ized in its territorial divisions according to the law of nationality, and in its institutions in accordance with the forms of Cæsarean democracy.

An author who has read his books, and confronted them with the achievements of his reign, thus sums up the new Napoleonic idea constantly pursued by Louis in his youth, middle life, and old age, in exile, in prison, and on the throne:

"Peoples distributed according to their needs and instincts, belonging each to a self-elected country, provided each with a constitution fixed yet democratic; devoted at their choice to works of civil industry destined to transform the world; Europe, free in her various nations, consolidated almost into a federated republic, with France as its centre; France aggrandized and forming the clasp in the strong chain of free intercourse; universal exhibitions to encourage nations in the exchange of reciprocal visits; European congresses, where governments, laying aside arms, could compose their differences; Paris, the imperial city par excellence, wonderfully embellished, raised to the honors of capital of the world, metropolis of wealth and wisdom, under the wing of the Napoleonic eagle, offering to the two hemispheres the rarest discoveries in science, masterpieces of art, exquisite refinements of luxury and civilization."*

Divisum imperium cum Jove Cæsar habet!

Such was the intoxicating dream of the life and reign of Napoleon III., the idea which he believed himself created to carry out-a combination of the designs of Henry IV. and the aspirations of Augustus, mounted on the frail pedestal of the principles of 1789.

"La politique du second empire, essai d'histoire contemporaine, d'après les documents, par M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu "-Revue des Deux Mondes, April 1, 1872, pp. 552-53.

In fact, proceeds our author, "Within and without the confines of the Empire, this idea was reduced to two words: reconstruction and reconciliation, based upon the principles of the French Revolution. Here was to be the general synthesis of all external and internal politics in France and Europe: Reconstruction of nations founded on national will within and without; effected by a single instrument-universal suffrage

applied to the determination of the nationality as well as of the sovereign and the government; reconciliation of nations among themselves, and of the divers classes composing them, thanks to an equal satisfaction of the rights and interests of all."*

That nothing might be wanting to the enchantment of his fair dream, the young prisoner of Ham contemplated a double mission of giving peace and glory to France. "War was to consolidate peace, imperial battles were to give repose to the world. Thus the famous device, The Empire and Peace, came to bear a sublime significance."t

In short, the Napoleonic idea had for its ultimate aim the aggrandizement and European omnipotence of France under the dynasty of the Bonapartes, through the universal means of popular suffrage with plébiscites, forming a basis of a new national and international right, opposed to the old historical right of peoples. The other three principles of territorial compensation, non-intervention and accomplished facts, were special means and passing aids to be used according to opportunity for carrying out intentions.

III.

Louis Napoleon received his political education from his uncle exiled

Revue des Deux Mondes, p. 554. +Ibid. p. 552.

in the Island of St. Helena, and from the Carbonari, among whom Ciro Menotti enrolled him in Tuscany, in the year 1831.* 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 Napo

La Reine Hortense en Italie, en France, en

leon, 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 powerthis, 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?

According to the theory of natural limits, the aggrandizement which France could have demanded in

antraits de ses mémoires inédits, écrits par elle mm, PP. 55-56. Paris, 1834.

VOL. XVIII. 6

successful warfare would have been

reduced to some additions towards the Alps, the Pyrenees, and in Flanders; to a few thousand square kilometres, and perhaps three or four millions of inhabitants. Towards the Rhine, we cannot see what the Empire could have claimed without contradicting the theory itself. Germany has maintained that Alsace and half of Lorraine, incorporated with French soil, are German, and has forced them to a legal annexation to her territory. Now, were these slender acquisitions, so disproportioned to the acquisitions of neighboring countries, worth the cost of turning Europe upside down, and subjecting France to a chance of political and military ruin?

Louis Napoleon rejoiced in the thought of one day resuscitating the fair name of Italy, extinguished for many years, and restoring it to provinces so long deprived of it. This sounds well; but was this resurrection to end in a united kingdom, or in the simple emancipation from foreign rule? And granted that unity could not be prevented, and that it should prove equal to the imaginary union of Spain and Portugal, was it really advantageous to create alongside of France, from a platonic love of nationality, two new states of twenty-five millions of souls each, capable of supplanting her later in the Mediterranean. And if Prussia, taking advantage of the loss of Italy and Hungary to her rival Austria, had united in a single political and military body the scattered members of Germany, would it have been useful and hopeful for France to feel herself pressed on the other side by a kingdom or empire of fifty millions of inhabitants, a military race of the first order?

*

Moreover, what would have be

*Idées Napoléoniennes, P. 143.

come of the Roman Pontiff in this renovation of countries, governments, and juridical laws. The Pope is a great moral power, the greatest in the world. If his independence were to give way before the principle of nationality, what would become of his religious liberty, so necessary to the public quiet of consciences. Could a pope, subject to an Italy constructed in any way soever, increase the light, peace, and tranquillity of France and the rest of Europe? Would the palace of the Vatican, changed into a prison, have accorded with the imagined splendors of the Tuileries?

Finally, a new international and national right, which should have sanctioned, in accordance with popular suffrage, the obligation of nonintervention and accomplished facts, far from reconciling nations and various classes of citizens among themselves by superseding the inalienable right of nature, would have become a firebrand of civil discord, an incentive to foreign wars, and a germ of revolutions which would have plunged Europe into the horrors of socialism.

An eagle eye was not needed to see and foresee these weighty dangers. However affairs might have turned, even if they had succeeded according to every wish, it is indubitable that the ship of Napoleonic politics, following in its navigation the star of this idea, must eventually have struck on three rocks, each one hard enough to send ship and pilot to the bottom: the Papacy, Germany, and Revolution. The Papacy, oppressed by the Italy of the Carbonari, would have taken from France her greatest moral force. Germany, in one way or another, strongly united in her armies, would have tried, as in 1813, to overwhelm the Empire. Revolution, kindled and fed from without, would have

gathered strength in France to the ruin of the Empire.

These rocks were not only visible, but palpable to touch. Napoleon III. saw them, felt them, and used all the licit and illicit arts of his administration to avoid them. In vain; it was impossible. He should not have followed the guidance of his enchantress, his idea; following it, perdition was inevitable.

V.

Perhaps history offers no other example of a man who has grasped the sceptre under conditions so propitious for good and so opposed to evil as those under which Louis Napoleon Bonaparte began his reign; or of one who has so pertinaciously abused his advantages to his own ruin and that of others.

The vote of the better and larger portion of the French nation had raised him to the throne, that he might save them from the hydra of socialism, and stop the course of political changes in France. Europe, just recovering from terrible agitations, welcomed his elevation as a pledge of order and peace. Catholics of every country rejoiced over it almost as the reward of the uncontested restoration in Rome of the principality of S. Peter. Interest and conscience seemed to unite in inducing him to take the triumphal road of justice which must lead to certain glory.

But cum in honore esset non intellexit.* He seemed to wish to take this path. But, in fact, he showed that he was preparing to follow another by the ephemeral light of that idea which he worshipped on the imperial throne with the same devotion which he had professed in prison and in exile.

* Psalm xlviii. 21.

The Crimean war, to a participation in which he invited little Piedmont, predestined by him to enjoy the benefits of Italian resurrection, helped him to cut the knot of the Holy Alliance, to humble Russia and set her at enmity with Austria, to create by a plébiscite the first of his national unities-that of the Roumanian Principalities-and to introduce at the Congress of Paris that subalpine diplomacy which, endorsed by him, sowed the seeds of the contemplated Italian war.

Meanwhile, the daggers and bombs of the Pianori, Tibaldi, and Orsini came to remind him that, before being Emperor of the French, he had been an Italian Carbonaro, and that he was expected to keep his oaths. It is said that, after the explosion of Orsini's bombshell, a friend of the assassin, to whom Napoleon complained confidentially of this party persecution, replied: "You have forgotten that

you are an Italian."

"What shall I do ?" asked his majesty.

"Serve your country."

"Very good. But I am Emperor of the French, a nation hard to govern. Can I sacrifice the interests of my people to accommodate those of Italy ?"

"No one will prevent you from studying the interests of France when you have promulgated the independence and secured the unity of your country. Italy first of all."

But he had less need of spurring than was supposed.

After the secret negotiations of Plombières, he attacked Austria in the plains of Lombardy, and, having subdued her, he inaugurated the resurrection of Italy according to his idea, which, presiding over the work, showed itself unveiled, with all the

Univers, Jan. 21, 1873.

magnificence of territorial compensation, universal suffrage, non-intervention, and accomplished facts, as we all know.

VI.

But the Napoleonic ship got lost irreparably among the three rocks above named. Between the Mincio and the Adige it met Germany in threatening guise; in Rome, the betrayed pontiff rose up; and in Paris revolution lifted her savage head. For eleven years Bonaparte struggled to save the ship from the straits into which his Italian enterprise had driven it; but the more earnest his efforts, the worse became the entanglement, until the tempest of 1870 split the vessel in the midst with awful shipwreck.

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 his tory will show him to posterity-a monster of immorality, to use the apt expression of one of his former sycophants.*

*He was in science a phenomenon, in history in adventurer, in morality a monster (Le Siècle, Jan. 12, 1873). Amid the labyrinth of contradicSions in which Bonaparte enveloped his thoughts concerning the political condition in which he meant to place the Roman Pontiff, it is impossible to decide what was his true conception, or whether he had formed any fixed and definite plan. In 1859, when he dreamed of three kingdoms in Italy, one subalpine, a second for his cousin Jerome, and a third for his cousin Murat, Napoleon III. traced upon the map of the Peninsula with his own hand a small circlet enclosing the new Pontifical state, including Rome, and five provinces. At the end of that year, the dream vanished through the opposition of Lord Palmerston in the famous opuscule, The Pope and the Congress, where he showed a wish to restrict the dominion of the Holy Father to Rome, converted into something like a Hanseatic city. In Sept., 1863, according to the revelations of Marquis Carlo Alfieri (L'Italia Liberale, p. 83), who

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

declares himself well informed, Bonaparte consented to the "gradual withdrawal of French

troops from Rome, so arranged that, on the departure of the last French battalion, the territorial dominion of the Pontiff should be reduced to the city of Rome, the suburban campagna, and the road and port of Cività Vecchia." So the Pope would have remained king of a city, a road, and a port. In 1867, when the nation obliged Bonaparte to go to the aid of the Pontiff, assailed by the irregolari of Italy, he wished the state to remain as it was left after the dismemberment of 1860, and commanded the Ital

ian regulars to withdraw from Viterbo and Frosinone, which they did with military punctuality. In that year, and during the perplexities (says

Armonia of Jan. 12, 1873), there came to visit him in Paris an illustrious Italian who enjoyed his confidence, and had been decorated by his

imperial hand with the cross of the Legion of position of the Pope, was lamenting it with Napoleon III., and remarked that, unless reparation

Honor. This gentleman, engrossed with the

were made, the Revolution would enter Rome. The ex-emperor replied: "So long as Pius IX. lives, I shall never permit it. After the death of Pius IX., I will adjust the affairs of the church.” If we question whether after his dethronement the unhappy man approved the accomplished fact of Sept. 20, 1870, l'Opinione of Jan. 18, 1873. removes all doubt. It tells us that an individual (generally supposed to be Count Arese, a great friend of his), visited him at Chiselhurst, and, "when the conversation turned to Rome, where the Italian government was established, Napoleon III. said with entire frankness that he had personal engagements with the Pope, to which as emperor he could never have proved faithless; but that, since his dethronement, Italian politics had passed beyond his action. And he added: "This was to be foreseen as being in the order of facts, and it is not an occasion for turning back.” From which we may infer that he wished the temporal power of the popes to cease with Pius IX., without caring to substitute for their necessary liberty any other guarantee than that of chance. This will be enough to convince posterity that Napoleon III. was not a statesman of the first order.