For the last five or six months, since it has been known that a prince,
nephew, cousin, and son of emperors or kings formerly very powerful, had
proposed to answer the libel, as he calls it, written by M. Taine about
Napoleon, we have been awaiting this reply with an impatience, a
curiosity which were equally justified,--although for very different
reasons,--by M. Taine's reputation, by the glorious name of his
antagonist, by the greatness, and finally the national interest of
the subject.
The book has just appeared; and if we can say without flattery that it
has revealed to us in the Prince a writer whose existence we had not
suspected, it is because we must at once add that neither in its manner
nor in its matter is the book itself what it might have been. Prince
Napoleon did not wish to write a 'Life of Napoleon,' and nobody expected
that of him,--for after all, and for twenty different reasons, even had
he wished it he could not have done it. But to M. Taine's Napoleon,
since he did not find in him the true Napoleon, since he declared him to
be as much against nature as against history, he could, and we expected
that he would, have opposed his own Napoleon. By the side of the
"inventions of a writer whose judgment had been misled and whose
conscience had been obscured by passion,"--these are his own words,--he
could have restored, as he promised in his 'Introduction,' "the man and
his work in their living reality." And in our imaginations, on which M.
Taine's harsh and morose workmanship had engraven the features of a
modern Malatesta or modern Sforza, _he_ could at last substitute for
them, as the inheritor of the name and the dynastic claims, the image of
the founder of contemporary France, of the god of war. Unfortunately,
instead of doing so, it is M. Taine himself, it is his analytical
method, it is the witnesses whom M. Taine chose as his authorities, that
Prince Napoleon preferred to assail, as a scholar in an Academy who
descants upon the importance of the genuineness of a text, and moreover
with a freedom of utterance and a pertness of expression which on any
occasion I should venture to pronounce decidedly insulting.
For it is a misfortune of princes, when they do us the honor of
discussing with us, that they must observe a moderation, a reserve, a
courtesy greater even than our own. It will therefore be unanimously
thought that it ill became Prince Napoleon to address M. Taine in a tone
which M. Taine would decline to use in his answer, out of respect for
the very name which he is accused of _slandering_. It will be thought
also that it ill became him, when speaking of Miot de Melito, for
instance, or of many other servants of the imperial government, to seem
to ignore that princes also are under an obligation to those who have
served them well. Perhaps even it may be thought that it poorly became
him, when discussing or contradicting the 'Memoirs of Madame de
Rémusat,' to forget under what auspices the remains of his uncle, the
Emperor, were years ago carried in his city of Paris. But what will be
thought especially is, that he had something else to do than to split
hairs in discussion of evidences; that he had something far better to
say, more peremptory and to the point, and more literary besides, than
to call M. Taine names, to hurl at him the epithets of "Entomologist,
Materialist, Pessimist, Destroyer of Reputations, Iconoclast," and to
class him as a "déboulonneur" among those who, in 1871, pulled down the
Colonne Vendôme.
Not, undoubtedly, that M. Taine--and we said so ourselves more than once
with perfect freedom--if spending much patience and conscientiousness in
his search for documents, has always displayed as much critical spirit
and discrimination in the use he made of them. We cannot understand why
in his 'Napoleon' he accepted the testimony of Bourrienne, for instance,
any more than recently, in his 'Revolution,' that of George Duval, or
again, in his 'Ancien Régime,' that of the notorious Soulavic. M.
Taine's documents as a rule are not used by him as a foundation for his
argument; no, he first takes his position, and then he consults his
library, or he goes to the original records, with the hope of finding
those documents that will support his reasoning. But granting that, we
must own that though different from M. Taine's, Prince Napoleon's
historical method is not much better; that though in a different manner
and in a different direction, it is neither less partial nor less
passionate: and here is a proof of it.
Prince Napoleon blames M. Taine for quoting "eight times" 'Bourrienne's
Memoirs,' and then, letting his feelings loose, he takes advantage of
the occasion and cruelly besmirches Bourrienne's name. Does he tell the
truth or not? is he right at the bottom? I do not know anything about
it; I do not _wish_ to know anything; I do not need it, since I _know_,
from other sources, that 'Bourrienne's Memoirs' are hardly less spurious
than, say, the 'Souvenirs of the Marquise de Créqui' or the 'Memoirs of
Monsieur d'Artagnan.' But if these so-called 'Memoirs' are really not
his, what has Bourrienne himself to do here? and suppose the former
secretary of the First Consul to have been, instead of the shameless
embezzler whom Prince Napoleon so fully and so uselessly describes to
us, the most honest man in the world, would the 'Memoirs' be any more
reliable, since it is a fact that _he_ wrote nothing? ...
And now I cannot but wonder at the tone in which those who contradict M.
Taine, and especially Prince Napoleon himself, condescend to tell him
that he lacks that which would be needed in order to speak of Napoleon
or the Revolution. But who is it, then, that _has_ what is needed in
order to judge Napoleon? Frederick the Great, or Catherine II.,
perhaps,--as Napoleon himself desired, "his peers"; or in other words,
those who, born as he was for war and government, can only admire,
justify, and glorify themselves in him. And who will judge the
Revolution? Danton. we suppose, or Robespierre,--that is, the men who
were the Revolution itself. No: the real judge will be the average
opinion of men; the force that will create, modify, correct this average
opinion, the historians will be; and among the historians of our time,
in spite of Prince Napoleon, it will be M. Taine for a large share.