in 1849 a fatal blow was delivered to the heart of the settlement with the election of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the ogre’s nephew, as President of France, which he would follow up by becoming Emperor two years later. The very thing the Quadruple Alliance had been designed to prevent had occurred. Less than two decades later he was toppled by the Prussians, and a German empire came into being. By then the political map of Europe bore little relation to that so sententiously sanctified only half a century before.
