second Bonaparte. How else should
it be, seeing he is forced to raise alongside of the actual classes of
society, an artificial class, to which the maintenance of his own regime
must be a knife-and-fork question? One of his first financial operations
was, accordingly, the raising of the salaries of the government
employees to their former standard and the creation of new sinecures.

Another "idee Napoleonienne" is the rule of the parsons as an instrument
of government. But while the new-born allotment, in harmony with
society, in its dependence upon the powers of nature, and in its
subordination to the authority that protected it from above, was
naturally religious, the debt-broken allotment, on the contrary, at odds
with society and authority, and driven beyond its own narrow bounds,
becomes as naturally irreligious. Heaven was quite a pretty gift thrown
in with the narrow strip of land that had just been won, all the more as
it makes the weather; it, however, becomes an insult from the moment it
is forced upon the farmer as a substitute for his allotment. Then
the parson appears merely as the anointed blood-hound of the earthly
police,--yet another "idee Napoleonienne." The expedition against Rome
will next time take place in France, but in a reverse sense from that of
M. de Montalembert.

Finally, the culminating point of the "idees Napoleoniennes" is the
preponderance of the Army. The Army was the "point of honor" with the
allotment farmers: it was themselves turned into masters, defending
abroad their newly established property, glorifying their recently
conquered nationality, plundering and revolutionizing the world. The
uniform was their State costume; war was their poetry; the allotment,
expanded and rounded up in their phantasy, was the fatherland; and
patriotism became the ideal form of property. But the foe, against whom
the French farmer must now defend his property, are not the Cossacks,
they are the sheriffs and the tax collectors. The allotment no longer
lies in the so-called fatherland, but in the register of mortgages. The
Army itself no longer is the flower of the youth of the farmers, it
is the swamp-blossom of the slum-proletariat of the farmer class. It
consists of "remplacants," substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte
himself is but a "remplacant," a substitute, for Napoleon. Its feats of
heroism are now performed in raids instituted against farmers and in the
service of the police;--and when t