'But what,' I said, 'would be the consequences of the pistol-shot or the fever?'
'The immediate consequence,' answered Tocqueville, 'would be the installation of his successor. Jérôme would go to the Tuileries as easily as Charles X. did, but it would precipitate the end. We might bear Louis Napoleon for four or five years, or Jérôme for four or five months.'
'It has been thought possible,' I said, 'that in the event of the Jérôme dynasty being overset by a military revolution, it might be followed by a military usurpation; that Nero might be succeeded by Galba.'
'That,' said Tocqueville, 'is one of the few things which I hold to be impossible. Nero may be followed by another attempt at a Republic, but if any individual is to succeed him it must be a prince. Mere personal distinction, at least such as is within the bounds of real possibility, will not give the sceptre of France. It will be seized by no one who cannot pretend to an hereditary claim.
'What I fear,' continued Tocqueville, 'is that when this man feels the ground crumbling under him, he will try the resource of war. It will be a most dangerous experiment. Defeat, or even the alternation of success and failure, which is the ordinary course of war, would be fatal to him; but brilliant success might, as I have said before, establish him. It would be playing double or quits. He is by nature a gambler. His self-confidence, his reliance, not only on himself, but on his fortune, exceeds even that of his uncle. He believes himself to have a great military genius. He certainly planned war a year ago. I do not believe that he has abandoned it now, though the general feeling of the country forces him to suspend it. That feeling, however, he might overcome; he might so contrive as to appear to be forced into hostilities; and such is the intoxicating effect of military glory, that the Government which would give us that would be pardoned, whatever were its defects or its crimes.
'It is your business, and that of Belgium, to put yourselves into such a state of defence as to force him to make his spring on Italy. There he can do you little harm. But to us Frenchmen the consequences of war must be calamitous. If we fail, they are national loss and humiliation. If we succeed, they are slavery.'
'Of course,' I said, 'the corruption that infects the civil service must in time extend to the army, and make it less fit for service.
'Of course it must,' answered Tocqueville. 'It will extend still sooner to the navy? The matériel of a force is more easily injured by jobbing than the personnel. And in the navy the matériel is the principal.
'Our naval strength has never been in proportion to our naval expenditure, and is likely to be less and less so every year, at least during every year of the règne des fripons.'
Tuesday, May 24.—I breakfasted with Sir Henry Ellis and then went to Tocqueville's.