76
Three New Postage-Stamps
Weare getting pretty close to the present time, to “Now.”
Let us look backward a minute to see what had been going on in Europe since the time of Napoleon.
After Napoleon had been sent to Elba, the French had to have another ruler. They wanted their old kings back again. The family name of their old kings was Bourbon. So the French thought they ought to have a Bourbon ruler over them. Accordingly they tried out three Bourbons one after the other, all relatives of their last king, whom they had beheaded.
But all of them proved no good, the French people had given the Bourbon family a good tryout, and so at last they stopped worrying with kings and started another republic.
Now, a republic has a president instead of a king, so that the people had to choose a president; and whom do you suppose they picked out? Why, the nephew of Napoleon. The nephew of Napoleon was named Louis Napoleon. He had planned and plotted again and again to makehimself king of France, but again and again he had failed. And now he was elected president! But Louis Napoleon didn’t want to beonlypresident. He wanted to be like his uncle the great Napoleon. He dreamed of being emperor and conquering Europe, and so it was not long after this before he had himself made emperor, and he called himself Napoleon III.[5]
[5]Napoleon I had a young son who might have been Napoleon II if he had lived. The story is, that when Napoleon III was made emperor his name was printed simply with three exclamation marks after it—“Napoleon!!!” and this was by mistake read Napoleon III.
[5]Napoleon I had a young son who might have been Napoleon II if he had lived. The story is, that when Napoleon III was made emperor his name was printed simply with three exclamation marks after it—“Napoleon!!!” and this was by mistake read Napoleon III.
Napoleon III was jealous of the neighboring country of Prussia. She was getting to be too strong, he thought. Prussia had a king at this time named William who was very able himself, and he had an able assistant or prime minister named Bismarck, who was looking for an excuse to fight France. So presently a war was started between the two countries in 1870. Napoleon soon found he had made a bad mistake in picking the war with Prussia. Prussia was notgettingtoo strong; she was already too strong.
Napoleon III was completely beaten by Prussia, and he with a large army had to surrender. Then in disgrace he went to live in England.
The Prussians marched into Paris and made the French agree to pay them a billion dollars. When some of the French towns said theycouldn’t pay, Bismarck lined up the leading citizens of the place and told them they would be shot if they didn’t raise the money that was demanded. So France paid, and to the wonder and amazement of everybody she paid this immense sum in two years’ time. But the French and the French children have never forgotten the way they were made to pay and the way they were treated by the Prussians, and so ever since then there has been deadly enmity between these two countries. This war was called the Franco-Prussian War, as it was between France and Prussia.
There were a number of little countries near Prussia. They were called German states. But though their people were related, the countries or states were separate. As a result of this war, Prussia was able to join all these German states together and to make for the first time one big, strong, powerful nation called Germany, feared by other countries on account of her great army of fighting men. William was made emperor of all Germany and called kaiser. He was crowned in the French palace at Versailles that Louis XIV had built.
The French thought the Germans had been able to win this war because they had public schools in which all their children were trained, and because of the way their soldiers were drilled.So France set to work and started public schools everywhere in France and imitated the German way of drilling their army so that they would be ready for them in the next war.
Ever since then France has been a republic with a president and an Assembly chosen by the people.
At that time Italy was not a single country as now but like Germany a collection of small states. Some of these were independent, some were owned by France, some were owned by Austria. The king of one of these Italian states was Victor Emmanuel. He wanted all the Italian states to unite and become one single country like our United States. He was helped by his prime minister, a very able man named Cavour, and by a rough but romantic popular hero named Garibaldi, who was called the hero of the Red Shirt.
Garibaldi, who had been a candle-maker in New York City, was always poor and seemed not to care for money. He was so popular that whenever he called for soldiers to fight with him for his beloved Italy, they at once flocked around him ready to fight to the death.
And so at last these three, Victor Emmanuel, Cavour, and Garibaldi, succeeded in making their country one big nation. The Italians erected monuments to them and named streets after them. To Victor Emmanuel they built a magnificentbuilding on a hill in Rome overlooking the city, a building that was intended to be more beautiful than anything built in Athens during the time of Pericles or in Italy during the Renaissance.
If you collect postage-stamps it would be interesting for you to get, if you can, stamps of these countries at that time, the New French Republic, United Germany, and United Italy.