It was another unfortunate circumstance for Napoleon, that the observers of the times ascribed the dismissal of the old Republican counsellors, and the more rigorous measures adopted against political malecontents, to the influence of the Austrian alliance. With many persons in France, Buonaparte, as the Heir of the Revolution, might, like Danton, Robespierre, and others, have exercised the most despotic authority, providing he claimed his right to do so by and through the Revolution. But they could not endure to see the Emperor Napoleon, while exercising the same authority with a thousand times more lenity, attempt to improve his right to the submission of his subjects by an alliance with one of the ancient houses of Europe, against whom the principles of the Revolution had declared eternal war. Every class of politicians has its fanatics, and in that of the ancient Jacobins were many who would rather have perished by the short, sharp terrors of the Republican guillotine, than survived to linger in a dungeon during the pleasure of a son-in-law of the Emperor of Germany. Such ideas, inconsistent as they were in themselves, and utterly irreconcilable with the quiet, gentle, and irreproachable character of Maria Louisa, who could never be justly accused of even attempting to influence her husband upon any political subject, circulated, nevertheless, and were even accredited in political society. There was indeed this argument in their favour, that no other motive could be assigned for Buonaparte's sparing Austria when she was lying at his mercy, and choosing a partner out of her royal family, than the desire of allying himself with the House of Hapsburg, and of gaining such access as could be attained by such an alliance to a share in the rights and privileges of the most ancient hereditary dynasty of Europe. But in approaching to that fraternal alliance with legitimate royalty, Napoleon proportionally abandoned those revolutionary principles and associates, by whose means he had first climbed to power; and by this change, rather of the basis of his authority than of the authority itself, he offended many of the Republicans, without effectually gaining the aristocrats, to whom his new connexion might have seemed a recommendation. Indeed, when his right to sovereignty was considered without reference to his possession, and his power to maintain it, Napoleon was in some measure censured like the bat in the fable. The democrats urged against him his matrimonial alliance with a house of the ancient régime; while the aristocrats held him disqualified on account of the origin of his power under the revolutionary system.