ance was ever decided by circumstances so trifling.
"There is but one step from triumph to a fall. I have seen that in the
greatest affairs a little thing has always decided important
events"--so wrote Bonaparte three years before his triumph at St.
Cloud: he might have written it of that event. It is equally
questionable whether it can be regarded as saving France from anarchy.
His admirers, it is true, have striven to depict France as trodden
down by invaders, dissolved by anarchy, and saved only by the stroke
of Brumaire. But she was already triumphant: it was quite possible
that she would peacefully adjust her governmental difficulties: they
were certainly no greater than they had been in and since the year
1797: Fouche had closed the club of the Jacobins: the Councils had
recovered their rightful influence, and, but for the plotters of
Brumaire, might have effected a return to ordinary government of the
type of 1795-7. This was the real blow; that the vigorous trunk, the
Legislature, was struck down along with the withering Directorial
branch.

The friends of liberty might well be dismayed when they saw how tamely
France accepted this astounding stroke. Some allowance was naturally
to be made, at first, for the popular apathy: the Jacobins, already
discouraged by past repression, were partly dazed by the suddenness of
the blow, and were also ignorant of the aims of the men who dealt it;
and while they were waiting to see the import of events, power passed
rapidly into the hands of Bonaparte and his coadjutors. Such is an
explanation, in part at least, of the strange docility now shown by a
populace which still vaunted its loyalty to the democratic republic.
But there is another explanation, which goes far deeper. The
revolutionary strifes had wearied the brain of France and had
predisposed it to accept accomplished facts. Distracted by the talk
about royalist plots and Jacobin plots, cowering away from the white
ogre and the red spectre, the more credulous part of the populace was
fain to take shelter under the cloak of a great soldier, who at least
promised order. Everything favoured the drill-sergeant theory of
government. The instincts developed by a thousand years of monarchy
had not been rooted out in the last decade. They now prompted France
to rally round her able man; and, abandoning political liberty as a
hopeless quest, she obeyed the imperious call which promised to
revivify the order and brilliance of