ek it was famous throughout all France where
serious literature does not reap renown quickly. M. M.
Lairesse De Voguee, Bourdeau, Sorel, all welcomed it as
a revelation, in the _Debats, Revues des Deux Mondes_,
and elsewhere, and its real title was awarded it in the
_Temps_, by M. Albert Sorel, whose experience and
competence as an historical critic has never been
denied, and who unhesitatingly proclaimed it, _Le Fuit
et l'Idee_, namely, the announcement of the ruling
national idea whence the fact of German unity was
immediately derived.

The public of the whole universe will remember that at the time of the
Emperor Frederick's death the great question first arose as to who
was the initiator (or inventor) of the "United German Empire," and
from all sides poured forth the declarations of eye and ear witnesses;
this was the moment of the Gessellen-incident, and the outbreak of
hostility between Prince Bismarck and Baron de Rozzenbach and Gustav
Freitag, the novelist, and the celebrated jurisconsult for whose
illegal imprisonment the high-handed chancellor had later to atone.
But there apparently resulted from all these disputes that, as the
glory of "priority of invention" was so eagerly sought for, there must
have been an "inventor!" That was in reality the point on which Sybel
"spoke," and he therefore entitled his "history" that of the
"_Creation of the German United Empire, by William_ I."

This it was not; but this was at the same time the view it suited the
vanity of the French nation to take of it; accordingly, Sybel's theory
was rapidly accepted, and French public opinion did its utmost to
cause the unity of Germany, as recognized in 1871, to be regarded as
an accident, the creation of one man, promoted, for that matter
ungrudgingly, to the rank of the "greatest European statesman," but
whose work, being that of an individual, and therefore accidental,
might quite conceivably be eventually undone. Sybel's theory, being
official and Bismarckian, puts forth in truth the French conception,
and is, as a matter of fact, the very opposite of the national German
one.

The Germans who agreed with Sybel were the men of the old regime, with
far less, be it said, of the "cute" chancellor himself, than of
Marshal Moltke, the chancellor being far more distant from the
materialism of the "Grand Fritz" with his "big battalions