342 ORIGIN OF THE WAR OF 1853 CHAP. XV. Personal feelings of the new Emperor. verse, but then France was utterly in Lis power; and it seemed to him that, by offering to thrust France into an English policy, he might purchase for himself an alliance with the Queen, and win for his new throne a sanction of more lasting worth than Morny's wen-warranted return of his eight millions of approving Frenchmen. Above all, if he could be united with England, he might be able to enter upon that conspicuous action in Europe which was needful for his safety at home, and might do this without bringing upon himself any war of a dangerous kind. Another motive of a narrower sort was urging him in the same direction. Hating freedom, hat- ing the French people, and delighting in an inci- dent which he looked upon as reducing the theory of Representative Government to the absurdum, Nicholas had approved and enjoyed the treatment inflicted upon France by throwing her into the felon's van and sending her to jail ; but he had objected to the notion of the Second Napoleon being called 'the Third;'* and, in a spirit still
- It is said, I know not with what truth, that the style of
the new Emperor was the result of a clerical error. In the course of its preparations for constituting the Empire, the Home Office wished the country to take up a word which should be intermediate between ' President ' and ' Emperor ; ' so the minister determined to order that France should sud- denly burst into a cry of 'Vive Napoleon!' and he wrote, they say, the following order, 'Que le mot d'ordre soit Vive ' Napoleon ! ! ! ' The cleric, the}' say, mistook the three notes of admiration for Roman numerals ; and in a few hours the forty thousand communes of Fiance had cried out so obediently for ' Napoleon III.,' that the Government was obliged to adopt the clerk's blunder.
