with the Republicans was complete. Ollivier founded a Third Party pledged to support the Empire and to urge it down the path of liberal reform. Three years later a following of forty-two had swollen to a hundred and fifteen.

It is claimed for this design that it was not only sound in principle, but that it was within measurable reach of winning a great and durable success. M. Ollivier contends that a Republic was not really desired by France, that the monarchical parties were impossible, and that the requisite union of force and liberty could only be secured by the harmonious co-operation of those two incommensurables-a parliamentary government and an Empire founded by a coup d'état and consolidated by a plebiscite. He further argues with much circumstance that such a policy was the natural and logical outcome of Bonapartism. The great Emperor was himself quite outside the ordinary category of European dynasts. He was the child of fortune; his throne depended not upon legitimacy, but upon the will of the people; and the most durable achievement of his government had been to secure to France the social conquests of a popular revolution. During the Hundred Days, perceiving that a change had come over the political climate, he issued a Constitution, better, in the opinion of Thiers, than any other which France had obtained in all her revolutions; but the first experiment in a Liberal Empire was shortlived. The battle of Waterloo, which, as Napoleon observed at St Helena, was as fatal to the liberties of Europe as the battle of Philippi was fatal to the liberties of Rome, ushered in a period of autocratic reaction. All over Europe the liberal spirit was proscribed, and in the stupid excesses of the restored governments the banished Emperor discerned the future hope of his dynasty. In the St Helena conversations he portrayed his liberal intentions and the democratic elements in his rule. He stood for liberty, equality, nationality, peace. If he had not been a Constitutional monarch from the first, this was not due to any inherent incompatibility between the Empire and Constitutionalism, but to the necessity of quieting the ferment of revolution, and then to the stress of a war which he would gladly have avoided. The day would

come when Europe would need a government founded upon the principles of Bonapartism and capable of securing for them the respect which they deserved. A generation elapsed and part of the prophecy was realised the French had returned to an Empire based upon the plébiscite. However despotic may have been its primal aspect, such a government contained the precious and necessary seeds of liberty. There was the authority of the plébiscite, there was a Chamber elected on a scheme of universal suffrage, there was an Emperor who had shown in his early writings that he possessed a grasp of Liberal principle and an eye for social reform. M. Ollivier contends that a free Constitution was the necessary complement of the Imperial idea. It was not indeed part of his conception that the Emperor should be an irresponsible figurehead. Rouher, who stood for autocracy, said that it was plainly impossible that the Emperor should reign but not govern, and M. Ollivier appears to think that a Chief of a State-active, initiating great lines of policy, and responsible to the people at large-could co-exist with a Ministry chosen from the dominant party in the elected Chamber and liable to be removed from office by its vote. Whatever Whatever may be the difficulties inherent in such a dualism, they had not time to develope themselves under the Liberal Empire. M. Ollivier's dream had hardly assumed a palpable form before it was rudely and finally shattered; but while it lasted the dream was bright. In December 1869 he was invited to form a responsible Ministry. The Constitution was remodelled; so that it became, as M. Ollivier remarked to the Emperor, 'the most truly Liberal Constitution which had existed in France since 1789.' The press was freed from its shackles; the parliament recovered complete control over every department of public policy; and the great scheme of Liberal reform was on May 8, 1870, endorsed by seven million votes of the French people.

If I had then been carried off by fever like Cavour,' remarks M. Ollivier, 'I should have been unanimously applauded as one of the rare statesmen of the nineteenth century whose design had been accomplished in its entirety.' Unfortunately the first achievement of the Liberal Empire was to accept that disastrous encounter

which has permanently lowered the military prestige of France. 'A cyclone which I could not foretell, and against which I was not allowed the time to struggle, beats down upon my work, crushes it and casts me among the vanquished who are condemned to ostracism.' But for that unseen calamity M. Ollivier announces that 'without phrases or charlatanism of any kind' he would have slain anarchical or despotic Socialism by a vast scheme of social reform. A sketch of this imposing but uncompleted design is vouchsafed to us. It includes a reform of the civil, penal, and procedural codes, the abolition of collateral inheritance, and the legal emancipation of women. M. Ollivier was a true Liberal. He hated tyranny in all its forms, whether it were the tyranny of the trades union over the workman or of the State over the Church or of the Church over the State. He wished to respect the freedom of contract and to sanction the formation of religious as well as of commercial and civil associations. The Latin genius is averse to compromise, and political movements in France have been too often armed with terror in place of argument. M. Ollivier's policy was framed on a basis of confidence. He trusted the capacity of women to manage their own investments, and of priests to shape their own dogma. Above all, he trusted the Emperor, who is exhibited to us as the faithful interpreter of democratic France, ambitious of adding one last stone to the radiant pyramid of glory and generosity' erected by the genius of his illustrious uncle. So confiding is M. Ollivier that he believes that a Bonaparte could adapt himself to a philosophy of affairs which might have emanated from the brain of John Stuart Mill.

It is obvious that Napoleon III understood M. Ollivier : it is not so clear that M. Ollivier understood Napoleon III. Having persuaded himself that the Emperor was a Liberal, he finds his own honest and Liberal countenance reflected everywhere in the stream of Imperial policy. His handling of diplomatic affairs is an illustration of this amiable but misleading tendency. The Crimean War, by sowing dissension between Austria and Prussia, undoubtedly paved the way for the liberation of Italy, but what are we to say of this version of the motives which led the Emperor to embark on it?

"The Emperor had no hatred for the Cossacks and did not even cherish any ill will against the Tsar for his impertinence. He had no superstition for the balance of power; indeed, he intended to destroy it; and the Turk interested him as little as the Ottoman Empire. His object in making war was to restore the prestige of France in that quarter of the world which had witnessed our bitter humiliation of 1840. He wished to put an end to the Holy Alliance of the North, to make a rupture between Russia and Austria which would pave the way to the policy of nationalities-to the freedom of Italy and perhaps to the freedom of Poland.'

Did Napoleon III really take up arms against the Muscovites for the principal reason that he might the more effectually rescue the suffering Lombards and Venetians from the Austrian yoke? Would he have expected such a story to find credence with the Empress or with Rouher? And when M. Ollivier swallowed it, was he not thereby encouraged to pay an even more elaborate compliment to his Minister's credulity? The Mexican expedition was not upon the face of it an enterprise calculated upon national or Liberal ideals. The French Government attempted to impose an alien Emperor upon the Mexicans by force of arms, hoping that a clerical autocracy so founded and supported would arrest the advancing tide of the Protestant Yankees. No episode in the whole history of Empire was more difficult to accommodate to the conscience of a man like M. Ollivier, who believed in Rome for the Romans, Germany for the Germans, Mexico for the Mexicans, and France for the French. Yet a good conjuror can show us a bird where we expected to see a sixpenny piece. We learn that the underlying thought of the Mexican expedition was not the Jecker contract, nor the claims of the Vatican, nor the outcry of the Mexican clericals, nor the desire to profit by the Civil War in America to extend French influence in the Western Hemisphere, nor the fabulous gold mines of the Sonora, nor any of the many sinister motives which were so freely attributed by the opposition press; it was, purely and simply, Venice. The idea of the Mexican expedition was so to smooth the ruffled plumes of Austria that she would consent to cede Venice

* L'Empire Libéral,' iii, 188.

to Victor Emmanuel. The ghost of Venice,' as Nigra wrote to Ricasoli, 'roams along the corridors of the Tuileries.' In his subtle and circuitous way the Emperor was still pursuing the fair phantom of Italy, and Frenchmen were dying on the parched uplands of Mexico as they had died in their snow-bound cantonments round Sebastopol that the land of Dante might be free.

M. Ollivier, is, however, constrained to concede that some passages in the diplomacy of his hero do not admit of this exalted interpretation. There were 'aberrations' from the straight path of altruism. The acquisition of Savoy and Nice was apparently sound nationalism, a restoration of lost members rather than a conquest, but no such apology can be discovered even by M. Ollivier for the designs upon Belgium, Luxemburg and the Palatinate. These projects were regrettable aberrations' from the nationalist ideal, but no part, we are told, of the permanent fabric of Imperial diplomacy. 'Save in a moment of illness and folly in 1867. . . the Emperor had not even a vague inclination to take Belgium ... under pressure of public opinion he may perhaps sometimes have desired a rectification of frontier towards the Palatinate.' We are convinced that upon this point M. Ollivier is mistaken and that a rectification of the eastern frontier of France was a fixed part of the foreign policy of the Second Empire.

That M. Ollivier should have fallen into an error on a matter so important is partly due to his eagerness to minimise the incompatibility between his own political ideals and the practice of the Empire and partly also to the peculiar confusion and uncertainty of his master's policy. The Emperor's mind was full of vague, grand and imperfectly harmonised ideas. He had a genuine sympathy for the Italians and Poles, and cherished a belief that it was the predestined task of the Empire to assist in the emancipation of suffering nationalities. At the same time he was ambitious for France. He understood enough of French human nature to know that it wanted glory, and he knew enough of French history to find the quarter where conquest would be most glorious and glory would be most grateful. From the very beginning of his reign he had made up his mind to revise the treaties of 1815. He spoke upon the Vol. 213.-No. 424.

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