The Emperor had no hatred for the Cossacks and did not even cherish any ill will against the Tsar for his impertinence. He had no superstition for the balance of power; indeed, he intended to destroy it; and the Turk interested him as little as the Ottoman Empire. His object in making war was to restore the prestige of France in that quarter of the world which had witnessed our bitter humiliation of 1840. He wished to put an end to the Holy Alliance of the North, to make a rupture between Russia and Austria which would pave the way to the policy of nationalities-to the freedom of Italy and perhaps to the freedom of Poland.' *

Did Napoleon III really take up arms against the Muscovites for the principal reason that he might the more effectually rescue the suffering Lombards and Venetians from the Austrian yoke? Would he have expected such a story to find credence with the Empress or with Rouher? And when M. Ollivier swallowed it, was he not thereby encouraged to pay an even more elaborate compliment to his Minister's credulity? The Mexican expedition was not upon the face of it an enterprise calculated upon national or Liberal ideals. The French Government attempted to impose an alien Emperor upon the Mexicans by force of arms, hoping that a clerical autocracy so founded and supported would arrest the advancing tide of the Protestant Yankees. No episode in the whole history of Empire was more difficult to accommodate to the conscience of a man like M. Ollivier, who believed in Rome for the Romans, Germany for the Germans, Mexico for the Mexicans, and France for the French. Yet a good conjuror can show us a bird where we expected to see a sixpenny piece. We learn that the underlying thought of the Mexican expedition was not the Jecker contract, nor the claims of the Vatican, nor the outcry of the Mexican clericals, nor the desire to profit by the Civil War in America to extend French influence in the Western Hemisphere, nor the fabulous gold mines of the Sonora, nor any of the many sinister motives which were so freely attributed by the opposition press; it was, purely and simply, Venice. The idea of the Mexican expedition was so to smooth the ruffled plumes of Austria that she would consent to cede Venice

* L'Empire Libéral,' iii, 188.

to Victor Emmanuel. 'The ghost of Venice,' as Nigra wrote to Ricasoli, 'roams along the corridors of the Tuileries.' In his subtle and circuitous way the Emperor was still pursuing the fair phantom of Italy, and Frenchmen were dying on the parched uplands of Mexico as they had died in their snow-bound cantonments round Sebastopol that the land of Dante might be free.

M. Ollivier, is, however, constrained to concede that some passages in the diplomacy of his hero do not admit of this exalted interpretation. There were 'aberrations from the straight path of altruism. The acquisition of Savoy and Nice was apparently sound nationalism, a restoration of lost members rather than a conquest, but no such apology can be discovered even by M. Ollivier for the designs upon Belgium, Luxemburg and the Palatinate. These projects were regrettable aberrations' from the nationalist ideal, but no part, we told, of the permanent fabric of Imperial diplomacy. 'Save in a moment of illness and folly in 1867. . . the Emperor had not even a vague inclination to take Belgium ... under pressure of public opinion he may perhaps sometimes have desired a rectification of frontier towards the Palatinate.' We are convinced that upon this point M. Ollivier is mistaken and that a rectification of the eastern frontier of France was a fixed part of the foreign policy of the Second Empire.

That M. Ollivier should have fallen into an error on a matter so important is partly due to his eagerness to minimise the incompatibility between his own political ideals and the practice of the Empire and partly also to the peculiar confusion and uncertainty of his master's policy. The Emperor's mind was full of vague, grand and imperfectly harmonised ideas. He had a genuine sympathy for the Italians and Poles, and cherished a belief that it was the predestined task of the Empire to assist in the emancipation of suffering nationalities. At the same time he was ambitious for France. He understood enough of French human nature to know that it wanted glory, and he knew enough of French history to find the quarter where conquest would be most glorious and glory would be most grateful. From the very beginning of his reign he had made up his mind to revise the treaties of 1815. He spoke upon the Vol. 213.-No. 424.

I

subject with Prince Albert in 1858, casting and recasting the map of Europe and Africa in his conversation with the freedom of a Bonaparte; and amid all the vacillations of an uncertain and divided policy he never wholly lost sight of the waters of the Rhine. The complexion of affairs did not, however, permit a frank and thorough pursuit either of the one aim or of the other. Napoleon could not sacrifice the temporal independence of the Papacy to the Italian Kingdom and at the same time retain the loyalty of the French clericals; and the desigus on Belgium and the Rhine were of so revolu tionary a character that they could only be tentatively and secretly pressed as part of a general scheme of reconstruction. The problem of alliances was as complex as the objects of policy were various and confused. The English alliance, consistent with enmity to Russia and help to Piedmont, was at variance with any scheme for extending the frontier to the north-east. On the other hand an understanding with Austria, while it would gratify the clericals and check the Prussians, would carry dismay into all the Liberal and nationalist circles in Europe. The Emperor was torn between conflicting sympathies and opposing counsels. Persigny was the friend of the English, Drouyn of the Austrians, Morny of the Russians. Ollivier gives it as his opinion that the capital fault of the Empire was that it did not make a firm friend of the Tsar after the Crimean War. Napoleon listened to everybody and trusted nobody. Like Louis XV he sent abroad secret agents and wove his own web of secret diplomacy. Walewski was kept in ignorance of his master's secret meeting with Cavour at Plombières and of the offensive and defensive alliance which was there entered into. No ambassador and no Minister knew of the Triple Alliance between Austria, Italy and France which was so nearly concluded in 1869. A declaration from one of my Ministers,' observed Napoleon to Von Goltz, 'would not be important. I alone know what the foreign policy of France will be -a perfectly intelligible position, but one not easily to be conciliated with parliamentary control.

The truth of the matter is that Napoleon III was illfitted for the rôle of a constitutional monarch, not because he was devoid of public virtue or popular instincts, but

because he could not divest himself of certain ingrained habits of mind, partly due to his antecedents as a plotter, partly to his early practice of autocracy, which are incompatible with true parliamentary government. His reputation both as a man and a statesman has suffered abrupt and unusual vicissitudes. After a period of almost unqualified censure and contempt, a marked tendency has set in to portray the Emperor not indeed as a model of domestic virtue—that would be plainly impossible-but as more generous and less Macchiavellian than he had been depicted, to discover in him a certain width of view and elevation of aim, a kindliness of disposition, even a warmth of heart, wholly incompatible with the cruel and calculating egotism ascribed to him by such writers as Kinglake and Victor Hugo. This tendency, which is part of the general revival of Napoleonic studies and has been powerfully assisted by the writings of M. Ollivier, has recently found an English exponent in Mr Simpson, who has derived from a careful study of Louis Bonaparte's early life a great, perhaps an excessive, admiration for the character of his hero. That Louis Bonaparte possessed in early life an inflexible faith in his destiny, that his tenacity was proof against failures which would have dashed the courage and ruined the prospects of nine out of ten pretenders, that in the midst of a good deal of trumpery display and vulgar self-indulgence he showed industry and resource, that he played a remarkably bad hand with surprising skill, always keeping himself in view when it was most opportune that he should be noticed, always projecting his mind into the future and cleverly guiding it into the grooves of the social progress, will not be denied by any one who studies the pages of Mr Simpson or those of his French precursors, MM. Thirria and Lebey. But was he of the stuff out of which constitutional monarchs are made? Was he loyal? Was he capable of trusting his Ministers? Had he those habits of judicious compromise and quiet influence which are essential to the successful conduct of a constitutional monarchy? Above all, was he prepared to make a permanent surrender of autocratic power, or were his concessions accompanied by half-formed and cloudy resolutions of withdrawal which the energetic pressure of a reactionany camarilla might at any moment

cause to solidify in action? It is to questions such as these that M. Ollivier supplies an unsatisfactory answer.

The early life of Louis Napoleon would, of itself, constitute a weighty reason for distrusting the solidity of the Liberal Empire. For the profession of constitutional monarchy there can be no worse training than a youth expended in conspiracy. Now whether or no Louis Bonaparte was in 1831 an enrolled member of the Carbonaro Society or only in avowed sympathy with its aims, it is certain that he graduated in Italian conspiracy and that for eighteen years conspiracy of the most secret kind was the main strand of his existence. And this conspiracy belonged in no small measure to the type which is most repugnant to a delicate conscience. For about five years Louis Bonaparte's main object was to debauch the loyalty of the French army. He began by composing a treatise on artillery and by circulating it as widely as might be among the French officers of that arm. Then in 1836, when his name had acquired some notoriety, he made an attempt to corrupt the garrison of Strasburg, was arrested, pardoned by the King and despatched to America. Having failed with the great eastern garrison, he and his friends next turned their attention to the army of the north. In 1840 they crossed the Channel, a live eagle tied to the mast of their vessel, and descended on Boulogne. The affair was a ludicrous and ignominious failure. The Pretender was this time put upon his trial and sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in the insalubrious castle of Ham. Here, exhibiting the finer side of a character singularly compounded of good and evil, he addressed himself to the cultivation of those branches of knowledge which seemed likely to commend him to the rising generation. He composed a pamphlet on the extinction of pauperism which drew a warm eulogy from George Sand, advocated protective duties on sugar to conciliate the beetroot industry, and recommended a study of the Prussian military system to keep his name before the soldiers. Louis Blanc visited him in prison and found him interested in Socialism; Lord Malmesbury, another visitor, reported that five years of confinement had not emptied his mind or relaxed his faith. It is, however, probable that both in mind and body he was permanently