So the attempt at reorganization was a miserable failure, and the national parliament gradually dissolved. In the meantime the revolutionary fires in Europe had burned out. Hungary was again submissive in the grasp of the Hapsburgs, and Austria was also once more supreme in Italy; while the French republic, which had lighted this conflagration, had become a monarchy. The national party had developed no great leader, had shown no ability to grasp its opportunity. The people, disheartened and in sullen disappointment, saw the old Bund-Diet restored at Frankfort, in 1851, and found themselves back in a slightly improved and amended confederation, still under the headship of Austria. Then Louis Napoleon's assumption of Imperial power, in 1851, gave renewed strength to the German rulers. It demonstrated the instability of popular governments, and the sure return to the good old methods of their fathers, as soon as the temporary madness of the people had subsided. So all things conspired to depress aspiration and to make the hopes awakened in 1848 a tantalizing delusion. It was not night, but it was a very dark and dreary day for patriotism in Germany. The country was under a spell which no one knew how to break. In 1857 Frederick William IV. was stricken with apoplexy, and his brother, Prince William, was appointed Prince Regent. The new emperor of the French, with oppressive sense of the greatness of his name, was looking about for opportunities to be Napoleonic. In 1856 he had formed an alliance with England against Russia. The fact of the alliance of itself gave weight to the rather flimsy fabric of his greatness, while the results of the Crimean War added much to its solidity. In the year 1859 Italy was vainly struggling to free herself from the grasp of Austria. Mazzini, the exalted dreamer, and Garibaldi, the soldier and patriot, with Cavour, the no less patriotic statesman, though with different ends in view, were working together for the destruction of the Austrian yoke, which must be preliminary to any form of Italian nationality. The astute statesman saw in the ambition of Napoleon III. a means to that end.