Throne-Makers. William Roscoe Thayer
that his Prussians must be roused in a different way.
It may be that the empire he created will not last; it is certain that it cannot escape modifications which will change the aspect he stamped upon it; but we may be sure that, whatever happens, the recollection of his Titanic personality will remain. He belongs among the giants, among the few in whom has been stored for a lifetime a stupendous energy—kinsmen of the whirlwind and the volcano—whose purpose seems to be to amaze us that the limits of the human include such as they. At the thought of him, there rises the vision of mythic Thor with his hammer, and of Odin with his spear; the legend of Zeus, who at pleasure held or hurled the thunderbolt, becomes credible.
NAPOLEON III
Madame de Staël said of Rienzi and his Romans: “They mistook reminiscences for hopes;” of the second French Empire and the third Napoleon we may say: “They staked their hopes on reminiscences.”
In our individual lives we realize the power of memory, suggestion, association. If we have ever yielded to a vice, we have felt, it may be years after, how the sight of the old conditions revives the old temptation. A glance, a sound, a smell, may be enough to conjure up a long series of events, whether to grieve or to tempt us, with more than their original intensity. So we learn that the safest way to escape the enticement is to avoid the conditions. Recent psychology has at last begun to measure the subtle power of suggestion.
But now, suppose that instead of an individual a whole nation has had a terrific experience of succumbing to temptation, and that a cunning, unscrupulous man, aware of the force of association and reminiscence, deliberately applies both to reproduce those conditions in which the nation first abandoned itself to excess: the case we have supposed is that of France and Louis Napoleon. Before the reality of their story the romances of hypnotism pale.
After Sédan it was the fashion to regard Louis Napoleon as the only culprit in the gilded shame of the Second Empire; we shall see, however, that the great majority of Frenchmen longed for his coming, applauded his victories, and by frequent vote sanctioned his deeds. A free people keeps no worse ruler than it deserves.
The Napoleonic legend, by which Louis Napoleon rose to power, was not his creation, but that of the French: he was simply shrewd, and used it. What was this legend?
When allied Europe finally crushed the great Napoleon at Waterloo, France breathed a sigh of relief. Twenty campaigns had left her exhausted: she asked only for repose. This the Restoration gave her. But the gratification of our transient cravings, however strong they may be, cannot long satisfy; and when the French recovered from their exhaustion, they felt their permanent cravings return. The Bourbons, they soon realized, could not appease those dominant Gallic desires. For the Bourbons had destroyed even that semblance of liberty Napoleon took care to preserve; they persecuted democratic ideas; they brought back the old aristocracy, with its mildewed haughtiness; they babbled of divine right—as if the worship of St. Guillotine had not supervened. During twenty years France had been the arbitress of Europe; now, under the narrow, forceless Bourbons, she was treated like a second-rate power. Waterloo had meant not only the destruction of Napoleon, from which France derived peace, but also humiliation, which galled Frenchmen more and more as their normal sensitiveness returned.
The Bourbons, knowing that they might be tolerated so long as they were not despised, got up a military promenade into Spain, to prove that France could still meddle in her neighbors’ affairs, and that the Bourbons were not less mighty men of war than the Bonapartes. They captured the Trocadero, and restored vile King Ferdinand and his twenty-six cooks to the throne of Spain; and they hoped that the one-candle power of fame lighted by these exploits would outdazzle the Sun of Austerlitz. But no, the dynasty of Bourbon, long since headless, proved to be rootless too: one evening Charles X played his usual game of whist at St. Cloud; the next, he was posting out of France with all the speed and secrecy he could command.
Louis Philippe, who came next, might have been expected to please everybody: Royalists, because he was himself royal; Republicans, because he was Philippe Egalité’s son; constitutionalists, because he hated autocratic methods; shopkeepers of all kinds, because he was ‘practical.’ And in truth his administration may be called the Golden Age of the bourgeoisie—the great middle class which, in France and elsewhere, was superseding the old aristocracy. Napoleon had organized a nobility of the sword; after him came the nobility of the purse. Louis Philippe could say that under his rule France prospered: her merchants grew rich; her factories, her railroads, all the organs of commerce, were healthily active. And yet she was discontented. The spectacle of her Citizen King walking unattended in the streets of Paris, his plump thighs encased in democratic trousers, his plump and ruddy face wearing a complacent smile, his whole air that of the senior partner in some old, respectable, and rich firm—even this failed to satisfy Frenchmen. “He inspires no more enthusiasm than a fat grocer,” was said of him. Frenchmen did not despise money-making, but they wanted something more: they wanted gloire.
Let us use the French word, because the English glory has another meaning. Glory implies something essentially noble—nay, in the Lord’s Prayer it is a quality attributed to God himself: but gloire suggests vanity; it is the food braggarts famish after. The minute-men at Concord earned true glory; but when the United States, listening to the seductions of evil politicians, attacked and blasted a decrepit power—fivefold smaller in population, twenty-fold weaker in resources—they might find gloire among their booty, but glory, never. As prosperity increased, the Gallic appetite for gloire increased. Louis Philippe made several attempts to allay it, but he dared not risk a foreign war, and the failure of his attempts made him less and less respected.
And now arose the Napoleonic legend, at first no more than a bright exhalation in the evening, but gradually taking on the sweep, the definiteness, the fascination, of mirage at noonday. Time enough had elapsed to dull or quite blot out the recollections of the hardships and strains, the millions of soldiers killed and wounded, the taxes, the grievous tyranny; men remembered only the victories, the rewards, and the splendor. A new generation, unacquainted with the havoc of war, had grown up, to listen with fervid envy to the reminiscences of some gray-haired veteran, who had made the great charge at Wagram or ridden behind Ney at Borodino. Those exploits were so stupendous as to seem incredible, and yet they were vouched for by too many survivors to be doubted. Was not Thiers setting forth the marvelous story in nineteen volumes? Were not Béranger and even Victor Hugo singing of the departed grandeur? Were not the booksellers’ shelves loaded with memoirs, lives, historical statements, polemics? Paris, France, seemed to exist merely to be the monument of one man. And wherever the young Frenchman traveled—in Spain, in Italy, along the Rhine or the Danube, to Vienna, or Cairo, or Moscow—he saw the footprints of French valor and French audacity, reminders that Napoleon had made France the mistress of Europe. No Frenchman, were he Bourbon or Republican, but felt proud to think that his countrymen had humbled Prussia and Austria.
Confronted by such recollections, the France of Louis Philippe looked degenerate. It offered nothing to thrill at, to brag over; it sinned in having—what it could not help—a stupendous past just behind it. So the Napoleonic legend grew. The body of the great Emperor was brought home from St. Helena, to perform more miracles than the mummy of a mediæval saint. Power and gloire came to be regarded as the products of a Napoleonic régime: to secure them it was only necessary to put a Bonapartist on the throne.
Contemporaneous with the expansion of this spell, Socialism grew up, and taught that, just as the bourgeoisie had overthrown the old privileged classes in the French Revolution, so now the working classes must emancipate themselves from the tyranny of the bourgeoisie. Political equality without industrial equality seemed a mockery. In this wise the doctrines of a score of Utopians penetrated society to loosen old bonds and embitter class with class. And besides all this, there was the usual wrangle of political parties. The tide of opposition rose, and on February 24, 1848, swept away Louis Philippe and his minister Guizot. Among the many fortune-seekers whom that tide brought to land was Louis Napoleon.
He was born in Paris,