We have been carried on a few years too far by following Lamennais
to the period of his conversion to democracy. At the time of the
completion of his book on indifference in the matter of religion,
that is in 1823, he, like all the other adherents of the principle of
theocracy, still aimed at strengthening the authority of the monarch by
means of the authority of the church.
Presently the particular monarch in question dies, and Charles
X. ascends the throne. He ascends it with all possible pomp and
ceremonial. He is taken to Reims to be anointed. The ceremony was
performed on the 20th of May 1825, and it seemed as if the old royalist
and religious superstitions had risen from their graves for the
occasion. One of the oldest of these was the belief that crowned heads
possessed the power of curing scrofula. This power had been regarded as
absolutely indisputable. A lady of Valenciennes, who had been touched
by Louis XV., and who afterwards, in the hope of getting into favour,
sent in a medical certificate that she was entirely cured of scrofula,
received the answer: "The privileges which the Kings of France enjoy
in the matter of the healing of scrofula have been attested by such
conclusive proofs that they require no further confirmation."
This was under Louis XV. Under Charles X. people showed themselves
no less orthodox. We remember that at the time of the Revolution the
ampulla containing the sacred oil was shivered into fragments. In
the eyes of pious Catholics this was sacrilege of the deepest dye.
Gregory of Tours, the earliest chronicler who tells of the baptism
of Clovis, has evidently no idea that this little fig-shaped vial of
heavenly anointing oil was used on the occasion. But some centuries
later various traditions on the subject were committed to writing,
some of them telling that the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove, others
that an angel, had deposited it in the cathedral of Reims; and these
traditions, which had survived as popular beliefs, were now freshened
up again. The man who had been priest at the church of St. Remi at
Reims in 1793, and from whom the sacred ampulla had been taken by
force, came forward and declared that before giving it up he had
extracted most of the congealed oil which it contained; and this he
now produced.[1] Another of the faithful asserted that at the time the
sacrilege was committed he had collected some fragments of the ampulla,
which he had kept until now. The priest and the church officials
recognised these fragments as genuine.
So Charles X. was able to rejoice his subjects with the intelligence
that he was to be anointed with the sacred oil of Clovis. The fragments
of the old ampulla were introduced into a new one, covered with gold
and precious stones, and the precious drops were diluted with others.
Particulars of the anointment have already been given in connection
with the coronation of Napoleon. At ten o'clock on the morning of the
following day, the King mounted a beautiful white horse and rode in
the midst of a brilliant retinue, and attended by a troop of hussars,
to the hospital of St. Mark. There the chief physician to the royal
household awaited him at the head of a band of 121 persons afflicted
with scrofula. The King, after offering a short prayer in the hospital
chapel, set boldly to his task of curing them. The famous surgeon
Dupuytren was not ashamed to hold the heads of some of the patients
during the comedy.
Lamartine celebrated the anointment of Charles X. in a cycle of poems
(_Chant du sacre_) and Victor Hugo in an enthusiastic ode. But on the
occasion of the same memorable event there was also written a little
song which led to its author's prosecution and punishment. The song was
called _Sacre de Charles le Simple_, and the name of its writer was
Béranger.
The tone of Victor Hugo's ode, _Le Sacre de Charles X_, was, as the
following verse shows, orthodox, Biblical, and royalist:
Mais trompant des vautours la fureur criminelle,
Dieu garda sa colombe au lys abandonné.
Elle va sur un Roi poser encor son aile:
Ce bonheur à Charles est donné!
Charles sera sacré suivant l'ancien usage,
Comme Salomon, le Roi sage,
Qui goûta les célestes mets,
Quand Sadoch et Nathan d'un baume l'arrosèrent,
Et, s'approchant de lui, sur le front le baisèrent,
En disant: "Qu'il vive à jamais!"
The tone of Béranger's poem was disrespectful in the extreme. He
apostrophises the sparrows, which, according to an old custom, had been
driven into the church to fly about there, and charges them to guard
their liberty better than human beings have guarded theirs:
Français, que Reims a réunis,
Criez: Montjoie et Saint-Denis!
On a refait la sainte ampoule,
Et, comme au temps de nos aïeux,
Des passereaux lâchés en foule
Dans l'église volent joyeux.
D'un joug brisé ces vains présages
Font sourir sa majesté.
Le peuple s'écrie: Oiseaux, plus que nous soyez sages,
Gardez bien, gardez bien votre liberté!
O oiseaux, ce roi miraculeux
Va guérir tous les scrofuleux.
Fuyez, vous qui de son cortège
Dissipez seuls l'ennui mortel;
Vous pourriez faire un sacrilége
En voltigeant sur cet autel.
Des bourreaux sont les sentinelles
Que pose ici la piété.
Le peuple s'écrie: Oiseaux, nous envions vos ailes.
Gardez bien, gardez bien votre liberté!
Gardez bien votre liberté!
With the exception of Delavigne, who is a direct descendant of the
eighteenth century writers, and who in his _Méseniennes_ shows himself
to have been an equally ardent revolutionist and patriot, Pierre de
Béranger was the only poet who had kept aloof from the dominant group
of thinkers and talented writers. Born in 1780, he was nine at the time
of the storming of the Bastille, which event left as ineffaceable an
impression on his mind as did those writings of Voltaire which he read
in his childhood. The following anecdote will serve to show how early
he arrived at definite conclusions on religious matters. One day when
he was only thirteen years old he was standing laughing scornfully at
his aunt, who was sprinkling the room with holy water during a dreadful
thunderstorm, when a flash of lightning came into the room, passing so
close to him that he fell to the ground unconscious. He was so long in
recovering that it was feared he was dead. The first thing he did when
he opened his eyes was to call triumphantly to his kind, pious aunt:
"Well, was your holy water of any use?" The anecdote has an air of
truth, and it is told in depreciation of him by orthodox writers. It
was in this same spirit that he now attacked the Bourbons, and their
holy water was of no use to them.
At the very time when they were making themselves ridiculous there
occurred a remarkable phenomenon. A poetic halo developed round the
once hated name of Napoleon. He was transformed from a historical into
a mythical figure; during his own life-time he became a legendary
hero. The compulsory inactivity which suddenly followed on a display
of energy that had kept all Europe in constant agitation, powerfully
affected the popular imagination. There was in reality no element of
greatness in Napoleon's compulsory second abdication, and his plan
of placing himself under the protection of England was simply a rash
one. But the ignoble manner in which the English treated him added
to his fame. The far-off, lonely island in the middle of the great
ocean became, as it were, a pedestal for the heroic figure. The real
Bonaparte was transformed into an ideal Napoleon. History made him over
to poetry and legend.
Even his former enemies could not restrain an expression of admiration
for the man in whose direction all eyes turned. Chateaubriand gave
utterance to the famous saying, "that Napoleon's grey coat and hat upon
a stick, planted on the coast at Brest, would be enough to make all
Europe take up arms."
Béranger wrote the soulful poem _Les souvenirs du peuple_, which
perhaps gives us the simplest and most beautiful picture of the
legendary hero, but also that which has least resemblance to the real
man, for it makes him out to be as kindly as he is great. It is the
poem which begins:
On parlera de sa gloire
Sous le chaume bien long-temps:
L'humble toit, dans cinquante ans,
Ne connaîtra plus d'autre histoire.
The reminiscences of the Emperor are put into the mouth of the old
grandmother, who at different periods of her life has seen him--first
as the victorious general, then as the happy father on his way to Notre
Dame, then as the defender of France against the allied armies. A good
specimen verse is:
Mes enfants, dans ce village,
Suivi de rois, il passa.
Voilà bien long-temps de ça:
Je venais d'entrer en ménage.
À pied grimpant le coteau
Où pour voir je m'étais mise
Il avait petit chapeau
Et redingote grise.
Près de lui je me troublai!
Il me dit: Bon jour, ma chère,
Bon jour, ma chère.
Il vous a parlé, grand'mère,
Il vous a parlé!
The young men who not long ago had been thankful to break their ranks
and escape from the tyranny of military discipline, now began to look
back with longing to the heroic days of the Consulate and the Empire.
They had been dreaming, writes De Musset, of the ice of Russia and
the sun of the Pyramids, and the world of the day seemed an empty,
colourless world. "The King of France sat upon his throne, and some
held out their hats for him to throw an alms into them, and others
held out crucifixes, which he kissed. And when boys talked of glory,
the answer was: 'Become priests!' and when they talked of honour, the
answer was: 'Become priests!' and when they talked of hope, of love, of
energy and life, it was still: 'Become priests!'"[2]
And so they became priests. Why and how they did it we can learn from
the novels which describe the life of the period, such as Beyle's
_Rouge et Noire_. This was undoubtedly the priests' golden age. On the
7th of June 1814, three days after the publication of the Charter, the
notorious law was passed which prescribed compulsory observation of
Sundays and holy-days. Frenchmen were to be Catholics under penalty of
fine. Even the adherents of other creeds were obliged to decorate their
houses on the occasion of processions of the Holy Sacrament. On the 7th
of August 1814 the order of the Jesuits was solemnly re-established.
The education of the country was placed in the hands of the clergy. As
much of its power as possible was taken from the University, if for no
other reason than because numbers of the students had taken part in the
defence of Paris against the foreign troops, _i.e._ the allies of the
monarchy.
At this time there begins within the Catholic Church itself a short
process of fermentation (to which Joseph de Maistre's and Lamennais'
feud with Gallicanism belongs), which in the course of a score of
years produces the hitherto unknown phenomenon of perfect unity among
Catholics. Catholicism and submission to Rome become one and the
same thing. And another, kindred phenomenon, quite as unheard of, is
witnessed in our century. Religious unity spreads even beyond the
bounds of the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant Church holds out
its hand to the Catholic, which in days gone by it had abominated as
the Babylonian whore. Glancing at the later religious development of
the century, we find that in our days the difference between orthodox
Protestantism and Catholicism is only an apparent difference, only the
difference between faith in the infallibility of the Bible and faith
in the infallibility of the Pope. The Protestants reject the reason of
the eighteenth and the scientific criticism of the nineteenth century;
they go back to the creeds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and do not consider even these orthodox enough; Luther is too advanced
for them. Schleiermacher is regarded as a free-thinker by orthodox
Germany; Bossuet's attitude is reprobated by French Catholics. He is
considered a heretic, in as far as he asserted the independence of
the French church. We remember that Joseph de Maistre disapproved of
him. Even Montalembert, in his book on the interests of Catholicism
in the nineteenth century, mentions him in a condemnatory tone. But
the movement does not stop here. The contributors to the Catholic
newspapers and periodicals take to writing historical articles which
constitute a regular crusade against the great pagan geniuses who
founded the civilisation of Europe, such as Pindar, Plato, Virgil.
In Danish literature we have an equivalent in Grundtvig's earliest
historical pronouncements.[3] Hence Montalembert, in the work just
referred to, is able to declare triumphantly: "Lying history, parodied
history, declamatory history, as written by Voltaire, Dulaure, and
Schiller, the men who educated our fathers, would hardly be put up with
to-day, even in a feuilleton." A glance through Lamennais' letters is
sufficient to persuade us that one great cause of the Revolution of
July was the behaviour of the clerical party. The Jesuits acted as the
storming force of fanaticism. Missionaries, whose fervent faith was due
to their gross ignorance, were sent to all parts of the country. They
sometimes converted whole regiments at a time, and these were then led
by their officers in a body to the altar.
The worship of the Virgin developed in a way it had never done before.
Belief in Mary underwent the same change that belief in Christ had done
in ancient days, only more quickly. She was gradually transformed from
a human into a divine being.
Let us for a moment follow the course of the religious reaction beyond
the period under consideration, and we shall see that this movement has
progressed with giant steps. The dogma of Mary's immaculate conception,
from which, in the twelfth century, the Middle Ages shrank, has been
finally accepted and sanctioned. Mary imperceptibly supplants Christ
and becomes the deity of France, as she already was of Italy and Spain.
In one of the manuals used in the education of Catholic priests[4]
we read: "The blessed Virgin is to be honoured as the spouse of God
the Father, because with her and in her he begot our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ; in her we honour all the divine and adorable perfections
with which God has endowed her by communicating to her in abundant
measure his fertility, his wisdom, his holiness, and his divine
fulness of life." In a work on the immaculate conception written by
Archbishop Malou, Mary is represented as being at one and the same
time the daughter of God, the spouse of God, and the mother of God;
so involved are his explanations of the relationships of the Trinity
that one of the conclusions we arrive at is that she is the daughter
of her own son. In a book by the Abbé Guillon, _Le Mois de Marie_, she
is represented as a kind of chief divinity, to whom consequently it is
safest of all to pray. "To be the mother of God means to have a kind of
power over God, to retain, if it is permissible to use the expression,
a kind of _authority_ over him." Authority thus culminates in the
Madonna.
The Mariolaters, in the manner of the schoolmen of the Middle Ages,
set about collecting proofs of the immaculate conception from the
writings of the Fathers. One ecclesiastic, Passaglia by name, collected
8000. Archbishop Malou declared himself able to produce not fewer
than 800,000 proofs of it. One's head begins to swim. On Mariolatry
followed, about the middle of the century, the recrudescence of the
worship of relics; for the relics which had stopped working miracles
at the time of the Revolution, began to work them again for the
generation educated by the Jesuits. In 1844 Bishop Arnoldi of Treves
began to exhibit the coat of our Saviour, a seamless linen garment
which is mentioned in a falsified clause introduced (as is convincingly
demonstrated by two German historians, J. Gildemeister and H. von
Sybel) between 1106 and 1124 into a proclamation of Pope Sylvester
(327) as having been given by the Empress Helena to the Cathedral of
Treves. It is affirmed to be the garment mentioned in the 19th chapter
of the Gospel of St. John as worn by Jesus before his crucifixion.
But besides the sacred coat at Treves, there are some twenty more in
other parts of the world, all claiming to be equally genuine. The
one in Galatia is much older than the one at Treves. The genuineness
of several of them is attested by papal briefs. In 1843 Gregory XVI.
ratified the genuineness of the coat at Argenteuil; but Leo X. had
already, in 1514, acknowledged the claim of the Treves coat, and its
champions would not bow to the new decree; the consequence was that
pilgrimages were made to both. Görres, in his _Historisch-politische
Blätter_, rejoices at the success of the great pilgrimage to the sacred
coat of Treves.
The religious reaction reaches its climax in the famous Encyclical of
Pius IX., which pronounces free thought to be the delirium of liberty,
anathematises civil marriage, separation of church and state, liberty
of religion, liberty of the press, liberty of speech, and the erroneous
idea that the church ought to make its peace with progress, liberalism,
and modern civilisation. But even more severely consistent than the
Encyclical are the apologies for it, the German Bishop Kettler's _Die
falsche und die wahre Freiheit_ and the French Bishop Dupanloup's
_La convention du 15 Septembre et l'Encyclique du 8 Décembre_, which
explain and justify the Pope's determined stand against "the insolent
repudiation of all the great truths which form the foundation of human
society." Let no one, however, imagine that these pamphlets are either
very sensational in tone or very full of glaring absurdities. Both in
manner and matter they have a strong resemblance to moderate articles
in a Danish Liberal newspaper.
To such results did the Neo-Catholic movement lead. But it is to be
noted that these results belong entirely to the domain of political
history, and in no way concern literature. _Every movement continues
to affect the course of general history long after it has ceased
influencing the history of literature_. It affects the latter as
long as it has, not only monarchs, nobles, and bishops, but men of
distinguished intellect and talent in its service. After 1830 this
is no longer the case with the religious reaction in France. The
difference between the reaction in 1820 and the reaction with which
exhausted and unhappy France was visited after the defeats and the
Commune of 1870-71, is that the former vigorous crusade against light
had almost every Frenchman of intellect and talent in its service, in
its army, whilst the latter could not boast of a single supporter with
any literary pretensions.
We have now to see how that first reaction came to an end. It was,
in the first place, attacked from without. The daily press began to
declaim against the spirit of antagonism to enlightenment; Béranger
sang his songs on the subject; one enterprising publisher, Touquet by
name, brought out between the years 1817 and 1824 thirty-one thousand
copies of the works of Voltaire (1,598,000 vols.) and twenty-four
thousand five hundred copies of the works of Rousseau. He was punished
and the sale of his books was prohibited; but this aroused such
exasperation that the _Globe_ prophesied a general apostasy from
Catholicism, whereupon the country was again inundated with the Touquet
editions.
The government next wreaked its vengeance on a master of language,
the rustic simplicity of whose satiric pamphlets proved an effective
offensive weapon.
Paul Louis Courier, born in Paris in 1773, was one of the cleverest
writers of the age. From his father, a rich bourgeois who in his youth
had narrowly escaped being murdered because he had had an amour with a
lady of rank, he inherited a burning hatred of the indolent and haughty
aristocracy. At the age of twenty he entered an artillery regiment and
served in the campaigns of the Revolution, but they only gave him a
loathing of war. From his earliest youth literature had had a strong
attraction for him, especially ancient literature, which he studied as
a philologist. In 1795 he left his regiment, which was then besieging
Mainz, without permission, and occupied himself with translating Latin
authors. In 1798 we find him again in the army, in Italy; presently
he is studying in Paris; then he returns to Italy in command of a
squadron of artillery. He keeps quiet during the Empire, and after its
fall lives the life of an agriculturist and Hellenist on his farm in
Touraine.
It was the persecution by the victorious clerical party of every
countryman, however insignificant, in whom they detected an enemy,
which induced Paul Louis Courier to appear before the public as an
author. In 1816 he wrote a _Petition to the Two Chambers_, employing
for the first time that plain, shrewd rustic style which, with the
purest Greek models in view, he was so successful in acquiring. In
simple, clear, always moderate language he tells of the injuries
inflicted by clerically disposed provincial tyrants upon unfortunate
peasants guilty of not having taken off their hats to a priest or of
having "spoken ill of the government." He confesses that there is
probably a good foundation for the accusations, since in his part of
the country the priests are not popular, and very few people know what
the _government_ is. Then he shows how imprisonment for six months
without a proper trial, and misery, sickness, and death brought upon
the children and other relatives of the prisoners, are the punishment
for perfectly trifling offences. Forty gendarmes are sent to a village
directly it falls under the suspicion of "Bonapartism"; the suspected
persons are taken naked from their beds and fettered like criminals.
"They are carried off; their relations, their children would have
followed them, if it had been permitted by authority. _Authority_,
Messieurs! that is the great word in France.... Everywhere we see
inscribed: _Not reasons, authority_. It is true that this authority is
not the authority of the councils or of the fathers of the church, much
less of the law; but it is the authority of the gendarmes, and that is
as good as any other."
Courier did not write books, or even what we generally call pamphlets.
He produced his effect with tracts of a few pages. In these, with
apparent naïve downrightness, in reality with consummate satiric art,
he kept up an agitation against the rule of the hereditary monarchy
until his assassination in 1825.
A gem of satiric humour is his _Pétition pour les villageois que l'on
empêche de danser_. Its occasion was the prohibition by hypocritical
magistrates and priests of dancing in the village market-places. He
unveils the hypocrisy which lies at the root of the new holy-day
regulations, and the harm which they do. He is perfectly aware of the
fact that these holy-days were originally ordained for the good of
the serfs and bondmen--but there are no serfs and bondmen in France
now. Once their taxes are paid, the peasants now work for themselves,
and to _compel_ them to be idle is ridiculous; it is worse even than
the old imposts; those at least benefited the courtiers, but idleness
benefits no one. He describes the hot-headed young village priests,
who fulminate against dancing and all other pleasures, and compares
them with the aged curé of Véretz, who is beloved by his flock for his
gentle goodness, but who is hated and persecuted by the authorities
because of his having sworn allegiance to the constitution at the time
of the Revolution. In a later tract Courier tells of the assassination
of this good old man. He writes of everything without resentment,
simply ejaculating with a sigh that comes from the heart: "Thy will,
O Lord, be done!" He cannot, however, resist adding: "Who could have
predicted this in the days of Austerlitz?"
He grants that the rural population is much more settled and much
happier now than it was before the Revolution, but he maintains that it
is also much less religious. "The curé of Azai, who wished last Easter
to have his canopy carried by four male communicants, could not find
four such in the village. The peasant is so happy in possession of the
land of which he has so lately become owner (the confiscated lands
of the nobility and the church) that he is entirely absorbed in its
cultivation, and forgets religion and everything else." Courier allows
that Lamennais is right in reproaching the people with indifference in
the matter of religion. "We do not belong to the number of the lukewarm
whom the Lord, as Holy Scripture tells us, spews out of his mouth; we
are worse; we are cold."
Nowhere do we find more graphic descriptions than in Courier's writings
of the state of society throughout France during the latter years of
Louis XVIII's reign.
He was again and again imprisoned for his pamphlets; but he did
not allow this to intimidate him. In his _Réponse aux anonymes qui
ont écrit des lettres_ he writes: "It is not my cleverness, but my
stupidity which has landed me in prison. I have put faith in the
Charter (_la Charte_); I confess it to my shame.... If it had not been
for the Charter I should never have dreamt of talking to the public
of the things that occupy my thoughts. Robespierre, Barras, and the
great Napoleon had taught me for twenty years to hold my tongue.... But
then came the Charter, and people said to me: 'Speak, you are a free
man; write away, print; the liberty of the press is secured along with
every other liberty. What are you afraid of?' ... So I said, with my
hat in my hand: 'Will you graciously grant us leave to dance in our
market-place on Sunday?'.... 'Gendarmes--off with him to the lock-up.
The longest possible term of imprisonment, a fine besides,' &c, &c."
In another letter he writes with perfect calmness, and yet with biting
severity, of the consequences of the celibacy of the priesthood. One
of the priests who had inveighed most fiercely against the harmless
peasant dances is discovered to be a seducer and murderer. Some years
back he had murdered a woman who had been his mistress. In this case
his fellow-priests attempted to throw the blame of the murder on
her husband. Since then he has murdered and cut in pieces a young
girl whom he had seduced. His superiors have sent him, unpunished,
across the frontier, so that he is now an honoured preacher of the
Gospel in Savoy. Courier shows what crimes, born of superstition and
covetousness, are committed in districts where the inhabitants are
so orthodox that nothing would induce them to eat meat on Friday; he
says: "This is the true faith--honest, childlike, without suspicion of
hypocrisy," and adds laconically: "They say that morality is founded
upon this."
The little satire entitled _Pièce diplomatique_ he was obliged to
publish privately. It is a letter supposed to be written by King Louis
to his cousin, Ferdinand of Spain, in 1823, after the war undertaken by
France to restore that depraved Bourbon to his throne had been brought
to a successful conclusion. In it Courier satirises Louis's attitude
to the constitution. His cousin will not hear of a constitution, but
Louis maintains that, far from being burdensome, it is agreeable and
advantageous to the king.
Extremely witty is the pamphlet _Simple Discours_, in which Courier
ventured to express his disapprobation of the proposal made by the
court party to raise a national subscription for the purpose of
purchasing the property and castle of Chambord for the heir to the
throne. The delicate little Duke of Bordeaux, afterwards Comte de
Chambord, was born so long after his father's death that his birth was
regarded as a miracle. Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and De Musset all sang
of this wonderful event, Lamartine and Hugo comparing the child to
Joash. The proposal to raise the national subscription was, thus, made
at a time when an enthusiastic feeling prevailed in loyalist circles;
but Courier, true to his principles, opposed it from his peasant
standpoint.
Soon all the historians, with the exception of Michaud, began to write
in a spirit ominous of danger to the restored monarchy. In 1823 Thiers
published the first part of his history, which produced much the same
effect as Béranger's songs.
The government of France had always been in the habit of supporting
literature. All the rulers of France had done so, with the exception
of Napoleon, and the Bourbons were expected to follow the example of
their ancestors. But they gave sparingly, in spite of the enthusiastic
welcome and homage which they received from both poets and prose
writers. On the few disaffected authors they revenged themselves to the
best of their ability; to punish Béranger, his rival, Désaugiers, was
made a court favourite; Delavigne was punished with the loss of his
post as librarian.
But more dangerous than the attacks from without were the germs of
dissolution which appeared within the school of authority itself. The
authors, both prose writers and poets, who formed the Immanuelist or
Legitimist group, felt their principles wavering.
We have already seen that Lamennais was on the verge of defection. And
his plight was the plight of all the others; the germs of the new were
stirring within them in spite of their sincere desire to defend the old.
This is particularly observable in the case of Alfred de Vigny, who
belongs to a generation a little younger than Lamartine, a little
older than Victor Hugo. His family, as we have seen, was royalist. His
father, who had been an officer and a brilliant courtier in the days
of Louis XV., lost all his property at the time of the Revolution.
After the fall of the Empire, Alfred, then sixteen, was equipped at
his father's expense and enrolled in the gendarme corps of the guards.
When the Hundred Days came, he attended the king on the first stages
of his flight; when they were over, he was made a lieutenant in the
royal foot-guards. But the time of active service was past, and
nothing remained but the tedium of garrison life; the young man sought
compensation in unremitted intellectual activity.
In his boyhood everything had been done to keep his thoughts from
turning to Napoleon and all that concerned him. Hence almost before his
schooldays were over he donned the white cockade and entered the guard
of the Bourbons. But the ungrateful Bourbons, ungrateful because they
believed that people owed everything to them, kept him waiting nine
years for promotion, when he became captain by seniority.
When he began to write, his books gave dissatisfaction at the stupid
court; though their whole tendency was royalist, they were regarded as
seditious. He was accused of liberalism because he exalted Richelieu at
the expense of Louis XIII. His father's early inculcations of devotion
to the house of Bourbon proved of no avail; he now began to see what
that devotion really was--"superstition, political superstition, a
groundless, childish old belief in the fealty incumbent on men of noble
birth, a kind of vassalage."[5]
Chivalry might, and did, induce him to preserve the outward appearance
of a royalist; he would, for instance, have defended the monarchy
during the Revolution of July if his services as an old officer had
been required; but at heart he was no longer a monarchist--though this
by no means implied that he was a democrat. "The world," he writes in
his diary, "is vacillating between two absurdities, monarchy by the
grace of God and the sovereignty of the people."
In the matter of religious faith he fell away even earlier. In spite
of all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers of his
youthful poems, he was suited for anything rather than a champion of
the faith. By nature he was melancholy and sceptical, so melancholy
that no ray of hope or momentary happiness seems ever to have
penetrated into his heart, so sceptical in regard to the creed which he
confessed with his lips that he nourished a kind of personal animosity
to the idea of God and of the immortality of the soul.
As early as 1824 we find him giving expression (in his diary) to his
conception of life in the following parable: "I see a crowd of men,
women, and children, all sound asleep. They awake in a prison. They
become reconciled to their prison and make little gardens in its yard.
By degrees they begin to notice that one after the other of them is
taken away, never to return. They neither know why they are in prison
nor where they are taken to afterwards, and they know that they will
never know it. Nevertheless, some among them tell the others what
becomes of them after their period of imprisonment--tell without
knowing. Are they not mad? It is plain that the lord of the prison, the
governor, could, if such had been his will, have let us know the charge
on which we have been arrested and all the particulars of our case.
Since he has not done it, and never will do it, let us be content to
thank him for the more or less comfortable quarters he has given us...."
There is much contempt in this for the theologians, with their
pretensions to knowledge, and much acrimony beneath the gratitude to
"the lord of the prison." He adds in the same tone: "How good God is,
what an adorable jailer, to sow so many flowers in our prison yard!...
How explain this wonderful, consoling pity, which makes our punishment
so mild? For no one has ever doubted that we are punished--we only do
not know for what."
Six years later, employing the same parable, he writes: "I feel myself
bowed down, O Lord, by the weight of a punishment which causes me
constant suffering; but as I neither know my crime nor the accusation
brought against me, I reconcile myself to my prison. _I plait straw_ in
order sometimes to forget it. For this is what human work amounts to. I
am prepared for all possible evils, and I thank Thee, O Lord, for every
day which has passed without any calamity!"
But two years after this he speaks out plainly: "The world revolts at
the injustices entailed by its creation; dread of eternity prevents it
from speaking openly; but its heart is full of hatred of the God who
created evil and death. When a defier of the gods, like Ajax the son of
Oileus, appears, the world approves him and loves him. Such another is
Satan, such Orestes, such Don Juan. All who have combated the injustice
of heaven have been admired and secretly loved by men."
De Vigny's diary shows that down to the very last days of the
hereditary monarchy the connection between the literary, merely
theoretical principle of authority and the practical, working principle
was perfectly well understood. Germinating Romanticism was not less
ardently opposed by the political opposition (who saw in the young
school a support of ecclesiasticism) than by the men who from principle
adhered to old tradition. De Vigny tells that he asked Benjamin
Constant during the winter of 1819 what was the cause of the extreme
disfavour shown by the Left to the poetry of the day. The answer was
that the party _wished to avoid the appearance of breaking every
chain_, and therefore retained the least irksome, the literary.
When the Revolution of July came, and put an end to the reign of the
Bourbons, Vigny's attachment to the ideas of the restoration came to
an end too. He writes: "I feel happy that I have left the army; after
thirteen years of ill-rewarded service I may regard myself as quits
with the Bourbons.... I have done for ever with burdensome political
superstition."
Lamartine, too, at this time showed signs of an intellectual
development of a suspicious nature. He continued to sing his pious
hymns, but the orthodox Genevan pastor, Vinet, discovered that this
piety was Christianity only in appearance, and that a most unorthodox
pantheism lay concealed beneath the Christian phraseology.[6]
And Victor Hugo, whom one would have taken, judging by his début, to
be more reliable, soon showed himself, not only by the style of his
poems, but by their tone, to be a doubtful acquisition. In 1822, in the
ode entitled _Buonaparte_, he had pronounced Napoleon to be a false
god, an emissary of hell; and even as late as June 1825, in _Les Deux
Îles_ (Corsica and St. Helena), he had caused the nations to shout in
chorus to the fallen Emperor: "Honte! Opprobre! Malheur! Anathême!
Vengeance!" and the curses of the dead, as the echo of his fatal glory,
to roll like thunder from the Volga, the Tiber, and the Seine, from
the walls of the Alhambra, from the grave at Vincennes (Enghien's),
from Jaffa, from the Kremlin which he had tried to destroy, from all
his bloody battle-fields. Now, a year and a half later, Hugo suddenly
strikes a different chord. In the first ode _À la Colonne de la Place
Vendôme_, written in February 1827, Buonaparte has become Napoleon, and
his glory the glory of France. The occasion of the ode was this. At the
conclusion of peace in 1814, Austria had demanded that the Frenchmen
to whom Napoleon had given titles which conveyed the idea of supremacy
over any Austrian town or province should cease to bear these titles.
This was all that was required, no objection being raised to titles
which merely recalled the French victories in Austria. The French
government had persuaded Austria to refrain from making the agreement
arrived at public, and the Austrian ambassador contrived to avoid
wounding French susceptibility by placing himself on his reception
evenings so near the door that it was not necessary to announce the
guests. But in the beginning of 1827 this ambassador was recalled,
and his successor was ordered by the Austrian government to decide
the matter finally. Consequently, on one of his reception evenings,
Marshal Oudinot, Duke of Reggio, and Marshal Soult, Duke of Dalmatia,
were simply announced by their military titles and their family names.
They immediately withdrew, and the affair aroused a great sensation and
considerable animosity. As the two officers in question were in high
favour with the royal family, the royalist party took up their cause
and made it the cause of France. Victor Hugo, who was created to give
expression to every prevailing sentiment, and who was conscious before
any one else of that movement in men's minds which in the course of a
few years was to transform Napoleon into a legendary and national hero,
made himself for the first time, in his ode _À la Colonne de la Place
Vendôme_, the organ of the cult of the great memories of the Empire.
The column, cast of the metal of conquered cannon, which roared as it
was melted in the furnace, speaks to the poet in the silent watches of
the night, in its character of last remnant of the great empire and
the great army. He hears a murmur from the bronze battalions on its
sides, hears the sound of names: _Tarentum, Reggio, Dalmatia, Treviso_,
sees the eagles on the pedestal whetting their beaks, and feels that
the immortal shades are awakening. Who dare think of wiping out this
history of France written in blood with the points of swords! Who dare
dispute the right of the old generals to the inheritance of Napoleon's
glory! Who dare strike at the trophies of France! Every spark struck
from the column is a flash of lightning. With magnificent eloquence and
ardent enthusiasm Napoleon's history is evolved into a heroic poem,
and any sagacious reader of that poem might have foreseen that in the
course of a year Hugo (in his poem "Bounaberdi," in _Les Orientales_,
the motto of which is: "Grand comme le monde") would go over to the
veritable cult of Napoleon. And since Bonapartism and Liberalism,
in those days shaded off into each other--_vide_ Béranger, Armand
Carrel, and Heinrich Heine--it would also have been easy to foresee
the possibility of his defining Romanticism a few years later (in the
preface to _Hernani_) as "liberalism in literature."
[1] See the notes to Lamartine's _Chant du sacre_.
[2] Alfred de Musset, _Confessions d'un enfant du siècle_.
[3] See Saisset, _La philosophic et la renaissance religieuse. Revue
des deux mondes_, 1853, tome i.
[4] _Manuel de piété à l'usage des seminaries_, 7 éd. Paris, 1835.
[5] _Journal d'un poète_, 47.
[6] See Vinet's interesting essays on modern French lyric poetry.