Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/467

454 up the army. For half a century the population has oscillated a little across the point at which Napoleon I. left it, but has never made the regular advance which is a matter of course with its neighbours. The great gap in its manhood during a generation has retarded its agriculture and its commerce; and the consequence is a kind and degree of poverty, in Paris and in the provinces, which is not seen or imagined in England.

After the stroke of retribution there was an interval of nearly half a century, which all Europe wished to see made into a fresh start on the road of progress. Whatever may have been the faults and errors of the various European governments and people, no one of them has shown the slightest disposition to injure France. Free from attack and from interference, she had only to shape or pursue her own course. Yet now, at the end of the long interval, we see her again ridden by a Monarch-Adventurer fast on the same downward road which she travelled before.

Few of the order—perhaps none—have been from childhood adventurers, aiming at the throne, on other than hereditary grounds. The strongest peculiarity in the case of Napoleon III., next to his lot being cast in so late a century, is his life-long preparation as a parvenu (as he calls himself) for the throne.

He was the youngest of three brothers; and he had many cousins—five in one family—who stood nearer to their uncle’s throne than himself. The eldest of his brothers died in infancy; but, till he was three-and-twenty he had an elder brother; and his early-planted ambition was altogether of a personal character. He was not in the front rank of the Bonapartes by birth: he is unlike them in the whole cast of his character and quality of his genius, and he evidently uses his ostensible relationship to the first Emperor as a mere charm over the imaginations of his more noisy and excitable subjects. It is for himself and by himself that he has been the Monarch-Adventurer; and he has used the Bonapartes generally, and the Emperor in particular, as helps to his purpose.

He has that dreamy, unreasoning, superstitious and egotistical cast of mind which affords all the strength of pertinacity as long as imagination will serve; but when the moment for reason and conviction arrives, the false supports do not avail, and weakness appears, to the surprise of others and his own dismay. He was absorbed in the idea of gaining a throne till he had got it: and the steadiness of his expectation had generated an universal belief in the unalterableness of his purposes. This has given way, amidst the pressure of cares and difficulties, to a fickleness and obvious embarrassment of judgment, which cast a strong light on the interior workings of his faculties, and enable us to speak of him with more clearness than at any time since he first came before the world as a candidate for notoriety of some sort.

I believe he does not pretend to the distinction of an array of comets and falling stars and fights in the clouds at his birth; but he certainly was the only one of the name, except the Emperor’s own son, whose birth was announced by the firing of cannon.

The Emperor was affectionate towards the boy’s mother, Hortense, the daughter of his wife Josephine by her first marriage; and he not only favoured her with dignities and privileges while living apart from her husband, Louis Bonaparte, but had an idea of adopting this her youngest son as his successor, if he should have no natural heir. When the boy was seven years old, the Emperor set him before him in the Champ de Mai, and presented him to the soldiers. Though this was no sign of adoption, because the little King of Rome was then living, the incident deeply impressed the imagination of the visionary and ambitious child.

Thus persuaded that he was to be a supreme personage some day, his aspirations took their direction from the spectacle of the Emperor in his fall. The boy went to see him, with his mother, during his depression at Malmaison; and he heard what the dethroned monarch had to say about Waterloo, when his last hopes had been shattered there. The effect on his mind of what he heard about St. Helena, as the dreary years passed, may partly be conceived. Emotional topics are profoundly affecting to children of sensibility; and especially to dreamers, before twelve years old; and Louis Napoleon was twelve when the ex-Emperor died in a remote tropical island, a weird scene thronged with fearful imagery.

Never boy more needed the control and companionship of a father than this strange egotist, for whom his mother was no competent guide; but Louis Napoleon never had experience of paternal care. His youth and early manhood were wayward and eccentric, not only from his own character, but from the influences under which he was placed.

Robespierre’s friend, Lebas, had a son who was as staunch a republican as himself, and full of enthusiasm for socialism; and this man, of all men in the world, was the tutor of Hortense’s son in Switzerland. The effect of his instructions is seen in the early works of the future Emperor. He had a military education also at Thun, where he strengthened himself for military life by travels among the Alps. He was a republican socialist in Switzerland; he was a revolutionary volunteer in Italy in 1831, when his brother died at Pesaro from fatigue and anxiety; he was a fugitive and an exile after the failure of the Italian revolts; he was an author, giving out revolutionary ideas in a strange tone of dogmatic reverie: yet, all the while he was dreaming of an imperial destiny for himself, and expecting the future homage of mankind, while thus far manifesting no qualities which could procure him consideration from any quarter. The Emperor’s son, too, was still living,—a fact which gave the last finish of absurdity to the anticipations of the dreamer; and the French army was actually prepared, in 1832, to try its strength for the restoration of the youth who is now called Napoleon II., but who was then known by his Austrian title as the Duc de Reichstadt. In that year the boy died; and Louis Napoleon sprang at once into a habit of very definite dreaming indeed, which is commonly called conspiracy.

After the accession of the Orleans dynasty,