VOLUME X SLICE VII Fox, George to France (continued 9)

What happened was exactly the contrary. Meanwhile, the armies were kept in perpetual motion, procuring money for the impecunious Directory, making a diversion for internal discontent, and also permitting of a “reversed Coup d’état of the 22nd Floréal. Fructidor,” against the anarchists, who had got the upper hand in the partial elections of May 1798. The social danger was averted in its turn after the clerical danger had been dissipated. The next task was to relieve Paris of Bonaparte, who had already refused to repeat Hoche’s unhappy expedition to Ireland and to attack England at home without either money or a navy. The pecuniary resources of Berne and the wealth of Rome fortunately tided over the financial difficulty and provided for the expedition Bonaparte in Egypt. The second coalition. to Egypt, which permitted Bonaparte to wait “for the fruit to ripen”—i.e. till the Directory should be ruined in the eyes of France and of all Europe. The disaster of Aboukir (August 1, 1798) speedily decided the coalition pending between England, Austria, the Empire, Portugal, Naples, Russia and Turkey. The Directory had to make a stand or perish, and with it the Republic. The directors had thought France might retain a monopoly in numbers and in initiative. They soon perceived that enthusiasm is not as great for a war of policy and conquest as for a war of national defence; and the army dwindled, since a country cannot bleed itself to death. The law of conscription was voted on the 5th of September 1798; and the tragedy of Rastadt, where the French commissioners were assassinated, was the opening of a war, desired but ill-prepared for, in which the Directory showed hesitation in strategy and incoherence in tactics, over a disproportionate area in Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Military reverses were inevitable, and responsibility for them could not be shirked. As though shattered by a reverberant echo from the cannon of the Trebbia, the Directory crumbled to pieces, succumbing on the 18th of June 1799 beneath the reprobation showered on Treilhard, Merlin de Douai, and La Révellière-Lépeaux. A few more military disasters, royalist insurrections in the south, Chouan disturbances in Normandy, Orleanist intrigues and the end came. To soothe the populace and protect the frontier more was required than the resumption, as in all grave crises of the Revolution, of terrorist measures such as forced taxation or the law of hostages; the new Directory, Sieyès presiding, saw that for the indispensable revision of the constitution “a head and a sword” were needed. Moreau being unattainable, Joubert was to be the sword of Sieyès; but, when he was killed at the battle of Novi, the sword of the Revolution fell into the hands of Bonaparte.

Although Brune and Masséna retrieved the fight at Bergen and Zürich, and although the Allies lingered on the frontier as they had done after Valmy, still the fortunes of the Directory were not restored. Success was reserved Coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire. for Bonaparte, suddenly landing at Fréjus with the prestige of his victories in the East, and now, after Hoche’s death, appearing as sole master of the armies. He manœuvred among the parties as on the 13th Vendémiaire. On the 18th Brumaire of the year VIII. France and the army fell together at his feet. By a twofold coup d’état, parliamentary and military, he culled the fruits of the Directory’s systematic aggression and unpopularity, and realized the universal desires of the rich bourgeoisie, tired of warfare; of the wretched populace; of landholders, afraid of a return to the old order of things; of royalists, who looked upon Bonaparte as a future Monk; of priests and their people, who hoped for an indulgent treatment of Catholicism; and finally of the immense majority of the French, who love to be ruled and for long had had no efficient government. There was hardly any one to defend a liberty which they had never known. France had, indeed, remained monarchist at heart for all her revolutionary appearance; and Bonaparte added but a name, though an illustrious one, to the series of national or local dictatorships, which, after the departure of the weak Louis XVI., had maintained a sort of informal republican royalty.

On the night of the 19th Brumaire a mere ghost of an The Consulate, Sept. 11, 1799-May 18, 1804. Assembly abolished the constitution of the year III., ordained the provisionary Consulate, and legalized the coup d’état in favour of Bonaparte. A striking and singular event; for the history of France and a great part of Europe was now for fifteen years to be summed up in the person of a single man (see Napoleon).

This night of Brumaire, however, seemed to be a victory for Sieyès rather than for Bonaparte. He it was who originated the project which the legislative commissions, charged with elaborating the new constitution, had to discuss. Bonaparte’s The constitution of the year VIII. cleverness lay in opposing Daunou’s plan to that of Sieyès, and in retaining only those portions of both which could serve his ambition. Parliamentary institutions annulled by the complication of three assemblies—the Council of State which drafted bills, the Tribunate which discussed them without voting them, and the Legislative Assembly which voted them without discussing them; popular suffrage, mutilated by the lists of notables (on which the members of the Assemblies were to be chosen by the conservative senate); and the triple executive authority of the consuls, elected for ten years: all these semblances of constitutional authority were adopted by Bonaparte. But he abolished the post of Grand Elector, which Sieyès had reserved for himself, in order to reinforce the real authority of the First Consul himself—by leaving the two other consuls, Cambacérès and Lebrun, as well as the Assemblies, equally weak. Thus the aristocratic constitution of Sieyès was transformed into an unavowed dictatorship, a public ratification of which the First Consul obtained by a third coup d’état from the intimidated and yet reassured electors-reassured by his dazzling but unconvincing offers of peace to the victorious Coalition (which repulsed them), by the rapid disarmament of La Vendée, and by the proclamations in which he filled the ears of the infatuated people with the new talk of stability of government, order, justice and moderation. He gave every one a feeling that France was governed once more by a real statesman, that a pilot was at the helm.

Bonaparte had now to rid himself of Sieyès and those republicans who had no desire to hand over the republic to one man, particularly of Moreau and Masséna, his military rivals. The victory of Marengo (June 14, 1800) momentarily in the balance, but secured by Desaix and Kellermann, offered a further opportunity to his jealous ambition by increasing his popularity. The royalist plot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise (December 24, 1800) allowed him to make a clean sweep of the democratic republicans, who despite their innocence were deported to Guiana, and to annul Assemblies that were a mere show by making the senate omnipotent in constitutional matters; but it was necessary for him to transform this deceptive truce into the general pacification so ardently desired for the last eight years. The treaty of Lunéville, signed in February 1801 with Austria who had been disarmed by Moreau’s victory at Hohenlinden, restored peace to the continent, gave nearly the whole of Italy to France, and permitted Bonaparte to eliminate from the Assemblies all the leaders of the opposition in the discussion of the Civil Code. The Concordat (July 1801), drawn up not in the Church’s interest but in that of his own policy, by giving satisfaction to the religious feeling of the country, allowed him to put down the constitutional democratic Church, to rally round him the consciences of the peasants, and above all to deprive the royalists of their best weapon. The “Articles Organiques” hid from the eyes of his companions in arms and councillors a reaction which, in fact if not in law, restored to a submissive Church, despoiled of her revenues, her position as the religion of the state. The Consulate. The peace of Amiens with England (March 1802), of which France’s allies, Spain and Holland, paid all the costs, finally gave the peacemaker a pretext for endowing himself with a Consulate, not for ten years but for life, as a recompense from the nation. The Rubicon was crossed on that day: Bonaparte’s march to empire began with the constitution of the year X. (August 1802).

Before all things it was now necessary to reorganize France, ravaged as she was by the Revolution, and with her institutions in a state of utter corruption. The touch of the master was at once revealed to all the foreigners who rushed Internal reorganization. to gaze at the man about whom, after so many catastrophes and strange adventures, Paris, “la ville lumière,” and all Europe were talking. First of all, Louis XV.’s system of roads was improved and that of Louis XVI.’s canals developed; then industry put its shoulder to the wheel; order and discipline were re-established everywhere, from the frontiers to the capital, and brigandage suppressed; and finally there was Paris, the city of cities! Everything was in process of transformation: a second Rome was arising, with its forum, its triumphal arches, its shows and parades; and in this new Rome of a new Caesar fancy, elegance and luxury, a radiance of art and learning from the age of Pericles, and masterpieces rifled from the Netherlands, Italy and Egypt illustrated the consular peace. The Man of Destiny renewed the course of time. He borrowed from the ancien régime its plenipotentiaries; its over-centralized, strictly utilitarian administrative and bureaucratic methods; and afterwards, in order to bring them into line, the subservient pedantic scholasticism of its university. On the basis laid down by the Constituent Assembly and the Convention he constructed or consolidated the funds necessary for national institutions, local governments, a judiciary system, organs of finance, banking, codes, traditions of conscientious well-disciplined labour, and in short all the organization which for three-quarters of a century was to maintain and regulate the concentrated activity of the French nation (see the section Law and Institutions). Peace and order helped to raise the standard of comfort. Provisions, in this Paris which had so often suffered from hunger and thirst, and lacked fire and light, had become cheap and abundant; while trade prospered and wages ran high. The pomp and luxury of the nouveaux riches were displayed in the salons of the good Joséphine, the beautiful Madame Tallien, and the “divine” Juliette Récamier.

But the republicans, and above all the military, saw in all this little but the fetters of system; the wily despotism, the bullying police, the prostration before authority, the sympathy lavished on royalists, the recall of the émigrés, the The republican opposition. contempt for the Assemblies, the purification of the Tribunate, the platitudes of the servile Senate, the silence of the press. In the formidable machinery of state, above all in the creation of the Legion of Honour, the Concordat, and the restoration of indirect taxes, they saw the rout of the Revolution. But the expulsion of persons like Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël sufficed to quell this Fronde of the salons. The expedition to San Domingo reduced the republican army to a nullity; war demoralized or scattered the leaders, who were jealous of their “comrade” Bonaparte; and Moreau, the last of his rivals, cleverly compromised in a royalist plot, as Danton had formerly been by Robespierre, disappeared into exile. In contradistinction to this opposition of senators and republican generals, the immense mass of the people received the ineffaceable impression of Bonaparte’s superiority. No suggestion of the possibility of his death was tolerated, of a crime which might cut short his career. The conspiracy of Cadoudal and Pichegru, after Bonaparte’s refusal to give place to Louis XVIII., and the political execution of the duc d’Enghien, provoked an outburst of adulation, of which Bonaparte took advantage to put the crowning touch to his ambitious dream.

The decision of the senate on the 18th of May 1804, giving him the title of emperor, was the counterblast to the dread he had excited. Thenceforward “the brow of the emperor broke through the thin mask of the First Napoleon emperor May 18, 1804-April 6, 1814. Consul.” Never did a harder master ordain more imperiously, nor understand better how to command obedience. “This was because,” as Goethe said, “under his orders men were sure of accomplishing their ends. That is why they rallied round him, as one to inspire them with that kind of certainty.” Indeed no man ever concentrated authority to such a point, nor showed mental abilities at all comparable to his: an extraordinary power of work, prodigious memory for details and fine judgment in their selection; together with a luminous decision and a simple and rapid conception, all placed at the disposal of a sovereign will. No head of the state gave expression more imperiously than this Italian to the popular passions of the French of that day: abhorrence for the emigrant nobility, fear of the ancien régime, dislike of foreigners, hatred of England, an appetite for conquest evoked by revolutionary propaganda, and the love of glory. In this Napoleon was a soldier of the people: because of this he judged and ruled his contemporaries. Having seen their actions in the stormy hours of the Revolution, he despised them and looked upon them as incapable of disinterested conduct, conceited, and obsessed by the notion of equality. Hence his colossal egoism, his habitual disregard of others, his jealous passion for power, his impatience of all contradiction, his vain untruthful boasting, his unbridled self-sufficiency and lack of moderation—passions which were gradually to cloud his clear faculty of reasoning. His genius, assisted by the impoverishment of two generations, was like the oak which admits beneath its shade none but the smallest of saplings. With the exception of Talleyrand, after 1808 he would have about him only mediocre people, without initiative, prostrate at the feet of the giant: his tribe of paltry, rapacious and embarrassing Corsicans; his admirably subservient generals; his selfish ministers, docile agents, apprehensive of the future, who for fourteen long years felt a prognostication of defeat and discounted the inevitable catastrophe.

So France had no internal history outside the plans and transformations to which Napoleon subjected the institutions of the Consulate, and the after-effects of his wars. Well knowing that his fortunes rested on the delighted acquiescence of France, Napoleon expected to continue indefinitely fashioning public opinion according to his pleasure. To his contempt for men he added that of all ideas which might put a bridle on his ambition; and to guard against them, he inaugurated the Golden Age of the police that he might tame every moral force to his hand. Being essentially a man of order, he loathed, as he said, all demagogic action, Jacobinism and visions of liberty, which he desired only for himself. To make his will predominant, he stifled or did violence to that of others, through his bishops, his gendarmes, his university, his press, his catechism. Nourished like Frederick II. and Catherine the Great in 18th-century maxims, neither he nor they would allow any of that ideology to filter through into their rough but regular ordering of mankind. Thus the whole political system, being summed up in the emperor, was bound to share his fall.

Although an enemy of idealogues, in his foreign policy Napoleon was haunted by grandiose visions. A condottiere of the Renaissance living in the 19th century, he used France, and all those nations annexed or attracted by the Revolution, Napoleon’s political idea. to resuscitate the Roman conception of the Empire for his own benefit. On the other hand, he was enslaved by the history and aggressive idealism of the Convention, and of the republican propaganda under the Directory; he was guided by them quite as much as he guided them. Hence the immoderate extension given to French activity by his classical Latin spirit; hence also his conquests, leading on from one to another, and instead of being mutually helpful interfering with each other; hence, finally, his not entirely coherent policy, interrupted by hesitation and counter-attractions. This explains the retention of Italy, imposed on the Directory from 1796 onward, followed by his criminal treatment of Venice, the foundation of the Cisalpine republic—a foretaste of future annexations—the restoration of that republic after his return from Egypt, and in view of his as yet inchoate designs, the postponed solution of the Italian problem which the treaty of Lunéville had raised.

Marengo inaugurated the political idea which was to continue its development until his Moscow campaign. Napoleon dreamed as yet only of keeping the duchy of Milan, setting aside Austria, and preparing some new enterprise in the East or in Egypt. The peace of Amiens, which cost him Egypt, could only seem to him a temporary truce; whilst he was gradually extending his authority in Italy, the cradle of his race, by the union of Piedmont, and by his tentative plans regarding Genoa, Parma, Tuscany and Naples. He wanted to make this his Cisalpine Gaul, laying siege to the Roman state on every hand, and preparing in the Concordat for the moral and material servitude of the pope. When he recognized his error in having raised the papacy from decadence by restoring its power over all the churches, he tried in vain to correct it by the Articles Organiques—wanting, like Charlemagne, to be the legal protector of the pope, and eventually master of the Church. To conceal his plan he aroused French colonial aspirations against England, and also the memory of the spoliations of 1763, exasperating English jealousy of France, whose borders now extended to the Rhine, and laying hands on Hanover, Hamburg and Cuxhaven. By the “Recess” of 1803, which brought to his side Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden, he followed up the overwhelming tide of revolutionary ideas in Germany, to stem which Pitt, back in power, appealed once more to an Anglo-Austro-Russian coalition against this new Charlemagne, who was trying to renew the old Empire, who was mastering France, Italy and Germany; who finally on the 2nd of December 1804 placed the imperial crown upon his head, after receiving the iron crown of the Lombard kings, and made Pius VII. consecrate him in Notre-Dame.

After this, in four campaigns from 1805 to 1809, Napoleon transformed his Carolingian feudal and federal empire into one modelled on the Roman empire. The memories of imperial Rome were for a third time, after Caesar and Charlemagne, to modify the historical evolution of France. Though the vague plan for an invasion of England fell to the ground Ulm and Austerlitz obliterated Trafalgar, and the camp at Boulogne put the best military resources he had ever commanded at Napoleon’s disposal.

In the first of these campaigns he swept away the remnants of the old Roman-Germanic empire, and out of its shattered fragments created in southern Germany the vassal states of Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Hesse-Darmstadt Treaty of Presburg, 1805. and Saxony, which he attached to France under the name of the Confederation of the Rhine; but the treaty of Presburg gave France nothing but the danger of a more centralized and less docile Germany. On the other hand, Napoleon’s creation of the kingdom of Italy, his annexation of Venetia and her ancient Adriatic empire—wiping out the humiliation of 1797—and the occupation of Ancona, marked a new stage in his progress towards his Roman Empire. His good fortune soon led him from conquest to spoliation, and he complicated his master-idea of the grand empire by his Family Compact; the clan of the Bonapartes invaded European monarchies, wedding with princesses of blood-royal, and adding kingdom to kingdom. Joseph replaced the dispossessed Bourbons at Naples; Louis was installed on the throne of Holland; Murat became grand-duke of Berg, Jerome son-in-law to the king of Württemberg, and Eugène de Beauharnais to the king of Bavaria; while Stéphanie de Beauhamais married the son of the grand-duke of Baden.

Meeting with less and less resistance, Napoleon went still further and would tolerate no neutral power. On the 6th of August 1806 he forced the Habsburgs, left with only the crown of Austria, to abdicate their Roman-Germanic title of Jena. Eylau and Friedland. Peace of Tilsit, July 8, 1807. Continental blockade. emperor. Prussia alone remained outside the Confederation of the Rhine, of which Napoleon was Protector, and to further her decision he offered her English Hanover. In a second campaign he destroyed at Jena both the army and the state of Frederick William III., who could not make up his mind between the Napoleonic treaty of Schönbrunn and Russia’s counter-proposal at Potsdam (October 14, 1806). The butchery at Eylau and the vengeance taken at Friedland finally ruined Frederick the Great’s work, and obliged Russia, the ally of England and Prussia, to allow the latter to be despoiled, and to join Napoleon against the maritime tyranny of the former. After Tilsit, however (July 1807), instead of trying to reconcile Europe to his grandeur, Napoleon had but one thought: to make use of his success to destroy England and complete his Italian dominion. It was from Berlin, on the 21st of November 1806, that he had dated the first decree of a continental blockade, a monstrous conception intended to paralyze his inveterate rival, but which on the contrary caused his own fall by its immoderate extension of the empire. To the coalition of the northern powers he added the league of the Baltic and Mediterranean ports, and to the bombardment of Copenhagen by an English fleet he responded by a second decree of blockade, dated from Milan on the 17th of December 1807.

But the application of the Concordat and the taking of Naples led to the first of those struggles with the pope, in which were formulated two antagonistic doctrines: Napoleon declaring himself Roman emperor, and Pius VII. renewing the theocratic affirmations of Gregory VII. The former’s Roman ambition was made more and more plainly visible by the occupation of the kingdom of Naples and of the Marches, and the entry of Miollis into Rome; while Junot invaded Portugal, Radet laid hands on the pope himself, and Murat took possession of formerly Roman Spain, whither Joseph was afterwards to be transferred. But Napoleon little knew the flame he was kindling. No more far-seeing than the Directory or the men of the year III., he thought that, with energy and execution, he might succeed in the Peninsula as he had succeeded in Italy in 1796 and 1797, in Egypt, and in Hesse, and that he might cut into Spanish granite as into Italian mosaic or “that big cake, Germany.” He stumbled unawares upon the revolt of a proud national spirit, evolved through ten historic centuries; and the trap of Bayonne, together with the enthroning of Joseph Bonaparte, made the contemptible prince of the Asturias the elect of popular sentiment, the representative of religion and country.

Napoleon thought he had Spain within his grasp, and now suddenly everything was slipping from him. The Peninsula became the grave of whole armies and a battlefield Bailen. for England. Dupont capitulated at Bailen into the hands of Castaños, and Junot at Cintra to Wellesley; while Europe trembled at this first check to the hitherto invincible imperial armies. To reduce Spanish resistance Napoleon had in his turn to come to terms with the tsar Alexander at Erfurt; so that abandoning his designs in the East, he could make the Grand Army evacuate Prussia and return in force to Madrid.

Thus Spain swallowed up the soldiers who were wanted for Napoleon’s other fields of battle, and they had to be replaced by forced levies. Europe had only to wait, and he Wagram. would eventually be found disarmed in face of a last coalition; but Spanish heroism infected Austria, and showed the force of national resistance. The provocations of Talleyrand and England strengthened the illusion: Why should not the Austrians emulate the Spaniards? The campaign of 1809, however, was but a pale copy of the Spanish insurrection. After a short and decisive action in Bavaria, Napoleon opened up the road to Vienna for a second time; and after the two days’ battle at Essling, the stubborn fight at Wagram, the failure of a patriotic insurrection in northern Germany and of the English expedition against Antwerp, the treaty of Vienna (December 14, 1809), with Peace of Vienna. the annexation of the Illyrian provinces, completed the colossal empire. Napoleon profited, in fact, by this campaign which had been planned for his overthrow. The pope was deported to Savona beneath the eyes of indifferent Europe, and his domains were incorporated in the Empire; the senate’s decision on the 17th of February 1810 created the title of king of Rome, and made Rome the capital of Italy. The pope banished, it was now desirable to send away those to whom Italy had been more or less promised. Eugène de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s stepson, was transferred to Frankfort, and Murat carefully watched until the time should come to take him to Russia and install him as king of Poland. Between 1810 and 1812 Napoleon’s divorce of Joséphine, and his marriage with Marie Louise of Austria, followed by the birth of the king of Rome, shed a brilliant light upon his future policy. He renounced a federation in which his brothers were not sufficiently docile; he gradually withdrew power from them; he concentrated all his affection and ambition on the son who was the guarantee of the continuance of his dynasty. This was the apogee of his reign.

But undermining forces were already at work: the faults inherent in his unwieldy achievement. England, his chief enemy, was persistently active; and rebellion both of the governing and the governed broke out everywhere. Beginning of the end. Uprising of nationalism. Napoleon felt his impotence in coping with the Spanish insurrection, which he underrated, while yet unable to suppress it altogether. Men like Stein, Hardenberg and Scharnhorst were secretly preparing Prussia’s retaliation. Napoleon’s material omnipotence could not stand against the moral force of the pope, a prisoner at Fontainebleau; and this he did not realize. The alliance arranged at Tilsit was seriously shaken by the Austrian marriage, the threat of a Polish restoration, and the unfriendly policy of Napoleon at Constantinople. The very persons whom he had placed in power were counteracting his plans: after four years’ experience Napoleon found himself obliged to treat his Corsican dynasties like those of the ancien régime, and all his relations were betraying him. Caroline conspired against her brother and against her husband; the hypochondriacal Louis, now Dutch in his sympathies, found the supervision of the blockade taken from him, and also the defence of the Scheldt, which he had refused to ensure; Jerome, idling in his harem, lost that of the North Sea shores; and Joseph, who was attempting the moral conquest of Spain, was continually insulted at Madrid. The very nature of things was against the new dynasties, as it had been against the old.

After national insurrections and family recriminations came treachery from Napoleon’s ministers. Talleyrand betrayed his designs to Metternich, and had to be dismissed; Fouché corresponded with Austria in 1809 and 1810, Treachery. entered into an understanding with Louis, and also with England; while Bourrienne was convicted of peculation. By a natural consequence of the spirit of conquest he had aroused, all these parvenus, having tasted victory, dreamed of sovereign power: Bernadotte, who had helped him to the Consulate, played Napoleon false to win the crown of Sweden; Soult, like Murat, coveted the Spanish throne after that of Portugal, thus anticipating the treason of 1813 and the defection of 1814; many persons hoped for “an accident” which might resemble the tragic end of Alexander and of Caesar. The country itself, besides, though flattered by conquests, was tired of self-sacrifice. It had become satiated; “the cry of the mothers rose threateningly” against “the Ogre” and his intolerable imposition of wholesale conscription. The soldiers themselves, discontented after Austerlitz, cried out for peace after Eylau. Finally, amidst profound silence from the press and the Assemblies, a protest was raised against imperial despotism by the literary world, against the excommunicated sovereign by Catholicism, and against the author of the continental blockade by the discontented bourgeoisie, ruined by the crisis of 1811.

Napoleon himself was no longer the General Bonaparte of his campaign in Italy. He was already showing signs of physical decay; the Roman medallion profile had coarsened, the obese body was often lymphatic. Mental degeneration, Degeneration of Napoleon. too, betrayed itself in an unwonted irresolution. At Eylau, at Wagram, and later at Waterloo, his method of acting by enormous masses of infantry and cavalry, in a mad passion for conquest, and his misuse of his military resources, were all signs of his moral and technical decadence; and this at the precise moment when, instead of the armies and governments of the old system, which had hitherto reigned supreme, the nations themselves were rising against France, and the events of 1792 were being avenged upon her. The three campaigns of two years brought the final catastrophe.

Napoleon had hardly succeeded in putting down the revolt in Germany when the tsar himself headed a European insurrection against the ruinous tyranny of the continental blockade. To put a stop to this, to ensure his own Russian campaign. access to the Mediterranean and exclude his chief rival, Napoleon made a desperate effort in 1812 against a country as invincible as Spain. Despite his victorious advance, the taking of Smolensk, the victory on the Moskwa, and the entry into Moscow, he was vanquished by Russian patriotism and religious fervour, by the country and the climate, and by Alexander’s refusal to make terms. After this came the lamentable retreat, while all Europe was concentrating against him. Pushed back, as he had been in Spain, from bastion to bastion, after the action on the Beresina, Napoleon had to fall back upon the frontiers of 1809, and then—having refused the peace offered him by Austria at the congress of Prague, from a dread of losing Italy, where each of his victories had marked a stage in the accomplishment of his dream—on those of 1805, despite Lützen and Bautzen, and on those of 1802 after his defeat at Leipzig, where Bernadotte turned upon him, Moreau figured Campaigns of 1813-14. among the Allies, and the Saxons and Bavarians forsook him. Following his retreat from Russia came his retreat from Germany. After the loss of Spain, reconquered by Wellington, the rising in Holland preliminary to the invasion and the manifesto of Frankfort which proclaimed it, he had to fall back upon the frontiers of 1795; and then later was driven yet farther back upon those of 1792, despite the wonderful campaign of 1814 against the invaders, in which the old Bonaparte of 1796 seemed to have returned. Paris capitulated on the 30th of March, and the “Delenda Carthago,” pronounced against England, was spoken of Napoleon. The great empire of East and West fell in ruins with the emperor’s abdication at Fontainebleau.

The military struggle ended, the political struggle began. How was France to be governed? The Allies had decided on the eviction of Napoleon at the Congress of Châtillon; and the precarious nature of the Bonapartist monarchy Downfall of the Empire. in France itself was made manifest by the exploit of General Malet, which had almost succeeded during the Russian campaign, and by Lainé’s demand for free exercise of political rights, when Napoleon made a last appeal to the Legislative Assembly for support. The defection of the military and civil aristocracy, which brought about Napoleon’s abdication, the refusal of a regency, and the failure of Bernadotte, who wished to resuscitate the Consulate, enabled Talleyrand, vice-president of the senate and desirous of power, to persuade the Allies to accept the Bourbon solution of the difficulty. The declaration of St Ouen (May 2, 1814) indicated that the new monarchy was only accepted upon conditions. After Napoleon’s abdication, and exile to the island of Elba, came the Revolution’s abdication of her conquests: the first treaty of Paris (May 30th) confirmed France’s renunciation of Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine, and her return within her pre-revolutionary frontiers, save for some slight rectifications.

After the scourge of war, the horrors of conscription, and the despotism which had discounted glory, every one seemed to rejoice in the return of the Bourbons, which atoned for humiliations by restoring liberty. But questions of Faults of the Bourbons. form, which aroused questions of sentiment, speedily led to grave dissensions. The hurried armistice of the 23rd of April, by which the comte d’Artois delivered over disarmed France to her conquerors; Louis XVIII.’s excessive gratitude to the prince regent of England; the return of the émigrés; the declaration of St Ouen, dated from the nineteenth year of the new reign; the charter of June 4th, “concédée et octroyée,” maintaining the effete doctrine of legitimacy in a country permeated with the idea of national sovereignty; the slights put upon the army; the obligatory processions ordered by Comte Beugnot, prefect of police; all this provoked a conflict not only between two theories of government but between two groups of men and of interests. An avowedly imperialist party was soon again formed, a centre of heated opposition to the royalist party; and neither Baron Louis’ excellent finance, nor the peace, nor the charter of June 4th—which despite the irritation of the émigrés preserved the civil gains of the Revolution—prevented the man who was its incarnation from seizing an opportunity to bring about another military coup d’état. Having landed in the Bay of Jouan on the 1st of March, on the 20th Napoleon re-entered the Tuileries in triumph, while Louis XVIII. fled to Ghent. By the Acte additionnel of the 22nd of April he induced Carnot and Fouché—the The Hundred Days. March-June 1815. last of the Jacobins—and the heads of the Liberal opposition, Benjamin Constant and La Fayette, to side with him against the hostile Powers of Europe, occupied in dividing the spoils at Vienna. He proclaimed his intention of founding a new democratic empire; and French policy was thus given another illusion, which was to be exploited with fatal success by Napoleon’s namesake. But the cannon of Waterloo ended this adventure (June 18, 1815), and, thanks to Fouché’s treachery, the triumphal progress of Milan, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, and even of Moscow, was to end at St Helena.

The consequences of the Hundred Days were very serious; France was embroiled with all Europe, though Talleyrand’s clever diplomacy had succeeded in causing division over Saxony and Poland by the secret Austro-Anglo-French Louis XVIII. alliance of the 3rd of January 1815, and the Coalition destroyed both France’s political independence and national integrity by the treaty of peace of November 20th: she found herself far weaker than before the Revolution, and in the power of the European Alliance. The Hundred Days divided the nation itself into two irreconcilable parties: one ultra-royalist, eager for vengeance and retaliation, refusing to accept the Charter; the other imperialist, composed of Bonapartists and Republicans, incensed by their defeat—of whom Béranger was the Tyrtaeus—both parties equally revolutionary and equally obstinate. Louis XVIII., urged by his more fervent supporters towards the ancien régime, gave his policy an exactly contrary direction; he had common-sense enough to maintain the Empire’s legal and administrative tradition, accepting its institutions of the Legion of Honour, the Bank, the University, and the imperial nobility—modifying only formally certain rights and the conscription, since these had aroused the nation against Napoleon. He even went so far as to accept advice from the imperial ministers Talleyrand and Fouché. Finally, as the chief political organization had become thoroughly demoralized, he imported into France the entire constitutional system of England, with its three powers, king, upper hereditary chamber, and lower elected chamber; with its plutocratic electorate, and even with details like the speech from the throne, the debate on the address, &c. This meant importing also difficulties such as ministerial responsibility, as well as electoral and press legislation.

Louis XVIII., taught by time and misfortune, wished not to reign over two parties exasperated by contrary passions and desires; but his dynasty was from the outset implicated in the struggle, which was to be fatal to it, between old France and revolutionary France. Anti-monarchical, liberal and anti-clerical France at once recommenced its revolutionary work; the whole 19th century was to be filled with great spasmodic upheavals, and Louis XVIII. was soon overwhelmed by the White Terrorists of 1815.

Vindictive sentences against men like Ney and Labédoyère were followed by violent and unpunished action by the White Terror, which in the south renewed the horrors of St Bartholomew and the September massacres. The elections of August 14, 1815, made under the influence of these royalist and religious passions, sent the “Chambre introuvable” to Paris, an unforeseen revival of the ancien régime. Neither the substitution of the duc de Richelieu’s ministry for that of Talleyrand and Fouché, nor a whole series of repressive laws in violation of the charter, were successful in satisfying its tyrannical loyalism, and Louis XVIII. needed something like a coup d’état, in September 1816, to rid himself of the “ultras.”

He succeeded fairly well in quieting the opposition between the dynasty and the constitution, until a reaction took place between 1820 and 1822. State departments worked regularly and well, under the direction of Decazes, The Constitutional party’s rule. Lainé, De Serre and Pasquier, power alternating between two great well-disciplined parties almost in the English fashion, and many useful measures were passed: the reconstruction of finance stipulated for as a condition of evacuation of territory occupied by foreign troops; the electoral law of February 5, 1817, which, by means of direct election and a qualification of three hundred francs, renewed the preponderance of the bourgeoisie; the Gouvion St-Cyr law of 1818, which for half a century based the recruiting of the French army on the national principle of conscription; and in 1819, after Richelieu’s dismissal, liberal regulations for the press under control of a commission. But the advance of the Liberal movement, and the election of the generals—Foy, Lamarque, Lafayette and of Manuel, excited the “ultras” and caused the dismissal of Richelieu; while that of the constitutional bishop Grégoire led to the modification in a reactionary direction of the electoral law of 1817. The assassination of the duc de Berry, second son of the comte d’Artois (attributed to the influence of Liberal ideas), caused the downfall of Decazes, and caused the king—more weak and selfish than ever—to override the charter and embark upon a reactionary path. After 1820, Madame du The reaction of 1820. Cayla, a trusted agent of the ultra-royalist party, gained great influence over the king; and M. de Villèle, its leader, supported by the king’s brother, soon eliminated the Right Centre by the dismissal of the duc de Richelieu, who had been recalled to tide over the crisis—just as the fall of M. Decazes had signalized the defeat of the Left Centre (December 15, 1821)—and moderate policy thus received an irreparable blow.

Thenceforward the government of M. de Villèle—a clever statesman, but tied to his party—did nothing for six years but promulgate a long series of measures against Liberalism and the social work of the Revolution; to retain power it had to yield to the impatience of the comte d’Artois and the majority. The suspension of individual liberty, the re-establishment of the censorship; the electoral right of the “double vote,” favouring taxation of the most oppressive kind; and the handing over of education to the clergy: these were the first achievements of this anti-revolutionary ministry. The Spanish expedition, in which M. de Villèle’s hand was forced by Montmorency and Chateaubriand, was the united work of the association of Catholic zealots known as the Congregation and of the autocratic powers of the Grand Alliance; it was responded to—as at Naples and in Spain—by secret Carbonari societies, and by severely repressed military conspiracies. Politics now bore the double imprint of two rival powers: the Congregation and Carbonarism. By 1824, nevertheless, the dynasty seemed firm—the Spanish War had reconciled the army, by giving back military prestige; the Liberal opposition had been decimated; revolutionary conspiracies discouraged; and the increase of public credit and material prosperity pleased the whole nation, as was proved by the “Chambre retrouvée” of 1824. The law of septennial elections tranquillized public life by suspending any legal or regular manifestation by the nation for seven years.

It was the monarchy which next became revolutionary, on the accession of Charles X. (September 16, 1824). This inconsistent prince soon exhausted his popularity, and remained the fanatical head of those émigrés who had Charles X. learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. While the opposition became conservative as regards the Charter and French liberties, the king and the clerical party surrounding him challenged the spirit of modern France by a law against sacrilege, by a bill for re-establishing the right of primogeniture, by an indemnity of a milliard francs, which looked like compensation given to the émigrés, and finally by the “loi de liberté et d’amour” against the press. The challenge was so definite that in 1826 the Chamber of Peers and the Academy had to give the Villèle ministry a lesson in Liberalism, for having lent itself to this ancien régime reaction by its weakness and its party-promises. The elections Victory of the constitutional parties, 1827. “de colère et de vengeance” of January 1827 gave the Left a majority, and the resultant short-lived Martignac ministry tried to revive the Right Centre which had supported Richelieu and Decazes (January 1828). Martignac’s accession to power, however, had only meant personal concessions from Charles X., not any concession of principle: he supported his ministry but was no real stand-by. The Liberals, on the other hand, made bargains for supporting the moderate royalists, and Charles X. profited by this to form a fighting ministry in conjunction with the prince de Polignac, one of the émigrés, an ignorant and visionary person, and the comte de Bourmont, the traitor of Waterloo. Despite all kinds of warnings, the former tried by a coup d’état to put into practice his theories of the supremacy of the royal prerogative; and the battle of Navarino, the French occupation of the Morea, and the Algerian expedition could not make the nation forget this conflict at home. The united opposition of monarchist Liberals and imperialist republicans responded by legal resistance, The Revolution of 1830. then by a popular coup d’état, to the ordinances of July 1830, which dissolved the intractable Chamber, eliminated licensed dealers from the electoral list, and muzzled the press. After fighting for three days against the troops feebly led by the Marmont of 1814, the workmen, driven to the barricades by the deliberate closing of Liberal workshops, gained the victory, and sent the white flag of the Bourbons on the road to exile.

The rapid success of the “Three Glorious Days” (“les Trois Glorieuses”), as the July Days were called, put the leaders of the parliamentary opposition into an embarrassing position. While they had contented themselves with words, Republican and Orleanist parties. the small Republican-Imperialist party, aided by the almost entire absence of the army and police, and by the convenience which the narrow, winding, paved streets of those times offered for fighting, had determined upon the revolution and brought it to pass. But the Republican party, which desired to re-establish the Republic of 1793, recruited chiefly from among the students and workmen, and led by Godefroy Cavaignac, the son of a Conventionalist, and by the chemist Raspail, had no hold on the departments nor on the dominating opinion in Paris. Consequently this premature attempt was promptly seized upon by the Liberal bourgeoisie and turned to the advantage of the Orleanist party, which had been secretly organized since 1829 under the leadership of Thiers, with the National as its organ. Before the struggle was yet over, Benjamin Constant, Casimir Périer, Lafitte, and Odilon Barrot had gone to fetch the duke of Orleans from Neuilly, and on receiving his promise to defend the Charter and the tricolour flag, installed him at the Palais Bourbon as lieutenant-general of the realm, while La Fayette and the Republicans established themselves at the Hôtel de Ville. Louis Philippe. An armed conflict between the two governments was imminent, when Lafayette, by giving his support to Louis Philippe, decided matters in his favour. In order to avoid a recurrence of the difficulties which had arisen with the Bourbons, the following preliminary conditions were imposed upon the king: the recognition of the supremacy of the people by the title of “king of the French by the grace of God and the will of the people,” the responsibility of ministers, the suppression of hereditary succession to the Chamber of Peers, now reduced to the rank of a council of officials, the suppression of article 14 of the charter which had enabled Charles X. to supersede the laws by means of the ordinances, and the liberty of the press. The qualification for electors was lowered from 300 to 200 francs, and that for eligibility from 1000 to 500 francs, and the age to 25 and 30 instead of 30 and 40; finally, Catholicism lost its privileged position as the state religion. The bourgeois National Guard was made the guardian of the charter. The liberal ideas of the son of Philippe Égalité, the part he had played at Valmy and Jemappes, his gracious manner and his domestic virtues, all united in winning Louis Philippe the good opinion of the public.

He now believed, as did indeed the great majority of the electors, that the revolution of 1830 had changed nothing but the head of the state. But in reality the July monarchy was affected by a fundamental weakness. It sought The bourgeois monarchy. to model itself upon the English monarchy, which rested upon one long tradition. But the tradition of France was both twofold and contradictory, i.e. the Catholic-legitimist and the revolutionary. Louis Philippe had them both against him. His monarchy had but one element in common with the English, namely, a parliament elected by a limited electorate. There was at this time a cause of violent outcry against the English monarchy, which, on the other hand, met with firm support among the aristocracy and the clergy. The July monarchy had no such support. The aristocracy of the ancien régime and of the Empire were alike without social influence; the clergy, which had paid for its too close alliance with Charles X. by a dangerous unpopularity, and foresaw the rise of democracy, was turning more and more towards the people, the future source of all power. Even the monarchical principle itself had suffered from the shock, having proved by its easy defeat how far it could be brought to capitulate. Moreover, the victory of the people, who had shown themselves in the late struggle to be brave and disinterested, had won for the idea of national supremacy a power which was bound to increase. The difficulty of the situation lay in the doubt as to whether this expansion would take place gradually and by a progressive evolution, as in England, or not.

Now Louis Philippe, beneath the genial exterior of a bourgeois and peace-loving king, was entirely bent upon recovering an authority which was menaced from the very first on the one hand by the anger of the royalists at their failures, and on the other hand by the impatience of the republicans to follow up their victory. He wanted the insurrection to stop at a change in the reigning family, whereas it had in fact revived the revolutionary tradition, and restored to France the sympathies of the nationalities and democratic parties oppressed by Metternich’s “system.” The republican party, which had retired from power but not from activity, at once faced the new king with the serious problem of the acquisition of political power by the people, and continued to remind him of it. He put himself at the head of the party of progress (“parti du mouvement”) as opposed to the (“parti de la cour”) court party, and of the “resistance,” which considered that it was now necessary “to check the revolution in order to make it fruitful, and in order to save it.” But none of these parties were homogeneous; The parties. in the chamber they split up into a republican or radical Extreme Left, led by Garnier-Pagès and Arago; a dynastic Left, led by the honourable and sincere Odilon Barrot; a constitutional Right Centre and Left Centre, differing in certain slight respects, and presided over respectively by Thiers, a wonderful political orator, and Guizot, whose ideas were those of a strict doctrinaire; not to mention a small party which clung to the old legitimist creed, and was dominated by the famous avocat Berryer, whose eloquence was the chief ornament of the cause of Charles X.’s grandson, the comte de Chambord. The result was a ministerial majority which was always uncertain; and the only occasion on which Guizot succeeded in consolidating it during seven years resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy.

Louis Philippe first summoned to power the leaders of the party of “movement,” Dupont de l’Eure, and afterwards Lafitte, in order to keep control of the progressive forces for his own ends. They wished to introduce democratic reforms and to uphold throughout Europe the revolution, which had spread from France into Belgium, Germany, Italy and Poland, while Paris was still in a state of unrest. But Louis Philippe took fright at the attack on the Chamber of Peers after the trial of the ministers of Charles X., at the sack of the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois and the archbishop’s palace (February, 1831), and at the terrible strike of the silk weavers at Lyons. Casimir Périer, who was both a Liberal and a believer in a strong government, was then charged with the task of heading the resistance to advanced ideas, and applying the principle of non-intervention in foreign affairs (March 13, 1831). After his death by cholera in May 1832, the agitation which he had succeeded by his energy in checking at Lyons, at Grenoble and in the Vendée, where it had been stirred up by the romantic duchess of Berry, began to gain ground. The struggle against the republicans was still longer; for having lost all their chance of attaining power by means of the Chamber, they proceeded to reorganize themselves into armed secret societies. The press, which was gaining that influence over public opinion which had been lost by the parliamentary debates, openly attacked the government and the king, especially by means of caricature. Between 1832 and 1836 the Soult ministry, of which The Republicans crushed. Guizot, Thiers and the duc de Broglie were members, had to combat the terrible insurrections in Lyons and Paris (1834). The measures of repression were threefold: military repression, carried out by the National Guard and the regulars, both under the command of Bugeaud; judicial repression, effected by the great trial of April 1835; and legislative repression, consisting in the laws of September, which, when to mere ridicule had succeeded acts of violence, such as that of Fieschi (July 28th, 1835), aimed at facilitating the condemnation of political offenders and at intimidating the press. The party of “movement” was vanquished.

But the July Government, born as it was of a popular movement, had to make concessions to popular demands. Casimir Périer had carried a law dealing with municipal organization, which made the municipal councils The bourgeois policy. elective, as they had been before the year VIII.; and in 1833 Guizot had completed it by making the conseils généraux also elective. In the same year the law dealing with primary instruction had also shown the mark of new ideas. But now that the bourgeoisie was raised to power it did not prove itself any more liberal than the aristocracy of birth and fortune in dealing with educational, fiscal and industrial questions. In spite of the increase of riches, the bourgeois régime maintained a fiscal and social legislation which, while it assured to the middle class certainty and permanence of benefits, left the labouring masses poor, ignorant, and in a state of incessant agitation.

The Orleanists, who had been unanimous in supporting the king, disagreed, after their victory, as to what powers he was to be given. The Left Centre, led by Thiers, held that he should reign but not govern; the Right The socialist party. Centre, led by Guizot, would admit him to an active part in the government; and the third party (tiers-parti) wavered between these two. And so between 1836 and 1840, as the struggle against the king’s claim to govern passed from the sphere of outside discussion into parliament, we see the rise of a bourgeois socialist party, side by side with the now dwindling republican party. It no longer confined its demands to universal suffrage, on the principle of the legitimate representation of all interests, or in the name of justice. Led by Saint-Simon, Fourier, P. Leroux and Lamennais, it aimed at realizing a better social organization for and by means of the state. But the question was by what means this was to be accomplished. The secret societies, under the influence of Blanqui and Barbès, two revolutionaries who had revived the traditions of Babeuf, were not willing to wait for the complete education of the masses, necessarily a long process. On the 12th of May 1839 the Société des Saisons made an attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie by force, but was defeated. Democrats like Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin and Lamennais continued to repeat in support of the wisdom of universal suffrage the old profession of faith: vox populi, vox Dei. And finally this republican doctrine, already confused, was still further complicated by a kind of mysticism which aimed at reconciling the most extreme differences of belief, the Catholicism of Buchez, the Bonapartism of Cormenin, and the humanitarianism of the cosmopolitans. It was in vain that Auguste Comte, Michelet and Quinet denounced this vague humanitarian mysticism and the pseudo-liberalism of the Church. The movement had now begun.

At first these moderate republicans, radical or communist, formed only imperceptible groups. Among the peasant classes, and even in the industrial centres, warlike passions were still rife. Louis Philippe tried to find an outlet The Bonapartist revival. for them in the Algerian war, and later by the revival of the Napoleonic legend, which was held to be no longer dangerous, since the death of the duke of Reichstadt in 1832. It was imprudently recalled by Thiers’ History of the Consulate and Empire, by artists and poets, in spite of the prophecies of Lamartine, and by the solemn translation of Napoleon I.’s ashes in 1840 to the Invalides at Paris.

All theories require to be based on practice, especially those which involve force. Now Louis Philippe, though as active as his predecessors had been slothful, was the least warlike of men. His only wish was to govern personally, as Parliamentary opposition to the royal power. George III. and George IV. of England had done, especially in foreign affairs, while at home was being waged the great duel between Thiers and Guizot, with Molé as intermediary. Thiers, head of the cabinet of the 22nd of February 1836, an astute man but not pliant enough to please the king, fell after a few months, in consequence of his attempt to stop the Carlist civil war in Spain, and to support the constitutional government of Queen Isabella. Louis Philippe hoped that, by calling upon Molé to form a ministry, he would be better able to make his personal authority felt. From 1837 to 1839 Molé aroused opposition on all hands; this was emphasized by the refusal of the Chambers to vote one of those endowments which the king was continually asking them to grant for his children, by two dissolutions of the Chambers, and finally by the Strasburg affair and the stormy trial of Louis Napoleon, son of the former king of Holland (1836-1837). At the elections of 1839 Molé was defeated by Thiers, Guizot and Barrot, who had combined to oppose the tyranny of the “Château,” and after a long ministerial crisis was replaced by Thiers (March 1, 1840). But the latter was too much in favour of war to please the king, who was strongly disposed towards peace and an alliance with Great Britain, and consequently fell at the time of the Egyptian question, when, in answer to the treaty of London concluded behind his back by Nicholas I. and Palmerston on the 15th of July 1840, he fortified Paris and proclaimed his intention to give armed support to Mehemet Ali, the ally of France (see Mehemet Ali). But the violence of popular Chauvinism and the renewed attempt of Louis Napoleon at Boulogne proved to the holders of the doctrine of peace at any price that in the long-run their policy tends to turn a peaceful attitude into a warlike one, and to strengthen the absolutist idea.

In spite of all, from 1840 to 1848 Louis Philippe still further extended his activity in foreign affairs, thus bringing himself into still greater prominence, though he was already frequently held responsible for failures in foreign Guizot’s ministry. politics and unpopular measures in home affairs. The catchword of Guizot, who was now his minister, was: Peace and no reforms. With the exception of the law of 1842 concerning the railways, not a single measure of importance was proposed by the ministry. France lived under a régime of general corruption: parliamentary corruption, due to the illegal conduct of the deputies, consisting of slavish or venal officials; electoral corruption, effected by the purchase of the 200,000 electors constituting the “pays légal,” who were bribed by the advantages of power; and moral corruption, due to the reign of the plutocracy, the bourgeoisie, a hard-working, educated and honourable class, it is true, but insolent, like all newly enriched parvenus in the presence of other aristocracies, and with unyielding selfishness maintaining an attitude of suspicion towards the people, whose aspirations they did not share and with whom they did not feel themselves to have anything in common. This led to a slackening in political life, a sort of exhaustion of interest throughout the country, an excessive devotion to material prosperity. Under a superficial appearance of calm a tempest was brewing, of which the industrial writings of Balzac, Eugène Sue, Lamartine, H. Heine, Vigny, Montalembert and Tocqueville were the premonitions. But it was in vain that they denounced this supremacy of the bourgeoisie, relying on its two main supports, the suffrage based on a property qualification and the National Guard, for its rallying-cry was the “Enrichissez-vous” of Guizot, and its excessive materialism gained a sinister distinction from scandals connected with the ministers Teste and Cubières, and such mysterious crimes as that of Choiseul-Praslin.35 In vain also did they point out that mere riches are not so much a protection to the ministry who are in power as a temptation to the majority excluded from power by this barrier of wealth. It was in vain that beneath the inflated haute bourgeoisie which speculated in railways and solidly supported the Church, behind the shopkeeper clique who still remained Voltairian, who enviously applauded the pamphlets of Cormenin on the luxury of the court, and who were bitterly satirized by the pencil of Daumier and Gavarni, did the thinkers give voice to the mutterings of an immense industrial proletariat, which were re-echoing throughout the whole of western Europe.

In face of this tragic contrast Guizot remained unmoved, blinded by the superficial brilliance of apparent success and prosperity. He adorned by flights of eloquence his invariable theme: no new laws, no reforms, no foreign Guizot’s Foreign Policy. complications, the policy of material interests. He preserved his yielding attitude towards Great Britain in the affair of the right of search in 1841, and in the affair of the missionary Pritchard at Tahiti (1843-1845). And when the marriage of the duc de Montpensier with a Spanish infanta in 1846 had broken this entente cordiale to which he clung, it was only to yield in turn to Metternich, when he took possession of Cracow, the last remnant of Poland, to protect the Sonderbund in Switzerland, to discourage the Liberal ardour of Pius IX., and to hand over the education of France to the Ultramontane clergy. Still further strengthened by the elections of 1846, he refused the demands of the Opposition formed by a coalition of the Left Centre and the Radical party for parliamentary and electoral reform, which would have excluded the officials from the Chambers, reduced the electoral qualification to 100 francs, and added to the number of the electors the capacitaires whose competence was guaranteed by their education. For Guizot the whole country was represented by the “pays légal,” consisting of the king, the ministers, the deputies and the Campaign of the banquets. electors. When the Opposition appealed to the country, he flung down a disdainful challenge to what “les brouillons et les badauds appellent le peuple.” The challenge was taken up by all the parties of the Opposition in the campaign of the banquets got up somewhat artificially in 1847 in favour of the extension of the franchise. The monarchy had arrived at such a state of weakness and corruption that a determined minority was sufficient to overthrow it. The prohibition of a last banquet in Paris precipitated the catastrophe. The monarchy which for fifteen years had overcome its adversaries collapsed on the 24th of February 1848 to the astonishment of all.

The industrial population of the faubourgs on its way towards the centre of the town was welcomed by the National Guard, among cries of “Vive la réforme.” Barricades were raised after the unfortunate incident of the firing on The Revolution of Feb. 24, 1848. the crowd in the Boulevard des Capucines. On the 23rd Guizot’s cabinet resigned, abandoned by the petite bourgeoisie, on whose support they thought they could depend. The heads of the Left Centre and the dynastic Left, Molé and Thiers, declined the offered leadership. Odilon Barrot accepted it, and Bugeaud, commander-in-chief of the first military division, who had begun to attack the barricades, was recalled. But it was too late. In face of the insurrection which had now taken possession of the whole capital, Louis Philippe decided to abdicate in favour of his grandson, the comte de Paris. But it was too late also to be content with the regency of the duchess of Orleans. It was now the turn of the Republic, and it was proclaimed by Lamartine in the name of the provisional government elected by the Chamber under the pressure of the mob.

This provisional government with Dupont de l’Eure as its president, consisted of Lamartine for foreign affairs, Crémieux for justice, Ledru-Rollin for the interior, Carnot for public instruction, Gondchaux for finance, Arago for The Provisional Government. the navy, and Bedeau for war. Garnier-Pagès was mayor of Paris. But, as in 1830, the republican-socialist party had set up a rival government at the Hôtel de Ville, including L. Blanc, A. Marrast, Flocon, and the workman Albert, which bid fair to involve discord and civil war. But this time the Palais Bourbon was not victorious over the Hôtel de Ville. It had to consent to a fusion of the two bodies, in which, however, the predominating elements were the moderate republicans. It was doubtful what would eventually be the policy of the new government. One party, seeing that in spite of the changes in the last sixty years of all political institutions, the position of the people had not been improved, demanded a reform of society itself, the abolition of the privileged position of property, the only obstacle to equality, and as an emblem hoisted the red flag. The other party wished to maintain society on the basis of its ancient institutions, and rallied round the tricolour.

The first collision took place as to the form which the revolution of 1848 was to take. Were they to remain faithful to their original principles, as Lamartine wished, and accept the decision of the country as supreme, or were they, Universal suffrage. as the revolutionaries under Ledru-Rollin claimed, to declare the republic of Paris superior to the universal suffrage of an insufficiently educated people? On the 5th of March the government, under the pressure of the Parisian clubs, decided in favour of an immediate reference to the people, and direct universal suffrage, and adjourned it till the 26th of April. In this fateful and unexpected decision, which instead of adding to the electorate the educated classes, refused by Guizot, admitted to it the unqualified masses, originated the Constituent Assembly of the 4th of May 1848. The provisional government having resigned, the republican and anti-socialist majority on the 9th The Executive Commission. of May entrusted the supreme power to an executive commission consisting of five members: Arago, Marie, Garnier-Pagès, Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin. But the spell was already broken. This revolution which had been peacefully effected with the most generous aspirations, in the hope of abolishing poverty by organizing industry on other bases than those of competition and capitalism, and which had at once aroused the fraternal sympathy of the nations, was doomed to be abortive.

The result of the general election, the return of a constituent assembly predominantly moderate if not monarchical, dashed the hopes of those who had looked for the establishment, by a peaceful revolution, of their ideal socialist state; but they were not prepared to yield without a struggle, and in Paris itself they commanded a formidable force. In spite of the preponderance of the “tricolour” party in the provisional government, so long as the voice of France had not spoken, the socialists, supported by the Parisian proletariat, had exercised an influence on policy out of all proportion to their relative numbers or personal weight. By the decree of the 24th of February the provisional government had solemnly accepted the principle of the “right to work,” and decided to establish “national workshops” for the unemployed; at the same time a sort of industrial parliament was established at the Luxembourg, under the presidency of Louis Blanc, with the object of preparing a scheme for the organization of labour; and, lastly, by the decree of the 8th of March the property qualification for enrolment in the National Guard had been abolished and the workmen were supplied with arms. The socialists thus formed, in some sort, a state within the state, with a government, an organization and an armed force.

In the circumstances a conflict was inevitable; and on the 15th of May an armed mob, headed by Raspail, Blanqui and Barbès, and assisted by the proletariat Guard, attempted to overwhelm the Assembly. They were defeated by the bourgeois battalions of the National Guard; but the situation none the less remained highly critical. The national workshops were producing the results that might have been foreseen. It was impossible to provide remunerative work even for the genuine unemployed, and of the thousands who applied the greater number were employed in perfectly useless digging and refilling; soon even this expedient failed, and those for whom work could not be invented were given a half wage of 1 franc a day. Even this pitiful dole, with no obligation to work, proved attractive, and all over France workmen threw up their jobs and streamed to Paris, where they swelled the ranks of the army under the red flag. It was soon clear that the continuance of this experiment would mean financial ruin; it had been proved by the émeute of the 15th of May that it constituted a perpetual menace to the state; and the government decided to end it. The method chosen was scarcely a happy one. On the 21st of June M. de Falloux decided in the name of the parliamentary commission on labour that the workmen should be discharged within three days and such as were able-bodied should be forced to enlist. The June Days. A furious insurrection at once broke out. Throughout the whole of the 24th, 25th and 26th of June, the eastern industrial quarter of Paris, led by Pujol, carried on a furious struggle against the western quarter, led by Cavaignac, who had been appointed dictator. Vanquished and decimated, first by fighting and afterwards by deportation, the socialist party was crushed. But they dragged down the Republic in their ruin. This had already become unpopular with the peasants, exasperated by the new land tax of 45 centimes imposed in order to fill the empty treasury, and with the bourgeois, in terror of the power of the revolutionary clubs and hard hit by the stagnation of business. By the “massacres” of the June Days the working classes were also alienated from it; and abiding fear of the “Reds” did the rest. “France,” wrote the duke of Wellington at this time, “needs a Napoleon! I cannot yet see him ... Where is he?”36

France indeed needed, or thought she needed, a Napoleon; and the demand was soon to be supplied. The granting of universal suffrage to a society with Imperialist sympathies, and unfitted to reconcile the principles The Constitution of 1848. of order with the consequences of liberty, was indeed bound, now that the political balance in France was so radically changed, to prove a formidable instrument of reaction; and this was proved by the election of the president of the Republic. On the 4th of November 1848 was promulgated the new constitution, obviously the work of inexperienced hands, proclaiming a democratic republic, direct universal suffrage and the separation of powers; there was to be a single permanent assembly of 750 members elected for a term of three years by the scrutin de liste, which was to vote on the laws prepared by a council of state elected by the Assembly for six years; the executive power was delegated to a president elected for four years by direct universal suffrage, i.e. on a broader basis than that of the chamber, and not eligible for re-election; he was to choose his ministers, who, like him, would be responsible. Finally, all revision was made impossible since it involved obtaining three times in succession a majority of three-quarters of the deputies in a special assembly. It was in vain that M. Grévy, in the name of those who perceived the obvious and inevitable risk of creating, under the name of a president, a monarch and more than a king, proposed that the head of the state should be no more than a removable president of the ministerial council. Lamartine, thinking that he was sure to be the choice of the electors under universal suffrage, won over the support of the Chamber, which did not even take the precaution of rendering ineligible the members of families which had reigned over France. It made the presidency an office dependent upon popular acclamation.

The election was keenly contested; the socialists adopted as their candidate Ledru-Rollin, the republicans Cavaignac; and the recently reorganized Imperialist party Prince Bonaparte. Louis Napoleon, unknown in 1835, and Louis Napoleon. forgotten or despised since 1840, had in the last eight years advanced sufficiently in the public estimation to be elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848 by five departments. He owed this rapid increase of popularity partly to blunders of the government of July, which had unwisely aroused the memory of the country, filled as it was with recollections of the Empire, and partly to Louis Napoleon’s campaign carried on from his prison at Ham by means of pamphlets of socialistic tendencies. Moreover, the monarchists, led by Thiers and the committee of the Rue de Poitiers, were no longer content even with the safe dictatorship of the upright Cavaignac, and joined forces with the Bonapartists. On the 10th of December the peasants gave over 5,000,000 votes to a name: Napoleon, which stood for order at all costs, against 1,400,000 for Cavaignac.

For three years there went on an indecisive struggle between the heterogeneous Assembly and the prince who was silently awaiting his opportunity. He chose as his ministers men but little inclined towards republicanism, for Expedition to Rome. preference Orleanists, the chief of whom was Odilon Barrot. In order to strengthen his position, he endeavoured to conciliate the reactionary parties, without committing himself to any of them. The chief instance of this was the expedition to Rome, voted by the Catholics with the object of restoring the papacy, which had been driven out by Garibaldi and Mazzini. The prince-president was also in favour of it, as beginning the work of European renovation and reconstruction which he already looked upon as his mission. General Oudinot’s entry into Rome provoked in Paris a foolish insurrection in favour of the Roman republic, that of the Château d’Eau, which was crushed on the 13th of June 1849. On the other hand, when Pius IX., though only just restored, began to yield to the general movement of reaction, the president demanded that he should set up a Liberal government. The pope’s dilatory reply having been accepted by his ministry, the president replaced it on the 1st of November by the Fould-Rouher cabinet.

This looked like a declaration of war against the Catholic and monarchist majority in the Legislative Assembly which had The Legislative Assembly. been elected on the 28th of May in a moment of panic. But the prince-president again pretended to be playing the game of the Orleanists, as he had done in the case of the Constituent-Assembly. The complementary elections of March and April 1850 having resulted in an unexpected victory for the advanced republicans, which struck terror into the reactionary leaders, Thiers, Berryer and Montalembert, the president gave his countenance to a clerical campaign against the republicans at home. The Church, which had failed in its attempts to gain control of the university under Louis XVIII. and Charles X., aimed at setting up a rival establishment “Loi Falloux.” Electoral law of May 31. of its own. The Loi Falloux of the 15th of March 1850, under the pretext of establishing the liberty of instruction promised by the charter, again placed the teaching of the university under the direction of the Catholic Church, as a measure of social safety, and, by the facilities which it granted to the Church for propagating teaching in harmony with its own dogmas, succeeded in obstructing for half a century the work of intellectual enfranchisement effected by the men of the 18th century and of the Revolution. The electoral law of the 31st of May was another class law directed against subversive ideas. It required as a proof of three years’ domicile the entries in the record of direct taxes, thus cutting down universal suffrage by taking away the vote from the industrial population, which was not as a rule stationary. The law of the 16th of July aggravated the severity of the press restrictions by re-establishing the “caution money” (cautionnement) deposited by proprietors and editors of papers with the government as a guarantee of good behaviour. Finally, a skilful interpretation of the law on clubs and political societies suppressed about this time all the Republican societies. It was now their turn to be crushed like the socialists.

But the president had only joined in Montalembert’s cry of “Down with the Republicans!” in the hope of effecting a revision of the constitution without having recourse to a coup d’état. His concessions only increased the Struggle between the President and the Assembly. boldness of the monarchists; while they had only accepted Louis Napoleon as president in opposition to the Republic and as a step in the direction of the monarchy. A conflict was now inevitable between his personal policy and the majority of the Chamber, who were, moreover, divided into legitimists and Orleanists, in spite of the death of Louis Philippe in August 1850. Louis Napoleon skilfully exploited their projects for a restoration of the monarchy, which he knew to be unpopular in the country, and which gave him the opportunity of furthering his own personal ambitions. From the 8th of August to the 12th of November 1850 he went about France stating the case for a revision of the constitution in speeches which he varied according to each place; he held reviews, at which cries of “Vive Napoléon” showed that the army was with him; he superseded General Changarnier, on whose arms the parliament relied for the projected monarchical coup d’état; he replaced his Orleanist ministry by obscure men devoted to his own cause, such as Morny, Fleury and Persigny, and gathered round him officers of the African army, broken men like General Saint-Arnaud; in fact he practically declared open war.

His reply to the votes of censure passed by the Assembly, and their refusal to increase his civil list, was to hint at a vast communistic plot in order to scare the bourgeoisie, and to denounce the electoral law of the 31st of May in order to gain the Coup d’État of Dec. 2, 1851. support of the mass of the people. The Assembly retaliated by throwing out the proposal for a partial reform of that article of the constitution which prohibited the re-election of the president and the re-establishment of universal suffrage (July). All hope of a peaceful issue was at an end. When the questors called upon the Chamber to have posted up in all barracks the decree of the 6th of May 1848 concerning the right of the Assembly to demand the support of the troops if attacked, the Mountain, dreading a restoration of the monarchy, voted with the Bonapartists against the measure, thus disarming the legislative power. Louis Napoleon saw his opportunity. On the night between the 1st and 2nd of December 1851, the anniversary of Austerlitz, he dissolved the Chamber, re-established universal suffrage, had all the party leaders arrested, and summoned a new assembly to prolong his term of office for ten years. The deputies who had met under Berryer at the Mairie of the tenth arrondissement to defend the constitution and proclaim the deposition of Louis Napoleon were scattered by the troops at Mazas and Mont Valérian. The resistance organized by the republicans within Paris under Victor Hugo was soon subdued by the intoxicated soldiers. The more serious resistance in the departments was crushed by declaring a state of siege and by the “mixed commissions.” The plebiscite of the 20th of December ratified by a huge majority the coup d’état in favour of the prince-president, who alone reaped the benefit of the excesses of the Republicans and the reactionary passions of the monarchists.

The second attempt to revive the principle of 1789 only served as a preface to the restoration of the Empire. The new anti-parliamentary constitution of the 14th of January 1852 was to a large extent merely a repetition of that The Second Empire. of the year VIII. All executive power was entrusted to the head of the state, who was solely responsible to the people, now powerless to exercise any of their rights. He was to nominate the members of the council of state, whose duty it was to prepare the laws, and of the senate, a body permanently established as a constituent part of the empire. One innovation was made, namely, that the Legislative Body was elected by universal suffrage, but it had no right of initiative, all laws being proposed by the executive power. This new and violent political change was rapidly followed by the same consequence as had attended that of Brumaire. On the 2nd of December 1852, France, still under the effect of the Napoleonic virus, and the fear of anarchy, conferred almost unanimously by a plebiscite the supreme power, with the title of emperor, upon Napoleon III.

But though the machinery of government was almost the same under the Second Empire as it had been under the First, the principles upon which its founder based it were different. The function of the Empire, as he loved to repeat, was to guide the people internally towards justice and externally towards perpetual peace. Holding his power by universal suffrage, and having frequently, from his prison or in exile, reproached former oligarchical governments with neglecting social questions, he set out to solve them by organizing a system of government based on the principles of the “Napoleonic Idea,” i.e. of the emperor, the elect of the people as the representative of the democracy, and as such supreme; and of himself, the representative of the great Napoleon, “who had sprung armed from the Revolution like Minerva from the head of Jove,” as the guardian of the social gains of the revolutionary epoch. But he soon proved that social justice did not mean liberty; for he acted in such a way that those of the principles of 1848 which he had preserved became a mere sham. He proceeded to paralyze all those active national forces which tend to create the public spirit of a people, such as parliament, universal suffrage, the press, education and associations. The Legislative Body was not allowed either to elect its own president or to regulate its own procedure, or to propose a law or an amendment, or to vote on the budget in detail, or to make its deliberations public. It was a dumb parliament. Similarly, universal suffrage was supervised and controlled by means of official candidature, by forbidding free speech and action in electoral matters to the Opposition, and by a skilful adjustment of the electoral districts in such a way as to overwhelm the Liberal vote in the mass of the rural population. The press was subjected to a system of cautionnements, i.e. “caution money,” deposited as a guarantee of good behaviour, and avertissements, i.e. requests by the authorities to cease publication of certain articles, under pain of suspension or suppression; while books were subject to a censorship. France was like a sickroom, where nobody might speak aloud. In order to counteract the opposition of individuals, a surveillance of suspects was instituted. Orsini’s attack on the emperor in 1858, though purely Italian in its motive, served as a pretext for increasing the severity of this régime by the law of general security (sûreté générale) which authorized the internment, exile or deportation of any suspect without trial. In the same way public instruction was strictly supervised, the teaching of philosophy was suppressed in the Lycées, and the disciplinary powers of the administration were increased. In fact for seven years France had no political life. The Empire was carried on by a series of plebiscites. Up to 1857 the Opposition did not exist; from then till 1860 it was reduced to five members: Darimon, Émile Ollivier, Hénon, J. Favre and E. Picard. The royalists waited inactive after the new and unsuccessful attempt made at Frohsdorf in 1853, by a combination of the legitimists and Orleanists, to re-create a living monarchy out of the ruin of two royal families. Thus the events of that ominous night in December were closing the future to the new generations as well as to those who had grown up during forty years of liberty.

But it was not enough to abolish liberty by conjuring up the spectre of demagogy. It had to be forgotten, the great silence had to be covered by the noise of festivities and material enjoyment, the imagination of the French people had Material prosperity a condition of despotism. to be distracted from public affairs by the taste for work, the love of gain, the passion for good living. The success of the imperial despotism, as of any other, was bound up with that material prosperity which would make all interests dread the thought of revolution. Napoleon III., therefore, looked for support to the clergy, the great financiers, industrial magnates and landed proprietors. He revived on his own account the “Let us grow rich” of 1840. Under the influence of the Saint-Simonians and men of business great credit establishments were instituted and vast public works entered upon: the Crédit foncier de France, the Crédit mobilier, the conversion of the railways into six great companies between 1852 and 1857. The rage for speculation was increased by the inflow of Californian and Australian gold, and consumption was facilitated by a general fall in prices between 1856 and 1860, due to an economic revolution which was soon to overthrow the tariff wall, as it had done already in England. Thus French activity flourished exceedingly between 1852 and 1857, and was merely temporarily checked by the crisis of 1857. The universal Exhibition of 1855 was its culminating point. Art felt the effects of this increase of comfort and luxury. The great enthusiasms of the romantic period were over; philosophy became sceptical and literature merely amusing. The festivities of the court at Compiègne set the fashion for the bourgeoisie, satisfied with this energetic government which kept such good guard over their bank balances.

If the Empire was strong, the emperor was weak. At once headstrong and a dreamer, he was full of rash plans, but irresolute in carrying them out. An absolute despot, he remained what his life had made him, a conspirator through the very mysticism of Napoleon III.’s ideas. his mental habit, and a revolutionary by reason of his demagogic imperialism and his democratic chauvinism. In his opinion the artificial work of the congress of Vienna, involving the downfall of his own family and of France, ought to be destroyed, and Europe organized as a collection of great industrial states, united by community. of interests and bound together by commercial treaties, and expressing this unity by periodical congresses presided over by himself, and by universal exhibitions. In this way he would reconcile the revolutionary principle of the supremacy of the people with historical tradition, a thing which neither the Restoration nor the July monarchy nor the Republic of 1848 had been able to achieve. Universal suffrage, the organization of Rumanian, Italian and German nationality, and commercial liberty; this was to be the work of the Revolution. But the creation of great states side by side with France brought with it the necessity for looking for territorial compensation elsewhere, and consequently for violating the principle of nationality and abjuring his system of economic peace. Napoleon III.’s foreign policy was as contradictory as his policy in home affairs, “L’Empire, c’est la paix,” was his cry; and he proceeded to make war.

So long as his power was not yet established, Napoleon III. made especial efforts to reassure European opinion, which had been made uneasy by his previous protestations against the treaties of 1815. The Crimean War, in The Crimean War. which, supported by England and the king of Sardinia, he upheld against Russia the policy of the integrity of the Turkish empire, a policy traditional in France since Francis I., won him the adherence both of the old parties and and the Liberals. And this war was the prototype of all the rest. It was entered upon with no clearly defined military purpose, and continued in a hesitating way. This was the cause, after the victory of the allies at the Alma (September 14, 1854), of the long and costly siege of Sevastopol (September 8, 1855). Napoleon III., whose joy was at its height owing to the signature of a peace which excluded Russia from the Black Sea, and to the birth of the prince imperial, which ensured the continuation of his dynasty, thought that the time had arrived to make a beginning in applying his system. Count Walewski, his minister for foreign affairs, gave a sudden and unexpected extension of scope to the deliberations of the congress which met at Paris in 1856 by inviting the plenipotentiaries to consider the questions of Greece, Rome, Naples, &c. This motion contained the principle of all the upheavals which were to effect such changes in Europe between 1859 and 1871. It was Cavour and Piedmont who immediately benefited by it, for thanks to Napoleon III. they were able to lay the Italian question before an assembly of diplomatic Europe.

It was not Orsini’s attack on the 14th of January 1858 which brought this question before Napoleon. It had never ceased to occupy him since he had taken part in the patriotic conspiracies in Italy in his youth. The triumph of his The War in Italy. armies in the East now gave him the power necessary to accomplish this mission upon which he had set his heart. The suppression of public opinion made it impossible for him to be enlightened as to the conflict between the interests of the country and his own generous visions. The sympathy of all Europe was with Italy, torn for centuries past between so many masters; under Alexander II. Russia, won over since the interview of Stuttgart by the emperor’s generosity rather than conquered by armed force, offered no opposition to this act of justice; while England applauded it from the first. The emperor, divided between the empress Eugénie, who as a Spaniard and a devout Catholic was hostile to anything which might threaten the papacy, and Prince Napoleon, who as brother-in-law of Victor Emmanuel favoured the cause of Piedmont, hoped to conciliate both sides by setting up an Italian federation, intending to reserve the presidency of it to Pope Pius IX., as a mark of respect to the moral authority of the Church. Moreover, the very difficulty of the undertaking appealed to the emperor, elated by his recent success in the Crimea. At the secret meeting between Napoleon and Count Cavour (July 20, 1858) the eventual armed intervention of France, demanded by Orsini before he mounted the scaffold, was definitely promised.

The ill-advised Austrian ultimatum demanding the immediate cessation of Piedmont’s preparations for war precipitated the Italian expedition. On the 3rd of May 1859 Napoleon declared his intention of making Italy “free from the The peace of Villafranca. Alps to the Adriatic.” As he had done four years ago, he plunged into the war with no settled scheme and without preparation; he held out great hopes, but without reckoning what efforts would be necessary to realize them. Two months later, in spite of the victories of Montebello, Magenta and Solferino, he suddenly broke off, and signed the patched-up peace of Villafranca with Francis Joseph (July 9). Austria ceded Lombardy to Napoleon III., who in turn ceded it to Victor Emmanuel; Modena and Tuscany were restored to their respective dukes, the Romagna to the pope, now president of an Italian federation. The mountain had brought forth a mouse.

The reasons for this breakdown on the part of the emperor in the midst of his apparent triumph were many. Neither Magenta nor Solferino had been decisive battles. Further, his idea of a federation was menaced by the The Italian problem. revolutionary movement which seemed likely to drive out all the princes of central Italy, and to involve him in an unwelcome dispute with the French clerical party. Moreover, he had forgotten to reckon with the Germanic Confederation, which was bound to come to the assistance of Austria. The mobilization of Prussia on the Rhine, combined with military difficulties and the risk of a defeat in Venetian territory, rather damped his enthusiasm, and decided him to put an end to the war. The armistice fell upon the Italians as a bolt from the blue, convincing them that they had been betrayed; on all sides despair drove them to sacrifice their jealously guarded independence to national unity. On the one hand the Catholics were agitating throughout all Europe to obtain the independence of the papal territory; and the French republicans were protesting, on the other hand, against the abandonment of those revolutionary traditions, the revival of which they had hailed so enthusiastically. The emperor, unprepared for the turn which events had taken, attempted to disentangle this confusion by suggesting a fresh congress of the Powers, which should reconcile dynastic interests with those of the people. After a while he gave up the attempt and resigned himself to the position, his actions having had more wide-reaching results than he had wished. The treaty of Zürich proclaimed the fallacious principle of non-intervention (November 10, 1859); and then, by the treaty of Turin of the 24th of May 1860, Napoleon threw over his ill-timed confederation. He conciliated the mistrust of Great Britain by replacing Walewski, who was hostile to his policy, by Thouvenel, an anti-clerical and a supporter of the English alliance, and he counterbalanced the increase of the new Italian kingdom by the acquisition of Nice and Savoy. Napoleon, like all French governments, only succeeded in finding a provisional solution for the Italian problem.

But this solution would only hold good so long as the emperor was in a powerful position. Now this Italian war, in which he had given his support to revolution beyond the Alps, and, though unintentionally, compromised the temporal Catholic and protectionist opposition. power of the popes, had given great offence to the Catholics, to whose support the establishment of the Empire was largely due. A keen Catholic opposition sprang up, voiced in L. Veuillot’s paper the Univers, and was not silenced even by the Syrian expedition (1860) in favour of the Catholic Maronites, who were being persecuted by the Druses. On the other hand, the commercial treaty with Great Britain which was signed in January 1860, and which ratified the free-trade policy of Richard Cobden and Michael Chevalier, had brought upon French industry the sudden shock of foreign competition. Thus both Catholics and protectionists made the discovery that absolutism may be an excellent thing when it serves their ambitions or interests, but a bad thing when it is exercised at their expense. But Napoleon, in order to restore the prestige of the Empire before the newly-awakened hostility of public opinion, tried to gain from the Left the support which he had lost from the Right. After the return from Italy the general amnesty of the 16th of August 1859 had marked the evolution of the absolutist empire towards the liberal, and later parliamentary empire, which was to last for ten years.

Napoleon began by removing the gag which was keeping the country in silence. On the 24th of November 1860, “by a coup d’état matured during his solitary meditations,” like a conspirator in his love of hiding his mysterious The Liberal Empire. thoughts even from his ministers, he granted to the Chambers the right to vote an address annually in answer to the speech from the throne, and to the press the right of reporting parliamentary debates. He counted on the latter concession to hold in check the growing Catholic opposition, which was becoming more and more alarmed by the policy of laissez-faire practised by the emperor in Italy. But the government majority already showed some signs of independence. The right of voting on the budget by sections, granted by the emperor in 1861, was a new weapon given to his adversaries. Everything conspired in their favour: the anxiety of those candid friends who were calling attention to the defective budget; the commercial crisis, aggravated by the American Civil War; and above all, the restless spirit of the emperor, who had annoyed his opponents in 1860 by insisting on an alliance with Great Britain in order forcibly to open the Chinese ports for trade, in 1863 by his ill-fated attempt to put down a republic and set up a Latin empire in Mexico in favour of the archduke Maximilian of Austria, and from 1861 to 1863 by embarking on colonizing experiments in Cochin China and Annam.

The same inconsistencies occurred in the emperor’s European politics. The support which he had given to the Italian cause had aroused the eager hopes of other nations. The proclamation of the kingdom of Italy on the 18th of The policy of nationalism. February 1861 after the rapid annexation of Tuscany and the kingdom of Naples had proved the danger of half-measures. But when a concession, however narrow, had been made to the liberty of one nation, it could hardly be refused to the no less legitimate aspirations of the rest. In 1863 these “new rights” again clamoured loudly for recognition, in Poland, in Schleswig and Holstein, in Italy, now indeed united, but with neither frontiers nor capital, and in the Danubian principalities. In order to extricate himself from the Polish impasse, the emperor again had recourse to his expedient—always fruitless because always inopportune—of a congress. He was again unsuccessful: England refused even to admit the principle of a congress, while Austria, Prussia and Russia gave their adhesion only on conditions which rendered it futile, i.e. they reserved the vital questions of Venetia and Poland.