Dear master, I received your article yesterday, and I should answer
it at length if I were not in the midst of preparations for my
departure for Paris. I am going to try to finish up with Aisse.
The middle of your letter made me SHED A TEAR, without converting
me, of course. I was moved, that was all, without being persuaded.
I look vainly in your article for one word: "justice," and all our
ill comes from forgetting absolutely that first notion of morality,
which to my way of thinking composes all morality. Humanitarianism,
sentiment, the ideal, have played us sufficiently mean tricks for us
to try righteousness and science.
If France does not pass in a short time to the crisis, I believe
that she will be irrevocably lost. Free compulsory education will do
nothing but augment the number of imbeciles. Renan has said that
very well in the preface to his Questions contemporaines. What we
need most of all, is a natural, that is to say, a legitimate
aristocracy. No one can do anything without a head, and universal
suffrage as it exists is more stupid than divine right. You will see
remarkable things if they let it keep on! The masses, the numbers,
are always idiotic. I have few convictions, but I have that one
strongly. But the masses must be respected, however inept they may
be, because they contain the germs of an incalculable fecundity.
Give it liberty but not power.
I believe no more than you do in class distinction. Castes belong to
archeology. But I believe that the poor hate the rich, and that the
rich are afraid of the poor. It will be so forever. It is as useless
to preach love to the one as to the other. The most important thing
is to instruct the rich, who, on the whole, are the strongest.
Enlighten the bourgeois first, for he knows nothing, absolutely
nothing. The whole dream of democracy is to elevate the proletarian
to the level of the imbecility of the bourgeois. The dream is partly
accomplished. He reads the same papers and has the same passions.
The three degrees of education have shown within the last year what
they can accomplish: (1) higher education made Prussia win; (2)
secondary education, bourgeois, produced the men of the 4th of
September; (3) primary education gave us the Commune. Its minister
of public instruction was the great Valles, who boasted that he
scorned Homer!
In three years every Frenchman can know how to read. Do you think
that we shall be the better off? Imagine on the other hand that in
each commune, there was ONE bourgeois, only one, who had read
Bastiat, and that this bourgeois was respected, things would change.
However I am not discouraged as you are, and the present government
pleases me, because it has no principle, no metaphysics, no humbug.
I express myself very badly. Moreover you deserve a different
response, but I am much hurried.
I hear today that the mass of the Parisians regrets Badinguet. A
plebiscite would declare for him, I do not doubt it, universal
suffrage is such a fine thing.
CC. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Nohant, 10 October, 1871
I am answering your post scriptum, if I had answered Flaubert I
should not have ... ANSWERED, knowing well that your heart does not
always agree with your mind, a discordance into which we all
moreover are continually compelled to fall. I answered a part of a
letter of some friend whom no one knows, no one can recognize, since
I address myself to a part of your reasoning that is not you
entirely.
You are a troubadour all the same, and if I had to write to you
PUBLICLY the character would be what it ought to be. But our real
discussions ought to remain between ourselves, like caresses between
lovers, and even sweeter, since friendship also has its mysteries
without the storms of personality.
That letter that you wrote me in haste, is full of well expressed
truths against which I do not protest. But the connection and
agreement between your truths of reason and my truths of sentiment
must be found. France, alas! is neither on your side nor my side;
she is on the side of blindness, ignorance and folly. Oh! that I do
not deny, it is exactly that over which I despair.
Is this a time to put on Aisse? You told me it was a thing of
distinction, delicate like all that HE did, and I hear that the
public of the theatres is more THICKHEADED than ever. You would do
well to see two or three plays, no matter which, in order to
appreciate the literary condition of the Parisian. The provinces
will contribute less than in the past. The little fortunes are too
much cut down to permit frequent trips to Paris.
If Paris offered, as in my youth, an intelligent and influential
nucleus, a good play would perhaps not have a hundred performances,
but a bad play would not have three hundred. But this nucleus has
become imperceptible and its influence is swamped. Who then will
fill the theatres? The shopkeepers of Paris, without a guide, and
without good criticism? Well, you are not the master in the matter
of Aisse. There is an heir who is impatient, probably.--They write
me that Chilly is very; seriously ill, and that Pierre Berton is
reengaged.
You must be very busy; I will not write a long letter to you.
I embrace you affectionately, my children love you and ask to be
remembered to you.