Hippolyte A. Taine - "The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3"

Edith Wharton - "Crucial Instances"

Various - "Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853"

Elliott O'Donnell - "Scottish Ghost Stories"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5




Note what he means by - personal insult[101], how he intends to avenge
himself by reprisals of the worst kind, to what excess he carries his
interference, how he enters the cabinets of foreign sovereigns,
forcibly entering and breaking, to drive out their councilors and
control their meetings: like the Roman senate with an Antiochus or a
Prusias, like an English Resident with the King of Oude or of Lahore.
With others as at home, he cannot help but act as a master. The
aspiration for universal dominion is in his very nature; it may be
modified, kept in check, but never can it be completely stifled."[102]

It declares itself on the organization of the Consulate. It explains
why the peace of Amiens could not last; apart from the diplomatic
discussions and behind his alleged grievances, his character, his
exactions, his avowed plans, and the use he intends making of his
forces form the real and true causes of the rupture. In
comprehensible sometimes even in explicit terms, he tells the English:
Expel the Bourbons from your island and close the mouths of your
journalists. If this is against your constitution so much the worse
for it, or so much the worse for you. "There are general principles
of international law to which the (special) laws of states must give
way."[103] Change your fundamental laws. Suppress the freedom of the
press and the right of asylum on your soil, the same as I have done.
"I have a very poor opinion of a government which is not strong enough
to interdict things objectionable to foreign governments."[104] As to
mine, my interference with my neighbors, my late acquisitions of
territory, that does not concern you: "I suppose that you want to talk
about Piedmont and Switzerland? These are trifles"[105] "Europe
recognizes that Holland, Italy, and Switzerland are at the disposition
of France.[106] On the other hand, Spain submits to me and through her
I hold Portugal. Thus, from Amsterdam to Bordeaux, from Lisbon to
Cadiz and Genoa, from Leghorn to Naples and to Tarentum, I can close
every port to you; no treaty of commerce between us. Any treaty that
I might grant to you would be trifling: for each million of
merchandise that you would send into France a million of French
merchandise would be exported;[107] in other words, you would be
subject to an open or concealed continental blockade, which would
cause you as much distress in peace as if you were at war." My eyes
are nevertheless fixed on Egypt; "six thousand Frenchmen would now
suffice to re-conquer it";[108] forcibly, or otherwise, I shall return
there; opportunities will not be lacking, and I shall be on the watch
for them; "sooner or later she will belong to France, either through
the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, or through some arrangement
with the Porte."[109] Evacuate Malta so that the Mediterranean may
become a French lake; I must rule on sea as on land, and dispose of
the Orient as of the Occident. In sum, "with my France, England must
naturally end in becoming simply an appendix: nature has made her one
of our islands, the same as Oleron or Corsica."[110] Naturally, with
such a perspective before them, the English keep Malta and recommence
the war. He has anticipated such an occurrence, and his resolution is
taken; at a glance, he perceives and measures the path this will open
to him; with his usual clear-sightedness he has comprehended, and he
announces that the English resistance "forces him to conquer Europe. .
. ."[111] - "The First Consul is only thirty-three and has thus far
destroyed only the second-class governments. Who knows how much time
he will require to again change the face of Europe and resurrect the
Western Roman Empire?"

To subjugate the Continent in order to form a coalition against
England, such, henceforth, are his means, which are as violent as the
end in view, while the means, like the end, are given by his
character. Too imperious and too impatient to wait or to manage
others, he is incapable of yielding to their will except through
constraint, and his collaborators are to him nothing more than
subjects under the name of allies. - Later, at St. Helena, with his
indestructible imaginative energy and power of illusion, he plays on
the public with his humanitarian illusions.[112] But, as he himself
avows, the accomplishment of his retrospective dream required
beforehand the entire submission of all Europe; a liberal sovereign
and pacificator, "a crowned Washington, yes," he used to say, "but I
could not reasonably attain this point, except through a universal
dictatorship, which I aimed at."[113] In vain does common sense
demonstrate to him that such an enterprise inevitably rallies the
Continent to the side of England, and that his means divert him from
the end. In vain is it repeatedly represented to him that he needs
one sure great ally on the Continent;[114] that to obtain this he must
conciliate Austria; that he must not drive her to despair, but rather
win her over and compensate her on the side of the Orient; place her
in permanent conflict with Russia, and attach her to the new French
Empire by a community of vital interests. In vain does he, after
Tilsit, make a bargain of this kind with Russia. This bargain cannot
hold, because in this arrangement Napoleon, as usual with him, always
encroaching, threatening, and attacking, wants to reduce Alexander to
the role of a subordinate and a dupe.[115] No clear-sighted witness
can doubt this. In 1809, a diplomat writes: "The French system, which
is now triumphant, is directed against the whole body of great
states,"[116] not alone against England, Prussia, and Austria, but
against Russia, against every power capable of maintaining its
independence; for, if she remains independent, she may become hostile,
and as a precautionary step Napoleon crushes in her a probable enemy.

All the more so because this course once entered upon he cannot stop;
at the same time his character and the situation in which he has
placed himself impels him on while his past hurries him along to his
future.[117] At the moment of the rupture of the treaty of Amiens he
is already so strong and so aggressive that his neighbors are obliged,
for their own security, to form an alliance with England; this leads
him to break down all the old monarchies that are still intact, to
conquer Naples, to mutilate Austria the first time, to dismember and
cut up Prussia, to mutilate Austria the second time, to manufacture
kingdoms for his brothers at Naples, in Holland and in Westphalia. --
At this same date, all the ports of his empire are closed against the
English, which leads him to close against them all the ports of the
Continent, to organize against them the continental blockade, to
proclaim against them an European crusade, to prevent the neutrality
of sovereigns like the Pope, of lukewarm subalterns like his brother
Louis, of doubtful collaborators or inadequate, like the Braganzas of
Portugal and the Bourbons of Spain, and therefore to get hold of
Portugal, Spain, the Pontifical States, and Holland, and next of the
Hanseatic towns and the duchy of Oldenburg, to extending along the
entire coast, from the mouths of the Cattaro and Trieste to Hamburg
and Dantzic, his cordon of military chiefs, prefects, and custom-
houses, a sort of net of which he draws the meshes tighter and tighter
every day, even stifling not alone his home consumer, but the producer
and the merchant.[118] - And all this sometimes by a simple decree,
with no other alleged motive than his interest, his convenience, or
his pleasure,[119] brusquely and arbitrarily, in violation of
international law, humanity, and hospitality. It would take volumes
to describe his abuses of power, the tissue of brutalities and
knaveries,[120] the oppression of the ally and despoiling of the
vanquished, the military brigandage exercised over populations in time
of war, and by the systematic exactions practiced on them in times of
peace.[121]

Accordingly, after 1808, these populations rise against him. He has so
deeply injured them in their interests, and hurt their feelings to
such an extent,[122] he has so trodden them down, ransomed, and forced
them into his service. He has destroyed, apart from French lives, so
many Spanish, Italian, Austrian, Prussian, Swiss, Bavarian, Saxon, and
Dutch lives, he has slain so many men as enemies, he has enlisted such
numbers at home, and slain so many under his own banners as
auxiliaries, that nations are still more hostile to him than
sovereigns. Unquestionably, nobody can live together with such a
character; his genius is too vast, too baneful, and all the more
because it is so vast. War will last as long as he reigns; it is in
vain to reduce him, to confine him at home, to drive him back within
the ancient frontiers of France; no barrier will restrain him; no
treaty will bind him; peace with him will never be other than a truce;
he will use it simply to recover himself, and, as soon as he has done
this, he will begin again;[123] he is in his very essence anti-social.
The mind of Europe in this respect is made up definitely and
unshakably. One petty detail alone shows how unanimous and profound
this conviction was. On the 7th of March the news reached Vienna that
he had escaped from the island of Elba, without its being yet known
where he would land. M. de Metternich[124] brings the news to the
Emperor of Austria before eight o'clock in the morning, who says to
him, "Lose no time in finding the King of Prussia and the Emperor of
Russia, and tell them that I am ready to order my army to march at
once for France." At a quarter past eight M. de Metternich is with the
Czar, and at half-past eight, with the King of Prussia; both of them
reply instantly in the same manner. "At nine o'clock," says M. de
Metternich, "I was back. At ten o'clock aids flew in every direction
countermanding army orders. . . . Thus was war declared in less than
an hour."

VI. Fundamental Defaults of his System.

Inward principle of his outward deportment. - He subordinates the
State to him instead of subordinating himself to the State. - Effect
of this.- His work merely a life-interest. - It is ephemeral. -
Injurious. - The number of lives it cost. - The mutilation of France.
- Vice of construction in his European edifice. - Analogous vice in
his French edifice.

Other heads of states have similarly passed their lives in doing
violence to mankind; but it was for something that was likely to last,
and for a national interest. What they deemed the public good was not
a phantom of the brain, a chimerical poem due to a caprice of the
imagination, to personal passions, to their own peculiar ambition and
pride. Outside of themselves and the coinage of their brain a real
and substantial object of prime importance existed, namely, the State,
the great body of society, the vast organism which lasts indefinitely
through the long series of interlinked and responsible generations.
If they drew blood from the passing generation it was for the benefit
of coming generations, to preserve them from civil war or from foreign
domination.[125] They have acted generally like able surgeons, if not
through virtue, at least through dynastic sentiment and family
traditions; having practiced from father to son, they had acquired the
professional conscience; their first and only aim was the safety and
health of their patient. It is for this reason that they have not
recklessly undertaken extravagant, bloody, and over-risky operations;
rarely have they given way to temptation through a desire to display
their skill, through the need of dazzling and astonishing the world,
through the novelty, keenness, and success of their saws and scalpels.
They felt that a longer and superior existence to their own was
imposed upon them; they looked beyond them-selves as far as their
sight would reach, and so took measures that the State after them
might do without them, live on intact, remain independent, vigorous,
and respected athwart the vicissitudes of European conflict and the
uncertain problems of coming history. Such, under the ancient régime,
was what were called reasons of state; these had prevailed in the
councils of princes for eight hundred years; along with unavoidable
failures and after temporary deviations, these had become for the time
being and remained the preponderating motive. Undoubtedly they
excused or authorized many breaches of faith, many outrages, and, to
come to the word, many crimes; but, in the political order of things,
especially in the management of external affairs, they furnished a
governing and a salutary principle. Under its constant influence
thirty monarchs had labored, and it is thus that, province after
province, they had solidly and enduringly built up France, by ways and
means beyond the reach of individuals but available to the heads of
States.

Now, this principle is lacking with their improvised successor. On
the throne as in the camp, whether general, consul, or emperor, he
remains the military adventurer, and cares only for his own
advancement. Owing to the great defect in the education of both
conscience and sentiments, instead of subordinating himself to the
State, he subordinates the State to him; he does not look beyond his
own brief physical existence to the nation which is to survive him.
Consequently, he sacrifices the future to the present, and his work is
not to be enduring. After him the deluge! Little does he care who
utters this terrible phrase; and worse still, he earnestly wishes,
from the bottom of his heart that everybody should utter it.

"My brother," said Joseph, in 1803,[126] "desires that the necessity
of his existence should be so strongly felt, and the benefit of this
considered so great, that nobody could look beyond it without
shuddering. He knows, and be feels it, that he reigns through this
idea rather than through force or gratitude. If to-morrow, or on any
day, it could be said, 'Here is a tranquil, established order of
things, here is a known successor; Bonaparte might die without fear of
change or disturbance,' my brother would no longer think himself
secure. . . . Such is the principle which governs him."

In vain do years glide by, never does he think of putting France in a
way to subsist without him; on the contrary, he jeopardizes lasting
acquisitions by exaggerated annexations, and it is evident from the
very first day that the Empire will end with the Emperor. In 1805,
the five per cents being at eighty francs, his Minister of the
Finances, Gaudin, observes to him that this is a reasonable rate.[127]
"No complaint can now be made, since these funds are an annuity on
Your Majesty's life." - "What do you mean by that?" - "I mean that the
Empire has become so great as to be ungovernable without you." - "If
my successor is a fool so much the worse for him!" - "Yes, but so much
the worse for France!" Two years later, M. de Metternich, by way of a
political summing up, expresses his general opinion: "It is remarkable
that Napoleon, constantly disturbing and modifying the relations of
all Europe, has not yet taken a single step toward ensuring the
maintenance of his successors."[128] In 1809, adds the same
diplomat:[129] "His death will be the signal for a new and frightful
upheaval; so many divided elements all tend to combine. Deposed
sovereigns will be recalled by former subjects; new princes will have
new crowns to defend. A veritable civil war will rage for half a
century over the vast empire of the continent the day when the arms of
iron which held the reins are turned into dust." In 1811, "everybody
is convinced[130] that on the disappearance of Napoleon, the master in
whose hands all power is concentrated, the first inevitable
consequence will be a revolution." At home, in France, at this same
date, his own servitors begin to comprehend that his empire is not
merely a life-interest and will not last after he is gone, but that
the Empire is ephemeral and will not last during his life; for he is
constantly raising his edifice higher and higher, while all that his
building gains in elevation it loses in stability. "The Emperor is
crazy," said Decrees to Marmont,[131]"completely crazy. He will ruin
us all, numerous as we are, and all will end in some frightful
catastrophe." In effect, he is pushing France on to the abyss,
forcibly and by deceiving her, through a breach of trust which
willfully, and by his fault, grows worse and worse just as his own
interests, as he comprehends these, diverge from those of the public
from year to year.

At the treaty of Luneville and before the rupture of the peace of
Amiens,[132] this variance was already considerable. It becomes
manifest at the treaty of Presbourg and still more evident at the
treaty of Tilsit. It is glaring in 1808, after the deposition of the
Spanish Bourbons; it becomes scandalous and monstrous in 1812, when
the war with Russia took place. Napoleon himself admits that this war
is against the interests of France and yet he undertakes it.[133]
Later, at St. Helena, he falls into a melting mood over "the French
people whom he loved so dearly."[134] The truth is, he loves it as a
rider loves his horse; as he makes it rear and prance and show off its
paces, when he flatters and caresses it; it is not for the advantage
of the animal but for his own purposes, on account of its usefulness
to him; to be spurred on until exhausted, to jump ditches growing
wider and wider, and leap fences growing higher and higher; one ditch
more, and still another fence, the last obstacle which seems to be the
last, succeeded by others, while, in any event, the horse remains
forcibly and for ever, what it already is, namely, a beast of burden
and broken down. - For, on this Russian expedition, instead of
frightful disasters, let us imagine a brilliant success, a victory at
Smolensk equal to that of Friedland, a treaty of Moscow more
advantageous than that of Tilsit, and the Czar brought to heel. As a
result the Czar is probably strangled or dethroned, a patriotic
insurrection will take place in Russia as in Spain, two lasting wars,
at the two extremities of the Continent, against religious fanaticism,
more irreconcilable than positive interests, and against a scattered
barbarism more indomitable than a concentrated civilization. At best,
a European empire secretly mined by European resistance; an exterior
France forcibly superposed on the enslaved Continent;[135] French
residents and commanders at St. Petersburg and Riga as at Dantzic,
Hamburg, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Barcelona, and Trieste. Every able-bodied
Frenchman that can be employed from Cadiz to Moscow in maintaining and
administering the conquest. All the able-bodied youth annually seized
by the conscription, and, if they have escaped this, seized again by
decrees.[136] The entire male population thus devoted to works of
constraint, nothing else in prospect for either the cultivated or the
uncultivated, no military or civil career other than a prolonged guard
duty, threatened and threatening, as soldier, customs-inspector, or
gendarme, as prefect, sub-prefect, or commissioner of police, that is
to say, as subaltern henchman and bully restraining subjects and
raising contributions, confiscating and burning merchandise, seizing
grumblers, and making the refractory toe the mark.[137] In 1810, one
hundred and sixty thousand of the refractory were already condemned by
name, and, moreover, penalties were imposed on their families to the
amount of one hundred and seventy millions of francs In 1811 and 1812
the roving columns which tracked fugitives gathered sixty thousand of
them, and drove them along the coast from the Adour to the Niemen; on
reaching the frontier, they were en-rolled in the grand army; but they
desert the very first month, they and their chained companions, at the
rate of four or five thousand a day.[138] Should England be conquered,
garrisons would have to be maintained there, and of soldiers equally
zealous. Such is the dark future which this system opens to the
French, even with the best of good luck. It turns out that the luck
is bad, and at the end of 1812 the grand army is freezing in the snow;
Napoleon's horse has let him tumble. Fortunately, the animal has
simply foundered; "His Majesty's health was never better";[139]
nothing has happened to the rider; he gets up on his legs, and what
concerns him at this moment is not the sufferings of his broken-down
steed, but his own mishap; his reputation as a horseman is
compromised; the effect on the public, the hooting of the audience, is
what troubles him, the comedy of a perilous leap, announced with such
a flourish of trumpets and ending in such a disgraceful fall. On
reaching Warsaw[140] he says to himself, ten times over:

"There is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous."

The following year, at Dresden, he exposes still more foolishly,
openly, and nakedly his master passion, the motives which determine
him, the immensity and ferocity of his pitiless pride.

"What do they want of me?" said he to M. de Metternich.[141] " Do
they want me to dishonor myself? Never! I can die, but never will I
yield an inch of territory! Your sovereigns, born to the throne, may
be beaten twenty times over and yet return to their capitals: I cannot
do this, because I am a parvenu soldier. My domination will not
survive the day when I shall have ceased to be strong, and,
consequently, feared."

In effect, his despotism in France is founded on his European
omnipotence; if he does not remain master of the Continent," he must
settle with the corps législatif.[142] Rather than descend to an
inferior position, rather than be a constitutional monarch, controlled
by parliamentary chambers, he plays double or quits, and will risk
losing everything.

"I have seen your soldiers," says Metternich to him, "they are
children. When this army of boys is gone, what will you do then?"

At these words, which touch his heart, he grows pale, his features
contract, and his rage overcomes him; like a wounded man who has made
a false step and exposes himself, he says violently to Metternich:

"You are not a soldier You do not know the impulses of a soldier's
breast! I have grown up on the battle-field, and a man like me does
not give a damn for the lives of a million men! "[143]

His imperial pipe-dreams has devoured many more. Between 1804 and
1815 he has had slaughtered 1,700,000 Frenchmen, born within the
boundaries of ancient France,[144] to which must be added, probably,
2,000,000 men born outside of these limits, and slain for him, under
the title of allies, or slain by him under the title of enemies. All
that the poor, enthusiastic, and credulous Gauls have gained by
entrusting their public welfare to him is two invasions; all that he
bequeaths to them as a reward for their devotion, after this
prodigious waste of their blood and the blood of others, is a France
shorn of fifteen departments acquired by the republic, deprived of
Savoy, of the left bank of the Rhine and of Belgium, despoiled of the
northeast angle by which it completed its boundaries, fortified its
most vulnerable point, and, using the words of Vauban, "made its field
square," separated from 4,000,000 new Frenchmen which it had
assimilated after twenty years of life in common, and, worse still,
thrown back within the frontiers of 1789, alone, diminished in the
midst of its aggrandized neighbors, suspected by all Europe, and
lastingly surrounded by a threatening circle of distrust and rancor.

Such is the political work of Napoleon, the work of egoism served by
genius. In his European structure as in his French structure this
sovereign egoism has introduced a vice of construction. This
fundamental vice is manifest at the outset in the European edifice,
and, at the expiration of fifteen years, it brings about a sudden
downfall: in the French edifice it is equally serious but not so
apparent; only at the end of half a century, or even a whole century,
is it to be made clearly visible; but its gradual and slow effects
will be equally pernicious and they are no less sure.

______________________________________________________________________

Notes:

[1] See my "Philosophy of Art" for texts and facts, Part II., ch. VI.
- Other analogies, which are too long for development here, may be
found, especially in all that concerns the imagination and love. "He
was disposed to accept the marvelous, presentiments, and even certain
mysterious communications between beings. . . . I have seen him
excited by the rustling of the wind, speak enthusiastically of the
roar of the sea, and sometimes inclined to believe in nocturnal
apparitions; in short, leaning to certain superstitions." (Madame de
Rémusat, I., 102, and III., 164.) - Meneval (III., 114) notes his
"crossing himself involuntarily on the occurrence of some great
danger, on the discovery of some important fact." During the
consulate, in the evening, in a circle of ladies, he sometimes
improvised and declaimed tragic "tales," Italian fashion, quite worthy
of the story-tellers of the XVth and XVIth centuries. (Bourrienne,
VI., 387, gives one of his improvisations. Cf. Madame de Rémusat, I.,
102.) - As to love, his letters to Josephine during the Italian
campaign form one of the best examples of Italian passion and "in most
piquant contrast with the temperate and graceful elegance of his
predecessor M. de Beauharnais." (Madame de Rémusat, I., 143). - His
other amours, simply physical, are too difficult to deal with; I have
gathered some details orally on this subject which are almost from
first hands and perfectly authentic. It is sufficient to cite one
text already published: "According to Josephine, he had no moral
principle whatever; did he not seduce his sisters one after the other?
" - "I am not a man like other men, he said of himself, "and moral
laws and those of propriety do not apply to me." (Madame de Rémusat,
I., 204, 206.) - Note again (II., 350) his proposals to Corvisart. -
Such are everywhere the sentiments, customs, and morality of the great
Italian personages of about the year 1500.

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