I was in London when the Franco-German war broke out, and being so
fortunate as to have intercourse with some wholly unbiased men of great
political insight, I foresaw sooner than my French acquaintances all
the disasters the war must inevitably bring upon France. On my return
to Paris, I found the people full of hope and confidence; indeed,
there was, as is well known, a manifestation of arrogance that could
not but affect every stranger unpleasantly. This arrogance, however,
was by no means shared by men of science. As yet there had been no
battle; but already the news of the suicide of Prévost Paradol in North
America had filled with the most painful forebodings every one who knew
him and was aware how thoroughly posted he was in the preparations and
resources of France. The terrible event occurred immediately after
an attack of fever, yet no one doubted that Paradol had laid hands
on himself with a full consciousness of what he was doing, and with
a plain design. That he had not merely sent in his resignation was
because--so it would seem--he was altogether too proud to admit that he
had in any way been in error; he was not even willing to make such an
admission in an argument, and now he had been guilty of a triple error:
believing in the justice of the constitutional tendency of the emperor;
seeking the post of ambassador to Washington; and finally not giving
up his post at once, when the odious comedy of universal suffrage in
May had shown what the constitutional temper of the emperor indicated.
The declaration of war, in his eyes identical with the downfall of
France, caused him to prefer death to a position in which he could not
consistently remain, and from which he was unable to withdraw without
a humiliation far worse to him than death. This solitary pistol-shot,
resounding across the ocean as the signal of many hundred thousand
terrible volleys, deeply affected the friends and companions of Prévost
Paradol's youth. Taine, who had been making a brief trip to Germany,
where he went to collect materials for an essay on Schiller, which
had been interrupted by the war, was profoundly moved by the thought
of the impending crisis. "I have just come from Germany," said he,
"and have conversed with so many industrious and excellent men. When
I consider how much trouble it costs to bring a human child into the
world, to tend it, bring it up, educate it, establish it in life; when
I, furthermore, consider how many struggles and hardships this child
must itself undergo in order to gain preparation for life, and then
reflect that all this must now be cast into a ditch as a mass of bloody
flesh, I can do nothing but mourn! With two regents of the nature of
Louis Philippe, we might have succeeded in escaping the war; with two
chieftains like Bismarck and Louis Napoleon, it became a necessity."
He was at that time the first Frenchman whom I heard take into
consideration the possibility of German superiority.
Then came a series of shocks in the first tidings of great defeats,
only varied by false rumors of victory directly after the battle at
Weissenburg. Dejected and sorrowful was the prevailing mood in the
city in those days, when the proclamations at the street comers told
of armies put to rout and lost battles; but more fearful still was the
mood on that 6th of August, when the first half of the day was passed
in the mad intoxication of triumph over victory, the last half in
mortified despondency. How great would have been the humiliation had
there been the slightest foreboding of the battle of Wörth, whose fate
was at the same moment sealed! When, early in the morning, the news of
great victories spread through the city, all Paris covered itself with
banners; the citizens walked the streets with little flags in their
hats; all the horses had little flags on their heads. I sat in front
of a café, opposite the "Hôtel de Ville," gazing at the houses about
the public square that were decked with hundreds of small flags, when
suddenly there appeared, at the window of a house near me, a hand that
hastily drew in the flag there floating in the breeze. Never shall
I forget that hand, or that act. Trifling as was the occurrence, it
startled me; for there was something so sorrowful about the movement
of the hand; something in its appearance testifying so plainly of
disappointment, that the thought immediately flashed through my mind:
"The news of victory must be false!" Soon hands were seen at all the
surrounding windows; the flags quickly disappeared, and in quarter of
an hour the whole banner decoration seemed as though it had been blown
away by the wind. A proclamation from the government had declared
that nothing at all was reported that day from the scene of war, and
that the police were on the track of the promulgators of false news,
in order to punish them severely. The promulgators of false news! As
though the hungering imaginations and the languishing yearning of the
great city were not the only guilty ones!
About a week later, on the 12th of August, I met Renan. He had returned
from the far North before the appointed time. I have never seen him
so deeply moved. He was desperate; this trivial word is the only
appropriate one. He was beside himself with exasperation. "Never," said
he, "was an unhappy people so governed by imbeciles as we are. One
might have supposed that the emperor had had an attack of insanity.
But the fact is, he is surrounded by the most contemptible flatterers.
I know officers of high rank, who were well aware that the Prussian
cannons far surpassed our much-lauded _mitrailleuses,_ but; who dared
not tell him so, because he had taken an active part in the preparation
of these machine-guns himself, had done a little drawing on the design,
which is expressed in official language by the statement that he is
the inventor of the _mitrailleuse_. Never was there so great a lack
of brains (_si peu de tête_) in an imperial ministry; he was himself
sensible of it. I am acquainted with a person to whom he said so,
and yet he undertook a war with such a ministry. Was ever such folly
known? Is it not heart-rending? As a people, we are vanquished for a
long time to come. And to think that all that we men of science have
been striving to build up for the past fifty years--sympathy between
nations, mutual understanding, fruitful co-operation--is overthrown
with one blow. How such a war destroys the love of truth! What lies,
what calumnies, will not for the next fifty years be eagerly believed
by one people of the other, and separate them from one another for
immeasurable time! What a delay of European progress! We cannot raise
up again in a hundred years what these people have tom down in a day."
No one could have been more grieved at the rupture between the two
great neighbors than Renan, who had so long stood in France as the
representative of German culture. Nor could any one have spoken with
greater gratitude than he, of German thought. One of his favorite
remarks was: "There is nothing that can hold so much as a German head."
He seemed to have little liking for the Germans personally, but he
spoke with respect of their noble intelligence. To the South German,
however, in every other respect than in a capacity for the affairs
of government, he ascribed a far higher endowment than to the North
German, an opinion shared by the majority of cultivated Frenchmen.
In speaking of his journey, Renan said: "We were in Bergen when the
first ambiguous tidings of the threatened war reached us from France.
None of us could deem it possible. The prince and I looked at each
other. He who possesses so rare and so keen an intellect merely said,
'It cannot be,' and gave orders to continue our journey. We sailed
to Tromsöe. When we reached that place two despatches awaited the
prince, one from his secretary in Paris, and another from Emile
Ollivier with these words: '_Guerre inévitable!_ 'We held a brief
council, but so irrational did the affair appear to us, since Leopold
von Hohenzollern had withdrawn his candidacy; so impossible did it
seem that this pretext could incite all Europe, and especially all
Germany, against us; and, finally, so great was our desire to sail to
Spitzbergen and see 'the great icebergs,' that we resolved to depart
the next morning. We went to bed. My room was situated next to that of
the prince's adjutant. Early in the morning I heard the valet awaken
the adjutant with a despatch. I rose, we went on board, the ship set
sail, and you may fancy my astonishment when I saw that we were taking
a southward course. The prince sat in despair, staring fixedly before
him. The first words he uttered were: '_Voilà leur dernière folie, il
n'en feront pas d'autres_.' He was a true prophet; this will be their
last folly." "I myself," added Renan, "was of the same opinion. I
knew how badly we were prepared, but who could have dreamed that the
crisis would come so soon! Do not say that we may yet be victorious.
We will never be victorious again; we have never, under this emperor,
conquered, in a definite way, any tribes whose subjugation could serve
as a happy omen, when Prussia was in question. The Arabs are the
poorest tacticians in the world." More than once he broke out with
the words: "Was such a thing ever heard of before! Poor prince! Poor
France!" He was so vehement that he exhausted himself in imprecations
on all the leading men; according to his words, at this time uttered
with little regard to shades of meaning, they were all weak-minded
creatures, or villains. "What is this Palikao?" he cried. "A thief,
a pronounced thief, to whom our best houses are closed; and does not
every one know that one of his colleagues is a criminal, a murderer,
who has only escaped capital punishment by flight! And in the hands of
such men lies our fate!"
I saw tears in his eyes, and I bade him adieu. I have never seen him
since that day. He quickly regained his composure and the control of
his grief; but in that sorrowful outburst Renan was another man than
when he wrote, "The savant is a spectator in the universe. He knows
that the world belongs to him only as an object for study; and even
if he could reform it, he would perhaps find it so curious an object
that he would lose all desire to do so." It is scarcely likely that
Renan was altogether in earnest when he uttered these audacious and
aristocratic words; but even if he was, the emotions he experienced in
the year 1870 would have inclined him to repudiate them.
It is difficult to estimate how demoralizing an influence, during the
second empire, life under the dominion and pressure of the "_fait
accompli_" exercised on the French savant. A tendency to quietism
and fatalism, to the approval of everything that had once been
accomplished, characterized beyond all else French moral science under
Napoleon III. Traces of its influence could be observed everywhere in
social life and in conversation. Entire freedom from enthusiasm was
looked upon as almost equivalent to culture and ripe scholarship. A
young foreigner had daily opportunity to marvel over the reserve and
the passiveness of even the best of these people, as soon as there
arose any question of a practical reform; and I remember well coming
home one evening in May, 1870, very much out of humor, and writing in
my note-book: "There was once another France." Once, indeed, there had
been a wide-awake, enthusiastic, poetic France, keenly alive to the
needs of humanity. It seems as though such a France must gradually
arise from the debasement, which, even if it brought with it no other
good, at least has given all aspiring souls a new impetus toward the
truth.
With changeful emotions Renan has watched the development of republican
France. Although the republicans almost immediately restored to him
his professorship, their demeanor toward him, as well as toward the
other friends of Prince Napoleon, was rather cool and reserved.
Thoroughly aristocratic in his views as he is, he gave the democrats
to understand in his "Caliban" how exceedingly little he esteemed
them; yet in a letter written shortly afterward to a German friend,
in explanation of his speech on entering the French Academy, he said:
"What now, if, while your statesmen are absorbed in this thankless
task of chastising and trampling under foot, the French peasant, with
his rude understanding, his unvarnished politics, his labor, and his
savings, should happily found an order-loving and enduring republic!
Would it not be droll?" He is patriot and philosopher enough to become
friendly, in the course of time, to any form of government which
satisfied the majority of his fellow-countrymen, and corresponded to
their intellectual standpoint.
Renan, as it is well known, is a native of Brittany, and has all the
peculiarities of his race. The Bretons, in modern French literature,
are distinguished by a common trait. Like Chateaubriand and Lamennais,
Renan hates the commonplace, the easy-going, frivolous tone; and
although a victim of doubt, he has the most ardent need of a faith
and an ideal. For his narrow fatherland he cherishes a most profound
attachment. In a hopeful moment he has even apostrophized his race
with the words: "O simple clan of farmers and seamen, to whom, in an
extinguished land, I owe the strength to preserve my soul alive!"
We must not place too literal an interpretation on this outburst of
feeling. No one realized more profoundly than Renan how far from
being extinguished was that France of which he wrote to Strauss, that
it was essential to Europe as "a lasting protest against pedantry and
dogmatism." But the remark is characteristic of the at once obstinate
and restless, enthusiastic and sceptical child of Brittany. If he
renounce his faith in any one particular, as he here lost faith in
France, it is only to adhere elsewhere with all the warmer enthusiasm
to an ideal. In religion, too, he has a Brittany in which he believes.
[Illustration: ESAIAS TEGNÉR]