ister. In a few months he was a terror to the peace of Europe. He
refused Lord Palmerston's invitation to enter into an alliance with
Britain, Austria, and Prussia for the preservation of the integrity of
the Ottoman empire, from a sympathy with the principles which dictated
the first Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and Syria, and a desire to
accomplish by diplomacy with Mehemet Ali what Bonaparte had endeavored
to effect by force of arms--the supremacy of France in these regions. He
talked menacingly of setting aside the treaties of 1815, and of
extending the French frontier to the Rhine, and is said to have actually
spent L8,000,000 on military and naval demonstrations. Then followed the
seizure of the Society Islands, and a well-founded protest by the
British government against the ill-treatment by the French of Mr.
Pritchard, their consul at Tahiti. In consequence of this Thiers was
forced to resign office, and retire into private life. He now returned
to the study of French history. The first volume of his "Histoire du
Consulat et de l'Empire" appeared in 1845; it was not completed till
1860. This, the most ambitious of all Thiers's literary enterprises,
must be considered a large rather than a great work. It is a monument to
its author's industry in reading, and rises here and there to rhetorical
brilliance. But that it is inaccurate and unfair has been admitted even
by French critics. Thiers greatly overrated Napoleon, and probably to
his own hurt.

Thiers was not one of the promoters of the revolution which in 1848
drove Louis Philippe from the throne. On the contrary, he would, as
prime minister summoned at the eleventh hour, have prevented it if he
could. He accepted its consequences in the form of the Republic. He
voted for the election of Prince Louis Napoleon as its president. This
action brought him much vituperation and ridicule from former political
friends. But whatever may have been the motive that inspired it, it
certainly did not help him at the time of the coup-d'etat of 1851; he
was arrested, imprisoned in Mazas, and banished. Next year, however, he
was allowed to return from Switzerland to France. For eight years he was
occupied with his "History of the Consulate and Empire." He re-entered
the Chamber in 1863, having been elected liberal deputy for the
Department of the Seine in opposition to the imperialist candidate. Till
the fall of the Second Empire he was regarded as the ablest and most
formidab