Nevertheless, amidst all the seeming vagaries of Thiers’ conduct there emerge two governing principles—­a passionate love of France, and a sincere attachment to reasoned liberty.  The first was absolute and unchangeable; the second admitted of some variations if the ruler did not enhance the glory of France, and also (as some cynics said) recognise the greatness of M. Thiers.  For the many gibes to which his lively talents and successful career exposed him, he had his revenge.  His keen glance and incisive reasoning generally warned him of the probable fate of Dynasties and Ministries.  Like Talleyrand, whom he somewhat resembled in versatility, opportunism, and undying love of France, he might have said that he never deserted a Government before it deserted itself.  He foretold the fall of Louis Philippe under the reactionary Guizot Ministry as, later on, he foretold the fall of Napoleon III.  He blamed the Emperor for not making war on Prussia in 1866 with the same unanswerable logic that marked his opposition to the mad rush for war in 1870.  And yet the war spirit had been in some sense strengthened by his own writings.  His great work, The History of the Consulate and Empire, which appeared from 1845 to 1862—­the last eight volumes came out during the Second Empire—­was in the main a glorification of the First Napoleon.  Men therefore asked with some impatience why the panegyrist of the uncle should oppose the supremacy of the nephew; and the action of the crowd in smashing the historian’s windows after his great speech against the war of 1870 cannot be called wholly illogical, even if it erred on the side of Gallic vivacity.

In the feverish drama of French politics Time sometimes brings an appropriate Nemesis.  It was so now.  The man who had divided the energies of his manhood between parliamentary opposition of a somewhat factious type and the literary cultivation of the Napoleonic legend, was now in the evening of his days called upon to bear a crushing load of responsibility in struggling to win the best possible terms of peace from the victorious Teuton, in mediating between contending factions at Bordeaux and Paris, and, finally, in founding a form of government which never enlisted his whole-hearted sympathy, save as the least objectionable expedient then open to France.

For the present, the great thing was to gain peace with the minimum of sacrifice for France.  Who could drive a better bargain than Thiers, the man who knew France so well, and had recently felt the pulse of the Governments of Europe?  Accordingly, on the 17th of February, the Assembly named him Head of the Executive Power “until it is based upon the French Constitution.”  He declined to accept this post until the words “of the French Republic” were substituted for the latter clause.  He had every reason for urging this demand.  Unlike the Republic of 1848, the strength of which was chiefly, or almost solely, in Paris, the Republic was proclaimed at Lyons, Marseilles, and Bordeaux, before any news came of the overthrow of the Napoleonic dynasty at the capital[58].