578 IN THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE-VII 



f erred to Jules Simon s work on Thiers s administration. 

 Bismarck said that Thiers, in the treaty negotiations at 

 Versailles, impressed him strongly ; that he was a patriot ; 

 that he seemed at that time like a Roman among Byzan 

 tines. 



This statement astonished me. If ever there existed a 

 man at the opposite pole from Bismarck, Thiers was cer 

 tainly that man. I had studied him as a historian, ob 

 served him as a statesman, and conversed with him as a 

 social being; and he had always seemed, and still seems, 

 to me the most noxious of all the greater architects of 

 ruin that France produced during the latter half of the 

 nineteenth century and that is saying much. His policy 

 was to discredit every government which he found exist 

 ing, in order that its ruins might serve him as a pedestal ; 

 and, while he certainly showed great skill in mitigating 

 the calamities which he did so much to cause, his whole 

 career was damning. 



By his History of the French Revolution he revived 

 the worst of the Revolution legend, and especially the dei 

 fication of destructiveness ; by his History of the Consu 

 late and of the Empire, and his translation of the body of 

 Napoleon to France, he effectively revived the Napoleonic 

 legend. The Queen of the French, when escaping from the 

 Tuileries in 1848, was entirely right in reproaching him 

 with undermining the constitutional monarchy of 1830; 

 and no man did more than he to arouse and maintain the 

 anti-German spirit which led to the Franco-Prussian War. 



By his writings, speeches, and intrigues he aided in 

 upsetting, not only the rule of the Bourbons in 1830, but 

 the rule of Louis Philippe in 1848, the Second Republic 

 in 1851, and the Second Empire in 1870; and, had he 

 lived, he would doubtless have done the same by the pres 

 ent Republic. 



Louis Blanc, a revolutionist of another bad sort so 

 common in France who can ruin but not restore, once 

 said to me that Thiers s i greatest power lay in his voicing 

 average, unthinking, popular folly; so that after one of his 



