PRINCE VICTOR'S LETTER.
IT must, we suppose, be conceded that the business of a Pretender is to pretend; but of late years the result of acting on this maxim has been that Pretenders have done everybody's business except their own. The success- ful Pretender nowadays must have learned that his strength is to sit still, and for a Pretender at all events there is no lesson so hard to master. To be altogether passive, to be always close at hand if wanted, and never within call if not wanted, are but simple arts, but they are arts that take long to learn. Pre- tendership is now more than anything else a matter of patience, and of patience practised under the most difficult of all conditions. Ever since Sedan the French Pretenders have had special need to make this lesson their own. The French people had learned to distrust self-assertion, whether Monarchical or Imperial. It wished to be left to go its own way, to try experiments for itself, to puzzle out as it best could some tolerable form of government which should have a chance of lasting. On the whole, it has had better success than it could have hoped for. The Third Republic is very far from being an ideal govern- ment, but in point of duration it has greatly exceeded the average of the governments that France has witnessed during the century. Still, at many points of its existence the French nation has seen cause to question the success of its efforts, and at any one of these points a Pretender of the right sort might have recognised and seized his opportunity. If the Comte de Paris or the Prince Imperial, the Duke of Orleans or Prince Victor Bona- parte, had contented himself with giving notice that he was in waiting ; if he had renounced both in speech and in action all thought of putting himself for- ward as a candidate for the headship of the State, and repudiated every attempt on the part of others to claim that distinction for him ; if he had declared that till he was called to the conduct of affairs by an unmistakable expression of the national will he should remain a simple citizen, exiled it might be, but still loyal to the govern- ment that France had chosen for herself,—we believe that the desired condition would long ago have been realised. France has grown suspicious of Pretenders who covet her ; she might have been in a different mood if she had fallen in with a Pretender willing to wait till he was coveted.
It is too late, probably, for the existing candidates for the French throne to play such a part as this, even if they had come to see its wisdom. They would not be able to keep their followers quiet, or to put an end to the ostenta- tious intrigues of which Royalists and Bonapartists seem never weary. Even a great leader is to some extent in the hands of his followers, and neither the Royalist nor the Bonapartist leader has any title to be called great. Still, there are distinctions even in the microscope, and when the Duke of Orleans and Prince Victor come to be closely Jooked at, there is no danger of mistaking one for the other. The Duke of Orleans seems incapable of washing his linen at home, or of imposing mutual civility upon the newspapers which espouse his cause. His public appearances must be the despair of all his well- wishers. He has neither reserve, nor dignity, nor the faculty of intervening to any purpose. A Royalist pretendership can apparently have no chance unless it can somehow be put in commission. In all these respects Prince Victor has the advantage of his rival. He intervenes less often, and when he does appeal to the French people he does so in very much better lan- guage. Either he has a very good idea how such docu- ments ought to be written, or he is fortunate in the possession of an excellent political draftsman. His letter to the Mayor of Ajaccio is an unusually good speci- men of the literature of pretendership. Its history is correct as far as it goes, its description of the writer's pretensions indicates a position which comes very near to what we have already seen to be the only position which can give a Pretender a chance of success. The occasion of the letter is the centenary of the first Napoleon's appointment as First Consul, and Prince Victor does not exaggerate the services which in that character he did to France. "One hundred years ago," be says, "France was torn by factions. The Directory was unable even to ensure order at home. France lived only in her armies General Bonaparte appeared," and "within four years the whole aspect of things changed." And then the letter describes in a few well-chosen sentences the wonderful restoration that Napoleon achieved in an incredibly short time. He created a system of government which subsists to this day. He restored order in the finances, in education, in religion. He found Frenchmen thinking of nothing but cutting one another's throats, and by his persistent will he forced them to live at peace among themselves. The Directory could not do this because, being "the government of a party, it was fatally condemned by its origin to fight daily with the other parties for its very existence. Having come forth from the suffrage of the people, the First Consul had not to count with the parties."
There is no exaggeration, we repeat, in this summary of Napoleon's administrative and legislative successes. But Prince Victor ought not to have stopped where he did. To speak of Napoleon's reign as though it had been wholly occupied in these beneficent works was to lay himself needlessly open to a very obvious retort,—the retort, in fact, which M. de Blowitz promptly supplies. "Unfortunately," says the Times correspondent, "the romantic tale related by Prince Napoleon in no way resembles the real facts, for France, after having endured the most oppressive of tyrannies, thought itself happy to fall back exhausted under the monstrous yoke of Monarchical fanaticism." Though this is rather a rhetorical description of the reign of Louis XVIII, there is no doubt that at the time it was a yoke to which France was quite willing to submit. But the tale Prince Napoleon tells is something more than romantic. Its weakness is not that it is false, but that, though true, it is not the whole truth. It describes Napoleon's earlier rule, but not his later. It enumerates, and no more than enumerates, the civil benefits he bestowed upon France ; it leaves untold the evils which his lust of empire brought upon the nation he had rescued from anarchy and impotence. Prince Victor would have done better to confront facts which there is no possibility of disguising. A bolder and more complete statement would have served his turn better. If he had described Napoleon's whole reign instead of stopping at the end of the first chapter, he might have emphasised the distinction between the good, which he might hope one day to emulate, and the evil, which he could reject by anticipation. Probably nothing stands more in the way of a Bonapartist restoration, so far, at least, as the civil population is concerned, than the conviction that it would once more plunge Europe into war. A new Empire, it is argued, must justify its existence, and it can only do this by giving France her old frontiers, and so making Europe her foe. How far this conviction is well founded is a question that need not be debated here. It is enough for our present purpose that it exists, and that the first step towards disproving it is the express repudiation of all desire for military glory by the Bonapartist Pretender. Even this would be nothing more than a first step, but while this remains untaken the process of disabusing the French civilian mind has not been so much as begun. Indeed, to dwell on the earlier and briefer part of Napoleon's wonderful career without making any reference to the later, longer, and immeasurably more conspicuous part is to suggest the thought that when what is so obvious is not expressly disclaimed, it is because it is not really re- nounced.
• The latter part of Prince Victor's letter is less open to criticism. He has some right to say that he has never troubled his country " by vain words or empty demon- strations." As Pretenders go, the Prince has been reason- able and prudent. He has a right, too, to " note " that his proscription has not "contributed to restore calm," while to "long for the moment of national reconciliation" is the inalienable privilege of every exile. To say all this is to accept that position of present self-effacement which will create—if anything can create—a general desire for a Bonapartist restoration. We doubt, however, whether the adoption of this attitude does not come too late, and whether the Prince has even now the power of imposing it upon his followers at home. The worst enemies of a Pretender have often been the friends he has left behind him, and the recent action of the Imperialist party in France is only another illustra- tion of this fact. Neither Bonapartists nor Royalists seem able to master the obvious truth that they who preach the need of order must not identify themselves with the fomenters of disorder. The true policy of the Bonapartists would have been to associate themselves with the work of the present Cabinet. The one man who has stood out in the recent conflict as the resolute enforcer of military subor- dination, and of the deliverance of the Executive from military terrorism, is General de Galliffet, and if the Bona- partists had known their own interests, they would have supported the Minister of War in the really admirable effort he has made to carry out the ends for the promotion of which he took office. Whether that effort had failed or succeeded, they might have counted upon making profit out of it. In the one case they would have proved the impotence of the Republic to rescue France from confusion ; in the other case they might have claimed that, in so far as the rescue had been effected, it had been by the disinterested help of the one French party that values order for order's sake. As it is, they have shown no capacity for rising above those common hand-to-mouth expedients which are the resource of dis- credited factions at all times and in all countries. Prince Victor will find it hard to shake himself clear of the wreckage with which his ill-fortune has surrounded him.
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