CHAPTER IV
Political Men of the Time
I became very well acquainted with both M. Rouher and M. Emile Ollivier. The latter inspired me with warm feelings of friendship. He was essentially an honest man, and his mistakes were more the faults of others than his own. He never had the opportunity really to show of what stuff he was made. Though possessed of the best intentions in the world, he was always misunderstood and suspected, even by the very people who should have had confidence in him and in his sense of justice and impartiality.
When he was called upon to form a Cabinet he was met by the antagonism of the Empress, who did not approve of the new trend in politics, which had replaced the one inaugurated at the coup d’état. She hated the idea of the slightest diminution in the Imperial power and prestige. She did not believe in the necessity of concessions to public opinion, and she was deeply incensed to find that her ideas on the subject were not shared by her husband, who was more or less under the influence of his new Prime Minister. Eugénie, who was superstitious, declared to her friends that she had the feeling when she spoke with Emile Ollivier that he was going to be fatal to her.
The fact is that fate went against the new Prime Minister. M. Ollivier had hardly been in power when occurred an event almost forgotten to-day, but which was to sound the first knell of the Empire. Prince Pierre Bonaparte shot Victor Noir.
Till that fatal day very few people knew anything about Prince Pierre. He was a distant cousin of the Emperor, with whom his relations had never been either affectionate or even friendly. He was the black sheep of a family which at that time could ill afford a setback, and his political opinions, coupled with an irregular connection with a person belonging to an inferior class, and whom he was ultimately to make his wife, had led to his disgrace by the head of his house. Napoleon III. ignored the existence of this inconvenient kinsman, who lived in a little house at Auteuil.
Prince Pierre was a true Corsican in character: violent, and given to strong fits of passion. He professed, together with most Radical political opinions and strong Republican sympathies, an immense worship for the memory of his great ancestor, the first Napoleon, and a great respect for the family traditions of the Bonapartes. And when one day, in a small newspaper edited at Bastia, he chanced across a very vile attack on the family, he got into a rage, and replied to it in the same paper by an equally virulent attack directed against the author.
The matter did not end there, for very soon the Parisian press took part, and the occasion was used by the enemies of the Imperial regime in order to air their grievances against it. At last one of the editors of an opposition paper called La Revanche, M. Paschal Grousset, who later on was to acquire a sorry celebrity during the excesses of the Commune, sent two of his friends to Prince Pierre, to request him either to apologise in person or else to fight.
What happened during the interview no one will ever know. The versions given by the Prince and that of M. Ulric de Fonville, who together with Victor Noir had called at Auteuil at the request of Paschal Grousset, differ entirely as to what passed. The result, however, was the murder of Noir by the cousin of Napoleon III.
This event, occurring as it did at a moment when the Empire was being attacked on all sides and already tottering, added considerably to the difficulties under which the Emperor was labouring. Unfortunately, neither he nor his responsible advisers calculated its consequences. Instead of following the advice given by M. Rouher, who was of opinion that Prince Pierre should have been imprisoned in a fortress until his crime had been forgotten by the public, Napoleon III. decided to have his cousin tried by a special court which assembled at Tours. The court acquitted the accused, which only added to the general exasperation against the government. M. Ollivier was reproached with having lent himself to a travesty of justice, in order to shield a relative of the Sovereign from a justly deserved punishment, and was accused by his former friends and followers of allowing himself to fall under the influence of the Court.
This was gall and wormwood to that sincere politician, and the bitterness which resulted on both sides made the head of the Cabinet lose that calmness which, more than anyone else, he required in the difficult task that lay before him.