(1.) _Documents Authentiques Annotés. Les Papiers Secrets du Second
Empire._ 4e édition. "Fiat lux." Bruxelles: Office de Publicité. 1870.
(2.) _La Guerre de 1870: l'Esprit Parisien produit du la régime
Impérial._ Par EMILE LECLERCQ. 5e édition. Bruxelles. 1870.
(3.) _Napoléon Ier, et son Historien, M. Thiers._ Par JULES BARNI.
Paris, Germer-Baillière. 1869.
(4.) _Histoire de Napoléon Ier._ Par P. LANFREY. Paris: Charpentier.
1867-70. Vols. I. to IV.
(5.) _Napoléon le Petit._ Par V. HUGO. Bruxelles. 1852.
(6.) _Romans Nationaux._ Par ERCKMANN-CHÂTRIAN. Paris: Hetzel. 1868-70.
_Histoire d'un Paysan, ou la Révolution Française racontée
par un paysan._
_Le Conscrit._
_Le Blocus._
_La Guerre._
_L'Invasion._
_Waterloo, etc._
(7.) _Louis's own Account of the Fight at Dame Europa's School._
Literally translated from the French. London: J. Camden Hotten. 1871.
Imperialism has fallen; and with it France has for the present
disappeared from among the great Powers. With Metz in foreign hands, she
is much in the same position as that of Paris when the Prussians had
turned upon her the guns of Mont Valérien. Her eastern frontier is
wholly exposed; she must feel as Lombardy did while Austria held the
Quadrilateral.
As far as material influence is concerned, France is become a
second-rate state. She must confine her aim to doing what she has so
often done before--influencing the world of ideas. She did this in the
Middle Ages in a way which we seldom sufficiently appreciate; she did it
in a less degree during the post-Reformation period, for then her own
religious wars and the preponderance of Germany had thrown her somewhat
into the shade; she did it most of all when the _Encyclopédistes_ began
to claim for her a definite position as the world's teacher. This
position she had not formally claimed before. Under the old _régime_ she
had been slowly getting welded together; feudalism, carried out more
'logically' in France than elsewhere, had kept her provinces almost as
distinct as so many little German kingdoms. Louis XI.'s policy, indeed,
did for the French _noblesse_ much what the Wars of the Roses did for
ours; and Louis XIV., by giving the higher classes a taste for Court
life, drew them together and trained them to a community of habits and
aims; but the mass of provincials were scarcely affected by this
centralization of a single class. Louis XIV., however, did one thing
more: he secured to Paris that fatal predominance which has ever since
made her the arbitress of the national destinies. While saying
'_l'état c'est moi,_' he so arranged that very soon the Parisians
could say, _Paris c'est la France_. The great writers, too, lent their
influence to glorify the capital: the town-loving spirit was strong in
them all. Paris got more and more supreme, while at the same time the
efforts of Government were divided between crushing out provincial
independence and meeting the ruinous expenditure of a Court always
luxurious and very often warlike. Hence a tendency in the old _régime_
to a more and more strictly personal government. Feudal liberties were
crushed; feudal tyranny was aggravated. The provincial parliaments, and
that of Paris into the bargain, gradually lost even the semblance of
power; and the old system degenerated into despotism.
The Revolution, while superficially breaking up this system, left
untouched those parts of it which some say are grounded on the
peculiarities of French character. It intensified centralization, and it
practised most oppressively that interference with the rights of the
individual which is of the essence of personal government. The very men
who so loudly proclaimed the principles of '89 were found most ready to
act on rules which led them straight to the lawless tyranny of the
Terror. Their 'ideas' were grand, but personal freedom was far too
trifling a thing to be allowed to stand in their way for a moment. In
one point the Revolution diverged from the old _régime_: it became
intensely and deliberately propagandist--bent, _i.e._, on carrying
forward, with the strength of the whole nation, the mission which the
thinkers of Voltaire's day had assigned to themselves. We often find
that the man who believes in nothing in particular is the most violent
in opposing the beliefs of others. So it was with the leaders of the
Revolution: they were mad to spread their doctrines over Europe; and
their doctrines being those of Paris, Paris became (in Frenchmen's eyes)
the recognized head, not of France only, but of the civilized world.
Imperialism was at first a reaction from despotic anarchy; the dread of
another Terror made the French welcome with delight a man who seemed
strong enough to be 'the saviour of society.' So it was again in 1849,
when the Socialist struggle in which 13,000 Parisians perished so
alarmed the successful 'bourgeois,' that to prevent its repetition they
condoned the _coup d'état_. Ideas, it was said in 1795, were ruining
France; the men of ideas had been beaten in the field; Imperialism
therefore meant military glory as the basis of French prosperity.
Frenchmen were content to believe that (as M. Louis Blanc said the other
day at Bordeaux) 'glory and liberty are incompatible,' and deliberately
to choose the former.
Of course the Imperialism of 1852 differs somewhat from that of 1804,
but it is the same in its intense selfishness, and its thorough
insincerity. Under the second Empire, there have been commercial
treaties and alliances, and the working class has found good wages, so
long as it has been content with political nothingness; but the two will
be seen to be the same in principle. Each has the radical evil of
depending on success in war, or peace, or both, for its stability; and
this necessary instability makes them more hopeless as systems than the
old _régime_, with all its corruptness, or even than the wild theories
of the Republic.[211]
But it is needless to enlarge on the manifest causes which made a
hereditary monarchy stable so long as it is not wholly intolerable. The
same causes make the best of 'tyrannies' (in the Greek sense of the
word) unstable. Men as 'logical' as Frenchmen are sure to feel that if
such a government is not fulfilling the purpose of its creation, it had
better cease to exist; and feeling with Frenchmen generally means
action.
The first Napoleon had immense success on his side; he 'saved France,'
in his own fashion, and so long as he was successful, very few Frenchmen
cared to inquire into the soundness of the method employed. The third
Napoleon had in his favour the remembrance of his uncle's success, and
the fact that the _règne du bavardage_ had failed as completely in 1849
as it had done in the days of the Directory. Both were helped, too, by
the systematic lying of their newspapers, which, amid the enforced
silence of all who would not speak as they did, could say what they
pleased without fear of contradiction. Both, too, were able
administrators: Louis points out, in 'his own Account of the Fight at
Dame Europa's School'--a bitter satire on the selfish insincerity of
Imperialism--how hard he worked for years, and how by repressing them
with one hand and giving them employment with the other, he controlled
the terrible Paris _canaille_. This is, in fact, his solitary claim for
forgiveness. But both fell when the moment of pressure came, and the
fall of the nephew is irreparable: for him there can be no 'hundred
days;' even the boundless capabilities of treachery which he found in
Bazaine failed to do anything but seal his fate by convincing France
that, whereas the uncle shed French blood like water in support of his
selfish ambition, the nephew actually paltered with the enemy, and
betrayed the strongest fortress in the country, in the vain hope of
securing foreign support.
It is plain to the most superficial observer that of all the things
which have collapsed in France since last July, none has collapsed so
hopelessly as Imperialism. When the ex-Emperor rushed into war as the
only way of staving off a revolution, France showed herself (as she so
often has done at critical periods of her history) culpably passive.
There were complaisant prefects who assured his Majesty that his people
went with him heart and soul; there were crowds, hired or not, such as
can always be collected in any great city, who shouted _Vive la guerre_
and _à Berlin_; but the peasantry still believed that the Empire meant
peace; and when they afterwards found war come upon them, they fancied
(so strong was their faith in Napoleon) that it was the Prussians who
were the aggressors. Just in the same way on the eve of the Spanish war,
in 1808, the servile Senate said: 'Sire, the will of the French people
goes along with you. This Spanish war is just and necessary. Fathers
envy their sons the glory of rushing to join your ranks, and of winning
another Marengo and another Austerlitz.' And this farce was kept up at a
time when the conscription had grown so odious that the Government had
to imitate Louis XIV.'s _dragonnades_, and to quarter _garnisaires_ upon
the families of those lads who had escaped to the woods, or had fled
across the frontier.
France was passive in July, 1870, as she was more than once during the
first Napoleon's career; the difference is, that the nephew's army, on
which he was supposed to have lavished so much thought and money, and
which, since the _coup d'état_, he had pampered into prætorian
insolence, failed him utterly both for defence and offence; whereas the
uncle always had something which he could trust to fight well, if not to
win battles.
Since Sedan, France, no longer passive, has worked wonders; and every
step in her work has made a relapse to the old state of things more
impossible. 'The man of Sedan,' it was felt all along, could never
return, except behind Prussian bayonets. Had he, on that last fatal day,
cut his way at whatever loss through the encompassing host, and,
throwing himself on Paris, raised a _levée en masse_ to the old cry of
'the country in danger,' matters might have turned out very differently,
both for him and for France; but he could not have so acted without
denying his own principles. His whole career had been an attempt to
juggle with universal suffrage while practising the narrowest despotism,
and now to appeal in real earnest to popular principles, and to give the
pledges necessary to make that appeal a serious one, was an
impossibility for the man who had eagerly snatched at the chances of war
which the crafty Bismarck threw in his way, rather than honestly carry
out the liberal measures which he had at last been forced to adopt.
There is a point beyond which charlatanism cannot go. Thrice had the
uncle felt that this kind of appeal is useless when it is contrary to a
man's whole antecedents: once at Arcis-sur-Aube, when in the midst of
the battle, Sebastiani said, 'Are these all your Majesty's forces?'
'Every man I have.' 'Then does not your Majesty think of raising the
nation?' 'Nonsense: you're dreaming of the way they did things in Spain,
or here in France, in '91. How can you talk of raising a nation whose
nobles and priests have been destroyed by the Revolution, and whose
Revolution has been destroyed by me?' There was nothing, he felt, left
to appeal to. Again, on his return from Elba, wisdom said, 'Wait on
French soil, and crush the invaders at Paris and Lyons;' but this would
have necessitated an appeal to the nation and a pledge that all war
except defensive war should cease, and, as Colonel Charras says, in
words which seem almost prophetical of the events of last July, 'to
re-establish his despotism he could not do without the prestige of
victory: he thought to find it on the frontier, so thither he hastened.'
A third time, when, after Waterloo, Napoleon was among the remnant of
his troops at Laon, it was still free to him to show himself not only
the 'child of the Revolution,' but its legitimate offspring and its
protector. He still shrank instinctively from doing so: bolder, indeed,
than his nephew, he did go to Paris; but with the invincible dislike of
all his race to true freedom of government, he went there merely to see
if there was a chance of carrying on the war without making any real
political concessions.
So it was that, after Sedan, the nephew passed out of history: no amount
of plotting can restore the man who showed himself fool as well as
knave, who fell--not, like his uncle, under the blows of banded
Europe--but because he had allowed himself to be wholly deceived, both
as to the quality and composition of his own army and as to the
dispositions of neighbouring powers. France never can forgive such a
result of twenty years of personal government. But that the ex-Emperor
should disappear out of history is natural enough; the marvel is that he
ever became one of the makers of history. His success was due to the
vitality of the Napoleonic idea, nourished as it was after the
restoration by writers of all kinds--notably by the veteran statesman
who now, more than any one else, has made a return to Imperialism
impossible. For this total revolution in literature it is hard to give a
sufficient reason. Before the restoration, literature, when not venal,
was strongly anti-Bonapartist.'[212] After the Bourbons were restored,
writers began to extol Napoleon as industriously as before they had
decried him. This change was owing partly to French feeling against the
mode of his removal: it was a great humiliation; as Madame de Staël said
(deploring the return from Elba), 'It's all over with liberty if he
succeeds, and with the national independence if he is beaten.' The
nation felt that the peace of 1815 had compromised its independence;
and, in writing down the king who had been brought in by foreign armies,
literary men were acting as the mouthpiece of France. But this is not
all; wounded vanity did much. Under the Empire mind had been powerless,
unless, as in the case of Lacépède and other _savans_, it had submitted
to be the humble tool of force: when Sièyes said, 'I'll be the head and
that little Corsican shall be the arm,' he had quite unwittingly spoken
the truth; for, in Napoleon's system, the head was nothing and the arm
everything. Great, then, was the disappointment when under Louis XVIII.,
and still more under his successor, the head seemed almost as powerless
as before. The heart (if such a word may be used of the hollow system of
Popery) came into play; and, unless a man was _dévôt_, or seemed to be
so, ability of any kind served him little. Add to this the wilful
blindness of the Bourbons, who (it was soon seen) 'had learnt nothing
and forgotten nothing.' Their petty despotism disgusted the nation;
while the 'Memoirs of St. Helena' and a crowd of similar writings made
out, with a sophistry so barefaced that we should fancy it could never
have deceived even Frenchmen, that the Emperor had always acted as a
dutiful son of the revolution, according to the programme which himself
had laid down, that 'liberty, equality, and prosperity shall be
ensured.' Will the nephew ever venture to assert, as the uncle did in
1816, that his government was a constitutional and temperate monarchy,
and that the French people under it were the freest people in Europe?
However this may be, there is no doubt that the claim thus made by
Napoleon I. told immensely on the thought of the nation, and through it
on the masses. Claiming to have saved the revolution by moderating its
violence, the exile of St. Helena persistently called himself its
soldier and its martyr. His wars (he said) had been undertaken to spread
its civilizing influence; and the consciousness of this had made kings
and princes so determined on his overthrow. We, of course, can see
through the hollowness of all this: but the French writers of that day,
finding France humiliated, and knowing that she had been glorious,
actually came to believe, or at any rate fostered the belief, that in
the days of her glory she had been free, since undoubtedly in the days
of her humiliation she was fettered. No wonder the rest were deceived,
since a man of consummate ability, M. Thiers, whose honesty is proved by
his having refused office during some seventeen years of 'personal
government,' could write such a marvellous romance as that which he gave
to the world under the title of 'The Consulate and the Empire.'
Thus, by a combination of causes we may partly account for the change in
the mind of France; and this change told upon the more or less educated
masses. When Thiers wrote as he did; when Victor Hugo--whom a strange
Nemesis afterwards urged to write 'Napoleon the Little'--sang the great
man's praises in 'Lui,' and, throwing moral sanctions to the winds,
declared that
'Tu domines notre siécle, _ange ou démon qu'importe_?'
when Beauchèsne, in 'L'Ecolier,' pathetically described the day-dreams
of the boyish enthusiast; and, yet more, when Béranger sang his 'Vieux
drapeau,' and his 'Serrez vos rangs, Gaulois et Francs,' and, above all,
his 'Souvenirs du Peuple,' no wonder men forgot the real Napoleon, and
accepted the ideal which was so persistently put before them.