The Revolution, while superficially breaking up this system, left untouched those parts of it which some say are grounded on the peculiarities of French character. It intensified centralization, and it practised most oppressively that interference with the rights of the individual which is of the essence of personal government. The very men who so loudly proclaimed the principles of '89 were found most ready to act on rules which led them straight to the lawless tyranny of the Terror. Their 'ideas' were grand, but personal freedom was far too trifling a thing to be allowed to stand in their way for a moment. In one point the Revolution diverged from the old régime: it became intensely and deliberately propagandist—bent, i.e., on carrying forward, with the strength of the whole nation, the mission which the thinkers of Voltaire's day had assigned to themselves. We often find that the man who believes in nothing in particular is the most violent in opposing the beliefs of others. So it was with the leaders of the Revolution: they were mad to spread their doctrines over Europe; and their doctrines being those of Paris, Paris became (in Frenchmen's eyes) the recognized head, not of France only, but of the civilized world.
Imperialism was at first a reaction from despotic anarchy; the dread of another Terror made the French welcome with delight a man who seemed strong enough to be 'the saviour of society.' So it was again in 1849, when the Socialist struggle in which 13,000 Parisians perished so alarmed the successful 'bourgeois,' that to prevent its repetition they condoned the coup d'état. Ideas, it was said in 1795, were ruining France; the men of ideas had been beaten in the field; Imperialism therefore meant military glory as the basis of French prosperity. Frenchmen were content to believe that (as M. Louis Blanc said the other day at Bordeaux) 'glory and liberty are incompatible,' and deliberately to choose the former.
Of course the Imperialism of 1852 differs somewhat from that of 1804, but it is the same in its intense selfishness, and its thorough insincerity. Under the second Empire, there have been commercial treaties and alliances, and the working class has found good wages, so long as it has been content with political nothingness; but the two will be seen to be the same in principle. Each has the radical evil of depending on success in war, or peace, or both, for its stability; and this necessary instability makes them more hopeless as systems than the old régime, with all its corruptness, or even than the wild theories of the Republic.[211]
But it is needless to enlarge on the manifest causes which made a hereditary monarchy stable so long as it is not wholly intolerable. The same causes make the best of 'tyrannies' (in the Greek sense of the word) unstable. Men as 'logical' as Frenchmen are sure to feel that if such a government is not fulfilling the purpose of its creation, it had better cease to exist; and feeling with Frenchmen generally means action.
The first Napoleon had immense success on his side; he 'saved France,' in his own fashion, and so long as he was successful, very few Frenchmen cared to inquire into the soundness of the method employed. The third Napoleon had in his favour the remembrance of his uncle's success, and the fact that the règne du bavardage had failed as completely in 1849 as it had done in the days of the Directory. Both were helped, too, by the systematic lying of their newspapers, which, amid the enforced silence of all who would not speak as they did, could say what they pleased without fear of contradiction. Both, too, were able administrators: Louis points out, in 'his own Account of the Fight at Dame Europa's School'—a bitter satire on the selfish insincerity of Imperialism—how hard he worked for years, and how by repressing them with one hand and giving them employment with the other, he controlled the terrible Paris canaille. This is, in fact, his solitary claim for forgiveness. But both fell when the moment of pressure came, and the fall of the nephew is irreparable: for him there can be no 'hundred days;' even the boundless capabilities of treachery which he found in Bazaine failed to do anything but seal his fate by convincing France that, whereas the uncle shed French blood like water in support of his selfish ambition, the nephew actually paltered with the enemy, and betrayed the strongest fortress in the country, in the vain hope of securing foreign support.
It is plain to the most superficial observer that of all the things which have collapsed in France since last July, none has collapsed so hopelessly as Imperialism. When the ex-Emperor rushed into war as the only way of staving off a revolution, France showed herself (as she so often has done at critical periods of her history) culpably passive. There were complaisant prefects who assured his Majesty that his people went with him heart and soul; there were crowds, hired or not, such as can always be collected in any great city, who shouted Vive la guerre and à Berlin; but the peasantry still believed that the Empire meant peace; and when they afterwards found war come upon them, they fancied (so strong was their faith in Napoleon) that it was the Prussians who were the aggressors. Just in the same way on the eve of the Spanish war, in 1808, the servile Senate said: 'Sire, the will of the French people goes along with you. This Spanish war is just and necessary. Fathers envy their sons the glory of rushing to join your ranks, and of winning another Marengo and another Austerlitz.' And this farce was kept up at a time when the conscription had grown so odious that the Government had to imitate Louis XIV.'s dragonnades, and to quarter garnisaires upon the families of those lads who had escaped to the woods, or had fled across the frontier.
France was passive in July, 1870, as she was more than once during the first Napoleon's career; the difference is, that the nephew's army, on which he was supposed to have lavished so much thought and money, and which, since the coup d'état, he had pampered into prætorian insolence, failed him utterly both for defence and offence; whereas the uncle always had something which he could trust to fight well, if not to win battles.
Since Sedan, France, no longer passive, has worked wonders; and every step in her work has made a relapse to the old state of things more impossible. 'The man of Sedan,' it was felt all along, could never return, except behind Prussian bayonets. Had he, on that last fatal day, cut his way at whatever loss through the encompassing host, and, throwing himself on Paris, raised a levée en masse to the old cry of 'the country in danger,' matters might have turned out very differently, both for him and for France; but he could not have so acted without denying his own principles. His whole career had been an attempt to juggle with universal suffrage while practising the narrowest despotism, and now to appeal in real earnest to popular principles, and to give the pledges necessary to make that appeal a serious one, was an impossibility for the man who had eagerly snatched at the chances of war which the crafty Bismarck threw in his way, rather than honestly carry out the liberal measures which he had at last been forced to adopt. There is a point beyond which charlatanism cannot go. Thrice had the uncle felt that this kind of appeal is useless when it is contrary to a man's whole antecedents: once at Arcis-sur-Aube, when in the midst of the battle, Sebastiani said, 'Are these all your Majesty's forces?' 'Every man I have.' 'Then does not your Majesty think of raising the nation?' 'Nonsense: you're dreaming of the way they did things in Spain, or here in France, in '91. How can you talk of raising a nation whose nobles and priests have been destroyed by the Revolution, and whose Revolution has been destroyed by me?' There was nothing, he felt, left to appeal to. Again, on his return from Elba, wisdom said, 'Wait on French soil, and crush the invaders at Paris and Lyons;' but this would have necessitated an appeal to the nation and a pledge that all war except defensive war should cease, and, as Colonel Charras says, in words which seem almost prophetical of the events of last July, 'to re-establish his despotism he could not do without the prestige of victory: he thought to find it on the frontier, so thither he hastened.' A third time, when, after Waterloo, Napoleon was among the remnant of his troops at Laon, it was still free to him to show himself not only the 'child of the Revolution,' but its legitimate offspring and its protector. He still shrank instinctively from doing so: bolder, indeed, than his nephew, he did go to Paris; but with the invincible dislike of all his race to true freedom of government, he went there merely to see if there was a chance of carrying on the war without making any real political concessions.
So it was that, after Sedan, the nephew passed out of history: no amount of plotting can restore the man who showed himself fool as well as knave, who fell—not, like his uncle, under the blows of banded Europe—but because he had allowed himself to be wholly deceived, both as to the quality and composition of his own army and as to the dispositions of neighbouring powers. France never can forgive such a result of twenty years of personal government. But that the ex-Emperor should disappear out of history is natural enough; the marvel is that he ever became one of the makers of history. His success was due to the vitality of the Napoleonic idea, nourished as it was after the restoration by writers of all kinds—notably by the veteran statesman who now, more than any one else, has made a return to Imperialism impossible. For this total revolution in literature it is hard to give a sufficient reason. Before the restoration, literature, when not venal, was strongly anti-Bonapartist.'[212] After the Bourbons were restored, writers began to extol Napoleon as industriously as before they had decried him. This change was owing partly to French feeling against the mode of his removal: it was a great humiliation; as Madame de Staël said (deploring the return from Elba), 'It's all over with liberty if he succeeds, and with the national independence if he is beaten.' The nation felt that the peace of 1815 had compromised its independence; and, in writing down the king who had been brought in by foreign armies, literary men were acting as the mouthpiece of France. But this is not all; wounded vanity did much. Under the Empire mind had been powerless, unless, as in the case of Lacépède and other savans, it had submitted to be the humble tool of force: when Sièyes said, 'I'll be the head and that little Corsican shall be the arm,' he had quite unwittingly spoken the truth; for, in Napoleon's system, the head was nothing and the arm everything. Great, then, was the disappointment when under Louis XVIII., and still more under his successor, the head seemed almost as powerless as before. The heart (if such a word may be used of the hollow system of Popery) came into play; and, unless a man was dévôt, or seemed to be so, ability of any kind served him little. Add to this the wilful blindness of the Bourbons, who (it was soon seen) 'had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.' Their petty despotism disgusted the nation; while the 'Memoirs of St. Helena' and a crowd of similar writings made out, with a sophistry so barefaced that we should fancy it could never have deceived even Frenchmen, that the Emperor had always acted as a dutiful son of the revolution, according to the programme which himself had laid down, that 'liberty, equality, and prosperity shall be ensured.' Will the nephew ever venture to assert, as the uncle did in 1816, that his government was a constitutional and temperate monarchy, and that the French people under it were the freest people in Europe? However this may be, there is no doubt that the claim thus made by Napoleon I. told immensely on the thought of the nation, and through it on the masses. Claiming to have saved the revolution by moderating its violence, the exile of St. Helena persistently called himself its soldier and its martyr. His wars (he said) had been undertaken to spread its civilizing influence; and the consciousness of this had made kings and princes so determined on his overthrow. We, of course, can see through the hollowness of all this: but the French writers of that day, finding France humiliated, and knowing that she had been glorious, actually came to believe, or at any rate fostered the belief, that in the days of her glory she had been free, since undoubtedly in the days of her humiliation she was fettered. No wonder the rest were deceived, since a man of consummate ability, M. Thiers, whose honesty is proved by his having refused office during some seventeen years of 'personal government,' could write such a marvellous romance as that which he gave to the world under the title of 'The Consulate and the Empire.'
Thus, by a combination of causes we may partly account for the change in the mind of France; and this change told upon the more or less educated masses. When Thiers wrote as he did; when Victor Hugo—whom a strange Nemesis afterwards urged to write 'Napoleon the Little'—sang the great man's praises in 'Lui,' and, throwing moral sanctions to the winds, declared that