In spite of the unbridled verse of Hugo and the even more unbridled prose of Kinglake, Napoleon III. is really and solely discredited in history because of the catastrophe of 1870.  Hugo hurled any amount of lightning on Louis Napoleon; but he threw very little light on him.  Some passages in the “Chatiments” are really caricatures carved in eternal marble.  They will always be valuable in reminding generations too vague and soft, as were the Victorians, of the great truth that hatred is beautiful, when it is hatred of the ugliness of the soul.  But most of them could have been written about Haman, or Heliogabalus, or King John, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as about poor Louis Napoleon; they bear no trace of any comprehension of his quite interesting aims, and his quite comprehensible contempt for the fat-souled senatorial politicians.  And if a real revolutionist like Hugo did not do justice to the revolutionary element in Caesarism, it need hardly be said that a rather Primrose League Tory like Tennyson did not.  Kinglake’s curiously acrid insistence upon the Coup d’etat is, I fear, only an indulgence in one of the least pleasing pleasures of our national pen and press, and one which afterwards altogether ran away with us over the Dreyfus case.  It is an unfortunate habit of publicly repenting for other people’s sins.  If this came easy to an Englishman like Kinglake, it came, of course, still easier to a German like Queen Victoria’s husband and even to Queen Victoria herself, who was naturally influenced by him.  But in so far as the sensible masses of the English nation took any interest in the matter, it is probable that they sympathised with Palmerston, who was as popular as the Prince Consort was unpopular.  The black mark against Louis Napoleon’s name until now, has simply been Sedan; and it is our whole purpose to-day to turn Sedan into an interlude.  If it is not an interlude, it will be the end of the world.  But we have sworn to make an end of that ending:  warring on until, if only by a purgatory of the nations and the mountainous annihilation of men, the story of the world ends well.

There are, as it were, valleys of history quite close to us, but hidden by the closer hills.  One, as we have seen, is that fold in the soft Surrey hills where Cobbett sleeps with his still-born English Revolution.  Another is under that height called The Spy of Italy, where a new Napoleon brought back the golden eagles against the black eagles of Austria.  Yet that French adventure in support of the Italian insurrection was very important; we are only beginning to understand its importance.  It was a defiance to the German Reaction and 1870 was a sort of revenge for it, just as the Balkan victory was a defiance to the German Reaction and 1914 was the attempted revenge for it.  It is true that the French liberation of Italy was incomplete, the problem of the Papal States, for instance, being untouched by the Peace of Villafranca.  The volcanic but fruitful spirit of Italy had already