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Updated: June 13, 2025
"A man may steal the livery of Heaven to serve the devil in." It has always been a favorite device of Napoleonism to dress itself up in the garb of popular government, and to appropriate the peculiar phrases of democracy, with a view to confound the distinction between the sovereign will of one and the sovereign will of the many.
If M. Thiers showed tact, wisdom, and above all courage and firmness, in probably the most difficult position in which man was ever placed, surely we may pause to admire Gambetta.... Daring in all things, under the Empire he denounced Napoleonism, and by his eloquence and courage he guided timid millions and rival factions from the day when Napoleon III. was deposed.
The year 1816 was the Augustan age of outrageous negrophilism and equally extreme anti- Napoleonism. We are glad to be rid of the Jagas, a subject which has a small literature of its own; the savage race appeared everywhere like a "deus ex machina," and it became to Intertropical Africa what the "Lost Tribes" were and even now are in some cases, to Asia and not rarely to Europe.
It was one of the sentimental out-growths of the French Revolution, for which Napoleonism is always the proper remedy. One of his peculiar notions was that every man should black his own boots. George Ripley and his friends do not seem to have made any definite calculation of what might be the result of their experiment.
Their lack of perception was due partly to their political inexperience; but a deeper reason for it lies in their wholly false estimate as to what "world-policy" and "world-empire" mean. Trained in the Prussian school, they thought of them, like soldiers, in terms of conquest, glory, and prestige. That way lies Napoleonism. None of the great Powers is wholly free from blame on this score.
I came here at the Peace, and here have I resided the greater part of each year ever since. The vast masses of energy and life, broken up by the great thaw of the Imperial system, floating along the tide, are terrible icebergs for the vessel of the state. Some think Napoleonism over its effects are only begun.
Gracchus Babeuf and his fellows were treated as criminals, and died or suffered the torture of prison for attempting to put into practice those words which the Republic still carried on its banners, and Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality were interpreted in a middle-class, or if you please a Jesuitical, sense, as the rewards of success for those who could struggle into an exclusive class; and at last property had to be defended by a military adventurer, and the Revolution seemed to have ended with Napoleonism.
He might have been the true Bourbon and headed the party of the returned émigrés, in which case his crown would not have stayed long upon his head; or he might have made himself king of the bourgeoisie, opposed to revolution, Napoleonism, or disturbances of any kind, the party, in short, of the Restoration of Peace: a peace that might outlast his time; et après moi le déluge!
Despotism within and conquest without, both being summed up in the one word Napoleon such was the fate of the Mother of Liberty, who had loved her child "not wisely but too well." Yet Napoleonism was a very necessary stage in the development of modern Europe.
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