Note 58 — Chapter 3

All this, except a few additions and corrections, was written ten years ago. I must confess that later events have led me to revise my opinion of Louis Blanc to some extent. He really has taken a step forward—and as might have been anticipated, away from the old Believers of Jacobinism. It has cost him something. ‘What’s to be done?’ Louis Blanc said to me when the Mexican War was at its height, ‘the honour of our flag is compromised.’ A purely French and absolutely anti-human opinion. Evidently it deeply distressed Louis Blanc. A year later at a banquet given in honour of Victor Hugo at Brussels, after the publication of Les Misérables, Louis Blanc said in his speech: ‘Woe to the people whose conception of honour in general does not correspond with their conception of military honour.’ This was a complete volte-face, it showed itself unmistakably at the beginning of the late war. Louis Blanc’s vigorous, apt and deeply true articles published in Le Temps had raised a storm in Le Siècle and the Opinion Nationale: they had almost proved Louis Blanc to be an Austrian agent, and would have done so altogether, but for his well-deserved reputation for honesty.

When I came to know Louis Blanc more intimately, I was struck by his untroubled inner serenity. Everything was settled and in order in his understanding; no questions except subsidiary ones arose in it. He had settled his accounts with himself: er war im Klaren mit sich: he was morally free as a man is who knows that he is right. He good-naturedly recognised his personal mistakes and the blunders of his friends, but he had no theoretical qualms of conscience. He was as pleased with himself after the breakdown of the Republic in 1848 as the Mosaic God after the creation of the world. His mind, alert in details and daily affairs, was of a Japanese immobility on theoretical subjects. This unfaltering confidence in principles accepted once for all, though lightly played upon by the cold breath of reason, rested firmly on moral foundations the strength of which he never tested because he had faith in them. A religious brain and an absence of sceptical misgivings encircled him with a Chinese Wall, over which not one new idea, one doubt could be flung.—(Author’s Note.)