RESTORATION OF DIVINE RIGHT.
With the fall of the Dictatorship, an entire European system crumbled
away, and the Empire vanished in a shadow which resembled that of the
expiring Roman world. Nations escaped from the abyss as in the time of
the Barbarians; but the Barbarism of 1815, which could be called by
its familiar name the counter-revolution, had but little breath, soon
began to pant, and stopped. The Empire, we confess, was lamented, and
by heroic eyes, and its glory consists in the sword-made sceptre; the
Empire was glory itself. It had spread over the whole earth all the
light that tyranny can give,--a dim light, we will say, an obscure
light; for when compared with real day, it is night. This disappearance
of the night produced the effect of an eclipse.
Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris, and the dances of July 8 effaced the
enthusiasm of March 20. The Corsican became the antithesis of the
Bearnais, and the flag on the dome of the Tuileries was white. The
exile was enthroned, and the deal table of Hartwell was placed before
the fleur-de-lysed easy-chair of Louis XIV. People talked of Bouvines
and Fontenoy as if they had occurred yesterday, while Austerlitz was
antiquated. The throne and the altar fraternized majestically, and
one of the most indubitable forms of the welfare of society in the
19th century was established in France and on the Continent,--Europe
took the white cockade. Trestaillon was celebrated, and the motto,
_nec pluribus impar_, reappeared in the stone beams representing a
sun on the front of the barracks, on the Quai d'Orsay. Where there
had been an Imperial Guard, there was a "red household;" and the arch
of the Carrousel, if loaded with badly endured victories, feeling not
at home in these novelties, and perhaps slightly ashamed of Marengo
and Arcola, got out of the difficulty by accepting the statue of the
Duc d'Angoulême. The cemetery of the Madeleine, a formidable public
grave in '93, was covered with marble and jasper, because the bones of
Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were mingled with that dust. In the
moat of Vincennes a tomb emerged from the ground, as a reminder that
the Duc d'Enghien died there in the same month in which Napoleon was
crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the ceremony very close upon
that death, tranquilly blessed the downfall, as he had blessed the
elevation. There was at Schönbrunn a shadow four years of age, whom it
was seditious to call the King of Rome. And these things took place,
and these kings regained their thrones, and the master of Europe was
put in a cage, and the old regime became the new, and the light and
the shadow of the earth changed places, because on the afternoon of a
summer day a peasant boy said to a Prussian in a wood, "Go this way and
not that!"
That 1815 was a sort of melancholy April; the old unhealthy and
venomous realities assumed a new aspect. Falsehood espoused
1789; divine right put on the mask of a charter; fictions became
constitutional; prejudices, superstitions, and after-thoughts, having
article fourteen in their hearts, varnished themselves with liberalism.
The snakes cast their slough. Man had been at once aggrandized and
lessened by Napoleon; idealism, in this reign of splendid materialism,
received the strange name of ideology. It was a grave imprudence of
a great man to ridicule the future; but the people, that food for
powder, so fond of the gunner, sought him. "Where is he? What is he
doing?" "Napoleon is dead," said a passer-by to an invalid of Marengo
and Waterloo. "He dead!" the soldier exclaimed; "much you know about
him!" Imaginations deified this thrown man. Europe after Waterloo
was dark, for some enormous gap was long left unfilled after the
disappearance of Napoleon. The kings placed themselves in this gap,
and old Europe took advantage of it to effect a reformation. There
was a holy alliance,--Belle Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had
said beforehand. In the presence of the old Europe reconstituted, the
lineaments of a new France were sketched in. The future, derided by
the Emperor, made its entry and wore on its brow the star--Liberty.
The ardent eyes of the youthful generation were turned toward it; but,
singular to say, they simultaneously felt equally attached to this
future Liberty and to the past Napoleon. Defeat had made the conquered
man greater; Napoleon fallen seemed better than Napoleon standing
on his feet. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him
guarded by Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montcheme. His
folded arms became the anxiety of thrones, and Alexander called him his
insomnia. This terror resulted from the immense amount of revolution he
had in him, and it is this which explains and excuses Buonapartistic
liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to tremble, and kings sat
uneasily on their thrones, with the rock of St. Helena on the horizon.
While Napoleon was dying at Longwood, the sixty thousand men who fell
at Waterloo rotted calmly, and something of their peace spread over the
world. The Congress of Vienna converted it into the treaties of 1815,
and Europe called that the Restoration.
Such is Waterloo; but what does the Infinite care? All this tempest,
all this cloud, this war, and then this peace. All this shadow did not
for a moment disturb the flash of that mighty eye before which a grub,
leaping from one blade of grass to another, equals the eagle flying
from tower to tower at Notre Dame.