Ebe aPpertator, Zuguist 24th, 1652
The overwhelming ambition of the French President appears to shoot beyond the setting up of a mere temporal kingdom for himself, to the establishment of a theocracy. Louis Napoleon ordains that the great national holyday of the year -shall be the saint's-day of his uncle: and in solemnising it, on Sunday last, along with other imposing agencies, he availed himself of the gorgeous superstitions of the Romish Church: military display, illuminations and fireworks, and the cere- monies of high mass, were so skilfully blended, that spec- tators, dazzled with light and drunken with frankincense, lost the power of discriminating between Napoleon the Saint and Napoleon the Emperor. Their imaginations began to manu- facture one mythical personage out of those two dissimilar characters, and to attribute a share in their sanctity to all
II members of the family. This attempted apotheosis of the Emperor has been compared to the deification of Julius Caesar by Augustus: it more resembles the attribution of a sacred as well as a royal character to the reigning families of Russia and China. This retrograde movement towards the hierarchical juggling of barbarous ages, is passing strange in the land— we will not say of Voltaire, but of Pascal.
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