His political career recalls Seneca's
theory of Ulysses--'nauseator' but fulfilling his Odyssey. He disliked
but never shirked the responsibilities which were pressed upon him. It
used to be said of M. Thiers that whenever Louis Philippe wished to get
an unpopular measure carried, he contrived to make M. Thiers oppose it
violently, upset the government upon it, come into power upon his
victory, and then take the measure up himself and carry it through. The
Duc de Broglie was not a politician of this adroit and acrobatic type.
His yea was yea and his nay, nay in politics as in private life. He kept
aloof from the Second Empire, as his grandfather, Mr. Carlyle's 'War-god
Broglie,' had kept aloof from the first. But he never fell into the
Republican folly of pretending to regard the Second Empire as a tyranny
imposed upon the people of France against their will. On the contrary,
he saw things not as he wished them to be, but as they were, and so he
said of the Second Empire, 'It is the government which the masses of the
people in France desire and which the upper classes of France deserve.'

The sting of this saying was given to it by the acquiescence of the
'upper classes' in the blow struck by the Second Empire at the rights of
property in France when it confiscated in 1852 the estates of the House
of Orleans. This blow was aimed, of course, by Napoleon III. at the
Monarchy of July; just as the blow struck by Napoleon at the Duc
d'Enghien was aimed at the ancient monarchy. But in the one case as in
the other, the iniquity of the blow affected the fundamental conditions
of social order and peace in France. In the one case as in the other, an
Imperial Government, assuming to be a government of law, committed
itself to the most outrageous and despotic practices of the 'Terror' of
1793. In the charter of 1814, Louis XVIII. had abolished confiscation.
In the Charter of 1830, Louis Philippe had re-affirmed this abolition.
By the decrees of 1852, seizing the property of the House of Orleans,
Napoleon III. re-established confiscation. In principle these decrees of
1852 were no better than the Jacobin decrees of September 1793, which
fixed the proportion of his own income to be enjoyed by every citizen in
France. Real, the chairman, as we should call him, of the Finance
Committee of the Convention of 1793, who calmly divided the income of
every citizen into three categories: 'the necessary' not to exceed, in
the case of a bachelo