On the 6th of October, 1840, a young man was brought up for sentence in
one of the highest courts of Europe, before which he had been tried, and
by which he had been found guilty of one of the greatest crimes that can
be charged upon any human being, though the world seldom visits it with
moral condemnation. The young man was Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,
the court was the French Chamber of Peers, and the sentence was
imprisonment for life. Had the French government of that day felt strong
enough to act strongly, the condemned would have been treated as the
Neapolitans treated Murat, and as the Mexicans treated Yturbide. He
would have been perpetually imprisoned, but his prison would have been
"that which the sexton makes." But the Orleans dynasty was never strong,
and its head was seldom able to act boldly. To execute a Bonaparte,
the undoubted heir of the Emperor, required nerve such as no French
government had exhibited since that day on which Maréchal Ney had been
shot; and there were seven hundred thousand foreign soldiers in France
when that piece of judicial butchery was resolved upon. The army might
not be ready to join a Bonaparte, but it could not be relied upon to
guard the scaffold on which he should be sent to die. The people might
not be ready to overthrow Louis Philippe, to give his place to Louis
Napoleon, but it did not follow that they would have seen the latter's
execution with satisfaction, because they desired peace, and he had
fallen into the habit of breaking it. The enthusiasm that was created in
France by the arrival in that country of the remains of Napoleon I.,
not three months after the coming Napoleon III. had been sent to the
fortress of Ham, showed how difficult a matter it would have been to
proceed capitally against the Prince. Louis Philippe has been praised
for sparing him; but the praise is undeserved. Certainly, the King of
the French was not a cruel man, and it was with sincere regret that he
signed the death-warrants of men who had sought his own life, and who
had murdered his friends; but it would have been no act of cruelty, had
he sent his rival to the guillotine. When a man makes a throw for a
crown, he accepts what is staked, against it,--a coffin. Nothing is
better established than this, that, when a sovereign is assailed, the
intention of the assailant being his overthrow, that sovereign has a
perfect right to put his rival to death, if he succeed in obtaining
possession of his person. The most confirmed believer in Richard III.'s
demoniac character would not think of adding the execution of Richmond
to his crimes, had Plantagenet, and not Tudor, triumphed on Bosworth
Field. James II. has never been blamed for causing Monmouth to be put to
death, but for having complied with his nephew's request for a personal
interview, at which he refused to grant his further request for a
mitigation of punishment. Murat's death was an unnecessary act, but
Ferdinand of Naples has never been censured for it. Had Louis Philippe
followed these examples, and those of a hundred similar cases, he could
not have been charged with undue severity in the exercise of his power
for the conservation of his own rights, and the maintenance of the
tranquillity, not of France alone, but of Europe, and of the world,
which the triumph of a Bonaparte might have perilled. He spared the
future Emperor's life, not from any considerations of a chivalric
character, but because he durst not take it. He feared that the blood
of the offender would more than atone for his offence, and he would
not throw into the political caldron so rich a material, dreading the
effects of its presence there. Then the Orléans party and the Imperial
party not only marched with each other, but often crossed and ran into
each other; and it was not safe to run the risk of offending the first
by an attempt to punish its occasional ally. There was, too, something
of the ludicrous in the Boulogne affair, which enabled government to
regard the chief offender with cheap compassion. Louis Philippe is
entitled to no credit, on the score of mercy, for his conduct in
1840,--for the decision of the Court of Peers was his inspiration; but
he acted wisely,--so wisely, that, if he had done as well in 1848, his
grandson would at this moment have been King of the French, and the
Emperor that is a wanderer, with nothing but a character for flightiness
and a capacity for failure to distinguish him from the herd, while many
would have regarded him as a madman. But the end was not then, and the
hand of Fate was not even near that curtain which was to be raised for
the disclosure of events destined to shake and to change the world.
The defence of Louis Napoleon was conducted by M. Berryer, the great
leader of the Legitimists, who, twenty-five years before, had aided
in the defence of Ney, and who, nearly twenty years later, defended
Montalembert, his client of 1840 being in this last case the prosecutor.
In his speech in defence of the Prince, this first of French orators and
advocates made use of language, the recollection of which in after-days
must have been attended with very conflicting emotions. Addressing
himself to the judges, he said,--"Standing where I do, I do not think
that the claims of the name in which this project was attempted can
possibly fall humiliated by the disdainful expressions of the _Procureur
Général_. You make remarks upon the weakness of the means employed, of
the poverty of the whole enterprise, which made all hope of success
ridiculous. Well, if success is anything, I will say to you who are
men,--you, who are the first men in the state,--you, who are members of
a great political body,--there is an inevitable and eternal Arbitrator
between every judge and every accused who stands before him;--before
giving your judgment, now, being in presence of this Arbitrator, and in
face of the country, which will hear your decrees, tell me this, without
regard now to weakness of means, but with the rights of the case, the
laws, and the institution before your eyes, and with your hands upon
your hearts, as standing before your God, and in presence of us, who
know you, will you say this:--'If he had succeeded, if his pretended
right had triumphed, I would have denied him and it,--I would have
refused all share in his power,--I would have denied and rejected him'?
For my part, I accept the supreme arbitration I have mentioned; and
whoever there may be amongst you, who, before their God, and before
their country, will say to me,--'If he had succeeded, I would have
denied him,'--such a one will I accept for judge in this case." In
making this sweeping challenge, M. Berryer knew that he was hitting
the Court of Peers hard, for it contained men who had been leading
Napoleonists in the days of the Empire, and others who were ready to
join any government which should be powerful enough to establish itself;
while it left the Legitimists, the orator's own party, unharmed. They
were the only men, according to M. Berryer's theory of defence, who
would have furnished an impartial tribunal for the trial of his client;
for they alone, with strict truth, could have said that they would deny
his right, and refuse to share in his power, no matter at what time he
should succeed in accomplishing his designs.
Had the French Peers been gifted with that power of mental vision which
enables men to see into the future, they would not have been disposed to
condemn the man who stood before them in 1840. Could it have been made
known to them that in eight years he would be elected President of the
French Republic by nearly five and a half millions of votes,--that in
twelve years he would become Emperor of the French,--that in fifteen
years he would, as the ally of England, have struck down the Russian
hegemony,--and that in twenty years he would be the conqueror of
Austria, and have called the Kingdom of Italy into existence, while his
enmity was dreaded and his friendship desired by all the nations of the
earth, and the fate of the Popedom was in his hands,--had these things
been so much as dreamed of by his judges, they would have formed the
most lenient of tribunals, and have suffered him to depart in peace.
They are not to be charged with a lack of wisdom in not foreseeing what
must have appeared to be the ravings of lunacy, had it been deliberately
set down by some inspired prophet. Neither the man nor his cause
commanded much respect. We, who know that the French Emperor is the
first man of the age, as well in intellect as in position, have no right
to sneer at the men of 1840 because they looked upon him as a feeble
pretender. He had made two attempts to place himself at the head of the
French nation, and in each instance his failure had been so signal, and
in some respects so ridiculous, that it was impossible to regard him as
the representative of a living principle. Even those who thought him a
man of talent could account for his want of success only by supposing
that Imperialism was no longer powerful in France, and that his appeals
were made to an extinct party. The soldiery, amongst whom the traditions
of the Empire were supposed to be strong, had evinced no desire to
substitute a Bonaparte for a Bourbon of the younger branch; and as to
the peasantry, who showed themselves so fanatically Bonapartean in 1848,
and in 1851-2, they were never thought of at all. France consisted of
the government, the army, the _bourgeoisie_, and the skeleton colleges
of electors; and so long as they were agreed, nothing was to be feared
either from Prince Louis Napoleon or from the Comte de Chambord. We
think this was a sound view of affairs, and that the French government
of 1841 might have been the French government of 1861, had not the
parties to the combination that ruled France in 1841 quarrelled. It was
the loss of the support of the middle class that caused Louis Philippe
to lose his throne in the most ignominious manner; and that support the
monarch would not have forfeited, but for the persistence of M. Guizot
in a policy which it would have been difficult to maintain under any
circumstances, and which was enfeebled in 1847-8 by the gross corruption
of some of its principal supporters. That the _bourgeoisie_ intended to
subvert the throne they had established, for the benefit of either
the Republicans or the Imperialists, is not to be supposed; but their
natural disgust with the wickedness of the government as it was at the
beginning of 1848, and with the refusal of the minister to allow even
the peaceful discussion of the reform question, was the occasion of the
kingdom's fall, and of the establishment, first of the shadowy Republic,
and then of the solid Empire.
The events of 1848 furnished to Louis Napoleon the place whereon to
stand, whence to move the French world. He must have lived and died an
exile, but for the Revolution of February. The ability with which he
profited by events suffices to show that he is entitled to be considered
a great man as well as a great sovereign. That he had been born in the
purple, and that he bore a great name, and that through the occurrence
of several deaths he had become the legitimate heir of Napoleon, were
favorable circumstances, and helped not a little to promote his purpose;
but they could not alone have made him Emperor of the French, and the
world's arbiter. There must have been extraordinary talent in the man
who aspired as he did, or he would have failed as completely in 1848 as
he had failed in 1836 and in 1840. But the real power of the man came
out as soon as he found a standing-place. Previously to 1848, he could
act only as a criminal in seeking his proper place, as he believed it to
be. He had first to conquer before he could attempt to govern,--and to
conquer, too, with the means of his enemy. All this was changed in 1848.
Then he was safe in France, as he had been in England, and began
the political race on equal terms with such men as Cavaignac and
Ledru-Rollin. That he soon passed far ahead of them was, perhaps, as
much due to circumstances as to his political abilities. The name of
Bonaparte was associated with the idea of the restoration of order
and prosperity, and this helped him with that large class of persons,
embracing both rich men and poor men, who not only believe that "order
is Heaven's first law," but that under certain conditions it is the
supreme law, for the maintenance of which all other laws are to be set
aside and disregarded. These men, whose organ and exponent was M.
César Romieu, who called so loudly for cannon to put down the
revolutionists,--"even if it should come from Russia!"--and whose type
of perfection is the churchyard, were all fanatical supporters of "the
coming man," and they assisted him along the course with all their might
and strength. No matter how swiftly he drove, his chariot-wheels seemed
to them to tarry. The very arguments that were made use of to induce
other men to act against the rising Bonaparte were those which had
the most effect in binding them to his cause. He would establish a
cannonarchy, would he? Well, a cannonarchy was exactly what they
desired, provided its powers should be directed, not against foreign
monarchs, but against domestic Republicans. That a government of which
he should be the head would disregard the constitution, would shackle
the press, would limit speech, and would suppress the Assembly, was an
argument in his favor, that, to their minds, was irresistible. Had
they thought of the Russian War, and of the Italian War, and of the
extinction of the Pope's temporal power, and of the liberal home-policy
that was adopted in 1860, as things possible to occur, Louis Napoleon
would have remained Louis Napoleon to the end of his days, for all the
support he would have received at their hands. They wished for a sort
of high-constable, whose business it should be to maintain order by
breaking the heads or seizing the persons of all who did not take their
view of men's political duties. It is the custom to speak of this
class of men as if they were peculiar to France, and to say that their
existence there is one of the many reasons why that country can never
long enjoy a period of constitutional liberty. This is not just to
France. The French are a great people, who have their faults, but who
are in no sense more servile than are Americans, or Englishmen, or
Germans. Extreme disciples of order, men who are ready to sacrifice
everything else for the privileges of making and spending or hoarding
money in peace, are to be found in all countries; and nowhere are they
more numerous, and nowhere is their influence greater or more noxious,
than in the United States. The difference of populations considered,
there are as many of them in Boston as in Paris; and our breed is
ready to go as far in sacrificing freedom, and in treating right with
contempt, as were their French brothers of 1848. The infirmity belongs,
not to French nature, but to human nature.
Louis Napoleon received not a little assistance, in the early part of
his French career, from the strongest of his political enemies. The
friends of both branches of the Bourbons were his friends--at that time,
and for their own purposes. A restoration was what they desired, and
they held that it would be easier to convert the Comte de Chambord or
the Comte de Paris into a king as the consequence of another Bonapartean
usurpation, than as the consequence of the Republic's continuance. Louis
Napoleon was to destroy the Republic, and they were to destroy him, with
the aid of foreign armies. The fate which Cicero wished for Octavius,
that he should be elevated and then destroyed, was what they meant for
him. They counted upon the effect of that reaction which so soon set in
against the revolutions of 1848, and which they did not believe
would spare any government which had grown out of any one of those
revolutions. They also believed the Prince to be a fool, and thought
he would be a much easier person to be disposed of, after he had been
sufficiently used, than any one of his rivals. They overrated their own
power as much as they underrated his abilities; and down to the last
moment, and when the contest had become one for life or death, they bore
themselves as if they were sure that they were acting against a man who
had been elevated solely through the force of circumstances, and who
could not maintain his position. The _coup d'état_ opened their eyes,
but it was not until the event of the Russian War had secured for the
Emperor the first place in Europe, that they became convinced that in
the man who was the ruler of France they had a master. Even now, when
the condition of every country within the circle of civilization bears
evidence to the vast weight of Imperial France, it is not difficult to
find Frenchmen who declare that the Emperor is a mere adventurer, and
that he is only "a lucky fellow." If they are right, what shall we think
of all France? Does the reign of Napoleon III. serve only to illustrate
the proverb, that among the blind the one-eyed man is a king?
The manner in which the French President became Emperor of the French
has been much criticized. That some of his deeds, at the close of 1851,
and in the early part of 1852, deserve censure, few of his intelligent
admirers will be disposed to deny. His defence is, that it was
impossible for him to act differently without forfeiting his life. The
contest, in 1851, had assumed such a character, that it was evident
that the one party or the other must be destroyed. We have M. Guizot's
authority for saying that in French political contests no quarter is
ever given, and that the vanquished become as the dead. French history
shows that there is no exaggeration in this statement, and that every
political leader in France must fight for his life as well as for his
post, the loss of the latter placing the former in great peril. This is
a characteristic of French politics to which sufficient attention has
not been paid, in discussing the morality of French statesmen. In
England, for many generations, and in the United States, down to the
decision of the last Presidential election, a constitutional opposition
was as much a political institution, and as completely a part of the
machinery of government, as the administration itself. Formerly,
opposition was not without its dangers in England, and, whichever party
had possession of the government, it sought to crush out its opponents
with all the vigor and venom of an American slavocrat. Charles I. sent
Sir John Eliot to the Tower, by way of punishing him for the opposition
he had made to unconstitutional government; and there he died, and there
he was buried. The execution of Strafford, though as just a deed as ever
was performed, must be allowed to have resulted from proceedings that
belong to French politics rather than to those of England since the
times of the Tudors. All through the reigns of the Stuart kings, and
down to the Revolution, parties fought for safety as well as for spoils.
A defeat was then often followed by a butchery. Hume, speaking of the
political warfare that happened just before the Revolution of 1688, says
that the "two parties, actuated by mutual rage, but cooped up within the
narrow limits of the law, levelled with poisoned daggers the most
deadly blows against each other's breast, and buried in their factious
divisions all regard to truth, honor, and humanity." This evil was
gradually, but surely, removed from English politics by the triumph of
the constitutional party. It lingered, however, for half a century, and
after the accession of the House of Hanover caused the impeachment of
Oxford and the exile of Bolingbroke and Ormond. The last pronounced
appearance of it was in 1742, when Sir Robert Walpole's enemies, not
content with his political fall, sought his life. They failed utterly,
and for one hundred and twenty years the course of English politics has
been strictly constitutional, an opposition party being, as it were, the
complement of the administration or ministry. The same party divisions
that existed in England under George II. substantially exist under the
grand-daughter of his grandson. So has it been in the United States,
though it would not be difficult to show that none of our parties have
been so free from approaching to the verge of illegality as English
parties have been since 1714; and the conduct of the present American
opposition is simply detestable, and has destroyed the national
constitution.
The French began their political imitation of the English in 1789. As
in most imitations, caricature has largely predominated in it. The one
thing that might advantageously have been imitated they have altogether
neglected. They never have been able to comprehend the nature and the
purpose of an opposition party, and hence every such party that has come
into existence in France has been treated by the governing party as if
it were composed of enemies of the State. When the Jacobins sent the
Girondins to the scaffold, and when Robespierre and St. Just sent Danton
and Desmoulins to the same place, and when the Thermidorians so disposed
of Robespierre and St. Just, they did no more than has been done by
other French political leaders, except that their measures were more
trenchant than have been those of later statesmen of their country. The
reason why the Revolution led to a military despotism was, that no
party would tolerate its political foes, much less protect them in the
exercise of the right of free discussion and legal action. The execution
of Louis XVI. was but a solitary incident in the game that was played by
the most excitable political gamblers that ever converted a nation into
a card-table. He was slain, not so much because he was a king, or had
been one, as because he was the natural chief of the Royal party, a
party which the Republicans would not spare. Party after party rose and
fell, the leaders perishing under the guillotine, or flying from their
country, or being sent to Guiana. Despotism came as a relief to the
people who were thus tormented by the bloody freaks of men who were
energetic only as murderers. There probably never was a more popular
government than Bonaparte's Consulship, in its first days. Soon,
however, the old evil renewed itself in full force. A few men, the most
conspicuous of whom was Carnot, confined their opposition to the policy
of the government, and kept themselves within the limits of the law;
but others were less scrupulous, and labored for the destruction of the
government, and compassed the death of the governors. Jacobins were as
bad as Royalists, and Royalists were no better than Jacobins. Confusion
was as much the object of the party of order as it was that of the party
of disorder. Men of all ranks, opinions, parties, and conditions were
among the conspirators of those days, or in some way encouraged the
conspirators, from Cadoudal, a hero of the Vendée, to Moreau, the hero
of the Black Forest and Hohenlinden. The vigorous, and in some instances
tyrannical, action of the government put a stop to this kind of
opposition for some years. The seizure and execution of the Duc
d'Enghien, though in itself not to be approved, was followed by a
cessation of Royalist attempts against the person of the chief of the
State. It was one of those terrible lessons by which constituted power
sometimes teaches its enemies that the force of lawlessness is not
necessarily confined to one side in a political controversy. Nothing
contributed more to the establishment of the Empire than the violence
of Bonaparte's enemies, as they favored the plan of establishing an
hereditary monarchy, the existence of which should not be bound up with
the existence of an individual. During the reign of Napoleon I. the
opposition was quiet, but it was organized, and its conduct was from
first to last illegal, as it corresponded with the banished princes, and
with the foreign enemies of France. The Mallet affair, in 1812, which
came so very near effecting the Emperor's dethronement when he was in
the midst of his Russian disasters, shows how frail was his tenure
of power when he was absent from Paris, and how extensive were the
ramifications of the informal conspiracy that existed against him. "You
have found the tail, but not the head," were the words in which the
bold conspirator let his judges know that the danger was not over. The
Legislative Body endeavored to act as an opposition party in France
after the disasters of 1813, and the Emperor, after giving them a
lecture, dismissed them. The Allies would never have dared to cross
the French frontier, had they not been advised of the existence of
disaffection, which was ready to become treason, in their enemy's
country. The opposition to Louis XVIII.'s government was highly
treasonable in its character; and so was that which Napoleon encountered
during the Hundred Days. When the second Restoration had been effected,
the French government found itself in a strange predicament. The
extraordinary Chamber of Deputies which then met, "the Impracticable
Chamber," was so intensely royalist in its sentiments, that it alarmed
every reasonable friend of monarchy in Europe. It would have subjected
the king himself to its will, in order that it might be free to punish
the enemies of royalty with even more vigor and cruelty than the
Jacobins had punished its friends. There was to be a revival of the
Terror by the party which had suffered in 1793, and for the purpose of
exterminating imperialists, republicans, and moderate monarchists. Lord
Macaulay has compared this Chamber with the first English Parliament
that was called after the restoration of the House of Stuart. The
comparison is unfair to the Parliament. There had been a long and a
bitter war between parties in England, and the Cavaliers remembered,
because they were events of yesterday, the terrible series of defeats
they had experienced, from Edgehill to Worcester. Between the date of
the Battle of Worcester and the date of the Restoration there were less
than nine years. The same generation that saw Charles I. beheaded saw
Charles II. enter Whitehall. England had changed but little in the
twenty years that elapsed between the meeting of the Long Parliament and
the dissolution of the Convention Parliament. Very different was it in
France. There parties had had no fighting in the field, save in Brittany
and the Vendée. There the change had been as complete as if it had been
half a century in the making. Twenty-three years had passed away since
the fall of the monarchy, when the Impracticable Chamber met, to
legislate for a new France in the spirit of the worst period of the
reigns of the worst Bourbons. These ultra-royalists would have had their
way, and the massacres of the Protestants would have been accompanied or
followed by the destruction of all parties save the victors, but for the
existence of circumstances which it is even now painful for Frenchmen
to think of. The Allies occupied the country, and their influence was
thrown in behalf of moderate counsels. The good-nature of Louis XVIII.
was supported by the sound common-sense of Wellington, and by the
humanity of Alexander; and so but few persons were punished for
political offences. The conduct of the Chamber showed that the Deputies
had no just conception of the nature either of a ministry or of an
opposition. So it was, though with less violence, throughout the period
known as the Restoration; and the Polignac movement of 1830, which led
to the fall of the elder Bourbons, was a _coup d'état_, the object being
the destruction of the Charter. In Louis Philippe's reign, there were
facts upon facts that establish the proposition that no French party
then clearly comprehended the character of a political opposition; and
it was the attempt of M. Guizot to prevent even the discussion of the
reform question that was the occasion, though not the cause, of the
Revolution of 1848. No sooner had the Republic been established than the
Royalists began to conspire against its existence, while the Republicans
themselves were far from being united, the _Reds_ hating the _Blues_
quite as intensely as they hated the _Whites_, or old Royalists; and
beyond even the _Reds_ were large numbers of men who, for the lack of a
more definite name, have been called Socialists, who wanted something as
vehemently as Brutus desired his purposes, but who would probably have
been much puzzled to say what that something was, had the question been
put to them by the agent of a power willing and able to gratify their
wish.
It was into such a political chaos as this that Louis Napoleon found
himself plunged in 1848. He had a difficult part to fill; and that he
did not succeed in satisfying most of those who had been most prominent
in elevating him was inevitable from the discrepancy between his views
of his position and their views of it. They had intended him to be a
tool, and he was determined to be master of all the land. There was a
contest for power, which ended in the _coup d'état_ of 1851. Victory
waited on the heir of her old favorite. The contest was marked by many
deeds, on both sides, not defensible on strict moral grounds, but which
bear too close a resemblance to the ordinary course of French politics
to admit of the actors being sweepingly condemned, as if they had
poisoned a pure fountain. Neither party could afford to act with
fairness, because each party was convinced that the other was seeking
its destruction, according to the usual rule of Gallic political
warfare. That the world should have heard much of the errors of the
victor, while those of the vanquished have been charitably passed over,
is but natural. Victors become objects of envy, while pity is the
feeling that is created by thoughts of their foes. It is only in America
that the beaten party is so insolent that the conquerors are fairly
over-crowed by it. All the blunders, all the acts of violence of which
the other side were guilty, have been forgotten, or are not alluded
to, because parties are not held accountable for evils that never were
perpetrated, though it was intended that they should take form and shape
and bear fruit. It is charged against the Emperor, that he deliberately
planned the destruction of the Republic, and that he ceased not to
labor until his purpose had been effected. Admitting this charge to be
strictly well founded, what is it more than can be brought against the
very men who are so loud in preferring it? The Republic was doomed from
the hour of its birth, and the final struggle between the Imperialists
and the Royalists was made over its carcass. That struggle was neither a
Pharsalia, in which two great men contended for supremacy in a republic,
nor a Philippi, in which parties fought deliberately in support of
certain principles, but an Actium; and the question to be decided was,
With which of two energetic forms of force should the victory be? Louis
Napoleon contended for the imperial form, for the rehabilitation of the
scheme of his uncle, and for an opportunity to develop the Napoleonic
ideas. The other side sought the restoration of the monarchy as it had
been between 1814 and 1830, with Henry V. for their idol, as any attempt
to make the Comte de Paris king must have failed, though in due time
Henry V. might have been displaced, if not succeeded regularly, by the
head of the Orléans family. Of the two parties to the struggle that
followed the election of Louis Napoleon to the Presidency, that of the
President was the more friendly to liberal institutions, and the most
disposed to govern in accordance with modern sentiments. The President
himself was attached to the liberal party, and leaned decidedly to
the left wing of it. Circumstances had all tended to make him a
Constitutionalist. His connections had been principally with those
countries in which liberty is best understood, and whose histories are
the histories of freedom. By birth he was a prince of Holland. He had
lived much in Switzerland and in England, and he had visited the United
States. That part of his youth in which the mind is formed he had passed
in those years in which the Bonapartists and Liberals had been allies.
His writings prove that he both understood and appreciated the
constitutional system of government. Such a man was not likely to become
a despot merely from choice, though circumstances might make him one
for the time, as they made Fabius a dictator. His recent action, in
extensively liberalizing the imperial system, and in providing for
perfect freedom of discussion in the Senate and the Legislative Body,--a
freedom of which the supporters of the Pope have thoroughly availed
themselves,--confirms the belief that his original intention was to
provide a free constitution for France. Had he done so, there would
have been civil war in that country within a year from the time that he
became master of it. He could not trust his enemies, who, could they
have obtained power, would have granted him no mercy, and therefore had
no right to expect it from him. Had they been successful, we should have
heard much of their acts of usurpation and cruelty, and of the injustice
with which the President and his party and policy had been treated.
Severe criticism, often unfair both in matter and in manner, is that
which every victorious party must experience, not only from those whom
it has defeated, but from the world at large. This is one of the items
in the details of the heavy price which the victors must pay for their
victory, no matter where it is won, or what the character of the contest
the issue of which it has decided. Men worship success, but they worship
it much after the fashion that some savage tribes worship the gods
created by their own hands, tearing and rending at one time the images
that at another had been objects of their most abject devotion.
If we judge the conduct of Louis Napoleon by reference only to Napoleon
III., we shall not be inclined to condemn it. His rule has not been a
perfect one, but it has been the best that France has known for fifty
years, not only for the French themselves, but for foreign peoples. He
has lifted France out of that slough in which she had floundered under
both branches of the Bourbons, and he has done so without being guilty
of any act of injustice toward other nations. The greatness of the
France of Napoleon I. was unpleasingly associated with the idea of the
degradation of neighboring countries, which implied the ultimate fall of
the Empire, as it could not be expected that Russians and Germans would
be governed from Paris. Independence is what every people strong enough
to vindicate its rights will have; and hence the men at St. Petersburg
and Vienna and Berlin were certain to act against the men of Paris
at the first favorable opportunity that should present itself. Their
dependent state was an unnatural state, and when the reaction came, the
torrent swept all before it. The fall of Napoleon I. was the consequence
of the manner in which he rose to the greatest height ever achieved by
a man in modern days. Napoleon III., whose power is really greater than
that of his uncle, has incurred the enmity of no foreign people. He
has led his armies into no European capital city, and he has levied no
foreign contributions. When it was in his power to dictate terms to
Russia, he astonished men, and even made them angry, by the extent of
his moderation. His abrupt pause in his career of Italian success, no
matter what the motive of it, enabled Austria to retire from a war in
which she had found nothing but defeat, with the air of a victor. The
only additions he has made to the territory of France--Savoy, Nice, and
Monaco--were obtained by the fair consent of all those who had any right
to be consulted on the changes that were made. We find nothing in his
conduct that betrays any desire to humiliate his contemporaries, and a
superiority to vulgar ideas of what constitutes triumph that is
almost without a parallel. No man was ever treated more insolently by
hereditary sovereigns, from Czar and Kaiser and King to petty German
princelings; and this insolence he has never repaid in kind, nor sought
to repay in any manner. He has foregone occasions for vengeance that
legitimate monarchs would have turned to the fullest account for the
gratification of their hatred. He has, apparently, none of that vanity
which led Napoleon I. to be pleased with having his antechamber full of
kings whose hearts were brimful of hatred of their lord and master.
If he were to have an Erfurt Congress, it would be as plain and
unostentatious an affair as that of his uncle was superficially grand
and striking. He seems perpetually to have before his mind's eye what
the Greeks called _the envy of the gods_, the divine Nemesis, to which
he daily makes sacrifice. He is the most prosperous of men, but he is
determined not to be prosperity's spoiled child. If the truth were
known, it would probably be found that he has not a single personal
enemy among the monarchs, all of whom would, as politicians, be glad
to witness his fall. In their secret hearts they say that "Monsieur
Bonaparte is a well-behaved man, to whom they could wish well in any
other part than that which he prefers to hold." Their predecessors hated
Napoleon I. personally, and with intense bitterness, which accounts for
the readiness with which they took parts in the hunting of the eagle,
and for the rancor with which they treated him when his turn came to
drain the cup of humiliation to the very dregs. The dislike felt for
Napoleon III. is simply political, and such dislike is not incompatible
with liberality in judgment and generosity of action. Should it be his
fortune to fall, there would be no St. Helena provided for him.
The domestic rule of the Emperor of the French will bear comparison
with that of any monarch which that people have ever had. It is not
faultless, but it is as little open to criticism of a just nature as
that of any European sovereign, and with reference to the changed
position of sovereigns. We are not to compare Napoleon III. with Louis
XIV., that sublime and ridiculous egotist, who seems never to have had a
human feeling, except those feelings which humanity would be the better
without. The French Revolution banished that breed of kings from
Christendom, if not from the world. He must be compared with monarchs
who have felt the responsibilities of their trust very differently from
the man who called himself the State, who thought that twenty millions
of people had been made to minister to his vanity, and who gently
reproached God with ingratitude because of the victories of Eugène
and Marlborough. "God, it appears, is forgetting us," he said,
"notwithstanding all that we have done for Him." A monarch of this class
is now as extinct as the mammoth, and traces of his footsteps excite the
wonder of the disciples of political science. In these days, a monarch
must rule mostly for the people, and largely by the people. He is only
the popular chief in a country which has not a well-defined constitution
over which time has thrown the mantle of reverence. The course of
Napoleon III. has been in accordance with this view of his position. He
is not the State, but he is the first man in the State. Under his lead
and direction the French have known much material prosperity, and have
added not a little to that wealth which, when judiciously used as a
means, and not worshipped as the end of human exertion, is the source of
so much happiness. The readiness with which the people, the masses
of his subjects, subscribed to the great war-loans, contending for
subscriptions as for valuable privileges, establishes both their
prosperity under his government, and their confidence in that
government's strength and permanence. That he has not made use of his
power to stifle the expression of thought is clear from the numerous
works that have been published, some of which were written for the
purpose of attacking his dynasty,--authors of eminence choosing to
pervert history by converting its volumes into huge partisan pamphlets,
in which the subject handled and the object aimed at are alike libelled.
He has kept the press, meaning the journals, more sharply reined up than
Englishmen and Americans have approved or can approve; but as French
journalists, instead of confining their political warfare to its proper
use, are in the habit, when free to publish what they please, of
assailing the very existence of the government itself, he has some
excuse for his conduct. An English journal which should recommend the
dethronement of Victoria would be as summarily silenced as ever was
a French White, Blue, or Red paper. The most determined advocate of
freedom of discussion must find it hard to disapprove of the suppression
of the "Univers," which, while availing itself of every possible license
to advocate the extremest doctrines of despotism in Church and State,
demanded the suppression of freedom of all kinds in every other quarter.
It is an advantage to the enemies of free speech, that they can avail
themselves of its existence to advocate restriction in its comprehensive
sense, while their opponents cannot consistently demand that they shall
be silenced. Under the liberal policy which has just been inaugurated
in France, great advantages will be enjoyed by the enemies of the
government, and of free principles generally; and the Emperor is
reported to have said that he shall accept the logical consequences of
that policy, let the result be what it may. What has thus far happened
confirms this report; but it ought not to surprise us, if he should find
himself compelled to have resort to measures of restriction not much
different from those "warnings" that have been fatal to more than one
journal in times past. The tendency in the French mind to illegal
opposition, and of the French government to meet such opposition by
harsh action, will not allow us to be very sanguine as to the workings
of the experiment upon which the Emperor has entered. His chief object
is to establish his dynasty, and he cannot tolerate attacks upon that;
and attacks of that kind would form the staple of the opposition press,
were it permitted to become as free as the press is in England and in
the Northern States of America.
One of the charges that have been made against the Imperial system is,
that it is a stratocracy, a mere government by the sword, and that it
must pass away with the Emperor himself, or be continued in the person
of some military man; so that France must degenerate into a vast
Algiers, and be ruled by a succession of Deys. There is something
plausible in this view of the subject, which has imposed upon many
persons, and which is all the more imposing because the Emperor is
fifty-three years old, while his only son has but completed his fifth
year; and Prince Napoleon is not popular with the army, and is an object
of both fear and dislike to the members of several powerful interests.
The Imperialists have themselves principally to blame for this state of
things, as they have encouraged and promulgated opinions that favor
its existence. Clever historical writers have discovered a remarkable
resemblance between the France of to-day and the Roman Empire of the
days of Augustus. Napoleon I. was the modern Julius Caesar, and Napoleon
III. is Octavius. The Emperor is writing a Life of Julius Caesar, and it
is believed that it is his purpose to establish the fact that his family
is playing the part which the family of Caesar played more than eighteen
centuries ago. If one were disposed to be critical, it would not be
difficult to point out, that, as the first Roman imperial dynasty became
Claudian rather than Julian in its blood and character, after the death
of Augustus, so has the French imperial dynasty a better claim to be
considered of the family of Beauharnais than of the family of Bonaparte.
This Caesarian game is a foolish one, and may be played to an ultimate
loss. Of the difference between France as she is and Rome as she was in
the times of the first Caesars it is not necessary to say much, for
it presents itself to every cultivated mind. The Roman Empire was an
aggregation of various nations, including the highest and lowest forms
of human development then known, and stretching from the Atlantic to the
Euphrates, and from the forests of Germany to the deserts of Africa.
Over that vast and various collection of peoples a portion of Italy bore
sway; and it was to break down the tyranny of that Italian rule that the
Julian rule was created, and that the Republic was made to give way to
the Empire.
The cause of the Caesars was the cause of the provincials against the
Italians, of the masses in twenty lands against the aristocracy of but a
part of one land, of many millions of sheep against a few select wolves.
The revolution that was effected through the agency of Julius and
Octavius was necessary for the continuance of civilization, which
was threatened with extinction through the plundering processes of
proprietors and proconsuls. The Roman Emperor was the shepherd,
who, though he might shear his sheep close to their skins, and not
unfrequently convert many of them into mutton, for his own profit or
pleasure, would nevertheless protect them against the wolves. He stood
between the imperial race, of which he was himself the first member,
and all the other races that were to be found in his extensive and
diversified dominions. The question that he settled was one of races,
not merely one of parties and political principles. What resemblance,
then, can there be between the French Emperor and the Roman Imperator,
or between the quarrel decided by the Napoleons and that which was
decided by the first two Caesars? There may be said to be some
resemblance between them, from the fact that the French aristocracy, as
a body, belong to the party that is hostile to the Bonapartes, and
that it was the Roman aristocracy who were beaten at Pharsalia and
politically destroyed at Philippi; but the nobility of France were
ruined before the name of Bonaparte had been raised from obscurity, and
the first Napoleon sought to please and to conciliate the remnants of
that once brilliant order. There can be no comparison made between the
two aristocracies; as the Roman was one of the ablest and most ferocious
bodies of men that the world has ever seen, and made a long and
desperate fight for the maintenance of its power,--while the French is
effete, and it is difficult to believe that in the veins of its members
runs the blood of the heroes of the days of the League, or even that of
the _Frondeurs_. Their political action reminds us of nothing but the
playing of children; and the best of the leaders of the opposition to
the Imperial _régime_ are new men, most of whose names were never heard
of until the present century. The Imperial family, too, unlike that of
Rome, is a new family. The democratic revolution of Rome, which led
to the fall of the Republic, was enabled to triumph only because the
movement was headed by one of the noblest-born of Romans, a patrician of
the bluest blood, who claimed descent from Venus, and from the last
of the Trojan heroes. No Roman had a loftier lineage than "the mighty
Julius"; and when the place of Augustus passed to Tiberius, the third
Emperor represented the Claudian _gens_, the most arrogant, overbearing,
haughty, and cruel of all those patrician _gentes_ that figure in the
history of the republican times. He belonged, too, to the family of
Nero, which was to the rest of the Claudian _gens_ what that _gens_ was
to other men,--the representative of all that is peculiarly detestable
in an oligarchical fraternity. The French Caesars are emphatically
_novi homines_, the founder of their greatness not being in existence
a century ago, and born of a poor family, which had never made any
impression on history. There are abundant points of contrast to be
found, when we examine the origin of Imperial Rome in connection with
the origin of Imperial France, but few of resemblance.
Even in the bad elements of the modern Imperial rule there is little
imitation of that of the Caesars. "The ordinary notion of absolute
government, derived from the form it assumes in Europe at the present
day," says Merivale, "is that of a strict system of prevention, which,
by means of a powerful army, an ubiquitous police, and a censorship
of letters, anticipates every manifestation of freedom in thought or
action, from whence inconvenience may arise to it. But this was not the
system of the Caesarean Empire. Faithful to the traditions of the Free
State, Augustus had quartered all his armies on the frontiers, and his
successors were content with concentrating, cohort by cohort, a small,
though trusty force, for their own protection in the capital. The
legions were useful to the Emperor, not as instruments for the
repression of discontent at home, but as faithful auxiliaries among whom
the most dangerous of his nobles might be relegated, in posts which were
really no more than honorable exiles. Nor was the regular police of the
city an engine of tyranny. Volunteers might be found in every rank
to perform the duty of spies; but it was apparently no part of the
functions of the enlisted guardians of the streets to watch the
countenances of the citizens, or beset their privacy. We hear of no
intrusion into private assemblies, no dispersion of crowds in the
streets...... They [the Emperors] made no effort to impose restraints
upon thought. Freedom of thought may be checked in two ways, and modern
despotism resorts in its restless jealousy to both. The one is, to guide
ideas by seizing on the channels of education; the other, to subject
their utterance to the control of a censorship. In neither one way nor
the other did Augustus or Nero interfere at all. From the days of the
Republic the system of education had been perfectly untrammelled. It was
simply a matter of arrangement between the parties directly interested,
the teacher and the learner. Neither State nor Church pretended to take
any concern in it: neither priest nor magistrate regarded it with the
slightest jealousy. Public opinion ranged, under ordinary circumstances,
in perfect freedom, and under its unchecked influence both the aims and
methods of education continued long to be admirably adapted to make
intelligent men and useful citizens...... The same indulgence which
was extended to education smiled upon the literature which flowed so
copiously from it. There was no restriction upon writing or publication
at Rome analogous to our censorships and licensing acts. The fact that
books were copied by the hand, and not printed for general circulation,
seems to present no real difficulty to the enforcement of such
restrictions, had it been the wish of the government to enforce them.
The noble Roman, indeed, surrounded by freedmen and clients of various
ability, by rhetoricians and sophists, poets and declaimers, had within
his own doors private aid for executing his literary projects; and when
his work was compiled, he had in the slaves of his household the hands
for multiplying copies, for dressing and binding them, and sending forth
an edition, as we should say, of his work to the select public of his
own class or society. The circulation of compositions thus manipulated
might be to some extent surreptitious and secret. But such a mode of
proceeding was necessarily confined to few. The ordinary writer must
have had recourse to a professional publisher, who undertook, as a
tradesman, to present his work for profit to the world. Upon these
agents the government might have had all the hold it required: yet it
never demanded the sight beforehand of any speech, essay, or satire
which was advertised as about to appear. It was still content to punish
after publication what it deemed to be censurable excesses. Severe and
arbitrary as some of its proceedings were in this respect,... it must
be allowed that these prosecutions of written works were rare and
exceptional, and that the traces we discover of the freedom of letters,
even under the worst of the Emperors, leave on the whole a strong
impression of the general leniency of their policy in this
particular."[A] This correct picture of the policy of Imperial Rome on
this point shows that the ancient sovereigns of the first of empires
were more liberal than are modern rulers of their class, and that the
Caesars scorned to do that which has been common with the Bonapartes.
The changes in the direction of freedom which Napoleon III. has recently
made are really more Caesarean in their character than anything that he
had previously done in connection with thought and public discussion. It
ought to be added, however, that the Romans had no daily press, and that
journalism, as we understand it, was as unknown to the Caesars as were
steamships and rifled cannon. Had they been troubled with those daily
showers of Sibylline leaves that so vex modern potentates, their
magnanimity would have been severely tested, and they might have
established as severe censorships as ever have been known in Paris or
Vienna.
[Footnote A: _A History of the Romans under the Empire_. By CHARLES
MERIVALE, B.D., late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Vol. VI.,
pp. 224-231.]
Flattery has discovered a resemblance between the career of Napoleon
III. and the career of Augustus, and it required the eyes of flattery
to make such a discovery. The Frenchman is the equal of the Roman in
talent, but the resemblance goes no farther. What resemblance can there
be between the boy who became a statesman at twenty and the man who
began his career at forty? between the youth who made himself master of
the Roman situation in a few months and the elderly man whose position
at fifty-three is by no means an assured one? between the man who at
thirty-three had destroyed all rivals and competitors, and gathered into
his person all the powers of the State, and the man who at a much later
period of life is still engaged upon an experiment in politics? Augustus
avenged the murder of Julius within a brief time after it had been
perpetrated; Napoleon III. has never avenged the fall of _his_
uncle, but has refrained from injuring his uncle's destroyers, when,
apparently, he might have done so with profit to himself, and with the
general approbation of the world. Augustus's public life knew but one
signal calamity, the loss of the legions of Varus, which happened toward
its close, and in his dying moments he could congratulate himself on
having played well, which meant successfully, his part in the drama of
life. Napoleon III.'s life has been full of calamities, and it remains
yet to be seen whether history shall have to rank him among its
favorites, or high in the list of those unfortunates against whom it
has recorded sentence of everlasting condemnation. Should he live, and
maintain his place, and bequeath his throne to his son, and that son be
of an age to appreciate his position, and possessed of fair talent,
he may pass for the modern Augustus; but thinking of him, and of the
strange reverses of fortune that have happened since 1789 to men and to
nations, we subscribe to the wisdom of the hackneyed Greek sentiment,
that no man should be called fortunate until the seal of death shall
have placed an everlasting and an impassable barrier between him and the
cruel sports of Mutabilities which are played "to many men's decay."
In one respect it will be allowed by all but absolutists that the
condition of Europe has changed greatly for the better in the last
eleven years, as a consequence of the triumphs of the French Emperor.
From the year 1815 to 1850, national independence was in its true sense
unknown to Continental Europe. The ascendency of Napoleon I. had small
claim to faultlessness, but the men who led in the work of his overthrow
proceeded as if they meant to make the world regret his fall. This is
the secret--which secret is none--of the reaction that speedily took
place in his favor, and which caused an alliance of Liberals and
Jacobins and Imperialists to do honor to his memory; so that, being
dead, he was from his island-sepulchre a more effective foe to
legitimacy and the established order of things than he had been from St.
Cloud and the Tuileries. It has been satirically said that a mythical
Napoleon rose from the dust of the dead Emperor, who bore no moral
resemblance to Europe's master of 1812. As to the resemblance between
the master of a hundred legions and "the dead but sceptred sovereign" of
1824, who ruled men's spirits from his urn, we will not stop to inquire;
but it can be positively asserted that the mythical Napoleon, if any
such creation there was, was the work of the true Napoleon's destroyers.
They earned the hatred and detestation of the greater part of the better
classes in the civilized world; and as it is the nature of men to love
those who have warred against the objects of their hate, nothing was
more natural than for Europeans and Americans to turn fondly to the
memory of one who had beaten and trampled upon every member of the Holy
Alliance, and who had carried the tricolor, that emblem of revolution,
to Vienna and Berlin and Moscow. Men wished to have their own feet upon
the necks of Francis and Frederick William and Alexander, and therefore
they were ready to forget the faults, and to remember only the virtues,
of one who had enjoyed the luxury they so much coveted. It would be
unreasonable to complain of that disposition of the public mind toward
Napoleon I. which prevailed from about the date of his death to that of
the restoration of his dynasty in the person of his nephew, or to sneer
at the inconsistency of "that many-headed monster thing," the people,
who had shouted over the decisions of Vittoria and Leipsic, and before
a decade had expired were regretting that those decisions could not be
reversed; for the change was the consequence of the operations of an
immutable law, of that reaction which dogs the heels of all conquerors.
The legitimate despots, whose union had been too much for the parvenu
despot, established a tyranny over Europe that threatened to stunt the
human mind, and which would have left the world hopeless, if England
had not resolved to part company with her military allies. But her
condemnation of their policy did not prevent its development. Even the
events of 1830 did not restore national freedom to the Continent;
and fifteen years after the overthrow of the elder Bourbons, the
partitioners of Poland could unite, in defiance of their plighted faith,
to destroy the independence of Cracow, the last shadowy remnant of old
and glorious Poland. The ascendency of Napoleon III. has put a stop to
such proceedings as were common from the invasion of France, in 1815, to
the invasion of Hungary, in 1849. He has, to be sure, interfered in the
affairs of foreign countries, but his acts of interference have been
made against the strong, and not against the weak. He interfered to
protect Turkey when she was threatened with destruction by Russia, and
he did so with success. He interfered to protect the Italians against
the hordes of Austria, and with such effect that the _Kingdom of Italy_
has been called into existence through his action, when there was not
another sovereign in the world who would have fired a shot to prevent
the whole Italian Peninsula, and the great islands of Sicily and
Sardinia, from becoming Austrian provinces. He interfered to protect the
Christians of the East against the fire and sword of the Mussulmans, and
it is under the shadow of the French flag alone that Christianity can be
preached in the Lebanon and in the Hollow Syria, in the aged Damascus
and in the historical Sidon. He has interfered to assist England in
China, whereby there has been a new world, as it were, opened to the
enterprise of commerce. He has falsified the predictions of those who
have seen in him only the enemy of England, and who have told us twice
a year, for nine years past, that he would attempt to throw his legions
into Kent, and to march them upon London. He has added nothing to the
territory of France that has not been honorably acquired. Having thus
redeemed Europe from degradation, and not having justified the fears of
those who expected him to renew the old duel between France and
England, his continued prosperity may be earnestly desired by Liberals
everywhere, and with perfect consistency; for can any intelligent man
venture to say that there would be any hope for a better state of
things, either for France or for Europe at large, should his rule be
changed for that of either branch of the Bourbons, or for that of the
Republicans, Red or Blue? Considering the good that he has done, and the
evil that he might have done, and yet has refrained from doing, he will
compare advantageously with any living ruler; and mankind can overlook
his errors in view of his virtues,--save and except those men whom he
vanquished at their own weapons, and whose chief regret it is, that,
being no better political moralists than was the Prince-President, their
immorality was fruitless, while his, according to their interpretation
of his history, gave him empire. Other men, whom his success has not
consigned to partisan darkness, will judge him more justly, and say that
his victory was the proper meed of superior ability, and that whatever
was vicious in his manner of acquiring power has been redeemed by the
use he has almost invariably made of that power. He is not without sin;
but if he shall not die until he shall be stoned by saints selected from
governments and parties, his existence will be prolonged until doomsday.
* * * * *