Editor’s note: This is the last of six lectures given by H.A.L. Fisher at the University of London in June, 1907. They were published in book form under the title, Bonapartism (London, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1908).
(Continued from Part 5)
The Italian War was the turning-point in the history of the Second Empire. Up to 1860 everything seemed to have succeeded with the man who twelve years before could not boast of fifty acquaintances in France. But now the sky was overcast. The Emperor had wished to drive the Austrians out of Italy, and the white-coats were still encamped in Venice; he had striven to prevent the absorption of the central Italian states in the Piedmontese monarchy, only to find that his efforts were powerless. It was in vain that he had tried to prevent Garibaldi from quitting Sicily, in vain that a French fleet had been dispatched to the harbour of Gaeta to protect the Bourbon King of Naples; Garibaldi had crossed the Straits of Messina, and the French sailors had been compelled to act as passive spectators during the last scene in the squalid tragedy of the Neapolitan Bourbons. Having obtained power with the aid of the Catholic suffrage, the Emperor of the French had posed as the protector of the papal interests. All the papal territory save the patrimony of St. Peter had been incorporated in the new kingdom of Italy. It is true that a French force still guarded the city of Rome, but would a man whose diplomatic course had been marked by so many surrenders, refrain at the call of policy from making one more final surrender to the spirit of the Italian Revolution? The diplomacy of Napoleon had been woven without the knowledge and against the judgement of the men who were officially responsible for the conduct of French foreign affairs. It pleased nobody. In the eyes of the Radicals he had not gone far enough. In the eyes of the Clericals and Royalists he had gone much too far.
The decree of November 24, 1860, opened the floodgates of Parliamentary debate by permitting the discussion of the address. Italy became at once the burning question of the day. ‘To follow the discussions of the legislative body,’ says Ollivier, the leader of the Opposition, ‘one would believe there was no other question in the world but Italy.’ The Liberals placed upon their programme the withdrawal of the French troops from Rome, and argued that Italy was the natural ally of France, that Italian unity should be accepted without apprehension or reserve, and that the necessary corollary of Italian unity was that Rome should be the political capital of the new kingdom. The Conservatives replied that the real ally of France was not Italy but Austria, that Italian unity had been effected by a course of cynical guile and broken faith and revolutionary violence. In the great and passionate discussions all the old hatreds of France blazed up again. It was a contest between the men of the French Revolution and the men of the Ancien Régime. ‘We know you,’ cried Jules Favre, the Radical barrister, to Keller the eloquent champion of the Catholic cause, ‘your fathers were at Quiberon, ours were at Waterloo.’
Meanwhile another question had arisen, which proved to be fraught with great calamity to the Empire. This was the question of Mexico. The idea of recovering in the Far West some part of the political influence which had been lost to France during the Seven Years’ War had entered into the combinations of the Great Napoleon. Finding it necessary after the peace of Amiens to acquiesce, at least for a time, in the loss of Egypt, the First Consul had plotted a vast scheme of compensation on the other side of the Atlantic. A French expedition was sent to break the black power in San Domingo, Louisiana was acquired by purchase from Spain, and negotiations were begun with a view to the acquisition of the Floridas. French officers began to gossip in the mess-room of an expedition up the Mississippi from St. Louis, and of how a French attack launched from the great lakes might drive the English out of Canada and undo the work of Chatham and Wolfe. All this scheming came to nothing, for war broke out on the Continent, and the waterways of the Atlantic were barred by the English navy. Louisiana was hastily sold to the United States, the negotiation for the Floridas was dropped, and the dream of a French empire in the West had to be indefinitely postponed.
The attention of Louis Bonaparte had been attracted to the Latin States of America by an offer of the presidentship of Ecuador, which reached him during his imprisonment in the fortress of Ham, and had stimulated the preparation of a pamphlet upon the advantages of a Nicaraguan canal. The scheme for a canal faded away, but the dream of opposing some barrier to the progress of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism in the western hemisphere continued to haunt Napoleon’s mind; and in the troubled condition of Mexico he discovered a pretext for intervention, a hope of aggrandizement, and a prospect of appeasing the Catholic resentments which had been stirred up by his recognition of the Kingdom of Italy.
Mexico, after achieving its independence in 1821, had been the prey of chronic disturbance. It had waged an unsuccessful war with the United States in 1848, and in 1857 it was divided between two contending parties, one clerical and conservative, led by Miramon; the other anticlerical and liberal, led by a very remarkable Indian, Benito Juarez. Juarez was sober, disinterested, incorruptible, but he had deeply offended the Catholic party by confiscating the property of the Church, by decreeing civil marriage, and by suppressing the religious congregations. There can be little doubt that he represented the will, not only of the six million Indians, who formed two-thirds of the Mexican population, but also of a considerable section of the more enlightened creoles. In Spain, however, and in France, it was represented by the envoys of Miramon, and in particular by a certain General Almonte, that Mexican society was monarchical in law and religion, in habits and ideas. It was pointed out with no little verisimilitude that a Latin country educated in the Spanish tradition could not in so short a space of time have discarded all the influences of her early training, and that while the object of Juarez was to assimilate Mexico to the United States, it was the aim of American diplomacy to keep Mexico in a state of weakness, turbulence, and division, until the moment should have arrived when it might safely be brought under the Stars and Stripes. An opportunity had fortunately presented itself of spoiling the illegitimate ambitions of the Anglo-Saxon heretics. The Americans were involved in a civil war and would be powerless to interfere. It would be possible, therefore, to found in Mexico a Roman Catholic monarchy which should shield the interests of the Latin and Catholic world in the West from Teutonic aggression. Such a monarchy would protect Cuba, the Philippines, and the Antilles, would gratify the French and Italian Clericals, and maintain the balance of power in the world.
The Empress Eugénie was a Spaniard, and listened with willing ears to the romantic project. Visions of wonderful gold-mines in the wastes of the Sonora fired the brain of the poet Lamartine, and other men of baser clay, who were not poets, saw in the embarrassments of a feeble government the prospect of pecuniary advantage. A Swiss banker, by name Jecker, had speculated in the fortunes of Miramon by the advance of seven million francs at a usurious rate, and Morny, the Emperor’s half-brother, was promised thirty percent of the takings, if the French government should help the foreign money-lender to wring his debt out of the Mexicans.
The financial embarrassments of the Mexican government provided a reasonable pretext for interference. In September, 1860, a consignment of silver, chiefly the property of British subjects, was seized on its way to the coast by order of Juarez, and two months later a force under Miramon’s direction appropriated some funds which were deposited in a warehouse belonging to the British Embassy. Both parties pleaded necessity, and each party protested that he would make repayment as soon as he had conquered the country. At the beginning of 1861 Juarez obtained a decisive victory over his opponent, but nevertheless repayment was not made. Faced by grave financial embarrassment, a Mexican congress in July, 1861, voted a law suspending for two years the payment of the foreign debt.
The country which was most concerned in the solvency of Mexico was England, and the English government determined to take measures to protect the interest of its creditors. Accordingly, on October 3, 1861, a convention was signed in London between Great Britain, France, and Spain, by which it was arranged that contingents should be sent to Mexico with instructions to occupy certain positions on the coast, to protect the foreign residents in the country and to enforce the just claims of the foreign creditors. The three Powers, in other words, had combined to concert a debt-collecting expedition to Mexico, and it would have been well for France if she had confined her energies to the collection of debts.
It soon became apparent that the three signatories to the convention were animated by divergent aims. England was prudent enough to recognize that it was not her business to make war in Mexico, to alter the form of the Mexican government, or to regenerate the morals of the Mexican people. She was aware that the United States of America entertained a strong objection to the political interference of European nations in the American continent, and she had no desire to challenge the attachment of the American people to the Monroe doctrine. Spain was more closely interested in the fate of Mexico, but jealous of France and unwilling to take a large military risk for a difficult and doubtful object. Napoleon alone was determined that the expedition should lead to the foundation of a Mexican Empire under French influence.
Mexico is a country of 750,000 square miles separated from France by 5,000 miles of ocean, and specially protected from hostile attack by a belt of malarious country lying between the ports of arrival and the highlands of the interior. To one who scanned the map there was clearly a prospect of much rude, perplexed, and scattered fighting, not to speak of wastage by disease, if the Mexicans should prove so perverse as to prefer material progress to the restoration of priestly control. The faintest exercise of political judgement should have informed Napoleon that his design would certainly encounter a firm resistance from America, and that its success would entirely depend upon the condition of the public mind in Mexico, as to which he was imperfectly informed. Considerations of prudence, however, weighed light in the balance against the magical policy out of which, as from a fairy hoard, an emperor was to be given to Mexico, a brilliant lustre to be conferred on French arms, a timely rebuff administered to the Yankee, and the Pope cured of his ill humour; not to speak of those fabled gold-mines in the romantic wastes of the Sonora, and other little speculations which it is not necessary to enumerate. General Almonte was sent over to Mexico to prepare the way for a fresh revolution, and the appearance of this avowed Monarchist in the French camp was a sign that the Emperor was bent on hostilities. The commanders of the English and Spanish contingents refused to be accomplices in this new development of policy. They had been sent across the ocean to collect debts, not to overturn the political situation in Mexico. They had signed a convention with Juarez, had recognized his government, and they saw that the French pecuniary claims were framed to drive him not to solvency but to desperation. They withdrew their forces, leaving six thousand French troops to carry out a task the vast proportions of which were as yet but dimly discerned. In the Boulevards of Paris the wits spoke of ‘Duke Jecker’s war’; and indeed there was something of high comedy in the suggestion that the governor of a state should be compelled to pay the bill for the guns and cartridges which had been used against him in a civil war. But there was little comedy in the heart of the affair. The opening event of the Mexican campaign was a resounding defeat of the hitherto unvanquished imperial army. On May 4, 1861, a French force attacking the fortified town of Puebla was decimated by its Mexican defenders. It was the first note of warning, the Baylen of the Second Empire.
The news of this catastrophe spurred Napoleon to fresh efforts. A force of 23,000 men was sent across the Atlantic, and a few brilliant actions resulted in the capture of Puebla and the city of Mexico. To sanguine minds it seemed as if the task was already half accomplished and success secure. A provisional government was set up with General Almonte at its head, and on July 10, 1863, an assembly of 215 Mexican notables, all of the proper political complexion, invited the Austrian archduke Maximilian to assume the Mexican Crown. The invitation was not spontaneous, and the choice of the Mexican congress, like that of an English Chapter, was guided from above. Maximilian was the brother of Francis Joseph of Austria, and the husband of Charlotte, daughter of Leopold, King of the Belgians. He was tall and handsome, full of ambition and energy, and had earned the name of liberality as a proconsul in Lombardy while Milan was still an Austrian capital. In every respect he seemed to Napoleon to be the right man for Mexico, and to provide an unexpected and happy issue out of many European perplexities. The choice of a Habsburg prince would please the Catholic world, which had found in the French expeditions to China and Syria no adequate compensation for the support which had been given to the sacrilegious government of Piedmont. The goodwill of England was valuable, and Maximilian’s father-in-law was the trusted friend of Queen Victoria. Most important of all, the choice of a Habsburg archduke would tend to conciliate Austria, and Napoleon needed Austrian friendship. A plan was forming in his mind by which, in return for Eastern compensations, Venice might be ceded to the clamorous patriots of Italy.
From the very first the Mexican enterprise had aroused deep misgivings in the French chamber. ‘If we go to Mexico,’ said Jubinal, a supporter of the Government, ‘to impose a form of polity on an independent nation, what becomes of the grand principle of non-intervention? What right have we to attack a poor little people beyond the sea, among whom we seem to hear the distant echo of those principles which have founded our great nation?’ It was pointed out that the cost of the expedition would far exceed the amount of the debt, and that Juarez did not refuse payment, but had merely asked for delay. A weighty warning came in March, 1862, from the general who had commanded the Spanish contingent. Prim assured Napoleon that he knew Mexico well, that there was very little monarchical sentiment in the country, and that although it would be easy to conduct Maximilian to the capital and to crown him emperor, he would find no support in the native population, and would be helpless as soon as the French army should leave the country.
This prediction was exactly realized. On his arrival in Mexico in May, 1864, Maximilian experienced nothing but a series of bitter disappointments. He had been told that the country was pacified; he discovered that there were two centres of rebellion, one in the north under Juarez, another in the south under Porfirio Diaz, and that the French army, though brave and efficient, was unable to police more than a small area in the country. He had hoped to find administrative order, he discovered chaos and confusion. His treasury was empty, and until the last embers of resistance had burned themselves out it would be impossible to collect a sufficient revenue to meet the current expenditure. He was compelled, therefore, to live upon loans and subsidies from France, and to hope that in time his uncertain native troops might be drilled into an efficient army. Perceiving that the Clericals were incapable, and finding that the restoration of church lands would add to the financial confusion of the country, he attempted to form a Liberal administration. In so doing, he lost the support of the Church without obtaining the goodwill of the Liberal party. At last, in 1865, with the end of the American Civil War, France received the warning which the exercise of ordinary political forethought might have expected from the first. She was informed in plain language from Washington that the French troops must be withdrawn. Napoleon replied that he was willing to evacuate the country if the Federal Government would consent to recognize Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico. The request was refused. Secretary Seward bluntly informed the French that they must quit the country and that the United States would never recognize a governor who had been imposed upon the people of Mexico against their will.
Then came the final tragedy. The French troops embarked, and Maximilian, acting partly on the advice of Marshal Bazaine and partly on counsels from Vienna, determined to remain. He was alone, for his wife had left him to beg for aid among the European courts. He had incurred the vehement hostility of the Republicans by an ill-judged enforcement of martial law, and was soon to discover the bitter truth which Bazaine had carefully shrouded from his eyes, that the whole country was against him. At Queretaro, after standing a brief siege, he was betrayed into the hands of his enemies, condemned by court martial, and shot. His wife, the Empress Charlotte, had been spared the news of this calamity. Rebuffed by Napoleon, and learning that no help was to be expected from Belgium or from Austria, she lost the balance of her reason in the palace of the Vatican. She had gone to Rome to entreat the Pope to reconcile the Mexican clergy to the Empire; and in all history there is no more striking example of retribution than the collapse of this poor suppliant in the Vatican, a visible symbol of the tragical policy of unwisdom which the Vatican had commended and pursued. The Mexican catastrophe made a profound impression upon the mind of France. The country had squandered men and money upon a fantastic enterprise and had been ordered out of Mexico by the United States. She had invited a foreign prince to undertake an impossible task, and then, at the call of her own convenience, had left him to die like a dog. The speakers for the Government threw the blame of the disaster upon Marshal Bazaine, the French commander, who had represented that all was well, and by whose counsels Maximilian had waited behind; the Opposition retorted that if Bazaine had been fully trusted the Empire of Mexico would have been saved. The name of this arrogant and stupid soldier became one of the war-cries of party, and among the misfortunes which followed from the Mexican expedition there was perhaps none graver than the spurious reputation which the rhetoric of the opposition press and of the opposition deputies conferred upon the man whose treachery and ineptitude lost the great army of Metz in the Franco-Prussian war.
The Mexican adventure was not the only disaster which had befallen French diplomacy. It had been part of the imperial tradition to sympathize with the cause of Polish nationality, and in 1831 Louis Napoleon had considered, and only under family directions consented to decline, a proposal to put himself at the head of the Polish rising. When, therefore, in 1863 the woes of Poland were again pressed upon the notice of the world, Napoleon felt bound to take strenuous action. ‘I have changed my views on many points,’ said he, ‘but I think on Poland as I thought in 1831.’ Feeling in Paris was deeply stirred. The Conservatives defended the Polish insurrection because it was led by nobles, the Catholics because it was favoured by priests, the Revolutionaries because it was a revolution. Nothing could have done more to retrieve the waning popularity of the Second Empire than a chivalrous war on behalf of Poland. Nor could anything be more calculated to damage its reputation than a failure to obtain from the Court of the Tsar any concessions to the Polish claims. Yet a war was quite out of the question. Neither England nor Austria was in the Quixotic mood, as the Tsar well knew, and France could not go into the quarrel single-handed. It was in vain that Napoleon attempted to bring moral pressure to bear upon Russia through the collective action of England, Austria, and France, that he imparted to Austria a scheme by which, in exchange for the cession of Gallicia, she should receive Silesia from Prussia, who might be compensated by a serious reform of the German Confederation. He only earned the deep indignation of the Russian Emperor. Alexander intended to manage his own affairs, and had secured himself by a military convention signed with Prussia. A new man had risen above the horizon of European politics, a rough Pomeranian squire, who after serving in some diplomatic posts had now become the head of the Prussian Cabinet. The Russo-Prussian convention was the work of Otto von Bismarck, and the first of a long series of diplomatic triumphs. It was a measure of far-reaching importance, for it secured Prussia from Muscovite interference during the great task which lay before her.
Napoleon had helped Italy to become a nation without apparently perceiving that another power in Europe might wish to become a nation as well. Germany had not forgotten the war of liberation in 1813, or the great national movement of 1848, when, by one of the chief calamities of modern history, she had failed to unify herself on liberal lines, largely owing to the refusal of the King of Prussia to accept the imperial crown from a parliament at Frankfort. But the movement towards national unity had only been temporarily checked. Bismarck, who in the wonderful year of revolutions had opposed the Pan-German Liberals because their scheme seemed to him to be fraught with danger to the Prussian monarchy, had learnt, as Prussian delegate to the diet at Frankfort, that Austria must be eliminated from the German system, not by persuasion but by blood and iron. The movement must come not from the centre or the south, but from Prussia. It must be achieved not by talk but by deeds, not by ideals but by arms; it must be led by the Prussian monarchy; its instrument of success must be the Prussian army, and its end the unification of the German state under Prussian control. It was first necessary to quarrel with Austria, and in the question of the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein Bismarck discovered the pretext for an Austrian war.
The French Emperor had no clear idea either of the significance of the Schleswig-Holstein question or of the drift of affairs in Germany. He believed that Prussia was his friend, and that in the event of a war between Prussia and Austria, France would be able to step in to rectify her own defective frontiers and to claim Venetia for Italy. Even should Prussia succeed in driving Austria from Germany and in founding a North German confederation, the balance of power would, in his judgement, have been readjusted in a manner favourable to France. Instead of one great federal state of 75,000,000 inhabitants, stretching from Roumania to the Rhine, he would be confronted with three states, one of which might be detached and bound to the chariot of France. Napoleon the First had made a Rhenish confederation and had experienced the loyalty of the South German states. His nephew, remembering this example, was impressed by the belief that a South German federation would lean upon the support of France. It was part of his philosophy of history to anticipate the growth of large national aggregates, part of his fatalism to regard himself as an instrument designed by Providence to forward the process, part of his self-approval that, having adopted the principle of nationalities in Italy, he should continue to give it effect all over the world. When England pressed him to intervene on behalf of Denmark in the Schleswig-Holstein question, he answered with an uncertain sound. First he would not, then he would; ultimately he acquiesced in the Prussian triumph. To Italy, debating whether she should accept the proffered friendship of Prussia, he gave counsel that it would be well to arm. He saw nothing but profit to France in a joint attack of Prussia and Italy upon the house of Habsburg. ‘The ghost of Venice,’ to borrow the phrase of an Italian diplomat, ‘was wandering about the corridors of the Tuileries.’ Napoleon realized the difficulties which beset the young Italian kingdom, he knew that all the forward spirits in Italy, led by Garibaldi and Mazzini, were pressing forward for Venice and Rome. He saw that there would be no rest in the land till the tricolour waved over the lagoons, and with that curious vein of obstinate persistence which shot through all his many vacillations, he determined to help the young Italian kingdom to obtain Venetia. He felt this course to be all the more incumbent upon him since he, a Catholic sovereign, could never concede upon the point of Rome. Yet some means must be found to settle the Roman question. Diplomacy discovered, not a remedy, but a palliative. A convention was struck with Italy in September, 1864, which arranged that the French troops should retire from Rome within two years, that the King of Italy should protect the Roman patrimony against republican incursions, and that the capital of the Italian kingdom should be removed from Turin to Florence, a pledge that it should not be moved further south still, and a sedative to Clerical nerves. The convention satisfied nobody. The Catholics cried out that the Pope was abandoned, the Republicans that the honour of Italy was sold, and both parties gathered themselves together to renew the strife. The Pope declined to recognize the convention, and issued a syllabus protesting against all the political ideas of nineteenth-century Liberalism. The Emperor prohibited the publication of the syllabus; the situation became more and more tense, both in Italy and in France, but if the Hapsburgs could be made to cede Venice, then perchance the air might cool.
Bismarck saw the value of Italy. ‘If Italy did not exist,’ he said, ‘it would be necessary to invent it.’ He knew Napoleon, divined his cloudy ambitions, and in the October of 1865 came expressly to Biarritz to sound his mind and to secure his neutrality. With the frank, spontaneous charm which made him so dangerous an antagonist, the genial diplomatist unveiled in a series of informal conversations the seductions of the Prussian alliance. Prussia wanted to fortify her position in Germany at the expense of Austria. Of course, if France would permit her to do so, France should find it to her advantage. She might take Belgium, or a piece on the Rhine, or Luxemburg. Suum cuique was the device of the Hohenzollerns. Nothing was put upon paper; no pledges were exchanged. The French foreign minister mocked at the indiscretions of this Teutonic Gascon; but Bismarck saw that the seed sown from a full sack had fallen on fruitful soil. He knew that the Emperor was open to temptation, and that, as Piedmont had bought him with Savoy, so Prussia might buy him again with something else. All that Bismarck touched turned to gold. He gained the Italian Alliance, fended off Russia, forced on a war with Austria, and beat his antagonist in a campaign of seven weeks.
The wonderful victory of Sadowa fell like a thunderbolt on the political world in Paris. Napoleon had expected a long war, a hard war, a war which would exhaust all three combatants and result in an immense accession of strength to France. He had pictured himself intervening in a late stage of the hard-fought struggle with a kind of Olympian benevolence, and dictating the terms of a European peace. He would give Venice to Italy and wipe out the memories of Villa Franca and Chambéry; he would take Belgium or Luxemburg for himself, and thereby efface Waterloo and the humiliating treaties of 1815. He knew how well the Austrians had fought at Magenta and Solferino. Who could have thought that a single battle would place the whole empire of the Habsburgs at the feet of Prussia? The event was so sudden that it found him utterly unprepared. We should not blame him too severely. Prince Hohenlohe, the Bavarian statesman, was equally disconcerted in his prognostics.
One course promised success. If, while the Prussian armies were still in Bohemia, France should mobilize an army corps, she would be able in all probability to force Bismarck to accept her terms, and might obtain territorial compensation to balance the augmented strength of Prussia and to pacify the jealous feeling at home. The question was debated in the council, but Mexico had drained away men and money, and the Emperor, who was suffering from a painful attack of his distressing malady, allowed himself to be dissuaded from the energetic course. Instead of mobilizing an army, he sent an ambassador. He did enough to show Bismarck his ill-will, and too little to influence the terms of the treaty. The result of this mismanagement was, that while Prussia annexed all Germany north of the Main, and Venetia was ceded to Italy, France went empty-handed. A cry of rage and jealousy rose up in the country. ‘It is France which has been conquered at Sadowa,’ said Marshal Randon. ‘It is a misfortune,’ cried Thiers, ‘such as France has not experienced for four hundred years.’ The opposition press painted in sombre colours a France humiliated, powerless, and degraded, and even the most prudent of the Emperor’s councillors advised that concessions should be made to the state of public feeling. ‘National sentiment,’ wrote Magne to Napoleon, July 20, 1866, ‘would be profoundly wounded if at the end of the account France had obtained nothing from her intervention but to have attached to her flanks two dangerous enemies with their power enormously increased.’ It was on all hands admitted that a war would be impolitic, but even Prince Napoleon the Nationalist advised the search for compensations. It was expected that the gratitude of Prussia for the neutrality of France would come to the rescue of her embarrassed government. No expectations could have been more futile, no worse advice could have been given or accepted. Compensations might be obtained in one way and in one way only, at the point of the sword. To seek them at all was, indeed, as Ollivier puts it, ‘blasphemy against the principle of nationalities’; but in this desperate hour Napoleon was persuaded against his better judgement thus to blaspheme. First he asked for the Rhenish Palatinate and Hesse, then for Belgium, then for Luxemburg. The request for South German territory was communicated by Bismarck in 1870 to the public Press, and spread a wild feeling of indignation against the French. By an astute piece of diplomacy, Benedetti, the French ambassador in Berlin, was persuaded to copy out in his own hand a draft secret treaty containing among other provisions the stipulation that France should be permitted to seize Belgium. The treaty was shown to the Bavarian prime minister in October, 1866, and quickened the conclusion of an offensive and defensive treaty between Bavaria and Prussia. Nor did this exhaust its utility. When war broke out in 1870, it was published to the world as evidence of the criminal ambitions of the French and with a view to turning the current of English feeling against the plotter in the Tuileries.
In the exasperated state of French opinion any spark might light a conflagration. Thiers had openly pronounced in the Sadowa debates that if Prussia crossed the Main France should draw the sword to prevent the unity of Germany. A strong hand and a clear brain were needed to cope with the situation. Prussia had created her victorious army in the teeth of the popular chamber and in defiance of constitutional forms, and what autocracy had done in Prussia autocracy might do in France. But in 1868 the power of Napoleon was neither autocratic nor uncontested. Ever since the first concessions of 1860, he had gone upon the principle of admitting the legislative chambers to a larger and larger share of influence in the government. In November, 1860, the Corps Legislatif was given the right to criticize the imperial policy; then in December, 1861, to discuss, and if necessary to reject, the items of the budget; then in January, 1867, the right of questioning the ministers who might be commissioned by the Emperor to take part in particular debates. In the following year many of the restrictions upon the Press were removed, and the Government became the object of much brilliant, coarse, and imaginative defamation. Meanwhile, the parliamentary opposition had steadily grown in strength. In the days of the autocracy five members alone, the representatives of Lyons and of Paris, had had the courage to oppose the Man of December. In 1863 the opposition numbered 35, in 1869 it had swollen to 100, and, despite all the government pressure, had polled half the electorate of France. It was a bitter, passionate, jealous opposition. Part of it, led by Ollivier, believed in a future for the Liberal Empire; part were determined to wreck the dynasty. All the young men of promise belonged to it, and all the leaders of the broken causes. It could count on the exuberant southern genius of Thiers, on the plausible and fluent oratory of Favre, on the acute and vigilant intelligence of Jules Simon. The Empire, indeed, had enlisted the service of some able men of the second class, notably Rouher, Billault, and Fould the Jew financier. But it is the Nemesis of despotism that it trains bureaucrats rather than statesmen, and that young talent is not attracted to its service. Youth follows the magnet of the future, and the future appeared in the guise of Liberalism. The programme of the Liberals was seductive in its sweep and simplicity. They claimed liberty in its largest sense—liberty of elections, of public meetings, of the Press, of the municipalities, and the repeal of all exceptional legislation against personal freedom. They demanded that the popular chamber should exercise a real control over the budget, that the legislature should be chosen by the people, and not by the prefects. In the end they obtained the substance of their desire, but long before the end came pure autocracy was a thing of the past. A request for fresh loans and for the sale of the state forests had been refused in 1865, and every item of military expenditure was jealously challenged. It may be urged that the Chamber had every right to be scrupulous. The Government had an unclean financial conscience. Millions had been poured out on the luxuries of the imperial court, on establishments for the imperial relations, on bribing the Press and manipulating the elections and subsidizing the favourites. In 1868 Thiers showed that the Empire had incurred an annual floating debt of 270,000,000 francs, and Rouher confessed that loans amounting to 450,000,000 francs had been secretly raised by the Government without consulting the legislature. A fit of financial nervousness seized the country, similar to that great paroxysm of anxiety which shook France from end to end in 1789. It was fatal to a grand scheme of military reform. In 1866 the Chambers threw out a plan for universal military service, and three years later they refused an appropriation for the garde mobile, and helped to compromise the success of the only scheme of army reform which was before the country. The plan was far from perfect; it made no improvements in armament and mobilization, but it was all that the military advisers of Napoleon had to offer, and if war was really regarded as a probable contingency the Government should have used every weapon in their armoury rather than permit any part of this plan to miscarry.
Meanwhile a new enemy had appeared upon the field. The Socialists had been crushed by the fusillades of 1848 and the great proscription of 1852; but so long as there is a sharp division between capital and labour, Socialism will continue to appeal to the working classes. The Empire bestowed great material benefits on France: it doubled the output of wealth, covered the country with a network of railways, more than quintupled the steam force utilized by industry, and stimulated the application of scientific knowledge to industrial processes. In twenty years the number of patents taken out by inventors was doubled. But this rapid economic development was purchased by the concentration of capital, by the elimination of small businesses, and by much temporary displacement of labour as every department of industry in turn became invaded by machinery. Money wages rose, but there was a more than corresponding rise in house rents and in the prices of some of the staple articles of food. An intermittent explosion of strikes marked the sharp discord between the employer and his man, and the emergence of all the ugly problems which attend an industrial revolution. The discipline of the factory was proclaimed on the one hand to be tyrannical, on the other to be essential to the well-being of the business. To the workmen who demanded shorter hours the masters replied that the profit was made in the last few minutes. Large towns bred their peculiar problems, and the workshops of Lyons and Paris harboured, like the catacombs of Rome, a secret and proscribed religion. Socialism had its sacred books, its historical memories, its martyrs who had wasted under the burning suns of an African exile. The pamphlets of ’48 were thumbed and rethumbed in many a poor garret; the fiery exhortations of Proudhon found a place on the shelf with Blanc’s more cogent plea for the organization of labour. By degrees, as their sentences expired—for of the twenty-six thousand proscripts of 1852 eighteen thousand were under forty—batches of exiles returned with rage and bitterness in their hearts. Whatever their fellow-workmen might desire, these men meant to overturn the despot who had broken their lives, and to take revenge on the men of the middle class who had mown them down at the barricades and grown fat upon their ruin. ‘The vanquished of June,’ said a writer in L’Opinion Nationale, a workmen’s organ, of April 10, 1869, ‘do not discuss with their murderers: they wait.’ Hatred and need want no stronger preceptors, and the Socialism of the French working-classes was the result of economic facts rather than the consequence of any fine-spun theory. Still behind all the debated questions there was a vague pervasive idea that the existence of a wage-earning proletariat was an offence against eternal justice which society must correct. Reforms, not in themselves incompatible with the continued institution of private property, such as the legalization of trade unions or the extension of credit facilities to co-operative societies, were claimed as steps towards ‘a society founded on common right’. And for the more thoughtful leaders of the labouring class a new outlook and a fresh assurance of success was afforded by a doctrine which came from Germany, hammered with the hard steel of German science. The prophets of the new Socialism were Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle. Obeying the main intellectual current of their age, and working on the poignant experience afforded by capitalistic production, these two Jewish writers discovered in the tendencies of history a preceptive philosophy and a practical programme. The Revolution of 1789 had broken the ascendancy of the feudal aristocracy, and led to the triumph of the middle class, the owner of capital and the exploiter of labour. For these, too, an inexorable fate was preparing an inevitable doom. It was an iron law of wages that while interest and profit steadily swelled the remuneration of labour was kept about subsistence point. By an automatic social process the accumulation of capital becomes concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, and the number of men and women ground down to a bare level of subsistence waxes greater and greater. Nature, however, after her mysterious fashion, was working out the remedy for the ills which she so mysteriously creates. An awful zigzag of lightning would suddenly reveal the hideous outline of the sombre, storm-laden landscape. The toilers in their millions would rise, shake off the incubus, and appropriate to the use of humanity the land and the instruments of production. Humanity would enter into its own, the war of classes would cease, and the slave-drivers of the factory would perish of their own suicidal egoism. These fatalistic doctrines, shorn of their scientific apparatus, and with many pitiless and savage corollaries, swiftly sped through the leaders of the labour movement. In 1864 an International Association of workmen had been organized in England, and this body soon fell under the influence of the new Socialism. ‘The country,’ said Ollivier, ‘is calm on the surface, but below, in every mind, there is a mysterious anxiety. By degrees an impression is penetrating through the masses that we are traversing a dangerous crisis and that the Empire is going to its doom.’ Prosper Mérimée shared the same impression. ‘We are ill,’ he wrote, ‘we are not governed. The prefects receive no direction.’
In 1869 things seemed to be pointing to the dissolution of the Empire. The Emperor, the Empress, the Court, and the Ministers, were the object of incessant attacks from the half-liberated Press. Henri Rochefort published a little red paper called La Lanterne which sold like wildfire on the boulevards of Paris, for its impudent and brilliant scurrility. A young orator from the South, Léon Gambetta, threw a wild defiance at the crime of December in the course of a political trial, and became the popular hero of France. It was a strange moment, in face of the rising tide of Socialism, the open disaffection of Paris, and the heavy Government losses in the elections of 1869, to select for further concessions to the Opposition. But Napoleon was ill and weary, and not unwilling to devolve some of his responsibilities. In response to a demand coming from 116 deputies he agreed to submit to the Senate a measure for the revision of the Constitution. He proposed to establish a responsible ministry still depending on the Emperor but subject to impeachment by the Senate, and to give to both branches of the legislature enlarged powers over legislation and finance. These constitutional proposals were placed before the people. ‘The Empire,’ so ran the ministerial circular, ‘addresses a solemn appeal to the nation. In 1852 it asked for power to secure order. It now asks in 1870 for power to establish liberty.’ Seven million votes testified the assent of France to the Liberal Empire, and there are some who still believe that, but for the momentary aberration of judgement which led to the Franco-Prussian war, the principle of Liberalism might have saved the Empire of Napoleon. There is some reason to question this decision. A government is only strong if it adheres to its guiding principle. The guiding principle of Bonapartism was autocracy founded on popular consent, safeguarding social order and social equality. An autocrat does not easily abdicate to a parliamentary ministry, does not easily adapt himself to the delicate mechanism of constitutional forms. And in France, though there was still no little personal attachment to Napoleon, the faith in the Empire had declined. Who could be enthusiastic for a government with such a record of humiliation and failure? Could the Liberals forgive the harsh tyranny of the earlier years? Could they trust a nephew of Napoleon to unlearn the traditions of his house? Could they believe that the interests of Liberalism would be safe in the hands of a regency controlled by the Empress and her ultramontane camarilla? Could they forget that France had been cheated out of her Republic in 1793 by foreign war, in 1814 by alien Powers, in 1830 by the adroit manipulation of the Orleanist faction? The Empress at least was under no delusion. She saw that the dynasty depended on prestige, and that its prestige required to be refreshed; and whether or no it be true that Bismarck determined to force on a war with France in the summer of 1870, she and her party were eager for the fray. They believed that a war would save the dynasty, and that a war alone could save it. And perhaps some justification is afforded for this opinion by the fact that when the news of Sedan was telegraphed to Paris the Empire fell suddenly, without noise, without a hand to help it, or a voice raised in its defence.
It was one of Benjamin Constant’s wise maxims that a constitutional monarchy differs from a republic in form, but from an absolute monarchy in substance. The plébiscite of May 8, 1870, by ratifying the transformation of the absolute Empire into a constitutional monarchy had effected a fundamental change in the government of France. A people endowed with universal suffrage, parliamentary institutions, and an executive responsible to the legislature, possesses all the substance of sovereignty. Republican institutions cannot add to its power, and may easily abridge its liberties. If man were a creature of reason, if names were not as potent as things, if bloodshed had no power to create or rancour to prolong the spirit of political partisanship, the Republicans might in time have been brought to accept the Liberal Empire. Those who regret its disappearance believe that it would have rallied at least the larger and more moderate section of the party, and would in the end have healed the social wounds which had been kept open by ninety years of political unrest. They see the impassable gulf which now divides the Royalists from the Republic, and argue that the Liberal Empire would have offered political shelter to Royalists and Republicans alike. Reft of its autocratic significance, Bonapartism would have come to represent the great central party of common sense and prudent compromise. It would have retained the loyalty of the Church while keeping at arm’s length the pretensions of the Vatican; it would have provided careers for turbulent ambition, and destroyed the revolution by the gradual process of absorbing it. Time alone was wanting, as to the uncle, so to the nephew; but Time, acting through Wellington and Moltke, would not wait for the political consolidation of France, and the Liberal Empire which was to reconcile all antagonisms was twice shattered before it could mould a tradition and while its healing potencies were yet unrealized. The collapse of the audacious compromise, twice repeated, left the nation with all its old hostilities unappeased. The Church fell away from the State. Was not Darboy, that Archbishop of Paris who was murdered in the Commune, the last of the Gallican prelates?
The prophetic ghosts of history may be examined, but we cannot lay them. In our view Bonapartism was a spent force before Count Bismarck changed the Ems telegram. It had done its work, and France will never call upon it to do work again. The Second Empire was accepted because it offered an escape from anarchy and socialism, because it stood for social equality, vigorous, efficient government, a courageous outlook on the world, and the ascendancy of a dazzling name. But these foundations had crumbled away during the eighteen years of chequered fortune which succeeded the Coup d’État. The memory of the days of June had grown dim; vacillation and failure had marked the conduct of public affairs; the name of Bonaparte had lost its magic even in the barracks. The plébiscite of May 8 served to show that, though the peasant vote remained solid, the larger towns were breaking away from the Empire. Yet when the telegrams flowed in to the Tuileries at the end of that anxious day, a keen spasm of relief shot through the Court at the greatness of the majority. It seemed as if the Empire had refreshed its credentials and was started on a new term of certificated power. Cool analysis would have shown how uncertain was the ground for confidence. The vote was taken upon the latest phase of Imperial policy, not upon the cardinal issue of the continued existence of the dynasty. Some cast their votes for Napoleon out of hatred for the autocracy which he proposed to discard; others because fear of revolution outbalanced disaffection to the Empire; others again, in the hopes that the blasts of freedom might bring the Imperial fabric to the ground. The pessimists, remembering some Imperial utterances during the Hundred Days, believed that a Napoleon could never be loyal to free institutions, and that a successful war would end the liberties of France. The war came, bringing with it not success but such revelations of incompetence and such crushing disasters as have never been equalled in modern history. In every department of public affairs the government was shown to be a hollow sham. Its diplomacy was a tissue of miscalculations, for it precipitated a conflict with Prussia when a few weeks’ delay might have procured the Austrian alliance; its military preparation was inadequate and confused; its plan of campaign based upon a grave misapprehension of the leading military and political conditions. Such defects do not condemn France. They show that the government had failed to enlist the intelligence or to discipline the labours of a brilliant and energetic nation. The Second Empire, for all its widely-advertised beneficence, was no school of public morality, and the heritage of hopes and beliefs which had made its fortunate youth was squandered in the Franco-Prussian war beyond retrieve. Bonapartism can never stand again as the symbol of science and energy in affairs, still less as the talisman of victory, for though Frenchmen, in speaking of the Bonapartes, may remember the glories of Lodi and Marengo, they do not forget the disaster of Sedan, the shame of Metz, or the loss of Alsace-Lorraine.
