Free The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 by Alistair Horne Page A

impassioned hatred against the regime far exceeding anything known in the revolutionary year of 1848. ‘Moderation is Death’ became the slogan, and worship of the ancestors of 1793 one of the most popular themes. Meanwhile the Government stood aside, quoting to itself as comfort the parable of the cats of Kilkenny, and hoping that the Clubs too would eventually wipe each other out.
    Typical of the new, inflammatory atmosphere was the ‘Baudin Trial’. Baudin was an obscure revolutionary who had found a fleeting moment of glory in the uprising against Louis-Napoleon in 1851, when he had leaped on top of a barricade crying ‘I’ll show you how one dies for 25 sous a day’, and was promptly shot. On All Soul’s Day, 1868, his name was ‘rediscovered’ on a neglected tombstone. There were demonstrations and cries of ‘ Vive la République! ’, and Delescluze opened in his paper Le Réveil a fund to provide the martyr with a more suitable memorial. The Government foolishly rose to the fly, and brought Delescluze to court. Delescluze was defended by young Gambetta, who astutely turned the trial into a devastating indictment of the Empire. The Government was made to look ridiculous (something inexcusable in France), and Gambetta and Delescluze became idols in their respective spheres.
    By 1870 it could with justice be said that France had become one of the most truly democratic parliamentary monarchies among the major powers; there was more liberty than under Louis-Philippe, the Press and political life were as unrestrained as during the SecondRepublic. Yet the extreme Republicans continued to preach revolution and even assassination against the Emperor, regarding every fresh relaxation—the amnesty of the Republican exiles, the appointment of a former anti-Bonapartist, Ollivier, to take charge of the new ‘Liberal Empire’—as a sign of weakness. In a way they were right. Louis-Napoleon had been greatly debilitated by the deaths, in 1865, first of his shrewdest lieutenant, the Duc de Morny, 1 and later of Walewski and Troplong. There was little new blood available, and old tired faces seemed to surround him. Worst of all, about 1867 the Emperor himself began to show himself tired, worn out with the cares of governing, and foreign ambassadors noted how his conduct of affairs was becoming increasingly dilatory and infirm. At one point, von der Goltz reported to Bismarck that ‘the Emperor seemed to have lost his compass’. When Ollivier summoned up courage to tell him that people thought his faculties were declining, Louis-Napoleon (according to the Goncourts) replied impassively, and no doubt thinking of his private life, ‘That is consistent with all the reports I have received’. The truth was that the unhappy man was also beginning to suffer the tortures of the damned from an enormous stone on the bladder. Unable to sleep, he was forced to leave his retreat at St.-Cloud because of the noise of the clowns at a nearby fête, and the only sympathy he received from his subjects was: ‘What ingratitude on the part of the clowns, whom he had so protected throughout his reign!’
    To an English observer who watched the young Prince Impérial drilling his troop of fellow boy cadets, Louis-Napoleon now ‘huddled in his seat, was a very minor show’, whereas the Empress struck ‘a splendid figure, straight as a dart, and to my young eyes the most beautiful thing I had ever seen…’, who ‘dominated the whole group’. As the powers of the Emperor declined, so those of his consort rose. In the eyes of her faithful admirer, Mérimée, ‘there is no longer an Eugénie, there is only an Empress. I complain and I admire…’. Others were less admiring. To them Eugénie—cold but capricious and unpredictable, adventurous and aggressive—was the single most disastrous influence upon the Emperor in his later years.
    In 1869 the last of the great Tuileries masked balls was held; the Empress Eugénie appeared