1852.]

APPROACH OF THE SECOND EMPIRE.

.523

*

in the heather by the Prince, and witnessed all these fiascos, to our humiliation." This happy holiday was sadly broken by the death of the Duke of Wellington, which brought the Court unexpectedly back to Windsor in October, their route being through Edinburgh, Preston, Chester, and North Wales, where they inspected, on the 14th of October, the Britannia tubular bridge over the Menai Straits. The Queen drove through the bridge in a State carriage drawn by men, while Prince Albert, accompanied by Mr. R. Stephenson, walked across on the roof of the tube. On reaching the south end, the party descended to the water's edge, from which they obtained a complete view of the magnificent proportions of the gigantic structure. During 1852 one striking event in Foreign Affairs that occupied the attention of the Queen was the transformation of the French Republic into the Second Empire. In Paris, on the 1st of January, Charles Louis Napoleon was installed at Notre Dame as President of France, and he promulgated a new Constitution, preserving little of the form and none of the spirit of Liberty. The whole Executive was to be vested in the President, who was to be advised by a Council of State, a Senate of nobles nominated for life, and a powerless legislative body elected by universal suffrage for six years, whose transactions at the demand of five members could be kept secret. The next step taken by the Prince-President was to issue Decrees on the 23rd of January, compelling the Orleans Princes to sell their real and personal property in France within a year, and confiscating the property settled on the family by Louis Philippe previous to his accession in 1830. This raised a storm of indignation among all Frenchmen who were not accomplices of the Prince-President in the coup d'état, and it caused Montalembert to resign his seat on the Consultative Commission of the 2nd of December. De Morny and Fould also resigned, M. de Persigny replacing the former.† To the Queen, whose partiality for the Orleans family was well known, these Decrees were painfully offensive. The Prince-President's strongest partisan in England, Lord Malmesbury, wrote a letter remonstrating with him, and the reply serves to illustrate the character of the men who consented to serve in the Senate. "He (the Prince-President)," says Lord Malmesbury in a letter to Lord Cowley, British Ambassador at Paris, "declared the confiscation necessary, as even some of his own Senators had been tampered with by Orleanist agents and money." On September 13th this patriotic Senate prayed for "the

"Persigny," writes Lord Malmesbury, "whose real name was Fialin, was one of those adventurers who looked forward with confidence to the success of Louis Napoleon's fatalism and dreams of ambition, and proved it by the most absolute devotion, and, I must add, personal affection for his master, whom he always accompanied through his failures and imprisonments. Faithful to the Emperor, the Emperor was faithful to him, and loaded him with honours. He was a courageous and impetuous man, and his hot temper was against him as ambassador."-Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, Vol. I., p. 300.

Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, Vol. I., p. 310.

re-establishment of the hereditary sovereign power in the Bonaparte family;" and on the 4th of November the Prince-President announced that he had in view the restoration of the Empire, and ordered the French people to be consulted on the matter. The French people, when consulted, were for the restoration-7,839,552 voting "Yes," and 254,501 "No." The vote was cast on

the 21st of November, three days after Wellington was laid in the grave. As Cobden said, one might almost picture the third Napoleon rising from the yet open tomb of the vanquisher of the first.* On the 2nd of December Charles Louis Napoleon was declared Emperor of the French under the title of Napoleon III. The Constitution of January was confirmed with some slight modifications. A Royal title was given to Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon's uncle. St. Arnaud, Magnan, and Castillane were created Marshals of France; and

Morley's Life of Cobden, Chap. XXI.

1852.]

"BROTHER" OR "COUSIN "?

525

then there arose the first of the Imperial difficulties-that of obtaining recognition from the European Courts.

The Queen took a thoroughly sensible view of the situation. The atrocities of December and the confiscation of the Orleans property had not prepossessed her Majesty in favour of the French Emperor. But in her opinion there was no essential difference between such a Republic as had

been established by the coup d'état strengthened by the Constitution of January, and a military Empire without glory or genius. If the vast majority of Frenchmen were desirous of transforming their Prince-President into an Emperor, that was their affair, and Foreign Courts had no concern in the matter. The Queen was, therefore, strongly in favour of recognising the title of the Emperor of the French, and of according to him the customary courtesy of addressing him in ceremonial communications as frère.* The Northern Courts, however, could not bring themselves to treat

mon

* On hearing of the coup d'état, the Queen, without waiting for Ministerial advice, personally directed the Cabinet to follow a policy of strict neutrality. Lord John Russell replied: "Your Majesty's

as an equal, an adventurer who, to use his own expression in announcing his marriage in the Chamber on the 22nd of January, 1853, “had frankly taken up before Europe the position de parvenu." Ultimately they all yielded to facts, and with the exception of Russia, agreed to address Charles Louis Bonaparte as their "brother." The haughty autocrat of Muscovy, who had smiled on him approvingly when he strangled Liberty in France, frowned on the attempt to raise on its ruins a fabric of Empire, claiming parity with the ancient dominion of the Romanoffs. The Czar, therefore, persisted in addressing the French Emperor, not as "my brother," but "my cousin." This trivial slight is mentioned here, because it had subsequently a potent influence on the fortunes of England.

66

66

"England," writes Sir Theodore Martin, "conceded the phrase mon frère without a grudge."* That is a somewhat misleading statement. It was certainly decided in England that the Emperor should be recognised some little time before the Empire was proclaimed, because everybody knew that its proclamation was inevitable. Having determined that the Prince-President was to be recognised in some fashion as Emperor, a question as to style was raised by the pedants of diplomacy, which showed where the "grudge" lay. It gave rise to that most grotesque of diplomatic struggles-the once famous but now forgotten Battle of the Numeral. Charles Louis Bonaparte, through his envoys, let it be known at the Court of the Queen that he meant to call himself Napoleon III. Why Napoleon the Third?" asked alarmed Diplomacy. Clearly he means to filch from us a recognition of the ephemeral title of the Duc de Reichstadt, the son and heir of Napoleon I., who was proclaimed when the First Empire crashed into ruins." It was a crafty device to avenge Waterloo with the blast of a herald's trumpet, and to wipe out fifty years of French history, just as the Parliament of the Restoration tried to efface the Commonwealth by dating the statutes of 1660, as of the twelfth year of the Merry Monarch's reign. The usurper might be recognised by England as Napoleon II., perhaps, but never, argued Lord Malmesbury, as Napoleon III., for that would have countenanced more than our recognition of the Second Empire was actually meant to convey. It would have implied a recognition of the Emperor's hereditary, as distinguished from his elective, title to the Throne. Most wearisome were the disputes and most tiresome the conferences between Lord Malmesbury, then Foreign Secretary, and the French Ambassador on this subject. At last it was agreed that we should accept the disagreeable numeral, after the French Government admitted in writing that it was not to imply our recognition of the Emperor's hereditary right to the Imperial

directions respecting the state of affairs in Paris shall be followed." Note that the relations of the Crown and the Minister were identical in this case with those which obtained under the Tudor Sovereigns. It is a curious instance of a policy being initiated by specific "directions" from the Queen in an age when, according to constitutional practice, the functions of the Crown are supposed to be limited to suggestion, criticism, and sanction. * Martin's Life of the Prince Consort, Chap. XLVII.

1852.]

THE THIRD NAPOLEON'S MARRIAGE.

527

Crown of France. From first to last, however, Lord Malmesbury and the other diplomatists were mistaken. Very little reflection might have taught them that if the numeral were meant to efface Waterloo, and the Monarchies of the Bourbons and the Barricades, the usurper would have styled himself Napoleon V., and not Napoleon III., for his elder uncle Joseph and his father Louis both survived the young and ill-fated Duc de Reichstadt. A hereditary title, moreover, would not need to have been consecrated by a plebiscite, and the reign of its wearer would not have been dated from 1852, but from the date of Louis Bonaparte's death. It is, therefore, natural to ask how Charles Louis Bonaparte came to style himself the Third and not the Second Emperor. The explanation illustrates the facility with which the tragicomedy of fussy English diplomacy is transformed into farce at the touch of fact. Lord Malmesbury, who is rendered supremely ridiculous by the story, tells it himself as follows in his Diary :

"December 29 (1852). We went to Heron Court. Whole country under water. Lord Cowley relates a curious anecdote as to the origin of the numeral III. in the Emperor's title. The Prefect of Bourges, where he slept the first night of his progress, had given instructions that the people were to shout Vive Napoléon!' But he wrote Vive Napoléon!!!' The people took the three notes of interjection for a numeral. The President, on hearing it, sent the Duc de Mortemart to the Prefect to know what the cry meant. When the whole thing was explained, the President, tapping the Duke on the shoulder, said, ‘Je ne savais pas que j'avais un Préfet Machiavéliste.”” †

After the proclamation of the French Emperor, his matrimonial schemes touched the family connections of the Queen somewhat closely. The Emperor's marriage, in truth, was the favourite topic for gossip and scandal in every high social circle in Europe. As a matter of fact, Charles Louis Napoleon was averse from marriage. Two women were already devoted to him; perhaps more zealously than any bride of exalted rank could ever be. One was Madame Favart de l'Anglade, a creole, who lived some time at Kensington Gate, and whose whist and dinner parties have, perhaps, not yet been quite forgotten in the old Court suburb. (Lord Malmesbury, it may be said in passing, was told by Kisseleff, the Russian Ambassador at Paris, that had the coup d'état failed, Charles Louis Bonaparte and De Morny were to have fled for concealment to this lady's house.) The other woman who exercised so much influence on the Prince-President's life was a Mrs. Howard. She was his mistress, and he created her Comtesse de Beauregard after he broke off his intimacy with her.t This event was virtually an intimation of his intention to marry. He

This person wielded an influence that few people suspected at the time. For example, in September, 1852, Lord Malmesbury, then Foreign Secretary, set a gang of police spies to watch the outraged victims of the coup d'état in London. Having put together all the information he could get,