authors in France who knew how to write as scarcely any but Mr. Ruskin
or Mr. Swinburne have ever written in England. They doubled the
opulence and the significance of language, and made prose more
sonorous and more penetrating than anything but the highest poetry.
There were not more than half a dozen, beginning with Chateaubriand,
and, I fear, ending with Saint Victor. Lamartine became the historian
in this Corinthian school of style, and his purple patches outdo
everything in effectiveness. But it would appear that in French
rhetoric there are pitfalls which tamer pens avoid. Rousseau compared
the Roman Senate to two hundred kings, because his sensitive ear did
not allow him to say three hundred--_trois cents rois_. Chateaubriand,
describing in a private letter his journey to the Alps, speaks of the
moon along the mountain tops, and adds: "It is all right; I have
looked up the Almanac, and find that there was a moon." Paul Louis
Courier says that Plutarch would have made Pompey conquer at Pharsalus
if it would have read better, and he thinks that he was quite right.
Courier's exacting taste would have found contentment in Lamartine. He
knows very well that Marie Antoinette was fifteen when she married the
Dauphin in 1770; yet he affirms that she was the child the Empress
held up in her arms when the Magyar magnates swore to die for their
queen, Maria Theresa. The scene occurred in 1741, fourteen years
before she was born. Histories of literature give the catalogue of his
amazing blunders.
In his declining years he reverted to this book, and wrote an apology,
in which he answered his accusers, and confessed to some passages
which he exhorted them to tear out. There was good ground for
recantation. Writing to dazzle the democracy by means of a bright
halo, with himself in the midst of it, he was sometimes weak in
exposing crimes that had a popular motive. His republicanism was of
the sort that allows no safeguard for minorities, no rights to men
but those which their country gives them. He had been the speaker who,
when the Chamber wavered, rejected the Regency which was the legal
government, and compelled the Duchess of Orleans to fly. When a report
reached him that she had been seized, and he was asked to order her
release, he refused, saying, "If the people ask for her, she must be
given up to them."
In his own defence he showed that he had consulted the widow of
Danton, and had found a witness of the last banquet of the Girondins.
In his book he dramatised the scene, and displayed the various bearing
of the fallen statesmen during their last night on earth. Granier de
Cassagnac pronounced the whole thing a fabrication. It was told by
Nodier who was a professional inventor, and by Thiers who gave no
authority, and none could be found. But there was a priest who sat
outside the door, waiting to offer the last consolations of religion
to the men about to die. Fifty years later he was still living, and
Lamartine found him and took down his recollections. An old Girondin,
whom Charlotte Corday had requested to defend her, and who died a
senator of the Second Empire, Pontecoulant, assured his friends that
Lamartine had given the true colour, had reproduced the times as he
remembered them. In the same way General Dumas approved of Thiers's
10th of August. He was an old soldier of the American war, a statesman
of the Revolution, a trusted servant of Napoleon, whose military
history he wrote, and he left memoirs which we value. But I suspect
that these lingering veterans were easily pleased with clever writers
who brought back the scenes of their early life. There may be truth in
Lamartine's colouring, but on the whole his Girondins live as
literature not as history. And his four volumes on the National
Assembly are a piece of book-making that requires no comment.
Before the thunder of the Girondins had rolled away, they were
followed by two books of more enduring value on the same side. Louis
Blanc was a socialist politician, who helped, after 1840, to cement
that union of socialists and republicans which overthrew the monarchy,
and went to pieces on the barricades of June 1848. Driven into exile,
he settled in London, and spent several years at work in the British
Museum. It was not all a misfortune, as this is what he found there:
it will give you an encouraging idea of the resources that await us on
our path. When Croker gave up his house at the Admiralty on the
accession of the Whigs, he sold his revolutionary library of more than
10,000 pieces to the Museum. But the collector's fever is an ailment
not to be laid by change of government or loss of income. Six years
later Croker had made another collection as large as the first, which
also was bought by the Trustees. Before he died, this incurable
collector had brought together as much as the two previous lots, and
the whole was at last deposited in the same place. There, in one room,
we have about five hundred shelves crowded, on an average, with more
than one hundred and twenty pamphlets, all of them belonging to the
epoch that concerns us. Allowing for duplicates, this amounts to forty
or fifty thousand Revolution tracts; and I believe that there is
nothing equal to it at Paris. Half of them were already there, in time
to be consulted both by Louis Blanc and Tocqueville. Croker's
collection of manuscript papers on the same period was sold for L50 at
his death, and went to what was once the famous library of Middle
Hill.
Louis Blanc was thus able to continue in England the work he had begun
at home, and he completed it in twelve volumes. It contains much
subsidiary detail and many literary references, and this makes it a
useful book to consult. The ponderous mass of material, and the power
of the pen, do not compensate for the weary obtrusion of the author's
doctrine and design.
An eminent personage once said to me that the parliament of his
country was intent on suppressing educational freedom. When I asked
what made them illiberal, he answered, "It is because they are
liberal." Louis Blanc partook of that mixture. He is the expounder of
Revolution in its compulsory and illiberal aspect. He desires
government to be so constituted that it may do everything for the
people, not so restricted that it can do no injury to minorities. The
masses have more to suffer from abuse of wealth than from abuse of
power, and need protection by the State, not against it. Power, in the
proper hands, acting for the whole, must not be restrained in the
interest of a part. Therefore Louis Blanc is the admirer and advocate
of Robespierre; and the tone of his pleading appears at the September
massacres, when he bids us remember St. Bartholomew.
Michelet undertook to vindicate the Revolution at the same time as
Louis Blanc, without his frigid passion, his ostentatious research,
his attention to particulars, but with deeper insight and a stronger
pinion. His position at the archives gave him an advantage over every
rival; and when he lost his place, he settled in the west of France
and made a study of La Vendee. He is regardless of proof, and rejects
as rubbish mere facts that contribute nothing to his argument or his
picture. Because Arras was a clerical town, he calls Robespierre a
priest. Because there are Punic tombs at Ajaccio, he calls Napoleon a
countryman of Hannibal. For him the function of history is judgment,
not narrative. If we submit ourselves to the event, if we think more
of the accomplished deed than of the suggested problem, we become
servile accomplices of success and force. History is resurrection. The
historian is called to revise trials and to reverse sentences, as the
people, who are the subject of all history, awoke to the knowledge of
their wrongs and of their power, and rose up to avenge the past.
History is also restitution. Authorities tyrannised and nations
suffered; but the Revolution is the advent of justice, and the central
fact in the experience of mankind. Michelet proclaims that at his
touch the hollow idols were shattered and exposed, the carrion kings
appeared, unsheeted and unmasked. He says that he has had to swallow
too much anger and too much woe, too many vipers and too many kings;
and he writes sometimes as if such diet disagreed with him. His
imagination is filled with the cruel sufferings of man, and he hails
with a profound enthusiasm the moment when the victim that could not
die, in a furious act of retribution, avenged the martyrdom of a
thousand years. The acquisition of rights, the academic theory,
touches him less than the punishment of wrong. There is no forgiveness
for those who resist the people rising in the consciousness of its
might. What is good proceeds from the mass, and what is bad from
individuals. Mankind, ignorant in regard to nature, is a righteous
judge of the affairs of man. The light which comes to the learned from
reflection comes to the unlearned more surely by natural inspiration;
and power is due to the mass by reason of instinct, not by reason of
numbers. They are right by dispensation of heaven, and there is no
pity for their victims, if you remember the days of old. Michelet had
no patience with those who sought the pure essence of the Revolution
in religion. He contrasts the agonies with which the Church aggravated
the punishment of death with the swift mercy of the guillotine, and
prefers to fall into Danton's hands rather than into those of Lewis
IX. or Torquemada.
With all this, by the real sincerity of his feeling for the multitude,
by the thoroughness of his view and his intensely expressive language,
he is the most illuminating of the democratic historians. We often
read of men whose lives have been changed because a particular book
has fallen into their hands, or, one might say, because they have
fallen into the hands of a particular book. It is not always a happy
accident; and one feels that things would have gone otherwise with
them if they had examined Sir John Lubbock's List of Best Books, or
what I would rather call the St. Helena library, containing none but
works adequate and adapted to use by the ablest man in the full
maturity of his mind. Of such books, that are strong enough, in some
eminent quality, to work a change and form an epoch in a reader's
life, there are two, perhaps, on our revolutionary shelf. One is
Taine, and the other Michelet.
The fourth work of the revolutionary party, that was written almost
simultaneously with these, is that of Villiaume. Lamartine esteemed
Vergniaud. Louis Blanc esteemed Robespierre, Michelet, Danton.
Villiaume went a step farther, and admired Marat. He had lived much in
the surviving families of revolutionary heroes, and received, he says,
the last breath of an expiring tradition. He had also gathered from
Chateaubriand what he remembered; and Thierry, who was blind, caused
his book to be read to him twice over.
The account of Marat in the 28th volume of Buchez was partly written
by Villiaume, and was approved by Albertine Marat. The great
bibliographical curiosity in the literature of the Revolution is
Marat's newspaper. It was printed often in hiding-places and under
difficulties, and is so hard to find that, a few years ago, the Paris
library did not possess a complete set. A bookseller once told me that
he had sold it to an English statesman for L240. Marat's own copy,
corrected in his handwriting, and enriched with other matter, was
preserved by his sister. In 1835 she made it over to Villiaume, who,
having finished his book, sold it in 1859 for L80 to the collector
Solar. Prince Napoleon afterwards owned it; and at last it made its
way to an ancient Scottish castle, where I had the good fortune to
find it.
* * * * *
Whilst the revolutionary historians, aided by public events, were
predominating in France, the conservatives competed obscurely, and at
first without success. Genoude was for many years editor of the
leading royalist journal, and in that capacity initiated a remarkable
phase of political thought. When the Bourbons were cast out under the
imputation of incurable absolutism, the legitimists found themselves
identified with a grudging liberality and a restricted suffrage, and
stood at a hopeless disadvantage. In the _Gazette de France_ Genoude
at once adopted the opposite policy, and overtrumped the liberal
Orleanists. He argued that a throne which was not occupied by right of
inheritance, as a man holds his estate, could only be made legitimate
by the expressed will of France. Therefore he insisted on an appeal to
the nation, on the sovereignty of the people, on the widest extension
of the franchise. When his friend Courmenin drew up the Constitution
of 1848, it was Genoude who induced him to adopt the new practice of
universal suffrage, which was unknown to the Revolution. Having lost
his wife, he took orders. All this, he said one day, will presently
come to an end, not through the act of a soldier or an orator, but of
a Cardinal. And he drank to the memory of Richelieu.
The notion of a legitimate throne, restored by democracy, which was
borrowed from Bolingbroke, and which nearly prevailed in 1873, gives
some relief and originality to his work on the Revolution. You are not
likely to meet with it. When Talleyrand's _Memoirs_ appeared, most
people learnt for the first time that he went at night to offer his
services to the king, to get the better of the Assembly. The editor
placed the event in the middle of July. Nobody seemed to know that the
story was already told by Genoude, and that he fixed the midnight bid
for power at its proper date, a month earlier.
The history of Amedee Gabourd is a far better book, and perhaps the
best of its kind. Gabourd had previously written a history of France,
and his many volumes on the nineteenth century, with no pretension in
point of research, are convenient for the lower range of countries and
events. He writes with the care, the intelligence, the knowledge of
the work of other men, which distinguish Charles Knight's _Popular
History of England_. I have known very deep students indeed who were
in the habit of constantly using him. He says, with reason, that no
writer has sought truth and justice with more perfect good faith, or
has been more careful to keep aloof from party spirit and accepted
judgments. As he was a constitutionalist, the revolution of February
was the ruin of a system which he expected to last for ever, and to
govern the last age of the world. But Gabourd remained true to his
principles. He wrote: "I shall love the people, and honour the king;
and I shall have the same judgment on the tyranny from above and the
tyranny from below. I am not one of those who set a chasm between
liberty and religion, as if God would accept no worship but that of
servile hearts. I shall not oppose the results of the event which I
describe, or deny the merit of what had been won at the price of so
much suffering."
* * * * *
The Doctrinaires were of all men in the best position to understand
the Revolution and to judge it rightly. They had no weakness for the
ancient monarchy, none for the republic; and they accepted the results
rather than the motives. They rejoiced in the reign of reason, but
they required the monarchy duly limited, and the church as established
by the Concordat, in order to resume the chain of history and the
reposing influence of custom. They were the most intellectual group of
statesmen in the country; but, like the Peelites, they were leaders
without followers, and it was said of them that they were only four,
but pretended to be five, to strike terror by their number. Guizot,
the greatest writer among them, composed, in his old age, a history of
France for his grandchildren. It was left incomplete, but his
discourses on the Revolution, the topic he had thought about all his
life, were edited by his family. These tales of a grandfather are not
properly his work, and, like the kindred and coequal lectures of
Niebuhr, give approximately the views of a man so great that it is a
grief not to possess them in authentic form.
Instead of Guizot, our Doctrinaire historian is Barante. He had the
distinction and the dignity of his friends, their book learning, and
their experience of public affairs; and his work on the dukes of
Burgundy was praised, in the infancy of those studies, beyond its
merit in early life he had assisted Madame de la Rochejaquelein to
bring out her _Memoirs_. His short biography of Saint Priest,
Minister of the Interior in the first revolutionary year, is a
singularly just and weighty narrative. After 1848 he published nine
volumes on the Convention and the Directory. Like the rest of his
party, Barante had always acknowledged the original spirit of the
Revolution as the root of French institutions. But the movement of
1848, directed as it was against the Doctrinaires, against their
monarchy and their ministry, had much developed the conservative
element which was always strong within them.
In those days Montalembert succeeded Droz at the Academy, and took the
opportunity to attack, as he said, not 1793 but 1789. He said that
Guizot, the most eloquent of the immortals, had not found a word to
urge in reply. On this level, and in opposition to the revival of
Jacobin ideas and the rehabilitation of Jacobin character, Barante
composed his work. It was a great occasion, as the tide had been
running strongly the other way; but the book, coming from such a man,
is a disappointment. In the trial of the king adverse points are
slurred over, as if a historian could hold a brief. A more powerful
writer of conservative history appeared about the same time in
Heinrich von Sybel.
* * * * *
About the middle of the fifties, when Sybel's earlier volumes were
coming out, the deeper studies began in France with Tocqueville. He
was the first to establish, if not to discover, that the Revolution
was not simply a break, a reversal, a surprise, but in part a
development of tendencies at work in the old monarchy. He brought it
into closer connection with French history, and believed that it had
become inevitable, when Lewis XVI. ascended the throne, that the
success and also the failure of the movement came from causes that
were at work before. The desire for political freedom was sincere but
adulterated. It was crossed and baffled by other aims. The secondary
and subordinate liberties embarrassed the approach to the supreme goal
of self-government. For Tocqueville was a Liberal of the purest
breed--a Liberal and nothing else, deeply suspicious of democracy and
its kindred, equality, centralisation and utilitarianism. Of all
writers he is the most widely acceptable, and the hardest to find
fault with. He is always wise, always right, and as just as Aristides.
His intellect is without a flaw, but it is limited and constrained. He
knows political literature and history less well than political life;
his originality is not creative, and he does not stimulate with gleams
of new light or unfathomed suggestiveness.
Two years later, in 1858, a work began to appear which was less new
and less polished than Tocqueville's, but is still more instructive
for every student of politics. Duvergier de Hauranne had long
experience of public life. He remembered the day when he saw Cuvier
mount the tribune in a black velvet suit and speak as few orators have
spoken, and carry the electoral law which was the Reform Bill of 1817.
Having quarrelled with the Doctrinaires, he led the attack which
overthrew Guizot, and was one of three on whom Thiers was relying to
save the throne, when the king went away in a cab and carried the
dynasty with him. He devoted the evening of his life to a history of
parliamentary government in France, which extends in ten volumes to
1830, and contains more profound ideas, more political science, than
any other work I know in the compass of literature. He analyses every
constitutional discussion, aided by much confidential knowledge, and
the fullest acquaintance with pamphlets and leading articles. He is
not so much at home in books; but he does not allow a shade of
intelligent thought or a valid argument to escape him. During the
Restoration, the great controversy of all ages, the conflict between
reason and custom was fought out on the higher level. The question at
that time was not which of the two should prevail, but how they should
be reconciled, and whether rational thought and national life could be
made to harmonise. The introductory volume covers the Revolution, and
traces the progress and variation of views of government in France,
from the appearance of Sieyes to the elevation of Napoleon.
Laboulaye was a man of like calibre and measurements, whom
Waddington, when he was minister, called the true successor of
Tocqueville. Like him he had saturated himself with American ideas,
and like him he was persuaded that the revolutionary legacy of
concentrated power was the chief obstacle to free institutions. He
wrote, in three small volumes, a history of the United States, which
is a most intelligent abstract of what he had learnt in Bancroft and
Hildreth. He wrote with the utmost lucidity and definiteness, and
never darkened counsel with prevaricating eloquence, so that there is
no man from whom it is so easy and so agreeable to learn. His lectures
on the early days of the Revolution were published from time to time
in a review, and, I believe, have not been collected. Laboulaye was a
scholar as well as a statesman, and always knew his subject well, and
as a guide to the times we can have none more helpful than his
unfinished course.
* * * * *
The event of the English competition is the appearance of Carlyle.
After fifty years we are still dependent on him for Cromwell, and in
_Past and Present_ he gave what was the most remarkable piece of
historical thinking in the language. But the mystery of investigation
had not been revealed to him when he began his most famous book. He
was scared from the Museum by an offender who sneezed in the Reading
Room. As the French pamphlets were not yet catalogued, he asked
permission to examine them and to make his selection at the shelves on
which they stood. He complained that, having applied to a respectable
official, he had been refused. Panizzi, furious at being described as
a respectable official, declared that he could not allow the library
to be pulled about by an unknown man of letters. In the end, the usual
modest resources of a private collection satisfied his requirements.
But the vivid gleam, the mixture of the sublime with the grotesque,
make other opponents forget the impatient verdicts and the poverty of
settled fact in the volumes that delivered our fathers from thraldom
to Burke. They remain one of those disappointing stormclouds that
give out more thunder than lightning.
* * * * *
The proof of advancing knowledge is the improvement in compendiums and
school books. There are three which must be mentioned. In the middle
of the century Lavallee wrote a history of France for his students at
the Military College. Quoting Napoleon's remark, that the history of
France must be in four volumes or in a hundred, he pronounces in
favour of four. During a generation his work passed for the best of
its kind. Being at St. Cyr, once the famous girls' school, for which
Racine composed his later tragedies, he devoted many years to the
elucidation of Madame de Maintenon, and the recovery of her
interpolated letters. His Revolution is contained in 230 pages of his
fourth volume. There is an abridgment of the like moderate dimensions
by Carnot. He was the father of the President, and the son of the
organiser of victory, who, in 1815, gave the memorable advice to
Napoleon that, if he made a rush at the English, he would find them
scattered and unprepared. He was a militant republican, editor of the
_Memoirs_ of his father, of Gregoire, and of Barere, and M. Aulard
praises his book, with the sympathy of a co-religionist, as the best
existing narrative. Other good republicans prefer what Henri Martin
wrote in continuation of his history of France. I should have no
difficulty in declaring that the seventh volume of the French history
by Dareste is superior to them all; and however far we carry the
process of selection and exclusion, I would never surrender it.