The Revolution
made France more of a nation than it had been in the eighteenth century,
because it gave to the French people the civil freedom, the political
experience, and the economic opportunities which they needed, but it did
not heal the breach which the Bourbons had made between the political
organization of France and its legitimate national interests and
aspirations. France in 1815, like France in 1789, remained a nation
divided against itself,--a nation which had perpetuated during a
democratic revolution a part of its national tradition most opposed to
the logic of its new political and social ideas. It remained, that is, a
nation whose political organization and policy had not been adapted to
its domestic needs, and one which occupied on anomalous and suspected
position in the European international system.
On the other hand, French democracy and Imperialism had directly and
indirectly instigated the greater national efficiency of the neighboring
European states. Alliances among European monarchs had not been
sufficient to check the Imperial ambitions of Napoleon, as they had
been sufficient to check the career of Louis XIV, because behind a
greater general was the loyal devotion and the liberated energy of the
French people; but when outrages perpetrated on the national feelings of
Germans and Spaniards added an enthusiastic popular support to the
hatred which the European monarchs cherished towards a domineering
upstart, the fall of Napoleon became only a question of time.
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