To account for the Napoleonism of the peasants in other parts, we must add to the feeling that Napoleon had glorified France, on the part of those who (we said) were only too ready to forget how he had also humiliated and ruined her, the persistent dread of the spectre rouge on the part of the vast class of little landowners, and thirdly, the influence of the priests. Both these had been made use of by the uncle. Whenever he wanted an excuse for despotism, he always got up a Jacobin plot. This was the pretence for that famous 18th Brumaire, by which 'model and prototype of all coups d'état,' as M. Barni calls it, he destroyed the constitution which he had sworn to defend.
When, as First Consul, he arrested a number of those who remained true to the Republic—among them Jourdain, the hero of Fleurus—and threatened to banish them to Cayenne, the pretext was 'the infernal machine' (very probably 'got up,' like so many more recent conspiracies), which was denounced as a Jacobin invention. Jacobinism was his apology for forming (at the beginning of the Empire) eight State prisons, and for exercising the most rigorous censorship both of the press and of the stage.
How the priests helped him may be judged from the amusingly profane addresses made to him on his accession to empire by the different bishops. The Bishop of Aix wrote: 'Like another Moses, Napoleon has been summoned by God from the deserts of Egypt,' 'God seems to have said (wrote the Bishop of Orleans), "My heart hath chosen a new ruler to rule my people; My almighty arm shall help him in his glorious work, and I will strengthen his throne. He shall reign over the seas, and the rivers shall become his servants."' In the eyes of other bishops and capitular bodies the new emperor is 'another Matthias sent by the Lord,' 'a new Cyrus,' 'Scripture hath given us, in the reign of Jehoshaphat, a prophetic outline of his reign.' This, the fitting reward of the Concordat, was the incense offered up by a servile clergy on the eve of his coronation; and it matches well with the Catechism, published by authority, and in use in all French churches in 1811.[215] After repeated injunctions as to the special duty of reverence for the Emperor and his house, the question is asked, 'Are there not yet other motives to bind us strongly to our Emperor?'—'Yes; for it is he whom God raised up in troublous times to re-establish the public worship of the holy religion of our fathers and to be its protector. He has restored and preserved public order by his profound and energetic wisdom; he defends the State by his powerful arm; he is become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration which he has received from the Sovereign Pontiff, chief of the Universal Church.'[216]
How the Pope, of whose meanly cruel treatment by Napoleon, the Count d'Haussonville gave such a graphic account in the Revue des Deux Mondes of two years ago, really felt on the subject, we need not inquire; with Napoleon the case was simple enough: 'he wanted a clergy (says Madame de Staël) as he wanted chamberlains and courtiers, and all the old things over again.' As for his being the restorer of religion, no praise was ever less merited; he told Cabanis: 'This concordat of ours is la vaccine de la religion; in fifty years it will have killed it out like a moral small-pox.' On the other hand, before the Concordat was signed there was full liberty of worship, and nearly eight millions of people were in full practice of Catholicism. His Concordat was needless, except for his own purposes; at the outset, indeed, the Assembly had borne heavily on the clergy: to force them to take oaths and then to persecute those who refused was to show an ignorance of the first principles of toleration; and one of the few things which we have to find fault with in MM. Erckmann-Châtrian's excellent novels is the way in which the 'refractory priests' are spoken of, and in which the harsh treatment they underwent is justified, because they disturbed the peace of families, and intrigued for 'royalist restoration.' But by the Constitution of the year III. Church and State had been separated, and freedom of worship restored to every one. There was no need, therefore, for any effort on Napoleon's part to secure what the Constitution had already secured; he was, as usual, working simply for himself: 'I did not despair,' (he writes from St. Helena) 'of sooner or later getting full control of the Pope; and then what a lever for moving the world, what a help towards keeping men's minds in hand!'
With the Pope and the Italian clergy, indeed, Napoleon never had the least success; but in France the large salaries which he gave to the bishops produced the effect he anticipated; and at last, even in La Vendée, a good deal of the old feeling died out. The noblesse of course still spoke of him as a mere locum tenens: for them he was always 'the General Bonaparte, Lieutenant-in-Chief of the Forces of his Majesty's King Louis XVII.' But the peasantry were gradually taught to accept him as the friend of religion, and not simply as a temporary police magistrate who was necessary to keep down their hated enemies the 'Reds.' Of this his nephew reaped the reward, and he moreover was able to come forward as the defender of the Papacy under circumstances in which his conduct gratified not only the peasants, but every sincere Romanist in France, while it caused one more breach in the already divided Republican camp. If the occupation of Rome was actually initiated by honest Republicans, they never (not even when they made Louis Napoleon Prince-President) were guilty of a more fatal mistake. They shared the reward of all trimmers; supporting 'order' at the expense of principle, they lost the confidence of the best men of their party; while the Prince-President, assuming to be the champion of that 'order' which after all they had only defended with half-heartedness, gained all the credit of the act, and won thereby the support of the Ultramontanists. Of this support his subsequent vacillation could not deprive him, because the Ultramontanes were sure that, whatever he might do in other countries, in France he would not relax those fetters which the Papacy finds so essential in securing the acceptance of its newly 'formulated dogmas and repressive encyclicals. When we say this, we by no means assert that the ex-Emperor had the full confidence of the clergy; that confidence it is not the policy of Rome to accord to any one. Now again, as in 1848, she has shown that on occasion she can be as revolutionary as Garibaldi himself, if there is an end to be gained by being so. Napoleon is lost; despite the ridiculous outcry of London imperialist papers like La Situation, his cause is hopeless; therefore Rome hastens to give him up, and to affirm that he is rightly punished for having supported Victor Emmanuel. But, so long as he was a power in Europe, he received support enough to keep him popular among the priest-ridden classes, because he was less dangerous than those who would be sure to succeed him. A Republican government would without doubt have given up the Roman occupation; while the Orleanists, who would come to the surface if the Republic failed, are, as the real friends of religious liberty, the most unacceptable of all to the Ultramontane party. Guizot, the Orleanist statesman par excellence, ventured to doubt whether it is not an abuse of toleration to allow full scope to such irreconcilable foes to liberty as the Jesuits; therefore it was better to uphold Napoleon, and to trust to the influence of the Empress rather than to provoke a change which was sure to be for the worse.
But we have said enough to account somewhat for the growth of the Napoleonic idea, after the first Emperor had done his best by the failures, and still more by the littleness of his later years, to crush it.
France, moreover, had been humiliated in 1815, and Louis Philippe kept her at peace without giving an outlet for enterprise in foreign colonization. If Algeria had been less of a mere military settlement; or if, instead of Algeria, France had laid hold of a colony better suited for Europeans to thrive in, the Orleans line might have still been on the throne. But the nation was slow to realize the amount of waste which had accompanied the wars of the Empire. France did not like to keep quiet and repair the ugly gaps left in her prosperity; she wanted to make a grand figure before the world. Louis Philippe thought that by combined repression and corruption he could check this restlessness; and so he, a constitutional king, was led into a career of unconstitutional conduct—the proximate, though not the remote, cause of the revolution in 1848.
The facilis descensus from a republic to a despotism was seldom more inevitable than amid the chaos of parties which succeeded the Provisional Government. France wanted prestige: who more likely to give it to her than the nephew of the man who won Jena and Austerlitz? France wanted protection against the 'Reds,' 'the enemies of order and property:' surely, the very man to secure this to her was l'homme providentiel, who could sway the army as one man, and who, though he professed to believe in universal suffrage, and to have a high regard for the working man, was known to be hand in glove with the great financiers and capitalists? As Victor Hugo puts it in his little history of the coup d'état, 'tous les hommes du passé, depuis tel banquier juif qui se sentait un peu Catholique jusqu'à tel évêque qui se sentait un peu juif,' all combined to work up the Napoleonic idea, and to induce the masses to accept what was the best government for stock-jobbers and Court tailors and highly paid functionaries of all sorts. It was the Nemesis of 1793 which produced the coup d'état of December 1851: but for the recollection of the Reign of Terror, of that wild carnival of cruelty and rapine, such an outrage would have been impossible. Men of substance argued that what had been might be again; and therefore they threw in their lot with the saviour of society, even while they abhorred the means which he employed for its salvation. National susceptibility, then, and a half unconscious desire to wipe off old scores, combined with Popish influence and the dread of the 'Reds,' helped to give tangibility to this long-cherished Napoleonic idea, by bringing about the second Empire.
A few words, now, on the causes and the history of its decay. These, as usual in political and social matters, are complex and seemingly conflicting. First, those who looked for prestige were not satisfied with the declaration, l'Empire c'est la paix, even explained away though it was by the many wars undertaken in the last twenty years. France fighting side by side with England in the Crimea and in China, was not the same as France carrying her eagles into almost every European capital. This feeling forced on the war which resulted in the sudden peace of Villafranca—the suddenness of which peace proved (to the French Emperor's detractors) that Magenta and Solferino were not such very decided victories, after all. It always seemed in Napoleon III.'s undertakings, that he was stopped at a certain point, just as if he had not really been the master of France, but was only free to use her resources within the range of his tether. This may be due to the financial complications in which he and his creatures were always mixed up, or to that indecision of character which, while it gave him for a time a reputation for profound wisdom, did him immense harm by making men suspect him of deep plotting when he was simply at a loss how to reconcile conflicting ideas, and by exciting profound distrust on occasions where pity would have been the more appropriate feeling. Herein he paid the penalty (almost always exacted in all ranks of life) of seeing both ways. The notion which couples moral obliquity with crookedness of vision is confined to the vulgar; but comparatively few can avoid distrusting the mental power of looking at once in several directions. The ex-Emperor had his English experience; his political education was far in advance of that of most of his subjects; he saw the weak points of each party, and saw too how each drew strength from the amount of truth which it had grasped. Could he have lived as president of a republic in which all these elements should have had free scope, France might have thriven morally during the last nineteen years, as much as she has thriven materially. But the French character, no less than his own designs, forbade this. Frenchmen cannot bear to 'give and take;' their logique shows itself by forcing them into the streets to battle for their cause as soon as there is the feeblest chance of success; and, above all, his aim was, not to give France the best government, but to keep himself by all means at her head. Hence, lying and repression became his instruments. One party was played off against another. The prolétaires kept in good humour by the Hausmannizing, not of Paris only, but of half the French cities, were told that the Emperor was really their friend; and so long as they got panem et circenses they seem pretty generally to have believed it. The parti prêtre was petted at home; and the control which the clergy was allowed to have over education more than compensated for the cutting off of the Romagna. The moneyed class, and all the crowd of little rentiers, who are almost forced to accept the existing order of things, saw by the vast growth of public credit and by the steady price of public securities, that the Empire was the millennium of men of means. The army, petted and spoiled, was full of dislike for civilians, and of chauvinist contempt for foreigners. The literary class alone feebly kept up the struggle; and its protest against the dictum 'la France c'est moi,' was chiefly confined to such far-fetched allusions as we find in 'Labiénus' and in the 'leaders' of the Revue des Deux Mondes. The French are brave; but those who did not accept the Empire were cowed by the coup d'état; and in such circumstances they are of all people the most patient under what they have come to believe inevitable.
But though nothing was done much was felt, and the mistakes and disappointments of later years soon brought the feeling to the surface. From the very first, nothing but the coup d'état had thoroughly succeeded. The Crimean war ended too soon; it failed in its main object, that of crippling Russia, and it was from the outset distasteful to a large party because it drew France so close to England. The Austrian war wanted the dash and vigour of Marengo; and the Mexican campaign (so opposed by Thiers in 1864) showed that the ruler of France was afraid to move when the United States bade him stand still. Meanwhile Poland had been twice given up—and Poland is very dear to a large section of the French; the Confederate States had been abandoned, and Denmark had been left unhelped to the tender mercy of Prussia and Austria. Military prestige had gone, despite the numbers and the ruinous cost of the army. All the while the occupation of Rome was a standing outrage on the feelings of the most thinking part of the nation; and, combined with it, by that strange inconsistency which marks all Napoleonic procedure, the creation of the kingdom of Italy alienated the Ultramontanes, and set them plotting, after their fashion, against the man whom it was still their interest outwardly to support.