Volume 53 — THE BRITISH QUARTERLY APRIL 1871 (continued 4)

Apropos of Ghostland, just named, Barham was a great lover of spectral stories, and the reader who cares about such will find in his memoir some of the best we have ever seen. As to anecdotes, the book is brimming over with them. Of course, one meets with one or two that have been met before; but an old story, like an old friend or an old coat, is sometimes more enjoyable than a new one. Barham was at Paul's School with some men as well known as himself, among them being Sir Frederick Pollock, Nestor of lawyers, and Richard Bentley, Nestor of publishers. Another of his comrades was Charles Diggle, afterwards Governor of Sandhurst College. Of him and Barham we find a good story:—

'The two boys having in the course of one of their walks discovered a Quaker's meeting-house, forthwith procured a penny tart of a neighbouring pastry-cook; furnished with this, Diggle marched boldly into the building, and holding up the delicacy in the midst of the grave assembly said, with perfect solemnity,

'"Whoever speaks first shall have this pie."

'"Friend, go thy way," commenced a drab-coloured gentleman, rising; "go thy way, and——"

'"The pie's yours, sir!" exclaimed Master Diggle, politely; and placing it before the astounded speaker, hastily made his escape.'

It was very improper, certainly; and we cannot help hoping that the Head Master of Dean Colet's famous school heard of the impertinence, and administered to the 'nether-urchin' of the future military pedagogue the sharp flogging which he undoubtedly deserved. But one cannot help laughing at these schoolboy absurdities; and the naughtiest boys, if looked after by a schoolmaster like Tom Hood's,

often turn out the ablest men. There is incipient power in these wayward vivacities of youth.

Musical amateurs of the present day of the strenuous class that elicited Charles Lamb's verses beginning—

will doubtless deem Lord North an utter barbarian. George III. scolded him for never going to the concerts of ancient music. 'Your brother, the Bishop,' said the King, 'never misses them, my Lord.' 'Sir,' answered the Premier, 'if I were as deaf as my brother, the Bishop, I would never miss them either!'

Of Lord Thurlow we believe it was that Theodore Hook declared that nobody could be as wise as Thurlow looked. Whether he had much wisdom is a moot point; but strength of will he possessed in an enviable degree, as the following anecdote shows:—

'Lord Thurlow had applied to George the Third on behalf of his brother for the Bishopric of Durham, and having somewhat unexpectedly met with a refusal, he bowed, and was about to retire without pressing his suit, when the monarch, wishing to soften his decision as far as possible, added, "Anything else I shall be happy to bestow upon your relative, but this, unfortunately, is a dignity never held but by a man of high rank and family."

'"Then, Sire," returned Lord Thurlow, drawing himself up, "I must persist in my request—I ask it for the brother of the Lord High Chancellor of England!"

The Chancellor was firm, and the King was compelled to yield.'

This we take to have been highly creditable to Thurlow: it was a courageous assertion that the aristocracy of genius is at least equal to the aristocracy of birth. Here is an amusing story of clerical ignorance from Barham's diary:—

'December 3.—Dined for the first time with Dr. Sumner, Bishop of Llandaff, who told me, as a fact, that Dr. R——, a fellow of Eton, had some time since ordered one of his ponds to be cleared out. A great number of carp, tench, eels, &c., were taken in the course of the operation. The doctor was at dinner with some friends, who had been viewing the work, when a servant came in, to inform him that in draining off the water the men had found a chalybeate. "Have they indeed?" cried he, with much interest; "I am very glad to hear it. Tell them to put it along with the other fish for the present."'

In those days Eton was not famous for its erudition, and a fellow of that famous corporation was likely to be a better judge of the 'other fish' than of the chalybeate. Dr. R—— would probably have known exactly the right way to dress a red mullet from the Avon or a Coniston char.

Here is a good story of Dr. Thomas Hume, an intimate friend of Barham's:—

'They had walked together to the office of one of the morning newspapers, and there the doctor silently placed upon the counter an announcement of the death of some friend, together with five shillings, the usual charge for the insertion of such advertisements. The clerk glanced at the paper, tossed it on one side, and said gruffly, "Seven and six!"

'"I have frequently," replied Hume, "had occasion to publish these simple notices, and I have never before been charged more than five shillings."

'"Simple!" repeated the clerk, without looking up; "He's universally beloved, and deeply regretted! Seven and six."

'Hume produced the additional half crown, and laid it deliberately by the others, observing, as he did so, with the same solemnity of tone he had used throughout, "Congratulate yourself, sir, that this is an expense which your executors will never be put to."'

We hope that unlucky clerk could understand the rebuke that he received; but to us it appears that sarcasm is generally thrown away on such people. They are pachyderms.

The book contains some capital stories of poor Theodore Hook, that marvellously wasted intellect. His great power lay in impromptu, of prose or verse, spoken or written. No man has ever equalled him at a paragraph or a squib, except as to the latter, Garrick and Coleridge. Nobody was ever so exquisite a conversational wit. And certainly no one has ever possessed his power of improvisation in English. He threw off stanza and strophe as fast as a knifegrinder's wheel throws sparks. He scintillated always. Coleridge, after an evening in his company, declared he was as great a genius as Dante. His felicity was invariable. When he was improvising at the piano, after luncheon, at his Fulham villa, enter the ancilla, to say Mr. Winter, the tax collector, has called. Ejaculates Hook:—

But how could Hook stand the tremendous dissipation to which he foolishly condescended? Here is a specimen of his way of living:—

'After a dinner given by Mr. Stephen Price, of Drury-lane Theatre, all the guests, with the exception of Cannon and Theodore Hook, having long since retired, the host, who was suffering from an incipient attack of gout, was compelled to allude pretty plainly to the lateness of the hour. No notice, however, was taken of the hint; and, unable to endure any longer the pain of sitting up, Mr. Price made some excuse, and slipped quietly off to bed. On the following morning he inquired of his servant—"Pray at what time did those gentlemen go last night?" "Go, sir!" replied John; "they are not gone, sir; they have just rung for coffee!"'

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 I^er, et son Historien, M. Thiers. Par Jules Barni. Paris, Germer-Baillière. 1869.

(4.) Histoire de Napoléon I^er. 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

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.'

This, from a Belgian, is at least as humiliating to Paris as any of the Prussian victories.

From politics, as from warlike criticism, M. Leclercq abstains almost wholly: of course, he cannot help wondering at Bazaine's behaviour at Metz; as we heard it lately expressed by a great English financier, unable, like most financiers, to help liking the Emperor after all:—'I won't say Bazaine was a traitor; that is not quite fair upon him. But I will say that he thought more of his government than he did of France. He might have prevented the investment of Paris, there is not a doubt of it.' The decay of the Napoleonic idea is put in a startling light, when we reflect that Bazaine was, before the end of last September, almost the only Imperialist in France. Paris, which had been so delighted at the prospect of glory as to forget all about the coup d'état, went round as one man. In fact, Sedan was hurried on because Paris could not be trusted: there was no sincerity in the ex-Emperor's professions and concessions. The Parisians knew that, and though they had been ready enough to shout against the Prussians, they were only waiting for their opportunity to get rid of their own ruler. It is the old story of a house divided against itself. The poor men were mowed down at Sedan by shells from such a distance that they could not see whence they were fired, simply because it was 'useless' for Napoleon to go to Paris. The idea of really honestly trusting to the country, and giving pledges for future conduct, never presented itself as possible in 1870 any more than in 1814 and 1815.

On one point M. Leclercq finds just fault with the Republican government: they decreed a second expulsion of Germans from Paris, and they vowed not only never to yield an inch of French soil, but never to raze a stone of one of her fortresses:—'As to the soil (says our author), let the inhabitants decide; but the offer to dismantle Metz and Strasburg, and, above all, the little fortresses which have so long wished to be made open towns, would at once have set them right with all the noblest minds in Europe: to act as they did was to play into the hands of the King of Prussia.' But M. Leclercq is somewhat of a peace-at-any-price man.

He is a prophet, too, and delights in the thought that France, before long, will be a federation like the United States. Its provinces will then (he says) resume their old importance—'the life now heaped up in Paris will be spread abroad where it is needed.' Paris, no doubt, has done nobly, and there is, after all, a good side to her character. He is as little desirous as we are to deny this; but, then, the fault was mainly hers. Had she last autumn stood firmly by the Republican party, instead of falling so readily and blindly into the trap which Louis Napoleon laid for her, war would have been impossible. She enabled the Emperor to begin; and then, by her fickle restlessness, she hampered his movements and forced him to fight, as it were, with one hand tied up. Instead of Hugo's Paris-cerveau, M. Leclercq calls her Paris-spectacle, Paris-plaisir, Paris-panache, and he sees no future for France except in her humiliation: il faut trépaner (he says) le cerveau de la France.

The Papiers Secrets need not occupy us long; they were hardly worth the trouble of unearthing. The Government of National Defence might surely have found better work for men like De Kératry, Lavertujon, and Cochut, than to be rummaging among the rubbish found at the Tuileries, at St. Cloud, and at Meudon. If they had so destroyed the environs of Paris as to prevent the Prussians from finding shelter; if they had (as common sense would have dictated) fortified Versailles, connecting it with the enceinte by a strong military line, and used their abundant labour to make the works impregnable, it would have been far better than to have wasted precious time in docketing papers which are certainly disappointing. They reveal nothing, for we already know that the Empire was based upon corruption and espionnage; and all they do is to enable the curious reader to follow the ramifications of this imperial system into unsuspected corners.

Thus, at the outset, we have a letter from the Empress en route for Suez, which shows her grammar and orthography as much at fault as those of the fine ladies of Queen Anne's time, and which is sadly like what Henrietta of France might have written to Charles I.:—

'Plus on aura besoin de force plus tard, et plus il sera nécessaire de prouver au pays qu' on a des idées et non des expédients.' "Amuse-toi" (is her advice to her husband) 'il faut se refaire un moral, comme on se refait une constitution affaiblie, et une idée constante finie (sic) par user le cerveau le mieux organisé.'

Altogether Eugenie does not come off badly in the published correspondence.

Of the chapter on Napoleon's mistresses we need say nothing except that it will disappoint the prurient reader. Marguerite Bellanger, who first fathered a son on him, and then (after being managed by the président du cour, poor M. Devienne) confessed she had cheated him, and Miss Howard, are the only two who come to the front; the latter, by the way, appears to have received in the course of two years five and a half millions of francs—good interest for having paid 'the Prince's' debts when he was in England. It is unsafe to state anything about the ex-Emperor's private property. The 'facts' have been contradicted and re-asserted; but there they are, in this little pamphlet, with full details, sixty-three millions of francs, including the accounts with Baring of London, with Kindlet of Vienna, with Funder and Plitz of St. Petersburg, with Berg von Dussen of Amsterdam, and Jecker in Mexico, and Brown Brothers of New York. What he had in the French funds the author, of course, professes himself unable to tell; but en revanche he gives (in the chapter headed ce que coûtaient les impérialists) the whole of the enormous civil list, a great deal of which was (as is proved by marginal notes on the documents) paid by the Emperor over and above the allowance, without the intervention of the Ministry.

We all know how persistently Pierre Bonaparte begged for money, and how recklessly money was wasted on affairs like the Prince Imperial's baptism, but the amount expended per month on men like Baron Jérome David, M. Granier de Cassagnac, and others of the 'vendus' is prodigious; and we are told that of the actual total we can form no notion, the usual plan of payment having been one which may be recommended to our own 'man in the moon'—a trusty go-between used to breathe on the glass of the office door, and then write with his finger the sum which he was authorised to draw, whereupon it was paid without question.

Of the Cabinet Noir, where letters were opened, according to a system adopted in France at any rate since Louis XIV.'s day, we have all heard a good deal. The actual letter-stealers were certain concierges with whom the postmen were instructed to leave all letters addressed to certain persons. These letters were then carried off to M. Saintonier, 18, Rue Les Cases, who opened them, had them copied, if necessary, and, if possible, returned them in time for the next delivery. Among the copies found is a remarkable letter from Ducrot, at Strasburg, to Trochu, dated 1st December, 1866, setting forth the dangerous state of feeling in Germany, and pointing out that Prussia can get ready 600,000 men and 1,200 guns far sooner than France can muster half the number. Ducrot animadverts severely on the 'stupid vanity' which makes his countrymen think they can choose their own time, and get their Great Exhibition well over before they begin. He says, too, that the frontier swarms with Prussian agents, and that the feeling between the Moselle and the Vosges is far less French than people fancy:

'They are sons and grandsons of the men who, in 1815, petitioned the Holy Alliance that Alsace might be re-united to Germany.... The Prussians are working here just as I am told they did in Bohemia three months before their war with Austria began.'

Surely the Emperor was warned; and that, in spite of all warnings, he should have acted as he did, justifies as well as explains the scorn which all parties alike have manifested for him.

These papers, in fact, remind us that imperialism was based on surveillance publique, on a spy system so vast as to embrace lists of all the 'dangerous men,' of whatever views, throughout the Empire. The prop of this system was the terrible power of arbitrary arrest given to all prefects by the 10th article of the Criminal Code. How the nation which boasts of being exceptionally logique reconciles such an article with the principles of 1789 we cannot imagine; but it is clear that a Government, resting on such a basis, could only stand by its prestige. At whatever cost, it was necessary last July 'to do something,' and at Sedan the ex-Emperor judged rightly that he had better fall into Prussian hands than trust to feelings which even his uncle had not ventured to rely on.

Persigny, according to the letters contained in the Papiers Secrets, was Louis Napoleon's Strafford. As late as December, 1867, he memorialises the Emperor at great length on the state of the nation, and exclaims against the folly of concessions:

'Your enemies,' (says he) 'under the pretence of setting up Parliamentary rule, are working your ruin. I see it in their every movement. I watch them and note the bitterest hatred—hatred! and something more—showing itself in look, word, and gesture; and your Ministers bow down and humbly beg the Opposition to withdraw their motions.... If your majesty sees no harm in all this, it's no use my making plans to put out the fire that's burning up your house; but, anyhow, I can't go on with abstract studies amid such moral anarchy as this.'

Persigny, at any rate, was faithful, and, we believe, felt proper scorn for the miserable policy which tried to secure the bourgeoisie by alarming them every now and then with sham plots. Except the Orsini and Pianori plots, and the Villette affair of last summer, all the plots were, we are told, hatched by Pietri and Lagrange. Thus Greco, who was condemned to life transportation in 1853, was let out one night from Mazas by M. Lagrange himself, lived for years in America on a pension of £250 and then came back to Paris under a feigned name, and worked as a detective. The man, we read, is now in prison, and has made a full confession of his antecedents.

That Ollivier, at the end of 1869, was anxious to infuse new blood into the Imperial councils, and also to win over 'the few men of talent between thirty and forty years of age who had not already been driven into the revolutionary ranks,' is a proof that the Constitutional-Imperialist was more clear-sighted than his enemies will admit. That the Empress, after Wörth, should have telegraphed to her husband not on any account to return to Paris, as she could not be answerable for the consequences, shows a weakness of character which the admirers of Eugenie certainly did not anticipate.

These quotations from Paris newspapers and secret documents help to show why the Empire fell. It was unsound. However we may differ as to the amount of culpability shared by the French nation, or even by the Parisians, there is no doubt of the rottenness of the whole system. That it has been swept away is a gain for the world—a gain for France which will outweigh all her hopes, if only (in the words of the Siècle) the esprit boulevardier, the street-idler spirit, disappears along with the régime which fostered it; and if that hardness towards the poor, and indifference to their sufferings, which are too characteristic of the French wealthier classes, can be modified.

And now for a very few facts to show what a poor idol was the uncle of such a nephew. The three writers, Lanfrey, Barni, and Erckmann-Châtrian, have done more than any others to disabuse the French mind about Napoleonism. The cheap edition of Barni, from which the analysis and seriatim confutation of M. Thiers' books are omitted, has been immensely read; that such a book could be published in France in 1870 was a sign of the times quite as alarming to imperialists as the known disaffection of a part of the army. Besides these Charras, Scherer, Quinet, and Eugene Pelletan had for years been working against the worship of which Thiers was so long the prophet, and had succeeded in proving to all thoughtful Frenchmen that Fichte and Channing were much nearer the truth than was the romancer who wrote the 'Consulate and Empire.'

Our remarks must necessarily be brief; but we would call special attention to what M. Lanfrey tells about the early life of Napoleon: so much seems accounted for by such circumstances acting on such a temperament. Corsica was passing through a crisis when he was a boy; his father, head of one of the most influential families, went over to the French side when he saw resistance was hopeless. The son, who began life an ardent patriot, cursed his father for not having shared Paoli's exile. The family, however, profited by his change of side. He himself, displaying that same skill in managing men, above all Frenchmen, for which his son was afterwards so remarkable, became the confidential adviser of the governor and his cabinet. His children were provided for on the different royal foundations then so common in France. Napoleon went to Brienne, and thence to Paris; the great poverty of his family, and the humiliating position in which he found himself among the cadets of noble houses, accustomed to spend money as recklessly at their military colleges as our boys nowadays do at Sandhurst, made him cynical. The references to his want of means are frequent in his early journals; but this consciousness of poverty did not deprive him of his keen power of observation. His journals are an admixture of practical shrewdness and of originality expressed in wild bombast. He soon took the measure of those with whom he was brought in contact, fathomed their weaknesses, and adroitly made use of them. Life in Paris in the days when young Bonaparte first went there must have been trying to a young man's faith. Bonaparte had been 'finished' under the régime which was said to have existed par les femmes et pour les femmes; but before he was fully a man the old system was swept away, and Paris was a scene on which the most fantastic absurdities were enacted in the name of liberty. The selfish greed of the Republicans seems to have done more than anything else to make the young man a disbeliever in the grand phrases which he so freely used. His determination to act for himself comes out strikingly in his first Italian campaign, when by his happy boldness against Wurmser he had made the convention of Loeben inevitable. Throughout the preliminaries he behaved as an independent prince. He told the Directory what he was doing, and received their instructions, and from time to time acted upon them; but the only way in which he showed himself a faithful servant of the government was by putting money and art-treasures in their way. The greed which these Parisian deputies displayed was something incredible: and their young general encouraged them in it. He told them that Italy was rich and able to pay; and the contributions which he levied—though trifling compared with the amounts of recent Prussian requisitions—were sufficiently grievous to drive the people of the Milanese to revolt. Leghorn, for instance, had to pay two million francs for the privilege of being protected against the English. How Venice was treated is well known. 'The child of the revolution' betrayed that city to Austria as cynically as he afterwards crushed the Ligurian republic. 'Give them (said he, writing of the Corfiotes), plenty of talk about old Greece and liberty: it will please them, and it means nothing.' He is always the same, pitiless in his scorn of that bavardage, to put a stop to which he tells Menou that he was leaving Egypt. No success ever pleased him more than the way in which he fooled Sièyes, the man of ideas—making use of his reputation as a constitution-builder, and then showing 'the head' that as soon as its work was done it must give way to the arm.

Lanfrey's account of the 18th Brumaire, when only two of the five directors, Gohier and Moulins, stood firm, and when the affair of the Orangerie consummated by force what had been begun by corruption, is exceedingly instructive. It shows how, out of such a chaos, the rise of the ablest man was inevitable. Had Napoleon been a Washington he would, of course, have risen for far other than selfish ends; he would at once have taken in hand the constitution of which he so well knew the defects, and would have perfected it. Even had he been a Cromwell, earnest and impressed with a really noble idea, he would have looked at home instead of abroad, and have proved that 'the empire is peace.' Being what he was, the successful military commander, with no rule of action, except to make everything further his own advancement, he began by destroying representative life, and making even the judges his creatures, at the same time that he entered on that career of war in which he never paused save for short breathing times. A true instinct told him that either the French must have bonâ fide freedom, or must be drawn away from politics by being kept always at war. He may have mistrusted his ability to play the part of Washington; or what he had seen of Frenchmen may well have made him doubt whether they would appreciate his self-denial. Anyhow he never tried them; war became a necessity of his position; and to make war he did not shrink from so thoroughly exhausting France that we may doubt if she has suffered so much by this last ruinous war, and yet more ruinous peace, as she did by the long struggle which ended at Waterloo. The recklessness of last July was but a recognition by the nephew of the uncle's maxim, that 'by war, and war only, can our position be kept safe.'

Another point in common between uncle and nephew, is reckless expenditure; we do not sufficiently remember that, besides the conscription, the first Napoleon had the whole wealth of the nation under his personal control. He used it as the resources of the Second Empire have been used. The vast salaries of senators, the bribes, direct and indirect, the encouragement of a luxury which made large means essential—all this soon destroyed 'the austere simplicity of the republic.' 'Il faut se montrer' was the phrase in everybody's mouth, 'for if we do not come forward as friends of things as they are, we shall have none of the prizes which are being so lavishly distributed.' It was imperial Rome over again.

Such a system could not last; and the way in which France succumbed after Waterloo, while it does not exalt our opinion of French gratitude (for, after all, the first Napoleon had for years given France all that the mass of Frenchmen ask for), shows how inherently weak the strongest 'tyranny' (in the Greek sense) must always be. Any one who wants a simple and natural account of how Napoleonism grew up out of the folly and corruption and strife of the republicans, and of the helpless disgust with which the mass of the nation submitted when they saw what Napoleonism really meant, should study the Erckmann-Châtrian series. We do not wonder that the writers should have been elected as deputies for the Meurthe and the Haut Rhin, so thoroughly do their books photograph life and thought in these most republican departments. The peasant proprietor, who has bought with his hard-earned savings a little patch of confiscated land, is as fiercely bent on keeping it as ever tigress was on defending her cubs. He is told that kings and nobles, creatures of Pitt and Coburg, are sworn to wrest it from him; and his previous experience of kings and nobles assures him that he has nothing to hope if he fall into their clutches. That was the secret of Napoleon's strength; he went forth as the soldier of the Republic, predestined to show Europe that it was hopeless to dream of restoring the émigrés. How the true Republicans, who formed the nucleus of his armies, got gradually depraved until they became the 'dogs of war' of the Old Guard is wonderfully well set forth; and is, we fear, only too truly paralleled in this recent war, in which the moral deterioration of the German citizen-soldier has, like everything else, gone on at railroad pace.

The Erckmann-Châtrian novels have been compared with the Waverley series. We do not think the comparison a happy one. They do not aim at Sir Walter Scott's intricacy of plot; the stories are exceedingly simple, and the events (péripéties is the untranslateable word which best describes them) are unfolded historically, rather than after the manner of a romance; the human agent merely serves to string together a number of sketches from actual affairs. On the other hand, the Erckmann-Châtrian books show that rare power of accurate nature-painting which belongs almost wholly to very modern times, and which shines forth so conspicuously in our own George Eliot as well as in Dickens, and which among French writers is best seen, perhaps, in Georges Sand. Very different this from the landscape style of Scott, which has beauties of its own, but which differs from them much as a picture of Wilson, or Constable, or 'old Crome' differs from one by Tenniel. In the 'Romans Nationaux,' too, there is a vast deal more direct political teaching than 'the author of Waverley' ever attempted. He no doubt had very strong views of his own; and he managed, strangely enough, to make a sentimental Jacobitism fashionable at the very time when 'his most Sacred Majesty George IV.' was visiting North Britain. He is answerable for several inversions of historical truth: he makes Balfour of Burley and his class contemptible, and throws a halo of glory round Claverhouse, like that with which Byron invests his Werterian villains. But he never directly teaches politics. The 'Romans,' on the contrary, do this in almost every page. They assume, moreover, an amount of political knowledge on the part of their readers which would be very unwisely assumed by any English novel-writer. The fact is, the average Frenchman does know his own history since '89 far better than most Englishmen know the tortuous politics of the Georgian era—knows it better because he take a vastly more personal interest in it. For us, Mr. Disraeli well pointed out, history from the Revolution to the Reform Bill is chiefly the record of the quarrels of a few 'great houses;' to the Frenchman the earlier half of the eighteenth century is the time when his country was in the labour pangs of the strange, wild birth which was to follow; and the close of it is the fitful period in which the Revolution, surfeited with blood, sank helplessly under the yoke of military despotism. No need to urge Frenchmen to do what her Majesty's inspectors have so often recommended in our elementary schools, to begin history at the modern end and work backwards. Our boys and our men prefer woad-stained Britons and the strife of Dane and Saxon to the Rockinghams and Walpoles, and even the Pitts; but in France it is wholly different. Hence an amount of political knowledge in the country, for which we rarely give our neighbours credit. Your diligence-driver between Caen and Falaise will point out the Château Turgot, and will tell you all about the minister whose name it bears in a way which would have astonished any of the old mail-coachmen along the Western road, who knew, indeed, Burke's name in connection with High Wycombe, but who knew nothing but the name. This is one of the errors of 'our own correspondent:' because Frenchmen have not that blatant freedom of speech to which he is used at English hustings, he writes home that they know little and care less about politics—and this of people who seldom hesitate, on occasion, to die for their opinions. Their peculiar way of managing things arises from their habit of looking to authority, of moving under pressure of a force majeure; they have not, and can form but a faint idea of, that English liberty which is in our air, which M. de Montalembert used to call a bain de vie; but they have generally speaking, historically at any rate, more political knowledge than we have.

This accounts for much in the 'Romans' which, to the English reader, is wearying; they appeal to what he does not possess, a knowledge of the state of parties from '89 downwards. Every one, however, must appreciate the way in which the rise of Napoleon is shown to have been due to the corruption, the gross corruption, as well as imbecility of the Directory. No wonder Bonaparte despised mankind, when such poor specimens—vain, self-seeking, blindly conceited—were presented to him as the pick of republican France. Thus politics, as well as national character and habits (the habits, be it remembered, of that Alsace which is now to become the Ireland of Germany), are abundantly illustrated in these novels. We do not mean to analyse any of them, or to give samples which would be about as satisfactory as a single stone picked out of a Greek temple. The most touching of them is 'Madame Thérèse,' which, showing as it does how heartily the Germans on the frontier sympathized with the ideas of which Hoche was the expounder, bears on the question, 'How will the annexed districts get on under Junker rule?' Quiet Dr. Jacob, the hero of the story, is already so smitten with revolutionary ideas, that when he hears them commented on by the wounded vivandière whose life he has saved, he forgets that she is only the daughter of a village schoolmaster who had volunteered and had fallen, with his three sons, at Valmy, and, marrying her, joins Hoche as army surgeon. Men of this stamp are found on both sides of the Rhine; and to force Junkerism upon them would provoke a speedy break-up of the German empire. German optimists say that this danger is imaginary: acknowledging the disagreeable features in the Prussian character, they say that 'Germany will open Prussia out.' If not, trouble must ensue.

The 'Blocus' is, perhaps, the most picturesque of the whole series. The old Jew who, despite his timidity and his hatred of war, gradually becomes an effective national guard, is admirably drawn; the details of the siege, the misery, the excitement, are told so differently from the half flippant, half bombastic manner of even the best of 'our own correspondents.' The old soldier who, churl as he is supposed to be, meets the Jew's kindness with still greater kindness, and who, long refusing to believe in the Emperor's abdication, shoots himself when the truth is forced upon him, is a finished picture of which any artist might be proud. And the town thus immortalised is Phalsbourg, which henceforth is to be German. But we hope our readers will go to the books themselves: their appearance marks an era in novel-writing; it has done much more, for they are all novels with a purpose, and have been very powerful in pulling down the Napoleonic idol, in hastening the decay of the imperial idea.

The idol is overthrown; what will be reared in its place is doubtful. Political wisdom is not to be learned in six months, no matter how sternly its lessons may be enforced. The France which accepted Louis Napoleon, which gloried in the absurd boast, 'When France is satisfied the world is at rest,' which suffered itself to be kept in leading-strings for twenty years, giving full control over its wealth, its resources, its foreign and domestic policy, to an unscrupulous adventurer and his stock-jobbing associates, is not likely to rise at once to the dignity of a free people. 'Unstable as water' has hitherto been the curse of France's efforts at free government. The mission she has chosen has been to teach ideas to others, not to work them practically out for herself. When we read in old files of the approving Times of the revels at Compiègne, the luxury, the extravagance, we are reminded of the answer made to the first Napoleon, when he asked, 'Have I not got back the old system in toto?' 'Yes, but you forget that two million Frenchmen died to root out that old system; and you can't bring them to life again.'

Why is France, as a whole, sick of 'ideas?' Why, although they could dance round the statue of Strasburg when they ought to have been making peace and husbanding their strength for by-and-by, were the besieged Parisians incapable of any serious effort? Why was Trochu paralysed by the fear of Blanqui? Why should Bourbaki's wretched army have behaved so differently from that of Hoche, which was equally shoeless, and almost as much in want of everything, and which its enthusiastic leader kept at fighting point by allowing no tents during the bitterest winter that had been known for years? Man for man, Germans have always been superior to the French; to succeed, these last must move in masses welded together by one overmastering idea. They had no idea, no union, last year. Will this terrible lesson give them that unity of sentiment which Germany, since 1808, has been gradually feeling after, and has only just attained? Let us hope that sad experience may, at any rate, teach them the insufficiency of the very grandest of all merely human ideals. The noble thoughts of the 'Marseillaise'—

led to the brutal Carmagnole and the sickening excesses of the Terror, because, though noble, they were not sanctified. The sickness that comes from aiming at too much brought on a reaction which has lasted ever since; and the fact that Romanism is the hereditary religion of the French masses increases the difficulty of hearty national union. No earnest political reformer can ever look on the priests as more than temporary allies; no ultramontane can ever be an honest Republican.

What may come if Rome changes in the direction indicated by the Abbé (so he styled himself) and now lately by Père Hyacinthe, we cannot say; anyhow, such changes must be slow. At present the French priesthood must be reckoned among the bitter opponents of all free constitutional development.

The next few months will better enable us to determine whether Paris will still hold its own against France, or whether M. Leclercq's hope will be realized.[218] We may be quite sure that thousands of Frenchmen feel what he so well expresses—that it is Paris which made Louis Napoleon possible, even as it was Paris which enabled his uncle to be what he was. They both, indeed, used 'France' against Paris; but it was Paris which gave them a status at the outset. Those who think thus will feel that in the changed character of the capital is the best safeguard for the good government as well as for the moral regeneration of France; and if this change of character seems hopeless, the dangerous experiment must be tried of moving the Legislature out of such an unhealthy atmosphere.

We have thus striven to trace the growth and decay of Imperialism—which in its re-establishment was the practical expression of the Napoleonic idea—and to contrast it indirectly with the old régime, and with the sad delusion which, beginning so nobly in 1789, too soon ended in perhaps the bloodiest tyranny that modern Europe has ever seen. We decline to draw any horoscope of the future; such prophesying is always useless. Let us hope that God, who 'fulfils Himself in many ways,' will comfort the faith which this cruel satire on modern progress has so rudely shaken, by showing plainly that good has come out of all the evil. We cannot hope that nations will yet recognise the truth that war is organised crime; but we may hope that for a long time imperialism, based, as we have shown it to be, on lawlessness and on the glorification of the individual, will be impossible.

That the beaten nation always deserves to suffer is a maxim which nothing but a distorted view of Scripture will propound. Berlin is not many degrees above Paris in morality; and France, despite the character given of her in her filthy novels, is certainly not without home life and deep pure home affections.

All that we can say is that we, believing in God's providence, are very sure that, however strangely things may seem to turn out, the course of this world is ordered by Him.

Art. VI.—Religious Tests and National Universities. By F. A. Paley, M.A. Williams and Norgate, 1871.

(2.) Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords on University Tests.

Owing to the energy with which Her Majesty's Government have pushed through its earlier stages, the identical Universities Tests Bill which was so adroitly shelved last year by the resolution of the Marquis of Salisbury, we may confidently anticipate that, before these pages reach the public, every hindrance which kept men from the enjoyment of prizes which they had fairly won, and from posts of honour and usefulness which they were well qualified to fill, simply and solely because they were Nonconformists, will be swept away for ever. It would be gratifying if as reasonable a hope could be entertained that the far more stringent and objectionable religious test which is a practical bar to the enjoyment of half the fellowships of Oxford and Cambridge, not only to Nonconformists, but to all such as cannot say they believe in their hearts that they are inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost, and called, according to the Will of Our Lord Jesus Christ to His ministry, as defined by the Church of England, would be as speedily removed from the threshold of offices which in no way require, and, practically, are seldom associated with the exercise of this professedly divinely imposed ministry. The progress of events may discredit our hopes or our fears, but this need not prevent a review of the struggle for the abolition of those tests at the universities which are obnoxious to Nonconformists alone, as though it were a thing of the past; nor a prospective glance at the clerical test which is obnoxious to all conscientious laymen who object to give in their adhesion to a complex creed, and hesitate to assume functions which are imposed by the Majesty of Heaven, but defined by the Majesty of Britain. This is the point upon which we must next concentrate our forces.