286 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April achievements of Hardenberg, which were obviously based on French models. He demonstrates the truth of Bismarck's saying that the Hardenberg legislation was all taken from the Westphalian Moniteur.
- The Liberal in Hardenberg rapidly gave way to the Napoleonic
bureaucrat,' but where his legislation most closely resembled French models, as in the attempt to set up a bureaucratic administration, he met the strongest national opposition. Was it not the nationalist feeling inspired by Fichte, the national army created by the ' shrinkage system ', a system very different from Napoleon's conscription, which caused the resurgence of Prussia, rather than the political changes which were partially due to French example ? ' Thoughts on the Influence of Napoleon ' is an appendix to the chapters which Mr. Fisher wrote for the Cambridge Modern History. With the exceptions of Julius Caesar and Charlemagne, Napoleon ' exercised a greater influence on the political and social state of Europe than any other single man '. The idees Napoleoniennes are borrowed, some from the Revolution and some from the ancien regime, but ' it is not the business of a statesman to be original '. Mr. Fisher bases Napoleon's greatness as a civil ruler on these facts : ' he saved for France the most valuable conquests of the French Revolution, social equality and industrial freedom,' he arranged the Concordat, and ' he gave to France a code of laws and a system of administration which remain substantially unchanged to-day '. The parliamentary system in France Mr. Fisher regards as less important than ' the main blocks of Napoleonic granite, the Prefects, the Codes, the Legion of Honour, the Lycee '. There is much force in this, but it is difficult to accept the statement that ' modern France is still very much as the Consulate left it '. The Republic of to-day surely differs from the Consulate in as many and as important respects as it resembles it. Executive control is in the cabinet, and the centralized bureaucratic hierarchical administration inherited from the Empire is at least subject to parliamentary ministers and to parliamentary interpellation, which M. Seignobos has called ' l'institution dominante du regime parlementaire francais '. Municipal authorities are elective and the press is free. The republican party — as alien from Napoleonism as the whigs from Strafford — is one ruling force in France ; trade-unionism, illegal under the Code, is another. The Concordat has gone. Napoleon, if he returned, might find his bonne police but certainly not his bon clerge. Finally, under the Consulate universal suffrage existed in theory, but by elaborate electoral devices the people were really excluded from political life. Of the other historical essays the most striking are the estimates of Rousseau and of Acton as an historian. In the latter on p. 104 there is a sentence which states what is apparently the opposite of Mr. Fisher's meaning. After quoting Acton's remark that no man feels the grandeur of the Revolution till he reads Michelet, or the horror of it without reading Taine, Mr. Fisher writes : ' The sovereign merit of Lord Acton's lectures is that his repulsion from the horror has not prevented the grandeur from going unperceived.' The essays are all interesting to read, and they contain many shrewd, enlightening, and often witty comments on the history and historians of the nineteenth century. Walford D. Green.
