Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/240

Rh 228 NAPOLEON Dr Conneau, as a workman, and walking out of the gates of the castle with a plank over his shoulder (May 25, 1846). He went again to London, and it is characteristic of the life of exile and imprisonment which he had hitherto passed that he heard for the first time a French tragedy performed when Rachel played in London in July 1846. He was now again in the fashionable world, and he appears to have been compelled to raise very large sums of money from money-lenders. The house in which he lived was No. 10 King Street, St James s. In February 1848 Louis Philippe lost his throne. Louis Napoleon at once set off for Paris, offering his services to the provisional Govern ment. He was, however, requested to withdraw from France, and did so. In April 1848, during the Chartist disturbances, he was serving in London as a special con stable. But his name was kept before the public in France ; he was put up for election to the assembly, and was elected at Paris and in three departments. As a Bouapartist movement was now evidently beginning, the executive commission demanded authority to arrest Prince Louis as an avowed pretender. This, however, was refused by the assembly, and it was voted that he should take his seat. Louis, however, had the astuteness to remain in the background until the workmen s insurrection of June was over, declaring himself unwilling to be the cause of any disturbance. The insurrection was put down by Cavaignac ; reaction set in, and Louis now appeared upon the scene as the candidate of order and the representative of authority. His first appearance in the assembly was on September 26, 1848; and in December he was elected president of the republic by above 5,000,000 votes, Cavaignac, who was second on the list, receiving a million and a half, and Lamartine a few thousands. On assuming office he swore in the presence of God to remain faithful to the republic, and to fulfil the duties imposed on him by the constitution. From this time the political history of Louis Napoleon is the history of France (see article FRANCE). The principal foreign affair of his presidency was the expedition to Rome, in which, for the sake of anticipating the action of Austria, French troops put down the Roman republic by force, and restored the pope to his sovereignty. Abroad this gained for Louis Napoleon the bitter hostility of Italian patriots, who remembered him as a companion in insurrection against the pope in 1831; and it was one of the many inconsistencies of his position that he was at once a friend of Italian freedom in his heart and yet, as the &quot;man of order&quot; and the &quot;saviour of society &quot; in France, dependent to a great extent upon the support of the priesthood. On the 2d of December 1851 he executed the coup d etat, which made an end of constitutional government. Approved at first by an enormous majority of the French people, and even by English public men of the type of Palmerston, this act is now almost universally recognized as a disastrous crime. The sham constitution which was promulgated by the president immediately afterwards lasted less than twelve months. In the following November a plebiscite was taken upon the question whether the imperial dignity should be re-established in the person of Louis Napoleon, and an affirmative answer was given by nearly 8,000,000 voters, against a dissentient minority of 250,000. The empire was inaugurated on the anniversary of the coup d etat, and for eighteen years Louis Napoleon was sovereign of France. The first ten years of his reign were successful, and in some respects brilliant. His marriage with Eugenie de Montijo, countess of Te&quot;ba (January 30, 1853), placed beside him a figure which long charmed Paris and its visitors. Adhering to the alliance with England which, since 1830, had served France well against the three eastern courts, Napoleon III. entered into war against Russia, He had always represented the restoration of Poland to be one of the tasks left by his uncle to France; and, had his army encountered fewer difficulties in the Crimea, or had the German powers shown any inclination to take part in the struggle against Russia, he would probably have made some serious attempt to restore at least the duchy of Warsaw. But he was no soldier himself ; the war proved a serious and embarrassing matter, and in the end Napoleon was far more anxious to make peace than his English ally. The second nationality which associated itself with Napoleonic history, and which had been crushed by the treaties of 1815, was the Italian. Napoleon III. had warning that the cause of Italy could not be safely abandoned. In January 1858 Orsini attempted to take his life. Whether or not the act of Orsini and the letters which he wrote from prison had the effect of quickening the emperor s determination to do some thing for Italy may be disputed ; but the time had now come, and in the interviews which took place between Napoleon and Cavour at Plombieres in the autumn of 1858 the alliance between France and Sardinia against Austria was arranged. In the spring of 1859 French armies entered northern Italy, and the emperor himself took command. On the 4th of June he witnessed the battle of Magenta, and on the next morning entered Milan in company with Victor Emmanuel. During the battle of Solferino on June 24th, he gave directions from the tower of the church of Castiglione. He met the emperor of Austria at Villafranca on July llth, and there agreed to those preliminaries of peace which so deeply disappointed the hopes that had been excited by his own words, -&quot; Italy free from the Alps to the Adriatic.&quot; Venice was left to Austria; Lom- bardy west of the Mincio alone was liberated; and the subsequent union of the peninsula under the house of Savoy was no work of Napoleon III., whose own plan was to form an Italian federation under the presidency of the pope, and in virtual dependence upon France. Never theless the expulsion of Austria from Lombardy was in itself so great a blow that the later effects, though not foreseen by Napoleon, naturally resulted from it ; and he has a better title to the gratitude of the Italians than they have generally acknowledged. The feelings with which Napoleon was regarded in Italy before and after the meet ing of Villafranca are well exhibited in Mrs Browning s two poems, Napoleon in Italy and An August Voice. The annexation of Nice and Savoy to France excited great uneasiness in the British Government, but the treaty of commerce between France and England, which was signed in January 1860, gave the emperor a popularity in Eng land which he retained even after his fall. With the termination of the Italian war and the inauguration of a policy of free trade the rule of Napoleon III. had reached its best. His ill-judged interference in the affairs of Mexico ended disastrously; the part played by France in reference to the Danish War of 1864 was weak and incon sequent; and when the great struggle between Prussia and Austria was impending Napoleon appears to have been duped by Count Bismarck, and to have expected to gain Rhenish territory without taking up arms. Mean while the splendour of the court, the continuous improve ments in Paris, the rapid growth of wealth throughout France, the subservience of officials, deputies, and journalists, had veiled the decline of administrative energy and the progress of corruption and mismanagement. At length, after the establishment of a great North-German power in 1866, the prestige of the emperor unmistakably sank. He had to loosen the reins of government at home ; and yet the grant of any degree of liberty appeared to jeopardize his own existence. Failing in health, in confidence, in reputation, he was hurried into the war of 1870 by the clerical party at court, and by advisers who saw no help