IF ORSINI'S BOMB HAD NOT FAILED TO DESTROY NAPOLEON III
Edward A. Freeman wrote, after the fall of the second Bonaparte empire:
"The work of Richelieu is utterly undone, the work of Henry II and Louis
XIV is partially undone; the Rhine now neither crosses nor waters a
single rood of French ground. As it was in the first beginnings of
northern European history, so it is now; Germany lies on both sides of
the German river." This was not by any means the whole of the work
wrought by that adventurer on an imperial throne, Napoleon III, through
his disastrous war against a united Germany. He accomplished also the
slaughter of five hundred thousand men, and the impoverishment of
millions. He sounded the death knell of monarchical adventuring in
France, which was indeed one good result of the Napoleonic _debacle_,
but he also fastened militarism, in the form of excessive and
progressively increasing peace armaments, upon Europe, and magnified
public debts and taxation to the limit of endurance.
Every event here mentioned was a direct development, not of Napoleon
III's original seizure of the French throne, but of the final years, and
the eventual overthrow of his power--the overthrow itself due to the
Franco-Prussian war. A single event, criminal in its character, might
have prevented these results. That great benefits sometimes eventuate
from men's crimes is no news, and no longer a marvel, to the
philosopher, who, when good comes of evil, is apt to repeat the words,
"God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform."
The evil deed to which I have here referred, which would have saved the
lives of five hundred thousand people and left the river Rhine still
washing the confines of France, was the aiming of Orsini's bomb on the
evening of the 14th of January, 1858. This bomb was designed to take the
life of the emperor of the French. If the attempt had succeeded, and
Napoleon had died as Alexander II of Russia and King Humbert of Italy
afterward died, there would have been no Franco-German war. The throne
of the baby Napoleon IV, who was then less than two years old, very
likely would not have endured long; but whether the third republic had
immediately arisen, or whether the Orleans Bourbons had been restored to
the throne, it would have been found easy to preserve the peace with
Prussia and Germany.
For Napoleon III deliberately, and with malignant ingenuity, provoked
war with Germany in 1870. There is now no doubt that Bismarck desired
such a war. He afterward confessed that he deceived the aged King
William in such a way that all chance of peace at Ems was lost. But
nevertheless the provocation of Napoleon was direct and deliberate.
His grievance was that the Hohenzollern prince, Leopold, had consented
to become a candidate for the vacant throne of Spain. King William
withdrew Prince Leopold's candidature. This really destroyed Napoleon's
pretext for bringing on a war. But he desired a foreign war in order to
forestall revolutionary opposition at home, which threatened to become
irresistible. Napoleon thereupon caused his ambassador, Benedetti,
insolently, and in a manner quite unbearable, to demand personally from
King William a declaration that no Hohenzollern should ever be
permitted to become king of Spain. King William treated this insolence
as it deserved, and France, thereupon, declared war against Prussia.
What followed, the world knows. The consequences were tremendous. France
was maimed of Alsace and Lorraine. Half a million of the flower of the
manhood of both nations perished. France taxed herself with five
millions of francs of indemnity, and though she has paid the debt to
Germany, she still owes it to her own citizens. The difficulties of
French government and finance were increased prodigiously and
indefinitely by the war and the empire's delinquencies.
And all as a result contingent upon the failure of a criminal act!
Felice Orsini meant to kill Napoleon III, and he and his two companions
did kill ten innocent persons, and did wound one hundred and fifty
others. Yet the man for whom their bombs were intended--the adventurer
who had once been their comrade as a member of the Italian secret
society, the Carbonari, but who had afterward betrayed the cause of
Italian independence by leading an army into the peninsula and restoring
the papal power--escaped unharmed, to wind the trail of his infamous
conspiracies through European politics for twelve years longer. If the
bomb had done its direful work, one man, utterly without character or
conscience, would have died, and five hundred thousand men, mostly
honest, good and true, would have lived. As it happened, the one man was
spared, to make a vast holocaust of human life twelve years later.
It is, indeed, strange that the averting of a single crime may sometimes
precipitate a myriad of other crimes.