University of Virginia Library

LOUIS NAPOLEON'S “LIFE OF CÆSAR.”

DYNASTIC DELUSIONS OF THE EMPEROR.

The many who will persist in regarding Louis
Napoleon as merely an Emperor, in the common
sense of the word, do him far less than justice,
and take their observations of his character from
a stand-point which must for ever prevent their
forming a true appreciation of his motives and
the probable outcome of his acts. He is essentially
a philosopher who speculates in systems of
government; a literary man who, happily or
unhappily for himself, has obtained power to test
the various dynastic theories which he has formed
during a dreamy life, by the arbitrament of fleets,
armies, edicts, and schemes of finance—all the
moral and material resources of a powerful but
fickle people. To the subjects of government as
a science, and the perpetuation of dynasties as an
art, he would seem from his earliest days to have
devoted all the energies of a plodding but not
brilliant intellect—an intellect in which we find
the infidelity and audacity which marked the
France of twenty years before his birth, curiously
contrasted with an almost reverential study of the

lessons of history, and a touchingly credulous
acquiescence in whatever may appear to be the
necessities which those lessons would impose.

That faith in the “Napoleonic star” which,
with the stronger Uncle, was in great part a theatrical
assumption, designed to give confidence to
his followers in times of peril, would seem to have
been accepted by the weaker Nephew as a religious
truth—a truth both historical and philosophic,
on the sufficient basis of which a permanent
imperial dynasty for France may with safety be
constructed. For this theory he seeks support in
the analogies of history—his retrospection continually
studying and reproducing the motives and
maxims of his Uncle, as in the volume entitled
“Napoleonic Ideas;” and his slow intellect never
seeming to tire of analyzing the lives of Julius Cæ
sar and Charlemagne, as the two great military and
imperial characters in whose designs and successes
may be found the closest parallels to the achievements
of the elder Napoleon. For the written
results of his researches into the history and times
of Charlemagne, Parisian rumor says we may have
yet some years to wait; but already we know
there is in press a “History of Cæsar” from Louis
Napoleon's pen—the design of this last imperial
literary effort being, as we imagine, to prove:
that as the First Napoleon was, in his conquests
and final fate, a rather close counterpart of the

First Cæsar; so in the Second Napoleon we may
expect to see revived the peaceful glories, irresistible
sway, artistic and material progress, and consolidating
influences of the Augustan era.

For this conjecture as to the object and intended
moral of the forthcoming work, we have no other
ground than a pretty accurate study of Louis
Napoleon's character and a just estimate of the circumstances
under which he writes. Occupying
the most perplexing and unstable throne in Europe,
a prey to physical maladies and devoured by a
desire to perpetuate his dynasty in the person of
his son, the French imperial littérateur flies to his
pen, at once as a relief from oppressing cares and
as an instrument which may be made useful in
giving popularity to his ideas. That the views
which, we doubt not, his edition of Cæsar will be
found to contain are plausible on their face, is not
to be denied. As the Roman conqueror laid the
foundations of his greatness by victoriously carrying
the eagles of his country over France, Spain,
Germany, and Britain, while at home all was mutiny
and chaos in the expiring republic of the municipality
of Rome; so the elder Napoleon dazzled the
eyes of France by his successes in Italy and elsewhere,
at a period when the democratic government
in Paris had become the very incarnation of
oppression without purpose, and imbecility from
which there could be no appeal.

In the manner of their obtaining imperial
power—for Cæsar had long held it in fact, though
assassinated under a suspicion of desiring to assume
it in title—there is the strictest possible analogy
between the histories of the first Roman and the
first French Emperors. Both were first-class military
conquerors, and both poor statesmen; both
had achieved triumphs abroad while chaos ruled
at home; both were called upon to return and
assume the direction of affairs by the all but unanimous
cry of a people who could nowhere else see
any hope of stability; both committed the mistake
of believing themselves the creators and not the
creatures of the circumstances by which they found
themselves surrounded; and both paid the penalty
of their lives—Cæsar, the more happy, under sudden
blows, and Napoleon in the long exile of St.
Helena—for having failed to realize that the time
in which each lived was not the proper time for
the experiment of personal aggrandizement which
each attempted.

Different epochs and conditions of society call
for and produce new forms of government. Rome
had originally been governed by kings, of whom
Tarquinius Superbus was the last. Then came
four hundred years of a so-called republican government,
which was just terminating, utterly effete
and exhausted, when Cæsar stepped upon the stage.
It was not a republic in any true sense—the municipality

of Rome giving laws to the empire, but a
few aristocratic families holding the votes of all
other Roman citizens in complete subjection.
Cæsar judged a change of government to be imminent,
and in this he was right; but he contemplated
a return in his own person to the former
system of a kingship, and here was his error.
Nations, no more than individuals, repeat in the
progress of their lives the passions or the follies
of past eras. Rome did not want a king; and,
speaking by the hand of Brutus, Cæsar was bloodily
rebuked for supposing he could make himself
a successor to the last of the Tarquins. But Rome
did want a change of government; the hour had
become ripe for producing a new system of rule;
and in the person of Augustus, and with the title
of “Imperator,” or general-in-chief, borrowed from
the camps, and only suggesting military ascendency,
the Roman people passed cheerfully under
the yoke of an empire—that being the form of
government which most clearly realized their aspirations
for universal conquest.

In France and with the elder Napoleon the case
was different. There the kingship of the Capets,
accompanied by the oppressions of a feudal aristocracy,
had become effete, and all Frenchmen needed
a change. The republic, in the days of its infancy,
was assailed by powerful combinations of foreign
foes and domestic traitors. It absolutely needed

for its guidance through that bitter period the firm
hand and absolute will of a successful military
chief. This want the elder Napoleon supplied:
and history tells us how generous was his welcome,
how boundless the homage, almost the idolatry,
France poured at his feet. But as Cæsar, mistakenly,
under similar circumstances, supposed Rome
to need a king—so Napoleon, misled by his vanity
and personal ambition, thought France must need
an emperor. Here was an egregious folly, only
to be pardoned for the severity of the penalty
which it evoked. France, in making a republic in
Europe, had fulfilled her needs. Her new system
was not worn out: indeed, was only in its
infancy, as it is even yet. That new experiment
has since been interrupted by foreign accidents—a
few generations in the history of a nation being
comparatively as brief as the fainting fit of a
moment in the life of a young child. In throwing
off the Bourbon and Orleans dynasties, and accepting
Louis Napoleon as emperor by the voice of
universal suffrage, France well knows that she is
returning fast towards her intermitted experiment
of a democratic republic. It is her destiny, she
feels, to live under the new form of government
that she was the first to create in Europe—the
present emperorship of Louis Napoleon being no
more than a mask or curtain behind which the
forces of her Nationhood are preparing for a
return to the completion of their interrupted
dream.

Nations never go backward on their tracks: nor
can dissimilar causes in their history, any more
than in the history of individual lives, produce
similar results. Charlemagne tried to revive the
Roman imperial system in his own person, conquering
all Europe west of the Danube and calling
it the “Empire of the West”—the Roman
Power having then removed its capital to Constantinople,
and being well content with recognition as
the “Empire of the East.” That Western Europe
needed a change of government Charlemagne
clearly saw, and as a military conqueror he was
accepted in the iconoclastic spirit. His revival of
an empire was successful for his own stormy and
troubled lifetime; but the moment that powerful
repressive influence had been removed, the nations
saw a new thing—the feudal system—rise up in
Europe; that very feudal system which has since
been swept away in blood and fire by the first
throes of the French revolution. Like Cæsar
thinking of returning to the ancient Roman kingship;
like Charlemagne hoping to reconsolidate
in his own dynasty the early Roman empire; like
the First Napoleon, forgetting that his purple was
but tolerated as a portion of his military uniform,
and that his true character was that of the armed
hand of a democratic republic—we now see Louis

Napoleon dreaming of a French empire which is
to endure and be perpetuated in his family, and
painfully writing books to prove that in himself
is revived the Augustan era which only came to
Rome after nearly four hundred years of an aristocratic
republic.

If the present Emperor of the French be alive
half-a-dozen years from now, he will be quite
likely to appreciate the philosophic truth of this
article—a philosophy not spider-spun from dreams,
and discolored by personal aspirations, as is his
own; but drawn with disinterested candor from an
application of mere common-sense principles to
the great teachings of historical experience. In
the beheading of Louis Capet, France signified
her conviction that a republican form of government
was essential to her progress. That wish, in
any orderly sense, has never yet been gratified,
Europe conspiring to forbid the experiment, and
France having for a brief time to accept an “imperator,”
or absolute commander-in-chief, as her only
safeguard. The wish for the republic, however,
has not died out, nor can France forego the idea
until the idea shall—in the course of centuries,
perhaps—have fulfilled its mission. Louis Napoleon
may translate books and write commentaries
to prove himself a new Augustus, and to convince
the French people that under his dynasty alone
can their happiness be thoroughly developed. The

whole thing is nonsense, however—the nonsense
of a selfish and not large-minded dreamer, who
has so much at stake in the game that he does not
dare acknowledge, even to himself, how hopelessly
and inevitably all the chances are against him.
Whoever is alive ten years from now will see
France peacefully and proudly pursuing the republican
experiment from which she was compelled to
desist more than half a century ago, by the arms
of the Holy Alliance. Louis Napoleon, meanwhile,
may fancy himself a new Augustus; and
we have no doubt that, in this light, his forthcoming
volume may prove extremely instructive and
amusing.

Though not strictly in consonance with the general
tenor of this article, we here subjoin a view of
Napoleon III. from the easel of that most perfect
and wonderful of the world's song-writers—
Beranger—whose verses yet possess an interest and
power in France that not even the Emperor can
ignore. The lines here paraphrased, we may add,
were written by Beranger at a time when Napoleon
III. was attempting to excite the enthusiasm
of the students and young revolutionary classes of
Paris by representing that his reign furnished “a
revival of the days of the First Empire, in which
the armed soldier of Democracy led forth his
legions in behalf of the Democratic idea, and to
the downfall of all regal tyrannies.”