The Historians' History of the World 06

In the same way Napoleon III loved to increase his reputation in Europe and in his army by conducting wars which, even if they ended badly, could not shake his throne nor France itself. A war over the boundaries of the Rhine was as popular in France as a Parthian war under Augustus, but also as dangerous. For this reason Napoleon III made several attempts to attain the fruits of such a war by peaceable means and only proceeded to a declaration of war when he had convinced himself that there was no prospect of success in such attempts.

In a word, then as now the statesman succeeded the general, the prince of peace the warrior prince, nor did the former despise military glory; only he preferred to decorate himself with the laurels plucked from his uncle’s wreath. Augustus, no less than Napoleon III, reckoned it as of the very essence of the services he did to the world that he had put an end to the period of warfare at home and abroad. Just as Napoleon III, in the character of saviour of society, pronounced the dictum,“L’Empire c’est la paix,” so Augustus caused himself to be celebrated as the restorer of order and liberty, whose privilege it was thrice to shut the doors of Janus and to inaugurate a new era of things.

Neither was a man of genius, both were practical and astute to no common degree; they were cool political calculators who had early learned to conduct their own policies and to judge all circumstances from the practical point of view. If they sought an end they did not shrink from the means to accomplish it; as a parallel to the misdeeds of the triumvirs we have every right to quote the measures under Napoleon III by which the president was raised to an emperor. Later in their career both avoided acts of violence as far as possible, and in the face of outspoken public opinion, the symptoms of which they studied zealously, both made concessions even in the teeth of their own better convictions, for they were astute enough to know that their supremacy could not depend on might alone.

Possessed as they were of power they sought also to conciliate and fortify the conservative elements of the state. Those who bore old and famous names were treated with just such a preference in the bestowal of external honours by Augustus as in later times by Napoleon, whose endeavour was to adorn his new imperial nobility with the fairest names of old feudal France.

As he succeeded in reconciling the old nobility to some extent with the new order of things, so Napoleon understood how to conclude peace with the church, a peace which he bought and preserved at considerable cost. In a similar way Augustus, who took upon himself the dignity of a high priest, attempted to reanimate national traditions and the religion of the past and to reorganise the priesthoods.

The similarity of the two rulers is obvious and has been frequently referred to. That it should until now have been less recognised than it ought, is, perhaps, due to the fact that the characters of the two were after all fundamentally different. One might almost say the similarity lay in the circumstances of the times, the dissimilarity in the characters of the persons; and the more we harp on the former the clearer appears the latter. Napoleon remained all his life what Augustus never was, a dreamer and a conspirator. According to the version of De Tocqueville, Napoleon knew no hard and fast boundary between dreaming and thinking; this may have been the result of his moping youth with its conspiracies, his imprisonment, and his fantastic designs which never were realised but by the most extraordinary strokes of luck. Augustus, on the other hand, never had time to devote to dreamy imaginings. When he was still almost a boy, he had thrown himself on his own initiative into the struggle of parties, and from the beginning he had to summon all the powers of his mind to aid him in the struggle against opponents maturer than himself; so it is that later when power was his he never dreamed but always thought. Moreover, Augustus was never a conspirator. He obtained power early and wielded it recklessly. He both loathed and found superfluous that covert toying with designs and intrigues which shunned the public eye until they suddenly burst into publicity with éclat, such as Napoleon loved.