Such a humor in three of the high contracting parties makes it doubtful whether the Frankfort proposals had any reality, and this doubt is further increased by the circumstances of the so-called negotiation. St. Aignan, the French envoy to the Saxon duchies, had in violation of international law and courtesy been seized at Gotha and held as a prisoner. He was now set free and instructed to urge upon Napoleon the necessity of an immediate settlement. To his brother-in-law, the pacific Caulaincourt, who was soon to displace Maret as minister of foreign affairs, he was to hand a private and personal letter from Metternich. In the course of this epistle the writer expresses his conviction that any effort to conclude a peace would come to nothing. Not only, therefore, were the pretended negotiations entirely destitute of form, they were prejudged from the outset. Still further, the allies refused what Napoleon had granted after Bautzen, an armistice, and insisted that hostilities were to proceed during negotiation. All possible doubt as to the sincerity of the proposals is turned into assurance by Metternich's admission in his memoirs that they were intended to divorce Napoleon from the French nation, and in particular to work on the feelings of the army. He says that neither Alexander nor Frederick William would have assented to them had they not been convinced that Napoleon would "never in the world of his own accord" resolve to accept them. Yet the world has long believed that Napoleon, as he himself expressed it, lost his crown for Antwerp; that had he believed the honeyed words of the Austrian minister, and opened negotiations on an indefinite basis without delay, he might have kept France with its revolutionary boundaries intact for himself and his dynasty, and by the sacrifice of his imperial ambitions have retained for her, if not preponderance, at least importance in the councils of Europe.
Neither Napoleon nor the French nation was deceived; a peace made under such circumstances could result only in a dishonorable tutelage to the allied sovereigns. France abhorred the dynasties and all their works, believing that dynastic rule could never mean anything except absolutism and feudalism. The experiment of popular sovereignty wielded by a democracy had been a failure; but the liberal French, like men of the same intelligence throughout Europe, did not, for all that, lose faith in popular sovereignty; they knew there must be some channel for its exercise. Outside of France, as in it, the most enlightened opinion of the time regarded Napoleon as the savior of society. The Queen of Saxony bitterly reproached Metternich for having deserted Napoleon's "sacred cause." This was because the Emperor of the French seemed to have used the people's power for the people's good. His giant arm alone could wield the popular majesty. It is said that the great mass of the French nation, on hearing of the Frankfort proposals, groaned and laughed by turns. Being profoundly, devotedly imperialist and therefore idealistic, they were outraged at the thought of Hapsburgs, Romanoffs, or Hohenzollerns, the very incarnations of German feudality, as leaders of the new Europe. It seemed the irony of fate that civil and political rights on the basis, not of privilege, but of manhood, the prize for which the world had been turned upside down, should be intrusted to such keepers. Welded into a homogeneous nationality themselves, the French could not understand that the inchoate nationalities in other states had as yet nothing but dynastic forms of expression, or foresee that during a century to come the old dynasties would find safety only in adapting royalty to national needs.