[Footnote 51:  Gabriel Hanotaux, Contemporary France, vol. i. p. 14 (Eng. edit.)]

That fact shows the unreality of Bonapartist rule in France.  At bottom Napoleon III.’s ascendancy was due to several causes, that told against possible rivals rather than directly in his favour.  Hatred of the socialists, whose rash political experiments had led to the bloody days of street fighting in Paris in June 1848, counted for much.  Added to this was the unpopularity of the House of Orleans after the sordid and uninteresting rule of Louis Philippe (1830-48).  The antiquated royalism of the Elder or Legitimist branch of that ill-starred dynasty made it equally an impossibility.  Louis Napoleon promised to do what his predecessors, Monarchical and Republican, had signally failed to do, namely, to reconcile the claims of liberty and order at home and uphold the prestige of France abroad.  For the first ten years the glamour of his name, the skill with which he promoted the material prosperity of France, and the successes of his early wars, promised to build up a lasting power.  But then came the days of failing health and tottering prestige—­of financial scandals, of the Mexican blunder, of the humiliation before the rising power of Prussia.  To retrieve matters he toyed with democracy in France, and finally allowed his Ministers to throw down a challenge to Prussia; for, in the words of a French historian, the conditions on which he held power “condemned him to be brilliant[52].”

[Footnote 52:  Said in 1852 by an eminent Frenchman to our countryman, Nassau Senior (Journals, ii. ad fin).]

Failing at Sedan, he lost all; and he knew it.  His reign, in fact, was one long disaster for France.  The canker of moral corruption began to weaken her public life when the creatures of whom he made use in the coup d’etat of 1851 crept into place and power.  The flashy sensationalism of his policy, setting the tone for Parisian society, was fatal to the honest unseen drudgery which builds up a solid edifice alike in public and in private life.  Even the better qualities of his nature told against ultimate success.  As has been shown, his vague but generous ideas on Nationality drew French policy away from the paths of obvious self-interest after the year 1864, and gave an easy victory to the keen and objective statecraft of Bismarck.  That he loved France as sincerely as he believed in the power of the Bonapartist tradition to help her, can scarcely admit of doubt.  His conduct during the war of 1870 showed him to be disinterested, while his vision was clearer than that of the Generals about him.  But in the field of high policy, as in the moral events that make or mar a nation’s life, his influence told heavily against the welfare of France; and he must have carried into exile the consciousness that his complex nature and ill-matched strivings had but served to bring his dynasty and his country to an unexampled overthrow.