The Sun.
London, England, 1849-12-11 00:00:00

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LONDON, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1849.

Twelve months have elapsed since the people of
France, actuated by recollections of gratitude,
inspired by an inscrutable anxiety to expiate years of
misfortune and forgetfulness, and directed by that
spontaneous wisdom of the popular mind which
sets at nought the profoundest dictates of
philosophy and statesmanship, elected to the
presidential chair of the Republic the re-
presentative of the imperial dynasty. In England
the possibility of this election was almost unanimously
regarded with derision. As far as the principles of
hospitality were concerned, England had afforded to
the exile a place of shelter and consolation, influenced
doubtless, in some measure, in so doing, by a willing-
ness to redeem the memory of her turpitude to the
EMPEROR. Otherwise the people of these islands seem
to have looked down with a feeling of mingled
contempt and commiseration: upon the heir to so
much glory, the subject of so many vicissitudes, and
the adventurer upon so many eccentric
and futile expeditions. Having seen him
fail so repeatedly it became a conviction
amongst us that success, in his instance, was altogether
impossible. It was forgotten in the glare of his
successive catastrophes that the noblest, the bravest,
the sublimest adventures recorded in history have
been dependent upon a propitious casualty as wholly
beyond calculation as the accidental cast of a die.
But for a lucky fog, which concealed from the
English fleet in the Mediterranean the vessel bearing
the conqueror of the Pyramids from Egypt, the
Government of France might have still continued
under an effete Directory, instead of passing into the
virile grasp of the Consulate, and through that into
the vigorous grandeur of the Empire. But for
favouring breezes and fortunate currents the return
from Elba might have proved a miserable and insane
failure, instead of being, as it was, one of the most
sublime achievements recorded by ancient or modern
annalists. Had Prince CHARLIE continued his march
from Derby upon London as he himself projected,
but which he was dissuaded from attempting
by his more cautious companions, it is the
opinion of many able scrutinizers of that epoch that
the issue of the campaign would have been rendered
more than ever doubtful by the thronging in to his
assistance of auxiliaries from lVales and various
counties. " Success," NAPOLEON is declared to have
said in his " Pensees," "success makes the hero,
failure the criminal—a revolt, if fortunate, raises its
leader to the throne ; if unfortunate, conducts him to
the scaffold." The wisdom of that grand saying is
attested by all history, from the records of TAciTus
to those of ROBERTSON, from the ago of LIVY to that
of THII3AUDEA.U. It has been more recently evidenced
in the career, the misfortunes, and the ultimate suc-
cess of the son of HORTENSE and the nephew of
NAPOLEON. llad he hit the right moment either at
Strasburg or Boulogne, and been carried triumph-
antly from the frontiers to the capital, that
son of a king and nephew of an emperor
would have been regarded as the hero of
the age, and his heroic qualities, his sagacity and
chivalry would have been eagerly:eulogised by those
who were the first to deride his ill-luck. Either he was
too late or too soon upon both occasions—the projec-
tile lost its aim by the richochet of an accident !
For these reasons, the best reasons of all with the
world at large, the young Prince, instead of being
commiserated for his adverse fortunes, was almost
universally sneered at as a downright imbecile, or at
the least as a crack-brained adventurer. It was
nothing that he had written books revealing no very
mediocre capacity, that his scheme for the extinction
of pauperism displayed at once a singular goodness of
heart and a remarkable clearness of intelligence, or
that his " Ilistory of the Cannon " was a military
disquisition eminently worthy of a BONAPARTE—we
saw him captured as the leader of a riot at Strasburg,
and seized as a hairbrained enthusiast by the gens•
(1' cynics at Boulogne, and all his meritiwere forgotten
in the ignominy of his ill-success. Time elapsed :
the heir and imitator of the EMPEROR suffered with
unruffled patience an incarceration for six dreary
years in the fortress of Ham ; his imaginative and
impulsive nature became sobered down by calamities;
his energies, nevertheless, still continued in their un-
abated vigour, insomuch that he was enabled to effect
an ingenious escape from the place of his confinement,
and to return to his former refuge in expatriation.
A sudden revolution having given the popular elements
of the French nation freedom to follow the real bent
of their inclinations, it was very speedily manifest
that the imperial adventurer had not altogether so
egregiously miscalculated the strength of his cause
as had been previously conjectured. A vast majority,
upwards of six millions of votes, collected by universal
suffrage and by the ballot, declared to Europe that
the name of the great NAPOLEON still possessed its
magical influence over the land which he had
adorned with the evidences of his grandeur
and invested with the glory of his vic-
tories. The people " whom he had loved
so well," having reclaimed his august ashes from the
distant rock of the southern coasts of Africa, already