ART. VIII. THE FALL OF THE FRENCH EMPIRE.

Historical Map of the War. London : Allnutt.

HE fall of the French empire is like a coup d'état struck

human history there is no such sudden and surprising destruction of so great a dominion as this upon record. Three months ago it seemed to be the grandest power upon the earth -with the most variously gifted, patriotic, and homogeneous population, with the most admirably situated, fertile, and commodious territory, whose ports lay open to the Atlantic, and commanded the Mediterranean; whose soil grew corn and sugar, wine and tobacco, the potato and the olive, silk and wool with equal ease; with a language that interpreted between all other nations; with a capital that was the capital of half the world, and the choice focus of human genius; with an army whose eagles, within a few years, victory had attended in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America; whose flag had floated over Rome, Athens, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Pekin, Milan, and Mexico; with a great code; with a great system of administration; with a political constitution whose edifice, patiently and skilfully raised on the embers of revolution and the débris of dead institutions, had lately been crowned by liberty; with a dynasty which had just received the solemn sanction of the votes of eight millions of men, and to which a higher sanction than that of man seemed to attach-for within two generations had been born of that dynasty rulers possessing the most complex, the most consummate, yet the most curiously contrasted talents for the art of government in all its most arduous and various tasks. Where is it all now? Where is Babylon the great? And where the Cæsars? It has not so much perished as vanished. It is like the fall of a planet from its place. Prussia was more rapidly and even more completely crushed by the military power of France in the war of 1808; but Prussia was only kneaded into a nation by her calamity, and the common disaster only added a new title to the crown of the Hohenzollerns. The civil authority of Louis Philippe, which had lasted nearly as long, and was of scarcely less prestige for its prudence of policy, was dismissed almost as abruptly and contumeliously in 1848. Yet Louis Philippe had failed in no foreign war; and what he did for the military honour of France he did well. Paris owes her fortifications to his reign; every officer whose exploits added a ray of glory to the Empire, from Pelissier to VOL. XV.—NO. Xxx. [New Series.]

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Trochu, was trained and was even already distinguished in his time. But war and revolution combined to consume the Empire. The thunderbolt and the earthquake smote it together. It had arisen in a time of revolution, itself revolutionizing the revolution, acting against the system of political conspiracy and insurrection which surrounded it, by conspiracy at the centre of the State, and insurrection in the ranks of the army; and then proclaiming that it was Peace. In the end, its fate was risked on the issue of war, in the hope that war, at least, might prove a safety-valve to revolution. And so the great dominion, so splendid, so solid, which had made war so dexterously, which had made peace so prosperous, the name of whose much-contriving and mysterious chief has been daily on the lips of all men from the rising to the setting of the sun for twenty years of this quickest and busiest of ages, is all of a sudden torn up by the roots and flung away like a weed.

It is strange that this tremendous catastrophe should find its scene in the streets of Sedan, a place destined to mark memorable dates in history. That town is not an ancient possession of the Crown of France. It formed an independent principality under the Duc de Bouillon until the time of the conspiracy of Cinq Mars. Its cession thus marks the epoch in which a Duke of Orleans first plotted against the head of his house. He who knows what ill that unnatural family feud has wrought, from the days when Cardinal Richelieu grasped the keys of the impregnable citadel in his dying hand, which had raised the French monarchy to a position of such exalted power and repute, to the days when, after its disastrous capitulation, the old Orleanist Premier, M. Thiers, started on his hopeless cruise from court to court in search of an ally, at the bidding of two boisterous barristers, who have been suddenly flung from the gutter into the Louvre, is master of one of the principal clues of French history. The art of war always makes such rapid progress among men, that even between the time of Richelieu and the time of the Revolution, Sedan had ceased to be considered impregnable, and had even come to be regarded as hardly defensible. There can scarcely be a more curious coincidence of date and place in history than that between the position of General Dumouriez there on the 31st of August, 1792, and that of Marshal MacMahon there on the 31st of August, 1870. The grandfather of the present King of Prussia was marching on Paris. Hohenlohe beleaguered Thionville. Kahlkreuth was bombarding Verdun. Clerfait had arrived at Stenai. The French general seemed to be surrounded on all sides. "My little army would be in a mousetrap, cut off from Paris, from Kellermann and its magazines, if the Prussians were

to occupy the mountains with 20,000 men,"-so Dumouriez wrote to the minister of war at Paris on the 31st of August in the year afterwards called the year One of the first French Republic One and Indivisible. These are the results of your defensive warfare; " he continued gloomily, "if it had not been for the taking of Longwy, I should never have gone to Sedan, and now I am compromised here without being able to save anything." In some such words may MacMahon have written, when beaten at Carignan and Beaumont, cut off from Paris, from Bazaine, and from his magazines, he found himself hemmed in at Sedan on the 31st of August of this year One of the third Republic the third Republic, which can hardly yet be regarded as One, and which Count Bismarck proposes to divide. But by a sudden stroke of strategy, instinct with genius, courage, and velocity, Dumouriez broke through the German toils, and within a week completely turned the tide of war. Dillon, an Irish officer, who commanded the French van, cut his way through Clerfait's Austrians. Dumouriez had contrived, by skilfully masked marches, to reach Grandpré by the 4th of September. Dillon occupied the Islettes on the following day. The passes of the Argonnes, "the Thermopyla of France," were thus secured. And, on the 5th of September, Dumouriez was able to write to the same minister of war these momentous words: "If the King of Prussia advances on Paris now, he is a lost man." On the 5th of September, 1870, the Emperor Napoleon, prisoner of war, arrived at Cassel, and the King of Prussia, having given his army three days' rest, entered Rheims, where the kings of France were crowned of old, on his first day's march towards the walls of Paris.

As in the history of States there is no precedent for the utter and absolute collapse of the French empire, so in the history of war there is no such vast and terrible ruin as that of the French army. The French throughout this war have been circumvented, dislocated, and overwhelmed by the Prussians in a way more like that in which we have been accustomed to see Asiatics crushed by Europeans than like any result of war hitherto attained between two Western nations. Two months have now elapsed since the first shot was fired, and it may not certainly be said that the French have had the advantage in even one serious skirmish in the open field ever since. They have been beaten in nine pitched battles-at Weissenberg on the 4th of August, at Wöerth and at Forbach on the 6th, at Courcelles on the 14th, at Vionville on the 16th, at Gravelotte on the 18th, at Beaumont and at Carignan on the 30th, and before Sedan on the 2nd of September. In the course of exactly one month, measured day by day, from the taking of

Saarbruck, there was no French army at all in the field. What remained of it was invested in strong places, and so debarred from exercising any active influence on the course of the war; or was so utterly demoralized as to be inferior in discipline and courage to the Mobiles and the National Guard. Meantime the superiority of the Prussian army was proved to be a superiority of every military quality and capacity. In strategy, in tactics, in discipline, in fighting, in marching, in the special use of artillery, cavalry, and infantry, as well as in the combination of all arms, the Germans from the first shot established their mastery. The Emperor seemed to have taken the field without any plan of his own, without any theory as to the Prussian plans, without any adequate intelligence department. His military administration speedily and utterly broke down. Who may take the gauge of Marshal Leboeuf's incapacity? Over that calamitous name one drops a pall and passes on. But Marshal Niel was supposed to have so reorganized the army three years ago, that France should have a standing force ready to strike with, superior in numbers to that maintained by Germany on a peace footing, while her reserves were to have been mobilized, according to a plan which the Emperor himself wrote a pamphlet to explain, with at least equal rapidity. But the army that was sent to the frontier was hardly equal in numbers to the German corps that were ready to meet it; nor was it allowed to undertake any offensive operation until the Germans had had full time to embody their reserves and their Landwehr; and when the French standing army was destroyed, it transpired that there was no army of reserve. Of the Marshals who took the field, one was obliged to capitulate with an army of 100,000 men, and two others were surrounded and shut up within stone walls against their will, with another army of 100,000 men, and these three were the only French marshals who were in a condition to command. It cannot be truly said that there was even one general officer who distinguished himself by a single act of conspicuous military ability, while there were several of whom it is not much to say that the capitulation saved them from the court-martial. Again and again it happened, notably at Weissenberg, at Forbach, and at Beaumont, that a French division found itself surprised, not at night, or at dawn, or in the enemy's country, but at noon, while it was cooking, and so circumvented, had to accept battle at a minute's notice on the enemy's terms. No French general seemed to know where or when to expect a Prussian attack. They were not served by their spies. They had no outposts. They did not reconnoitre. Want of respect for their generals accordingly seems to have immediately blighted the discipline of the whole

army. The Germans found themselves, even before Sedan, encumbered with prisoners, who surrendered in thousands without shame, cursing their officers and their Emperor. The Emperor has always been a diligent student of the art of war, mainly, however, in its historical aspects, but he is no captain. He very nearly lost the battle of Magenta by an impromptu movement, skilfully repaired at great hazard by MacMahon. It were no reproach to him that he is ignorant of the conduct of war, for he never served with the army or saw a battle ranged until he was fifty years of age, but for the fact that he considered it due to the name and the rank that he bore to assume the command in chief. He not merely assumed, he seems to have exercised the chief command as long as it was possible for him to do so; and there can now be no doubt that this was an act of morbid folly. In the scale of military capacity, the Third Napoléon will occupy a place in history relatively to Von Moltke hardly so respectable as that in which Wurmser or Mack stood to the First Napoleon. But though no general, the Emperor has always been supposed to have a good knowledge of artillery; and in fact his experiments, of which the Cannon Napoléon and the building of the Gloire were the first results, have transformed the gunnery and the navies of the world. How then did it happen that he was ignorant of the fact that the Prussian artillery was so indefinitely superior to his own? In almost every battle, the French batteries were easily mastered by the Prussian fire; and in the end an army of 100,000 men, occupying a fortified town, had to submit to the unprecedented ignominy of laying down their arms, simply because a circle of Prussian cannon had been drawn around them. Its established superiority was such that the annihilation of the French army was supposed to be involved in any other issue. The Prussian artillery was generally supposed to be inferior to the Austrian when the war of 1866 was declared, and the Austrian artillery had been proved to be inferior to the French in the war of 1859; but the war of 1870 revealed the fact that the Prussians had got a new gun, whose power, whose very existence was unknown to the author of the Cannon Napoléon. The Prussian cavalry was generally thought, in 1866, by independent critics, to be far inferior to the Austrian cavalry, and none of the incidents of that war sufficed to reverse the presumption. Neither its artillery nor its cavalry was reckoned to be the strong arm of the Prussian army, but its steady, stalwart infantry. It may be doubted, however, whether any army was ever so well served by its cavalry as the Prussians have been during the present war. It is no exaggeration to say that the Prussian cavalry has been every