THE CONSCIENCE OF LOUIS NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

THE question whether the Ex-Emperor of the French has been gifted with a conscience, and if so, what it is like, what he has done to give it keenness of nerve, in what fashion he has blunted its power of communicating with his brain, or in what de- gree he has listened to its promptings, threatens to take its place among the riddles of history, and to perplex the moralists of the future. On the one side stand the eulogists of the Emperor, who hold all his acts to be so many signs of wisdom, and of a wish to live for the good of his country. Such men laud him as the best Sovereign that ever ruled over France ; pronounce the coup d'etat to have been dictated by the necessity of saving France from anarchy ; and, in a word, see in the Ex-Emperor, not only the most sagacious man of his time, but also one of the best. On the other side stands a phalanx of satirists represented by Victor Hugo. The only colour on the palette of those artists is lamp black. Morally they paint the Ex-Emperor as dark as a negro, array him in the livery of the Devil, and then invoke the execration of history. Between the poles of blind eulogy and equally blind denunciation stand a crowd of critics, who confess that they do not know what to make of the man, and in that puzzled corps we find M. Renan. Writing on the political state of France, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, this subtle critic has said :—" The character of the Emperor Napoleon III. is a problem on which, even when we shall possess data which are now beyond our reach, we must express ourselves with much caution. Few historic subjects will stand so much in need of retouching ; and if, within fifty years, we have no critic as profound as M. Sainte Beuve, as conscientious, as careful not to efface contradictions, but to explain them, the Emperor Napo- leon III. will never be rightly judged." M. Renan's historical studies must force him to view with profound suspicion the ver- dicts which the mass of people pronounce on those types of men whose mental and moral organization is marked by subtlety of thought and motive. In real life a Hamlet would never be under- stood. His vacillation, the intricacy of the path by which his mind travels from motive to deed, and the aberrations from what might seem to be the normal orbit of action, would all puzzle that vast class of persons who shape their life at the dictate of a few plain maxims, and do not see, or even suspect, that outside their own little world of duty there lies a whole universe of right and wrong.

It would not be difficult for a subtle critic to write a plausible defence of all the worst acts done by Louis Napoleon. As hard a task was undertaken by Mr. Fronde when he accepted a brief for Henry VIII. ; a harder task had been accepted by Mr. Lewes in his defence of Nero ; and, by the side of De Quincey's apology for Judas Iscariot, an apology for the author of the coup d'itat might seem trivial. The first count in the indictment would be, that Prince Louis tried to make France rise in rebellion against Louis Philippe ; but many good men have stirred up rebellions for good causes, and it might be plausibly argued that the Prince had a good cause when he sought to replace a Government which was essentially ignoble, by a Government which, in accordance with the traditions of the great Emperor, should give France glory abroad and prosperity at home. Again, the Prince broke the oath which he swore as President of the Republic, and destroyed that Republic which he had sworn to maintain. But the question whether political oaths are as obligatory as personal, and whether circum- stances may not destroy their binding force, is one of the most difficult problems in the whole range of ethics. By her coronation oath our own Queen was bound to maintain the Protestant religion in Ireland no less than in England ; but when Parliament decreed that the Protestant Church of Ireland should be disestablished, she felt that, as respects Ireland, the people had released her from the vow, and that they had the power to grant such a dispensation ; nor will the soundness of her judgment be impugned, except by the blindest bigotry. All the members of the French Army took an oath of allegiance to the Emperor, which the remnants of the force are now keeping by lending allegiance to the Republic. The same oath was taken by M. Gambetta and M. Jules Fevre, who were the first to proclaim the downfall of the Empire, and the estab- lishment of a Republic. Prince Louis, it is true, excused the breach of his oath on the plea that the National Assembly was filled with persons who strove by their plots to paralyze the authority which he had received from the people ; and M. de Tocqueville asserted not only that the statement was untrue, but that the Prince knew it to be untrue. Yet the word of the philo- sopher, although valuable as a proof that the members of the Assembly had not entered into a plot, does not prove that the Pre- sident said what he himself knew to be false. Perhaps he really fancied that if he did not strike down the Assembly, that body would strike down him. At last, M. de Montalembert, the most religious of men, feared so much that the action of the Assembly would bring anarchy to France and desolation to the Church, that he sang the praises of the author of the coup d'etat as the man who " had put to flight the whole of the Revolutionists, the whole of the Socialists, and the whole of the bandits of France and Europe." The same devotee warned the religious men of France that " to vote against Louis Napoleon would be to invite the dictatorship of the Reds, in place of the dictatorship of a Prince who had rendered for three years incomparable service to the cause of order and catholicism." And even if we assume that Louis Napoleon did tell a lie to the French people, he would, alas ! not stand alone among the political men whom the world has agreed to honour. Cavour told a lie to the Italian Parliament when he solemnly declared that he had not ceded an inch of Italian territory to the Emperor of the French. On the subject of poli- tical lies, a subtle casuist might discourse for a year, and might plausibly argue that no statesman ever tells the real truth to a popular assembly ; but glosses over ugly facts, or leaves false impressions by means of evasive sentences. Pitt's whole system of oratory was a system of rhetorical lying. A Queen's Speech might be described as an ungrammatical lie, if anybody expected such a document to tell the truth. The Prince-President, however, not only told a lie ; but shot down the people in the streets of Paris because, by erecting barricades and firing muskets, some few Parisians showed that they did not believe his words. But,. perhaps, it was the subordinates of the President who were responsible for the massacre ; or, perhaps, the massacre was- unavoidable, and the shooting of innocent wives and children was only a " misfortune," like the burning alive of the women and children in the village of Bezeilles the other day, when the Bavarians opened fire on the houses for strategical rea- sons; or, perhaps,—there is no end of the " perhapses " which might flow from the pen of a clever casuist who had been trained in the school of Loyola. The prisoners taken in the street fight, however, were shot down by scores in cold blood a full day after the battle had ceased ; and surely the President must bear the responsibility of those wholesale and deliberate murders, surely they will cover his name with infamy until the end of time. " Not necessarily," might be the reply of the casuist, "for they may have been done by De Moray and Persigny, without the authority, or even the knowledge, of the man whom they called their master. The evidence is too scanty to allow of our accurately deciding the guilt. As M. Renan says we must wait for our facts and our Sainte Bettye." But, again, the Emperor ,declared war against Prussia on grounds which the whole civilized world pronounced to. be a mere pretext. He declared war to save his dynasty. He deliberately sacrificed the lives of hundreds of thousands, and ha be lost if the scalpel were to go a hair's breadth too deep into the promptings of evil, but because he is too unimaginative to con- mass of flesh and tissue. The casuist would delight to hold a ceive crimes of Napoleonic grandeur, and too stupid to follow the

brief in the cause of Morality v. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, be- reflective process of a Napoleonic brain. Aud yet there have cause the evidence against the prisoner at the bar seems so strong, been Philistines whose own career in the world of commerce and the verdict of guilty so sure. And the arguments by which had somewhat of a Napoleonic sweep. There have been specula- he would seek to turn the point of the evidence, or to secure a tors for whom the world has seemed too small. And as railway, mitigation of sentence, are precisely such as a skilful Old Bailey or as cotton, or as stock-jobbing kings, those men have been practitioner would employ to defend a man who had not only mighty conquerors, with grand aims and without scruples, the committed a murder, but had been so unfortunate as to be caught artificers of colossal work, and the authors of the ruin which has in the act. Such answers as we have suggested to the impeach- fallen on a million homes. Such men, if they were able to analyze ment of Louis Napoleon are precisely similar to the pleas that the motives by which they have been driven from the slum of the might be suggested in favour of Bill Sykes. Caligula could be huckster to the throne of the commercial dictator, could reveal defended on similar grounds ; so could Fouquier Tinville ; so, with terrible vividness the temptations that lure on a Bonaparte whatever may have been the opinion of Macaulay, could Barrere ; from the position of a humble citizen of the Republic to that of an and so could that paragon of activity and filial piety, Troppmann, autocrat. Such men are seized with the idea that it would be a

who killed a whole French family in order to provide for his poor magnificent feat to bridge the Channel, since the link would make

relations. France and England friends for ever, and since, before all things, However, it is a weary task to shriek out accusations against the the iron highway from island to continent would give undying Ex-Emperor ; the task of interest is to understand the man, by fame and boundless power to him by whom it should be executed.

looking into what he is pleased to call his conscience, as we should So, in season and out of season, the plans are thrust on the notice look into a curious watch, that always revealed its presence by of the world. The world is careless ; it must be stimulated by loud ticking, and always told a lie about the time of day. The eloquent prophecies. It is sceptical ; it must be convinced by facts.

real explanation of his acts is, we believe, to be found in the theory It is dull of comprehension ; the facts must be arrayed in the garb by which Prevost-Paradol accounts for the moral aberrations of of that rhetoric which uses adjectives only of the superlative the First Napoleon. In perhaps the most remarkable passage ever degree. The world fails to see the meaning of facts ; it must be penned by the unhappy journalist, it is contended that the great taught truth by means of lies. It does not know its own interest ;

Napoleon wrote on the page of history an everliving record of so it must be treated like a baby by the Napoleon of the Stock selfish ambition and gigantic crime, not because he was morally Exchange. And yet one day the Napoleon finds that, in spite of

worse than the mass of men, but because in point of intellect all his good intentions, the mighty scheme for binding nations he was immeasurably greater. Morally, Napoleon I. was an together by means of iron rods has signally failed ; that the sea average man,—that is to say, he was selfish enough to has washed the fabric away ; that his schemes have driven a

prefer himself and his family to the nation, which had thousand families to eat the bread of charity or toil ; and that, cast itself at his feet, and given its destiny into his strange as the fact may seem, he, the Napoleon of his age, is keeping. He did, on a vast scale, what is done on a small pursued into exile by the curses of those to whom he meant to be by the average British Philistine, who fancies that to make a second Providence.

one's family comfortable, and to pay one's rates, and to under- Thus we get a clue to the nature of the man who, after destroy- sell one's neighbour is the whole duty of man. But the average ing the French Republic, and ruling France for twenty years with British Philistine is so wretchedly endowed with brain, and so in- sagacity and success, plunged into the most foolish as well as the

capable of following any train of thought to its logical result, most unprovoked war recorded in modern history, and ended his that he cannot conceive any aims grander than those of the career iu the mightiest capitulation known to military annals. The counting-house, or any code of right and wrong other than that personal ability of Napoleon III. has been exaggerated by his ad- furnished by the parson. Thus his selfishness has little room to mirers. He does not stand on the same plane as his uncle, to whom act. He is like a cow tethered in a field of clover, and with a nature had given one of those originating and organizing brains bandage over its eyes, so that it cannot stray beyond a small which she fashions once in a thousand years. Nor, in diplomatic circle, or see that the sweet clover stretches far beyond its subtlety, fertility of resource, or sagacious audacity of plan, is he little orbit in a billowy expanse of green. If the ordinary British the equal of such men as Cavour and Bismarck. But he acquired Philistine were as richly endowed with intellect as with selfish- immense power from the profound study of one political system, ness, these islands would be made uninhabitable in a week, and and the fanatical belief in one political idea. He was a Bona- the children of light would be forced to beg that Von Moltke would partist by conviction as well as by blood; The worship of his smite the Philistines " from the rising of the sun even unto uncle's name, and the study of his uncle's plans, had taught him the going down of the same." But the Philistine is so de- to regard the system of Imperialism with some such faith as the lightfully stupid as to be one of those good members of devotee regards the mission of the Church. In Imperialism he society who make a fortune, and live respectably, or, at found a religion, and in his uncle a Messiah. lie worshipped at the worst, die in the odour of sanctity and pecuniary debt. the shrine of Napoleon, and the one aim of his life was to ride into Napoleon the Great, on the other hand, added the selfish- supreme power over France on the wings of his uncle's fame, his ness of a Philistine to the intellect of a Titan. He was a uncle's system of government, his uncle's schemes for universal monster, not because he lacked a conscience, but, as Prevost- peace. He found Louis Philippe in the way, but why should he per- Paradol justly indicates, because the strength of his conscience mit his way to be blocked by a man who was the type of bourgeois

brought misery to a million homes, rather than permit the throne bore no relation to the strength of his brain. His aim was to of France to slip from the grasp of himself and Ws son. " But," make himself the first man in all the world, and then, let us not replies the casuist, " that is an assumption which no court of law doubt, to give the world such justice of law, such success of would receive as evidence. France wished for war ; and even such commerce, such breadth of culture, and such grandeur of aim as French statesmen as M. Thiers, who held the causes assigned it had never known before. All things were to be done for for the present war to be insufficient, would gladly have welcomed mankind, if only mankind would permit the work to be executed a war with Germany if it had been waged to prevent her from by Napoleon, and only allow the glory to be his. All things becoming the rival of France, and been declared at a time when must be done by him, whatever might be the cost iu tears and blood.

France was prepared to strike. Nay, it was the insane jealousy And, indeed, how trivial must the tears and blood of a few million with which the French people regarded a united Germany, and people, during one paltry generation, have seemed to a Napoleon, their immoral passion for /a gloire, that forced the Emperor to with his eye forecasting the results of a thousand years, and a attack the Prussian troops. He was not his own master. He was time when history should speak of Napoleon in the same breath forced to go with the stream. He went with it sorely against his with Caesar and Charlemagne ! It was as natural for such a man will, and saddened by the presentiment that he was going to meet to waste a million lives as it is for a British Philistine to effect a political death. Thus he has been the victim of circumstances." huge transaction on the Stock Exchange, and thus to beggar his Such are the pleas with which a clever casuist might defend neighbour, if he receive early intelligence of the fact that France Louis Napoleon at the bar of morality, and the case would give has declared war against Prussia, or that the army of Marshal room for the display of wonderful subtlety. A casuist of the MacMahon has capitulated at Sedan. The Philistine cannot school assailed by Pascal would delight to hold a brief for the de- understand how a Napoleon can be so wicked, for precisely fence. He would delight to undertake the task, for the same the same reason as he cannot understand Kant's Philosophy of

reason that a dexterous surgeon might glow with pleasure when the Unconditioned." He fails to follow the windings, and the im- about to execute an operation demanding such consummate pulses, and the flights of a Satanic intellect, not because he him-

delicacy and boldness of stroke that the life of the patient would self is too pure to have a sympathetic comprehension of the

be lost if the scalpel were to go a hair's breadth too deep into the promptings of evil, but because he is too unimaginative to con- mass of flesh and tissue. The casuist would delight to hold a ceive crimes of Napoleonic grandeur, and too stupid to follow the

brief in the cause of Morality v. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, be- reflective process of a Napoleonic brain. Aud yet there have cause the evidence against the prisoner at the bar seems so strong, been Philistines whose own career in the world of commerce and the verdict of guilty so sure. And the arguments by which had somewhat of a Napoleonic sweep. There have been specula- he would seek to turn the point of the evidence, or to secure a tors for whom the world has seemed too small. And as railway, mitigation of sentence, are precisely such as a skilful Old Bailey or as cotton, or as stock-jobbing kings, those men have been practitioner would employ to defend a man who had not only mighty conquerors, with grand aims and without scruples, the committed a murder, but had been so unfortunate as to be caught artificers of colossal work, and the authors of the ruin which has in the act. Such answers as we have suggested to the impeach- fallen on a million homes. Such men, if they were able to analyze ment of Louis Napoleon are precisely similar to the pleas that the motives by which they have been driven from the slum of the might be suggested in favour of Bill Sykes. Caligula could be huckster to the throne of the commercial dictator, could reveal defended on similar grounds ; so could Fouquier Tinville ; so, with terrible vividness the temptations that lure on a Bonaparte whatever may have been the opinion of Macaulay, could Barrere ; from the position of a humble citizen of the Republic to that of an and so could that paragon of activity and filial piety, Troppmann, autocrat. Such men are seized with the idea that it would be a

who killed a whole French family in order to provide for his poor magnificent feat to bridge the Channel, since the link would make

relations. France and England friends for ever, and since, before all things, However, it is a weary task to shriek out accusations against the the iron highway from island to continent would give undying Ex-Emperor ; the task of interest is to understand the man, by fame and boundless power to him by whom it should be executed.

looking into what he is pleased to call his conscience, as we should So, in season and out of season, the plans are thrust on the notice look into a curious watch, that always revealed its presence by of the world. The world is careless ; it must be stimulated by loud ticking, and always told a lie about the time of day. The eloquent prophecies. It is sceptical ; it must be convinced by facts.

real explanation of his acts is, we believe, to be found in the theory It is dull of comprehension ; the facts must be arrayed in the garb by which Prevost-Paradol accounts for the moral aberrations of of that rhetoric which uses adjectives only of the superlative the First Napoleon. In perhaps the most remarkable passage ever degree. The world fails to see the meaning of facts ; it must be penned by the unhappy journalist, it is contended that the great taught truth by means of lies. It does not know its own interest ; vulgarity, and whose aims were desperately common-place ; whose crowning ambition was to enrich his family, and whose parade of love for the plebeians was so hollow that, as Heine sarcastically said, he always used the same old dirty glove to cover the hand with which he shook the hands of his unwashed subjects? Louis Philippe must be put out of the way. So must the Republic, with its blustering, its quarrelling, and its inability to comprehend the grandeur of the scheme which had been unfolded by Prince Louis Bonaparte in the comments on the ideas of his uncle. A coup d'itat must be effected, and the Republic must bear the blame of the unfortunate necessity. The subsequent massacre was an un- happy incident; but the Republic must bear the blame of that too; Persigny had sworn to that fact with abundant gusto. If untruths must be told and lives sacrificed, in order to found the Empire, the plan, after all, had the warrant of all time. For, what- ever might be said by the theologians, evil had uniformly been done in order to bring forth good. That was Nature's plan ; that was the only plan open to a great statesman; and that should be the plan of Louis Napoleon. When men talked of morality, he asked what they meant, and showed, by a small ex- penditure of subtlety, that they were building houses upon the sand. It was easy for so able a man to demolish the foundations of the Philistine morality, and easy to laugh at the bugbears which the priests had instilled into his wife,—a passion for masses as well as for crinoline. And, moreover, the system of Imperialism would shower such abundant blessings on France and Europe as could never rain down from the arid sky of a Republic or a Monarchy. Italy should be free and united ; Mexico should be a great Empire, the representative in America of the Latin races, and the rival of the United States ; while France should be made as rich as England by the influences of free- trade. The scheme did not lack grandeur ; it lacked nothing but justice and truth. It forgot but one thing—the existence of a moral law. It has failed, as all such schemes will fail in a world of free- dom. A high priest of the religion of Selfishness, Louis Napoleon now expiates in exile the sins which he committed in the day when the magic of his uncle's name, and the worship of his uncle's system, gave him such power as comes, perhaps, only once in a generation to any of the children of men.