At first glance, the response of Prussian conservatives to the regimes of the two Bonapartes and to the phenomenon of Bonapartism, however defined, seems fairly obvious. All we have to do is dredge up some of the more colorful invective that Prussian conservatives used in their commentary on Napoleon I and Napoleon III. Thus Frederick William IV, King of Prussia from 1840 to 1861 and one of the central figures in the history of nineteenth century German conservatism, was unsparing in his rather imaginative polemics, referring to Napoleon I at various times as “Satan,” the “Prince of Darkness” (Fürst der Finsternis), the “Höllenkaiser,” “Schinder,” “Nöppel,” “Nöppel-Racker,” “Schnapspoleon,” and the “bird of prey” (Raubvogel), to mention just a few. In 1855, Frederick William's closest political advisor, his Adjutant General Leopold von Gerlach (1790-1861), warned of what he called “the dangerous and great power of Bonapartism, this child of the vile marriage of absolutism and liberalism.” Similarly, his younger brother, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach (1795-1877), one of the leaders of the so-called Kreuzzeitung party in the post-1848 Prussian parliament, wrote in 1853, several months after the official proclamation of the Second Empire, that it “is good that we have eluded the Charybdis of revolution . . . but now we are falling into the Scylla of Bonapartism.”