the
Roman pontiffs. At the end of the fifteenth century the Emperor still
possessed the golden globe, the golden crown, the scepter of Charlemagne
and of Otho the Great, but, after the death of Frederick II., he was
nothing more than a majesty for show; the Pope still wore the tiara,
still held the pastoral staff and the keys of Gregory VII. and of
Innocent III., but, after the death of Boniface VIII., he was nothing
more than a majesty of the Church. Both abortive restorations had merely
added ruins to ruins, while the phantom of the ancient empire alone
remained erect amid so many fragments. Grand in its outlines and
decorations, it stood there, august, dazzling, in a halo, the unique
masterpiece of art and of reason, as the ideal form of human society.
For ten centuries this specter haunted the medieval epoch, and nowhere
to such an extent as in Italy.[2338]

It reappears the last time in 1800, starting up in and taking firm hold
of the magnificent, benighted imagination of the great Italian,[2339] to
whom the opportunity afforded the means for executing the grand Italian
dream of the Middle Ages; it is according to this retrospective vision
that the Diocletian of Ajaccio, the Constantine of the Concordat, the
Justinian of the Civil Code, the Theodosius of the Tuileries and of St.
Cloud reconstructed France.

This does not mean that he copies--he restores; his conception is not
plagiarism, but a case of atavism; it comes to him through the nature
of his intellect and through racial traditions. In the way of social
and political conceptions, as in literature and in art, his spontaneous
taste is ultra-classic. We detect this in his mode of comprehending the
history of France; State historians, "encouraged by the police," must
make it to order; they must trace it "from the end of Louis XIV. to
the year VIII," and their object must be to show how superior the new
architecture is to the old one.[2340] "The constant disturbance of the
finances must be noted, the chaos of the provincial assemblies,... the
pretensions of the parliaments, the lack of energy and order in the
administration, that parti-colored France with no unity of laws or of
administration, being rather a union of twenty kingdoms than one single
State, so that one breathes on reaching the epoch in which people enjoy
the benefits of the unity of the laws, of the administration, and of the
territory." In effect, he breathes; in thus passing from the former t