1
THE EXILES IN LONDON—THE GERMANS AND THE FRENCH—PARTIES—VICTOR HUGO—FELIX
PYAT—LOUIS BLANC AND ARMAND BARBÈS
‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’
If any one from outside had conceived the idea of writing the inner
history of the political exiles and refugees from the year 1848 in
London, what a melancholy page he would have added to the records of
to-day! What sufferings, what privations, what tears ... and what
triviality, what narrowness, what poverty of intellectual powers,
of resources, of understanding, what obstinacy in quarrelling, what
pettiness in wounded vanity!...
On the one hand, those simple-hearted men, who have accepted the cause
of revolution through heart and instinct and have made for its sake
the greatest sacrifice a man can make, that of voluntary poverty,
form a small group of the righteous. On the other hand, there are
men, actuated by disguised and ill-concealed ambition, for whom the
revolution meant office, _position sociale_, and who were driven into
exile without attaining such position. Then there were fanatics of all
kinds, monomaniacs of every sort, men who were insane with every variety
of insanity. It was due to this nervous, strained, hysterical condition
that table-turning numbered so many victims among the exiles. Almost
every one was turning tables—from Victor Hugo and Ledru-Rollin to Quirik
Philopanti—who went further still and found out everything that men were
doing a thousand years ago.
And with all that not a step forward. They were like the court clock
at Versailles, which pointed to one hour, the hour at which the King
died.... And like the clock, they had not been wound up since the death
of Louis XVI. They point to one event, the end of some event. They talk
about it, they think about it, they go back to it. Meeting the same men,
the same groups,—in five or six months, in two or three years—one feels
terrified: the same arguments are still going on, the same personalities
and recriminations, only the furrows drawn by poverty and privation are
deeper; jackets and overcoats are shabbier; there are more grey hairs,
and everything about them is older and bonier and more gloomy ... and
still the same things being said over and over again.
The revolution has remained the philosophy of social order with them,
as it was in the ’nineties, but they have not and cannot have the naïve
passion for the struggle which in those days gave vivid colour to the
most meagre generalisations and body to the dry outlines of their
political skeleton; generalisations and abstract ideas were a joyful
novelty, a revelation in those days. At the end of the eighteenth
century, men for the first time, not in books but in actual fact, began
to free themselves from the fatal, mysteriously oppressive world of
theological tradition, and were trying to base on conscious understanding
the whole political system which had grown up apart from will or
consciousness. In the attempt at a rational state, as in the attempt to
found a religion of reason, there was in 1793 a grand titanic poetry,
which bore its fruits, but has for all that grown meagre and threadbare
in the last sixty years. Our heirs of the Titans do not observe this.
They are like the monks of Mount Athos, who busy themselves about their
own affairs, deliver the same speeches which they delivered in the time
of Chrysostom, and keep up a manner of life superseded ages ago by the
Turkish power, which is now itself drawing to its end ... while they go
on meeting together on certain days to celebrate certain events with the
same ritual, the same prayers.
Another bane of the exiles is the constant defending of themselves
against each other; this is terribly destructive of intellectual effort
and every sort of conscientious work. They have no objective purpose at
all, the parties are obstinately conservative, any forward movement seems
a weakness to them, almost a desertion; if once you have taken your stand
under the banner you must go on standing under it, even if in the process
of time you may have discerned that its colours are not quite what they
seemed.
So the years pass—gradually everything changes about them. Where there
were snowdrifts, the grass is growing; where there were bushes, there
is a forest; where there was a forest are only tree-stumps—they notice
nothing. Some gateways are completely fallen and are blocked up, they go
on knocking at them; new outlets have opened, the light streams through
them, but they look the other way.
The relations formed between the different exiles and the English might
furnish wonderful illustrations of the chemical affinity of various
nationalities.
English life at first dazzles the Germans, overwhelms them, then swallows
them up, or rather dissolves them into inferior Englishmen. As a rule, if
a German undertakes any kind of business, he at once shaves, turns his
shirt collar up to his ears, says _yes_ instead of _ja_ and _well_ where
there is no need to say anything at all. In a couple of years, he writes
his letters and his diary in English, and lives entirely in an English
circle. Germans never treat Englishmen as equals, but behave with them
as our workpeople behave with officials, and our officials behave with
noblemen.
Though they enter English life, Germans do not really become Englishmen,
but affect to be English, and to some extent cease to be German. The
English are as whimsical in their relations with foreigners as they are
in everything else; they rush at a new arrival as they do at a comic
actor or an acrobat and give him no peace, but they hardly disguise their
sense of their own superiority and even a certain aversion they feel for
them. If the foreigner keeps to his own dress, his own way of doing his
hair, his own hat, the offended Englishman jeers at him, but by degrees
grows used to recognising him as an independent person. If in his first
panic the foreigner begins to adapt his manners to the Englishman’s, the
latter does not respect him but treats him superciliously from the height
of his British haughtiness. It is sometimes hard, even with the greatest
tact, to steer one’s course so as not to err either on the minus or the
plus side; it may well be imagined what is done by Germans who are devoid
of all tact, and are familiar and cringing in their manners, too stiff
and also too simple in their deportment, sentimental without reason and
rude without provocation.
But if the Germans look upon the English as upon a higher species of the
same race, and feel themselves to be inferior to them, it by no means
follows that the attitude of the French, and especially of the French
refugees, is any more intelligent. Just as the German respects everything
in England indiscriminately, the Frenchman detests everything English and
protests against it. This peculiarity sometimes, I need hardly say, is
pushed to the most comically grotesque extreme.
The Frenchman cannot forgive the English, in the first place, for not
speaking French; in the second, for not understanding him when he calls
Charing Cross Sharan-Kro, or Leicester Square Lessesstair-Skooar. Then
his stomach cannot digest the English dinner, consisting of two huge
pieces of meat and fish, instead of five little portions of all sorts
of ragouts, fritters, salmis and so on. Then he can never resign himself
to the ‘slavery’ of restaurants being closed on Sundays, and the people
being _bored to the glory of God_, though the whole of France is bored to
the glory of Buonaparte all seven days of the week. The whole _habitus_,
all that is good and bad in the Englishman, is detestable to the
Frenchman.
The Englishman pays him back in the same coin, but looks with envy at the
cut of his clothes and attempts like a caricature to imitate him.
All this is of great significance for the study of comparative
physiology, and I am not describing it in order to amuse.
The German, as we have observed, recognises that he is, in political
capacity at any rate, an inferior specimen of the race to which the
Englishman belongs, and subordinates himself to him. The Frenchman,
belonging to another race, not so completely different as to prevent
comparison, as is the case with the Turk and the Chinaman, detests the
Englishman, especially because both nations are each blindly convinced
of being the foremost people in the world. The German, too, is inwardly
convinced of this, particularly _auf dem theoretischen Gebiete_, but is
ashamed to own it.
The Frenchman is, indeed, the opposite of the Englishman in every
respect. The Englishman is a solitary creature, who likes to live apart,
obstinate and impatient of control; the Frenchman is a gregarious animal,
impudent but easily driven. Hence two completely parallel lines of
development with the Channel lying between them. The Frenchman is for
ever running ahead of things, meddling in everything, training everybody,
giving instructions about everything. The Englishman waits to see, does
not meddle at all in other people’s business and would be readier to be
taught than to teach, but has not the time—he has to get to his shop.
The two corner-stones of English life, personal independence and family
tradition, hardly exist for the Frenchman. The coarseness of the English
manners drives the Frenchman frantic, and it really is disgusting and
poisons life in London, but behind it he fails to see the stern power
with which this people has stood up for its rights, the stubbornness of
character which makes it impossible to turn an Englishman into the slave
who delights in his flunkey’s livery and hugs his laurel-crowned chains,
though by flattering his passions you may do almost anything else with
him.
The world of self-government, decentralisation, developing in all
directions capriciously, of its own initiative, seems to the Frenchman
so savage, so incomprehensible, that, however long he lives in England,
he never understands its political and civic life, its rights and its
judicial forms. He is lost in the incongruous multiplicity of precedents
on which English law rests, as in a dark forest, and does not observe the
immense and majestic oaks that compose it, nor see the charm, the poetry
and the significance of its very variety. His little Codex with its
sanded paths, its lopped trees and police-gardeners in every avenue, is a
very different matter.
Shakespeare and Racine again.
If a Frenchman sees drunken men fighting in a tavern and a policeman
looking at them with the serenity of an outsider and the interest of
a man watching a cock-fight, he is furious with the policeman for not
flying into a rage and carrying off some one _au violon_. He does not
reflect that personal freedom is only possible when a policeman has no
parental authority, when his intervention is reduced to passive readiness
to come when he is summoned. The confidence that every poor fellow feels
when he shuts the door of his cold, dark, damp little den transforms
a man’s attitude. Of course, behind these jealously guarded, strictly
watched rights, the criminal sometimes escapes—and so be it. It is far
better that the clever thief should go unpunished than that every honest
man should be trembling like a thief in his own room. Before I came to
England, the appearance of a policeman in the house in which I lived
gave me an overwhelmingly nasty feeling, and morally I stood _en garde_
against an enemy. In England the policeman at your door or within your
doors only adds a feeling of security.
In 1855, when the Governor of Jersey took advantage of the especial
_lawlessness_ of his island to persecute the journal, _L’Homme_, for
Felix Pyat’s letter to the Queen, and, not daring to take legal measures
in the matter, ordered Victor Hugo and the other refugees who had
protested against the treatment of the journal to leave the island—the
common sense of the public, and all the opposition newspapers, told them
that the Governor had exceeded his powers, that they ought to remain and
take legal proceedings against him. The _Daily News_, together with other
papers, undertook to bear the expense. But this would have been a lengthy
business; besides, was it possible to win a case against the Government?
The refugees published another ferocious protest, threatened the Governor
with the verdict of history and proudly retreated to Guernsey.
I will describe one example of the French comprehension of English
manners. One evening a refugee ran in to see me and, after a perfect
volley of abuse against England and the English, told me the following
‘monstrous’ incident.
The French exiles had that morning been attending the funeral of one
of their _confrères_. I must mention that in the dull and gloomy life
of exiles the funeral of a comrade is seized upon as almost a festive
occasion—an opportunity for making speeches, for waving their flag, for
getting together, for walking through the streets, for noting who was
there and who was not, and so the forces of exiled democracy rallied
_au grand complet_. An English clergyman with a prayer-book appeared
at the cemetery. My friend observed to him that the dead man was not a
Christian and that therefore he did not need his prayers. The clergyman,
a pedant and a hypocrite, like all English clergymen, answered with
affected humility and the national phlegm, ‘that possibly the dead man
did not need his prayers, but that it was an essential part of his duty
to accompany with his prayers every dead man to his last resting-place.’
A dispute arose and, as the French began to get excited and shout, the
obstinate clergyman sent for the police. ‘_Allons donc, parlez-moi de
ce chien de pays avec sa sacrée liberté!_’ added the gentleman who took
the leading part in this scene, next to those of the dead man and the
clergyman. ‘Well,’ I inquired, ‘what was done by _la force brutale au
service du noir fanatisme_?’
‘Four policemen arrived _et le chef de la bande_ asked: “Who spoke to the
clergyman?”
‘I stepped forward at once,’ and, as he said it, my friend who was dining
with me looked as Leonidas must once have looked when he set off to sup
with the gods; ‘“_C’est moi, Monsieur_,”[45] _car je me garde bien de
dire “citoyen” à ces gueux-là_. Then the _chef des sbires_ said to me
with the utmost impudence: “Tell the others not to make a row, bury your
comrade and go to your homes. But if you make a row, I shall order you
all to be turned out.” I looked at him, and taking off my hat, I shouted
at the top of my voice, “_Vive la République démocratique et sociale!_”’
Hardly able to restrain my laughter, I asked him: ‘What did the _chef des
sbires_ do?’
‘Nothing,’ the Frenchman replied, with self-complacent pride. ‘He looked
at his companions, said, “Well, get on, get on with your job!” and
remained quietly waiting. They knew very well that they were not dealing
with English rabble ... they have sharp noses!’
What was passing in the soul of the grave, stolid, and probably slightly
tipsy constable during this performance? My friend did not dream that he
might have afforded himself the satisfaction of uttering the same shout
outside the Queen’s window at the railings of Buckingham Palace without
the slightest inconvenience. But what is still more remarkable is that
neither my friend nor any of the other Frenchmen ever reflect under such
circumstances that in France for a similar freak they would have been
sent to Cayenne or Lambessa. If one reminds them of that fact their
answer is ready: ‘_Ah bah! C’est une halte dans la boue ... ce n’est pas
normal!_’
And when has their freedom been normal?
The antagonism at one time expressed by a _practical_ Martin Luther,
and a _consistent_ Thomas Münzer, lies like a germ in every embryo: the
logical development, the growth of every party inevitably leads to its
manifestation. We find it equally in the three _impossible_ Gracchi,
counting Gracchus Babœuf among them, and in the only two _possible_
Sullas and Soulouques[46] of all shades. Nothing is _possible_ but the
middle line, the compromise, hackneyed and mediocre in class, fortune,
and understanding. Lilly and the Huguenots paved the way for Henry IV.,
the Stuarts and Cromwell for William of Orange, the Revolution and
Legitimism for Louis-Philippe. After the latter, antagonism arose between
the practical republic and the consistent one; the practical one was
called the Democratic, the logically-consistent the Socialist; their
contests led to the Empire, but the parties remained.
The uncompromising extremists found themselves in Cayenne, Lambessa and
Belle-Île, and to some extent in foreign countries, especially in England.
As soon as the exiles had recovered their breath in London, and their
eyes had grown used to distinguishing objects in the fog, the old quarrel
was renewed with the peculiar intolerance of exiles and the gloomy
character of the London climate.
The President of the Luxemburg Committee[47] was _de jure_ the leading
figure among the Socialist exiles in London. The representative of the
organisations of labour and the working-class _égalitaire_ societies, he
was beloved by the working men; strict in his life, of irreproachable
purity in his views, always at work himself, sober, a first-rate speaker,
popular without familiarity, bold and at the same time cautious, he had
every qualification for influencing the masses.
On the other hand, Ledru-Rollin represented the religious tradition of
1793; for him the words _Republic_ and _Democracy_ embraced everything:
the feeding of the hungry, the right to work, the emancipation of Poland,
the crushing of Nicholas, the brotherhood of nations, the downfall of
the Pope. There were fewer workmen about him, his circle consisted of
_capacités_—that is, of lawyers, teachers, journalists, _clubistes_ and
so on. The division between these parties is distinct, and so I could
never understand how it was that Mazzini and Louis Blanc ascribed their
final breach to personal dissensions. The split lay at the very root of
their outlook, in the task they set before themselves; they could not
go hand in hand, but perhaps it was not necessary to have quarrelled in
public.
The difference between the cause of Socialism and the cause of Italy
was rather one of order or degree. Political independence was bound to
come before economic reconstruction in Italy. We saw the same thing
in Poland in 1831, in Hungary in 1848. But in that there is no ground
for polemics, it is rather a question of division of labour in time
than of mutual annihilation. Socialist theories hindered the direct
concentrated activity of Mazzini, hindered the military organisation
which was essential for Italy; he was angry at this without reflecting
that a similar organisation could only be mischievous to the French.
Carried away by his intolerance and his Italian blood, he attacked the
Socialists, and Louis Blanc in particular, in a little pamphlet which was
offensive and unnecessary. Incidentally he fell foul of others too; thus,
for instance, he speaks of Proudhon as ‘a demon’.... Proudhon thought
of answering him, but confined himself in a later pamphlet to calling
Mazzini ‘the Archangel.’ On two occasions I said to Mazzini in jest, ‘_Ne
réveillez pas le chat qui dort_,’ for with such warlike combatants it was
hard to get off without severe wounds.
The London Socialists answered him with equal venom, with unnecessary
personalities and rudeness.
The hostility between the French of the two persuasions was of
a different kind and more fundamental. Every effort to reach an
understanding between formal Republicanism and Socialism was
unsuccessful, and only made the insincerity of concessions and the
irreconcilable difference more obvious; an agile acrobat had flung his
plank over the abyss that separated them and upon it proclaimed himself
emperor.
The proclamation of the Empire was a galvanic shock which horrified and
disheartened the exiles.
Their faces showed the melancholy, dejected conviction of the sick man
that he will never walk again without crutches. Weariness, concealed
hopelessness began to master both parties. Serious argument lost its
colour, was reduced to personalities, to reproaches and recriminations.
For two years longer both the French groups maintained themselves in
aggressive readiness, one celebrating the 24th of February, the other the
days of July. But at the outbreak of the Crimean War and Napoleon III.’s
triumphal procession with Queen Victoria across London, the impotence
of the exiles became evident. Even the chief of the London Metropolitan
Police, Sir Robert Maine, testified to it. When the Conservatives thanked
him after Napoleon’s visit for the skilful measures by which he had
prevented any demonstration on the part of the exiles, he replied: ‘I
have done nothing to deserve these thanks. Thank Ledru-Rollin and Louis
Blanc.’
A still more ominous symptom of their approaching end was apparent about
the same time in their splitting up into parties for no serious reasons,
merely on personal grounds.
These parties were formed in the same way as ministries or departments
are invented in Russia to find a job for some superfluous personage; or
as composers sometimes invent parts for Grisi or Lablache in operas, not
because those parts are needed, but because Grisi or Lablache must be
employed....
* * * * *
They stayed on till late at night recalling the year 1848; when I had
seen them into the street, and gone back into my room, I was overcome by
an immense sadness, I sat down at my writing-table and was ready to weep.
I felt what a son must feel on returning to the parental home after a
long absence: he sees how everything has grown dingy and warped in it;
his father has grown old without being aware of it, but the son is very
well aware of it, and he is cramped, he feels that the grave is not far
off and conceals the feeling, but the meeting depresses him instead of
cheering and rejoicing him.
Barbès, Louis Blanc! Why, they were old friends, honoured friends of my
effervescent youth. _L’Histoire de Dix Ans_, the trial of Barbès before
the Chamber of Peers—all that had so long ago been absorbed into my brain
and my heart, we were so closely akin to all these men, and here they
were in person.
Their most malicious enemies have never dared suspect the incorruptible
honesty of Louis Blanc, nor cast a slur on the chivalrous valour of
Barbès. Every one had seen, had known both men in every position, they
had no private life, they had no closed doors. We had seen one of them
a member of the Government, the other half an hour from the guillotine.
On the night before his execution, Barbès did not sleep, but asked for
paper and began to write: those lines have been preserved, I have read
them. They are full of French idealism, of religious dreams, but there
is not a trace of weakness; his spirit was not troubled nor cast down;
with serene consciousness he was preparing to lay his head on the block
and was calmly writing when the gaoler’s hand rapped violently at the
door. ‘It was at dawn, I was expecting the executioners’ (he told me that
himself), but his sister rushed in instead and flung herself on his neck.
She had without his knowledge entreated from Louis-Philippe a commutation
of his sentence and had been galloping with post-horses all night to
reach him in time.
Louis-Philippe’s prisoner rose some years later to the pinnacle of civic
glory, the chains were struck off by the rejoicing populace, and he was
led in triumph through Paris. But the upright heart of Barbès never
wavered, he was the first to attack the Provisional Government for the
murders of Rouen. The reaction grew up beside him, the republic could
only be saved by reckless audacity, and, on the 15th of May, Barbès dared
what neither Ledru-Rollin nor Louis Blanc did, what Caussidière was
afraid to do. The _Coup d’État_ failed and Barbès, this time prisoner of
the Republic, was again on his trial. At Bourges, just as in the Chamber
of Peers, he told the lawyers of the petty-bourgeois world, just as he
had told the old sinner Paquier: ‘I do not recognise you as judges, you
are my enemies, I am your prisoner of war; do with me as you will, but I
do not accept you as my judges.’ And again the heavy doors of lifelong
imprisonment were closed upon him.
By chance, against his will, he came out of prison. Napoleon III. thrust
him out almost in mockery, after reading, during the Crimean War, the
letter in which Barbès in an access of Gallic Chauvinism speaks of the
military glory of France. Barbès retired to Spain, but the scared and
dull-witted government expelled him. He went to Holland and there found a
tranquil and secluded refuge.
And now this hero and martyr, together with some of the chief leaders of
the February Republic, together with the foremost statesman of Socialism,
had been recalling and criticising the past days of glory and misfortune!
And I was oppressed by a weight of misery, I saw with unhappy clearness
that they, _too_, belonged to the history of _another decade_, which
was finished to the last page, to the cover. Finished, not for them
personally, but for all the exiles and for all the political parties of
to-day.
Living and noisy ten, even five, years before, they had passed out of
the channel and were lost in the sand, imagining that they were still
flowing to the ocean. They had no longer the words which, like the word
Republic, have stirred whole nations, nor the songs like the Marseillaise
which have set every heart throbbing. Even their enemies were not of the
same grandeur, not of the same quality: there were no more old feudal
privileges of the Crown with which it was hard to do battle, there was no
king’s head which, rolling from the scaffold, would bear a whole system
with it. You may execute Napoleon III., but that will not bring you
another 21st of January, pull Mazas[48] to bits stone by stone, and that
will not bring you the taking of the Bastille! In those days, amid those
thunders and lightnings, a new revelation was made, the revelation of
the State founded upon Reason, a new means of redemption from the gloomy
slavery of mediaevalism. Since those days, the redemption by revolution
has been proved unsound, the State has not been founded upon reason.
The political reformation has degenerated like the religious one into
rhetorical babble, kept up by the weakness of some and the hypocrisy of
others. The Marseillaise remains a sacred hymn, but it is a hymn of the
past, like _Ein’ feste Burg_; the strains of the same song evoke even now
a series of majestic images, like the procession of shades in _Macbeth_,
all kings, but all dead.
The old is almost passed out of sight, but of the new there is still
only rumour. We are in an interregnum; till the heir arrives the police
have seized everything in the name of external order. There can be no
question here of rights; it is lynch law in history, it is a case of
temporary necessity, of executive measures, police cordons, quarantine
precautions. The new régime, combining all that is oppressive in monarchy
and all that is ferocious in Jacobinism, is defended, not by ideas, not
by conventions, but by terrors and uncertainties. While some were afraid,
others fixed bayonets and took up their positions. The first who should
break through their chain might capture the chief place that had been
taken by the police, but would at once become himself a policeman.
It recalls to us how on the evening of the 24th of February, Caussidière
arrived at the Prefecture with a gun in his hand, sat down in the chair
just vacated by the escaping Delessert, called the secretary, told him
that he had been appointed Prefect, and bade him give him his papers. The
secretary smiled as respectfully as to Delessert, as respectfully bowed
and went to fetch the papers, and the papers went their regular course,
nothing was changed, only Delessert’s supper was eaten by Caussidière.
Many discovered the password to the Prefecture, but never learned the
watchword of history. When the time came they behaved like Alexander I.
They wanted a blow to be struck at the old régime, but not a mortal
blow; and there was no Benningsen nor Zubov[49] among them.
And in all this there is a vast deal of _naïveté_. Behind the declamation
in the foreground there is the _mise en scène_.
The antique draperies and triumphal setting of the Convention have so
impressed the French mind by their menacing poetry, that with the name
of the Republic, for instance, its enthusiastic supporters call up, not
an inner change, but the fête of federalisation, the beating of drums
and the dismal notes of the tocsin. The country is proclaimed in danger,
the people rise up in a mass to defend it while they are celebrating the
triumph of Republicanism around the trees of freedom; girls in white
frocks are dancing to the strains of patriotic hymns, and France in
a Phrygian cap sends forth immense armies for the deliverance of the
nations and the overthrow of sovereigns.
The large majority of the refugees, particularly of the French, belong
to the bourgeoisie, their characters are at once defined by the fact.
The mark or stamp of the petty-bourgeois is as hard to efface as the
imprint of the gift of the Holy Spirit which our seminaries lay upon
their pupils. Of actual merchants, shopkeepers and business men there
were few among the exiles, and those few had come there as it were
by accident, for the most part thrust out of France after the 2nd of
December because they did not grasp the fact that upon them lay the
sacred duty of changing their constitution. They were the men to be
pitied, because their position was absolutely comic; they were lost in
the ‘Red’ surroundings of which they had known nothing at home, and were
simply scared; by virtue of their national weakness, they longed to
display themselves as far greater radicals than they really were; but not
being accustomed to the revolutionary jargon, they were always falling
into ‘Orleanism,’ to the horror of their companions. Of course, they
would all have been delighted to return home, if the _point d’honneur_,
the one binding moral force of the modern Frenchman, had not forbidden
their suing for permission.
The class next above them consisted of the bodyguard of the exiles’
community: lawyers, journalists, literary men and a few officers.
Most of them had been aiming at nothing in the revolution but to improve
their social position, but with the rapid turn of the tide they had found
themselves stranded on the English beach. Others were disinterestedly
absorbed by club life and agitation; their rhetoric had brought them to
London, partly of their own will, but quite twice as much against it.
Among them there were many single-minded and honourable men, but few of
any capacity; they had dropped into the revolution through temperament,
through the recklessness of a man who, hearing a shriek for help, flings
himself into the river, forgetting that it is deep and that he does not
know how to swim.
Behind these infants whose pointed beards, alas, were rapidly turning
grey, and whose conical Gallic skulls were somewhat short of hair, stood
several groups of far more serious workmen, who were held together not so
much by external bonds as by spirit and general interest.
Fate itself has made them revolutionaries, poverty and enlightenment have
made them practical Socialists; hence their thought is more realistic,
their resolution is firmer. These men have suffered many privations,
many humiliations, and, moreover, in silence, which develops greater
fortitude; they have crossed the Channel not with phrases but with
passions and hatreds. Their oppressed position has saved them from the
bourgeois _suffisance_, they know that they have not had time to be
educated, they want instruction, while the bourgeois has learnt no more
than they, but is perfectly content with his attainments.
And that is why if they come into the arena again they will be horrified
by the ingratitude of men. And may they think it is only ingratitude!
That is a gloomy thought, but easier to bear than many others.
But they had much better not go back at all; let them stay and tell us
and our children of their great deeds. There is no need to resent this
advice; what is living changes, and the unchanging becomes a monument.
They have left their trace, just as those who come after them will
leave theirs, and in their turn will be overtaken by the drifting snow,
and then all traces, present and past, will be hidden in the universal
amnesty of eternal oblivion!
Many are angry with me for saying these things openly. ‘In your words,’
a very worthy man said to me, ‘one hears the disinterested spectator
speaking.’
But I did not come to Europe a spectator. I have been turned into one. I
am very long-suffering, but at last I am worn out.
For five years I have not seen one bright face, I have not heard
spontaneous laughter, I have not met a glance of understanding. I have
been surrounded by _feldshers_[50] and _prosectors_.[51] The _feldshers_
have been continually trying their remedies, while the others have been
proving to them on the corpse that they have blundered—until I too have
snatched up the scalpel; perhaps through lack of practice I have cut too
deeply.
I have spoken not as an outside spectator, not to find fault: I
have spoken because my heart was full, because the lack of general
understanding has driven me out of all patience. That I was sobered
earlier than the rest has been no comfort to me. Only the very lowest of
_feldshers_ can smile with satisfaction as they look at the dying patient
and say: ‘Didn’t I tell you he would turn up his toes by the evening? and
you see he has.’ Why, then, have I endured?
In 1856 the best of all the German refugees, Carl Schurz,[52] arrived
in Europe from Wisconsin. On his return from Germany, he told me how
impressed he was by the moral desolation of the Continent. I had
translated to him aloud my _West European Sketches_. He tried to ward off
my conclusions, as though they were a ghost which a man fears, though he
is unwilling to believe in it.
‘Any one who understands contemporary Europe as you do,’ he said to me,
‘ought to abandon it.’ ‘That is what you have done,’ I observed. ‘Why is
it you don’t do so?’ ‘It is very simple. I can answer you as an honest
German in a fit of proud independence has answered before me. “I have a
king of my own in Swabia.” I have my own people in Russia!’
Coming down from the heights to the middle levels of the refugee
community, we see that most of the refugees have been drawn into exile
by a generous impulse and by rhetoric. These men sacrificed themselves
for words, that is, for their sound without ever giving themselves a
clear definition of their meaning. They loved them ardently and believed
in them, as Catholics believe in their Latin prayers, though they do
not know Latin. _La fraternité universelle comme base de la république
universelle_—that is final and accepted, _point de salariés, et la
solidarité des peuples_! And you may blush, but that is enough to send
some men to the barricades, and if a Frenchman goes to the barricade he
does not run away.
‘_Pour moi, voyez-vous, la république n’est pas une forme
gouvernementale, c’est une religion, et elle ne sera vraie que
lorsqu’elle la sera_,’ a man who had taken part in all the risings from
the day of Lamarque’s funeral said to me: ‘_Et lorsque la religion sera
une république_,’ I added. ‘_Précisément!_’ he answered, much pleased at
my having turned his phrase inside out.
The lower ranks among the refugees provide something like an ever open
sore of conscience before the eyes of the leaders. In them all their own
defects reappear in the exaggerated and ridiculous form in which Paris
fashions appear in some Russian district town.
Ill-used from childhood, they hate the social injustice by which they
have been so greatly oppressed. The corrupting influence of town life
and of the universal passion for gain has in many of them converted the
hatred into envy. Without clearly facing the fact, they try to become
bourgeois though they detest them, just as we detest a lucky rival,
though passionately longing to take his place, or to punish him for his
success.
But whether animated by hatred or envy, whether by the thirst for
comfort or for revenge, they are all to be dreaded in the future
upheaval of Western Europe. They will be in the foreground. What will
the Conservatives and rhetoricians do, confronted by their workmen’s
muscles, their gloomy recklessness and rankling thirst for revenge? And
what will all the town-dwellers do when at the workers’ call the locusts
of the fields and villages rise up? The Peasant Wars are forgotten; the
latest fugitives among land workers date back to the days of the Edict of
Nantes: the Vendée vanished in the smoke of guns. But we are indebted to
the 2nd of December for the sight of refugees wearing sabots.
The country people in the South of France, from the Pyrenees to the Alps,
lifted up their heads after the _Coup d’État_, as though asking: ‘Has not
our time come?’ The rising was suppressed at its very outbreak by masses
of soldiers, who were followed by military tribunals; a herd of tracking
gendarmes and police were scattered all over the cross-roads and little
villages. The peasant’s hearth, his home—the things he holds sacred,
were desecrated by the police; they demanded the wife’s evidence against
her husband, the son’s against his father, and on one doubtful word from
a kinsman, on the mere denunciation of a _garde-champêtre_, dragged to
prison fathers of families, old men grey as badgers, lads, women; they
were tried after a fashion, wholesale, and then at random some released,
some sent to Lambessa, to Cayenne, while others escaped to Spain, to
Savoy beyond the bridges over the Var.[53]
I do not know much about these peasants. In London I saw several men who
had escaped from Cayenne in an open boat; the very recklessness, the
madness of this adventure displays more of their character than whole
volumes. They were almost all from the Pyrenees. Broad-shouldered, well
grown, with large features, an utterly different race, not fined down
like the meagre Frenchman of the towns, with his thin blood and poor
little beard. The destruction of their homes and their stay at Cayenne
had educated them. ‘We shall go back some day,’ a Hercules of forty,
usually silent (they were none of them very talkative), said to me,
‘and pay off our score!’ They looked upon the other refugees, on their
meetings and speeches, as somehow foreign ... and three weeks later they
came to say good-bye to me.
‘We don’t want an idle life, and besides it’s dull here—we are going
to Spain, to Santander. There they have promised to give us work as
woodcutters.’ I glanced once more at the rough, manly figures and
muscular hands of the future woodcutters—and thought, ‘It will be as well
if their axes cut down nothing but chestnuts and oaks.’
Of the wild, devouring energy rankling in the breasts of the town
workmen, I had a closer view later.
2
FELIX PYAT—VICTOR HUGO AND OTHERS—LOUIS BLANC AND THE FRENCH REFUGEES
The French refugees, like all the other groups, carried with them into
exile and jealously maintained all their dissensions, all their parties.
Their nervous irritability was increased by the gloomy environment of an
alien and hostile country that did not conceal that it maintained its
right of asylum for the sake of its own self-respect, and not for the
sake of those who seek it.
And then they are cut off from their people and from their habits, and
they cannot move about freely. Misunderstandings become more spiteful,
upbraidings for past mistakes more merciless, parties are so sharply
divided that old friends drop all relations and cut each other in the
street....
There were real differences, theoretical and of every other description
also. Together with ideas there were personalities, together with party
badges there were individual names, side by side with fanaticism there
was envy, and with candid enthusiasm there was naïve vanity.
A year and a half after the _Coup d’État_, Felix Pyat arrived in London
from Switzerland. A lively journalist, he had become well known through
his trial, through the dull comedy _Diogenes_, which the French liked for
its thin, dry apophthegms, and finally by the success of _The Rag-Picker_
on the stage of Porte St. Martin. I have written a whole article[54]
on this play in another place. Felix Pyat was a member of the last
Legislative Assembly, sat with the Montagne, had a fight in the Assembly
with Proudhon, was mixed up in the protest of the 13th of June 1848, and
was in consequence obliged to leave France in secret. He got away, as I
did, with a Moldavian passport, and went about in Geneva disguised as a
Moor, probably in order that every one might recognise him. In Lausanne,
to which he moved, a small circle of admirers from among the French
exiles formed around him and lived on the manna of his witty sayings
and the crumbs of his ideas. It was painful for him to pass from being
the leader of a canton into being a member of a London party. There was
no party that had a vacancy for a great man; his friends and admirers
rescued him from this difficulty; withdrawing from the other parties,
they formed themselves into the so-called _London Revolutionary Commune_.
_La Commune Révolutionnaire_ was to represent the reddest section of
Democracy and the most communistic one of Socialism. It regarded itself
as for ever on the alert, in the closest relations with ‘Marianne,’[55]
and at the same time as the most faithful representative of Blanqui _in
partibus infidelium_.
In the form of Felix Pyat the gloomy Blanqui, the austere pedant and
doctrinaire of his cause, the ascetic emaciated in prisons, smoothed
away his wrinkles, dyed his black thoughts crimson, and set the Parisian
Commune shrieking with laughter in London. Felix Pyat’s sallies in his
letters to the Queen and to Walewski,[56] whom he called an _ex-réfugié_
and _ex-polonais_, not a prince and so on, were very amusing; but where
the resemblance to Blanqui came in I never could grasp; and altogether
it was not easy for a plain man to see what was the characteristic
difference that distinguished him from Louis Blanc, for instance.
The same thing must be said of the Jersey party of Victor Hugo.
Victor Hugo never was in the true sense of the word a politician. He was
too much of a poet, too much under the influence of his imagination,
to be one. Of course, I do not say this in disparagement. A Socialist
and an artist, he was at the same time a worshipper of military glory,
of the republican upheaval, of mediaeval romanticism, of the white
_fleur-de-lys_, was a _vicomte_ and a _citoyen_, a peer of Orleanist
France and an agitator of the 2nd of December. He was a great, exuberant
figure, but not the head of a party, in spite of the positive influence
he exerted over two generations. Who has not been set thinking over the
death penalty by _Les Derniers Jours d’un Condamné_? Whose conscience has
not been stirred by his striking pictures of the social sores of poverty
and fatal vice, full of the strange, terrible lights and shadows of a
Turner?
The February revolution caught Hugo unawares; he did not understand
it, was amazed, was left behind, made an infinite number of blunders,
until the Reaction went too far for him. Roused to indignation by the
censorship of his plays and by the proceedings at Rome, he appeared on
the platform of the Assembly with speeches that resounded throughout
France. Success and applause carried him on and on. At last, on the 2nd
of December 1851, he rose to his full stature in face of bayonets and
loaded guns, he summoned the people to revolt—under showers of bullets
protested against the _Coup d’État_ and withdrew from France, when it was
no longer possible to act there. He retreated like an infuriated lion
to Jersey; whence, hardly taking breath, he flung at the Emperor his
_Napoléon le Petit_ and then his _Châtiments_. Napoleon’s agents tried
in vain to reconcile the old poet with the new court. They could not.
‘If but ten Frenchmen remain in exile, I, too, will remain with them; if
three, I will be among them; if one, I will be that one—I will not return
except to a free France.’
Hugo’s moving from Jersey to Guernsey more than ever persuaded himself
and his friends of his political significance, though it should, one
would have thought, only have convinced them of the opposite. The
position was as follows. When Felix Pyat wrote his letter to Queen
Victoria after Napoleon’s visit to her, he read it at a meeting and sent
it to the editor of _L’Homme_. Swentoslawski, who published _L’Homme_ at
his own expense in Jersey, was at that time in London, and he came to
see me, together with Felix Pyat; as he was leaving, he drew me aside
and said that a lawyer of his acquaintance had told him that the journal
might easily be prosecuted for this letter, as Jersey was in the position
of a colony; but that Felix Pyat insisted on its appearing in _L’Homme_.
Swentoslawski hesitated, and wanted to know my opinion.
‘Don’t publish it.’
‘Yes, that is just what I think myself, only the worst of it is he will
think that I am afraid.’
‘Who wouldn’t be afraid of losing some thousands of francs under present
circumstances?’
‘You are right, that I cannot do. I ought not to do it.’
Swentoslawski, after reasoning so sagaciously, went back to Jersey and
published the letter.
There were rumours that the Ministry meant to do something. The English
were offended at the tone in which Pyat addressed the Queen. The first
result of the rumours was that Felix Pyat ceased to sleep at home—he was
afraid _in England_ of a _visite domiciliaire_ and arrest at night for
publishing an article! The Cabinet did not dream of a legal prosecution;
the Ministers gave a hint to the Governor of Jersey, or whatever he is
called there, and the latter, taking advantage of the illegal privileges
that exist in the Colonies, ordered Swentoslawski to leave the island.
Swentoslawski protested, and with him a dozen Frenchmen, among whom
was Victor Hugo; then the Napoleon of the police of Jersey ordered all
those who signed the protest to leave. They ought to have disobeyed the
order to the last moment, let the police seize some one by the collar
and fling him off the island, then it would have been possible to have
brought the question of the legality of banishing them before a court.
This was the course urged upon them by the English. Legal proceedings are
disgracefully expensive in England; but the editors of the _Daily News_
and other Liberal papers promised to collect whatever sum was needed,
and to procure capable lawyers to defend them. To the French the path of
legality seemed dull and long, revolting, and they proudly left Jersey,
taking with them Swentoslawski and S. Téléki.[57]
The police order was delivered to Victor Hugo with peculiar solemnity.
When the police official went in to him to read the order, Hugo summoned
his sons; he sat down, motioned the official to a chair, and, when all
were seated as in Russia before a journey, he rose to his feet and said:
‘_M. le Commissaire, nous faisons maintenant une page de l’histoire_.
Read your order.’ The policeman, who had expected to be kicked out of the
house, was very much surprised at the ease with which he had gained the
day; he bound Hugo by his signature to leave, and went away doing full
justice to the courtesy of the French, who had even offered him a chair.
Hugo did go, and the rest with him left Jersey. Most of them went no
further than Guernsey. Others went to London; their cause was lost, and
the right of expulsion remained unassailed.
There were only two real parties, _i.e._ the party of formal
Republicanism and of violent Socialism: Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc. Of
the latter I have not yet spoken, though I knew him better than almost
any other of the French exiles.
It could not be said that Louis Blanc’s outlook was indefinite, it was
sharply cut on all sides as with a knife. In the course of his exile,
Louis Blanc gathered a great deal of information (in his own line, that
is, the study of the first French Revolution) and became a little more
settled and tranquil; but in reality his views never moved one step from
the time when he wrote _L’Histoire de Dix Ans_ and _L’Organisation de
Travail_. What was settled and clarified was exactly the same as had been
fermenting from youth.
In Louis Blanc’s little body there lives a bold spirit firmly fitted
together, ‘_très éveillé_,’ with a strong character, with its own sharply
cut quality, and at the same time absolutely French. His quick eyes and
rapid movements give him an air at once mobile and highly finished,
which is not without grace. He is like a man of concentration reduced
to its least dimensions, while the colossal character of his opponent,
Ledru-Rollin, makes him like a swollen child, like a dwarf on an immense
scale, or seen through a magnifying glass. They are both splendidly
fitted to take parts in _Gulliver’s Travels_. Louis Blanc—and it is a
great power and a very rare characteristic—has complete self-control; he
has a great deal of reserve and, in the very heat of discussion, not only
in public but in friendly talk, never forgets the most complex aspects of
a question, never loses his temper in argument, never leaves off smiling
good-humouredly and never agrees with his opponent. He is a master at
telling stories, and, in spite of the fact that, like a Frenchman, he
talks a great deal—yet, like a Corsican, he never says a word too much.
He is interested in nothing but France, knows nothing but France.
The events of the world, the discoveries of science, earthquakes and
inundations interest him only in so far as they affect France. Talking
with him, listening to his subtle observations, his interesting stories,
one may easily study the character of the French intellect, and the
more easily as his soft and cultured manners do not provoke sarcastic
irritation.[58]
Sometimes in jest I would pull him up in the generalisations which he had
probably been repeating for years, never questioning them nor supposing
that any one could question such respectable truths as: ‘A man’s life is
a great social duty; a man _ought_ to be continually sacrificing himself
to society.’
‘Why so?’ I would ask suddenly.
‘Why so? Upon my word: why, the whole aim, the whole significance of the
individual is the welfare of society.’
‘It will never be attained if every one is to be sacrificed and no one is
to enjoy himself.’
‘That is playing with words.’
‘A barbarian’s confusion of ideas,’ I said laughing.
‘I can never understand the materialistic view of the spirit,’ he said
once. ‘Spirit and matter are after all distinct; they are closely
connected, so closely that they are not manifest apart, but yet they
are not the same thing’—and seeing that his exposition was not going
well, he added at once: ‘Now, I, for instance, shut my eyes and imagine
my brother; I see his features, I hear his voice; where is the material
existence of that image?’
At first I thought that he was joking; but seeing that he was speaking
quite seriously, I observed that the image of his brother was at
that moment in a photographic studio known as the brain, and that
Charles Blanc’s portrait could hardly be said to exist apart from that
photographic apparatus.
‘That is quite a different matter. The picture of my brother has no
material existence in my brain.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Why, how do you?’
‘From induction.’
‘By the way, that reminds me of a most amusing anecdote....’ And then,
as always, followed a story about Diderot or Mme. Tencin, very charming,
but not in the least to the point. As the successor of Maximilien
Robespierre, Louis Blanc worshipped Rousseau, and was somewhat cold in
his attitude to Voltaire. In his history he has divided all leading
men into two flocks in Biblical fashion—on the one hand, the sheep of
brotherhood, on the other, the goats of envy and egoism. For the egoists
such as Montaigne he had no mercy, and they caught it severely from him.
Louis Blanc did not stick at anything in this classification, and meeting
the speculator, Law, he boldly counted him among the sheep, which the
reckless Scotsman had certainly never expected.
In 1856 Barbès arrived in London from the Hague. Louis Blanc brought him
to me. I looked with emotion at the martyr who had spent almost his whole
life in prison. I had seen him once before, and where? At the window of
the Hôtel de Ville, on the 15th of May, a few minutes before the National
Guard broke in and seized him.[59]
I invited them to dine with me next day; they came, and we sat on till
late at night.
Before we pass on to the savage elemental force quivering in darkness,
enchained by man’s violence and its own ignorance, and at times bursting
like destructive fire through cracks and crevices, and arousing horror
and alarm, let us linger once more over the last knights-templars
and classic figures of the French Revolution, over the cultured and
democratic middle classes made up of exiles, republicans, journalists,
lawyers, doctors, professors of the Sorbonne, who for ten years took part
in the conflict with Louis-Philippe, were carried away by the events of
1848, and remained true to them, both at home and in exile.
In their ranks there are intelligent, keen-witted men, very good-hearted,
animated by ardent religion and readiness to sacrifice everything to it;
but men of understanding, men who could analyse their own position,
their own problems, as the man of science investigates a phenomenon or a
pathologist investigates disease, are almost entirely lacking.
They prefer complete despair, contempt for men and the cause, they
prefer the idleness of reproaches and recriminations, stoicism, heroism,
every privation, to analysis. Or they have the same complete faith in
success without weighing means, without making clear a practical object.
Instead of it, they are satisfied with a flag, with a badge, with a stock
phrase—the right to work, the abolition of the proletariat, the republic
and order, brotherhood and the solidarity of all peoples. But how is all
this to be arranged, to be realised? That is the last consideration. Only
to get the power; the rest would be done by decrees, plebiscites, and if
there were disobedience—_grenadiers, en avant armes! pas de charge ...
baïonnettes!_
And glimpses of the religion of terror, of the _Coup d’État_, of
centralisation, of military intervention show through rents in the
carmagnole and the blouse. In spite of the pedantic protest of some
Attic minds of the Orleans party, the Terror was grand in its menacing
suddenness, its unprepared colossal vengeance; but to dwell upon it with
love, to invoke it without necessity is a terrible blunder for which we
are indebted to the Reaction.
On me the Committee of Public Security always produced the same
impression as Charrière’s shop, Rue de l’École de Médecine; on all sides
there are straight or curved sabres, scissors, saws glittering ominously,
probably instruments for saving men, but certainly for hurting them.
Operations are justified by success, but the Terror cannot boast of that.
With all its surgery it did not save the Republic. With what object
was Dantonotomy, Herbertotomy performed? They hastened the fever of
Thermidor; and in it the Republic wasted away; as before and even more
so, men went on raving over the Spartan virtues with Latin mottoes and
classicism _à la David_; they raved on till one fine day they translated
_Salus populi_ into _Salvum fac Imperatorem_, and chanted it with full
ecclesiastical rites in Notre Dame.
The Terrorists were not ordinary men. Their stern, austere figures stand
out vividly in the fifth act, and will survive in history for ages, so
long as human records last; but the French republicans of to-day do not
look at it like that—they see in them patterns to be imitated, and try to
be bloodthirsty in theory and in the hope of practice.
Repeating _à la Saint-Just_ affected maxims from anthologies and Latin
classics, moved to enthusiasm by the cold rhetorical eloquence of
Robespierre, they will not allow their heroes to be judged like other
mortals! Any one who should begin to speak of them without the dutiful
words of eulogy which are applied to the ‘illustrious dead,’ would be
accused of being a renegade, a traitor, a spy.
I did, however, now and then meet eccentric men who had broken away from
the common path trodden by the crowd.
But even in such cases, when Frenchmen have taken the bit between their
teeth and bolted with some idea that does not belong to the received
currency of ideas and thoughts, they carry it to such an extreme that the
man who has given them the idea defends himself with horror.
In 1854, Dr. Cœurderoi, who had sent me his pamphlet from Spain, wrote
me a letter. I have rarely heard so exasperated a protest against
contemporary France and its latest revolutionaries. It was the answer
of France to the _Coup d’État_ dealt her so lightly; he doubted the
intelligence, the blood of his race; he invoked the Cossacks for the
correction of the ‘degenerate population,’ he wrote to me because he
found in my articles ‘the same standpoint.’ I answered that I did not go
so far as advocating transfusion of blood as a remedy, and sent him _Du
Développement des Idées révolutionnaires en Russie_.
Cœurderoi repaid the debt; he answered that he rested all his hopes on
the troops of Nicholas, who would raze to the ground without pity or
sparing the effete and corrupt civilisation which had not the strength to
renew itself nor to die a natural death.
I append one of his letters which has been preserved.
M. A. HERZEN.
SANTANDER, _Mai 27_.
MONSIEUR,—Que je vous remercie tout d’abord de l’envoi de votre
travail sur les idées révolutionnaires et leur développement en
Russie. J’avais déjà lu ce livre, mais il ne m’était pas resté
entre les mains, et c’était pour moi un très grand regret.
C’est vous dire combien j’en apprécie la valeur comme fond
et comme forme, et combien je le crois utile pour donner
conscience à chacun des forces de la Révolution universelle,
aux Français surtout qui ne la croient possible que par
l’initiative du faubourg St. Antoine.
Puisque vous m’avez fait l’amitié de m’envoyer votre livre,
permettez-moi, Monsieur, de vous en témoigner ma gratitude
en vous disant ce que j’en pense. Non que j’attache de
l’importance à mon opinion, mais pour vous prouver que j’ai lu
avec attention.
C’est une belle étude organique et originale, il y a là
véritable vigueur, travail sérieux, vérités nues, passages
profondément émouvants. C’est jeune et fort comme la race
slave; on sent parfaitement que ce n’est ni un Parisien, ni
un Paléologue, ni un Philiste d’Allemagne qui ont écrit des
lignes aussi brûlantes; ni un républicain constitutionnel, ni
un socialiste théocrate et modéré—mais un Cosaque (vous ne vous
effrayez pas de ce nom, n’est-ce pas?) grandement anarchiste,
utopiste et poète, acceptant la négation et l’affirmation la
plus hardie du XIXᵉ siècle. Ce que peu de révolutionnaires
français osent faire.
... Sur le point particulier de la Rénovation ethnographique
prochaine, j’ai trouvé dans votre livre (surtout dans
l’Introduction) bien des passages qui semblent se rapprocher
de mon opinion. Quoique vos conclusions ne soient pas
très-nettement formulées sur ce point, je crois que vous
comptez pour le succès de la Révolution sur la fédération
démocratique des races slaves qui donneront à l’Europe
l’impulsion générale. Il est bien entendu que nous ne différons
pas pour le but: la résurrection du Continent sous la forme
démocratique et sociale. Mais je crois que le sac de la
civilisation sera fait par l’absolutisme. Là je vois toute la
différence entre nous.
Oui, j’ai conçu ces convictions qu’on dit malheureuses, et j’y
persiste parce que chaque jour je les trouve plus justes:
1. Que la force a quelque chose à voir dans les affaires de
notre microcosme.
2. Qu’en étudiant la marche des événements révolutionnaires
dans le temps et dans l’espace on se convainct que la force
prépare toujours la Révolution que l’idée a démontrée
nécessaire.
3. Que l’idée ne peut pas accomplir l’œuvre de sang et de
destruction.
4. Que le despotisme, au point de vue de la rapidité, de la
sûreté, de la possibilité d’exécutions, est plus apte que la
démocratie à bouleverser un monde.
5. Que l’armée monarchique russe sera plutôt mise en mouvement
que la phalange démocratique slave.
6. Qu’il n’y a que la Russie en Europe assez compacte encore
sous l’absolutisme, assez peu divisée par les intérêts
propriétaires et les partis pour faire bloc, coin, massue,
glaive, épée et exécuter l’Occident et trancher le nœud gordien.
Là. Là. Là.
Qu’on me montre une autre force capable d’accomplir une
pareille tâche; qu’on me fasse voir quelque part une armée
démocratique toute prête et décidée à frapper sur les peuples,
les frères, et à faire couler le sang, à brûler, à abattre
sans regarder derrière elle, sans hésiter. Et je changerai de
manière de voir.
Avec vous je voulais seulement bien spécifier la question et la
limiter sur ce seul point, le moyen d’exécution générale de la
civilisation Occidentale.
Je n’ai pas besoin de vous dire que notre appréciation sur le
Passé et l’Avenir est la même. Nous ne différons absolument
que sur le Présent. Vous, qui avez si bien apprécié le rôle
révolutionnaire de Pierre Iᵉʳ, pourquoi ne pourriez-vous pas
penser que tout autre, Nicolas ou l’un de ses successeurs, put
avoir un formidable rôle à accomplir? Quelle autre main plus
puissante, plus large, plus capable de rassembler des peuples
conquérants, voyez-vous à l’Orient? Avant que la démocratie
slave ait trouvé un mot d’ordre et traduit le vague secret de
ses aspirations, le tsar aura bouleversé l’Europe. Le sort des
nations civilisées est dans son bras, s’il le veut. Le monde
ne tremble-t-il pas parce qu’il a parlé un peu plus haut que
d’habitude? Je vous l’avoue, cette force me frappe tellement,
que je ne puis concevoir qu’on cherche à en voir une autre.
Et les révolutionnaires sentent tellement la nécessité d’une
dictature pour démolir qu’ils voudraient l’instituer eux-mêmes
dans le cas de réussite d’une nouvelle Révolution. A mon sens,
ils ne se trompent pas sur la nécessité du moyen, seulement il
n’est ni dans leur rôle, ni dans leurs principes, ni dans leurs
forces de l’employer. Moi j’aime même voir le Despotisme se
charger de cette odieuse tâche de fossoyeur.
Cette lettre est déjà bien assez longue. Je voulais seulement
préciser avec vous le point débattu. Ce qu’il faudrait
maintenant entre nous, je le sens: ce serait une conversation
dans laquelle nous avancerons plus en une heure que par
milliers de lettres. Je n’abandonne pas cet espoir, et ce
jour sera le bienvenu pour moi. Avec un homme de révolution,
de travail, de science et d’audace je crois toujours pouvoir
m’entendre.
Quant aux sourds ou muets de la tradition révolutionnaire
de ’93, j’ai grand’ peur que vous n’en fassiez jamais des
socialistes universels et des hommes de liberté. Encore moins
des partisans de la possession, du droit au travail, de
l’échange et du contrat. C’est tellement séduisant que de rêver
une place de commissaire aux armées ou à la police, ou encore
une sinécure de représentant au peuple avec une belle écharpe
rouge autour des reins, comme disait Rabelais, beaux floquarts,
beaux rubans, gentil pourpoint, galantes braguettes, etc., etc.
La plupart de nos révolutionnaires en sont là!
Les hommes ne sont guère plus sages que les enfants, mais
beaucoup plus hypocrites. Ils portent des faux cols et de
décorations et se croient illustres. Les enfants jouent plus
sérieusement aux soldats que les grands monarques et les
énormes tribunes que les peuples admirent.
Vous voudrez bien me pardonner de vous avoir écrit sans avoir
l’honneur de vous connaître personnellement.
Vous m’excuserez surtout de m’être permis de vous donner
sur vos ouvrages une opinion qui n’a d’autre valeur que la
sincérité. J’estime d’après mes propres impressions que
c’est le moyen le plus efficace pour reconnaître un don, qui
vous a fait plaisir. D’ailleurs notre commun exil et nos
aspirations semblables me semblent devoir nous épargner à tous
deux les vaines formules de politique banale. Je termine
en vous résumant mon opinion par ces deux mots: La Force
et la Destruction demain par le tzar, la Pensée et l’Ordre
après-demain par les socialistes universels, les Slavs, comme
les Germano-Latins.—Agréez, etc.
ERNEST CŒURDEROI.
J’espère vous publierez en volume vos lettres à Linton Esqʳᵉ.
que le journal _l’Homme_ a données à ses lecteurs.
Pourriez-vous me dire s’il existe des traductions françaises
des poésies de Pouschkine, de Lermontoff et surtout de Koltzoff?
Ce que vous en dites me fait désirer infiniment de les lire. La
personne qui vous remettra cette lettre est mon ami L. Charre,
proscrit comme nous, à qui j’ai dédié _Mes Jours d’Exil_.