His crimes towards the Pope, the ignoble artifice of insults couched in reverential terms, of perfidy, lies, and hypocrisy, alienated from him not only Catholics, but all those who honored human loyalty and natural probity. The so-called Roman question, a compendium of the whole Italian question, ruined the credit of Napoleon III., unmasked him, and made him appear as inexorable history will show him to posterity—a monster of immorality, to use the apt expression of one of his former sycophants.[25]
Prussia, after checking him at the Mincio in 1859, cut short in his hands the thread of the web woven in 1863 to regenerate Poland on the plan of Italy. God did not permit a good and noble cause like that of Poland to be contaminated by the influence of the Napoleonic idea; and this seems to us an indication that he reserves to her a restoration worthy of herself and of her faith. Prussia also held him at bay during the Danish war, into which he threw himself with closed eyes, in the mad hope of conquering Mexico, and making it an empire after his own idea. This whim cost France a lake of blood, many millions of francs, and an indelible stain; it cost the unfortunate Maximilian of Austria his life, and his gifted wife her reason. Prussia solemnly mocked at him in the other war of 1866, when, leagued with Italy by his consent, she attacked the Austrian Empire.
It was the beginning of that political and military unity of Germany which was destined to make him pay dear for the work of unity accomplished beyond the Alps by so many crimes.[26]
Lastly, Prussia, choosing the occasion of the vacancy of the Spanish throne, and seconded by him in the promotion of an Iberian unity like that of Italy, and prepared by a subalpine marriage, drew him into the toils where he left his crown and his honor.
Step by step with the barriers opposed by Prussia to the foolish policy of Napoleon III. in Europe went the anxieties caused in the empire by revolution. Losing gradually the support of the honest Catholic plurality of the French, he thought to reinforce himself by flattering his enemy, demagogism, and by unchaining gradually passions irreligious, anarchical, destructive to civilization. Taking all restraint from the press, he removed every bar to theatrical license, gave unchecked liberty to villany, free course to nefarious impiety and a Babylonish libertinism, and finished by opening the doors to public schools of socialism. But as outside France his duplicity and cowardly frauds had drawn upon him the hatred and contempt of accomplices and beneficiaries, so at home they excited discontent and distrust among all parties.
On the 2d and 4th of September, 1870, he reaped at Sedan and in Paris the crop sowed by him in 1859. Germany broke his sword, and the Revolution his sceptre. The Napoleonic idea touched the apex of its triumphs.
VII.
The old Prince Theodore of Metternich, after 1849, predicted of Louis Bonaparte, then only President of the French Republic, that he would restore the Empire, and ruin himself as revolutionary emperor in Italy. Donoso Cortès, Marquis of Valdegamas, predicted a little later that Bonaparte, after becoming emperor, would work very hard, but the fruits of his labors would be enjoyed by another; by whom he could not say. Both these shrewd statesmen knew Louis Napoleon, the secret chains which bound him to his party, and the idea which clouded his mind, and both hit the mark; for Napoleon III. made every effort throughout his reign to play the revolutionary emperor in Italy; and, with all his refined policy, he worked for no one but the King of Prussia. Thanks to this policy, William enjoys the vassalage of the only two national unities created by the Napoleonic idea: the Roumanian, whose head is a Prussian prince, and the Italian, whose kingdom has become a Prussian regiment of hussars. He enjoys the German Empire reared on the ruins of that of France; and, moreover, he enjoys European supremacy, taken from France with the keys of Paris, and five milliards poured by her into the Prussian treasury, to pay expenses. In his own good time we shall see for whom Bismarck has made and still makes the King of Prussia work.
Such are the weighty consequences of that idea whose execution Bonaparte believed was to make the world over again, and raise his race and France to the summit of power—a political calamity, military ruin, and a dynastic downfall the most terrible which history has to record.
In conclusion, the dogma of nationality for which French liberalism played the fool with Napoleon has caused the loss to France of two provinces as opulent as those which Bonaparte took from Italy in homage to the same dogma. The principle of non-intervention, so carefully guarded by Bonaparte at the cost of the Roman Pontiff, and so loudly applauded by French liberalism, has borne fruit to France in her hour of sorest need, in the desertion of all those states, and especially of Italy, who owed their existence to French blood, and gold, and honor.