THE EX-EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH.

THE sombre figure of Napoleon III, for twenty-one years ruler, and for nineteen years Emperor of the French, will always seem to have been at once one of the most curious caprices of the historical fortune of France, and one of the most striking illustrations of the immutability of the law of strict political retribution. That after two attempts on the throne of France, one of them—the Boulogne attempt with the tame eagle—theatrical to the most ludicrous degree, he should have actually succeeded in obtaining the suffrages of the people, and gaining for himself a real chance of seizing the power he so long coveted, seems strange enough. But that, after such antecedents, he should have succeeded per fax aut nefas in governing France for twenty-one years with some repute in Europe, without any absolute disgrace, and then have thrown away his power, if not in quite so fanciful and conceited a fashion, yet in no less theatrical a fashion than that in which he attempted to gain it, is even stranger, because it furnishes one of those curious little bits of complete historical symmetry between the commencement and the close of a great political career, which is much more common in fiction than in actual life. In 1843, when Louis Napoleon was imprisoned at Ham, he published some striking remarks on the government of Louis Philippe, which contained the following sentences :—" Some years ago, there was in the United States a man called Sampatck, who went into the follow- ing trade : he constructed, with a great deal of art, a scaffolding above the falls of Niagara, and after having raised a heavy con- tribution from the immense crowd assembled from the whole neighbourhood to see him, he mounted majestically to his plat- form, and then threw himself headlong into the boiling waves at the foot of the cataract. He repeated this perilous experiment several times, till at last he was swallowed up by a whirlpool. Alas 1 there are some Governments whose appearances on the scene of the world are in every respect analogous to that of the American juggler : their history is summed up in these words,—' fearful scaffolding, terrible fall!' On a few stakes planted in the ground, they raise a shapeless building, com- posed of fragments and bits borrowed from the ruins of the past ; and when their task is finished, their bastard building, as without utility as it is without foundations, has only served to throw them headlong from a greater height into the abyss. What this amounts to is that raising a scaffolding is not build- ing. To appeal to the vulgar passions of the mob is not to govern. One cannot build solidly except upon the rock." Surely these words must now come back to the ex-Emperor

as a curiously accurate prediction of his own great feat. He- did, at great pains and with much ostentation, erect a scaffold- ing out of fragments of the ruins of the past—his uncle's. past,—which has served but for the same purpose as that des- cribed by him,—to furnish him with an artificial elevation, from which to cast himself headlong into the gulf beneath.

Indeed, to none of the recent mutable governments oV Francs has Louis Napoleon's parable applied with greater force than to his own. There has always been something of the juggler about his otherwise sombre and sedate- impersonation of the Imperial character. From the descent on Strasburg to the telegram about poor little Louis's " baptism, of fire," there has been visible at regular intervals in the ex-- Emperor's writings and actions a certain amount not merely

of theatricality, but of ill-judged and ridiculous theatricality,. —that sort of theatricality which arises not from social vanity,.

which is often very telling, but from the indulgence of moody and solitary reverie. The laboured rhodomontade which, he addressed, from his prison at Ham, " to the Manes.

of the Emperor," on occasion of the removal of Buonaparte's remains from St. Helena to Paris, is a very fair illustration of the purely intellectual side of this deep flaw in Louis Napoleon's- mind. That any able man should have written such high-- flown nonsense in the belief that it would identify him in the- popular mind with his uncle, we do not in the least believe. The rhapsody was written, we are persuaded, not out of con- tempt for vulgar minds which it was intended to please, but out of the unsound superstition in Louis Napoleon's own understanding. He cried out to the Manes of the Em- peror, — "The people have renounced your gospel, your ideas, your glory, your blood ; when I have spoken to them of your cause, they have said to me, We do not

understand it.' Let them say, let them do, what they- will. What matter to the mounting chariot the grains of

sand which fall under the wheels ? They have vainly said.

that you were a meteor which left no trace behind ; they have- vainly denied you political glory ; they will not disinherit us- of its fruits. Sire! the 15th December is a great day for France and for me. From the midst of your sumptuous- cortege, disdaining the homage of some, you have cast a single glance on my sombre dwelling-place, and remembering the- caresses which you heaped upon my infancy, you have said :— Friend, thou sufferest for me 1 I am satisfied with thee.' " That is not the sort of thing written to dazzle the fancy of a mob.. It is the sort of thingwhich occurs to a man apt to indulge moody- reveries of the subtle affinities which connect him with a great creative mind, whose career he hopes, or at least eagerly wishes, to imitate. Like the Imperial get-up at Strasburg, so ill- sustained by Louis Napoleon's actual demeanour when intro-

duced to the troops there,—like the tame eagle at Boulogne, —like many profoundly superstitious references to ' destiny- '"

throughout his writings, this rhapsody shows a trace of spurious- metal in the ex-Emperor's mind, which is not assumed for popular purposes, but is ingrained and inherent. The prisoner at.

Ham was, like all solitary persons, deprived of the aid of that implicit social criticism on his own most marked thoughts which, living in the world of itself insures, and therefore his writ- ings then had much more of this extatic Bonapartism about them than his speeches or actions have since shown. But you, can see the same kind of fixed and dreamy enthusiasm about his idea of raising up in Mexico an empire of the "Latin race " to balance the Teutonism of the United States, no less. than in those dreams of destiny which have from time to time- driven his slow and hesitating judgment into mad projects, like the Boulogne descent, and, let us add, the ill-prepared or- • unprepared invasion of Prussia.

The special characteristic of the ex-Emperor's policy has- been the constant balancing between long-headed cautiono and a craving for brilliant effects. At first he was very prudent. The war against Russia, which brought him into- such close alliance with England, was a by no means danger- ous stroke of tentative foreign policy ; indeed, that such a Power as England joined him in it showed how comparatively safe, for a war policy, it was. But his next attempt, the- liberation of Italy, far more original, far more really grand in conception—the only act, indeed, of his reign on which he- can now count for anything like the deliberate praise-

of posterity—was far more dangerous ; and this he him- self knew, staying himself in mid career, lest he should- either incur a change of fortune, or by succeeding tocr completely give Italy more than he desired or intended. Indeed, he soon found that the main idea of his policy was one far too potent over the minds of nations to admit of

being applied just as far as he wished, and no farther ; and the aim of the rest of his reign was to attenuate what he had done, strenuously supporting Rome against Italy. His next great conception, the foundation of a Franco-Spanish Empire in America, to balance the influence of the United States, was a failure on a great scale,—an experiment not even founded, like his Italian experiment, on any sound knowledge of the forces actually at work. Perhaps it was this sense of half-failure in Italy, and complete failure in Mexico, to gain any profit by his attempt to build up kingdoms founded on the same prin- ciple, which induced him to attempt in the case of Germany the opposite task—much more welcome to the counsellors he was most accustomed to listen to—of splintering in pieces a new Empire of this kind in the very moment of its crystallization. There, again, we probably see the capricious weight accorded by Louis Napoleon to his own subjective impression that he was dreaming a dream of destiny, and not merely indulging his own political fancy. He saw himself breaking up and over- running Germany as his uncle had done before him, and he took no real pains to gauge the solidity of the rock against which he has dashed his already decaying power to pieces.

For, naturally enough, while he has dreamt these brilliant dreams of external glory, he has given himself a comparative holiday in the much harder task of driving deep the founda- tions of his power in the hearts of the people of France. " On a few stakes planted in the ground, he raised a formless building composed of bits and fragments of the ruin of the past," and never till within the last eight months did he even appear to attempt seriously the laying of deeper foundations ; and then he found the task so difficult and disgusting that he quickly abandoned it for a dazzling stroke of foreign policy. In regard to the external comfort of the people, indeed,—in relation to roads, commerce, and free produc- tion,—the Emperor really did a good deal to make his people more prosperous. But beyond this he never got. Trusting as he did in universal suffrage, he never liked to educate the voters, lest they should cease to be dazzled by the Empire. The free Press shook his power, and he never permitted it till it seemed even more dangerous to curb it. The only crea- tive principle of his mind as a ruler was its dreamy imaginative- ness, and this he was far too cautious to apply except in foreign policy. For all experiments in developing the confidence of the educated classes at home he was too prudent. Hence the eighteen years of his rule were utterly sterile in home policy, except in relation to the development of the physical resources of France. All his tentative audacity was reserved for his foreign policy, and as that was not, on the whole, suc- cessful,—certainly not flattering to the vanity of France in its general results,—he never succeeded in gaining for the Empire the affection of the people, except so far as it was gained at once by the superstitious reverence felt for his name. In one of his curious political reveries he once wrote :—" No one can escape his destiny. Every government condemned to perish, perishes by the very means which it employs to save itself. Espartero believed that he should strengthen his power by the bombardment of Barcelona, and he only sapped its foundations. The Conservatives believed that by erecting the fortifications of Paris they should establish for ever their doctrine of peace at any price ; but they only imitated those kings of Egypt who raised immense tombs in their life-time,—monuments so colossal for men so little, that they buried in their immense wombs, as well as the body, the very name, of the founder." What can better describe the ex-Emperor's own fate ? His Government, "condemned to perish," has perished " by the very means it employed to save itself." He took credit to the Empire for its army, and by the weakness of the Army the Empire has perished. He sought to save his foreign policy from the reproach that it had raised up great rivals to France, by crushing Germany to fragments, and the attempt has ground his own twenty-one years' work to powder, and fearfully endangered the very independence of his realm. Certainly none of the unstable French Governments, which he described as raising ostentatiously a temporary scaffolding only for the sake of leaping from it into the abyss, ever took that leap with so strange an unconsciousness of the fatal whirlpools beneath, as he who is now, for the third time in his life, a political prisoner, and for the fourth time an exile from his native land. It is melancholy that a man who has spent two-thirds of his life in dreaming of power, and one-third in the exercise of it, should have to spend the remainder in regretting that he carefully made all the mis- takes which he had before his own accession so bitterly ridiculed others for perpetrating.