“Grandfather, it is eight o’clock in the evening.”
“I see your Republic--do you hear, Lambert? do you hear,
Juliette?--thrown to the ground by my Bonaparte. I repeat it, so that
you may hear: revolutions always end in empires.”
Grandmother, Blondeau, and especially my father and I, laughed heartily
at him.
At school, how excited and curious and frightened they all were! Half
the pupils were missing and were shut up at home, as it was thought
the revolution might spread in the provinces. The workmen of the glass
manufactory were all for the Republic. They would doubtless proclaim it
at Chauny, make a revolution on their own account, and perhaps commit
pillage.
Mademoiselle André and her younger sister sent for me as soon as I
arrived at school. They had long known of my father’s opinions and
guessed at mine. They wished to put themselves under our protection.
“Well, Juliette, how pleased your father must be at the news, as he has
always been a republican. Have you seen him?”
“Yes, Mademoiselle, he came yesterday, and he is overjoyed. He says
that France is now, at last, worthy of her history; that she will
govern herself; that all the European nations will admire us, and
perhaps imitate us; that it is now the coming to power of the people,
of the real people, not the corrupted middle class, and that----”
“That will do,” said the elder Mademoiselle André, sharply. “Please
keep to yourself these beautiful opinions of your father. I forbid you
to speak of them here.”
“In the class-room, Mademoiselle?”
“In the class-room or at recreation.”
I looked Mademoiselle André straight in the face. I was nearly as tall
as she was. I answered:
“I cannot promise that, Mademoiselle, for we number a good many
republicans in school. And no one can forbid us to speak of, and to
love, the Republic.”
“But France has not accepted your Republic,” said Mademoiselle Sophie.
“She will accept it, Mademoiselle, for now the people can vote.”
The Mesdemoiselles André were torn by conflicting feelings--the
imperative desire to hush me, which I perfectly understood from the
tone in which Mademoiselle Sophie said: “Ah! Juliette, how sad it is
to be divided between being obliged to be harsh to the daughter of a
friend and the fear of irritating republican sentiments. When you next
see your father, Juliette, you can tell him from us how sincerely we
hope that his Republic will calm France instead of disturbing her.”
I made my curtsey and went into the class-room. Curious glances
followed me. I answered by signs that an important affair had happened.
All my schoolmates were aware of my having been called into the
drawing-room by “Mesdemoiselles.”
I had a tri-coloured cockade pinned inside my bodice. I took it out and
held it in the palm of my hand, under the half-raised cover of my desk.
I showed it to my neighbour, and slipped it into her hand; she did the
same to her neighbour. In an instant my cockade went the round of our
long table, unperceived by our governess. My friends knew then that
“Mesdemoiselles” had spoken to me about the Republic!
The class became highly excited; we were all restless and inattentive.
Not one of us had learned her lessons or written her exercises, and
there seemed to be but one answer:
“Mademoiselle, I have had no time for my lessons on account of the
Republic.”
“Mademoiselle, I have had no time to study, on account of the Republic!”
“I wonder what interest the Republic can have for you?” said our
governess, in a most disdainful tone, and shrugging her shoulders.
A voice was heard to answer, amid general silence. It was mine:
“Why, Mademoiselle, the Republic is most exciting to us!”
An approving murmur upheld me. Mademoiselle was silent, and looked
amazed at me, and I saw it struck her that if I had dared to answer her
as I had, it was because I thought I had the right to do so.
The exit of the class was something like a small riot.
It was our Republic, and we, the _Frondeuses_, owned it! The King in
exile, republicans and democrats in power, it was simply a triumph!
Surrounded and questioned, I did not know which of my friends to answer
first.
“What did Mesdemoiselles say to you?” was the general query.
I told them what had passed, and, if it had been possible, they would
have crowned me with laurels. “That was right! That is what I call
brave and firm; that was just the thing to say; your true republican
answer was what it should have been!” was the approving comment on my
action.
I repeated for my friends’ benefit every word my father had said:
“The Republic was marvellous; we were to have complete liberty and no
authority.” Doubtless, and especially now, in the beginning of things,
we were not to be impertinent to our governesses, but we should very
soon be able to make them feel that, although younger and less clever
than they, the Republic considered us their equals!
What discussions, what plans, what different ways of understanding
Government there were! “I would do this! I would act thus!” we said.
We each of us wanted so many different things, that it was agreed at
last that we, the initiated, the _Frondeuses_, should each make out
a programme, which should be read in recess next day, and that which
seemed to us the best form of government should be decided upon by
vote. Our young minds were filled with the current words of the day.
The uniting of “abilities” was decidedly quite insufficient as a
reform; on that point everyone agreed; everybody must vote, men,
women, and especially schoolgirls. We had conceived in our minds a
foreshadowing of true universal suffrage, and later we were firmly
convinced that we had invented it.
The opening of national workshops pleased my father greatly. He wrote
to me that at last the people were to be happy; that one hundred
thousand citizens were fed by the State and worked for it. He thought
at that time, with many others, that Louis Blanc was secretly at the
head of the founding and organizing of the national workshops, and his
confidence in them grew thereby.
“All other nations admire us, and all will later imitate us,” added my
father at the end of his long letter. “The Republic is to arm every
Frenchman, so that all shall be prepared to join in delivering other
nations.”
My father came to see us again in March. Alas! he seemed already very
uneasy. The national assembly was full of reactionists. The Montagne
had no authority. True, the establishing of the Republic had taken
everyone by surprise. Nothing was ready; certain reforms had been
pushed through, certain measures had been too hurried, but the feelings
of all the republicans were so noble, so proud, so disinterested, there
was such a belief among them in right, in justice, in the divine voice
of the people, that it was better not to be disquieted with their
indecision, nor to be too hard on mistakes already committed.
In my father’s opinion, the worst of it was the fact that the whole
world had its eyes upon us, and that the dream of a Republic and
universal fraternity could be realised only by the Republic of France
giving definitely, and at once, the example she owed to the world.
My father had just been elected Mayor of Blérancourt. His friends and
disciples would never have allowed another to hold power there, however
small that power might be, nor that he should not be able to possess
the possibility of realising all that his enthusiasm and generosity
promised for the Republic.
Grandmother and I went to Blérancourt to see them plant the tree of
Liberty, but it displeased us to behold my father attending this
ceremony dressed in a blue blouse. His tri-coloured scarf was tied so
as to show the red only. Already my father declared: “Of the three
colours, we like only the red.” White seemed to him too Legitimist, and
blue too Orléanist.
“Juliette,” asked grandmother, in my ear, as we were starting for the
ceremony, “do you like that blouse? does it not shock your taste?”
“It is partly blue, at any rate, grandmother,” I answered, laughing;
“and, with papa’s ideas, it might have been all red!”
A young poplar tree was brought and planted in a large hole prepared
for it in the market-place.
My father, since the Republic had been declared in the name of liberty,
had become reconciled with the priest, who now blessed the tree of
Liberty.
In his speech the priest declared that if the Republic realized the
evangelical ideals of its programme, incarnated in the names of
liberty, equality, and fraternity, it would be the finest form of
government existing; but, in order to accomplish this, it was necessary
that all republicans should be as sincere, as generous, and, he
cleverly added, as Christian in heart, if not in form, and as devoted
to the poor as the new Mayor.
In a speech full of ardour, which carried me away, and with a fiery
eloquence which fascinated grandmother, my father answered the
priest that no one could deny that the Republic, and its principles
of liberty, equality, and fraternity, was born from the Gospel;
that Christ was the first of all socialists and republicans; that a
true republican should possess all the Christian virtues, and that
Christianity was the finest human formula ever conceived.
I was amazed. My father added: “All that has reference to the
temporal power of the Church is admirable. It is more advanced than we
socialists in the understanding and the practice of association. We
have a great deal to learn from her, but it is time that she herself
should learn from us the worship of nature, and allow herself to be
penetrated by the truth of science!”
“My dear Mayor,” said the vicar to my father after the ceremony, “you
would accept the Christian religion with your eyes shut under the
condition that it should be heathenish.”
“In return,” said my father, laughingly, to the vicar, “accept my
heathen religion, springing from the love of nature, under the
condition that it inspires Christian virtues.”
“Never! never!” replied the vicar, smiling. “You have said that we
are in advance of you in the conception of association and of life in
common; we are also in advance of you from a religious point of view.
Christianity represents the present and the future!” And he added,
mockingly: “Paganism will continue to be more and more a thing of the
past.”
“So be it!” the Mayor replied, gaily, leading off the vicar, who came
to breakfast with us.
“I believe,” said my father, in the manner of one proposing a toast,
at the end of the repast, “in an absolute, undeniable way, that
the Republic is the consecration of liberty, of conscience, and
of tolerance, and I, as Mayor, will prove to you, reverend vicar,
with what largeness, what elevation of ideas, with what grandeur we
democratic-socialist republicans understand liberty!”
XXXIII
“OTHER TIMES, OTHER MANNERS”
My progress as a student suffered considerably from my serious
political preoccupation.
My father came to see us every week, most anxious to keep me well
advised of all passing events. He gave me cuttings, selected and
cleverly classified, from the _Democratie Pacifique_, and brought me
books, pamphlets, and proclamations. One would have thought that it
was very necessary that I should be instructed about the acts of the
members of the Provisionary Government and with the writings of those
who showed themselves the most ardent among the reformers. The study
of the French language, of history, geography, and literature, were
secondary things to the author of my being.
Besides, in truth, who knew whether the French tongue might not become
universal; whether the history of kings would be able to keep its
footing amid the events of the great revolutionary outburst; whether
the geography of our planet was not going to be changed in such a way
by the fraternity of peoples that it would be almost useless to learn
it under the form given to it by the odious past?
The future meant progress, light, new things! All the old forms were to
be banished. But, by a strange contradiction, which, however, seemed to
strike no one, this progress, this light, these new things continued to
be based on the evangelical principles of liberty, equality, and on the
morality of Christ, “the Precursor,” the first Socialist.
In the jargon of the epoch, the Republic of Pericles, of Socrates, of
Plato, mingled its history with that of the great French Revolution.
The beauty of Athenian art alternated with the porridge of Sparta; the
naked feet, or the _sabots_, of the soldiers of the fourteen armies
with the magnificence of the festivals of the Goddess of Reason.
There was no escaping the qualifications given to all men and to all
things--what we call “saws” to-day. The integrity of Saint-Just’s
character, Robespierre’s austerity, Danton’s power, Ledru-Rollin’s
love of the people, Proudhon’s overwhelming courage, the sublime
social theories of Pierre Leroux, of Cabet, of Louis Blanc, woman’s
superiority as shown by Tousseuel in his _Esprit des Bêtes_, and by
Fourier in his _Phalanstère_, and by George Sand--all this kind of talk
studded the speeches of orators in small towns and villages to such a
degree that many orations were almost identical, no matter what subject
was treated. To improvise was easy; the speakers simply wove phrases
together, and the sonority of the words lulled their listeners as a
well-known air will do.
The oratorical art of the Republic of 1848 in the provinces was
analogous to the music of the hand-organs which delighted the whole
land at that time.
When grandmother or grandfather begged my father to lay aside his fine
phraseology and do them the honour of initiating them into the details
of such of his governmental conceptions as could possibly be realised,
he answered:
“Anything is better than what existed before! we are about to take a
plunge into the unknown; no matter what happens, we shall at least come
out of the ruts in which the chariot of State has stuck in the mud for
centuries. The French Revolution made a grand effort to urge the horses
of the chariot to gallop, but Bonaparte bestrode them and drove them
back. It is for us to drive them forward again.”
In spite of his increasing reservation of opinion on certain men whom
he began to suspect of being lukewarm, my father’s optimism was as
sincere as my own. Illusions, the love of the unforeseen, of the
romantic, the absolute ignorance of the possibility of the realisation
of an idea, the most infantile simplicity held sway in my father’s mind
as it possessed the minds of the greater number of the men of 1848
whom I have known; but what a passion of devotedness moved them, what
thirst for sacrifices to be made for the holy cause of the people, what
generosity, what loyal abandonment of the privileges of their caste,
what sincere fraternity, what conviction that “the humble class” was
ripe for equality, what indignation against the appetite for enjoyment,
against egotism, against Guizot’s celebrated formula, “Grow rich!”
The men of 1848 were apostles and saints. At no other epoch has there
been more honesty, more virtue, more noble simplicity. They were not
political men, they were souls in love with the ideal. They were all
as sincere as my father; all have a right to absolute respect, and no
one could have lived beside them without honouring and cherishing their
memory.
They were old-fashioned, if you like. All parties become old-fashioned
in time, but how few men, before and since 1848, have possessed their
youthful hearts, their high inspirations, their love of devotedness and
of sacrifice!
My memory preserves their noble faces crowned with laurels, while the
lucky, the rich, opportunists, men of business and of politics, whose
aim was personal gain, those who, victorious, said to one another:
“It is our turn to enjoy!” who repeated among themselves: “The most
important attribute of power is the spoils”--such men are as vile in my
mind as is the vileness of their disciples.
Not one among the republicans of 1848 thought of obtaining a better
position from his passage to power, not one grew richer. If they did
not accomplish what they dreamed for the people, it was not because
they threw their principles overboard when they obtained possession
of the great city of Paris; it was because their conception of social
and human happiness was too beautiful to be realised, and because the
people, first of all, refused to make a trial of their theories.
Later, I knew the greater part of these “imbeciles,” as Ernest Picard
called them. They resembled my father. Their doubts--and they had
many!--were of too recent date to have dried up their souls; they no
longer believed in a divine Christ; they still believed in a human one.
They worshipped that mysterious Science which replaced for them the
supernatural, and which had not then brought all its brutality to light
in crushing man under machinery.
They were internationalists, not foregoing by so being their legitimate
pride of race, not accepting without resistance being conquered by an
enemy, not admitting or imitating the utilitarian ideas of national
groupings morally inferior to themselves, but in order to infuse into
other nations their principles of love and of regeneration.
My father said to me, towards the end of April, that he saw the
distance grow wider every day between his hopes and the actual events
taking place.
“I am afraid,” he added, “that our Republic will be only a rose-water
Republic, of the kind which some day will be dyed with blood. The
‘yellow gloves’ of the _National_ are the masters, and are delivering
the Republic over to ambitious men.”
My grandmother, on the contrary, declared herself quite satisfied with
the Republic, which she found in no wise frightful, as she had feared
it would be.
“Jean Louis, I am getting on very well with your Republic!” she would
say to my father.
At first my father answered: “Wait a little, mother;” later he replied:
“You are more satisfied than I am.” One day he burst forth: “By Heaven!
if the Republic suits you, it is because it is made for your benefit!
The Orléanists might as well return; they will have nothing to change
in favour of the middle class.”
My father became soon, in the most bitter sense of the word, a
malcontent. Of course I became a malcontent also.
XXXIV
I GO TO BOARDING-SCHOOL
I was a very aggressive malcontent moreover. My discussions with
grandmother became so violent that grandfather several times was angry
with me, and even Blondeau blamed me. My friend Charles, who would
probably have upheld me--for he was a revolutionist, as well as my
father and myself--had left Chauny to become the secretary of one of
his boyhood friends, a high functionary of the Republic, at Paris.
My father soon became greatly excited. “They are lying to us, they
are deceiving us, they are trying to put us to sleep,” he said, much
grieved, feeling his Christian-heathen-socialist-scientific Republic
escaping him.
My grandmother felt more and more secure. “Order is maintained, and
therefore the form of government matters little, after all,” she said.
Grandfather, when my father and I became more hopeless, said:
“Come, come, things are going very well for the Empire.”
But I made my grandparents very unhappy with my sorrow, my
recriminations, my imprecations. Life became insupportable,
intolerable, to all of us. It must have been the same, at that time, in
every family where there were idealists and sincere Republicans, those
who believed they could bring down the moon for the people, worthy, as
they thought them, of all miraculous gifts.
The national workshops, which had interested me so much, now made
me despair. Alas! they were going wrong. What! that admirable
conception--the State creating workshops to give employment to those
who needed it, to feed those who were dying of hunger; that benevolent,
protecting institution, a social safeguard against poverty, an
admirable example held up to all nations--was it to be dissolved?
Émile Thomas, who was at the head of these workshops, did not follow
Louis Blanc’s ideas, although he often said to the contrary. They
were beginning to suspect him of being the agent of “the man of the
Strasbourg and Boulogne riots.” Instead of organising the national
workshops, he disorganised them.
“The reactionists,” said my father to me, “endeavour to make it
believed that Émile Thomas is acting according to Louis Blanc’s ideas,
when, on the contrary, he is the worst enemy of those ideas. They wish
to render pure socialism guilty of the crimes they are committing in
its name. Trélat, the Minister of Public Instruction, cannot suffer the
national workshops; the Executive Committee abhors them, the middle
class has a horror of them, because it is afraid of them. What will
happen if, as the National Assembly, composed of reactionists, desires,
they abolish the workshops? A hundred thousand men thrown suddenly out
of work, on the streets of Paris, will cause terrible riots; there will
be a bloody revolution, in which reforms will be drowned, and that is
their aim.”
Ah! those hundred thousand men threatened with being turned into the
streets! I saw them unhappy, wandering about, without work, despairing,
while their wives and children were dying of hunger at home. I wept
over them. My heart was full of an immense pity for them, and, day by
day, I felt obliged to be kept informed of all that was taking place.
My grandmother, who had recently subscribed to the _National_, wished
to prevent my reading it, but I insisted on seeing it, and, while I
was revolted at the hatred of the “yellow gloves” for _my_ national
workshops, I kept myself informed about events until my father’s visits.
When I learned that Monsieur de Falloux was commissioned by the
National Assembly to furnish a plan of dissolution of the national
workshops, I knew that everything was falling to pieces.
My father said to me: “They are organising butchery; they wish to
dissolve the national workshops from one day to another. Trélat himself
sees the danger. He proposes to replace the workmen successively,
little by little. He has destituted Émile Thomas, seeing at last the
disorganising work he was accomplishing; he has given his son-in-law,
Lalanne, the place, and Lalanne is reorganising the workmen, but it is
too late, for the wolves of the National Assembly wish carnage.”
This nearly killed me. The people, the good people, so patient, so
generous, who had behaved so admirably in the fateful days of February,
were being urged to yield to the evil instincts of plunder from the
poverty imposed upon them.
I was so unhappy at all I felt, and my suffering came so much into
contradiction with my grandparents’ and Blondeau’s excessive hardness
of heart, who said: “Let them finish at once with the beggars!” that I
begged grandmother to allow me to return to Blérancourt with my father
on his next visit.