The Times Great Victorian Lives

EMPEROR NAPOLEON III

Emperor of the French: ‘History will find much to reproach him with, but it is certain his contemporaries have been very unjust to him.’

9 JANUARY 1873

IT IS WITH regret we announce the death of the Emperor Napoleon yesterday. Although the fate of the illustrious patient’s general health and the critical nature of the operation performed on him naturally excited uneasiness as to the ultimate result, yet there was little apprehension of immediate danger. Indeed he had slept so soundly through the night and awakened comparatively so strong in the early morning that it had been decided to undertake a further operation at noon. He sank, however, suddenly, and in a very short time all was over.

In the singular career of the late Emperor, as in that of most remarkable men, there are breaks which divide it into distinct periods, without injuring the general dramatic unity. He was born seemingly to greatness. Apparently it threatened to elude him. He struggled after it in the face of adverse circumstances from the time he attained to years of discretion. He partly achieved it, partly had it thrust upon him, and after a success which should have satisfied his wildest dreams, he ended his active life an exile, as he had begun it. It would not be enough to say that Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was born in the purple. His cradle was at the Tuileries Palace, in the closest vicinity to the Throne. He was the youngest son of Louis, King of Holland, and of Hortense Beauharnais, the Empress Josephine’s daughter. His father was Napoleon’s third brother; but the descendants of Joseph were excluded from the succession by their sex, and those of Lucien by the disfavour under which that stern Republican had fallen; so that, at the date of Louis Napoleon’s birth, the 20th of April, 1808, the heir-apparent was sought among the scions of the younger branch. Whether, in the event of the Emperor’s dying without a son, preference would have been given to Louis Napoleon over his elder brother Napoleon Louis, and what reasons might have determined such a choice, it would now be useless to inquire. Suffice it to know that the Emperor evinced a strong predilection in favour of this younger son of his step-daughter, Hortense. ‘His name,’ we are told, ‘was written down at the head of the family register of the Napoleon dynasty.’ His baptism was put off for more than two years and a half, till the 10th of November, 1810, when the Emperor and his newly-married Empress, Maria Louisa, soon to be a mother, held him at the font; and although the birth of the King of Rome, five months later, disappointed the hopes of his immediate succession, the infant of Hortense still held for several years a most important position in his uncle’s household, and was treated with all the honours due to an heir presumptive. He was seven years old when he stood by his uncle’s side at the great gathering on the Champ de Mai during the Hundred Days, and, after Waterloo, he clung to his uncle’s knees when the Emperor left La Malmaison, struggling against separation, as if instinct had told him that with the Emperor his own fortunes and those of the House were overshadowed.

The young Prince, reduced, with his mother, to a private station, spent eight years then at the Augsburg Gymnasium; then six more as a student under domestic tutors at the Castle of Arenenberg, in the canton of Thurgau, on the Lake of Constance, became proficient in history and mathematics, skilful in fencing, horse-manship, and swimming, and curious about military affairs; joining the ranks of the Swiss Militia, and making the acquaintance of the Federal General Dufour. Next to the pale reminiscences of Court pageantries in his early childhood, nothing, perhaps, so powerfully contributed to form the character of the future Emperor as the influence of the mother in whose house he grew up as an only child. The marriage of Hortense with Louis Bonaparte was, by his confession, ‘forced and ill-assorted.’ Seven months before the birth of their third son the Royal couple parted never to be re-united. It was not without contention that the ex-King of Holland, now Duke of Saint Leu, made good his claims to his elder son, leaving the younger in the undisputed possession of the mother. Chagrined as she seemed with her retirement at Arenenberg, Hortense, however, not unfrequently spent the winter in Italy, chiefly at Rome. It was not under the ascendancy of such a mother that the aspiring youth could learn resignation to a humble lot. Louis Napoleon was taught to look for a change with as full a confidence as he would expect daylight at the close of the natural period of darkness. It little mattered when, where, or by what means the turn in his fortunes might come. Enough that an opening would be made. The Man was there; he would not have to wait long for the Hour.

The July Revolution in Paris was hailed as the dawn, but it was only a momentary and deceitful twilight. The Prince’s advances met with no favour from the men at the head of the movement in France, but a chance soon offered itself in Italy. The outbreak in the Roman States in February, 1831, found both the sons of Hortense in arms under the Italian tricolour. There was a bloodless campaign – a mere promenade under Sertognani from Foligno to Otricoli; then a journey to Forli, where the elder brother died of the measles on the 17th of March. Louis Napoleon, attacked by the same complaint at Ancona, was tended by his mother, smuggled away to Marseilles and Paris, and hence, after vain endeavours to obtain a restingplace, conveyed, a convalescent, to Arenenberg. On the downfall of the Italian cause, the Prince was seized with enthusiasm for Polish independence. He travelled through Germany on his way to Warsaw, but the tidings of the final catastrophe met him in Saxony, and for four years, from 1832 to 1836, he was forced back to his life of expectant leisure on the Bodensee. While, in all probability, the future candidate for power, at the early stage of his career, sought only for distinction as a soldier and a patriot, more than one short cut to fortune seemed to present itself to him. At Foligno and Forli he was emphatically hailed as ‘the Prince;’ Polish Generals tempted him with the proffered command of their legions; at the London Conference his name, it is said, was brought forward as a candidate for Belgian Royalty, and he was even, it would be difficult to say with what truth, put down among the suitors for the hand of Maria da Gloria of Portugal. Any ambitious views of that nature he, however, invariably disclaimed. To struggling nations he would only bring a volunteer’s sword; and as to France, ‘the hope to be able to serve her as a citizen and soldier was in his eyes worth more than all the thrones in the world.’

His devotion to France, however, was stimulated by other considerations than those of disinterested patriotism. The Duke of Reichstadt had died at Schönbrunn, and the Prince was now the acknowledged head of the Napoleon dynasty. Notwithstanding the greatest dissimilarity of mind and heart, his intense admiration for his uncle led him to a strange identification of himself with the great conqueror. His landing at Cannes, and ‘the flight’ of the Imperial Eagle from steeple to steeple, till ‘it folded its wings on the towers of Nôtre Dame,’ were, he thought, feats only to be tried again to meet with the same success. Nor was he altogether out of his reckoning. From 1831 to 1848 Bonapartism in France had made common cause with Republicanism. The First Empire, it was argued, had been an era of war and despotism; but it had peace and freedom in reserve. There was no limit to which ‘Napoleonic ideas’ could not be stretched; no degree of perfectibility incompatible with their full development. Of these ideas the young enthusiast at Arenenberg made himself the high priest and interpreter with an earnestness of faith of which he was, possibly, the first dupe. Those ideas, it must be borne in mind, were not altogether peculiar to the Prince. They were the great delusion of the age. The memory of the First Napoleon was no sooner released from the pressure under which the senseless reaction of the Bourbons vainly attempted to hold it than it was idealized into a myth. Napoleon was no longer the man of the Dix-huit Brumaire, of the Levée en masse. What men remembered of him were the Code Civil, the Alpine roads, the Legion of Honour. His name was, above all things, associated with the liberal Acte Additionel of 1815. He was the man with whose good intentions the courtyard of the villa at Longwood was paved. It was from this Prometheus bound that the young Pretender professed to hold his commission. He came to repair and to fulfil; he stood forth as the redeemer of the great man’s dying pledges, the executor of his last will and testament. Louis Philippe, who dreaded the Pretender and honoured him with the crown of proscription was all the time playing into his hands. From beginning to end the July Monarchy laboured at the apotheosis of Imperialism. Aware of the nature of the people’s complaint, their rulers hoped to overcome it by ministering to it homeopathically. They inoculated the virus already creeping in the nation’s veins. From the restoration of the bronze statue on the top of the Vendˆme column in 1831 to the laying of the granite coffin beneath the dome of the Invalides in 1840, France was being turned into a vast Napoleonic monument. The Press teemed with little else but Napoleonic literature. The attack on the Strasburg barracks in 1836, and the landing at Boulogne in 1840, were only egregious blunders in so far that they took France by surprise. There was neither preparation nor opportunity. Nations are not easily roused in cold blood. Popular movements must be in a great measure dependent on time and place. It was not because the Prince had any reason to believe that he would be particularly welcome in Alsace or in Picardy that he made choice of a city on the Rhine or of a seaport on the Channel. It was because those places happened to be each at a different period nearest at hand – the one nearest to him as he came up from Switzerland, the other opposite to him as he steamed from the English coast. The precedent at Cannes bewildered him. He acted in obedience to that blind idolatry of his uncle, to that servility of imitation, which, as may be seen in the sequel, marred not less than it made him. Strasburg and Boulogne were in every respect poor parodies of the Return from Elba. They were also clearly a rehearsal of the Coup d’Etat on a small scale. In 1836 and in 1840 Louis Napoleon had forgotten all his disclaimers of 1831. He no longer aspired to the glory of a mere French citizen and soldier of France. He was already a full-grown Cæsar, not with the tricolor merely, but with the crown, sceptre, and eagle. His notions about the sovereignty of the people were sufficiently plain and consistent. The people were to be free – free to choose him. At Strasburg and Boulogne he evidently took the nation’s consent for granted. His appeal was to the soldiers; his faith was in them. Had the barracks realized his expectation, had his cry ‘Vivel’Empereur’ found an echo in the ranks, the plébiscite would have followed as a matter of course.

Those miserable failures at Strasburg and Boulogne darkened the prospects of Bonapartism apparently for ever. They deprived the Pretender of all initiative in revolutionary movements. Henceforth the Prince would have to watch the tide. The quarry might be his yet, but only when others had struck it down for him. Those very failures, however, were instrumental in revealing no less than in forming his character. Placed in the power of his enemies, after Strasburg, from the 30th of October to the 21st of November, 1836, and, after Boulogne, from the 4th of August, 1840, to the 25th of May, 1846, he gave proof of fortitude and dignity. In his intercourse with his captors, judges, and gaolers, he managed to have himself treated as a Monarch, though a vanquished one. He repaid Swiss hospitality by a spontaneous departure from Arenenberg in August, 1838, when the gallant Confederacy professed its readiness to run the risk of a quarrel with France for his sake. Neither his six years’ confinement in a State fortress – his ‘course of studies at the University of Ham,’ as he termed it, nor the two distinct periods of his not ungenial exile in London – 1838 to 1840, and 1846 to 1848, were lost upon him. Amid the gloom of a captive’s life, as among the dissipations of a small if not quite select society, the activity of his mind was uncommon. He studied England; he conceived for this country that quiet but steady attachment which seldom fails to spring up in the heart of those who spend a summer and winter among us. Among the French the Prince generally sought tools and accomplices; of the English he made friends and companions. He was stanch rather than choice in his connexions. The consciousness of the loftiness of his ends rendered him indifferent to the lowness of his means. The best instrument in the schemer’s hand was the most passive, hence, if necessary, the most unscrupulous. His knowledge of men seldom failed him, and commensurate with his knowledge was his indulgence to their foibles, and his sympathy with their moods. He accepted devotion with all its burdens and drawbacks. He was a friend à toute épreuve. A partisan might have to be disavowed, but no one was ever sacrificed; nor was the least act of kindness shown to the Pretender in adversity ever forgotten by the Sovereign in his prosperity.

Eighteen hundred and forty-eight came. The faintheartedness of a King and the infatuation of a Minister left France to her own mastery. Ahandful of dreamers and schemers pulled down the whole social edifice. From February to June of that year the disorganization, though less violent and bloody, was far more thorough than during the worst period of the Reign of Terror. In an evil day France had been taken by surprise. On the morrow she was appalled at the results of her own supineness and improvidence. On the third day she was anxious for reaction, on the look-out for a man who could save society. That task was morally fulfilled by Lamartine with a happy phrase; materially by Cavaignac with an awful massacre. By biding his time Louis Napoleon reaped the benefit both of the poet’s and of the soldier’s work. In February he made a tender of his services; but in April and in June he still declined the seats which were offered to him in the National Assembly. On the memorable 10th of April, as the world remembers, Prince Louis Napoleon was still doing duty as special constable in King-street, St. James’s. He ‘wished to undeceive those who charged him with ambition,’ but he ‘would know how to fulfil any duty which the people might lay upon him.’ He said this on the 15th of June; ten days later the revolution was crushed. On the 26th of September he crossed the Channel and made his first appearance in the Assembly. Clear as the ground was before him, actively as his friends exerted themselves in his behalf, he still felt his way cautiously, almost timidly. Republicanism was in the mouth of all; monarchic restoration in the hearts of most men. Lamartine, Cavaignac, any of the so-called Republicans du lendemain, would keep the seat warm for a Prince either of the elder or of the younger Bourbonbranch; but Louis Napoleon, if he took it, would be sure to keep it for himself. Hence there was, doubtless, considerable mistrust of and illwill towards him. Aware of this feeling, and with but little confidence in his debating powers, the Pretender limited himself to a defensive policy in the Assembly. His rare attempts to speak were neither brilliant nor successful. He sat down unmoved, in sullen, silent discomfiture, trusting to the prestige of his uncle’s name to plead his cause among the people. Whether dictated by choice or necessity, his course was the wisest. On the 10th of December, 1848, Cavaignac had a million and a half of the people’s votes for the Presidency of the Republic. Prince Napoleon had above six millions. Upon that vote the supreme power of the Pretender could have been legally and peacefully founded for ever. Up to the close of the year 1848 no good whatever was known about the newly-elected President. Ridicule is apt to kill the most honourable names in France, and the Prince’s name was only associated with the farces of Strasburg and Boulogne. The vast majority of the national representation, the whole wealth and worth of the country, were dead against him; yet the mass of the people had, with very little solicitation and hardly any exertion on his part, pronounced for him. Henceforth the President had possession – nine-tenths of the law – on his side.

For the best part of the next two years the President and the still hostile Assembly were busy with the task of killing the dead. Republicanism had no friends, and no quarter was to be given to it. All efforts were turned to the reestablishment of that compact, centralized administration which, in normal times, constitutes the strength and pride of France. The sword of the State was being tempered; no matter who might be destined to wield it, every one was interested in the keenness of its edge and the sharpness of its point. In the meanwhile, however, its hilt was in the President’s hand and every repressive measure tightened his grasp upon it. Louis Napoleon was sure that the ‘union of the two powers – legislative and executive – was indispensable to the tranquillity of the country.’ The Assembly perceived, too late, that the President was bringing his theory into practice. They strove to limit his powers, to circumscribe his influence; they attempted to curtail his expenditure; they set up a permanent committee; they proposed to take from him the command-in-chief of the Army, and to invest it with the President of the Assembly. Goaded into action by imminent danger, the so-called ‘old parties’ – Bourbonists and Orleanists – were accused of a design to hasten a Restoration, which, if not absolutely impossible, was, at least, premature. In their visits to Claremont after Louis Philippe’s death, and to Wiesbaden at the time of the Count de Chambord’s stay in that place, the friends of the exiled Princes were supposed to be negotiating a fusion between the two branches of the Bourbon family – a negotiation which remains unfinished to the present time. Changarnier, the General in command of the Army of Paris and of the National Guard of the Seine, was pointed out as the French Monk who was to enable the legitimate dynasty to come by its own again. There may have been much or little in these surmises, but Louis Napoleon knew how to make the most of them. The President fought his battles with indifferent success in the Chamber, but his very defeats paved the way for his victories in the country. Nothing could be more daring than his self-assertion; nothing more open than his plans of operation. The Bonapartist conspiracy embodied in the Société du Dix Decembre was carried on with the cards on the table. ‘In extreme dangers,’ said the President, ‘Providence not unfrequently trusts one man with the safety of all.’ At the reviews of St. Maur and Satory the soldiers hailed the President with that cry of ‘Vivel’Empereur!’ to which the garrisons of Strasburg and Boulogne had refused to respond years before.

From the beginning of 1851 everything was being made ready for a final conflict. Early in January Changarnier was removed from his command. In October and November the President laid his ultimatum–first before his Ministers, then before the Assembly. He proposed the repeal of the law of May 31, 1850, by which universal suffrage had been restricted. ‘That measure,’ said the President, ‘was tantamount to the disfranchisement of 3,000,000 electors.’ Had even the law really had such sweeping effects the President had but little to fear from an appeal to the people. Had even that law been in force in December, 1848, the balance of the votes would still have been decisive in his favour. Nothing, however, but the certainty of an overwhelming majority could allay his apprehensions. To insure it he resolved on the Coup d’Etat of the 2d of December. He laid a violent hand on his most dreaded opponents. He dispersed the less dangerous. He dissolved the Assembly and the Council of State. He abrogated the law of May 31, and re-established universal suffrage. He then called together the ‘Comitia of the nation.’ In the mean time he declared Paris in a State of Siege; he deluged its streets with blood; he terrorized France by wholesale transportation. He finally asked for a sanction or condemnation of his deed of violence. Seven millions and a half of Frenchmen against little above half a million gave sentence in his favour.

The Second Napoleon had thus his Deux Decembre, as the first had his Dix-huit Brumaire. The elevation of Louis Napoleon under any circumstances appeared so certain that one is almost tempted to fancy that wanton display of uncalled-for energy to have only been prompted by the nephew’s blind obligation to tread in his uncle’s footsteps. Every subsequent act of his, at any rate, was sheer repetition. From the 2d of December, 1851, to the same day and month of the following year, the Imperial Revolution went through the same phases which it exhibited from the 10th of November, 1799, to the 18th of May, 1804; only the more recent catastrophe was limited within a narrower cycle. There was the same impatient stir in the Departments; the same obsequious solicitations of the Senate; the same martial pageantries on the Champ de Mars; the same triumphal progress of the Cæsar. The Constitution was a paltry copy. The history on the coins was identical. Even the fortuitous coincidence of the assassin’s dagger and of the infernal machine was not wanting. It was only in the number of votes that the new generation outdid the old.

And now, at last, Louis Napoleon was back at the Tuileries. It would be to little purpose if we were to endeavour to realize his sensations, as, at the mature age of 44, the pale reminiscences of thirty-seven years since crowded upon him on the threshold of that lately desecrated palace. Verily, the man’s faith had its reward! That faith which never forsook him at the gloomiest periods of his career; that faith which, at a distance, raised a sneer at his expense, yet cast a magnetic spell over all who came within his reach – that faith proved to have been founded on unerring instincts. The Pretender’s claims were admitted. He had aimed no higher than his stubborn will could lift him. That intense yearning by which the uncle had been haunted all his lifetime had certainly fallen to the nephew, whatever other parts of the rich inheritance might have been denied to him. The words by which that undefinable feeling found utterance in the strain of the Italian poet apply with equal force to the two aspiring relatives. There was in both cases ‘the stormy, trembling joy of a great purpose, the longing of a heart fretting as it impatiently thirsted for empire, and attaining it at last, and grasping a prize for which it had seemed madness to hope.’

In the magnitude of the result people easily lost sight of the means by which it had been achieved. The cold shiver which had followed closely upon the revolutionary fever heat of 1848 had scarcely passed away three years later, and, under its fit, men were ready to go any length in the way of reaction. The cry was everywhere for strong Government; and, somehow, the Coup d’Etat, whatever might be the grounds of justice or expediency on which it was made to stand, was hailed as evidence of its author’s energy, and accepted as a pledge of social security. The hand which had displayed so much vigour in seizing the reins of government might surelybe relied uponto hold them with equal firmness. Even for men swayed by more rigid notions of right and wrong, the moral question how the supreme power had been obtained was absorbed in the other far more momentous problem – what uses it would be put to. The ends of Providence are often fulfilled in inscrutable ways; and it little mattered, after all, by what means another Napoleon had ascended the throne of France, if men could only ascertain how much of the good or the evil of the old Napoleonic era would be reproduced in the new.

We have already expressed our opinion that the nephew carried the worship of the uncle’s memory to the verge of superstition. He was, however, aware that there was a weak no less than a strong side to old Imperialism. He announced the coming not of the Caesarean but of the Augustan age. The Second Empire brought not a sword but peace. In the mind of the French people the mere reappearance of the Eagle, the revival of the name of Napoleon, constituted a victory over allied Europe. The Deux-Decembre had avenged Waterloo. France had broken through the dynastic arrangements of 1815, and her ancient enemies had not a word to say against her achievement. This negative homage being paid to her vanity, France had no longer an interest in the disturbance of the common tranquillity. Questions about natural frontiers, about oppressed nationalities might, indeed, arise; but moral ascendency could now, perhaps, accomplish more than the edge of the sword. France would be no less true to her mission because she put off its fulfilment by violent means till she was convinced of the inefficiency of all other arguments. There was, at the outlet, perfect harmony between the views of the French people and those of their new Sovereign with respect to foreign politics. There was faith in the undisputed, though pacific, ascendency of the Empire over the council of nations – in the necessity for a revision of existing Treaties, for a remodelling of the map of Europe, for the emancipation of enslaved nations, for the protection of minor States, of those especially which had shown the greatest devotion to the cause of Imperial France and had been involved in its downfall; of States like Belgium, Denmark, and Saxony; of nations like Italy and Poland. Over and above these general French sympathies, the Emperor brought with him, as peculiar to himself, a genuine regard for England, our own estimate of the true bases of national greatness, our notions of a free commercial policy. It is not a little remarkable that the first enterprise of real magnitude in which France was engaged, after panting for so many years to avenge Waterloo, should have been planned in concert with the very country upon which vengeance for that defeat was to be mainly wreaked. Yet the Crimean War of 1854 was waged not only in obedience to what the majority of the French people were inclined to consider as English views, but also in subservience to what they regarded as English interests. It was the Emperor’s own war, and Napoleon only brought it to a sudden end when we refused to mix up with the original quarrel those French schemes about Poland and the Rhine in which he found it difficult to withstand his people’s aspirations. Against the same rock were wrecked, in later times, 1864, all hopes of a cordial co-operation of the two great Western Powers in behalf of invaded Denmark. As to the immediate relations between the two nations, there is no doubt that against the half-smothered animosities of French Chauvinisim nothing availed us so much as the Emperor’s stout determination, not only not to be driven into hostilities but to strengthen the bonds of amity with us at any price. Neither the vapouring and blustering of the Press nor the famous address of the Colonels were able to shake the Emperor’s determination to maintain the cordial understanding between the two countries; and the conclusion of the Commercial Treaty and the abolition of passports in favour of English travellers must be traced to his sole initiative.