Where is my life now? Since Saul went away, so much of it has gone, I feel as if more of myself were there than here. Why couldn't I go on thinking? It was such relief! The moon is up at last. A low rumble over the dried grass, like a great wave treading on sand. I am faint. I have tightened my dress, to keep out hunger, every hour of this day. Those starving children! God pity them! A higher wave of sound,—surely 'tis not fancy. I will look out. The moon shines on a prairie sail, a gleam of canvas. Another roll of the broad wheel, and Saul is here.
"Send the man on quickly," I cried; "the children are starving in the town."
"And you?" said Saul.
The power of his eyes is almost gone. I scarcely heed them. I see—a bag of meal.
NAPOLEON THE THIRD
On the 6th of October, 1840, a young man was brought up for sentence in one of the highest courts of Europe, before which he had been tried, and by which he had been found guilty of one of the greatest crimes that can be charged upon any human being, though the world seldom visits it with moral condemnation. The young man was Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the court was the French Chamber of Peers, and the sentence was imprisonment for life. Had the French government of that day felt strong enough to act strongly, the condemned would have been treated as the Neapolitans treated Murat, and as the Mexicans treated Yturbide. He would have been perpetually imprisoned, but his prison would have been "that which the sexton makes." But the Orleans dynasty was never strong, and its head was seldom able to act boldly. To execute a Bonaparte, the undoubted heir of the Emperor, required nerve such as no French government had exhibited since that day on which Maréchal Ney had been shot; and there were seven hundred thousand foreign soldiers in France when that piece of judicial butchery was resolved upon. The army might not be ready to join a Bonaparte, but it could not be relied upon to guard the scaffold on which he should be sent to die. The people might not be ready to overthrow Louis Philippe, to give his place to Louis Napoleon, but it did not follow that they would have seen the latter's execution with satisfaction, because they desired peace, and he had fallen into the habit of breaking it. The enthusiasm that was created in France by the arrival in that country of the remains of Napoleon I., not three months after the coming Napoleon III. had been sent to the fortress of Ham, showed how difficult a matter it would have been to proceed capitally against the Prince. Louis Philippe has been praised for sparing him; but the praise is undeserved. Certainly, the King of the French was not a cruel man, and it was with sincere regret that he signed the death-warrants of men who had sought his own life, and who had murdered his friends; but it would have been no act of cruelty, had he sent his rival to the guillotine. When a man makes a throw for a crown, he accepts what is staked, against it,—a coffin. Nothing is better established than this, that, when a sovereign is assailed, the intention of the assailant being his overthrow, that sovereign has a perfect right to put his rival to death, if he succeed in obtaining possession of his person. The most confirmed believer in Richard III.'s demoniac character would not think of adding the execution of Richmond to his crimes, had Plantagenet, and not Tudor, triumphed on Bosworth Field. James II. has never been blamed for causing Monmouth to be put to death, but for having complied with his nephew's request for a personal interview, at which he refused to grant his further request for a mitigation of punishment. Murat's death was an unnecessary act, but Ferdinand of Naples has never been censured for it. Had Louis Philippe followed these examples, and those of a hundred similar cases, he could not have been charged with undue severity in the exercise of his power for the conservation of his own rights, and the maintenance of the tranquillity, not of France alone, but of Europe, and of the world, which the triumph of a Bonaparte might have perilled. He spared the future Emperor's life, not from any considerations of a chivalric character, but because he durst not take it. He feared that the blood of the offender would more than atone for his offence, and he would not throw into the political caldron so rich a material, dreading the effects of its presence there. Then the Orléans party and the Imperial party not only marched with each other, but often crossed and ran into each other; and it was not safe to run the risk of offending the first by an attempt to punish its occasional ally. There was, too, something of the ludicrous in the Boulogne affair, which enabled government to regard the chief offender with cheap compassion. Louis Philippe is entitled to no credit, on the score of mercy, for his conduct in 1840,—for the decision of the Court of Peers was his inspiration; but he acted wisely,—so wisely, that, if he had done as well in 1848, his grandson would at this moment have been King of the French, and the Emperor that is a wanderer, with nothing but a character for flightiness and a capacity for failure to distinguish him from the herd, while many would have regarded him as a madman. But the end was not then, and the hand of Fate was not even near that curtain which was to be raised for the disclosure of events destined to shake and to change the world.
The defence of Louis Napoleon was conducted by M. Berryer, the great leader of the Legitimists, who, twenty-five years before, had aided in the defence of Ney, and who, nearly twenty years later, defended Montalembert, his client of 1840 being in this last case the prosecutor. In his speech in defence of the Prince, this first of French orators and advocates made use of language, the recollection of which in after-days must have been attended with very conflicting emotions. Addressing himself to the judges, he said,—"Standing where I do, I do not think that the claims of the name in which this project was attempted can possibly fall humiliated by the disdainful expressions of the Procureur Général. You make remarks upon the weakness of the means employed, of the poverty of the whole enterprise, which made all hope of success ridiculous. Well, if success is anything, I will say to you who are men,—you, who are the first men in the state,—you, who are members of a great political body,—there is an inevitable and eternal Arbitrator between every judge and every accused who stands before him;—before giving your judgment, now, being in presence of this Arbitrator, and in face of the country, which will hear your decrees, tell me this, without regard now to weakness of means, but with the rights of the case, the laws, and the institution before your eyes, and with your hands upon your hearts, as standing before your God, and in presence of us, who know you, will you say this:—'If he had succeeded, if his pretended right had triumphed, I would have denied him and it,—I would have refused all share in his power,—I would have denied and rejected him'? For my part, I accept the supreme arbitration I have mentioned; and whoever there may be amongst you, who, before their God, and before their country, will say to me,—'If he had succeeded, I would have denied him,'—such a one will I accept for judge in this case." In making this sweeping challenge, M. Berryer knew that he was hitting the Court of Peers hard, for it contained men who had been leading Napoleonists in the days of the Empire, and others who were ready to join any government which should be powerful enough to establish itself; while it left the Legitimists, the orator's own party, unharmed. They were the only men, according to M. Berryer's theory of defence, who would have furnished an impartial tribunal for the trial of his client; for they alone, with strict truth, could have said that they would deny his right, and refuse to share in his power, no matter at what time he should succeed in accomplishing his designs.
Had the French Peers been gifted with that power of mental vision which enables men to see into the future, they would not have been disposed to condemn the man who stood before them in 1840. Could it have been made known to them that in eight years he would be elected President of the French Republic by nearly five and a half millions of votes,—that in twelve years he would become Emperor of the French,—that in fifteen years he would, as the ally of England, have struck down the Russian hegemony,—and that in twenty years he would be the conqueror of Austria, and have called the Kingdom of Italy into existence, while his enmity was dreaded and his friendship desired by all the nations of the earth, and the fate of the Popedom was in his hands,—had these things been so much as dreamed of by his judges, they would have formed the most lenient of tribunals, and have suffered him to depart in peace. They are not to be charged with a lack of wisdom in not foreseeing what must have appeared to be the ravings of lunacy, had it been deliberately set down by some inspired prophet. Neither the man nor his cause commanded much respect. We, who know that the French Emperor is the first man of the age, as well in intellect as in position, have no right to sneer at the men of 1840 because they looked upon him as a feeble pretender. He had made two attempts to place himself at the head of the French nation, and in each instance his failure had been so signal, and in some respects so ridiculous, that it was impossible to regard him as the representative of a living principle. Even those who thought him a man of talent could account for his want of success only by supposing that Imperialism was no longer powerful in France, and that his appeals were made to an extinct party. The soldiery, amongst whom the traditions of the Empire were supposed to be strong, had evinced no desire to substitute a Bonaparte for a Bourbon of the younger branch; and as to the peasantry, who showed themselves so fanatically Bonapartean in 1848, and in 1851-2, they were never thought of at all. France consisted of the government, the army, the bourgeoisie, and the skeleton colleges of electors; and so long as they were agreed, nothing was to be feared either from Prince Louis Napoleon or from the Comte de Chambord. We think this was a sound view of affairs, and that the French government of 1841 might have been the French government of 1861, had not the parties to the combination that ruled France in 1841 quarrelled. It was the loss of the support of the middle class that caused Louis Philippe to lose his throne in the most ignominious manner; and that support the monarch would not have forfeited, but for the persistence of M. Guizot in a policy which it would have been difficult to maintain under any circumstances, and which was enfeebled in 1847-8 by the gross corruption of some of its principal supporters. That the bourgeoisie intended to subvert the throne they had established, for the benefit of either the Republicans or the Imperialists, is not to be supposed; but their natural disgust with the wickedness of the government as it was at the beginning of 1848, and with the refusal of the minister to allow even the peaceful discussion of the reform question, was the occasion of the kingdom's fall, and of the establishment, first of the shadowy Republic, and then of the solid Empire.
The events of 1848 furnished to Louis Napoleon the place whereon to stand, whence to move the French world. He must have lived and died an exile, but for the Revolution of February. The ability with which he profited by events suffices to show that he is entitled to be considered a great man as well as a great sovereign. That he had been born in the purple, and that he bore a great name, and that through the occurrence of several deaths he had become the legitimate heir of Napoleon, were favorable circumstances, and helped not a little to promote his purpose; but they could not alone have made him Emperor of the French, and the world's arbiter. There must have been extraordinary talent in the man who aspired as he did, or he would have failed as completely in 1848 as he had failed in 1836 and in 1840. But the real power of the man came out as soon as he found a standing-place. Previously to 1848, he could act only as a criminal in seeking his proper place, as he believed it to be. He had first to conquer before he could attempt to govern,—and to conquer, too, with the means of his enemy. All this was changed in 1848. Then he was safe in France, as he had been in England, and began the political race on equal terms with such men as Cavaignac and Ledru-Rollin. That he soon passed far ahead of them was, perhaps, as much due to circumstances as to his political abilities. The name of Bonaparte was associated with the idea of the restoration of order and prosperity, and this helped him with that large class of persons, embracing both rich men and poor men, who not only believe that "order is Heaven's first law," but that under certain conditions it is the supreme law, for the maintenance of which all other laws are to be set aside and disregarded. These men, whose organ and exponent was M. César Romieu, who called so loudly for cannon to put down the revolutionists,—"even if it should come from Russia!"—and whose type of perfection is the churchyard, were all fanatical supporters of "the coming man," and they assisted him along the course with all their might and strength. No matter how swiftly he drove, his chariot-wheels seemed to them to tarry. The very arguments that were made use of to induce other men to act against the rising Bonaparte were those which had the most effect in binding them to his cause. He would establish a cannonarchy, would he? Well, a cannonarchy was exactly what they desired, provided its powers should be directed, not against foreign monarchs, but against domestic Republicans. That a government of which he should be the head would disregard the constitution, would shackle the press, would limit speech, and would suppress the Assembly, was an argument in his favor, that, to their minds, was irresistible. Had they thought of the Russian War, and of the Italian War, and of the extinction of the Pope's temporal power, and of the liberal home-policy that was adopted in 1860, as things possible to occur, Louis Napoleon would have remained Louis Napoleon to the end of his days, for all the support he would have received at their hands. They wished for a sort of high-constable, whose business it should be to maintain order by breaking the heads or seizing the persons of all who did not take their view of men's political duties. It is the custom to speak of this class of men as if they were peculiar to France, and to say that their existence there is one of the many reasons why that country can never long enjoy a period of constitutional liberty. This is not just to France. The French are a great people, who have their faults, but who are in no sense more servile than are Americans, or Englishmen, or Germans. Extreme disciples of order, men who are ready to sacrifice everything else for the privileges of making and spending or hoarding money in peace, are to be found in all countries; and nowhere are they more numerous, and nowhere is their influence greater or more noxious, than in the United States. The difference of populations considered, there are as many of them in Boston as in Paris; and our breed is ready to go as far in sacrificing freedom, and in treating right with contempt, as were their French brothers of 1848. The infirmity belongs, not to French nature, but to human nature.
Louis Napoleon received not a little assistance, in the early part of his French career, from the strongest of his political enemies. The friends of both branches of the Bourbons were his friends—at that time, and for their own purposes. A restoration was what they desired, and they held that it would be easier to convert the Comte de Chambord or the Comte de Paris into a king as the consequence of another Bonapartean usurpation, than as the consequence of the Republic's continuance. Louis Napoleon was to destroy the Republic, and they were to destroy him, with the aid of foreign armies. The fate which Cicero wished for Octavius, that he should be elevated and then destroyed, was what they meant for him. They counted upon the effect of that reaction which so soon set in against the revolutions of 1848, and which they did not believe would spare any government which had grown out of any one of those revolutions. They also believed the Prince to be a fool, and thought he would be a much easier person to be disposed of, after he had been sufficiently used, than any one of his rivals. They overrated their own power as much as they underrated his abilities; and down to the last moment, and when the contest had become one for life or death, they bore themselves as if they were sure that they were acting against a man who had been elevated solely through the force of circumstances, and who could not maintain his position. The coup d'état opened their eyes, but it was not until the event of the Russian War had secured for the Emperor the first place in Europe, that they became convinced that in the man who was the ruler of France they had a master. Even now, when the condition of every country within the circle of civilization bears evidence to the vast weight of Imperial France, it is not difficult to find Frenchmen who declare that the Emperor is a mere adventurer, and that he is only "a lucky fellow." If they are right, what shall we think of all France? Does the reign of Napoleon III. serve only to illustrate the proverb, that among the blind the one-eyed man is a king?