A howl of obloquy pursued the Emperor over the Belgian frontier to his seclusion at Wilhelmshöhe. It was not unnatural. The war was in great measure his; it had brought unspeakable suffering and bitter humiliation on the country, and his accomplices execrated him for not influencing them for their own good, in virtue of the authority their votes had vested in him. But dispassionate spectators regarded the fallen man with very different feelings. It was not only that such startling reverses might well have silenced harsh judgment, but the manner in which he bore them commanded involuntary respect and esteem. People who had called him a charlatan at the Tuileries confessed him to be a man when they saw him in the depths of misfortune. The wonderful result of his ambitions had been blighted so late in his life, that all hope was over for him; his pride was stung by the thought that his career had closed in humiliation; that posterity would denounce him as an impostor who had owed his rise and reputation to luck rather than genius; that the son, like the father, would begin life in proscription and exile, and find it the harder to repeat his father’s successes among opponents forewarned by his father’s example. With reflections so bitter gnawing at his mind, with his physical maladies conspiring to produce intense depression, he not only preserved his apparent serenity, but displayed invariably that dignified courtesy which denotes a mind too stable to be easily shaken. Nor was the effort merely a passing one. It has lasted from then till now. Beset by a mortal malady which would have made most men irritable and captious, the Emperor has shown himself invariably calm and strong. Nothing, perhaps, is so admirable in the life of this remarkable man as the silence he has consistently preserved with regard to those whose ill-advised counsels, incapacity, and self-interested falsehoods contributed so largely to his ruin. Ungrateful protégés, from whom he should have been sacred, have sought to make him their scapegoat, as he has been abused and calumniated by bitter enemies. He has neither remonstrated nor recriminated in person or by deputy. The wranglers might tell their stories as they would, they might be sure enough he would never contradict them. History will find much to reproach him with, but it is certain his contemporaries have been very unjust to him.
We have lingered long on the last year of his reign, pregnant as it was with events which have shifted the landmarks of history. We may dismiss his sojourn at Chislehurst in a line or two. His life passed there uneventfully and in apparent tranquillity. Silent, self-reserved, and self-controlled, he did not take the world into the secret of his regrets or remorse. If his party raised their heads again and bragged of a new revolution to their profit while France was struggling still in the social and financial chaos into which they had cast her, we have no reason to believe he gave them encouragement. Disappointed adventurers might talk and act madly when life was short. But the Emperor returned to England, whose life and people he had always liked, and lived like an English country gentleman, whose shattered health condemns him to retirement and the society of a few intimates. There were attached friends with him when he died, and if constancy should command friends few men deserved friends better.
It was unfortunate for his reputation that he was spared to live out his life. Had he succumbed some years ago to the first attacks of the disease he died of, he would have found eulogists enough to justify his policy by its brilliant success, and to deny that the Imperial system carried the inevitable seeds of dissolution. Had it collapsed after his decease they might have urged that the collapse was but a proof the more of his unrivalled genius, – that such a man could leave no successor to develope the ideas he had originated. As it is, it can hardly be doubted that his contemporaries will do him injustice, and that his memory will be, in a measure, rehabilitated by posterity. Unless absorbing ambition is to be pleaded as an excuse by Pretenders born in the people, we must judge his political morality severely. The Coup d’Etat was an offence almost more venial than the systematically relaxing and demoralizing nature of the rule that followed it. His best excuse was that he honestly believed himself and his system better adapted to the French than any other that could be substituted for it; and subsequent errors seem to have shown that he was not altogether wrong. In considering himself to the best of his lights, he did the best he could for his country. His foreign policy was generous and consistent, until personal motives compelled him to arrange a series of sensational surprises. His enlightened commercial ideas cost him some popularity among the Protectionist supporters of his dynasty. England at least had nothing to reproach him with, and the firmness with which he had held to her friendship assured him a friendly welcome when he sought refuge on her shores.
As might be presumed from the marvellous vicissitudes of his career, few men showed stranger or subtler contrasts in their nature. He owed his rise to the unflinching resolution with which he pursued a fixed idea; yet he hesitated over each step he took, and it was that habit of he sitation that ruined him in the end. His strong point was that no disappointment discouraged him, and so long as he felt he had time to wait, his patience was inexhaustible. Confined at Ham, in place of dashing himself against his prison bars, he turned quietly to his studies, and educated himself for the destinies in store for him. After the ridicule of his failures on the frontiers and in the Chamber of Deputies, he tried again as if nothing had happened. It was significant of the man that he succeeded in France in spite of ridicule, yet there may have been cool policy in the deeds that changed ridicule to terror on the 2d of December.
With his unquestionable ability and some extraordinary gifts, it must be confessed he owed much to fortune. She repeatedly did wonderful things for him when his circumstances were critical. He came to count with too great confidence on her favours when they were showering down on him, and he drew recklessly on his prestige instead of nursing it against gloomier days. It had been his aim to persuade his subjects that he was something more than mortal; when his mishaps proved his mortality, they resented the deception he had practised on them, and trampled their idol in the dust. It is not in our province now to speculate as to the influence of his rule on France, or to examine how far France is to be blamed for the vices and corruption of the Empire. If he misunderstood the people he governed when he treated them rather like children than men, we can only repeat, the fault was a venial one. Had he been born in a station beneath the influence of those ambitions that tempt men to become criminal, he would have lived distinguished and died esteemed. As it is, if the circle of his devoted friends has sadly dwindled since his fall and abdication, we trust for the honour of human nature that there are many who mourn him sincerely, in common gratitude.
The Times had been concerned for days with the former Emperor’s deteriorating condition. His death, following an emergency operation designed to break up his kidney stones, was announced on 10 January 1873. Five days later his supporters issued a manifesto, stating that ‘the Emperor is dead but the Empire is living and indestructible’. All hopes of reviving the Empire died when Napoleon’s son, Eugène Louis, the Prince Imperial, was killed in Zululand, fighting with the British army, on 1 June 1879. Following his detention in Germany, the deposition of the Bonaparte dynasty and the declaration of the Third Republic in September 1870, Napoleon and his family had retired to Camden Place at Chislehurst in Kent. It was here that he died. In 1881 the Empress Eugénie moved to Farnborough in Hampshire, where she constructed a flamboyant domed mausoleum for her late husband and her son in 1887. She herself was interred there after her death in 1922. As this obituary consistently suggests, British responses to Napoleon Ill’s policies as Emperor were at best ambiguous, and at worst suspicious and antipathetic. He and Eugénie had forged an amicable personal relationship with Queen Victoria, but many British critics, including this otherwise fair-minded obituarist, seem to have found the term ‘charlatan’ an appropriate description of both the Emperor and his régime.
Actor: ‘A deep and subtle insight into the shades and peculiarities of character.’
27 APRIL 1873
IT SOUNDS A little strange, even to the ear of veteran playgoers, to record the death of Macready, the favourite of half-a-century