Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/25

Rh party interests, and not at all with the impartiality which is needed in order to solve so tangled a problem. The Republicans, the Orleanists, and the Legitimists of course declare that the omnipotence of Napoleon III. renders him alone responsible. The Bonapartists reply by counting up the hostile votes and speeches of the opposition deputies, and try to prove from them that the plans of military action put forward by the imperial government after 1866 were paralyzed by the Chamber. The eager reformers who have risen up in such abundance since the peace attribute the greater part of the blame to the prejudiced routine of the minister of war. The English press has added one more explanation by asserting that the temperament and dispositions of the whole French people had a not inconsiderable share in inducing the breakdown.

It would be a very difficult — perhaps even an impossible — task, to apportion the blame with critical exactness between these various elements; and here there is no space for the long developments which such an inquiry would necessitate: but, as foreigners, we have, at all events, an advantage over the French in the matter, because, having no personal interests and no political party to serve, we are able to recognize that blame is merited in each one of the four directions mentioned; and that, even if it be impracticable to allot it everywhere in precise degrees, the great fact is clear to us that it is deserved all round.

But, though we will not attempt to weigh out judgments so as to fit them accurately to the relative guiltiness of the accused, we may, in safety, indicate the general proportions of censure to which we are led by the evidence which has been given here. It seems impossible to deny that the great first culprit was the ministry of war, taken as a collective whole expressing the system and the principles on which the French army was administered. It was in the hands of that institution that all the working power was deposited, that all information was collected, that all initiative was concentrated; it was the supreme master of the army. We have seen that it did its work with negligence, incapacity, conceit, and disorder; it is on it that, without any possibility of reasonable doubt, the great condemnation of history will rest.

Next in culpability stands, incontestably, the emperor himself. No argument, no evidence, can set him free; on the contrary, in the eyes of all impartial persons who study the arguments and the evidence, whatever be their sympathy for the fallen or their respect for the dead, his share in the wretched tale is frightfully heavy. Without alluding to the collateral details of the question, to the councils of generals which, according to M. d'Audiffret Pasquier, he held during the spring of 1870, so as to get all ready; or to the pamphlet, evidently written or inspired by him, which was privately printed in Paris two months before the war, showing that the North-German army alone amounted to 895,000 men, and that France was no match for it, and limiting his responsibility to mere questions of technical preparation and forethought, — it is manifest that a terrible load weighs upon him. He had voluntarily assumed a position of individual power, and consequently of individual responsibility; and his position before France and before history is scarcely less grave than that of his acting agent at the ministry of war, for he approved, maintained, and applied the system which brought about defeat and ruin.

The Chamber may be put third in the list. It was both incapable and ridiculous; its habitual subservience to the emperor on the one hand, and its sudden assumption of independence on the subject of military organization on the other, were as comical as they were lamentable. It understood nothing of the great questions which it presumed to touch; but, by the act of touching them, it assumed a share of the onus of failure.

And then comes the nation at large, impulsive but mistrustful, self-confident but credulous, abandoning everything to its rulers, but reserving boundless faith in itself, convinced that French soldiers could not fail to conquer, but grumbling at the cost of keeping them; and, with all this, adoring detail and routine — a repetition on a vast scale of the ministry of war itself.

It may be said, in general terms, that in the universal race to ruin, the nation encouraged the Chamber, that the Chamber encouraged the emperor, and that the emperor encouraged his minister. It was between them all, by their collective acts, that they arrived at the result. The blame of it must lie upon them all.

With few exceptions, the entire people, 