Memo to Princes Charles, William and George

And English history speaks loudly to kings as follows:
If you march at the head of the ideas of your century, these ideas will follow and sustain you.
If you march behind them, they will drag you with them.
If you march against them, they will overthrow you!
Prince Napoleon Louis Bonaparte (later Napoleon III), Fragments Historiques, 1688 et 1830 (Paris, 1841), p. 125, quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (London, 1991), p. 88.