'On parlera de sa gloire
Sous le chaume bien longtemps;
L'humble toit en cinquante ans
Ne connaîtra plus d'autre histoire.'
It is not easy to trace how this feeling had so penetrated downwards,
and had so thoroughly laid hold of the lowest stratum, the wholly
uneducated peasantry, that the first time the vote by universal suffrage
was taken, many peasants thought they were voting for the old Emperor.
That it did so is one more proof how soon a nation with great
'recuperative powers' loses the memory of disasters. The cruel
conscriptions which drove mere boys to die in Spain under the fire of
Wellington's seasoned troops--the retreat from Russia, after which 'the
man of Smorgoni' was for a time as unpopular as 'the man of Sedan,' were
forgotten. The heroic defence of Champagne, and the glories which
preceded it, were alone remembered. This will account for the growth of
the Imperial idea in the more fighting parts of France, especially in
Alsace and Lorraine, which have always contributed much more than their
share to the army.
How it was in La Vendée we cannot pretend to say. Napoleon there had
been as ruthless in his way as the 'blues;' he had ordered that every
family which could not prove that all its members were at home and quiet
should lose its property, this being divided between the 'good subjects'
and the occupying troops. Nor can we understand how the Southern
peasants should have welcomed the nephew when they had hated the uncle.
It was against them chiefly that the odious _garnisaires_ had to be
employed; and we all know how they showed their feeling in 1814 by
several times nearly tearing the Emperor to pieces when he was on the
way to Elba, frightening him so that he disguised himself as an English
officer.
North-eastern France was Bonapartist because it was anti-Prussian, and
the Emperor had thoroughly humiliated Prussia. For this special hatred
of Prussia there is ample reason. The Prussian character is not
loveable; even at the best it is singularly domineering and
cantankerous; and during the invasions of French territory (not to speak
of the bloodthirsty pursuit after Waterloo) the Prussians had shown
themselves (as unhappily they too often have during this war)[213] worse
than Cossacks. This special hatred of Prussians comes out continually in
the Erckmann-Châtrian series. The contrast between the bitterness with
which the fights at Ligny and Wavre and the final conflict at Waterloo
are described is remarkable; it may almost be said to be prophetic of
the merciless way in which too much of the fighting has been carried on
within the past few months. 'No quarter' is the word on both French and
Prussian side; and scornful hatred lurks in every phrase of the graphic
account of those savage conflicts which at last left the French
nominally victorious. The English, on the other hand, are 'jolly
fellows, well shaved, and with the get-up of _bons bourgeois_.' We do
not think that, even before the Crimean war, French mothers ever taught
their children to hate us; whereas, _mon fils tu haïras les Prussiens_
was a daily lesson among the peasants of the North-east.[214]
To account for the Napoleonism of the peasants in other parts, we must
add to the feeling that Napoleon had glorified France, on the part of
those who (we said) were only too ready to forget how he had also
humiliated and ruined her, the persistent dread of the _spectre rouge_
on the part of the vast class of little landowners, and thirdly, the
influence of the priests. Both these had been made use of by the uncle.
Whenever he wanted an excuse for despotism, he always got up a Jacobin
plot. This was the pretence for that famous 18th Brumaire, by which
'model and prototype of all _coups d'état_,' as M. Barni calls it, he
destroyed the constitution which he had sworn to defend.
When, as First Consul, he arrested a number of those who remained true
to the Republic--among them Jourdain, the hero of Fleurus--and
threatened to banish them to Cayenne, the pretext was 'the infernal
machine' (very probably 'got up,' like so many more recent
conspiracies), which was denounced as a Jacobin invention. Jacobinism
was his apology for forming (at the beginning of the Empire) eight State
prisons, and for exercising the most rigorous censorship both of the
press and of the stage.
How the priests helped him may be judged from the amusingly profane
addresses made to him on his accession to empire by the different
bishops. The Bishop of Aix wrote: 'Like another Moses, Napoleon has been
summoned by God from the deserts of Egypt,' 'God seems to have said
(wrote the Bishop of Orleans), "My heart hath chosen a new ruler to rule
my people; My almighty arm shall help him in his glorious work, and I
will strengthen his throne. He shall reign over the seas, and the rivers
shall become his servants."' In the eyes of other bishops and capitular
bodies the new emperor is 'another Matthias sent by the Lord,' 'a new
Cyrus,' 'Scripture hath given us, in the reign of Jehoshaphat, a
prophetic outline of his reign.' This, the fitting reward of the
Concordat, was the incense offered up by a servile clergy on the eve of
his coronation; and it matches well with the _Catechism_, published by
authority, and in use in all French churches in 1811.[215] After
repeated injunctions as to the special duty of reverence for the Emperor
and his house, the question is asked, 'Are there not yet other motives
to bind us strongly to our Emperor?'--'Yes; for it is he whom God raised
up in troublous times to re-establish the public worship of the holy
religion of our fathers and to be its protector. He has restored and
preserved public order by his profound and energetic wisdom; he defends
the State by his powerful arm; he is become the anointed of the Lord by
the consecration which he has received from the Sovereign Pontiff, chief
of the Universal Church.'[216]
How the Pope, of whose meanly cruel treatment by Napoleon, the Count
d'Haussonville gave such a graphic account in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_ of two years ago, really felt on the subject, we need not
inquire; with Napoleon the case was simple enough: 'he wanted a clergy
(says Madame de Staël) as he wanted chamberlains and courtiers, and all
the old things over again.' As for his being the restorer of religion,
no praise was ever less merited; he told Cabanis: 'This concordat of
ours is _la vaccine de la religion_; in fifty years it will have killed
it out like a moral small-pox.' On the other hand, before the Concordat
was signed there was full liberty of worship, and nearly eight millions
of people were in full practice of Catholicism. His Concordat was
needless, except for his own purposes; at the outset, indeed, the
Assembly had borne heavily on the clergy: to force them to take oaths
and then to persecute those who refused was to show an ignorance of the
first principles of toleration; and one of the few things which we have
to find fault with in MM. Erckmann-Châtrian's excellent novels is the
way in which the 'refractory priests' are spoken of, and in which the
harsh treatment they underwent is justified, because they disturbed the
peace of families, and intrigued for 'royalist restoration.' But by the
Constitution of the year III. Church and State had been separated, and
freedom of worship restored to every one. There was no need, therefore,
for any effort on Napoleon's part to secure what the Constitution had
already secured; he was, as usual, working simply for himself: 'I did
not despair,' (he writes from St. Helena) 'of sooner or later getting
full control of the Pope; and then what a lever for moving the world,
what a help towards keeping men's minds in hand!'
With the Pope and the Italian clergy, indeed, Napoleon never had the
least success; but in France the large salaries which he gave to the
bishops produced the effect he anticipated; and at last, even in La
Vendée, a good deal of the old feeling died out. The _noblesse_ of
course still spoke of him as a mere _locum tenens_: for them he was
always 'the General Bonaparte, Lieutenant-in-Chief of the Forces of his
Majesty's King Louis XVII.' But the peasantry were gradually taught to
accept him as the friend of religion, and not simply as a temporary
police magistrate who was necessary to keep down their hated enemies the
'Reds.' Of this his nephew reaped the reward, and he moreover was able
to come forward as the defender of the Papacy under circumstances in
which his conduct gratified not only the peasants, but every sincere
Romanist in France, while it caused one more breach in the already
divided Republican camp. If the occupation of Rome was actually
initiated by honest Republicans, they never (not even when they made
Louis Napoleon Prince-President) were guilty of a more fatal mistake.
They shared the reward of all trimmers; supporting 'order' at the
expense of principle, they lost the confidence of the best men of their
party; while the Prince-President, assuming to be the champion of that
'order' which after all they had only defended with half-heartedness,
gained all the credit of the act, and won thereby the support of the
Ultramontanists. Of this support his subsequent vacillation could not
deprive him, because the Ultramontanes were sure that, whatever he might
do in other countries, in France he would not relax those fetters which
the Papacy finds so essential in securing the acceptance of its newly
'formulated dogmas and repressive encyclicals. When we say this, we by
no means assert that the ex-Emperor had the full confidence of the
clergy; that confidence it is not the policy of Rome to accord to any
one. Now again, as in 1848, she has shown that on occasion she can be as
revolutionary as Garibaldi himself, if there is an end to be gained by
being so. Napoleon is lost; despite the ridiculous outcry of London
imperialist papers like _La Situation_, his cause is hopeless; therefore
Rome hastens to give him up, and to affirm that he is rightly punished
for having supported Victor Emmanuel. But, so long as he was a power in
Europe, he received support enough to keep him popular among the
priest-ridden classes, because he was less dangerous than those who
would be sure to succeed him. A Republican government would without
doubt have given up the Roman occupation; while the Orleanists, who
would come to the surface if the Republic failed, are, as the real
friends of religious liberty, the most unacceptable of all to the
Ultramontane party. Guizot, the Orleanist statesman _par excellence_,
ventured to doubt whether it is not an abuse of toleration to allow full
scope to such irreconcilable foes to liberty as the Jesuits; therefore
it was better to uphold Napoleon, and to trust to the influence of the
Empress rather than to provoke a change which was sure to be for the
worse.
But we have said enough to account somewhat for the growth of the
Napoleonic idea, after the first Emperor had done his best by the
failures, and still more by the littleness of his later years, to crush
it.
France, moreover, had been humiliated in 1815, and Louis Philippe kept
her at peace without giving an outlet for enterprise in foreign
colonization. If Algeria had been less of a mere military settlement; or
if, instead of Algeria, France had laid hold of a colony better suited
for Europeans to thrive in, the Orleans line might have still been on
the throne. But the nation was slow to realize the amount of waste which
had accompanied the wars of the Empire. France did not like to keep
quiet and repair the ugly gaps left in her prosperity; she wanted to
make a grand figure before the world. Louis Philippe thought that by
combined repression and corruption he could check this restlessness; and
so he, a constitutional king, was led into a career of unconstitutional
conduct--the proximate, though not the remote, cause of the revolution
in 1848.
The _facilis descensus_ from a republic to a despotism was seldom more
inevitable than amid the chaos of parties which succeeded the
Provisional Government. France wanted _prestige_: who more likely to
give it to her than the nephew of the man who won Jena and Austerlitz?
France wanted protection against the 'Reds,' 'the enemies of order and
property:' surely, the very man to secure this to her was _l'homme
providentiel_, who could sway the army as one man, and who, though he
professed to believe in universal suffrage, and to have a high regard
for the working man, was known to be hand in glove with the great
financiers and capitalists? As Victor Hugo puts it in his little history
of the _coup d'état_, 'tous les hommes du passé, depuis tel banquier
juif qui se sentait un peu Catholique jusqu'à tel évêque qui se sentait
un peu juif,' all combined to work up the Napoleonic idea, and to induce
the masses to accept what was the best government for stock-jobbers and
Court tailors and highly paid functionaries of all sorts. It was the
Nemesis of 1793 which produced the _coup d'état_ of December 1851: but
for the recollection of the Reign of Terror, of that wild carnival of
cruelty and rapine, such an outrage would have been impossible. Men of
substance argued that what had been might be again; and therefore they
threw in their lot with the saviour of society, even while they abhorred
the means which he employed for its salvation. National susceptibility,
then, and a half unconscious desire to wipe off old scores, combined
with Popish influence and the dread of the 'Reds,' helped to give
tangibility to this long-cherished Napoleonic idea, by bringing about
the second Empire.
A few words, now, on the causes and the history of its decay. These, as
usual in political and social matters, are complex and seemingly
conflicting. First, those who looked for _prestige_ were not satisfied
with the declaration, _l'Empire c'est la paix_, even explained away
though it was by the many wars undertaken in the last twenty years.
France fighting side by side with England in the Crimea and in China,
was not the same as France carrying her eagles into almost every
European capital. This feeling forced on the war which resulted in the
sudden peace of Villafranca--the suddenness of which peace proved (to
the French Emperor's detractors) that Magenta and Solferino were not
such very decided victories, after all. It always seemed in Napoleon
III.'s undertakings, that he was stopped at a certain point, just as if
he had not really been the master of France, but was only free to use
her resources within the range of his tether. This may be due to the
financial complications in which he and his creatures were always mixed
up, or to that indecision of character which, while it gave him for a
time a reputation for profound wisdom, did him immense harm by making
men suspect him of deep plotting when he was simply at a loss how to
reconcile conflicting ideas, and by exciting profound distrust on
occasions where pity would have been the more appropriate feeling.
Herein he paid the penalty (almost always exacted in all ranks of life)
of seeing both ways. The notion which couples moral obliquity with
crookedness of vision is confined to the vulgar; but comparatively few
can avoid distrusting the mental power of looking at once in several
directions. The ex-Emperor had his English experience; his political
education was far in advance of that of most of his subjects; he saw the
weak points of each party, and saw too how each drew strength from the
amount of truth which it had grasped. Could he have lived as president
of a republic in which all these elements should have had free scope,
France might have thriven morally during the last nineteen years, as
much as she has thriven materially. But the French character, no less
than his own designs, forbade this. Frenchmen cannot bear to 'give and
take;' their _logique_ shows itself by forcing them into the streets to
battle for their cause as soon as there is the feeblest chance of
success; and, above all, his aim was, not to give France the best
government, but to keep himself by all means at her head. Hence, lying
and repression became his instruments. One party was played off against
another. The _prolétaires_ kept in good humour by the Hausmannizing, not
of Paris only, but of half the French cities, were told that the Emperor
was really their friend; and so long as they got _panem et circenses_
they seem pretty generally to have believed it. The _parti prêtre_ was
petted at home; and the control which the clergy was allowed to have
over education more than compensated for the cutting off of the Romagna.
The moneyed class, and all the crowd of little _rentiers_, who are
almost forced to accept the existing order of things, saw by the vast
growth of public credit and by the steady price of public securities,
that the Empire was the millennium of men of means. The army, petted and
spoiled, was full of dislike for civilians, and of chauvinist contempt
for foreigners. The literary class alone feebly kept up the struggle;
and its protest against the dictum 'la France c'est moi,' was chiefly
confined to such far-fetched allusions as we find in 'Labiénus' and in
the 'leaders' of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The French are brave; but
those who did not accept the Empire were cowed by the _coup d'état_;
and in such circumstances they are of all people the most patient under
what they have come to believe inevitable.
But though nothing was done much was felt, and the mistakes and
disappointments of later years soon brought the feeling to the surface.
From the very first, nothing but the _coup d'état_ had thoroughly
succeeded. The Crimean war ended too soon; it failed in its main object,
that of crippling Russia, and it was from the outset distasteful to a
large party because it drew France so close to England. The Austrian war
wanted the dash and vigour of Marengo; and the Mexican campaign (so
opposed by Thiers in 1864) showed that the ruler of France was afraid to
move when the United States bade him stand still. Meanwhile Poland had
been twice given up--and Poland is very dear to a large section of the
French; the Confederate States had been abandoned, and Denmark had been
left unhelped to the tender mercy of Prussia and Austria. Military
_prestige_ had gone, despite the numbers and the ruinous cost of the
army. All the while the occupation of Rome was a standing outrage on the
feelings of the most thinking part of the nation; and, combined with it,
by that strange inconsistency which marks all Napoleonic procedure, the
creation of the kingdom of Italy alienated the Ultramontanes, and set
them plotting, after their fashion, against the man whom it was still
their interest outwardly to support.
Herein uncle and nephew are thoroughly at one. Both Lanfrey and the
author of the 'Romans nationaux' remind us how constantly the first
Napoleon displayed a cynical disregard for men's feelings, without
apparently seeing that thereby he was giving irreparable offence. He
looked on men as reasoning machines, and quite left out of account all
the sentimental springs of action. Those whom he needlessly insulted
would, he thought, recognise both his power to crush and also to benefit
them, and therefore they would be his obedient servants. Such was the
state of the Continent that he was scarcely disabused of this notion
till he undertook to govern Spain. Italy submitted to exactions more
galling though less ruinous than those which the Germans have been
making upon France. Germany, thoroughly dissatisfied with its own serene
highnesses and arch-dukes, and looking upon Napoleon as the true
successor of Hoche and Moreau, and the others who had spread republican
ideas through the Fatherland, was content to bear a great deal before
she showed any signs of anger. Spain certainly set Continental Europe
an example in this. Napoleon might prove beyond dispute that under his
tutelage she would soon rise rapidly in position and wealth; but Spain
had been cruelly outraged by the treatment to which her people as well
as her royal family had been subjected; and Spain cared not a jot for
either position or wealth compared with a successful revolt against
French occupation. We know how wholly, in dealing with individuals, the
uncle left the power of personal feelings out of account; the nephew,
rarely forgetting this in regard to the individual, forgot it when
dealing with classes. To the clergy for instance, he said, 'Italy must
be reconstituted, and to that end the Pope must give up the Romagna and
the Marches. You shall have our troops still in Rome, and I will arrange
that you may control French education pretty much as you please.' The
clergy, accepting what he gave, never even pretended to be grateful for
the boon; they never forgave the 'spoliation of the Church;' and thus
the ex-emperor's conduct, as usual, displeased both parties, and
deprived him of any support except what it was manifestly men's interest
to give him.
Then came the dread of Prussia, and the sudden attempt (almost as bad as
deploying under fire) to reorganise that army for which so much money
had been drawn that had really been expended on other objects. The
severer conscription made the peasants restless; and the _plébiscite_
was called for much in that spirit of distrust which set David numbering
the people. When it was found that a considerable percentage of the army
had voted the wrong way, it was felt that the pyramid, hitherto propped
up on its small end by bayonets, was tottering; and the war, of which we
have lately seen the sad issue, was hurried on as the sole change of
retrieving the fortunes of the dynasty.
It is not our business to gauge the complicity of the French people in
the affair of Benedetti and Gramont.[217] France, as we said, showed
herself culpably passive; Paris, say the French 'irreconcilables,' was
culpably complaisant. We may be thankful that here in England we have
not for centuries seen twenty years of such a debasing system as that
which made Paris what it was till it was purified in the furnace of
affliction. We fancy that the reaction against the despotism of the
capital will be very strong. There is far more independent life left
than most people imagine in the French provincial cities, far more than
in our large towns; and they were increasingly indignant at the
pre-eminence which the imperial system gave to Paris in everything. This
exaltation of Paris is natural in a dynasty which has no roots in France
itself. Paris had proved herself in 1790 capable of taking the lead and
giving the law to all France; Paris, therefore, must be kept strong in
order that all France might be of one mind. How different from the days
of Henry IV., or of any of the old race! To the Corsican intruder the
peasant of Beauce was just the same as the peasant of the
Bourbonnais--merely a fighting machine. Hence the real depression of the
provinces, despite of some exceptional improvements in Brittany and in
the _landes_ of the Gironde. The first Napoleon's levies so reduced the
relative strength of the country districts that Paris, in his time,
gained a position which she has ever since held. Whatever form of
government she chose the provinces echoed her choice. Disliking her,
they still never thought of shaking off her yoke. That Paris, befooled
by Béranger, by chauvinism, and by the popular fiction of imperialism,
should have chosen such a President as she did, is a strange comment on
all the bombastic nonsense which Victor Hugo talks about
_Paris-cerveau_--Paris, the brain of the world. Paris now, conscious of
her degradation, is avenging herself by heaping all sorts of abuse on
the man of her choice--'the phlegmatic perjurer,' 'the silent Tartuffe,'
as M. Leclercq calls him. But the choice was hers, and the degradation
which resulted from the years of personal rule followed with peculiar
rapidity owing to a want in the French character. The most 'logical' of
nations is indeed terribly consistent; it always seems to want that
happy power of stopping short before things have gone so far as to make
a catastrophe inevitable.
The last years of the late emperor's reign were morally unhealthy beyond
the average of the most immoral times since the Reformation. It is not
that people were worse in their conduct: they were more cynical. They
had got to laugh at everything, to despise all sanctions--even those
shadowy ones which the first revolution substituted for the sanctions of
religion. The years in which Cora Pearl and the rest of the demi-monde
were the arbiters of fashion, in which Thérèse was the pet of
drawing-rooms, and the younger Dumas the popular _littérateur_, saw the
extinction of much that was noble in France, for they witnessed what we
may call the apotheosis of epicureanism. Paris seemed to have lost all
moral sense since the time that its government had ceased to have any.
The efforts of Parisian talent resulted in nothing but ill-digested and
unwholesome works. The upper classes did as the Court did--that crew of
wholesale stock-jobbers, like the Duke of Morny, among whom, one who was
a strange mixture of reckless extravagance and gross bigotry presided as
mistress of the revels. The masses were sunk in ignorance, and lived a
life--those Paris _ouvriers_ who have so often taken in hand to
regenerate the world--which it would terrify the average English workman
to contemplate. The middle class, the Famille Benoîton of the play,
vegetated, made money, and reasoned on false premises. It was Babylon
over again, as poor Prévost-Paradol styles it. Tongue-tied on all high
subjects, the Parisians flung themselves mad with delight upon that
class of ideas which soon brings thought down to its lowest level, 'Make
money, never mind how, and live simply to gratify your meanest
instincts,' that was everybody's maxim--_leur esprit s'était abâtardi_.
At the same time Paris still asserted that superiority over all the rest
of the world which her writers had first claimed when they began to
write up the first empire. Her writers kept on blowing one another's
trumpets, and crying out that theirs was the great nation, and that to
the people among whom primary education is more deficient than even in
Spain was entrusted the mission of indoctrinating Europe with ideas.
Grossly ignorant of their own shortcomings the French were, last July,
quite incapable of forming a fair estimate of any other nation. Because
Napoleon III. had always managed to mystify his people as to what he was
going to do, therefore they fancied he had mystified Europe. Because he
had met Bismark at Biarritz, and had been always fond of personal
conference with princes, therefore they dreamed of Tilsit over again,
and refused to see that on every point their master was either outwitted
or else over-mastered by other statesmen. All the follies which come of
boasting, of contempt for one's adversary, of unmeasured self-esteem, of
confidence in one's power of doing anything in any line whatever, seemed
to have burst out at once into monstrous growth in the Paris of last
July. M. Leclercq collects chronologically the choice passages from the
_Figaro_, the _Gaulois_, &c., which show the feeling of those who
claimed to be the leaders of thought; and surely nothing better than
such a collection can justify the almost universal dislike to France
which was felt at the beginning of the war. Belgian as he is, he knows
how bad the supremacy of Paris has been for Brussels, her little
imitator, and he hopes that this supremacy is gone never to be restored.
In this hope he gives us page after page of blatant absurdity, of
grotesque and childish rant, of transparent falsehood, from the
inaugural 'leader' in _Figaro_ down to the wild dithyramb which Victor
Hugo published when he entered Paris after the 4th September.
It is worth while to quote a few sentences from _Figaro_ of the 17th
July:--
'Drums beat, trumpets sound--it is war.'
* * * * *
'France, France, righteous land, hospitable land, noble
people; always thou shalt be first among the first ... thy
name is LEGION!'
* * * * *
'The cannon makes the pavement of the big city ring with a
dull sound.... Make way for the cannon, and hats off! It is
going to clear a passage for civilisation and humanity.
* * * * *
'These Prussians, too, have said that you were drawing
back! France drawing back; 'tis like the sun standing
still. And who is this new Joshua who shall make the sun of
France stand still! Moltke, perhaps!'
And the 'leader' (what an abuse of the word) winds up with a prayer 'to
the God who has said that they who take the sword shall perish by the
sword, and who ordains that liberty's furrows should be blood-watered,
since no otherwise can the germ of freedom be developed.' Many have been
offended during the war with the tone of Emperor William's telegrams;
but even the _Standard_ must confess that they are infinitely preferable
to the blasphemous hiccoughings of the _Figaro_.
The strangest part of it, perhaps, is the monstrous lying; Austria (we
are told) is thirsting for revenge:--'The Austrian aristocracy is wild
about the insolence of these Brandenburg margraves, _these parvenu,
princes_' (the appropriateness of the epithet from a Bonaparte of a
Hohenzöllern deserves remark).... 'Frankfort has shut all its shops, and
its trade won't recover the shock for many years.... Prussia has
withdrawn all the able-bodied men out of Hanover for fear of an
outbreak.' The truth being that, except a portion of the highest class,
and a very few of the lowest, the whole Hanoverian population went in
heart and soul for German unity.
This incredible ignorance of other nations is matched by an equal
ignorance of the French army and its belongings:--'War can bring us no
annoying surprises, for we have the most marvellous body of
_éclaireurs_ in Europe,' is an assertion repeated over and over again
towards the end of last July, at a time when the Uhlans were already
beginning to show what they were capable of, and when French officers
were finding out that they had nothing provided in the way of maps,
except out-of-date plans of East Prussian fortresses. The absurd vanity
which could write in this way when the Prussians were showing that they
knew every inch of French soil, is only equalled by the craven way in
which _Figaro's_ readers gave in whenever Prussian audacity, backed by
Prussian knowledge of their country, enabled Uhlans or regulars to make
a dash. The _Cornhill_ tale, 'How the Prussians took Mousseux-les-Caves'
(under the guidance of a sub-lieutenant who had been clerk to a wine
merchant there), is a story which has been acted out to the letter, not
once but fifty times, to the confusion of those who were boasting all
the while about their 'admirable corps d'éclaireurs.' The boasting was
about as well-grounded as that which, a fortnight later, declared that
of Prince Frederick Charles's army nothing was left but the remnants,
and that the whole corps of Bismark's white cuirassiers had been cut off
to a man.
The companion piece to all this senseless exaggeration, encouraged, we
must remember, and endorsed by the highest authority--first by the
Emperor himself and then by Count Palikao--is Victor Hugo's dithyramb
aforesaid. It appeared in the _Electeur Libre_ of 3rd October, and
surpasses anything which Walt Whitman, in his wildest moments, ever
dreamt of:--
'We are but one Frenchman, but one Parisian, but one single
heart; there is but one citizen left, 'tis you, 'tis I,
'tis all of us. Where the heart is, there will be our
breasts to make a barrier.
'Resistance to-day, deliverance to-morrow: that sums up
everything. We are no more flesh, but stone. I don't know
my own name any more, I am called, "Country, forward on the
foe!" We are called, "France, Paris, stand like a wall."...
'The Pantheon wonders what it can do to make room beneath
its dome for all this people who have a right to lie
there.... Each time the shells fall, and the grape-shot
roars, what see we in our streets? women tripping by with a
smile. O Paris, thou hast crowned the statue of Strasburg
with flowers; history will crown thee with stars!'
It is as hard for sober Englishmen to imagine a people delighting in
edicts penned in that style, as it is for us to read without disgust any
two consecutive pages of _L'homme qui rit_. Hugo's latest novel is well
matched by his latest political utterances.
One encouraging sign is, that Paris journalism grows ashamed of itself:
the lies, indeed, continue to the last: insincerity seems (since the
first Napoleon's time) to have become inseparable from French bulletins;
but the _Siècle_ of the middle of November proves what a change had come
on:--
'It is _esprit_ which has ruined France; the esprit, we
mean, of the boulevards, that _esprit_ nine-tenths of which
are made up of puns and jokes, of scepticism, of _blague_,
and of which the remaining tenth is boastful nonsense and
absurd lies.... So long as the _Figaro_, _Paris Journal_,
_Gaulois_ and all the rest keep up above the circulation of
500, which would suffice for the comic actors and actresses
who ought to be their only readers, there is no hope of
seeing France recover herself. Men talk with scorn of the
Greeks of the lower empire who were arguing about the kind
of light which shone on Mount Tabor, while Mahomet II. was
breaching their walls. But these Greeks were eagles
compared with our _boulevardiers_. They discussed a
theologico-physical question, wild and absurd, no doubt,
but still showing a capacity for lofty thought; our
_spirituel_ newspapers discuss the scandals which they rake
up out of the moral sewers of the capital.... If the
present war ends without having killed, not scotched, this
_esprit boulevardier_, peace will be no use, it will be
nothing but a halt in the mire.'