Mary Platt Parmele - A Short History of France

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Only a few days after this tragedy at Vincennes a proposition was made
in the Tribunate to bestow upon the first consul the title of
hereditary Emperor of the French!

This new Charlemagne did not go to the pope to be crowned, as that
other had done in the year 800; but at his bidding the pope came to
him. And when on the 2d of December, 1804, the crown of France was
placed upon his head, the great drama commenced in 1789 had ended.
Rivers of blood had flowed to free her from despotism, and France was
held by a power more despotic than that of Richelieu or of Louis XIV.

At war with all of Europe, Napoleon swiftly unfolded his great plan not
only to conquer, but to demolish--not one state, but all. He was going
to create an empire out of a federation of European kingdoms all held
in his own hand, and to tear in pieces the old map of Europe, precisely
as he had the map of Italy. He was going to break down the old
historic divisions and landmarks, and create new, as he had created a
kingdom of Italy out of Italian republics. So, while he was fighting a
combined Europe, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Saxony had become kingdoms,
and the West German States, seventeen in number, were all merged in a
Confederation of the Rhine, "the Rheinbund," under a French
Protectorate.

Then Austria felt the weight of his hand. Francis Joseph wore the
double crown created by Charlemagne a thousand years before, and was
Emperor of Rome as well as of Germany. It had become an empty title;
but it was the sacred tradition of a Holy Roman Empire, the empire
which had dominated the world during the Middle Ages, and while Europe
was coming into form. Napoleon was ploughing deep into the soil of the
past when he told Francis Joseph he must drop the title of Emperor of
Rome! And it is a startling indication of his power that the emperor
unresistingly obeyed; the logical meaning, of course, being that he,
already King of Italy, was the successor to Charlemagne and the head of
a new Roman Empire.

England, never having felt the touch of this insolent conqueror upon
her own soil, was still the bitterest of all in the coalition, and was
more indignant over the humiliation of Germany than she seemed to be
herself. Prussia, at last reluctantly opposing him, was defeated at
Jena, 1806, a time during which the beautiful Queen Louise was the
heroine, and the one brave enough to defy him; and then the peace of
Tilsit, 1807, completed the humiliation of the kingdom created by the
great elector.

It would seem that the people as well as the armies of Germany were
captured by this man, when we hear that ninety German authors dedicated
their books to him, a servile press praised him, and one of Beethoven's
greatest sonatas was inspired by him. But a man so colossal and
dazzling could only be accurately measured at a distance. Even yet we
are too near to him for that, and the world has not yet come to an
agreement concerning him, any more than as to the true analysis of the
character of Hamlet.

There was now scarcely an uncrowned head in Napoleon's family. His
brother Louis, who had married his step-daughter, Hortense Beauharnais,
was king of Holland. His brother-in-law Murat he made king of Naples;
Eugene Beauharnais, his step-son, viceroy of Italy; his brother Jerome,
King of Westphalia; and then his brother Joseph was placed upon the
throne of Spain, from which an indignant people drove him ingloriously
away.

In an hour's interview with Alexander, Emperor of Russia, Napoleon had
by the magic of superiority secured that emperor's friendship and
co-operation in his plans against England. All this excellent man was
fighting for was the peace of Europe! And he disclosed to Alexander
his plan that they two should be the eternal custodians of that peace;
which was to be secured by restraining the arrogance of England, and
that was to be done by ruining the commercial prosperity of that nation
of shop-keepers. There was to be organized a continental blockade
against England. Europe was to be forbidden to trade with that country.

A plan was forming in the mind of Napoleon which was destined as the
turning-point in his astonishing career. It was of vast importance to
him that he should have an heir to the great inheritance he was
creating. By repudiating Josephine, and marrying the daughter of
Francis Joseph, there might be an heir who would also be the legitimate
descendant of the Caesars; thus immensely fortifying the empire after
his own death.

When this thought took possession of his mind, the psychological moment
had arrived. The tide had turned toward disaster. The marriage with
Maria Louisa took place at Paris in 1810. The marriage of Napoleon
with a Hapsburg was not pleasing to the French people, who took pride
in the simple origin of their emperor and empress. This hero of
Marengo, and Austerlitz, and Jena, and Wagram, the man before whom
Europe trembled, was he not, after all, only a crowned citizen? And
was this not a triumph for the revolutionary principle which offset the
existence of an empire, as its final result?

[Illustration: Josephine crowned Empress, December 2, 1804, in Notre
Dame Cathedral. From the painting by David.]

Alexander had broken away from his agreement and his friendship with
the emperor, and had joined the allies. So in 1812 the
long-contemplated invasion of Russia began. Of the 678,000 souls
recruited chiefly from conquered states, only 80,000 would ever return.
Never before had Napoleon fought the elements, and never before met
overwhelming defeat! The flames at Moscow, followed by the arctic
cold, converted the campaign into a vast tragedy.

With indomitable courage another grand army had filled the vacant
places, and was putting down a great uprising in Germany. But his star
was waning. An overwhelming defeat at Leipsic was followed by a march
upon Paris. And in the spring of 1814, Alexander, the young Russian
emperor, the friend who was to aid him in securing an eternal peace for
Europe, was dictating the terms of surrender in Paris.

Within a week Napoleon had abdicated. The title of emperor he was
permitted to retain, but the empire which he was to leave to the infant
son of Maria Louisa, now two years old, had shrunk to the little island
of Elba, on the west coast of Italy!

CHAPTER XVII.

The allied powers named Louis XVIII., the brother of Louis XVI., for
the vacant throne, who promised the people to reign under a
constitutional government.

The man who had deserted his brother in his extremity, a man who
represented nothing--not loyalty to the past, nor sympathy with a
single aspiration of the present--was king. As he passed under
triumphal arches on the way to the Tuileries, there was sitting beside
him a sad, pale-faced woman; this was the Duchesse d'Angouleme, the
daughter of Louis XVI., the little girl who was prisoner in the Temple
twenty years before. What must she have felt and thought as she passed
the very spot where had stood the scaffold in 1793!

Almost the first act of Louis XVIII. was the removal of the mutilated
remains of the king and queen and his sister Elizabeth to the royal
vault in the Church of St. Denis. He then gave orders for a _Chapelle
Expiatoire_ to be erected over the grave where they had been lying for
two decades, and for masses to be said for the repose of the souls of
his murdered relatives. Paris was full of returning royalists.
Banished exiles with grand old names, who had been earning a scanty
living by teaching French and dancing in Vienna, London, and even in
New York, were hastening to Paris for a joyful Restoration; and Louis
XVIII., while Russian and Austrian troops guarded him on the streets of
his own capital, was freely talking about ruling by divine right!

That king was reigning under a liberal charter (as the new constitution
was called)--a charter which guaranteed almost as much personal liberty
as the one obtained in England from King John in 1215; and the palpable
absurdity of supposing that he and his supporters might at the same
time revive and maintain Bourbon traditions, as if there had been no
Revolution, was at least not an indication of much sagacity.

But there was a very smooth surface. The tricolor had disappeared.
Napoleon's generals had gone unresistingly over to the Bourbons.
Talleyrand adapted himself as quickly to the new regime as he had to
the Napoleonic; was witty at the expense of the empire and the emperor,
who, as he said, "was not even a Frenchman"; and was as crafty and as
useful an instrument for the new ruler as he had been for the
pre-existing one.

But something was happening under the surface. While the
plenipotentiaries were busy over their task of restoring boundaries in
Europe, and the other restoration was going on pleasantly in Paris, a
rumor came that Napoleon was in Lyons. A regiment was at once
despatched to drive him back; and Marshal Ney, "the bravest of the
brave," was sent with orders to arrest him.

The next news that came to Paris was that the troops were frantically
shouting "_Vive l'empereur_!" and Ney was embracing his beloved
commander and pledging his sword in his service.

At midnight the king left the Tuileries for the Flemish frontier, and
before the dawn Napoleon was in his Palace of Fontainebleau (March
20th), which he had left exactly eleven months before. The night after
the departure of the king there suddenly appeared lights passing
swiftly over the Font de la Concorde; then came the tramp of horses'
feet, and a carriage attended on each side by cavalry with drawn
swords. The carriage stopped at the first entrance to the garden of
the Tuileries, and a small man with a dark, determined face was borne
into the palace the Bourbon had just deserted.

There was consternation in the Council Chamber in London when the Duke
of Wellington entered and announced that Napoleon was in Paris, and all
must be done over again!

Immediate preparations were made for a renewal of the war. It was easy
to find men to fight the emperor's battles. All France was at his feet.

The decisive moment was at hand. Napoleon had crossed into the
Netherlands, and Wellington was waiting to meet him.

The struggle at Waterloo had lasted many hours. The result, so big
with fate, was trembling in the balance, when suddenly the booming of
Prussian guns was heard, and Wellington was re-enforced by Bluecher.
This was the end. The French were defeated (June 18, 1815). Napoleon
was in the hands of the English, and was to be carried a life-prisoner
to the island of St. Helena.

Louis XVIII., who had been waiting at Ghent, immediately returned to
the Tuileries, and to his foolish task of posing as a liberal king to
his people, and as a reactionary one to his royalist adherents. The
country was full of disappointed, imbittered imperialists, and of angry
and revengeful royalists. The Chamber of Peers immediately issued a
decree for the perpetual banishment of the family of Bonaparte from
French soil; the extremists demanding that the families of the men who
had consented to the death of Louis XVI. be included in the decree.
Sentence of death was passed upon Marshal Ney, as a traitor to France.
Some might have said that a greater traitor was at the Tuileries; but
the most picturesque in that heroic group of Napoleon's marshals was
shot to death.

There was, in fact, a determined purpose to undo all the work of the
Revolution; to restore the supremacy and the property of the Church,
and the power of the nobility. In the meantime, the people, perfectly
aware that the returned exiles were impoverished, were paying taxes to
maintain foreign troops which were in France for the sole purpose of
enabling the king's government to accomplish these things!

Here was material enough for discord in a troubled reign which lasted
nine years. Louis XVIII. died September 16, 1824; and the Count of
Artois, the brother of two kings, was proclaimed Charles X. of France.

If there had been any doubt about the real sentiments of Louis XVIII.,
it must have been dispelled by the last act of his reign, when, at the
bidding of the Holy Alliance, he sent French soldiers to put down the
Spanish liberals in their fight for a constitution.

But Charles X. did not intend to assume the thin mask worn by his
brother. He had marked out a different course. All disguise was to be
thrown aside in a Bourbon reign of the ante-revolutionary sort. The
press was strictly censored, the charter altered, the law of
primogeniture restored; and when saluted on the streets of Paris by
cries of "Give us back our charter!" the answer made to his people by
this infatuated man was, "I am here to receive homage, not counsel."

One wonders that a brother of Louis XVI., one who had been a fugitive
from a Paris mob in 1789--if he had a memory--dared to exasperate the
people of France.

On the 29th of July a revolt had become a Revolution, and once more the
Marquis de Lafayette was in charge of the municipal troops, which
assembled at St. Cloud and other defensive points.

[Illustration: The Revolution of July 28, 1830. From the painting by
Delacroix.]

In vain did Charles protest that he would revoke every offensive
ordinance, and restore the charter. It was too late.

Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, was appointed lieutenant-general of
the kingdom. When he appeared at the Hotel de Ville wearing the
tricolor, his future was already assured.

There was only one thing left now for Charles to do: he formally
abdicated, and signed the paper authorizing the appointment of his
cousin to the position of lieutenant-general; and ten days later, Louis
Philippe, son of Philippe Egalite, occupied the throne he left.

The note struck by this new king was the absolute surrender of the
principle of divine right. He was a "citizen king"; his title being
bestowed not by a divine hand, but by the people, whose voice was the
voice of God! The title itself bore witness to a new order of things.
Louis Philippe was not King of France, but "King of the French." King
of France carried with it the old feudal idea of proprietorship and
sovereignty; while a King of the French was merely a leader of the
people, not the owner of their soil. The charter and all existing
conditions were modified to conform to this ideal, and on the 9th of
August the reign of the constitutional king began.

It was the middle class in France which supported this reign; the class
below that would never forget that he was, after all, a Bourbon and a
king; while the two classes above, both royalists and imperialists,
were unfriendly, one regarding him as a usurper on the throne of the
legitimate king, and the other as a weakling unfit to occupy the throne
of Napoleon.

When Charles X. tried to secure the banishment of the families of the
men who had voted for the death of Louis XVI., he may have had in mind
his cousin, the son of Philippe Egalite, the wickedest and most
despicable of the regicides. Whatever his father had been, Louis
Philippe was far from being a wicked man. Whether teaching school in
Switzerland, or giving French lessons in America, he was the
kindest-hearted and most inoffensive of gentlemen. The only trouble
with this reign was that it was not heroic. The most emotional and
romantic people in Europe had a common-place king. Only once was there
a throb of genuine enthusiasm during the eighteen years of his
occupancy of the throne, and that was when the remains of their adored
Napoleon were brought from St. Helena and placed in that magnificent
tomb in the Hotel des Invalides by order of the king, who sent his son,
the Prince de Joinville, to bring this gift to the people. The act was
gracious, but it was also hazardous. Perhaps the king did not know how
slight was his hold upon this imaginative people, nor the possible
effect of contrast.

Under the new order of things in a constitutional monarchy the king
does not govern, he reigns. He was chosen by the people as their
ornamental figure-head. But what if he ceased to be ornamental? What
was the use of a king who in eighteen years had added not a single ray
of glory to the national name, but who was using his high position to
increase his enormous private fortune, and incessantly begging an
impoverished country for benefits and emoluments for five sons?

An excellent father, truly, though a short-sighted one. His power had
no roots. The cutting from the Orleans tree had never taken hold upon
the soil, and toppled over at the sound of Lamartine's voice
proclaiming a republic from the balcony of the Hotel de Ville.

When invited to step down from his royal throne, he did so on the
instant. Never did king succumb with such alacrity, and never did
retiring royalty look less imposing than when Louis Philippe was in
hiding at Havre under the name of "William Smith," waiting for safe
convoy to England, without having struck one blow in defence of his
throne.

But three terrible words had floated into the open windows of the
Tuileries. With the echoes of 1792 still sounding in his ears,
"Liberty," "Equality," and "Fraternity," shouted in the streets of
Paris, had not a pleasant sound!

Republicanism was an abiding sentiment in France, even while two dull
Bourbon kings were stupidly trying to turn back the hands on the dial
of time, and while an Orleans, with more supple neck, was posing as a
popular sovereign. During all this tiresome interlude the real fact
was developing. A Republican sentiment which had existed vaguely in
the air was materializing, consolidating, into a more and more tangible
reality in the minds of thinking men and patriots.

The ablest men in the country stood with plans matured, ready to meet
this crisis. A republic was proclaimed; M. de Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin,
General Cavaignac, M. Raspail, and Louis Napoleon were rival candidates
for the office of President.

The nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and son of Hortense, was only known
as the perpetrator of two very absurd attempts to overthrow the
monarchy under Louis Philippe. But since the remains of the great
emperor had been returned to France by England, and the splendors of
the past placed in striking contrast with a dull, lustreless present,
there had been a revival of Napoleonic memories and enthusiasm. Here
was an opportunity to unite two powerful sentiments in one man--a
Napoleon at the head of republican France would express the glory of
the past and the hope of the future.

The magic of the name was irresistible. Louis Napoleon was elected
President of the second Republic, and history prepared to repeat itself.

CHAPTER XVIII.

A revolution scarcely deserving the name had made France a second time
a republic. The Second French Republic was the creation of no
particular party. In fact, it seemed to have sprung into being
spontaneously out of the soil of discontent.

Its immediate cause was the forbidding of a banquet which was arranged
to take place in Paris on Washington's birthday, February 22d, 1848.
M. Guizot, who had succeeded M. Thiers as head of the ministry, knowing
the political purpose for which it was intended, and that it was a part
of an impending demonstration in the hands of dangerous agitators,
would not permit the banquet to take place.

This was the signal for an insurrection by a Paris mob, which
immediately led to a change in the form of government--a crisis which
the nation had taken no part in inaugurating. Revolution had been
written in French history in very large Roman capitals! But when the
smoke from this smallest of revolutions had curled away, there stood
Louis Napoleon--son of the great Bonaparte's brother Louis and Hortense
de Beauharnais--who had been elected president by vote of the nation.

France did not know whether she was pleased or not. Inexperienced in
the art of government, she only knew that she wanted prosperity, and
conditions which would give opportunity to the genius of her people.
Any form of government, or any ruler who could produce these, would be
accepted. She had suffered much, and was bewildered by fears of
anarchy on one side and of tyranny on the other. If she looked
doubtfully at this dark, mysterious, unmagnetic man, she remembered it
was only for four years, and was as safe as any other experiment; and
the author of those two ridiculous attempts at a restoration of the
empire, made at Strasbourg and at Boulogne, was not a man to be feared.

The overthrow of monarchy in France had, however, been taken more
seriously in other countries than at home. It had kindled anew the
fires of republicanism all over Europe: Kossuth leading a revolution in
Hungary, and Garibaldi and Mazzini in Italy, where Victor Emmanuel, the
young King of Sardinia, was at the moment in deadly struggle with
Austria over the possession of Milan, and dreaming of the day when a
united Italy would be freed from the Austrian yoke.

The man at the head of the French Republic was surveying all these
conditions with an intelligence, strong and even subtle, of which no
one suspected him, and viewed with satisfaction the extinguishment of
the revolutionary fires in Europe, which had been kindled by the one in
France to which he owed his own elevation!

The Assembly soon realized that in this prince-president it had no
automaton to deal with. A deep antagonism grew, and the cunningly
devised issue could not fail to secure popular support to Louis
Napoleon. When an assembly is at war with the president because _it_
desires to restrict the suffrage, and _he_ to make it universal, can
anyone doubt the result? He was safe in appealing to the people on
such an issue, and sure of being sustained in his proclamation
dissolving the Assembly.

The Assembly refused to be dissolved. Then, on the morning of December
2, 1851, there occurred the famous _coup d'etat_, when all the leading
members were arrested at their homes, and Louis Napoleon, relying
absolutely upon their suffrages, stood before the French nation, with a
constitution already prepared, which actually bestowed imperial powers
upon himself. And the suddenness and the audacious spirit with which
it was done really pleased a people wearied by incompetency in their
rulers; and so, just one year later, in 1852, the nation ratified the
_coup d'etat_ by voluntarily offering to Louis Napoleon the title,
Napoleon III., Emperor of the French.

His Mephistophelian face did not look as classic under the laurel
wreath as had his uncle's, nor had his work the blinding splendor nor
the fineness of texture of his great model. But then, an imitation
never has. It was a marble masterpiece, done in plaster! But what a
clever reproduction it was! And how, by sheer audacity, it compelled
recognition and homage, and at last even adulation in Europe!--and what
a clever stroke it was, for this heavy, unsympathetic man to bring up
to his throne from the people a radiant empress, who would capture
romantic and aesthetic France!

It was a far cry from cheap lodgings in New York to a seat upon the
imperial throne of France; but human ambition is not easily satisfied.
A Pelion always rises beyond an Ossa. It was not enough to feel that
he had re-established the prosperity and prestige of France, that fresh
glory had been added to the Napoleonic name. Was there not, after all,
a certain irritating reserve in the homage paid him? was there not a
touch of condescension in the friendship of his royal neighbors? And
had he not always a Mordecai at his gate--while the _Faubourg St.
Germain_ stood aloof and disdainful, smiling at his brand-new
aristocracy?

War is the thing to give solidity to empire and to reputation! So,
when invited to join the allies in a war upon Russia in defence of
Turkey, Louis Napoleon accepted with alacrity. France had no interests
to serve in the Crimean War (1854-56); but the newly made emperor did
not underestimate the value of this recognition by his royal neighbors,
and French soldiers and French gun-boats largely contributed to the
success of the allied forces in the East.

The little Kingdom of Sardinia, as the nucleus of the new Italy was
called, had also joined the allies in this war; and thus a slender tie
had been created between her and France at a time when Austria was
savagely attacking her possessions in the north of Italy.

When Napoleon was privately sounded by Count Cavour, he named as his
price for intervention in Italy two things: the cession to France of
the Duchy of Savoy, and the marriage of his cousin, Jerome Bonaparte,
with Clotilde, the young daughter of Victor Emmanuel. Savoy was the
ancestral home of the king, and the only thing he loved more than Savoy
was his daughter Clotilde, just fifteen years old. The terms were
hard, but they were accepted.

When Louis Napoleon entered Italy with his army in 1859, it was as a
liberator--dramatically declaring that he came to "give Italy to
herself"; that she was to be "free, from the Alps to the Adriatic"!
The victory at Magenta was the first step toward the realization of
this glorious promise; quickly followed by another at Solferino. Milan
was restored, Lombardy was free, and as the news sped toward the south
the Austrian dukes of Tuscany, Modena, and Parma fled in dismay, and
these rejoicing states offered their allegiance, not to the King of
Sardinia, now, but to the King of Italy. There were only two more
states to be freed, only Venetia and the papal state of Rome, and a
"United Italy" would indeed be "free from the Alps to the Adriatic."

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