POLITICAL IDEAS, IDEALS, INSTITUTIONS n
political art whose dignity had been the only one of its pristine virtues
that had not by then long since departed from it. The reigning Danubian
Hapsburg monarch Francis It's self-metamorphosis from a 'Roman
Kmperor' into an 'Hereditary Emperor of Austria' on the loth August,
1804, was caricatured, on the i2th October, 1823, in the proclamation of
Don l*cdro t as Kmperor of Brazil.1 Yet this rcductio ad absurduw of the
value of a political coinage which a Napoleon I had debased did not
deter a Napoleon III from assuming, on the 2nd December, 1853, a title
that was to lure him into liquidating a Second French Empire in a more
conclusive disaster than the First French Empire's debacle. Nor did
the collusiveness of the French nation's failure in the nineteenth
century to re-establish the reality of a Roman Empire on ex-Roman
ground in Europe deter French imperialists from seeking a more pro-
pitious field on ex-Roman ground in North-West Africa for an experi-
ment in political nccromacy that never ceased to exact sacrifices without
ever forfeiting its powers of fascination,2
Meanwhile a German nation that was taking its revenge on the Second
French Empire for the sins of the First had not waited 'for the capitula-
tion of a beleaguered Paris to reassume—-as it did at Versailles on the
3 ist December, 1870—-the incubus of which it had been relieved,
64 years back, by the fortuitous combined good ofliees of a Corsican
usurper and a Hapsburg defeatist;-1 and even the demonic twentieth-
century Austrian improviser of a momentary Third German Reich, in
whose wild eyes a Prussian essay in a Second German Reich and an
Austrian epilogue to a First German Reich were both alike anathema,
eventually came under the spell of the Roman Empire's still unlaid ghost
so far as to ily in the face of his own crazy ideology by perching his
vulture Vnest on a crag overhanging an enchanted Barbarossa's holy
cave at Berchtesgaden4 and by accepting the regalia of Charlemagne,
stolen from a 1 lapsburg treasure-house, as a tribute from the fifatt/Mltcr
of the lethal lunatic's own ghw/tgcsrhultut Austrian homeland,5
During the 134 years that had elapsed between the date of Hitler's
indulgence in this freak of historical fancy and the date of Napoleon 1's
assumption of a usurped imperial diadem, the now fast-fading phantom
of a Roman oecumenical autocrat's khwiren&hf which by that time had
been haunting a Western political waste-land for more than a thousand
years, had been whining with too faint a flicker of light to be capable any
longer of working more serious mischief than the will-o'-the-wisp's
1 See VI. vii, a a, n, i<
1 The qut'Ht for a consolation prm* in Afrkn to compensate for dLsappoinfmt'nts in
Europe w«n u motive of mnt'UTHth-i'cntuvy untl twentkih-t'.fUUU'y Kronch imperialism
in the MnKhi'ib ttutr hmi been noticed in Toynlitjc, A, J., «ml Uouher, V, M.: tiurvty of
J»tfrnatit*ttttl 4//«iVs, iv,/?, vol. i (London 1038, Milftml), pp. 489-90. See ulno thw
present Htutiy, IX, viii. 358.
i FnmdH II H«pntnH'K hiul renounced the titlts of Holy Komun Kmperor on the
6th AuftiiMt, x8a6.
*	See Uryve, j times: The ttluiy Human ftVi/»m% t-hnp. xi, m/,//ww/t quoted In 11L iii, 463.
i The rrKiihu of tho Holy Homnn Kmpirtr were pnvnuittnl to Hitk'r by S«.*yH.s-lntiu«rt
<m the <>th Scpteinbrr, xgsK, at th<t Nnticmul Sooiuli.st Pnrty'H nnnuitl riilly rtt Nuwmherflf.
Hitlwr placed thew« tre«»urt?H in th<* hiuuin wf the dvio uuthariti«H til' Nuremberg, who
htul been the t'ustoditms of them bt'fore a.», 1809,
*	Hte IX. viii. 5«tH, n. i,