the European continent, whether it
will or no, is responsible for France, and whatever abases France
humiliates Europe.

Before the 2nd of December, the leaders of the Right used freely to say
of Louis Bonaparte: "_He is an idiot._" They were mistaken. To be sure
that brain of his is awry, and has gaps in it, but one can discern here
and there thoughts consecutive and concatenate. It is a book whence
pages have been torn. Louis Napoleon has a fixed idea; but a fixed idea
is not idiocy; he knows what he wants, and he goes straight to it;
through justice, through law, through reason, through honour, through
humanity, it may be, but straight on none the less.

He is not an idiot. He is a man of another age than our own. He seems
absurd and mad, because he is out of his place and time. Transport him
to Spain in the 16th century, and Philip II would recognise him; to
England, and Henry VIII would smile on him; to Italy, and Caesar Borgia
would jump on his neck. Or even, confine yourself to setting him
outside the pale of European civilization,--place him, in 1817, at
Janina, and Ali-Tepeleni would grasp him by the hand.

There is in him something of the Middle Ages, and of the Lower Empire.
That which he does would have seemed perfectly simple and natural to
Michael Ducas, to Romanus Diogenes, to Nicephorus Botoniates, to the
Eunuch Narses, to the Vandal Stilico, to Mahomet II, to Alexander VI,
to Ezzelino of Padua, as it seems perfectly simple and natural to
himself. But he forgets, or knows not, that in the age wherein we live,
his actions will have to traverse the great streams of human morality,
set free by three centuries of literature and by the French Revolution;
and that in this medium, his actions will wear their true aspect, and
appear what they really are--hideous.

His partisans--he has some--complacently compare him with his uncle,
the first Bonaparte. They say: "The one accomplished the 18th Brumaire,
the other the 2nd of December: they are two ambitious men." The first
Bonaparte aimed to reconstruct the Empire of the West, to make Europe
his vassal, to dominate the continent by his power, and to dazzle it by
his grandeur; to take an arm-chair himself, and give footstools to the
kings; to cause history to say: "Nimrod, Cyrus, Alexander, Hannibal,
Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon;" to be a master of the world. And so he
was. It was for that that he accomplished the 18th Brumaire. This
fellow would fain have hor