The Ifs of History/Chapter 19
EDWARD A. FREEMAN wrote, after the fall of the second Bonaparte empire: "The work of Richelieu is utterly undone, the work of Henry II and Louis XIV is partially undone; the Rhine now neither crosses nor waters a single rood of French ground. As it was in the first beginnings of northern European history, so it is now; Germany lies on both sides of the German river." This was not by any means the whole of the work wrought by that adventurer on an imperial throne, Napoleon III, through his disastrous war against a united Germany. He accomplished also the slaughter of five hundred thousand men, and the impoverishment of millions. He sounded the death knell of monarchical adventuring in France, which was indeed one good result of the Napoleonic débâcle, but he also fastened militarism, in the form of excessive and progressively increasing peace armaments, upon Europe, and magnified public debts and taxation to the limit of endurance.
Every event here mentioned was a direct development, not of Napoleon III's original seizure of the French throne, but of the final years, and the eventual overthrow of his power—the overthrow itself due to the Franco-Prussian war. A single event, criminal in its character, might have prevented these results. That great benefits sometimes eventuate from men's crimes is no news, and no longer a marvel, to the philosopher, who, when good comes of evil, is apt to repeat the words, "God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform."
The evil deed to which I have here referred, which would have saved the lives of five hundred thousand people and left the river Rhine still washing the confines of France, was the aiming of Orsini's bomb on the evening of the 14th of January, 1858. This bomb was designed to take the life of the emperor of the French. If the attempt had succeeded, and Napoleon had died as Alexander II of Russia and King Humbert of Italy afterward died, there would have been no Franco-German war. The throne of the baby Napoleon IV, who was then less than two years old, very likely would not have endured long; but whether the third republic had immediately arisen, or whether the Orleans Bourbons had been restored to the throne, it would have been found easy to preserve the peace with Prussia and Germany.
For Napoleon III deliberately, and with malignant ingenuity, provoked war with Germany in 1870. There is now no doubt that Bismarck desired such a war. He afterward confessed that he deceived the aged King William in such a way that all chance of peace at Ems was lost. But nevertheless the provocation of Napoleon was direct and deliberate.
His grievance was that the Hohenzollern prince, Leopold, had consented to become a candidate for the vacant throne of Spain. King William withdrew Prince Leopold's candidature. This really destroyed Napoleon's pretext for bringing on a war. But he desired a foreign war in order to forestall revolutionary opposition at home, which threatened to become irresistible. Napoleon thereupon caused his ambassador, Benedetti, insolently, and in a manner quite unbearable, to demand personally from King William a declaration that no Hohenzollern should ever be permitted to become king of Spain. King William treated this insolence as it deserved, and France, thereupon, declared war against Prussia.
What followed, the world knows. The consequences were tremendous. France was maimed of Alsace and Lorraine. Half a million of the flower of the manhood of both nations perished. France taxed herself with five millions of francs of indemnity, and though she has paid the debt to Germany, she still owes it to her own citizens. The difficulties of French government and finance were increased prodigiously and indefinitely by the war and the empire's delinquencies.
And all as a result contingent upon the failure of a criminal act! Felice Orsini meant to kill Napoleon III, and he and his two companions did kill ten innocent persons, and did wound one hundred and fifty others. Yet the man for whom their bombs were intended—the adventurer who had once been their comrade as a member of the Italian secret society, the Carbonari, but who had afterward betrayed the cause of Italian independence by leading an army into the peninsula and restoring the papal power—escaped unharmed, to wind the trail of his infamous conspiracies through European politics for twelve years longer. If the bomb had done its direful work, one man, utterly without character or conscience, would have died, and five hundred thousand men, mostly honest, good and true, would have lived. As it happened, the one man was spared, to make a vast holocaust of human life twelve years later.
It is, indeed, strange that the averting of a single crime may sometimes precipitate a myriad of other crimes.