parliamentary rights, and was followed by the dismissal of Rouher and the formation in the last week of 1869 of a responsible ministry of which M. Ollivier was really premier, although that office was not nominally recognized by the constitution. The new cabinet, known as the ministry of the 2nd of January, had a hard task before it, complicated a week after its formation by the shooting of Victor Noir by Prince Pierre Bonaparte. Ollivier immediately summoned the high court of justice for the judgment of Prince Bonaparte and Prince Joachim Murat. The riots following on the murder were suppressed without bloodshed; circulars were sent round to the prefects forbidding them in future to put pressure on the electors in favour of official candidates; Baron Haussmann was dismissed from the prefecture of the Seine; the violence of the press campaign against the emperor, to whom he had promised a happy old age, was broken by the prosecution of Henri Rochefort; and on the 20th of April a sénatus-consulte was issued which accomplished the transformation of the Empire into a constitutional monarchy. Neither concessions nor firmness sufficed to appease the “Irreconcilables” of the opposition, who since the relaxation of the press laws were able to influence the electorate. On the 8th of May, however, the amended constitution was submitted, on Rouher's advice, to a plebiscite, which resulted in a vote of nearly seven to one in favour of the government. The most distinguished members of the Left in his cabinet—L. J. Buffet, Napoleon Daru and Talhouët Roy—resigned in April on the question of the plebiscite. Ollivier himself held the ministry of foreign affairs for a few weeks, until Daru was replaced by the duc de Gramont, destined to be Ollivier’s evil genius. The other vacancies were filled by J. P. Mege and C. I. Plichon, both of them of Conservative tendencies.
The revival of the candidature of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen for the throne of Spain early in 1870 disconcerted Ollivier’s plans. The French government, following Gramont's advice, instructed Benedetti to demand from the king of Prussia a formal disavowal of the Hohenzollern candidature. Ollivier allowed himself to be gained by the war party. The story of Benedetti's reception at Ems and of Bismarck's manipulation of the Ems telegram is told elsewhere (see Bismarck). It is unlikely that Ollivier could have prevented the eventual outbreak of war, but he might perhaps have postponed it at that time, if he had taken time to hear Benedetti's account of the incident. He was outmanoeuvred by Bismarck, and on the 15th of July he made a hasty declaration in the Chamber that the Prussian government had issued to the powers a note announcing the rebuff received by Benedetti. He obtained a war vote of 500,000,000 francs, and used the fatal words that he accepted the responsibility of the war “with a light heart,” saying that the war had been forced on France. On the 9th of August, with the news of the first disaster, the Ollivier cabinet was driven from office, and its chief sought refuge from the general rage in Italy. He returned to France in 1873, but although he carried on an active campaign in the Bonapartist Estafette his political power was gone, and even in his own party he came into collision in 1880 with M. Paul de Cassagnac. During his retirement he employed himself in writing a history of L’Empire liberal, the first volume of which appeared in 1895. The work really dealt with the remote and immediate causes of the war, and was the author's apology for his blunder. The 13th volume showed that the immediate blame could not justly be placed entirely on his shoulders. His other works include Démocratie et liberté (1867), Le Ministère du 2 janvier, mes discours (1875), Principes et conduite (1875), L’Eglise et l’Etat au concile du Vatican (2 vols., 1879), Solutions politiques et sociales (1893), Nouveau Manuel du droit ecclésiastique français (1885). He had many connexions with the literary and artistic world, being one of the early Parisian champions of Wagner. Elected to the Academy in 1870, he did not take his seat, his reception being indefinitely postponed. His first wife, Blandine Liszt, was the daughter of the Abbe Liszt by Mme d’Agoult (Daniel Stern). She died in 1862, and Ollivier married in 1869 Mile Gravier.
Ollivier’s own view of his political life is given in his L’Empire liberal, which must always be an important "document" for the history of his time; but the book must be treated with no less caution than respect.
OLMSTED, DENISON (1791–1859), American man of science, was born at East Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A., on the 18th of June 1791, and in 1813 graduated at Yale, where he acted as college tutor from 1815 to 1817. In the latter year he was appointed to the chair of chemistry, mineralogy and geology in the university of North Carolina. This chair he exchanged for that of mathematics and physics at Yale in 1825; in 1836, when this professorship was divided, he retained that of astronomy and natural philosophy. He died at New Haven, Connecticut, on the 13th of May 1859.
His first publication (1824–1825) was the Report of his geological survey of the state of North Carolina. It was followed by various text-books on natural philosophy and astronomy, but he is chiefly known to the scientific world for his observations on hail (1830), on meteors and on the aurora borealis (see Smithsonian Contributions, vol. viii.).
OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW (1822–1903), American landscape architect, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on the 27th of April 1822. From his earliest years he was a wanderer. While still a lad he shipped before the mast as a sailor; then he took a course in the Yale Scientific School; worked for several farmers; and, finally, began farming for himself on Staten Island, where he met Calvert Vaux, with whom later he formed a business partnership. All this time he wrote for the agricultural papers. In 1850 he made a walking tour through England, his observations being published in Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852). A horseback trip through the Southern States was recorded in A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey through Texas (1857) and A Journey in the Back Country (1860). These three volumes, reprinted in England in two as Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom (1861), gave a picture of the conditions surrounding American slavery that had great influence on British opinion, and they were much quoted in the controversies at the time of the Civil War. During the war he was the untiring secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. He happened to be in New York City when Central Park was projected, and, in conjunction with Vaux, proposed the plan which, in competition with more than thirty others, won first prize. Olmsted was made superintendent to carry out the plan. This was practically the first attempt in the United States to apply art to the improvement or embellishment of nature in a public park; it attracted great attention, and the work was so satisfactorily done that he was engaged thereafter in most of the important works of a similar nature in America—Prospect Park, Brooklyn; Fairmount Park, Philadelphia; South Park, Chicago; Riverside and Morningside Parks, New York; Mount Royal Park, Montreal; the grounds surrounding the Capitol at Washington, and at Leland Stanford University at Palo Alto (California); and many others. He took the bare stretch of lake front at Chicago and developed it into the beautiful World’s Fair grounds, placing all the buildings and contributing much to the architectural beauty and the success of the exposition. He was greatly interested in the Niagara reservation, made the plans for the park there, and also did much to influence the state of New York to provide the Niagara Park. He was the first commissioner of the National Park of the Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove, directing the survey and taking charge of the property for the state of California. He had also held directing appointments under the cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington and San Francisco, the Joint Committee on Buildings and Grounds of Congress, the Niagara Falls Reservation Commission, the trustees of Harvard, Yale, Amherst and other colleges and public institutions. Subsequently to 1886 he was largely occupied in laying out an extensive system of parks and parkways for the city of Boston and the town of Brookline, and on a scheme of landscape improvement of Boston harbour. Olmsted received honorary degrees from Harvard, Amherst and Yale in 1864, 1867 and 1893. He died on the 28th of August 1903.
