blicans refused to bow the knee to the new pinchbeck Caesar, "the
man," says Freeman, "whose lips uttered the words _je le jure_ and
kept the oath by a December massacre." Inspired by Victor Hugo, their
fiery poet and seer, whose _Chatiments_ have the passionate intensity
of an Isaiah, they braved exile, poverty, calumny and flattery; they
"stooped into a dark, tremendous sea of doubt, pressed God's lamp to
their breasts and emerged" to witness a sad and bitter day of
reckoning, when the corruption and vice of the Second Empire were
swallowed up in shame and disaster at Sedan.[176] The Third Republic,
with admirable energy and patriotism, rose to save the self-respect of
France. The first and Imperial war, up to Sedan, was over in a month;
the second national and popular war endured for five months.

[Footnote 176: "The collapse of the Empire is tremendous. I have no
pity for the melodramatic villain who ends as he began, in causeless
and wanton blood." Lord Coleridge, _Life_, ii., p. 172.]

Dynastic and ecclesiastical ambition die hard, and the new Republic
has had to weather many a storm in her career of a third of a
century. Carducci in a fine poem has imagined Letizia, mother of the
Bonapartes, a wandering shade haunting the desolate house at Ajaccio,
recalling the tragic fate of her children, and, like a Corsican Niobe,
standing on her threshold, fiercely stretching forth her arms to the
savage Ocean, calling from America, from Britain, from burning Africa,
some one of her hapless progeny to find a haven in her breast. But the
assegais of South African savages laid low the last hope of the
Imperialists, and it may reasonably be predicted that neither the
shades nor the living descendants of Bonaparte or Bourbon will ever
trouble again the internal peace of France nor her people be ruled by
one "regnant by right divine and luck o' the pillow." Throughout the
whole land a profound desire of peace possesses men's minds[177] and a
firm determination to effect a material and moral recuperation from
the disasters of the Empire.

[Footnote 177: "We could rouse no enthusiasm," said the head of a
State Department to the writer at the time of the Fashoda incident,
"even for a war for the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, much less
against England."]

The beneficent results of the Great Revolution have leavened the whole
world. In no small degree may it be said of France that by her stripes
we have been healed. With true i