in any line whatever, seemed to have burst out at once into monstrous growth in the Paris of last July. M. Leclercq collects chronologically the choice passages from the _Figaro_, the _Gaulois_, &c., which show the feeling of those who claimed to be the leaders of thought; and surely nothing better than such a collection can justify the almost universal dislike to France which was felt at the beginning of the war. Belgian as he is, he knows how bad the supremacy of Paris has been for Brussels, her little imitator, and he hopes that this supremacy is gone never to be restored. In this hope he gives us page after page of blatant absurdity, of grotesque and childish rant, of transparent falsehood, from the inaugural 'leader' in _Figaro_ down to the wild dithyramb which Victor Hugo published when he entered Paris after the 4th September.

It is worth while to quote a few sentences from _Figaro_ of the 17th July:--

'Drums beat, trumpets sound--it is war.'

* * * * *

'France, France, righteous land, hospitable land, noble
people; always thou shalt be first among the first ... thy
name is LEGION!'

* * * * *

'The cannon makes the pavement of the big city ring with a
dull sound.... Make way for the cannon, and hats off! It is
going to clear a passage for civilisation and humanity.

* * * * *

'These Prussians, too, have said that you were drawing
back! France drawing back; 'tis like the sun standing
still. And who is this new Joshua who shall make the sun of
France stand still! Moltke, perhaps!'

And the 'leader' (what an abuse of the word) winds up with a prayer 'to the God who has said that they who take the sword shall perish by the sword, and who ordains that liberty's furrows should be blood-watered, since no otherwise can the germ of freedom be developed.' Many have been offended during the war with the tone of Emperor William's telegrams; but even the _Standard_ must confess that they are infinitely preferable to the blasphemous hiccoughings of the _Figaro_.

The strangest part of it, perhaps, is the monstrous lying; Austria (we are told) is thirsting for revenge:--'The Austrian aristocracy is wild about the insolence of these Brandenburg margraves, _these parvenu, princes_' (the appropriateness of the epithet from a Bonaparte of a Hohenzöllern deserves remark).... 'Frankfort has shut all its shops, and its trade won't recover the shock for many years.... Prussia has withdrawn all the able-bodied men out of Hanover for fear of an outbreak.' The truth being that, except a portion of the highest class, and a very few of the lowest, the whole Hanoverian population went in heart and soul for German unity.

This incredible ignorance of other nations is matched by an equal ignorance of the French army and its belongings:--'War can bring us no annoying surprises, for we have the most marvellous body of _éclaireurs_ in Europe,' is an assertion repeated over and over again towards the end of last July, at a time when the Uhlans were already beginning to show what they were capable of, and when French officers were finding out that they had nothing provided in the way of maps, except out-of-date plans of East Prussian fortresses. The absurd vanity which could write in this way when the Prussians were showing that they knew every inch of French soil, is only equalled by the craven way in which _Figaro's_ readers gave in whenever Prussian audacity, backed by Prussian knowledge of their country, enabled Uhlans or regulars to make a dash. The _Cornhill_ tale, 'How the Prussians took Mousseux-les-Caves' (under the guidance of a sub-lieutenant who had been clerk to a wine merchant there), is a story which has been acted out to the letter, not once but fifty times, to the confusion of those who were boasting all the while about their 'admirable corps d'éclaireurs.' The boasting was about as well-grounded as that which, a fortnight later, declared that of Prince Frederick Charles's army nothing was left but the remnants, and that the whole corps of Bismark's white cuirassiers had been cut off to a man.

The companion piece to all this senseless exaggeration, encouraged, we must remember, and endorsed by the highest authority--first by the Emperor himself and then by Count Palikao--is Victor Hugo's dithyramb aforesaid. It appeared in the _Electeur Libre_ of 3rd October, and surpasses anything which Walt Whitman, in his wildest moments, ever dreamt of:--

'We are but one Frenchman, but one Parisian, but one single
heart; there is but one citizen left, 'tis you, 'tis I,
'tis all of us. Where the heart is, there will be our
breasts to make a barrier.

'Resistance to-day, deliverance to-morrow: that sums up
everything. We are no more flesh, but stone. I don't know
my own name any more, I am called, "Country, forward on the
foe!" We are called, "France, Paris, stand like a wall."...

'The Pantheon wonders what it can do to make room beneath
its dome for all this people who have a right to lie
there.... Each time the shells fall, and the grape-shot
roars, what see we in our streets? women tripping by with a
smile. O Paris, thou hast crowned the statue of Strasburg
with flowers; history will crown thee with stars!'

It is as hard for sober Englishmen to imagine a people delighting in edicts penned in that style, as it is for us to read without disgust any two consecutive pages of _L'homme qui rit_. Hugo's latest novel is well matched by his latest political utterances.

One encouraging sign is, that Paris journalism grows ashamed of itself: the lies, indeed, continue to the last: insincerity seems (since the first Napoleon's time) to have become inseparable from French bulletins; but the _Siècle_ of the middle of November proves what a change had come on:--

'It is _esprit_ which has ruined France; the esprit, we
mean, of the boulevards, that _esprit_ nine-tenths of which
are made up of puns and jokes, of scepticism, of _blague_,
and of which the remaining tenth is boastful nonsense and
absurd lies.... So long as the _Figaro_, _Paris Journal_,
_Gaulois_ and all the rest keep up above the circulation of
500, which would suffice for the comic actors and actresses
who ought to be their only readers, there is no hope of
seeing France recover herself. Men talk with scorn of the
Greeks of the lower empire who were arguing about the kind
of light which shone on Mount Tabor, while Mahomet II. was
breaching their walls. But these Greeks were eagles
compared with our _boulevardiers_. They discussed a
theologico-physical question, wild and absurd, no doubt,
but still showing a capacity for lofty thought; our
_spirituel_ newspapers discuss the scandals which they rake
up out of the moral sewers of the capital.... If the
present war ends without having killed, not scotched, this
_esprit boulevardier_, peace will be no use, it will be
nothing but a halt in the mire.'

M. Leclercq's comment on this is--

'If we, whom the second Empire has so poisoned through its
infamous press, have not energy enough to make a reaction
against Parisian manners and Parisian _esprit_, we shall
fall as low as our neighbours, and shall soon imbibe that
scorn of truth and reason which they have shown.'