In 1853, The Year After The Establishment Of The Second Empire, The
Government Of Napoleon III Had Annexed New Caledonia, Commencing On This
Island The Policy Of Transportation In The Very Year In Which Great
Britain Ceased To Send Convicts To Australia.
Thus for the first time did
France secure a footing in the South.
This was a safe step to take, as
the annexation was performed with the concurrence of Great Britain. But
Napoleon's oversea move of nine years later was rash in the extreme.
From 1862 to 1866 - after a joint Anglo-French-Spanish movement to compel
the Republic of Mexico to discharge her debts to European bondholders,
and after a disagreement between the allies which led to the withdrawal
of the British and the Spaniards - forty thousand French troops were
engaged upon the quixotic task of disciplining Mexican opinion,
suppressing civil war, and imposing upon the people an unwelcome and
absurd sovereign in the person of Maximilian of Austria. His throne
endured as long as the French battalions remained to support it. When
they withdrew, Maximilian was deposed, court-marshalled, and shot. The
wild folly of the Mexican enterprise, from which France had nothing to
gain, illustrated in an expensive form the unbalanced judgment and the
soaring megalomaniac propensities of "the man of December." That he
should institute such inquiries as are indicated by the document
described by Lord John Russell's biographer, even though the preservation
of friendly relations with Great Britain was essential to him, was quite
in accordance with the "somewhat crafty" character of the man of whom a
contemporary French historian has said: "He knew how to keep his own
counsel, how to brood over a design, and how to reveal it suddenly when
he felt that his moment had come."* (* M. Albert Thomas in Cambridge
Modern History 11 287.) It is a little singular, however, that Russell
did not allude to the mysterious paper when he wrote his Recollections
and Suggestions, five years after the fall of Napoleon III. There was no
imperative need for secrecy then, and the passage quoted from his book
indicates that the welfare of Australia was under his consideration.
The facts set forth in the preceding pages are sufficient to show that
the people of no portion of the British Empire have greater reason to be
grateful for the benefits conferred by the naval strength maintained by
the mother country, during the past one hundred years, than have those
who occupy Australia. Their country has indeed been, in a special degree,
the nursling of sea power. By naval predominance, and that alone, the way
has been kept clear for the unimpeded development, on British
constitutional lines, of a group of flourishing states forming "one
continent-isle," whose bounds are "the girdling seas alone."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
ALARD, Eloge Historique de Francois Peron, redacteur du Voyage de
Decouvertes aux Terres Australes. Paris, 1811.
Almanac de Gotha, 1811, contains a good narrative of the Baudin
expedition, founded on Peron's first volume, giving an account of the
discoveries claimed to have been made.
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