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The question, Why did the Orleans dynasty fall? has received many and various answers. But it is sometimes forgotten that there is another question to be asked respecting that dynasty-viz. Why did it stand seventeen or eighteen years first, before it fell? The restoration and the reign of the House of Orleans, taken together, occupied a period nearly extending to the term assigned a generation of man, and the younger branch of the House of Bourbon reigned during the better half of that period. We are entirely of opinion with a reflective German politician,' that neither the alleged excessive corruption nor arbitrary administration of the Orleans Government account for its abrupt catastrophe. 'How, indeed,' asked Tocqueville in a letter addressed to the late Mr. Senior nearly half-a-year before the February Revolution; 'how prevent a Government from carrying itself on by corruption, when the parliamentary régime naturally creates for it so much need to do so, and centralisation gives it so many means? The fact is we are trying to make two things go on together which have never before, to my knowledge, been united-an elective assembly and a highly centralised executive power.' Tocqueville, however, pointed out to his English friend, with prophetic insight, the singular malaise and sense of instability in the existing order of things which had for some time been creeping over men's minds in France. The middle class, in his view, was gradually becoming, in that of the rest of the nation, a new aristocracy, petty, vulgar, and arrogant, by which it was beginning to seem shameful to let themselves be governed. Lamartine (we think) called the Revolution of February a 'revolution du mépris.' We should be more disposed to call it a revolution of apathy, ennui, and indifference. Of bribery and corruption in direct and sordid shapes there was not a tithe of the amount in French that there is in English elections. Of arbitrary government we really think Louis Philippe's reign was not more guilty than perhaps any Government which had gone before or came after. He who rides the French 'democracy' 1 Von Usedom, Politische Briefe, &c., p. 84. 2 Nouvelle Correspondance, p. 231,

is, we suspect, more likely to lose the saddle, if he does not make it feel bit and spur, than if he does. But then it must be coaxed also, and given its head on certain occasions. Louis Philippe was rather too apt to begin by humouring and end by frustrating it of its will. It was the disposition of that prince,' says M. Guizot, 'to associate himself heartily with patriotic emotions, without allowing them to get the better of his calmer judgment. He was full of sympathy, and even complaisance, for the national sentiment, yet retaining his own independence of mind; very capable of participating to-day in its impulses, and of recognising tomorrow the error and peril of those impulses.'

To the question, why Louis Philippe reigned so long, and reigned no longer? it is sometimes, in substance, answeredbecause, in his essential policy, he represented the prose of the French people, and not its poetry. And yet he was everlastingly aiming to do the poetical as an element of French politics. As, at his entrance into life, the young Egalité affected, with hereditary alacrity, to draw patriotic inspiration from the sombre sources of Jacobinism, so as Citizen King he sought a species of borrowed popularity by paying, we must think, most impolitic tributes to the memories of the First Empire on canvas, in stone, in second obsequies of a warrior he would have done more wisely to leave quiet in his grave; and in participating, or affecting to participate, the French engouement for a second Napoleon in the East, in the shape of a semi-barbarous Turkish Pacha. All the young Egalité's flirtations with Jacobinism (which stopped short of complicity in its crimes) could not maintain his footing in the Jacobinised armies of the French Republic. All his later monumental and funereal homage to Napoleonism only inflamed passions to which his resolute peace policy refused substantial satisfaction. For a monarch who preferred to the most brilliant war the most inglorious peace, it might seem somewhat superfluous to spend millions on millions in fortifying a capital which certainly no unchallenged or unprovoked enemy would care to attack -to incur deficit upon deficit in increasing forces he was predetermined not to use.

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X.

CESARISM IN FRANCE RESURGENT-NAPOLEON THE

NEPHEW.1

In the later editions of Archbishop Whately's well-known satire, aimed at the German Egyptologists, and entitled "Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte,' the good prelate added an ironically grave exposure of the monstrous improbabilities involved in the commonly received report that the mouldering bones of the first great French Emperor had been shipped from St. Helena to France by the pious care of a junior Bourbon king, the interest of whose dynasty plainly would have suggested to him to leave those bones where they were; and an equally grave exposure of the later legend that another Napoleon Bonaparte-'a kind of new incarnation of their Grand Lama '-in the person of a pretender claiming to be the nephew of the hero of the older legend, was again at the head of the Government of France under the title of President. But had the good Archbishop lived to hear of that second Napoleon having played out, for nearly a score of years, the play of a second Empire-to land at last in a second St. Helena at Chislehurst-what a field had opened to him for a fresh series of Historic Doubts!' 'Here,' he might have urged, we have an Imperial nephew, even more plainly and palpably mythical than the Imperial uncle-called, it would seem, into existence merely to point the moral of an unappeased Nemesis, following into a second generation the name and family of the first fabled hero.'

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That this nephew of that uncle, all through youth and well half through manhood, should have brooded over an apparently hopeless day-dream of an Imperial throne, which, 1 Now first published.

won by the sword, had in turn been lost by the sword, seemingly for ever, at Waterloo-that this devoutest of selfbelievers should have found, in the least believing of nations, believers in him by millions, on the sole strength of his Napoleonic name; and having, per fas aut nejas, made himself absolute master of France, should have set about remodelling Europe upon a system founded on the first Napoleon's posthumously published after-thoughts of general European enfranchisement all this our good Archbishop might have adduced as the most conclusive evidence of the legendary character of the second as of the first Napoleon. And, he might have added, the most incredible part of the later legend was, that the Napoleonic idea-the fabulous legacy of the uncle--was described by that legend as having been actually, in great part, realised during the nephew's reign-realised indeed with consequences the last that would have been desired whether by uncle or nephew.

Amidst all the differences of personal character and politi cal circumstance between the first and second crowned and throned representatives of Napoleonic Cæsarism in France, there is one point of resemblance that each in turn based his claim to rule on popular suffrage.

Omitting to observe this, moral essayists may amuse themselves with invectives as empty as eloquent against usurpation and tyranny. Such invectives will go but little way towards accounting for the all but universal popular acquiescence in usurpation and tyranny-towards explaining how it happened that, in the case of the second as of the first Napoleon, the great unpolitical majority of the French people added their voices to the acclaim with which the army hailed its chosen imperator. To what purpose are interminable denunciations of conspiracies in which all conspired? of usurpations in which all were accessaries before the act-all assisting in its accomplishment?

Of the recent publications illustrative of the reign and character of the late Emperor of the French, the earliest in date, and the most unpretending in form, though by no means the least weighty in substance, is a little brochure on

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Napoleon III.,' in 1872, by the eminent historian Professor von Sybel, whom we have already had occasion to quote. To have been composed so soon after the triumph of his country in the Franco-German war, Professor von Sybel's biographical essay is singularly dispassionate in tone and comprehensive in judgment. In these respects it has hardly been excelled, if equalled, by anything that has appeared since. There is nothing whatever in it about the Gallic Erbfeind'-about the superiority, moral and intellectual, 'which nobody can deny' to the German over all other races of mortal men. Nothing of all this. Herr von Sybel, though a German professor, is too much a world-philosopher to have anything about him of the German professorial Imperial Chauvinism which sometimes seems to threaten, in these latter days, to out-Herod the French. His 'Napoleon III.' is really a masterly sketch of the higher as well as the lower qualities which marked the character and signalised the reign of the late French autocrat. His rapid though discriminating touch helps us better than we are helped by some works of more volume and of more pretension to understand to what was owing the duration (considerable, as French dynasties go) of the late reign, and to what was owing its disastrous close.

The most reliable-we may add, the most redoubtablewitnesses against or in favour of any character are, firstly, those whose acquaintance with it has been derived from early familiar companionship, and, secondly, those whose opportunities have been best, and whose motives strongest, for forming a correct judgment of it in maturer years. Amongst the former class of witnesses, much light is thrown on the strong and weak points of the singular and reserved character now under our review by a lady' who was foster

1 Madame Cornu. Of this lady M. de Corcelle gave the following account to Mr. Senior in 1857-'She wrote for Louis Napoleon a great part of his book on artillery practice. She used to read and make notes for him in the Bibliothèque when he was at Ham. Two days after the coup d'état she was to have breakfasted with the Princess Mathilde; she sent word that she would not go. The Grand Duchess Stéphanie called on her in her cottage in the Rue Rousselet to persuade her to change her mind; she spoke out against Louis

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