The so-called principle of nationality resolved itself, then, with Napoleon I. and the Carbonari, into a pure engine of war--into a battery which, after destroying the bulwarks of the opposite principle of legitimacy, should give into their hands nations and kingdoms. That Louis Napoleon, in prison, a fugitive, a conspirator, should support himself with this flattering principle, and dexterously dazzle with it the eyes of those who could help him to recover the sceptre of France, can be easily understood; but that, after obtaining this sceptre by a network of circumstances wholly foreign to the principle of nationality, he should adopt that principle as the final aim of his empire and the corner-stone of his own greatness and of French power--this, in truth, is hard to understand.
But that it was the case is only too clear. He spent the twenty years of his dominion over France in coloring the design which he had puzzled out twenty years before, dreaming over the memories of St. Helena, and plotting in the collieries of the Carbonari.
To a sagacious mind which had well weighed the true worth of the Napoleonic idea, even before the new emperor attempted its fulfilment, terrible dangers and obstacles must have presented themselves.
After a succession of wars and successful conspiracies had led nations to an independent reconstruction within natural frontiers, what increase of territory could have accrued to France?
Suppose Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Iberia adjusted on this principle, would their power have remained so equalized as to leave France secure of preponderance?
If Germany had been so reconstructed, to the certain advantage of Prussia, was there not a risk of exposing France to a shock which might have proved fatal?
According to the theory of natural limits, the aggrandizement which France could have demanded in compensation for protection and successful warfare would have been reduced to some additions towards the Alps, the Pyrenees, and in Flanders; to a few thousand square kilometres, and perhaps three or four millions of inhabitants. Towards the Rhine, we cannot see what the Empire could have claimed without contradicting the theory itself. Germany has maintained that Alsace and half of Lorraine, incorporated with French soil, are German, and has forced them to a legal annexation to her territory. Now, were these slender acquisitions, so disproportioned to the acquisitions of neighboring countries, worth the cost of turning Europe upside down, and subjecting France to a chance of political and military ruin?