Career Of Napoleon III

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

The French republic which had replaced the Orleans monarchy in 1848 had a brief and troubled career. From the outset it was embarrassed by crude socialistic proposals which produced much economic disorganization and even more business anxiety. This second Napoleon Bonaparte, posing as a liberal "safe" man, who would restore confidence and stabilize affairs, was able to secure his election as President in the October of that year. He took an oath as President to be faithful to the democratic republic, and to regard as enemies all who attempted to change the form of government. In two years' time (December 1852) he was Emperor of the French.

At first he was regarded with considerable suspicion by Queen Victoria, or rather by Baron Stockmar, the friend and servant of King Leopold of Belgium, and the keeper of the international conscience of the British queen and her consort. All this group of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha people had a reasonable and generous enthusiasm for the unity and wellbeing of Germany upon liberal lines and they were disposed to be alarmed at this Bonapartist revival. Lord Palmerston, the British foreign minister, was, on the other hand, friendly with the usurper from the outset; he offended the queen by sending amiable dispatches to the French President without submitting them for her examination and so giving her sufficient time to consult Stockmar upon them,and he was obliged to resign. But subsequently the British Court veered round to a more cordial attitude to the new ad-venturer. The opening years of his reign promised a liberal monarchy rather than a Napoleonic career; a government of "cheap bread, great public works, and holidays," and he expressed himself warmly in favour of the idea of nationalism, which was naturally a very acceptable idea to Any liberal German intelligence. There had been a brief all German parliament at Frankfort in 1848, which was over thrown in 1849 by the Prussian monarchy.

Before 1848 all the great European courts of the Vienna settlement had been kept in a kind of alliance by the fear of a second and more universal démoc atic revolution. After the evolutionary failures of 1848 and the restoration of monarchy in France, this fear was lifted, and they were free to resume the scheming and counter scheming of the days before 1789 with the vastly more powerful armies and fleets the first Napoleonic phase had given them. The game of Great Powers was resumed with zest, after an interval of sixty years, and it continued until it produced the catastrophe of 1914.

For a time the new Napoleon went warily. It was the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas I, who made the first move towards war, He resumed the traditional thrust of Peter the Great towards Constantinople. Nicholas invented the phrase of the "sick man of Europe" for the Sultan, and, finding an excuse in the misgovernment of the Christian population of the Turkish empire, he occupied the Danubian principalities in 1853. It was a real international retrocession. European diplomatists found themselves with a question of quite the eighteenth-century pattern. The designs of Russia were understood to clash with the designs of France in Syria, and to threaten the Mediterranean route to India of Great Britain, and the outcome was an alliance of France and England to bolster up Turkey and a war, the Crimean War, which ended in the repulse of Russia. One might have thought that the restraint of Russia was rather the business of Austria and Germany, but the passion of the foreign offices of France and England for burning their fingers in Russian affairs has always been very difficult to control. And the new Napoleon saw in this war an opportunity of cementing his insecure friendship with Britain and the British court, which had so far held aloof from him.

The next phase of interest in this revival of the Great Power drama was the exploitation by the Emperor Napoleon III and the king of the small kingdom of Sardinia in North Italy, of the inconveniences and miseries of the divided state of Italy, and particularly of the Austrian rule in the north. The King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel, made an old time bargain for Napoleon's help in return for the provinces of Nice and Savoy. France was to have these and Sardinia was to be compensated in Italy. The war between France and Sardinia on the one hand, and Austria on the other, broke out in 1859, and was over in a few weeks. The Austrians were badly beaten at Magenta and Solferino. Then, being threatened by Prussia on the Rhine, Napoleon made peace, leaving Sardinia the richer for Lombardy.

The next move in the game of Victor Emmanuel, and of his chief minister Cavour, was an insurrectionary movement in Sicily led by the great Italian patriot Garibaldi. Sicily and Naples were liberated, and all Italy, except only Rome (which remained loyal to the Pope) and Venetia, which was held by the Austrians, fell to the king of Sardinia. A general Italian parliament met at Turin in 1861, and Victor Emmanuel became the first king of Italy.But now the interest in this game of European diplomacy shifted to Germany. Already the common sense of the natural political map had asserted itself. In 1848 all Germany, including, of course, German Austria, was for a time united under the Frankfort parliament. But that sort of union was particularly offensive to all the German courts and foreign offices; they did not want a Germany united by the will of its people, they wanted Germany united by legal and diplomatic action as Italy was being united. In 1848 the German Parliament had insisted that the largely German provinces of Schleswig-Holstein, which had been in the German Bundy must belong to Germany. It had ordered the Prussian army to occupy them, and the king of Prussia had refused to take his orders from the German parliament, and so had precipitated the downfall of that body. Now the King of Denmark, Christian IX, for no conceivable motive except the natural folly of kings, embarked upon a campaign of annoyance against the Germans in these two duchies.Prussian affairs were then very much in the hands of a minister of the seventeenth century type, von Bismarck (count in 1865, prince in 1871), and he saw brilliant opportunities in this trouble. He became the champion of the German nationality in these duchies it must be remembered that the King of Prussia had refused to undertake this role for demoeratlc Germany in 1848 and he persuaded Austria to side with Prussia in a military intervention.Denmark had no chance against these Great Powers; she easily beaten and obliged to relinquish the duchies.

Then Bismarck picked a quarrel with Austria for the possession of these two small states. So he brought about a needless and fratricidal war of Germans for the greater glory of Prussia and the ascendancy of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany. He consolidated Germany under the Prussian Hohenzollern& German writers of a romantic turn of mind represent Bismark as a great statesman planning the unity of Germany; but indeed he was doing nothing of the kind. The unity of Germany was a reality in 1848. It was and is in the nature of things. The Prussian monarchy was simply delaying the inevitable in order to seem to achieve it in Piussian fashion. That is why, when at last Germany was unified, instead of bearing the likeness of a modem civilized people, it presented itself to the world with the face of this archaic Bismarck, with a fierce moustache, huge jack boots, a spiked helmet, and a sword.

In this war between Prussia and Austria, Prussia had for an ally Italy; while most of the smaller German states, who dreaded the schemes of Prussia, fought on the side of Austria. The reader will naturally want to know why Napoleon III did not grasp this admirable occasion for state-craft and come into the war to his own advantage. All the rules of the Great Power game required that he should. He was allowing a dangerous rival to France to arise in Europe in the shape of Prussia. He should have done something to prevent this. But Napoleon, unhappily for himself, had got his fingers in a trap on the other side of the Atlantic, and vas in no position just then to intervene.

He had been sorely tempted, by America. The discord between the interests of the southern and northern states in be North American union, due to the economic differences based on slavery, had at last led to open civil war. In our next section we will deal with this civil war more fully; here se will only say that it lasted four years, and ended at last in reunited United States. All the elements of reaction in Europe rejoiced during the four years of republican dissension; the British aristocracy openly sided with the cofederate states, and the British Government permitted several privateers, and particularly the Alabama, to be launched in England to attack the federal shipping.

Napoleon III was even more rash in his assumption that after all the new world had fallen before the old. Hitherto the United States had forbidden European interference upon the continent of America. This was, so to speak, a fixed rule of American policy. It had been first clearly enunciated by President Monroe, and it was called the Monroe doctrine. The sure shield of the Monroe doctrine, it seemed to Napoleon, was now thrust aside for good, the Great Powers might meddle again in America, and the blessings of an adventurous monarchy be restored there.

A pretext for interference was found in certain liberties taken with the property of foreigners by the Mexican president. A joint expedition of French, British, and Spanish occupied Vera Cruz, but Napoleon's projects were too bold for his allies, and they withdrew when it became clear that he contemplated nothing less than the establishment of a Mexican empire. This he did, after much stiff fighting, making the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, Emperor of Mexico in 1864. The French forces, however, remained in effectual possession of the country, and a crowd of French speculators poured into Mexico to exploit its mines and re. sources.

But in April, 1865, the civil war in the United States was brought to an end and the little group of eager Europeans in possession of Mexico found themselves faced by the victorious. United States government in a thoroughly grim mood, with

large, dangerous looking army in hand. The French imperialists were bluntly given the alternative of war with the United States or clearing out of America. In effect this was an instruction to go. This was the entanglement which pre vented Napoleon III from interference between Prussia am Austria in 1866, and this was the reason why Bismarck precipitated his struggle with Austria.

While Prussia was fighting Austria, Napoleon III was trying to escape with dignity from the briars of Mexico.

He invented a shabby quarrel upon financial grounds with Maximilian and withdrew the French troops. Then, by all the rules of kingship, Maximilian should have abdicated. But instead he made a fight for his empire; he was defeated by his recalcitrant subjects, caught, and shot as a public nuisance in 1867. So the peace of President Monroe was restored to the new world.

But while Napoleon was busy with his American misadventure, Prussia and Italy were snatching victory over the Austrians (1866). Italy, it is true, was badly beaten at Custozza and in the naval battle of Lissa, but the Austrian army was so crushed by the Prussian at the battle of Sadowa, that Austria made an abject surrender. Italy gained the province of Venetia, so making one more step towards unity only Rome and Trieste and a few small towns on the north and north-western frontiers remained and Prussia became the head of a North German Confederation, from which Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Baden, Hesse, and Austria were excluded.

This victory of Prussia, this supersession of Austria as even the nominal head of things German, this restoration of the predominance of the kingdom of Frederick the Great, brought Prussia and France face to face. A great rivalry had become clear, a rivalry that was to produce at last the greatest and most desolating war in all history. It was only a question of time before France and Prussia clashed. Each armed, but Prussia had better schoolmasters and a higher standard of obedience and efficiency than France. The war almost came in 1867, when, so soon as he was free from Mexico, Napoleon sought to pick a quarrel with Prussia over Luxembourg. It came in 1870 quite on eighteenth century grounds, with a dispute about the candidates for the vacant throne of Spain. Napoleon had some theory in his mind that Austria, Bavaria, Wurttemberg, and the other states outside the North German Confederation would side with him against Prussia. He probably thought this would happen because he wanted it to happen. But since 1848 the Germans, so far as foreign meddling was concerned, had been in spirit a united people; Bismarck had merely imposed the Hohenzollern monarchy, with pomp, ceremony, and bloodshed, upon accomplished facts. All Germany sided with Prussia.

Early in August 1870 the united German forces invaded France. In numbers, discipline, equipment, and leading they proved better than the French. The debacle of France was swift and complete. After the battles of Worth and Gravelotte, one French army under Bazaine was forced into Metz and surrounded there, and, on September 1st, a second, with which was Napoleon, was defeated and obliged to capitulate at Sedan. Napoleon became a prisoner. Paris found herself bare to the invader. For a second time the promises of Napoleonism had failed France disastrously.

On September 4th, France declared herself a republic again, and thus regenerated, prepared to fight for existence against triumphant Prussianism. For though it was a united Germany that had overcome French imperialism, it had Prussia in the saddle. The army in Metz capitulated in October; Paris, after a siege and bombardment, surrendered in January 1871, and France sued for peace.

With pomp and ceremony, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, amidst a great array of military uniforms, the King of Prussia was declared German Emperor, and Bismarck and the sword of the Hohenzollerns claimed the credit for that German unity which a common language and literature had long since assured.

The peace of Frankfort which followed was a Hohenzollern peace. Bismarck had availed himself of the national feeling of Germany to secure the aid of the South German states, but he had no grasp of the essential forces that had given victory to him and to his royal master. The power that had driven Prussia to victory was the power of the natural political map of Europe insisting upon the unity of the German-speaking peoples. In the east, Germany was already sinning against that natural map by her administration of Posen and other Polish districts. Now greedy for territory, and particularly for iron mines, she annexed a considerable area of French-speaking Lorraine, including Metz, and Alsace, which, in spite of its German speech, was largely French in sympathy. Inevitably there was a clash between German rulers and French subjects in these annexed provinces; inevitably the wrongs and bitterness of the subjugated France of Lorraine echoed in Paris and kept alive' the passionate resentment of the French.How at last that flared up in a great revanche we shall tell later!

Napoleon III hid his diminished head in England, and died there a year or so after his collapse. So ended the second, Bonapartist régime in France.