Excerpt from Bonapartism: Six Lectures, Delivered in the University of London Was the climax of many converging movements, political, social, intellectual, upon which the shock administered by Napoleon I to the archaic fabric of the German Empire acted with a decisive and liberating power. The triumph of Bismarck was rendered possible not only by the fierce envy of the Boulevards for the Prussian glory on the field of Sadowa, nor yet by the indiscretions of Benedetti or of Gramont, but by a certain bril liant simplification of German political geography carried out under the Consulate by Talleyrand as a consequence of the victories of Marengo and Hohenlinden, which had restored French supre macy in the valley of the Po, and brought the French boundary to the waters of the Rhine. Nor is it without ironical significance that the minus mimbilis of modern history which witnessed the completion of German and Italian unity, the destruction of Bonapartism and the humiliation of France, was marked by the sessions of the Vatican Council. The decree of Papal Infallibility was the cordial which the Roman Church adminis tered to itself in the hour of defeat, its defiance of the modern world, its protest against the sacrilege of Italian patriotism. It was the culmination of a quarrel old at least as the days of Luther and, so far as France was concerned, made bitter. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.