'Your enemies,' (says he) 'under the pretence of setting up Parliamentary rule, are working your ruin. I see it in their every movement. I watch them and note the bitterest hatred—hatred! and something more—showing itself in look, word, and gesture; and your Ministers bow down and humbly beg the Opposition to withdraw their motions.... If your majesty sees no harm in all this, it's no use my making plans to put out the fire that's burning up your house; but, anyhow, I can't go on with abstract studies amid such moral anarchy as this.'
Persigny, at any rate, was faithful, and, we believe, felt proper scorn for the miserable policy which tried to secure the bourgeoisie by alarming them every now and then with sham plots. Except the Orsini and Pianori plots, and the Villette affair of last summer, all the plots were, we are told, hatched by Pietri and Lagrange. Thus Greco, who was condemned to life transportation in 1853, was let out one night from Mazas by M. Lagrange himself, lived for years in America on a pension of £250 and then came back to Paris under a feigned name, and worked as a detective. The man, we read, is now in prison, and has made a full confession of his antecedents.
That Ollivier, at the end of 1869, was anxious to infuse new blood into the Imperial councils, and also to win over 'the few men of talent between thirty and forty years of age who had not already been driven into the revolutionary ranks,' is a proof that the Constitutional-Imperialist was more clear-sighted than his enemies will admit. That the Empress, after Wörth, should have telegraphed to her husband not on any account to return to Paris, as she could not be answerable for the consequences, shows a weakness of character which the admirers of Eugenie certainly did not anticipate.
These quotations from Paris newspapers and secret documents help to show why the Empire fell. It was unsound. However we may differ as to the amount of culpability shared by the French nation, or even by the Parisians, there is no doubt of the rottenness of the whole system. That it has been swept away is a gain for the world—a gain for France which will outweigh all her hopes, if only (in the words of the Siècle) the esprit boulevardier, the street-idler spirit, disappears along with the régime which fostered it; and if that hardness towards the poor, and indifference to their sufferings, which are too characteristic of the French wealthier classes, can be modified.
And now for a very few facts to show what a poor idol was the uncle of such a nephew. The three writers, Lanfrey, Barni, and Erckmann-Châtrian, have done more than any others to disabuse the French mind about Napoleonism. The cheap edition of Barni, from which the analysis and seriatim confutation of M. Thiers' books are omitted, has been immensely read; that such a book could be published in France in 1870 was a sign of the times quite as alarming to imperialists as the known disaffection of a part of the army. Besides these Charras, Scherer, Quinet, and Eugene Pelletan had for years been working against the worship of which Thiers was so long the prophet, and had succeeded in proving to all thoughtful Frenchmen that Fichte and Channing were much nearer the truth than was the romancer who wrote the 'Consulate and Empire.'
Our remarks must necessarily be brief; but we would call special attention to what M. Lanfrey tells about the early life of Napoleon: so much seems accounted for by such circumstances acting on such a temperament. Corsica was passing through a crisis when he was a boy; his father, head of one of the most influential families, went over to the French side when he saw resistance was hopeless. The son, who began life an ardent patriot, cursed his father for not having shared Paoli's exile. The family, however, profited by his change of side. He himself, displaying that same skill in managing men, above all Frenchmen, for which his son was afterwards so remarkable, became the confidential adviser of the governor and his cabinet. His children were provided for on the different royal foundations then so common in France. Napoleon went to Brienne, and thence to Paris; the great poverty of his family, and the humiliating position in which he found himself among the cadets of noble houses, accustomed to spend money as recklessly at their military colleges as our boys nowadays do at Sandhurst, made him cynical. The references to his want of means are frequent in his early journals; but this consciousness of poverty did not deprive him of his keen power of observation. His journals are an admixture of practical shrewdness and of originality expressed in wild bombast. He soon took the measure of those with whom he was brought in contact, fathomed their weaknesses, and adroitly made use of them. Life in Paris in the days when young Bonaparte first went there must have been trying to a young man's faith. Bonaparte had been 'finished' under the régime which was said to have existed par les femmes et pour les femmes; but before he was fully a man the old system was swept away, and Paris was a scene on which the most fantastic absurdities were enacted in the name of liberty. The selfish greed of the Republicans seems to have done more than anything else to make the young man a disbeliever in the grand phrases which he so freely used. His determination to act for himself comes out strikingly in his first Italian campaign, when by his happy boldness against Wurmser he had made the convention of Loeben inevitable. Throughout the preliminaries he behaved as an independent prince. He told the Directory what he was doing, and received their instructions, and from time to time acted upon them; but the only way in which he showed himself a faithful servant of the government was by putting money and art-treasures in their way. The greed which these Parisian deputies displayed was something incredible: and their young general encouraged them in it. He told them that Italy was rich and able to pay; and the contributions which he levied—though trifling compared with the amounts of recent Prussian requisitions—were sufficiently grievous to drive the people of the Milanese to revolt. Leghorn, for instance, had to pay two million francs for the privilege of being protected against the English. How Venice was treated is well known. 'The child of the revolution' betrayed that city to Austria as cynically as he afterwards crushed the Ligurian republic. 'Give them (said he, writing of the Corfiotes), plenty of talk about old Greece and liberty: it will please them, and it means nothing.' He is always the same, pitiless in his scorn of that bavardage, to put a stop to which he tells Menou that he was leaving Egypt. No success ever pleased him more than the way in which he fooled Sièyes, the man of ideas—making use of his reputation as a constitution-builder, and then showing 'the head' that as soon as its work was done it must give way to the arm.
Lanfrey's account of the 18th Brumaire, when only two of the five directors, Gohier and Moulins, stood firm, and when the affair of the Orangerie consummated by force what had been begun by corruption, is exceedingly instructive. It shows how, out of such a chaos, the rise of the ablest man was inevitable. Had Napoleon been a Washington he would, of course, have risen for far other than selfish ends; he would at once have taken in hand the constitution of which he so well knew the defects, and would have perfected it. Even had he been a Cromwell, earnest and impressed with a really noble idea, he would have looked at home instead of abroad, and have proved that 'the empire is peace.' Being what he was, the successful military commander, with no rule of action, except to make everything further his own advancement, he began by destroying representative life, and making even the judges his creatures, at the same time that he entered on that career of war in which he never paused save for short breathing times. A true instinct told him that either the French must have bonâ fide freedom, or must be drawn away from politics by being kept always at war. He may have mistrusted his ability to play the part of Washington; or what he had seen of Frenchmen may well have made him doubt whether they would appreciate his self-denial. Anyhow he never tried them; war became a necessity of his position; and to make war he did not shrink from so thoroughly exhausting France that we may doubt if she has suffered so much by this last ruinous war, and yet more ruinous peace, as she did by the long struggle which ended at Waterloo. The recklessness of last July was but a recognition by the nephew of the uncle's maxim, that 'by war, and war only, can our position be kept safe.'
Another point in common between uncle and nephew, is reckless expenditure; we do not sufficiently remember that, besides the conscription, the first Napoleon had the whole wealth of the nation under his personal control. He used it as the resources of the Second Empire have been used. The vast salaries of senators, the bribes, direct and indirect, the encouragement of a luxury which made large means essential—all this soon destroyed 'the austere simplicity of the republic.' 'Il faut se montrer' was the phrase in everybody's mouth, 'for if we do not come forward as friends of things as they are, we shall have none of the prizes which are being so lavishly distributed.' It was imperial Rome over again.
Such a system could not last; and the way in which France succumbed after Waterloo, while it does not exalt our opinion of French gratitude (for, after all, the first Napoleon had for years given France all that the mass of Frenchmen ask for), shows how inherently weak the strongest 'tyranny' (in the Greek sense) must always be. Any one who wants a simple and natural account of how Napoleonism grew up out of the folly and corruption and strife of the republicans, and of the helpless disgust with which the mass of the nation submitted when they saw what Napoleonism really meant, should study the Erckmann-Châtrian series. We do not wonder that the writers should have been elected as deputies for the Meurthe and the Haut Rhin, so thoroughly do their books photograph life and thought in these most republican departments. The peasant proprietor, who has bought with his hard-earned savings a little patch of confiscated land, is as fiercely bent on keeping it as ever tigress was on defending her cubs. He is told that kings and nobles, creatures of Pitt and Coburg, are sworn to wrest it from him; and his previous experience of kings and nobles assures him that he has nothing to hope if he fall into their clutches. That was the secret of Napoleon's strength; he went forth as the soldier of the Republic, predestined to show Europe that it was hopeless to dream of restoring the émigrés. How the true Republicans, who formed the nucleus of his armies, got gradually depraved until they became the 'dogs of war' of the Old Guard is wonderfully well set forth; and is, we fear, only too truly paralleled in this recent war, in which the moral deterioration of the German citizen-soldier has, like everything else, gone on at railroad pace.
The Erckmann-Châtrian novels have been compared with the Waverley series. We do not think the comparison a happy one. They do not aim at Sir Walter Scott's intricacy of plot; the stories are exceedingly simple, and the events (péripéties is the untranslateable word which best describes them) are unfolded historically, rather than after the manner of a romance; the human agent merely serves to string together a number of sketches from actual affairs. On the other hand, the Erckmann-Châtrian books show that rare power of accurate nature-painting which belongs almost wholly to very modern times, and which shines forth so conspicuously in our own George Eliot as well as in Dickens, and which among French writers is best seen, perhaps, in Georges Sand. Very different this from the landscape style of Scott, which has beauties of its own, but which differs from them much as a picture of Wilson, or Constable, or 'old Crome' differs from one by Tenniel. In the 'Romans Nationaux,' too, there is a vast deal more direct political teaching than 'the author of Waverley' ever attempted. He no doubt had very strong views of his own; and he managed, strangely enough, to make a sentimental Jacobitism fashionable at the very time when 'his most Sacred Majesty George IV.' was visiting North Britain. He is answerable for several inversions of historical truth: he makes Balfour of Burley and his class contemptible, and throws a halo of glory round Claverhouse, like that with which Byron invests his Werterian villains. But he never directly teaches politics. The 'Romans,' on the contrary, do this in almost every page. They assume, moreover, an amount of political knowledge on the part of their readers which would be very unwisely assumed by any English novel-writer. The fact is, the average Frenchman does know his own history since '89 far better than most Englishmen know the tortuous politics of the Georgian era—knows it better because he take a vastly more personal interest in it. For us, Mr. Disraeli well pointed out, history from the Revolution to the Reform Bill is chiefly the record of the quarrels of a few 'great houses;' to the Frenchman the earlier half of the eighteenth century is the time when his country was in the labour pangs of the strange, wild birth which was to follow; and the close of it is the fitful period in which the Revolution, surfeited with blood, sank helplessly under the yoke of military despotism. No need to urge Frenchmen to do what her Majesty's inspectors have so often recommended in our elementary schools, to begin history at the modern end and work backwards. Our boys and our men prefer woad-stained Britons and the strife of Dane and Saxon to the Rockinghams and Walpoles, and even the Pitts; but in France it is wholly different. Hence an amount of political knowledge in the country, for which we rarely give our neighbours credit. Your diligence-driver between Caen and Falaise will point out the Château Turgot, and will tell you all about the minister whose name it bears in a way which would have astonished any of the old mail-coachmen along the Western road, who knew, indeed, Burke's name in connection with High Wycombe, but who knew nothing but the name. This is one of the errors of 'our own correspondent:' because Frenchmen have not that blatant freedom of speech to which he is used at English hustings, he writes home that they know little and care less about politics—and this of people who seldom hesitate, on occasion, to die for their opinions. Their peculiar way of managing things arises from their habit of looking to authority, of moving under pressure of a force majeure; they have not, and can form but a faint idea of, that English liberty which is in our air, which M. de Montalembert used to call a bain de vie; but they have generally speaking, historically at any rate, more political knowledge than we have.