Even Cavour was startled.  Probably till that moment he had never felt sure that Napoleon would not after all throw the Italian cause to the winds.  The Emperor’s invariable method in dealing with men was to mystify them.  He was pleased to pose as a faithful ally, but human intellect was insufficient to fathom what he meant.  On this system, skilfully pursued, was reared the whole fabric of Louis Napoleon’s reputation for being a profound politician.  Bearing the fact in mind, we can easily see why that reputation crumbled away almost entirely when the present became the past.  There are few cases in which there is more disagreement between the judgment of contemporaries and that of immediate posterity than the case of the French Emperor.

The least surprised, and, among Italians, the most dissatisfied at the New Year’s Day pronouncement was Mazzini, who when he read it in the Times next morning felt that the Napoleonic war closed the heroic period of Italian Liberation.  To men like Mazzini failure is apt to seem more heroic than success, and the war of 1859 did close the period of failure.  The justification for calling in foreign arms could only be in necessity, and Mazzini denied the necessity.  Charles Albert denied it in 1848 with no less confident a voice.  Then, indeed, there did appear a chance of Italy making herself, but was there the slightest prospect, eleven years later, of that chance being repeated?  Each student of history may answer for himself.  What is plain is, that France and Sardinia together were to find it an exceedingly hard task even to drive the Austrians out of Lombardy.

The unconquerable dislike of men of principle, like Mazzini, to joining hands with the author of the coup d’etat was perfectly explicable.  There were doubtless some sincere Bulgarian patriots who disliked joining hands with the Autocrat of all the Russias.  The gift of freedom from a despot means a long list of evils.  Mazzini grasped the maleficent influence which Napoleon III. would be in a position to exercise over the young state; he knew, moreover, when only two or three other persons in Europe knew it, that the bargain of Plombieres was on the principle of give-and-take.  How Mazzini was for many years better informed than any cabinet in Europe, remains a secret.  ’I know positively,’ he wrote on the 4th of January 1859, ’that the idea of the war is only to hand over a zone of Lombardy to Piedmont, and the cession of Savoy and Nice to France:  the peace, upon the offer of which they count, would abandon the whole of Venetia to Austria.’  A month before this he had disclosed what was certainly true, namely, that Napoleon wanted to place a Murat on the throne of Naples, and to substitute Prince Napoleon for the Grand Duke of Tuscany.  The point that is doubtful in the above revelation is the statement that the Emperor never meant to emancipate Venetia.  The probabilities are against this.  He may, however, have questioned all along whether his troops, with those of the King of Sardinia, would display a superiority over the Austrian forces sufficiently incontestable for him to risk taking them into the mouse-trap of the Quadrilateral.  In this one thing Napoleon was amply justified—­in having no sort of desire to take a beaten army back to Paris.