BOOK ment for publishing an account of the Strasburg plot, while it shocked every just mind, led the public to speculate on the power of the party whom it was found necessary to frighten by so severe a sentence. This party, during the latter half of Louis Philippe's reign, was, indeed, more active and more en évidence than Orleanist or Republican writers have chosen to admit. There was the famous Société du Dix Décembre; the Club des Culottes de Peau, composed mainly of old officers of the Empire, as De Montholon, Voisin, and Bouffet de Montauban; and there was the Club des Cotillons, where Bonapartist ladies-Mesdames Salvage de Faverolles, Hamelin, and Régnault-Saint-Jean-d'Angely -talked treason behind their fans. The wits were merry, however, at the old grognards, at the ladies who hoped to walk through a cotillon back to the Empire, at the journalists who, with the elegant and spirituel Mocquard at their head, kept the Napoleonic tradition alive, and at the hero of Strasburg and Boulogne. Louis Philippe was at last persuaded that he had buried the mighty legend under the dome of the Invalides, and put the sword of Austerlitz on the same mouldering cushion with that of Charlemagne. He had not plucked a feather from the eagle's wing. When he had obtained from his Chamber of Peerscomposed mainly of old dignitaries and servants of the Empire the perpetual imprisonment of Napoleon's heir, he imagined that he had for ever secured the heads and remnants of the Empire. He had only stirred every village, and re-encompassed with a living interest every rude bust or portrait of the great man that decorated the hearths of the people. The delighted Orleanists accepted the acts of the Peers towards Louis Napoleon as a general public desertion of the cause of the Empire. That act helped to make many of those Peers twelve years later Senators, Councillors of State, prefects, and chamber- CHAP. lains of Napoleon III.1 But M. Delord is as blind as the Orleanists whom he ridicules. The implacable political adversary of Louis Napoleon, he cannot be just towards him in a single respect. He is so blinded by party passion that he cannot see how the blunders of the Orleanists favoured the Bonapartists, nor how the conduct of the rest of Napoleon's family, and the faith and courage and singleness of purpose of Louis Napoleon, had fixed the mind of the French people upon him as the only worthy descendant of the great man long before he stepped into the Hôtel du Rhin a representative of a French constituency, and soon to be the First Magistrate of the French. The Republican historian repeats all the old blunders and falsehoods about the Prince; with unpardonable carelessness adopts every unfavourable rumour or invention as a fact; commits a series of errors in dates, places, and names, the correction of which would fill many pages; and finally exhibits his outrageous caricature of the representative Bonaparte in the National Assembly as a poor creature of accident, with whom fantastic Fate has some strange pranks to play yet. M. Delord passes over the Prince's relations with Carrel, Chateaubriand, Thiers, Louis Blanc, Sismondi, Sand, Landor, Fonblanque, and other persons of note who had corresponded with him and knew him to be a student and a thinker. He treats him as a mere adventurer, who was unknown to the army and to the Les anciens serviteurs de la dynastie napoléonienne semblaient donner, par cet arrêt, un gage certain de dévouement à la dynastie régnante. Jamais, en effet, l'Empire n'avait été plus ouvertement renié. Les Orléanistes ravis partageaient la satisfaction et la sécurité de Louis Philippe. Qui leur eût dit que dans I. BOOK people; and then proceeds to narrate chapters of accidents by which the obscure young man was carried to the chief magistracy of France. Yet M. Delord is less unjust to Louis Napoleon than the majority of his brother historians and pamphleteers. He is impartiality and justice personified when compared with Mr. Kinglake. There was only one Napoleon whom France knew, whom the Republicans, Orleanists, and Legitimists feared, in 1848, and against whom the Provisional Government found it necessary to take precautions. Prince Napoleon Bonaparte was already, as we have shown, living in France, and on the morrow of Louis Philippe's flight might have been seen making his way through the crowd to the Hôtel de Ville, presenting himself to the various groups of politicians, and receiving from authorities and people alike expressions of indifference. He resembled the hero of Austerlitz in person; but he was unknown, untried, unproved. Even Lucien's son Pierre was more fortunate than the heir of the Bonaparte who was ready to sit in Louis Philippe's House of Peers, for this turbulent prince obtained a battalion in the foreign legion. Prince Louis was the Bonaparte. To him the party had looked exclusively since the death of the Duke of Reichstadt. Not only was he the heir of Napoleon: Nature had formed him to be his uncle's successor. For this mission he had studied, thought, and suffered with extraordinary patience. When events plainly told him that his hour was at hand, he was neither surprised nor hasty. It is quite true that in the elections of April 1848 his name was not carried before a single constituency, yet his faith, as we have seen, never faltered. He believed in that which he had always preached as the origin of all political power-in that power to which his uncle Joseph had appealed in favour of Napoleon II. in 1830, viz. the sovereignty of the people. Knowing that there was no escape from an ultimate appeal to the nation, he watched the rapid turns 1 Émile Thomas, director of the Ateliers Nationaux, recommended his candidature to the workmen at Paris. 2 Révélations sur la Propagande napoléonienne fait en 1848 et 1859. Par Aristide Ferrier Turin, 1863. CHAP. I. BOOK liquity to which he is subject under the influence of party passion. He traces even the cry of 'Vive l'Empereur !' which was first heard in April 1848, to a trivial accident. The National Guard were anxious to retain their bearskins; and as these were threatened by the Republic, they made a demonstration before the Hôtel de Ville, in which they were joined by some survivors of the old Guard. Cries were raised of Vive la Garde!' there was an attempt to force the way to the Executive, and when the soldiers of the Revolution fell back before the débris of Napoleon's battalions the popular enthusiasm knew no bounds, and the cry of 'Vive l'Empereur!' was heard. This incident, and the banker's customers, according to M. Delord,1 made Louis Napoleon's fortune. The shouts raised in the wake of the old Guardsmen were the natural outcome of the emotion that was in the public mind. The Bonapartist committees, especially that which had a meeting-place in the Passage des Panoramas, took care, no doubt, to create opportunities for Bonapartist manifestations. They were not always choice in the means which they adopted. They acted very much as electioneering agents acted in this country twenty-five years ago-as, indeed, some act at the present time. They paid agents, distributed bribes, were reckless in promises, disseminated pamphlets, portraits, and medals, wrote lampoons, vilified their opponents, resorted to tricks of a low kind, manufactured rumours, and carried on a war of skirmishes against the enemy with any arms they found handy. But they had material to work upon, or they would not have been successful. The Assembly was ready to devour them; the Executive loathed and feared them; yet their numbers increased daily. The crowds in their wake became hosts of 1 1 Taxile Delord, vol. i. p. 72. |