his wish for the effective union of Germans
with the one great State composed almost solely of Germans. "I shall
always be consistent in my conduct," he said. "If I have fought for the
independence of Italy, if I have lifted up my voice for Polish
nationality, I cannot have other sentiments in Germany, or obey other
principles." This declaration bespoke the doctrinaire rather than the
statesman. Untaught by the clamour which French Chauvinists and ardent
Catholics had raised against his armed support of the Italian national
cause in 1859, he now proposed to further the aggrandisement of the
Protestant North German Power which had sought to partition France
in 1815.

The clamour aroused by his leanings towards Prussia in 1864-66 was
naturally far more violent, in proportion as the interests of France
were more closely at stake. Prussia held the Rhine Province; and French
patriots, who clung to the doctrine of the "natural frontiers"--the
Ocean, Pyrenees, Alps, and Rhine--looked on her as the natural enemy.
They pointed out that millions of Frenchmen had shed their blood in the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to win and to keep the Rhine boundary;
and their most eloquent spokesman, M. Thiers, who had devoted his
historical gifts to glorifying those great days, passionately declaimed
against the policy of helping on the growth of the hereditary foe.

We have already seen the results of this strife between the pro-Prussian
foibles of the Emperor and the eager prejudices of Frenchmen, whose love
of oppressed and divided nations grew in proportion to their distance
from France, and changed to suspicion or hatred in the case of her
neighbours. In 1866, under the breath of ministerial arguments and
oratorical onslaughts Napoleon III.'s policy weakly wavered, thereby
giving to Bismarck's statecraft a decisive triumph all along the line.
In vain did he in the latter part of that year remind the Prussian
statesman of his earlier promises (always discreetly vague) of
compensation for France

John Holland Rose (1855-1942) was an influential English historian who wrote a famous biography of French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and also wrote a history of Europe, entitled The Development of the European Nations. Rose was the basis for C. P. Snows fictional character M. H. L. Gay (see Years of Hope: Cambridge, Colonial Administrator in the South Seas, and Cricket by Philip Snow.)

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