France in the Nineteenth Century Part 22

I have told at some length of this visit, because it seemed to me to mark the culminating point of Napoleon III.'s successful career; not only was he fully admitted into the inner circle of European sovereigns, but his place there was confirmed by the personal friendship and alliance of the greatest among them.

In 1867 there was another Universal Exposition held in Paris; and this was also a time of great outward glory and triumph for the emperor, surrounded as he was by European emperors, crown princes, and kings; but Queen Victoria was then a sorrowing widow, and decay was threatening Napoleon's apparent prosperity.

It was in 1867 that the emperor and empress received the czar, the sultan, the Crown Prince of Prussia, Princess Alice of Hesse Darmstadt, and many other crowned heads and celebrities. It was a year of fetes and international courtesies. But in Paris itself there was a strange feeling of insecurity,--a fearful looking for something, society knew not what. "It seemed," said one who breathed the rarefied air in which lived the upper circles of society, "as if the air were charged with electricity; as if the shadows of coming events were being darkly cast over the joyous city."

One of the most remarkable sights of that gay time of hollowness and brilliancy was the review given in honor of the Emperor of Russia, on June 6. No less than sixty thousand French troops, of all arms of the service, filed past the three grand-stands on the race-course of the Bois de Boulogne. On the central stand sat the Empress Eugenie, with the Prince Imperial, the Crown Princess of Prussia, her sister, Princess Alice, and the Grand d.u.c.h.ess of Leuchtenberg. Before this stand, on horseback on one side, sat the Grand Duke Vladimir, the Czarevitch (the present Czar of Russia), the Crown Prince of Prussia (since the lamented Emperor Frederick), Prince Gortschakoff (the Russian prime minister), Count Bismarck, and an English n.o.bleman; on the other side were the Duc de Leuchtenberg, the Duke of Mecklenburg, and the Prince of Hesse Darmstadt; while in the centre of them all rode the czar, with Napoleon III. on one hand, and on the other the king of prussia.[1]

[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]

How little could any of those who looked upon that throng of royal personages imagine what in little more than two years was coming on them all!

The emperor was fond of literature, and when drawn into a literary discussion, his half-closed eyes would gleam with sudden light, and his criticisms would be both witty and valuable. During his later years, hara.s.sed by sickness and perplexities of all kinds, his greatest pleasure was to shut himself up in his study, and there work upon his "Life of Caesar." He wrote it entirely himself, though he had many learned men in France and Germany employed in looking up references and making extracts for him. The book was considered a work of genuine merit. To its author it was a labor of love. He threw into it all his experience of life, all his theories, all his Napoleonic convictions; for in Caesar and Napoleon he found many parallels. He hoped to be admitted as a literary man into the French Academy, and he meant to base his claim upon this book.

I have said nothing of the cares that oppressed the emperor in connection with the war in the Crimea, which was prolonged far beyond his expectations; of the campaign in Italy, broken short off by threats of intervention made by the king of Prussia, and followed by feelings of disappointment and revenge on the part of the Italians; of the intervention of the emperor in 1866, after the battle of Sadowa, to check the triumphant march of the Prussian army through Austria; nor of the bombs of Orsini, which led to a rupture of the friendliness between France and England, breaking up the cordial relations which existed between the two courts in 1857, and reviving that panic about French invasion which seems periodically to attack Englishmen ever since the great scare in the days of Bonaparte. These subjects belong rather to historical reminiscences of England, Italy, or Germany; but the emperor had anxieties besides in France, and often found it hard to regulate with discretion even the ways of his own household.

The empress, who after she had governed France as regent in 1859, during her husband's absence in the Italian war, had been admitted to councils of state, by no means approved either her husband's domestic or foreign policy. We have seen that her influence was strongly exerted to bring about the unfortunate attempt to give an emperor and empress to Mexico; but on two other points that she had at heart she failed. She could not persuade her husband to undertake the reconstruction of the kingdom of Poland, nor to a.s.sist Queen Isabella of Spain when her subjects, exasperated at last by her excesses, drove her over the French frontier. The empress disliked many of the coterie who enjoyed her husband's intimacy, especially his cousin, Prince Napoleon. She resented the prince's opposition to her marriage; she disliked his manners, his political opinions, his aggressive opposition to all the offices of religion; and she succeeded in detaching him from the emperor's confidence, and in hindering his taking part in public affairs. To his wife--the Princess Clotilde--she was deeply attached; but that did not serve to reconcile her to the prince, her husband. Both ladies were opposed to any diminution of the pope's temporal power in Italy; but the private circle of the friends of the empress was too gay for the chastened nature of the Princess Clotilde, and by degrees her intimacy with the empress became less close and affectionate than it had been in the early days of her unhappy marriage.

An episode in the private life of the palace, in 1859, created considerable friction in Paris, and provoked remonstrances from the emperor's ministers.[1] This was the admission to the circle of intimates who surrounded the empress of the mesmerist and medium Home. This man gave himself out to be an American; but many persons suspected that his native land was Germany, and some said he was a secret agent of that court, which had emissaries all over France, in search of useful information. The empress, having heard of Home's strange feats of table-turning and spirit-rapping in fashionable _salons_ of the capital, was eager to witness his performances. The women in the high society of Paris were greatly excited about them.

Spiritualism was the fad of the season, and the empress caught the infection. The emperor, who was present at many of the exhibitions at the Tuileries, was also, it is said, much impressed by some of them, especially by a mysterious invisible hand laid firmly on his shoulder, and by an icy breath that pa.s.sed over his face.

But although the emperor, always indulgent to his wife, resisted at first the advice of his counsellors to get rid of Home, he was forced at last to put an end to the _seances_ at the Tuileries, Fontainebleau, and Biarritz. The spirits "summoned" had had the imprudence to obtrude upon him their own views of his policy. When the alliance with Italy and a probable war with Austria were under discussion in the cabinet, the spirit-inspired pencil at the Tuileries scrawled these words: "The emperor should declare war and deliver Italy from the Austrians." Not long afterwards, the vulgar presumption of Home, who had accompanied the court to Biarritz, provoked the emperor, and caused him to give ear to the earnest remonstrances of his Minister for Foreign Affairs. He gave orders that Home should appear at the Tuileries no more.

[Footnote 1: Pierre de Lana.]

Home died not long after in Germany, forgotten by the world of fashion, but leaving behind him a little circle of ardent believers.

The story of the emperor's later life seems to me to be one full of pathos and of pain. It is the record of a man who knew himself to be slowly dying, whose physical strength was ebbing day by day, but who was bearing up under the vain hope of accomplishing the impossible. One admires his extreme patience, his uncomplaining perseverance, as he tried to roll the stone of Sisyphus, yet with unspoken misgivings in his heart that it would escape from him and crush the hopes of his life, as it rolled back out of his hands.

"Poor emperor!" says the eye-witness who beheld him in his hour of triumph, before the grand-stand, in 1867, at the great review.

"He was a friend to all, and he fell through his friends. He was very true to England, whatever he may have been to other countries; but England failed him, unfortunately in Denmark, fortunately in Mexico, and fatally in 1870."[1]

[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]

It seems, too, as if the world forgets now--what a.s.suredly must be remembered hereafter in history--that it was he who relieved Europe from the treaties of Vienna, and a.s.serted the claims of nationalities; that he brought about the resurrection of Italy; that through his policy we have a solution satisfactory to the world in general of the question of the pope's power as a temporal prince in Italy; that he was the builder of modern Paris, the promoter of agriculture, the railroad king of France, the peasant's and the workman's friend.

In early life he had been an adventurer; but a kind heart gave him gracious manners. He was grateful, faithful, and generous; terribly prodigal of money, and the victim of the needy men by whom he was surrounded. It seems as if, in spite of his _coup d'etat_ (which, subtracting its ma.s.sacres, may have been a measure of self-preservation), he deserves better of the world and of France than to have his memory spurned and spat upon, as men do now.

He gave France eighteen years of pre-eminent prosperity; he left her, to be sure, in ruins. In his fall he utterly obliterated the prestige of the name of Bonaparte. No Bonaparte, probably, will ever again awaken the enthusiasm of the French people,--an enthusiasm which Napoleon III. relied on, justly at first, and fatally afterwards, when a generation had arisen in France, from whom the feeling had pa.s.sed away.

The emperor's malady, which was slowly sapping his strength, is said to be the most painful one that flesh is heir to. Every movement was pain to him. Absolute rest was what he needed, but cares pressed hard upon him on every side. He must die, and leave his empire in the hands of a woman and a child. His government had been wholly personal. He could not transmit his power, such is it was, to any other person,--least of all could he place it in feeble hands.

There were no props to his throne. No Bismarck or Cavour stood beside him, to whom he might confide his wife and son, and feel that though his hand no longer held the helm, the ship would sail straight on the course he had laid down for her. The men about him were third and fourth rate men,--all of them enormously his own inferiors. They cheated and deceived and plundered him; and he knew it in a measure, though not as he knew it after his downfall.

The emperor said once: "There is but one Bonapartist among us, and that is Fleury. The empress is a Legitimist, I am a Socialist, and Prince Napoleon a Republican." As he contemplated the future, it seems to have occurred to him that the only thing that could be done was to teach France to govern herself,--to change his despotic authority into a const.i.tutional government. He might live long enough, he thought, to make the new plan work, and if, by a successful war with Germany, a war impending and perhaps inevitable, he could gain brilliant military glory; if he could restore to France that frontier of the Rhine which had been wrested from her by Europe after the downfall of his uncle,--his dynasty would be covered with glory, and all might go on right for a few years, till his boy should be old enough to replace him.

Both these expedients he tried. In 1869 he announced that he was about to grant France liberal inst.i.tutions. He put the empress forward whenever it was possible, and he made up his mind that as war with Germany was sure to come, the sooner it came, the better, that he might reap its fruits while some measure of life and strength was left him. Long before, Prince Albert had a.s.sured him that his policy, which made his ministers mere heads of bureaux, which never called them together for common action as members of one cabinet, which compelled each to report only to his master, who took on trust the accuracy of the reports made to him, was a very dangerous mode of governing. It was indeed very unlike his uncle's _practice_, though it might have been theoretically his _system_. Both uncle and nephew came into power by a _coup d'etat_,--the one on the 18th Brumaire (Nov. 9, 1799), the other on Dec. 2, 1851. Both were undoubtedly the real choice of the people; both really desired the prosperity of France: but the younger man was more genuine, more kindly, more human than the elder one. The uncle surrounded himself with "mighty men, men of renown,"--great marshals, great diplomatists, great statesmen. Louis Napoleon had not one man about him whom he could trust, either for honesty, ability, or personal devotion, unless, indeed, we except Count Walewski. All his life he had cherished his early ideas of the liberation of Italy, which he accomplished; of the resurrection of Poland, which he never found himself in a position to attempt; of the rectification of the frontier of France, which he in part accomplished by the attainment of Nice and Savoy; and, finally, his dream included the restoration to France of self-government, with order reconciled to liberty.

As early as January, 1867, the emperor was consulting, not only his friends, but his political opponents as to his scheme of transforming despotism into a parliamentary government. He wrote thus to M.

emile Ollivier, a leader of the liberal party in France:[1]--

[Footnote 1: Pierre di Lana.]

"Believe me, I am not pausing through indecision, nor through a vain infatuation as to my prerogatives; but my fear is of parting in this country, which is shaken by so many conflicting pa.s.sions, with the means of re-establishing moral order, which is the essential basis of liberty. My embarra.s.sment on the subject of a law of the Press is not how to find the power of repression, but how to define in a law what deserves repression. The most dangerous articles may escape repression, while the most insignificant may provoke prosecution. This has always been the difficulty. Nevertheless, in order to strike the public mind by decisive measures, I should like to effect at one stroke what has been called the _crowning of the edifice_. I should like to do this at once and forever; for it is important to me, and it is above all important to the country.... I wish to advance firmly in a straight line, without oscillating to the right or left. You see that I have spoken to you with perfect frankness."

We also see in this letter one of Louis Napoleon's characteristics,--a fondness for taking people by surprise. Nearly everything he did was a surprise to the public, and yet it had long been maturing in his own mind.

The next time M. Ollivier saw the emperor he was told of his intention to grant the right of holding political meetings; the responsibility of cabinet ministers to the Chamber; and the almost entire freedom of the Press. The emperor added, with a smile: "I am making considerable concessions, and if my government immediately succeeded that of the First Empire, this would be acknowledged; but since I came after parliamentary governments, my concessions will be considered small."

The emperor's experiment was a failure. The moment restraint was taken off, and the French had liberty of speech and freedom of the Press, they became like boys released from school and its strict discipline. The brutal excesses of language in the Parisian newspapers, the fierceness of their attacks upon the Government, and the shamelessness of their slander, alarmed the emperor and the best of his personal adherents, who had been by no means supporters of his policy. But though the experiment gave signs of never being likely to succeed, and no one seemed pleased with the new system, the emperor persevered. He refused to withdraw his reforms; he declined to make what children call "an Indian gift" to his people: but the effect of the divided counsels by which he was embarra.s.sed was that these reforms were accepted by the public merely as experiments, to be tried during good behavior, and not as the basis of a new system definitively entered upon.

All through the year 1869 the difficulties of the course which the emperor adopted grew greater and greater. The emanc.i.p.ated Press was rampant. It knew no pity and no decency. Its articles on the emperor's failing health (which he insisted upon reading) were cruel in the extreme. Terrible anxieties for the future must have haunted him. If his project for self-government in France must prove a failure, when he was dead, what then? Could a child and a woman govern as he had done by a despotic will? He had done so in his days of health and strength; but events now seemed to intimate that his government had been a failure rather than a success.

Lord Palmerston, writing from Paris in Charles X.'s time, said: "Bonaparte in the last years of his reign crushed every one else, both in politics and war. He allowed no one to think and act but himself."

Somewhat the same remark could be applied to the Third Napoleon.

But Napoleon I. was a great administrator as well as a great general; his activity was inexhaustible, he corresponded with everybody, he looked after everything, he knew whether he was well or ill served; and his mode of obtaining power did not hinder his availing himself of the best talent in France. The case of his nephew was the reverse of this. His highest quality was his tenacity of purpose, and his disposition was inclined to kindly tolerance, even of pecuniary greed and slipshod service. He could rouse himself to great exertion; but in the later days of Imperialism, pain and his decaying physical powers had rendered him inert; moreover, in his general habits he had always been indolent and pleasure-loving. In carrying out the _coup d'etat_ nine tenths of the public men in France had been subjected to humiliations and indignities, by which they were permanently outraged, and a host of co-conspirators and adventurers had acquired claims upon the emperor that it was not safe to disregard. Places and money were distributed among them with reckless profusion, and many a shady money transaction, throwing discredit on some men high in favor with the emperor, was pa.s.sed over, to avoid exposure.

On the other hand, the emperor improved Paris till he made it the most beautiful city in the world. It was his aim to open wide streets through the old crowded quarters where revolution hid itself, hatching plots and crimes. He provided fresh air and drainage. He turned the Bois de Boulogne from a mere wild wood into the magnificent pleasure-ground of a great city. He completed the Louvre, and demolished the straggling, hideous buildings which disfigured the Carrousel in Louis Philippe's time. The working population, which his improvements drove out of the Faubourg Saint Antoine emigrated to high and healthy quarters in Montmartre and Belleville, where a beautiful park was laid out for them. No part of Paris escaped these improvements, though it took immense sums to complete them. But while their good results will be permanent, their immediate effect was to raise rents and make the increased cost of living burdensome to people of small incomes. The work brought also into Paris an enormous population of masons, carpenters, and day-laborers,--a population which was a good deal like the monster in the fairy tale, which had to be fed each day with the best; for if once it became hungry or dissatisfied, it might devour the man of science who had brought it into being.

Still, the French are ungrateful to Napoleon III. when they forget how much they are indebted to him for the extension of their commerce, the growth of their railroads, the improvement of their cities, and above all for his attention to sanitary science and to agriculture.

When he came to the throne, every traveller through France was struck by the poor breeds of swine, sheep, and cattle; the slovenly system of cultivation, the wide waste lands, the poor implements for farming, and the want of drainage. In his exile the emperor had lived much with English landowners, and he endeavored more than anything else to improve agriculture. He spent great sums of money himself in model farms for the purpose of showing how things could be done. But while commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing prosperity increased in France, so also did the cost of living; and the cry, "Put money in thy purse!" found its echo in the hearts of all men in all cla.s.ses of society. Speculation of every kind ran rampant, and by the year 1869 the cost of the improvements in Paris alone became greater than France could patiently bear.

Personally, Louis Napoleon had strong sympathy with the working-cla.s.ses, and was always seeking to benefit them. He favored co-operative societies; he was planning, when he fell, a system of state annuities to disabled or to aged workmen. He abolished pa.s.sports between France and England, and also the French workman's character-book, or _livret_, which by law he had been compelled to have always at hand.

In the midst of the emperor's other perplexities, there came, during the first days of 1870, a most damaging occurrence connected with his own family,--an occurrence with which the emperor had no more to do than Louis Philippe had had with the Praslin murder; but it helped to impair the remaining prestige which clung to the name of Bonaparte.

Prince Pierre Bonaparte, grandson of Lucien, was a dissolute and irregular character. His cousin, the emperor, had repeatedly paid his debts and given him, as he did to every one connected with the name of Bonaparte, large sums of money. At last Prince Pierre's conduct grew so bad that this help ceased. Then he threatened his cousin; but the emperor would not even buy an estate he owned in Corsica. Prince Pierre went back, therefore, to the cradle of his family, and there got into a fierce quarrel with an opposition member of the Chamber of Deputies. The deputy, like a true Corsican, nourished revenge. He waited till he went up to Paris, and there laid his grievances against the emperor's cousin before his fellow deputies of the opposition. They at once made it a party affair.

On Jan. 2, 1870,--the day the reformed Chamber of Deputies was opened,--two journalists of Paris, M. de Tourvielle and M. Victor Noir, went armed to Pierre Bonaparte's house at Auteuil to carry him a challenge. They found the prince in a room where he kept a curious collection of weapons. He was a coa.r.s.e man, with an ungovernable temper. High words were exchanged. Victor Noir slapped the prince in the face, and the prince, seizing a pistol, shot him dead. He then turned on M. de Tourvielle; but the latter had time to draw a sword from his sword-cane, and stood armed. Victor Noir's funeral was made the occasion of an immense republican demonstration, and M. Rochefort reviled the emperor and all his family in the newspaper he edited, "La Lanterne," calling upon Frenchmen to make an end of the Bonapartes.

Prince Pierre was tried for murder, and acquitted; Rochefort was tried for seditious libel, and condemned. It was an ominous opening for the new Chamber. The emperor had been most anxious that it should contain no deputies violently opposed to his new policy, and the elections had been scandalously manipulated in the interest of his dynasty.

Thiers complained bitterly to an Englishman, who visited him, of the undisguised tampering with voters in this election. He said,--

"The Government pretends to believe in a Chamber elected by universal suffrage, and yet dares not trust the votes of the electors; but mark my words, this tampering with an election is for the last time. What will succeed the Empire, I know not. G.o.d grant it may not be our country's ruin! But the state of things under which we live cannot last long. It is inc.u.mbent on honest men to lay before the emperor the state of the country, which his ministers do their best to keep from him. For a long time I kept silent,--it was no use to knock one's head against a wall; but now we have revolution staring us in the face, as the alternative with the Empire."

As the little man said this, we are told that the fire in his eyes gleamed through his spectacles; and as he walked about the room, he seemed to grow taller and taller.[1]

[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]

The new const.i.tutional ministry, into whose hands the emperor proposed to resign despotic power and to rule thenceforward as const.i.tutional sovereign, had for its chief M. emile Ollivier; Marshal Le Boeuf (made marshal on the field of Magenta) was the Minister of War.

The debates in the Chamber were all stormy. The opposition might not be numerous, but it was fierce and determined. It scoffed at the idea of France being free when elections were tampered with to sustain the Government; and finally things came to such a pa.s.s that the emperor resolved to play again his tromp-card, and to call a _plebiscite_ to say whether the French people approved of him and wished to continue his dynasty. They were to vote simply Yes or No.

There was not such open tampering this time with the vote as there had been in the election of the deputies, but all kinds of Government influences were brought to bear on prefects, _maires_, and other official personages, especially in the villages. The result was that 7,250,000 Frenchmen voted Yes, and one and a half million, No. But to the emperor's intense surprise and mortification, and in spite of all precautions, there were 42,000 Noes from the army. It was a terrible discovery to the emperor that there was disaffection among his soldiers. Promotion, many men believed, had for some years been distributed through favoritism. The men had little confidence in their officers, the officers complained loudly of their men. A dashing exploit in Algeria made up for irregularities of discipline.

Even the staff officers were deficient in geography, and the stories that afterwards came to light of the way in which the War Department collected worthless stores, while serviceable ones existed only on paper, seem almost incredible. Yet when war was declared, emile Ollivier said that he went into it with a light heart, and Marshal Le B?uf was reported to have told the emperor that he would not find so much as one b.u.t.ton missing on his soldiers' gaiters.

The discovery that the army was not to be depended on, and needed a war of glory to put it in good humor with itself and with its emperor, decided Napoleon III. to enter precipitately into the Franco-Prussian war while he still had health enough to share in it. Besides this, a struggle with Germany was inevitable, and he dared not leave it to his successor. Then, too, if successful,--and he never doubted of success,--all opposition at home would be crushed, and the prestige of his dynasty would be doubled, especially if he could, by a brilliant campaign, give France the frontier of the Rhine, at least to the borders of Belgium. This would indeed be a glorious crowning of his reign.

He believed in himself, he believed in his star, he believed in his own generalship, he believed that his army was ready (though his army and navy never had been ready for any previous campaign), and he believed, truly enough, that the prospect of glory, aggrandizement, and success would be popular in France.