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226 NAPOLEON been brought home to him, and in several cases he has tried to foist into history apocryphal documents. Here, as throughout his life, he shows quite a peculiar talent for misrepresentation. He knows that nine readers out of ten take a lucid statement for a true one, and his statements are always lucid, precise, and direct. And thus it has been, and is, particularly difficult to eradicate the Napoleonic legend, which has grown up in the very midst of the 19th century, and would perhaps never have been seriously shaken but for the failure of the Second Empire. Its growth was helped by the accident that at the moment of quitting the scene he seemed to be fighting for a good cause. Look at Napoleon s career between 1803 and 1814, when it was shaped most freely by his own will ; here everything is anti-popular, illiberal, and immoral, as well as ruinous beyond all precedent. In particular he stands out as the great enemy and oppressor of nationalities, so that the nationality movement, when it begins in Spain and Tyrol and spreads through North Germany, is a reaction against his tyranny. But in 1815 he succeeded in posing as a champion and martyr of the nationality principle against the Holy Alliance. The curtain fell upon this pose. It brought back the memory of that Bonaparte who at the end of the 18th century had seemed the antique republican hero dreamed of by Rousseau, and men forgot once more how completely he had disappointed their expectations. By looking only at the beginning and end of his career, and by disregarding all the middle of it, an imaginary Napoleon has been obtained who is a republican, not a despot, a lover of liberty, not an authoritarian, a champion of the Revolution, not the destroyer of the Revolution, a hero of independence, not a conqueror, a friend of the people, not a contemner of the people, a man of heart and virtue, not a ruthless militarist, cynic, and Machiavellian. This illusion led to the restoration of the Napoleonic dynasty in 1851. He died of an ulcer in the stomach on May 5, 1821. In his will he declared himself a Catholic, wished his ashes to repose " on the banks of the Seine in the midst of the French people whom he had loved so well," spoke tenderly of Marie Louise and his son, and of all his relatives except Louis, whom he " pardoned " for the libel he published in 1820, disavowed the Manuscrit de Sainte-Helene, a mysti fication which had recently had much success, defended the execution of D Enghien, imputed the two conquests of France to Marmont, Augereau, Talleyrand, and La Fayette, whom he "forgave," and devoted the English oligarchy, to whom he ascribed his premature death, to the ven geance of the English people. In a codicil he added a truly Corsican touch, bequeathing 10,000 francs to the subaltern officer Cantillon, "who has undergone a trial upon the charge of having endeavoured to assassinate Lord Wellington, of which he was pronounced innocent. Cantillon had as much right to assassinate that oligarchist as the latter had to send me to perish upon the rock of St Helena." He was buried at Longwood in St Helena ; but in the reign of Louis Philippe his remains were removed by per mission of the English Government to the Invalides at Paris, where a stately dome was erected over the sarcophagus that contains them. Posterity has not yet ceased to be perplexed by Napoleon s Litera- career. He inflames national partialities more than any other ture. personage, and his activity, by embracing many countries, tran scends the field of view of the historians of each nation. Till a recent time his life was written chiefly from French memoirs, when by French writers, with great ignorance of all affairs not French, when by English writers, with imperfect knowledge of all affairs not French or English, and by all writers alike, especially French writers, with extreme prejudice. Then came M. Thiers (1845), professing to write from official papers ; but his untrust- worthiness in particular matters has long been demonstrated, and some recent investigators (see, for instance, De Marteil, Lcs Histo- riens Fantaisistes) profess to convict him of the most outrageous contempt for truth. The story is now being slowly transferred from the basis of memoirs to that of official papers and correspond ence. The Correspondence of Napoleon himself in thirty-two volumes (which began to appear in 1858) is necessarily the corner stone, though it has been edited in the most unsatisfactory way, many letters having been withheld and others mutilated, even if some have not been garbled. On this foundation M. Lanfrey based his history, M hich extends unfortunately only as far as 1811. It is the first essay towards a serious estimate of the career ; what the writer chiefly wants is a first-hand knowledge of the affairs of foreign nations. It still remains to fuse together these materials with those equally rich that have been lately furnished by German research and by the opening of the different national archives. On German affairs the principal works are those of Eanke, Pertz, Oncken, and Treitschke. For the substance of them the English reader may refer to Professor Seeley s Life and Times of Stein. A good account (founded on original documents) of the Russian campaign by Bogdanovitch may be read in German. Colonel Jung in two works, Bonaparte ct son Temps and Lucien Bonaparte ct ses Memoircs, shows himself a true historical critic. The former work renders earlier books on the first period of Bonaparte (Coston, Libri, &c. ) superfluous. Of military works, Riistow on the Italian campaigns, Charras on the campaign of 1815, and Charras s fragment on the campaign of 1813, with Mr Dorsey Gardner s volume on the campaign of 1815, maybe recommended. Recent years have also brought valuable new memoirs, those of Marmont, of Miot de Melito, of Hardenberg (included in Ranke s Life), of Mme. de Remusat, of Metternich. Mme. de Remusat with the Duchesse d Abrantes gives the best picture of his private life. This whole class of books should be used with caution. Marmont often excites distrust ; still more the earlier memoir-writer Bour- rienne. The reader must also be on his guard against apocryphal works, such as Memoircs tires des papiers d un hoinme d etat, long attributed quite without ground to Hardenberg, and the Manuscrit venu de Stc-Helene-. (J- R- S.) NAPOLEON II. is the name given by Bonapartists to FranQois Charles Joseph, duke of Reichstadt, the son of Napoleon I. and Marie Louise, who was born at Paris 20th March 1811, and died of laryngeal phthisis at Schbnbrunn, near Vienna, 22d July 1832. His empty imperial title is derived from his father s two abdications in his favour in 1814 and 1815. He was created duke of Reichstadt in 1818 by his grandfather Francis I. of Austria, at whose court he resided after his father s fall. NAPOLEON III. (1808-1873). Louis Napoleon, emperor of the French, was the younger son of Louis, king of Holland (brother of Napoleon L), and of Hortense, daughter of the empress Josephine by her first husband Beauharnais. He was thus both nephew and step-grandson of Napoleon I. His father and mother were on the worst terms, and rarely lived together. Louis was born at Paris on April 20, 1808, at the house belonging to his mother in the street that is now Rue Lafitte. He was brought up at Paris, and was occasionally taken to the Tuileries and noticed by the emperor, who gave him the cordon of the Legion of Honour. But it is impossible that the child could have remembered much of Napoleon I., who, from the beginning of the Russian campaign in 1812, was con stantly away from Paris. "When, in 1814, the allies entered the French capital, generosity towards the con quered was the order of the day. Queen Hortense was courteously treated and visited by the czar Alexander, to whom her boy is said to have given a ring. The family continued to reside in France during the first restoration of the Bourbons, and were there when Napoleon returned from Elba. A story that when Napoleon was on the point of setting out for Waterloo the young Louis inter rupted him in a conference with Marshal Soult, and begged him not to go to the war, is probably mythical. The