THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
that was looming up, and tried to ridicule the pretender as an “inane ape” of his great uncle, this man set all means in motion to win the army and the masses of the people for himself and his schemes. The Napoleonic propaganda was organized in all parts of the country in the most varied forms, and this agitation fell especially with the peasant population on very fertile soil. The legend of the Napoleonic Empire, with its wars and victories, and its tragic end, was the heroic lay of the country people, in the glamor of which every peasant family sunned itself and felt itself great. Each could tell of some ancestor who at Rivoli, or at the Pyramids, or at Marengo, or at Austerlitz, or at Jena, or at Wagram, or at Borodino, or at Waterloo, had fought under the eyes of the mighty chief, and in this heroic epic there stood the colossal figure of the Great Emperor enveloped in myth, like a demigod, unequaled in his achievements, gigantic even in his fall. Every cabin was adorned with his picture, which signified the great past history of power and glory embodied in this one superior being. And now a nephew of the Great Emperor presented himself to the people, bearing the name of the demigod and promising in this name to restore the magic splendor of that period. Numberless agents swarmed through the country, and pamphlets and hand-bills passed from house to house and from hand to hand, to make known the message of the nephew and successor of the great Napoleon, who stood ready to restore all the old magnificent grandeur. Even the barrel-organ was pressed into the service of that agitation to accompany songs about the Emperor and his nephew in the taverns and the market-places of the country. The more intelligent populations of the cities did indeed not reverence the Napoleonic legend with the same naïve devotion; but that legend had, even before the nephew began his career as a pretender, been nourished in a
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