Art. 5. THE BEGINNING AND THE END OF THE SECOND EMPIRE. 1. L'Empire Libéral. By Émile Ollivier. Fourteen vols. Paris: Garnier, 1895-1909. 2. L'Évolution Constitutionnelle du Second Empire. By H. Berton. Paris: Felix Alcan, 1900. 3. The Rise of Louis Napoleon. By F. A. Simpson. London: Murray, 1909. 4. Les Trois Coups d'État de Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. Vol. 1, Strasbourg et Boulogne. By A. Lebey. Paris: Perrin, 1906. 5. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte et la Révolution de 1848. By A. Lebey. Two vols. Paris: Felix Juven, 1907–8. 6. Napoléon III avant l'Empire. By H. Thirria. Two vols. Paris: Plon, 1899. 7. Rome et Napoléon III. By E. Bourgeois and E. Clermont. Paris: Armand Colin, 1907. M. ÉMILE OLLIVIER has written an apology for his political career in fourteen volumes, eight thousand pages, and a million and a half words, and if the weight of an apology is to be measured in a grocer's scale his must be one of the weightiest apologies in literary history. It might perhaps be inferred from this that M. Ollivier was a party to transactions which it is impossible or at least embarrassing to defend, that his political course has been far from straight, and that his fame is so thickly obscured by clouds that only by gargantuan puffings and blowings can it be restored to its proper translucency. Such a conclusion would be hasty and erroneous. The writer of this prolix apology can afford to open his public career to the inspection of any jury of moralists without a twinge of misgiving. Whatever may have been his failures and his faults, nobody can say that they were the fruit of a mean, jealous, or double-dealing nature. M. Ollivier is the most diaphanous of men and the least malicious of memoir-writers. He has the full orator's allowance of vanity, but it is as the vanity of the sunflower, large, easy and expansive. He can admire Thiers, who eclipsed him, and find qualities to praise in Jules Simon, whom he regarded as an old ally sundered by treachery. He has been a hard but never a rancorous fighter, and has preserved a sweet core of geniality through misfortunes which would have dropped acid into a less wholesome nature. Nobody can read these volumes without feeling attracted to their author. They have none of those subtle and delicate harmonies which are so enchanting in the best prose of all; they are neither witty nor humorous, and they are sadly lacking in restraint, plan, concision; but they move along at a high level of clear and masculine eloquence; they are never languid or feeble; and who can refrain from admiring the unconquerable youth and buoyancy of heart which has prompted a man, after his political career had been broken beyond retrieve, to plan at the age of seventy, and to execute between the ages of seventy and eighty-four, so gallant and extensive a vindication of the faith that was in him? M. Ollivier's apology takes the form of a general history of the Second Empire and of its intellectual and political antecedents. He wishes to show that Liberalism was an essential part of the Imperial idea, and that he was fully justified in his belief that France could enjoy a wide measure of political liberty under an Emperor of the lineage of Napoleon. And this object is combined with a purpose which is still more directly relevant to M. Ollivier's political reputation. The Cabinet of which he was the nominal chief plunged France into the war of 1870; and not the least among the motives which have led to the composition of this elaborate book is the desire to recount the true causes of that plain and palpable catastrophe. The name Ollivier is associated with a great defeat. There was a time when no Frenchman could speak a good word for the Minister who, on July 15, 1870, announced from the tribune that he entered the Prussian war with a light heart.' Many were the imprecations heaped on that 'light heart' of M. Ollivier. No party would defend him. To the Royalists he was a demagogue, to the Republicans a renegade, to the Imperialists the quack doctor who had injured a sound constitution. When the first great defeats were announced, M. Ollivier was hurled from office and shot through descending levels of opprobrium and contempt into the oblivion from which an unresting spirit of selfassertion armed with an industrious and enduring pen has enabled him triumphantly to emerge. The writer of these memoirs was born at Marseilles July 2, 1825, and first came into public notice in 1848 when Ledru-Rollin sent him and his father into the departments of the Bouches du Rhône and Var as joint commissioners of the newly-founded Republic. Educated in the Radical tradition of France, Émile Ollivier had been familiar from early youth with some of the leaders of Republican opinion. His father, Demosthenes Ollivier, was the friend of Armand Carrel, the RepublicanBonapartist, of Pierre Leroux, the Republican-Socialist, of Ledru-Rollin, the Republican pure and simple. Above our childish heads,' says the autobiographer quaintly, ' resounded the grand words, God, Humanity, Plato, Jesus.' We are left to infer that the atmosphere of the Ollivier household was compounded of that sentimental and comprehensive idealism which is the special feature of the Revolution of 1848 in its early and exuberant phases. In such a home the young Ollivier naturally grew up to be a Republican, but not, though perhaps this may be the result of temperament rather than of surroundings, a Republican of the most austere and exclusive sect. One key to the inner shrine of Jacobinism he never possessed. He was neither an atheist nor an anti-clerical. On the contrary, much as he deplored the development of ultramontane tendencies in the Church, he was as a youth, and has ever since remained, a loyal Catholic. He tells us how as a boy he found his favourite intellectual pasture in Bossuet and Pascal, and how during his progress as Republican commissioner he created something of a sensation by calling on a bishop. Such Liberalism was rare among Ledru-Rollin's commissioners, but the brief life of the Second Republic afforded little scope for its exercise. The triumph of Louis Bonaparte dealt a shattering blow to the Ollivier family. The father was sentenced to Cayenne, then exiled; and the avenues of public life seemed to be effectively closed against the son. In the sudden and complete eclipse of public liberties Émile Ollivier found a refuge and eventually a reputation in the practice of the law. The bar has been a great school of political oratory in France. The leaders of the Gironde were barristers, Gambetta and Jules Favre won their first laurels at the bar, and M. Ollivier, who stands as far removed from the D'Aguesseaus and Pothiers of his profession as Lamennais from Aquinas or Erskine from Coke, learnt to love the sound of his eloquent voice first at Lyons and subsequently in the historic halls of the Île de la Cité. Then in 1857 he resolved to rid himself of the scruple which prevented the strait sect of Republicans from entering political life. The friend of Michelet took an oath to the Imperial Constitution, was elected to the Chamber by the third circumscription of the Seine, and found himself leader of a small company of five who alone represented the Republican principle in an Assembly manufactured by prefects and governed by emotions of servility and fear. The programme of the 'Five' was Liberalism. In domestic affairs they advocated the repeal of the Coercion Acts, the freedom of the press, the publication of parliamentary debates, parliamentary control of legislation and finance, elected municipal councils for Paris and Lyons, the abolition of official candidatures and governmental pressure at elections. In foreign policy they stood for the principle of Nationality; in the ecclesiastical domain for the free Church in the free State. To all Five it was common ground that the Empire could never consist with liberty, and that the true object of a Liberal Opposition was to sap its foundation and to prepare its fall. From this position Jules Favre, who was perhaps the most eloquent and resourceful of the Five, never departed, but Ollivier was cast in a less obdurate mould, and by swift and continuous gradations the Republican son of a Republican proscript became the apostle of the Liberal Empire. Of the agencies by which this transformation was accomplished there is naturally a full, though not a complete, account in these memoirs. It is clear, for instance, that the Duc de Morny, the Emperor's half-brother, took special pains to conciliate the vigorous young iconoclast, though it is impossible to determine with accuracy the weight which is to be attributed to the seductions of this adroit politician. But the course of public affairs probably counted for more with M. Ollivier than the personal influences to which the stalwarts of the Republican cause attributed his lapse. In 1860 the Emperor declared an amnesty for political offences. M. Ollivier's 'heart was appeased,' and henceforward he began to think more favourably of the possibilities of the Empire. When on November 24 of the same year the Emperor so far relaxed the rigour of his system as to permit the publication of parliamentary debates and the power of discussing the Address, M. Ollivier discovered, as he tells us, 'a sovereign capable of understanding liberty.' He still declared himself a Republican, but in vague and eloquent language promised his support to the Emperor if he would realise the liberal programme of the Hundred Days. When Morny asked him whether he was content with the concessions he replied, 'If it is the end you are lost, if it is a beginning you are established.' It proved only to be a beginning. The elections of 1863, despite all that the prefects could do to prevent it, brought new strength to the Opposition and restored Thiers to public life. Blow after blow rained down upon the Government defences. The Mexican expedition was shown to be unnecessary, expensive, a violation of the principles of nationalities; the Opposition demanded the withdrawal of the French troops from Rome, and claimed that the interests of France were being sacrificed to the clericals. In these attacks M. Ollivier joined, but he was now no longer the most conspicuous star in the Assembly. The wider experience and the more brilliant eloquence of Thiers gave the Orleanist leader a position among the opponents of the Government to which none of the young generation could aspire; and perhaps this fact may have exercised a certain unanalysed influence over the attitude of the Liberal leader. Be this as it may, in 1864 M. Ollivier quarrelled with the Left over a bill to legalise strikes, and in the following year cast his voteun vote d'espérance-for the Address. He was now drawn into the Imperial circle. On May 6, 1865, he dined with the Empress at the Tuileries, learnt that at sixteen she had been a Fourierist, and explained to her that his task was to convert a revolutionary into a constitutional democracy. On June 27 he had his first interview with the Emperor. I was charmed,' he wrote that evening in his diary; he was gay and open, ready with his smile, and so simple that he puts you at your ease at once; not talkative certainly, but an agreeable talker. His eye is quick, fine, caressing, his appearance cold but without stiffness. His nature strikes me as delicate and feminine.' In 1866 the breach |