III.
Louis Napoleon received his political education from his uncle exiled in the Island of St. Helena, and from the Carbonari, among whom Ciro Menotti enrolled him in Tuscany, in the year 1831.[21] In these two schools he acquired the fundamental idea of reconstructing European countries according to nationality. But he did not see that, in the hands of Napoleon I. and of the Carbonari, this idea was a strong weapon of destruction, not a practical or powerful argument for reconstruction. Bonaparte, gaoler of European potentates, and the Carbonari, persecuted by them, wished to use it to destroy the order of things established by the Holy Alliance in the treaty of Vienna of 1815, upon the right, more or less defined, of legitimacy. On the pretext of restoring political nationality to peoples, the first Napoleon bequeathed to his heirs the command to excite Italy and Hungary against Austria; Poland against Russia and Prussia; Greece and the Christian principalities against Turkey; Ireland, Malta, and the Ionian Isles against England; hoping that the changes originating in this movement, and the gratitude of these nations, would make easy to his heirs the extension of French boundaries and the recovery of the imperial crown.
The Carbonari worked with the same pretext to overthrow princes and substitute themselves, with a view of introducing into states their anti-Christian and anti-social systems.
The so-called principle of nationality resolved itself, then, with Napoleon I. and the Carbonari, into a pure engine of war—into a battery which, after destroying the bulwarks of the opposite principle of legitimacy, should give into their hands nations and kingdoms. That Louis Napoleon, in prison, a fugitive, a conspirator, should support himself with this flattering principle, and dexterously dazzle with it the eyes of those who could help him to recover the sceptre of France, can be easily understood; but that, after obtaining this sceptre by a network of circumstances wholly foreign to the principle of nationality, he should adopt that principle as the final aim of his empire and the corner-stone of his own greatness and of French power—this, in truth, is hard to understand.
But that it was the case is only too clear. He spent the twenty years of his dominion over France in coloring the design which he had puzzled out twenty years before, dreaming over the memories of St. Helena, and plotting in the collieries of the Carbonari.
IV.
To a sagacious mind which had well weighed the true worth of the Napoleonic idea, even before the new emperor attempted its fulfilment, terrible dangers and obstacles must have presented themselves.
After a succession of wars and successful conspiracies had led nations to an independent reconstruction within natural frontiers, what increase of territory could have accrued to France?
Suppose Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Iberia adjusted on this principle, would their power have remained so equalized as to leave France secure of preponderance?
If Germany had been so reconstructed, to the certain advantage of Prussia, was there not a risk of exposing France to a shock which might have proved fatal?