Another will o' the wisp which flitted before the ardent Bonapartists who pushed on the Emperor to war, was that the South German States would forsake the North and range their troops under the French eagles, as they had done in the years 1805-12. The first plan of campaign drawn up at Paris aimed at driving a solid wedge of French troops between the two Confederations and inducing or compelling the South to join France; it was hoped that Saxony would follow. As a matter of fact, very many of the South Germans and Saxons disliked Prussian supremacy; Catholic Bavaria looked askance at the growing power of Protestant Prussia. Würtemberg was Protestant, but far too democratic to wish for the control of the cast-iron bureaucrats of Berlin. The same was even more true of Saxony, where hostility to Prussia was a deep-rooted tradition; some of the Saxon troops on leaving their towns even shouted _Napoleon soll leben_[37]. It is therefore quite possible that, had France struck quickly at the valleys of the Neckar and Main, she might have reduced the South German States to neutrality. Alliance perhaps was out of the question save under overwhelming compulsion; for France had alienated the Bavarian and Hessian Governments by her claims in 1866, and the South German people by her recent offensive treatment of the Hohenzollern candidature. It is, however, safe to assert that if Napoleon I. had ordered French affairs he would have swept the South Germans into his net a month after the outbreak of war, as he had done in 1805. But Nature had not bestowed warlike gifts on the nephew, who took command of the French army at Metz at the close of July 1870. His feeble health, alternating with periods of severe pain, took from him all that buoyancy which lends life to an army and vigour to the headquarters; and his Chief of Staff, Leboeuf, did not make good the lack of these qualities in the nominal chief. [Footnote 37: _I.e._ "Long live Napoleon." The author had this from an Englishman who was then living in Saxony.]