The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 44, June, 1861

It was into such a political chaos as this that Louis Napoleon found himself plunged in 1848. He had a difficult part to fill; and that he did not succeed in satisfying most of those who had been most prominent in elevating him was inevitable from the discrepancy between his views of his position and their views of it. They had intended him to be a tool, and he was determined to be master of all the land. There was a contest for power, which ended in the coup d'état of 1851. Victory waited on the heir of her old favorite. The contest was marked by many deeds, on both sides, not defensible on strict moral grounds, but which bear too close a resemblance to the ordinary course of French politics to admit of the actors being sweepingly condemned, as if they had poisoned a pure fountain. Neither party could afford to act with fairness, because each party was convinced that the other was seeking its destruction, according to the usual rule of Gallic political warfare. That the world should have heard much of the errors of the victor, while those of the vanquished have been charitably passed over, is but natural. Victors become objects of envy, while pity is the feeling that is created by thoughts of their foes. It is only in America that the beaten party is so insolent that the conquerors are fairly over-crowed by it. All the blunders, all the acts of violence of which the other side were guilty, have been forgotten, or are not alluded to, because parties are not held accountable for evils that never were perpetrated, though it was intended that they should take form and shape and bear fruit. It is charged against the Emperor, that he deliberately planned the destruction of the Republic, and that he ceased not to labor until his purpose had been effected. Admitting this charge to be strictly well founded, what is it more than can be brought against the very men who are so loud in preferring it? The Republic was doomed from the hour of its birth, and the final struggle between the Imperialists and the Royalists was made over its carcass. That struggle was neither a Pharsalia, in which two great men contended for supremacy in a republic, nor a Philippi, in which parties fought deliberately in support of certain principles, but an Actium; and the question to be decided was, With which of two energetic forms of force should the victory be? Louis Napoleon contended for the imperial form, for the rehabilitation of the scheme of his uncle, and for an opportunity to develop the Napoleonic ideas. The other side sought the restoration of the monarchy as it had been between 1814 and 1830, with Henry V. for their idol, as any attempt to make the Comte de Paris king must have failed, though in due time Henry V. might have been displaced, if not succeeded regularly, by the head of the Orléans family. Of the two parties to the struggle that followed the election of Louis Napoleon to the Presidency, that of the President was the more friendly to liberal institutions, and the most disposed to govern in accordance with modern sentiments. The President himself was attached to the liberal party, and leaned decidedly to the left wing of it. Circumstances had all tended to make him a Constitutionalist. His connections had been principally with those countries in which liberty is best understood, and whose histories are the histories of freedom. By birth he was a prince of Holland. He had lived much in Switzerland and in England, and he had visited the United States. That part of his youth in which the mind is formed he had passed in those years in which the Bonapartists and Liberals had been allies. His writings prove that he both understood and appreciated the constitutional system of government. Such a man was not likely to become a despot merely from choice, though circumstances might make him one for the time, as they made Fabius a dictator. His recent action, in extensively liberalizing the imperial system, and in providing for perfect freedom of discussion in the Senate and the Legislative Body,—a freedom of which the supporters of the Pope have thoroughly availed themselves,—confirms the belief that his original intention was to provide a free constitution for France. Had he done so, there would have been civil war in that country within a year from the time that he became master of it. He could not trust his enemies, who, could they have obtained power, would have granted him no mercy, and therefore had no right to expect it from him. Had they been successful, we should have heard much of their acts of usurpation and cruelty, and of the injustice with which the President and his party and policy had been treated. Severe criticism, often unfair both in matter and in manner, is that which every victorious party must experience, not only from those whom it has defeated, but from the world at large. This is one of the items in the details of the heavy price which the victors must pay for their victory, no matter where it is won, or what the character of the contest the issue of which it has decided. Men worship success, but they worship it much after the fashion that some savage tribes worship the gods created by their own hands, tearing and rending at one time the images that at another had been objects of their most abject devotion.

If we judge the conduct of Louis Napoleon by reference only to Napoleon III., we shall not be inclined to condemn it. His rule has not been a perfect one, but it has been the best that France has known for fifty years, not only for the French themselves, but for foreign peoples. He has lifted France out of that slough in which she had floundered under both branches of the Bourbons, and he has done so without being guilty of any act of injustice toward other nations. The greatness of the France of Napoleon I. was unpleasingly associated with the idea of the degradation of neighboring countries, which implied the ultimate fall of the Empire, as it could not be expected that Russians and Germans would be governed from Paris. Independence is what every people strong enough to vindicate its rights will have; and hence the men at St. Petersburg and Vienna and Berlin were certain to act against the men of Paris at the first favorable opportunity that should present itself. Their dependent state was an unnatural state, and when the reaction came, the torrent swept all before it. The fall of Napoleon I. was the consequence of the manner in which he rose to the greatest height ever achieved by a man in modern days. Napoleon III., whose power is really greater than that of his uncle, has incurred the enmity of no foreign people. He has led his armies into no European capital city, and he has levied no foreign contributions. When it was in his power to dictate terms to Russia, he astonished men, and even made them angry, by the extent of his moderation. His abrupt pause in his career of Italian success, no matter what the motive of it, enabled Austria to retire from a war in which she had found nothing but defeat, with the air of a victor. The only additions he has made to the territory of France—Savoy, Nice, and Monaco—were obtained by the fair consent of all those who had any right to be consulted on the changes that were made. We find nothing in his conduct that betrays any desire to humiliate his contemporaries, and a superiority to vulgar ideas of what constitutes triumph that is almost without a parallel. No man was ever treated more insolently by hereditary sovereigns, from Czar and Kaiser and King to petty German princelings; and this insolence he has never repaid in kind, nor sought to repay in any manner. He has foregone occasions for vengeance that legitimate monarchs would have turned to the fullest account for the gratification of their hatred. He has, apparently, none of that vanity which led Napoleon I. to be pleased with having his antechamber full of kings whose hearts were brimful of hatred of their lord and master. If he were to have an Erfurt Congress, it would be as plain and unostentatious an affair as that of his uncle was superficially grand and striking. He seems perpetually to have before his mind's eye what the Greeks called the envy of the gods, the divine Nemesis, to which he daily makes sacrifice. He is the most prosperous of men, but he is determined not to be prosperity's spoiled child. If the truth were known, it would probably be found that he has not a single personal enemy among the monarchs, all of whom would, as politicians, be glad to witness his fall. In their secret hearts they say that "Monsieur Bonaparte is a well-behaved man, to whom they could wish well in any other part than that which he prefers to hold." Their predecessors hated Napoleon I. personally, and with intense bitterness, which accounts for the readiness with which they took parts in the hunting of the eagle, and for the rancor with which they treated him when his turn came to drain the cup of humiliation to the very dregs. The dislike felt for Napoleon III. is simply political, and such dislike is not incompatible with liberality in judgment and generosity of action. Should it be his fortune to fall, there would be no St. Helena provided for him.

The domestic rule of the Emperor of the French will bear comparison with that of any monarch which that people have ever had. It is not faultless, but it is as little open to criticism of a just nature as that of any European sovereign, and with reference to the changed position of sovereigns. We are not to compare Napoleon III. with Louis XIV., that sublime and ridiculous egotist, who seems never to have had a human feeling, except those feelings which humanity would be the better without. The French Revolution banished that breed of kings from Christendom, if not from the world. He must be compared with monarchs who have felt the responsibilities of their trust very differently from the man who called himself the State, who thought that twenty millions of people had been made to minister to his vanity, and who gently reproached God with ingratitude because of the victories of Eugène and Marlborough. "God, it appears, is forgetting us," he said, "notwithstanding all that we have done for Him." A monarch of this class is now as extinct as the mammoth, and traces of his footsteps excite the wonder of the disciples of political science. In these days, a monarch must rule mostly for the people, and largely by the people. He is only the popular chief in a country which has not a well-defined constitution over which time has thrown the mantle of reverence. The course of Napoleon III. has been in accordance with this view of his position. He is not the State, but he is the first man in the State. Under his lead and direction the French have known much material prosperity, and have added not a little to that wealth which, when judiciously used as a means, and not worshipped as the end of human exertion, is the source of so much happiness. The readiness with which the people, the masses of his subjects, subscribed to the great war-loans, contending for subscriptions as for valuable privileges, establishes both their prosperity under his government, and their confidence in that government's strength and permanence. That he has not made use of his power to stifle the expression of thought is clear from the numerous works that have been published, some of which were written for the purpose of attacking his dynasty,—authors of eminence choosing to pervert history by converting its volumes into huge partisan pamphlets, in which the subject handled and the object aimed at are alike libelled. He has kept the press, meaning the journals, more sharply reined up than Englishmen and Americans have approved or can approve; but as French journalists, instead of confining their political warfare to its proper use, are in the habit, when free to publish what they please, of assailing the very existence of the government itself, he has some excuse for his conduct. An English journal which should recommend the dethronement of Victoria would be as summarily silenced as ever was a French White, Blue, or Red paper. The most determined advocate of freedom of discussion must find it hard to disapprove of the suppression of the "Univers," which, while availing itself of every possible license to advocate the extremest doctrines of despotism in Church and State, demanded the suppression of freedom of all kinds in every other quarter. It is an advantage to the enemies of free speech, that they can avail themselves of its existence to advocate restriction in its comprehensive sense, while their opponents cannot consistently demand that they shall be silenced. Under the liberal policy which has just been inaugurated in France, great advantages will be enjoyed by the enemies of the government, and of free principles generally; and the Emperor is reported to have said that he shall accept the logical consequences of that policy, let the result be what it may. What has thus far happened confirms this report; but it ought not to surprise us, if he should find himself compelled to have resort to measures of restriction not much different from those "warnings" that have been fatal to more than one journal in times past. The tendency in the French mind to illegal opposition, and of the French government to meet such opposition by harsh action, will not allow us to be very sanguine as to the workings of the experiment upon which the Emperor has entered. His chief object is to establish his dynasty, and he cannot tolerate attacks upon that; and attacks of that kind would form the staple of the opposition press, were it permitted to become as free as the press is in England and in the Northern States of America.

One of the charges that have been made against the Imperial system is, that it is a stratocracy, a mere government by the sword, and that it must pass away with the Emperor himself, or be continued in the person of some military man; so that France must degenerate into a vast Algiers, and be ruled by a succession of Deys. There is something plausible in this view of the subject, which has imposed upon many persons, and which is all the more imposing because the Emperor is fifty-three years old, while his only son has but completed his fifth year; and Prince Napoleon is not popular with the army, and is an object of both fear and dislike to the members of several powerful interests. The Imperialists have themselves principally to blame for this state of things, as they have encouraged and promulgated opinions that favor its existence. Clever historical writers have discovered a remarkable resemblance between the France of to-day and the Roman Empire of the days of Augustus. Napoleon I. was the modern Julius Caesar, and Napoleon III. is Octavius. The Emperor is writing a Life of Julius Caesar, and it is believed that it is his purpose to establish the fact that his family is playing the part which the family of Caesar played more than eighteen centuries ago. If one were disposed to be critical, it would not be difficult to point out, that, as the first Roman imperial dynasty became Claudian rather than Julian in its blood and character, after the death of Augustus, so has the French imperial dynasty a better claim to be considered of the family of Beauharnais than of the family of Bonaparte. This Caesarian game is a foolish one, and may be played to an ultimate loss. Of the difference between France as she is and Rome as she was in the times of the first Caesars it is not necessary to say much, for it presents itself to every cultivated mind. The Roman Empire was an aggregation of various nations, including the highest and lowest forms of human development then known, and stretching from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, and from the forests of Germany to the deserts of Africa. Over that vast and various collection of peoples a portion of Italy bore sway; and it was to break down the tyranny of that Italian rule that the Julian rule was created, and that the Republic was made to give way to the Empire.

The cause of the Caesars was the cause of the provincials against the Italians, of the masses in twenty lands against the aristocracy of but a part of one land, of many millions of sheep against a few select wolves. The revolution that was effected through the agency of Julius and Octavius was necessary for the continuance of civilization, which was threatened with extinction through the plundering processes of proprietors and proconsuls. The Roman Emperor was the shepherd, who, though he might shear his sheep close to their skins, and not unfrequently convert many of them into mutton, for his own profit or pleasure, would nevertheless protect them against the wolves. He stood between the imperial race, of which he was himself the first member, and all the other races that were to be found in his extensive and diversified dominions. The question that he settled was one of races, not merely one of parties and political principles. What resemblance, then, can there be between the French Emperor and the Roman Imperator, or between the quarrel decided by the Napoleons and that which was decided by the first two Caesars? There may be said to be some resemblance between them, from the fact that the French aristocracy, as a body, belong to the party that is hostile to the Bonapartes, and that it was the Roman aristocracy who were beaten at Pharsalia and politically destroyed at Philippi; but the nobility of France were ruined before the name of Bonaparte had been raised from obscurity, and the first Napoleon sought to please and to conciliate the remnants of that once brilliant order. There can be no comparison made between the two aristocracies; as the Roman was one of the ablest and most ferocious bodies of men that the world has ever seen, and made a long and desperate fight for the maintenance of its power,—while the French is effete, and it is difficult to believe that in the veins of its members runs the blood of the heroes of the days of the League, or even that of the Frondeurs. Their political action reminds us of nothing but the playing of children; and the best of the leaders of the opposition to the Imperial régime are new men, most of whose names were never heard of until the present century. The Imperial family, too, unlike that of Rome, is a new family. The democratic revolution of Rome, which led to the fall of the Republic, was enabled to triumph only because the movement was headed by one of the noblest-born of Romans, a patrician of the bluest blood, who claimed descent from Venus, and from the last of the Trojan heroes. No Roman had a loftier lineage than "the mighty Julius"; and when the place of Augustus passed to Tiberius, the third Emperor represented the Claudian gens, the most arrogant, overbearing, haughty, and cruel of all those patrician gentes that figure in the history of the republican times. He belonged, too, to the family of Nero, which was to the rest of the Claudian gens what that gens was to other men,—the representative of all that is peculiarly detestable in an oligarchical fraternity. The French Caesars are emphatically novi homines, the founder of their greatness not being in existence a century ago, and born of a poor family, which had never made any impression on history. There are abundant points of contrast to be found, when we examine the origin of Imperial Rome in connection with the origin of Imperial France, but few of resemblance.

Even in the bad elements of the modern Imperial rule there is little imitation of that of the Caesars. "The ordinary notion of absolute government, derived from the form it assumes in Europe at the present day," says Merivale, "is that of a strict system of prevention, which, by means of a powerful army, an ubiquitous police, and a censorship of letters, anticipates every manifestation of freedom in thought or action, from whence inconvenience may arise to it. But this was not the system of the Caesarean Empire. Faithful to the traditions of the Free State, Augustus had quartered all his armies on the frontiers, and his successors were content with concentrating, cohort by cohort, a small, though trusty force, for their own protection in the capital. The legions were useful to the Emperor, not as instruments for the repression of discontent at home, but as faithful auxiliaries among whom the most dangerous of his nobles might be relegated, in posts which were really no more than honorable exiles. Nor was the regular police of the city an engine of tyranny. Volunteers might be found in every rank to perform the duty of spies; but it was apparently no part of the functions of the enlisted guardians of the streets to watch the countenances of the citizens, or beset their privacy. We hear of no intrusion into private assemblies, no dispersion of crowds in the streets…… They [the Emperors] made no effort to impose restraints upon thought. Freedom of thought may be checked in two ways, and modern despotism resorts in its restless jealousy to both. The one is, to guide ideas by seizing on the channels of education; the other, to subject their utterance to the control of a censorship. In neither one way nor the other did Augustus or Nero interfere at all. From the days of the Republic the system of education had been perfectly untrammelled. It was simply a matter of arrangement between the parties directly interested, the teacher and the learner. Neither State nor Church pretended to take any concern in it: neither priest nor magistrate regarded it with the slightest jealousy. Public opinion ranged, under ordinary circumstances, in perfect freedom, and under its unchecked influence both the aims and methods of education continued long to be admirably adapted to make intelligent men and useful citizens…… The same indulgence which was extended to education smiled upon the literature which flowed so copiously from it. There was no restriction upon writing or publication at Rome analogous to our censorships and licensing acts. The fact that books were copied by the hand, and not printed for general circulation, seems to present no real difficulty to the enforcement of such restrictions, had it been the wish of the government to enforce them. The noble Roman, indeed, surrounded by freedmen and clients of various ability, by rhetoricians and sophists, poets and declaimers, had within his own doors private aid for executing his literary projects; and when his work was compiled, he had in the slaves of his household the hands for multiplying copies, for dressing and binding them, and sending forth an edition, as we should say, of his work to the select public of his own class or society. The circulation of compositions thus manipulated might be to some extent surreptitious and secret. But such a mode of proceeding was necessarily confined to few. The ordinary writer must have had recourse to a professional publisher, who undertook, as a tradesman, to present his work for profit to the world. Upon these agents the government might have had all the hold it required: yet it never demanded the sight beforehand of any speech, essay, or satire which was advertised as about to appear. It was still content to punish after publication what it deemed to be censurable excesses. Severe and arbitrary as some of its proceedings were in this respect,… it must be allowed that these prosecutions of written works were rare and exceptional, and that the traces we discover of the freedom of letters, even under the worst of the Emperors, leave on the whole a strong impression of the general leniency of their policy in this particular."1 This correct picture of the policy of Imperial Rome on this point shows that the ancient sovereigns of the first of empires were more liberal than are modern rulers of their class, and that the Caesars scorned to do that which has been common with the Bonapartes. The changes in the direction of freedom which Napoleon III. has recently made are really more Caesarean in their character than anything that he had previously done in connection with thought and public discussion. It ought to be added, however, that the Romans had no daily press, and that journalism, as we understand it, was as unknown to the Caesars as were steamships and rifled cannon. Had they been troubled with those daily showers of Sibylline leaves that so vex modern potentates, their magnanimity would have been severely tested, and they might have established as severe censorships as ever have been known in Paris or Vienna.

Flattery has discovered a resemblance between the career of Napoleon III. and the career of Augustus, and it required the eyes of flattery to make such a discovery. The Frenchman is the equal of the Roman in talent, but the resemblance goes no farther. What resemblance can there be between the boy who became a statesman at twenty and the man who began his career at forty? between the youth who made himself master of the Roman situation in a few months and the elderly man whose position at fifty-three is by no means an assured one? between the man who at thirty-three had destroyed all rivals and competitors, and gathered into his person all the powers of the State, and the man who at a much later period of life is still engaged upon an experiment in politics? Augustus avenged the murder of Julius within a brief time after it had been perpetrated; Napoleon III. has never avenged the fall of his uncle, but has refrained from injuring his uncle's destroyers, when, apparently, he might have done so with profit to himself, and with the general approbation of the world. Augustus's public life knew but one signal calamity, the loss of the legions of Varus, which happened toward its close, and in his dying moments he could congratulate himself on having played well, which meant successfully, his part in the drama of life. Napoleon III.'s life has been full of calamities, and it remains yet to be seen whether history shall have to rank him among its favorites, or high in the list of those unfortunates against whom it has recorded sentence of everlasting condemnation. Should he live, and maintain his place, and bequeath his throne to his son, and that son be of an age to appreciate his position, and possessed of fair talent, he may pass for the modern Augustus; but thinking of him, and of the strange reverses of fortune that have happened since 1789 to men and to nations, we subscribe to the wisdom of the hackneyed Greek sentiment, that no man should be called fortunate until the seal of death shall have placed an everlasting and an impassable barrier between him and the cruel sports of Mutabilities which are played "to many men's decay."