LA BELLE FRANCE

1 Ante Portas

France was closed to me. A year after my arrival in Nice, in the summer of 1851, I wrote a letter to Léon Faucher, then Minister of the Interior, and asked his permission to visit Paris for a few days. ‘I have a house in Paris and I must look after it,’ I said. A genuine economist could not but yield to this argument, and I received permission to stay in Paris ‘for a very brief time.’

In 1852 I asked for the privilege of travelling through France to England: it was refused. In 1856 I wanted to return from England to Switzerland, and again asked for a visa; it was refused. I wrote to the Freiburg Conseil d’État that I was cut off from Switzerland, and should have to travel by stealth, or come through the Straits of Gibraltar, or across Germany, which would most likely land me in the Peter-Paul Fortress and not in Freiburg. On which grounds I begged the Conseil d’État to apply to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs and ask for leave for me to pass through France. The Consul answered me on the 19th of October 1856 with the following letter:—

‘Dear Sir,—In accordance with your desire, we charged the Swiss Minister in Paris to take the necessary steps to obtain for you an authorisation to pass through France on your way back to Switzerland. We forward you a copy of the answer received by the Swiss Minister: “M. Walewski has been obliged upon this subject to consult his colleague, the Minister of the Interior; considerations of special importance, so the Minister of the Interior has informed him, compelled the latter to refuse M. Herzen the right of passing through France last August, and he cannot revise his decision, etc., etc.”’

I had nothing in common with the French exiles except simple acquaintanceship; I had not taken part in any conspiracy or any society, and was at the time exclusively engaged in Russian propaganda. All this the French police—the one omniscient, the one national, and therefore the one infinitely powerful police—knew perfectly. They were angry with me for my articles and my connections.

Of this anger it cannot but be said that it went beyond all bounds. In 1859 I went for a few days to Brussels with my son. Neither at Ostend nor at Brussels was my passport asked for on arrival. Six days later, when I came back in the evening to the hotel, the waiter as he handed me a candle said to me that they had sent from the police for my passport. ‘They have thought of it in time,’ I observed. The man went with me to my room and took the passport. I had no sooner got into bed, between twelve and one, when there was a knock at the door; the same waiter appeared again with a big envelope. ‘The Minister of Justice begs that M. Herzen will present himself at eleven o’clock to-morrow morning at the Département de la Sûreté Publique.’

‘And you come and wake people up at night for that?’

‘They are waiting for an answer.’

‘Who?’

‘Some one from the police.’

‘Well, say that I will come, but say, too, that it is stupid to bring invitations after midnight.’

Then like Nulin⁠[66] I put out my candle.

At eight o’clock next morning a knock at the door again. It was not difficult to guess that this was all the foolery of Belgian justice. ‘Entrez!’

In walked a gentleman, excessively spick and span, in a very new hat and a fresh-looking black coat, with a long watch-chain, thick and apparently gold, and so on.

Not fully dressed—indeed, only partially clad—I presented the strangest contrast to a man who was obliged to be dressed so scrupulously from seven o’clock in the morning that he might be mistaken for an honest man. The advantage was certainly on his side.

‘I have the honour to be speaking avec M. Herzen père?’

‘C’est selon; as you look at it. On the one hand I am a father, on the other I am a son.’

That greatly diverted the spy.

‘I have come to you....’

‘Excuse me—to tell me that the Minister of Justice summons me at eleven o’clock to his department?’

‘Just so.’

‘Why does the Minister trouble you, and so early in the morning too? Is not it enough for him to disturb me so late at night, sending that envelope?’

‘So you will be there?’

‘Without fail.’

‘You know the way?’

‘Why? Have you been told to accompany me?’

‘Upon my word, quelle idée!’

‘And so....’

‘I wish you good day.’

‘Good morning.’

At eleven o’clock I was sitting with the head of the Belgian Public Security Department.

He was holding some sort of a manuscript book and my passport.

‘You must excuse me for our having troubled you, but you see there are two little circumstances here: in the first place, your passport is Swiss, while ...’ with police penetration, to test me, he fixed his eyes upon me.

‘While I am a Russian,’ I added.

‘Yes. I must confess that has struck us as strange.’

‘Why? Have you no law of naturalisation in Belgium?’

‘And you...?’

‘I was naturalised ten years ago at Morat of the Canton of Freiburg in the village of Châtel.’

‘Of course, if that is so, in that case I do not venture to doubt ... we will pass to the second difficulty. Three years ago you asked for permission to visit Brussels and received a refusal....’

‘Mille pardons, that did not happen and could not have happened. What should I have thought of free Belgium, if, though never banished from her, I could doubt my right to visit Brussels?’

The head of the Department of Public Security was a little embarrassed.

‘However, here it is ...’ and he opened the manuscript book.

‘It seems that not everything in it is correct. Here you did not know, for instance, that I was naturalised in Switzerland.’

‘To be sure. The Consul, M. Delpierre....’

‘Don’t disturb yourself, I will tell you the rest. I asked your Consul in London whether I could move the Russian printing-press to Brussels—that is, whether the press would be left alone if I did not interfere in Belgian affairs, which I had no inclination whatever to do, as you will readily believe. M. Delpierre asked the Minister. The Minister asked him to dissuade me from my plan of moving the printing-press. Your Consul was ashamed to communicate the Minister’s answer by letter, and he asked Louis Blanc, as an acquaintance of both of us, to give me this message. Thanking Louis Blanc, I asked him to reassure M. Delpierre and to tell him that I had with great fortitude received the news that my printing-press would not be allowed to enter Brussels, but “if,” I added, “the Consul had had to inform me of the opposite—that is, that my printing-press and I would never to all eternity be allowed to leave Brussels—I might not have had the courage to bear it.” You see, I remember all the circumstances very well.’

The guardian of public security cleared his throat a little, and reading the manuscript book observed: ‘It really is so; I had not noticed the mention of the printing-press. However, I imagine that you must in any case obtain permission from the Minister; otherwise, much as we shall regret it, we shall be forced to ask you....’

‘I am going to-morrow.’

‘Oh dear no, no one insists on such haste; you may remain a week, a fortnight. We are speaking of permanent residence.... I am almost certain that the Minister will sanction it.’

‘I may ask his sanction for some future occasion, but now I have not the slightest desire to remain longer in Brussels.’

There the affair ended. ‘I forgot one thing in the confusion of our explanation,’ the apprehensive guardian of public security said to me, ‘we are a small people, we are a small people, that’s our trouble, il y a des égards....’ He was ashamed.

Two years later my younger daughter, who was living in Paris, was taken ill. Again I asked for a visa, and again Persigny refused it. Just at that time Count Branicki was in London. Dining with him, I told him of the refusal. ‘Write a letter to Prince Napoleon,’ said Branicki, ‘I’ll see that he gets it.’

‘I have no grounds for writing to the Prince.’

‘That is true. Write to the Emperor. To-morrow I am going, and the day after to-morrow your letter shall be in his hands.’

‘That is very soon, let me consider it.’

On reaching home I wrote the following letter:—

‘Sire,—More than ten years ago I was compelled to leave France by ministerial order. Since then I have twice received permission to visit Paris.⁠[67]⁠

‘Of late I have been steadily refused the privilege of visiting France, though one of my daughters is being educated in Paris and I own a house there. I venture to apply directly to your Imperial Majesty with a request for permission to visit France and to remain in Paris for the time necessary for my business, and I shall await your decision with confidence and respect.

‘In any case, Sire, I give you my word that my desire to visit France has no political motive.—I remain, with profound respect, Your Majesty’s obedient servant,

‘Alexander Herzen.

‘Orsett House, Westbourne Terrace, London.’

Branicki thought the letter was curt and would therefore probably not attain its object. I told him that I should not write another letter, and that if he cared to do me a service he might deliver it, but that if on reflection he had changed his mind he could throw it in the fire. This conversation took place at the railway station; he went off.

Four days later I received the following letter from the French Embassy:—

‘Paris, June 3, 1861, Office of Prefect of Police, Bureau One.

‘Dear Sir,—By command of the Emperor I have the honour to inform you that His Imperial Majesty sanctions your visit to France and your sojourn in Paris on every occasion when your business requires it, as you have requested in your letter of May 31st.

‘You can consequently travel freely throughout the Empire, observing the accepted formalities.—Receive sir, etc., Prefect of Police.’

Then a signature written eccentrically slanting, impossible to decipher, and like anything rather than the name Boitelle.

The same day came a letter from Branicki. Prince Napoleon sent him the following letter from the Emperor:—

‘Dear Napoleon,—This is to inform you that I have just sanctioned the entrance of Monsieur⁠[68] Herzen into France and have ordered him to be given a passport.’

After this ‘Lift up!’ the Schlagbaum, which had been down for eleven years, was raised, and a month later I set off for Paris.

2 Intra Muros

‘Ma-ame Erstin!’ a gloomy gendarme with enormous moustaches shouted at Calais at the barrier through which travellers who have only just landed from the Dover steamer and been driven by the Customs House and other overseers into the stone-built barn have to pass one by one into France. The travellers went up, the gendarme served out the passports, the police commissioner questioned with his eyes and, where necessary, with his tongue, and the traveller, approved and found innocuous to the Empire, vanished behind the barrier.

This time no traveller moved forward at the gendarme’s shout.

‘Ma-ame Ogly Erstin!’ the gendarme shouted, raising his voice and waving a passport.

No one answered.

‘Why, is there no one of the name?’ shouted the gendarme, and looking at the passport, added: ‘Mam’zelle Ogly Erstin.’

Only then a little girl of ten, namely my daughter Olga, conjectured that the guardian of order was calling her with this ferocity. ‘Avancez donc, prenez vos papiers!’ the gendarme commanded savagely. Olga took her passport, and huddling up to Malwide von Meysenbug, asked her in a whisper: ‘Est-ce que c’est l’Empereur?’

That happened to her in 1860, but something worse happened to me a year later, and not at the barrier at Calais, which no longer exists, but everywhere: in a railway carriage, in the street, in Paris, in the provinces, in my home, in my dreams, in waking life, everywhere I saw before me the Emperor, with long moustaches waxed to a thread, with eyes that did not see and a mouth that did not speak. Not only the gendarmes, who are to a certain extent emperors from their position, but the soldiers, the shop-boys, the waiters, and especially the conductors on trains and omnibuses, looked to me like Napoleons. It was only here in Paris in 1861, before the Hôtel de Ville, before which I had stood in respect in 1847, before Notre Dame, the Champs-Élysées and the Boulevards, that I grasped the meaning of the psalm in which King David with flattering despair complains to Jehovah that he cannot get away from Him, cannot escape Him: ‘I go into the water,’ he says, ‘thou art there; into the earth, thou art there; into the sky, and of course thou art there also.’ If I went to dine at the Maison d’Or, Napoleon in one of his incarnations was dining the other side of the table and asking for truffles à la serviette; if I went to the theatre, one would be sitting in the same row and one would walk on to the stage. If I ran away from him out of town, he followed on my heels beyond the Bois de Boulogne in a closely buttoned coat and moustaches with stiffly waxed points. Where was he not? At the ball in Mabille? At mass in the Madeleine? He was sure to be at both.

La révolution s’est faite homme. ‘The revolution is embodied in a man,’ was one of the favourite phrases of the doctrinaire jargon of the days of Thiers and the liberal historians of the Louis-Philippe period; but this is rather more cunning: the revolution and the reaction, order and disorder, the van and the rear, are incarnate in one man, and that man in his turn is reincarnated in the whole administration, from the ministers to the rural constables, from the senators to the village mayors, is scattered in the infantry and afloat in the navy.

This man is not a prophet, not a poet, not a conqueror, not an eccentricity, not a genius, not a man of talent; but a cold, silent, surly, plain, prudent, persistent, prosaic ‘middle-aged gentleman, neither fat nor thin’⁠[69]⁠—le bourgeois of bourgeois France, l’homme du destin, le neveu du grand homme, the plebeian. He obliterates, he concentrates in himself, all the prominent aspects of the national character, all the tendencies of the people, as the topmost peak of a mountain or a pyramid ends in nothing.

In 1849 and in 1850 I had not grasped the significance of Napoleon III. Carried away by democratic rhetoric, I did not appreciate him. The year 1861 was one of the very best for the Empire, everything was going well. Everything had reached equilibrium, was reconciled with and submissive to the new régime. There was precisely enough opposition and daring thought to give shadow and some spiciness to the mixture. Laboulaye⁠[70] very cleverly praised New York to the disadvantage of Paris, Prévost-Paradol⁠[71] Austria to the disadvantage of France. Anonymous hints were made with regard to the Mirès case.⁠[72] People were quietly allowed to abuse the Pope and show some slight sympathy for the Polish movement. There were circles who met together to display their frondeur spirit, as we used to meet in the ’forties in Moscow at the house of some old friend. They even had their dissatisfied celebrities, rather after the fashion of our Yermolov, but turned civilian, such as Guizot. All the rest had been beaten flat by the storm. And no one complained, they even liked the repose of it, as people like the first week of Lent with its horse-radish and cabbage after the seven days of feasting and drinking in Carnival. Those who did not like lenten fare were hard to find; they had vanished for shorter or longer periods, and would come back with taste corrected from Lambessa or from the Mazas prison. The police, la grande police which had replaced la grande armée, was everywhere at all times. Literary style was all at a dead level—wretched boatmen floating calmly in wretched boats over the once stormy sea. The inanity of the plays produced on every stage induced heavy sleep at night, which was maintained in the morning by the futility of the newspapers. Journalism in the former sense of the word did not exist. The leading papers stood not for views but for commercial firms. After the leading articles of London papers, written in condensed, sensible language, with ‘nerve,’ as the French say, and ‘muscles,’ one simply cannot read the Paris premiers. Rhetorical flourishes, faded and frayed, and the same old, high-flown phrases, made more than absurd, disgusting, through their obvious contrast with facts, took the place of subject-matter. Oppressed nationalities were continually being invited as before to rely upon France; she still remained ‘at the head of the great movement,’ and was still bringing the world-revolution freedom and the great principles of 1789. Opposition took its stand under the banner of Buonapartism. These are nuances of precisely the same colour, and they might all be indicated as sailors indicate the intermediate winds, N.N.W., N.W.N., N.W.W., W.N.W.... Buonapartism desperate, furious, moderate; Buonapartism monarchical; Buonapartism republican, democratic, socialistic; Buonapartism peaceful, military, revolutionary, conservative; and finally, Buonapartism of the Palais Royal and the Tuileries.... Late in the evening certain gentlemen run to the newspaper offices to set the weather-cock of the paper straight, if it should have turned a little too far to the east or west of the north. They check the time by the chronometer of the Prefecture, erase and add, and hasten to bring out the next edition.

Reading in a café an evening paper which stated that Mirès’ lawyer had refused to disclose how certain sums had been employed, saying that ‘very highly placed persons’ were involved, I said to a man I knew: ‘But how is it the prosecutor does not compel him to tell, and how is it the newspapers do not insist upon it?’ My acquaintance gave a tug to my coat, cast a glance round, and signalled with his eyes, his hands and his cane. I had not lived in Petersburg for nothing. I understood him, and began discussing absinthe and seltzer-water.

As I came out of the café, I saw a minute man running towards me with minute arms outspread to embrace me. As he approached I recognised Darimon. ‘How happy you must be,’ said the deputy of the Left, ‘to be back in Paris! Ah, je m’imagine.’

‘Not particularly so!’

Darimon was petrified.

‘Well, how are Madame Darimon and your little son, who must be by now your big son, especially if he does not take after his father?’

‘Toujours le même, ha-ha-ha, très bien’—and we parted.

I felt oppressed in Paris, and I only breathed freely when a month later, through the rain and fog, I saw again the dirty white chalky cliffs of England. Everything that pinched like narrow shoes under Louis-Philippe pinched now like fetters on the legs. I had not seen the intermediate processes by which the new régime had been built up and made secure, but found it after ten years absolutely complete and established.... Moreover, I did not recognise Paris; its rebuilt streets, unfinished palaces, and, worst of all, the people I met were strange to me. This was not the Paris I had loved and hated, not the city I had longed to reach from childhood, not the city I had left with a curse on my lips. This was a Paris that had lost its individuality, had grown indifferent, and was no longer boiling. A strong hand oppressed it everywhere and was at every minute ready to tug at the reins—but that was not necessary; Paris had accepted the Second Empire tout de bon, it barely retained the external habits of older days. The ‘discontented’ had nothing serious and strong to set up against the Empire. The memories of the republicans of Tacitus and the vague ideas of the Socialists could not shake the throne of the Caesars. The police de surveillance did not combat these ‘fantasies’ seriously, they resented them not as a danger, but as disorderly and improper. They were more annoyed at the ‘memories’ than at the ‘hopes,’ they kept a stricter hand over the Orleanists. From time to time the autocratic police unexpectedly dealt some unjust and brutal blow as a menacing reminder of its power; it purposely aroused terror over two quarters of the city for two months, and then retreated again into the crevices of the Prefecture and the corridors of the Government Offices.

In reality, all was still. The two most violent protests were not French. The attempts of Pianori and Orsini were the revenge of Italy, the revenge of Rome. The Orsini affair, which terrified Napoleon, was taken as a sufficient excuse for dealing the last blow, the coup de grâce. It succeeded. A country which puts up with Espinasse’s⁠[73] laws concerning suspected persons has given its pledge. It was necessary to frighten people, to show that the police would not stick at anything; it was necessary to destroy all conceptions of human rights and dignity, to crush men’s minds by injustice, to accustom them to it, and to prove the power of the authorities by it. When he cleared Paris of suspected persons, Espinasse ordered the prefects to discover a conspiracy in each department, to involve in it not less than ten persons known to be hostile to the Empire, to arrest them and to put them at the disposition of the Minister. The Minister had the right to send them to Cayenne or Lambessa without legal proceedings, without rendering account or being held responsible. The man so exiled was lost, there could be no defence, no protest; he was not tried, and his only hope lay in the special mercy of the Emperor. ‘I received these orders,’ the prefect N. said to our poet Fyodor Tyutchev⁠[74]⁠—‘what was I to do? I racked my brains.... The position was difficult and unpleasant. At last a happy thought struck me how to get out of it. I sent for the commissaire of police and said to him: “Can you at very short notice find me a dozen desperate rascals, unconvicted thieves and so on?” The commissaire said that nothing would be easier. “Well then, make up a list; we will arrest them to-night and send them to the Minister as revolutionaries.”’

‘Well, what then?’ asked Tyutchev.

‘We collected them, and the Minister sent them off to Cayenne, and the whole department was delighted and thanked me for getting rid of the rascals so easily,’ added the worthy prefect, laughing.

The Government tired of the methods of terrorism and violence before the people and public opinion did. Times of peace, of tranquillity, de la sécurité, followed very shortly. Little by little the lines of care were smoothed out of the faces of the police; the insolent, provocative glance of the spy, the ferocious air of the sergeant de ville softened; the Emperor dreamed of various mild and clever forms of freedom and decentralisation. Ministers of incorruptible zeal restrained his liberal ardour.

From 1861 onwards the doors were open, and I passed several times through Paris. At first I was in haste to leave it; afterwards that feeling too died away, and I grew accustomed to a new Paris. I was less angry with it. It was a different town, huge, unfamiliar. Learning and the intellectual movement, thrust back beyond the Seine, were not to be seen, political life was not to be heard. Napoleon had granted his ‘broadened liberties’; the toothless opposition lifted its bald head and intoned the old phraseology of the ’forties; the working classes put no faith in them, kept silent and feebly tried co-operation and association. Paris was becoming more and more the general European market, in which everything in the world was crowding and jostling: merchants, singers, bankers, diplomats, aristocrats, artists of all countries, and masses of Germans unseen in old days. Taste, tone, expressions—all were changed. A glittering, oppressive luxury, metallic, golden, costly, succeeded the aesthetic feeling of old days: in dress and in trifles it was not choice nor taste that was the boast, but costliness, the power to waste, and people talked incessantly of profit, of gambling, of posts, of the funds. The lorettes set the tone for the ladies. The education of women sank to the level of Italy in the past.

L’Empire, l’Empire ... that is the evil, that is the trouble.... No, the cause lies deeper. ‘Sire, vous avez un cancer rentré,’ said the physician. ‘Un Waterloo rentré,’ answered Napoleon. And here we have two or three revolutions rentrées, avortées, stillborn.

Did France not bring them to the birth because she had too hurriedly, too prematurely conceived them, and wanted to be rid of her interesting position by a Caesarean operation? Was it because she had spirit enough for cutting off heads, but not enough for stamping out ideas? Was it because the Revolution was turned into an army and the rights of man were sprinkled with holy water? Was it because the masses were plunged in darkness, and the Revolution was made not for the peasants?

3 Alpendrücken

Russians who have no mountains near simply say that the domovoy choked them. It is perhaps a truer description. It certainly seems as though some one were choking you; your dream is not clear, but is very terrible; it is hard to breathe, yet one wants to draw deep breaths, the pulse is quicker, the heart throbs fast and painfully.... You are being hunted; creatures, not men, not visions, are just on your heels, you have glimpses of forgotten images that recall other years and an earlier age.... There are precipices, abysses, your foot slips, there is no escape, you fly into the void of darkness, a scream breaks unconsciously from your breast and you wake up. You wake up in a fever, drops of sweat on your brow; choking for breath, you hasten to the window.... Outside there is a fresh bright dawn, the breeze is carrying away the mist, there is the scent of grass and the forest, there are sounds and calls ... everything that is ours and earthly.... And, comforted, you drink in deep draughts of the morning air.

The other day I had such a nightmare, and not in my sleep, but awake, not in bed but in a book, and when I tore myself from it to the light, I almost cried aloud: ‘Hail to Reason! our simple earthly Reason!’

Old Pierre Leroux, whom I have been used to loving and respecting for thirty years, brought me his last work and begged me to be sure to read it, ‘the text at least; the commentary will do afterwards, any time.’

‘The Book of Job, a Tragedy in Five Acts, composed by Isaiah and translated by Pierre Leroux.’ And not merely translated but applied to contemporary questions.

I read the whole text, and, overwhelmed with sadness and horror, made for the window.

What was the meaning of it?

What antecedents could have produced such a brain and such a book? What land gave birth to such a man, and what is its destiny? Such madness can only be that of a great mind; it is the last stage of a long and frustrated development.

The book is the delirium of a poet-lunatic, whose memory still retains facts and order, hopes and images, though no meaning is left; who has kept memories, feelings, forms, but not kept reason; or, if reason has survived, it is only to regress, to dissolve into its elements, to pass from thoughts into fancy, from truths into mysteries, from deductions into myths, from knowledge into revelation.

There is no going beyond it; the next stage is catalepsy, the stupor of the Pythian prophetess, of a Shaman, the frenzy of a dancing-dervish, the frenzy of twirling tables....

Revolution and miracle-working, socialism and the Talmud, Job and George Sand, Isaiah and Saint-Simon, 1789 B.C. and A.D. 1789, all flung pell-mell into a cabalistic furnace—what could come out of these strained antagonistic combinations? The man has fallen ill with this undigested food, he has lost the healthy feeling for truth, the love and respect for reason. What is it that has driven him so far from his true course in his old age—a man who once stood among the leaders of the social movement, full of love and energy, whose words of indignation and sympathy for his poorer brethren moved our hearts? I remember those days. ‘Peter the Red’ (so we used to call him in the ’forties) ‘is becoming my Christ,’ Byelinsky, always carried to extremes, wrote to me. And here this teacher, this living, rousing voice, after fifteen years of seclusion in Jersey, appears with the Grève de Samarez and with the Book of Job, preaches some sort of transmigration of souls, seeks the solution in the other world, has no more faith in this one. France and the Revolution have deceived him; he pitches his tabernacle in the other world, in which there is no deception, and, indeed, nothing else, so that there is the more room for fantasy.

Perhaps it is an individual illness, an idiosyncrasy? Newton had his Book of Job, Auguste Comte his special madness.

Perhaps ... but what is one to say when one picks up a second, a third French book, and always it is a book of Job, clouding the mind and weighing upon the heart? All set one seeking light and air, all bear the traces of spiritual turmoil and sickness, of something lost and gone astray; we can hardly put much of it down to individual insanity. On the contrary, we have to look for the explanation of the individual case in the general aberration; it is just in those who most fully represent the French genius that I see these traces of sickness.

These giants are lost, plunged in a heavy sleep, in long, feverish suspense, worn out with the woes of the day and burning impatience; they rave, as it were, half-asleep, and try to persuade us and themselves that their visions are reality and that real life is a bad dream, which will soon pass, particularly for France.

The inexhaustible wealth of their long years of civilisation, the vast stores of words and images, glimmer in their brains like the phosphorescence of the sea that lights up nothing. The whirlwind that comes before an approaching cataclysm has swept up and floated into these gigantic memories the fragments of two or three worlds, without cement, without connection, without science. The process by which their thought is developed is unintelligible to us; they pass from word to word, from antinomy to antinomy, from antithesis to synthesis, without solving them; the symbol is taken for the reality, the desire for the fact. There are vast yearnings with no practical means, no clear aims, unfinished outlines, thoughts half worked out, hints, approximations, prophecies, ornaments, frescoes, arabesques.... They have none of the clear coherence of which France boasted of old, they are not seeking the truth, it is so terrible in real life that they turn aside from it. False and strained romanticism, swollen and over-exuberant rhetoric have spoilt their taste for everything simple and sane. Proportion is lost, the perspective is false.

And it is not so bad as long as it is a matter of souls journeying about the planets, of the angelic settlements of Jean Reynaud,⁠[76] of Job talking to Proudhon, and Proudhon to a dead woman; it is not so bad as long as a fairy-tale is made out of the Thousand and One Nights of humanity, and Shakespeare from love and respect is buried under pyramids and obelisks, Olympus and the Bible, Assyria and Nineveh. But what are we to say to it when, on the very brink of shame and ruin, this rigmarole breaks into real life, throwing dust in the eyes and shuffling the cards in order to prophesy with them ‘the nearness of happiness and the fulfilment of desire’? What is to be said when putrefying wounds are plastered over with the glittering rags of past glory, and syphilitic spots on the flabby cheeks are passed off for the flush of youth?

The old poet humbles himself in the dust before fallen Paris at the least pitiful moment of her degradation, when, pleased at the wealthy livery and lavishness of her alien masters, she carouses in the market of the world. He greets Paris as the guiding-star of humanity, the heart of the world, the brain of history; he assures her that the bazaar on the Champs-de-Mars is the beginning of the brotherhood of nations and universal peace.

To intoxicate with praise a generation that has grown shallow, insignificant, complacent and conceited, pleased with flattery and self-indulgent, to maintain the pride of futile and degenerate sons and grandsons, veiling their paltry, senseless existence with the approval of genius, is a great sin.

To make of contemporary Paris the saviour and deliverer of the world, to assure her that she is great in her downfall, that she is not really fallen, is like the apotheosis of the divine Nero or the divine Caligula or Caracalla.

The difference is that the Senecas and the Ulpians were strong and powerful, while Victor Hugo is an exile.

Together with the flattery, one is struck by the vagueness of the conception, the confusion of the tendencies and the immaturity of the ideals. Men who walked in the van leading others are left behind in the twilight with no poignant yearning for the dawn. Talk of the transformation of humanity, the transmutation of all that exists ... but of what and into what?

That is equally obscure in the other world of Pierre Leroux and in this world of Victor Hugo:—

‘In the twentieth century she will be a marvellous land, she will be great, and that will not hinder her from being free. She will be famous, rich, profound in thought, peaceable, friendly to all the rest of mankind. She will possess the mild ascendancy of an elder sister.

‘This central land which gives light to all, this model farm of humanity, on the pattern of which all the rest is moulded, has its heart, its brain, whose name is Paris.

‘This city has one disadvantage: the world belongs to him who rules her. Humanity follows her lead. Paris toils for the commonwealth of the earth. Whoever thou mayest be, Paris is thy master ... she sometimes goes astray, she has her optical illusions, her errors of taste ... and it is the worse for the sense of all the world: the compass is lost, and progress gropes its way.

‘But the true Paris, I think, is different. I do not believe in that Paris—it is a phantom, and, moreover, a passing shadow is as nought in face of the vast radiance of the dawn.

‘None but savages fear for the sun in an eclipse. Paris is a lighted torch; the lighted torch has will.... Paris will purge herself of all impurity; she has abolished the death penalty, so far as that lay in her power, and has transferred the guillotine to La Roquette. Men are hanged in London, in Paris they can no more be guillotined; if the guillotine were set up again before the Hôtel de Ville, the very stones would rise up. To kill in these surroundings is impossible. It remains but to cast out of the law what has already been cast out of the city!

‘1866 has been the year of the clash of nations, 1867 will be the year of their concord. The Exhibition in Paris is the great peace congress; all obstacles, all drags, all brakes on the wheels of progress will be shattered and fly into atoms.... War is impossible.... Why are dreadful cannons and other weapons of war exhibited?... Do we not know that war is dead? It died on the day on which Jesus said: “Love one another!” and has only lingered on like a ghost; Voltaire and the revolutionists slew it once more. We do not believe in war. All the nations have fraternised at the Exhibition, all the nations, flocking to Paris, have been France (ils viennent être France); they have learned that there is a city that is the sun of the world ... and are bound to love her, to desire her, to submit to her rule!’

And, moved to devotional tenderness before the nation which is evaporating in brotherhood, whose freedom is the testimony to the maturity of the human race, Hugo exclaims: ‘Oh France! farewell! thou art too grand to be my fatherland! One must part from a mother who has become a goddess. Another step and thou wilt vanish transformed; thou art so great that soon thou wilt not be. Thou wilt not be France, thou wilt be humanity; thou wilt not be a land, thou wilt be universality. Thou art destined to pass out in light.... Boldly take up the burden of thy infinity, and, as Athens became Greece, Rome became Christianity, be thou, oh France, the World!’

As I was reading these lines there was a newspaper lying before me, and in it a simple-hearted correspondent had written as follows:—

‘What is taking place now in Paris is extraordinarily interesting, not only for contemporaries, but for succeeding generations. The crowds that have gathered for the Exhibition are carousing.... All bounds are overstepped: there are orgies going on everywhere, in restaurants and private houses, most of all at the Exhibition itself. The arrival of the monarchs has finally intoxicated every one. Paris presents the spectacle of a colossal Descente de la Courtille. Yesterday (June 10) this intoxication reached its climax. When the crowned heads were feasting in the palace, which has seen so much in its day, the crowds thronged the surrounding streets and squares. Along the embankment in the rue Rivoli, rue Castiglione and rue St.-Honoré, as many as three hundred thousand people were feasting after their own fashion. From the Madeleine to the Théâtre des Variétés a most disorderly and unceremonious orgy was going on; big, open waggonettes, improvised omnibuses and chars-à-bancs, drawn by exhausted broken-down nags, moved at a snail’s pace along the boulevards through the dense masses of heads. These vehicles were packed to overflowing: in them men and women with bottles in their hands were standing, sitting, and most often lying at full length in every conceivable attitude; laughing and singing, they talked with the crowds on foot; uproar and shouts met them from the crowds in cafés and restaurants, which were full to overflowing; sometimes the songs and bawling were interspersed with the savage oaths of a cabman or the friendly wrangle of drunkards.... Men were lying at the street-corners and in the back-alleys, dead drunk; the police themselves seemed to have retreated before the impossibility of doing anything. “Never,” writes the correspondent, “have I seen anything like it in Paris, and I have lived there for twenty years.”

‘This was in the street, “in the gutter,” as the French express it, but what was being done within the palaces, illuminated by more than ten thousand lights ... what was done at the banquets on which millions of francs were squandered?

‘The sovereigns left the ball given by the city at the Hôtel de Ville about two o’clock’—the official chronicler of the Emperor’s festivities records. ‘The carriages could not reach the building in time, nor drive home the eight thousand visitors. Hour after hour passed; the guests were weary, ladies sat down on the stairs, others simply lay down in the halls on the rugs, and fell asleep at the feet of the lackeys and huissiers, while gentlemen stepped over them, catching their spurs in their lace and flounces. When by degrees the rooms were cleared, the carpets could not be seen; they were all covered with faded flowers, broken beads, rags of blonde and lace, of tulle and muslin, torn from the ladies’ dresses by the swords, hilts and stiff gold lace of the men.’

And behind the scenes the spies were catching men who shouted: ‘Vive la Pologne,’ beating them with their fists and passing them off for thieves, and in two instances the court condemned the latter to prison for hindering the spies from lawlessly, informally, arresting them with blows.

I purposely mention only trifles: microscopical dissection gives a better idea of the decay of the tissue than a big piece cut off a corpse.

4 The Daniels

In the days of July 1848, after the first terror and stupefaction of victors and vanquished, a thin, austere old man stepped forward as the embodiment of their stings of conscience. With gloomy words he cursed and branded the men of ‘order’ who had shot hundreds without even asking their names, had banished thousands untried, and had held Paris in a state of siege. When he had ended his anathema, he turned to the people and said: ‘And you, be silent, you are too poor to have the right to speak.’

This was Lamennais. They were on the point of seizing him, but were awed by his grey hair, his wrinkles, his eyes, in which the tears of old age were quivering, and which would soon be closed for ever.

Lamennais’ words passed, leaving no trace.

Twenty years later, other austere old men appeared with their stern words; and their voice too was lost in the wilderness.

They had no faith in the force of their words, but their hearts would not let them keep silent. Isolated in their banishment and their remoteness, these judges of the court of Vehm, these Daniels, pronounced their sentence, knowing that it would not be carried out.

They to their sorrow saw that this ‘trifling cloud obscuring the grand dawn’ was not so trifling; that this historical migraine, this drunkenness after revolution, would not pass off so quickly: and they said so.

‘In the worst days of the ancient Caesarism,’ said Edgar Quinet at the Congress in Geneva, ‘when every one was dumb except the sovereign, there were men who left their refuge in the wilderness to utter a few words of truth in the face of the fallen peoples. For sixteen years I have been living in the wilderness, and I in my turn should like to break the deathly silence to which our age has grown accustomed.’

What news did he bring from his mountains, and in the name of what did he lift up his voice? He lifted it up to tell his fellow-countrymen (whatever a Frenchman may be talking about, he always speaks of France): ‘You have no conscience ... it is dead, crushed under the heel of the mighty, it has disowned itself. For sixteen years I have been seeking traces of it and have not found it.

‘It was the same under the Caesars in the ancient world. The soul of man had vanished. The peoples aided their own enslavement, applauded it, showing neither regret nor remorse. As the conscience of mankind vanished, it left an emptiness which was felt in everything as it is now, and to fill it a new god was needed.

‘Who will in our day fill the abyss opened by modern Caesarism?

‘In place of the worn-out, abolished conscience has come night; we wander in the darkness not knowing whence to seek aid, to whom to turn. All have helped to bring about our fall: church and law-court, the nations and society.... Deaf is the earth, deaf conscience, deaf the peoples; right has perished with conscience; only might rules....

‘What have you come for, what are you seeking in these ruins of ruins? You answer that you are seeking peace. Whence do you seek it? You are lost among the broken ruins of the fallen edifice of justice. You seek peace, you are mistaken, it is not here. Here is war. In this night without a dawn, nations and races are doomed to combat and destroy each other at hazard in obedience to the will of the rulers who have fettered their hands and their minds in bondage.

‘The nations will rise again only when they are conscious of the depth of their fall!’

To diminish the horror of the picture the old man flung a few flowers for the children. His listeners applauded him. Even then they did not know what they had done. A few days later they went back on their applause.

Two months before these gloomy words rang out at the Geneva Congress, in another Swiss town another exile of old days wrote the following words:—

‘I have no more faith in France. If ever she rises again to a new life and recovers from her terror of herself, it will be a miracle; no sick nation has risen up again from so deep a fall. I do not expect miracles. Forgotten institutions may be born again—but the spirit of the people, once quenched, will not revive. An unjust providence has not given me even that consolation which it so liberally deals out to make up for poverty to all exiles: perpetual hope and faith in their dreams. Nothing is left me from all I have passed through but the lessons of experience, bitter disillusionment, and an incurable weariness (énervement). There is ice in my heart, I have no more faith in right or human justice or common sense. I have turned away from it into indifference as into the tomb.’

The Girondist Mercier, with one foot in the grave, said at the time of the fall of the First Empire: ‘I live only to see how it will end!’ ‘I cannot say even that,’ added Marc Dufraisse. ‘I have no special curiosity to know how the epic of the emperors will end.’

And the old man turned to the past, and with profound melancholy held it up to its degenerate successors. The present was strange, alien, revolting to him. From his cell rises the breath of the tomb, his words send a shiver through the listener.

Sayings of one, writings of another—all slid off, leaving no trace. Hearing them, reading them, the French had no ‘ice in their heart.’ Many were openly indignant: ‘These men rob us of our strength and drive us to despair.... What salvation, what comfort is there in their words?’

It is not a judge’s duty to comfort; he must unmask, must convict of sin, where there is no consciousness and no penitence. It is his work to stir the conscience. He is a judge and not a prophet, he has no Messiah in reserve for comfort in the future. He, like those he judges, belongs to the old religion. The judge stands for the pure and ideal side of it, while the masses represent its practical, evasive, attenuated application. While he condemns, the judge is practically forced to attack the ideal; while defending it, he proves its one-sidedness.

Neither Edgar Quinet nor Marc Dufraisse really knows of a solution, and they call us back to the past. It is no wonder that they do not see it; they stand with their back to it. They belong to the past. Revolted by the dishonourable end of their world, they seize their crutch, appear, uninvited guests, at the orgy of the haughty, complacent people, and tell them: ‘You have lost all, you have sold all, nothing insults you but the truth. You have neither your old sense nor your old dignity, you have no conscience, you have fallen to the lowest depth, and, far from feeling your slavery, you insolently claim to be the deliverer of nations and nationalities. Decked with the laurels of war, you want to wear the olive-branches of peace. Take thought and repent, if you can. We, the dying, have come to call you to repentance, and if you do not, to break our rod upon you.’

They see their army retreating, deserting its flag, and with the scourge of their words try to drive it back to its old position, and cannot. A new banner is needed to rally them, and they have it not. Like heathen high priests they tear their garments, defending their fallen shrine. Not they, but the persecuted Nazarenes, bring tidings of a new birth and the life of the world to come.

Quinet and Marc Dufraisse sorrow over the defilement of their temple, the temple of representative government. They sorrow not only for the loss in France of freedom and human dignity, they grieve at the loss of the foremost place, they cannot resign themselves to the fact that the Empire did not prevent the unity of Germany, they are horrified that France has sunk into the background.

The question why France, in whom they do not themselves believe, should have the first place never once presents itself to their minds.

Marc Dufraisse with exasperated humility says that he does not understand the new problems, namely, the economic ones; while Quinet seeks a god to come and fill the emptiness left by the loss of conscience.... He has passed by them, they did not know him and let him be crucified.

Postscript.—As a commentary on our sketch there comes Renan’s strange book on ‘Contemporary Questions.’ He too is frightened by the present. He sees that things are going badly. But what pitiful remedies! He sees a sick man, rotting with syphilis, and advises him to study well, especially the classics. He sees the inner indifference to everything except material profit, and weaves out of his rationalism some sort of religion—catholicism without a real Christ and without a pope, but with mortification of the flesh. He sets up disciplinary, or rather hygienic, fences for the mind.

Perhaps the most important and boldest thing in his book is his saying about the Revolution: ‘The French Revolution was a grand experiment, but it was an experiment that has failed.’

And then he presents the picture of the destruction of all the old institutions, which, though oppressive on the one side, did serve as a means of resistance against an all-devouring centralisation, and in their place man left weak and defenceless before an oppressive, all-powerful State and a Church that survived intact.

One cannot help thinking with horror of the union of this State and Church which is being accomplished before our eyes, and which goes so far that the Church is restricting medicine, taking doctors’ diplomas from materialists, and trying to decide questions of reason and revelation by decision of the Senate, to decree libre arbitre, as Robespierre decreed l’Être Suprême.

To-morrow, if not to-day, the Church will capture education—and what then?

The French who have survived the reaction see that, and their position in regard to foreigners becomes more and more disadvantageous. They have never put up with so much as now, and from whom? From the Germans in particular. Not long ago an argument between a German ex-refugié and a distinguished French littérateur took place before me. The German was ruthless. In old days the Germans had a sort of tacit agreement of tolerance for English people, who were always allowed to say absurd things, out of respect and the conviction that they were a little crazy, and for Frenchmen, from affection for them and gratitude for the Revolution. These amenities have only survived for the English; Frenchmen find themselves in the position of elderly beauties who have lost their looks and have for years failed to observe that their charms have diminished, and that they have nothing more to expect from the fascinations of their beauty.

In old days their ignorance of everything that lay outside the frontiers of France, their use of hackneyed phrases, their tawdry tinsel, their tearful sentimentality, their aggressive domineering tone and les grands mots, were all allowed to pass—but now all this indulgence is over.

The German, setting his spectacles straight, slapped the Frenchman on the shoulder, saying: ‘Mais, mon cher et très cher ami, these are stock phrases that take the place of criticism, of attention, of understanding; we know them by heart; you have been repeating them for thirty years; they prevent you from seeing clearly the real position of affairs.’

‘But anyway,’ said the literary gentleman, obviously desirous of finishing the conversation, ‘you, my dear philosopher, have all bowed your heads under the yoke of Prussian despotism. I quite understand that you look upon it as a means, that the Prussian domination is a step....’

‘That is just where we differ from you,’ the German interrupted him, ‘that we take that bitter path, hating it and submitting to necessity, with an object before our eyes, while you have reached that position as though it were a haven of refuge; for you it is not a step towards the goal, but the goal itself—and besides, the majority likes it.’

‘C’est une impasse, une impasse,’ observed the Frenchman gloomily, and changed the conversation.

Unluckily he began speaking of Jules Favre’s speech in the Academy; then another German turned grumpy and said: ‘Upon my soul, can that empty rhetoric, that verbosity, hypocrisy, please you? It is hypocritical, and false to everything; how can a man deliver a panegyric for two hours on that pale Cousin? And what business had he to defend orthodox spiritualism? And do you suppose that such opposition will save you? They are rhetoricians and sophists. And how absurd is the whole procedure of speech and answer, of having to praise one’s predecessor, all this mediaeval battle of words!’

‘Ah bah! Vous oubliez les traditions, les coutumes.’

I felt sorry for the Frenchman....

5 Spots of Light

But beyond the Daniels there are spots of light to be seen—faint, far away, and in Paris, too. I am speaking of the Quartier Latin, of that Aventine Hill to which the students and their teachers retreated, that is, those of them who remained faithful to the great tradition of 1789, to the encyclopaedists, to the Montagne, to the Socialist movement. There the gospel of the first revolution is preserved; there the acts of its apostles and the epistles of the holy fathers of the eighteenth century are read; there the great problems of which Marc Dufraisse knows nothing are familiar subjects; there men dream of the future Kingdom of Man just as the monks of the first centuries dreamed of the Kingdom of God.

From the side-streets of this Latium, from the fourth storey of its sombre houses, champions and missionaries continually go forth to combat and preach and perish—for the most part morally, but sometimes physically—in partibus infidelium, that is, on the other side of the Seine.

Objective truth is on their side, every sort of justice and real understanding is on their side, but that is all. ‘Sooner or later truth is always triumphant.’ But we imagine that it is very much later, and very rarely even then. From time immemorial reason has been unattainable or detestable to the majority. That reason might be attractive, Anacharsis Cloots had to dress it up as a pretty actress and to strip her naked. One can only work upon men by seeing their dreams more clearly than they see them themselves, and not by proving one’s thoughts to them as geometrical theorems are proved.

The Quartier Latin recalls the mediaeval Carthusians or Camaldoli,⁠[77] who turned aside from the noise of the crowd with their faith in brotherhood, mercy, and, above all, the speedy coming of the Kingdom of God. And this at the very time when outside their walls knights and ritters were burning and slaying, shedding blood, plundering the villeins and outraging their daughters.... Then followed other times, also without brotherhood and the Second Coming—but the Camaldoli and the Carthusians still clung to their faith. Manners have grown softer still, the fashion of plundering has changed, women are outraged now for pay, men are robbed in accordance with accepted rules. The Kingdom of God has not come, but was inevitably coming (so it seemed to the Carthusians), the tokens were growing clearer, more direct than ever; faith saved the recluses from despair.

At every blow which sends the last fragments of freedom flying into dust, at every downward step of society, at every insolent step backwards, the Quartier Latin lifts up its head, mezza voce at home sings the Marseillaise, and, setting its cap straight, says: ‘That is as it should be. They will reach the limit; the sooner the better.’ The Quartier Latin believes in its course and boldly draws the plan of its ‘kingdom of truth,’ running directly counter to the ‘kingdom of reality.’

And Pierre Leroux believes in Job!

And Victor Hugo in the Exhibition of universal brotherhood!

6 After the Invasion

I keep wanting to repeat these words to Bismarck. The pear is ripe and the thing cannot be done without His Excellency. Do not stand on ceremony, Count!

I do not marvel at what is being done, and I have no right to marvel—I have long been crying out, Beware, beware!... I simply say farewell, and that is hard. There is neither contradiction nor weakness in it. A man may know very well that if his gout gets worse it will hurt him very much: what is more, he may have a presentiment that it will get worse, and that there is no way of stopping it: nevertheless, it will hurt him just as much when it does come on.

I am sorry for individual persons whom I love.

I am sorry for the country, whose first awakening I saw with my own eyes and which now I see outraged and dishonoured. I am sorry for the Mazeppa, who was untied from the tail of one empire to be tied to the tail of another.

I am sorry that I am right. I am, as it were, connected with the fact from having in outline foreseen it. I am angry with myself as a child is angry with the barometer that predicts a storm and spoils his picnic.

Italy is like a family in which some black crime has lately been committed, some horrible calamity that has betrayed ugly secrets has come to pass; a family which has been touched by the hangman’s hand, or from which some one has been carried off to the galleys..... All are exasperated, the innocent are ashamed and ready for insolent defiance. All are tortured by an impotent desire of revenge, poisoned, weakened by a passive hatred.

Perhaps there are means of escape close at hand, but they cannot be found by reason; they lie in chance happenings, in external circumstances, they lie outside the frontiers. Italy’s fate is not in her own hands, that is in itself one of the most insufferable humiliations; it so rudely recalls her recent captivity and the feeling of her own weakness and instability which had begun to be effaced.

And only twenty years!

Twenty years ago at the end of December I finished in Rome the first article of my From the Other Side and was faithless to it, carried away by the year ’forty-eight. I was then in the heyday of my powers, and I watched with eagerness the unfolding of events. In my life there had not yet been one misfortune which had left one deep, aching scar, not one reproach of conscience inwardly, not one insulting word outwardly. With unreasoning light-heartedness, with boundless self-confidence, I floated lightly dancing on the waves with all sails set, and I have had to take them in one after another!

I was in Paris at the time of Garibaldi’s first arrest. The French did not believe in the invasion by their troops.⁠[78] I happened to meet with people of very different classes in society. The inveterate reactionaries and clericals desired intervention, clamoured for it, but yet doubted. At the railway station a distinguished French savant as he took leave of me said: ‘Your imagination, my dear northern Hamlet, is so constructed that you see nothing but what is black; that’s why the impossibility of war with Italy is not obvious to you. The Government knows too well that war for the Pope would set all thinking people against it; after all, you know, we are the France of 1789.’

The first news, not that I read but that I saw, was the fleet setting off from Toulon to Cività. ‘It is only a military manœuvre,’ another Frenchman said to me. ‘On ne viendra jamais aux mains, and besides there is no need for us to soil our hands in Italian blood.’

It turned out that there was need. A few lads from ‘Latium’ protested; they were clapped in the lock-up, and with that everything ended as far as France was concerned. Italy, blood-stained and taken unawares, thanks to the irresolution of the King and the trickery of the Ministers, made every concession. But the French, rendered savage, intoxicated by every victory, could not be stopped: to blood, to action, they had to add words of abuse.

And on these words of abuse being uttered and greeted with the applause of the Empire, its fiercest foes—the Legitimists in the form of the old attorney of the Bourbons, Berryer and the Orleanists in the form of the old Figaro of the days of Louis-Philippe, Thiers—shook hands with it.

I look upon Rouher’s words as an historical revelation. Any one who did not understand France after that must have been born blind.

Count Bismarck, it is your task now!

And you, Mazzini, Garibaldi, last of the saints, last of the Mohicans, fold your hands and take your rest. You are not needed now. You have done your part. Make room now for madness, for the frenzy of blood in which either Europe will slay herself or the Reaction will. What will you do with your hundred republicans and your volunteers with two or three cases of contraband guns? Now there are a million from here and a million from there with needle-guns and other artifices. Now there will be lakes of blood, seas of blood, mountains of corpses.... And then plague, famine, fire and devastation. Ah, messieurs les conservateurs, you would not have even so pale a republic as that of February, you would not have the mawkish democracy laid at your feet by the confectioner Lamartine, you would not have Mazzini the Stoic or Garibaldi the hero. You wanted order.

For that you will have a Seven Years’ war, a Thirty Years’ war....

You were afraid of social reforms, so now you have the Fenians with their barrel of gunpowder and their lighted match.

Who is the fool?

Genoa, December 31, 1867.