NAPOLEON III
Madame de Staël said of Rienzi and his Romans: “They mistook reminiscences for hopes;” of the second French Empire and the third Napoleon we may say: “They staked their hopes on reminiscences.”
In our individual lives we realize the power of memory, suggestion, association. If we have ever yielded to a vice, we have felt, it may be years after, how the sight of the old conditions revives the old temptation. A glance, a sound, a smell, may be enough to conjure up a long series of events, whether to grieve or to tempt us, with more than their original intensity. So we learn that the safest way to escape the enticement is to avoid the conditions. Recent psychology has at last begun to measure the subtle power of suggestion.
But now, suppose that instead of an individual a whole nation has had a terrific experience of succumbing to temptation, and that a cunning, unscrupulous man, aware of the force of association and reminiscence, deliberately applies both to reproduce those conditions in which the nation first abandoned itself to excess: the case we have supposed is that of France and Louis Napoleon. Before the reality of their story the romances of hypnotism pale.
After Sédan it was the fashion to regard Louis Napoleon as the only culprit in the gilded shame of the Second Empire; we shall see, however, that the great majority of Frenchmen longed for his coming, applauded his victories, and by frequent vote sanctioned his deeds. A free people keeps no worse ruler than it deserves.
The Napoleonic legend, by which Louis Napoleon rose to power, was not his creation, but that of the French: he was simply shrewd, and used it. What was this legend?
When allied Europe finally crushed the great Napoleon at Waterloo, France breathed a sigh of relief. Twenty campaigns had left her exhausted: she asked only for repose. This the Restoration gave her. But the gratification of our transient cravings, however strong they may be, cannot long satisfy; and when the French recovered from their exhaustion, they felt their permanent cravings return. The Bourbons, they soon realized, could not appease those dominant Gallic desires. For the Bourbons had destroyed even that semblance of liberty Napoleon took care to preserve; they persecuted democratic ideas; they brought back the old aristocracy, with its mildewed haughtiness; they babbled of divine right,—as if the worship of St. Guillotine had not supervened. During twenty years France had been the arbitress of Europe; now, under the narrow, forceless Bourbons, she was treated like a second-rate power. Waterloo had meant not only the destruction of Napoleon, from which France derived peace, but also humiliation, which galled Frenchmen more and more as their normal sensitiveness returned.
The Bourbons, knowing that they might be tolerated so long as they were not despised, got up a military promenade into Spain, to prove that France could still meddle in her neighbors’ affairs, and that the Bourbons were not less mighty men of war than the Bonapartes. They captured the Trocadero, and restored vile King Ferdinand and his twenty-six cooks to the throne of Spain; and they hoped that the one-candle power of fame lighted by these exploits would outdazzle the Sun of Austerlitz. But no, the dynasty of Bourbon, long since headless, proved to be rootless too: one evening Charles X played his usual game of whist at St. Cloud; the next, he was posting out of France with all the speed and secrecy he could command.
Louis Philippe, who came next, might have been expected to please everybody: Royalists, because he was himself royal; Republicans, because he was Philippe Egalité’s son; constitutionalists, because he hated autocratic methods; shopkeepers of all kinds, because he was ‘practical.’ And in truth his administration may be called the Golden Age of the bourgeoisie,—the great middle class which, in France and elsewhere, was superseding the old aristocracy. Napoleon had organized a nobility of the sword; after him came the nobility of the purse. Louis Philippe could say that under his rule France prospered: her merchants grew rich; her factories, her railroads, all the organs of commerce, were healthily active. And yet she was discontented. The spectacle of her Citizen King walking unattended in the streets of Paris, his plump thighs encased in democratic trousers, his plump and ruddy face wearing a complacent smile, his whole air that of the senior partner in some old, respectable, and rich firm,—even this failed to satisfy Frenchmen. “He inspires no more enthusiasm than a fat grocer,” was said of him. Frenchmen did not despise money-making, but they wanted something more: they wanted gloire.
Let us use the French word, because the English glory has another meaning. Glory implies something essentially noble,—nay, in the Lord’s Prayer it is a quality attributed to God himself: but gloire suggests vanity; it is the food braggarts famish after. The minute-men at Concord earned true glory; but when the United States, listening to the seductions of evil politicians, attacked and blasted a decrepit power,—fivefold smaller in population, twenty-fold weaker in resources,—they might find gloire among their booty, but glory, never. As prosperity increased, the Gallic appetite for gloire increased. Louis Philippe made several attempts to allay it, but he dared not risk a foreign war, and the failure of his attempts made him less and less respected.