Napoleon the Little

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The _coup d'etat_ brought Charlet before a court-martial. He was
charged with the death of the custom-house officer, which, after all,
was but an incident of war. At all events, Charlet was innocent of that
death; the officer was killed by a bullet, and Charlet had no weapon
but a sharpened file.

Charlet would not recognize as a lawful court the body of men who
pretended to sit in judgment on him. He said to them: "You are no
judges; where is the law? The law is on my side." He refused to answer
them.

Questioned on the subject of the officer's death, he could have cleared
up the whole matter by a single word; but to descend to an explanation
would, to a certain extent, have been a recognition of the tribunal. He
did not choose to recognize it, so he held his peace.

These men condemned him to die, "according to the usual mode of
criminal executions."

The sentence pronounced, he seemed to have been forgotten; days, weeks,
months elapsed. Everybody about the prison said to Charlet, "You are
safe."

On the 29th of June, at break of day, the town of Belley saw a mournful
sight. The scaffold had risen from the earth during the night, and
stood in the middle of the public square.

The people accosted one another, pale as death, and asked: "Have you
seen what there is in the square?"--"Yes."--"Whom is it for?"

It was for Charlet.

The sentence of death had been referred to M. Bonaparte, it had
slumbered a long time at the Elysee; there was other business to attend
to; but one fine morning, after a lapse of seven months, all the world
having forgotten the conflict at Seyssel, the slain custom-house
officer, and Charlet himself, M. Bonaparte, wanting most likely to
insert some event between the festival of the 10th of May and the
festival of the 15th of August, signed the warrant for the execution.

On the 29th of June, therefore, only a few days ago, Charlet was
removed from his prison. They told him he was about to die. He
continued calm. A man who has justice on his side does not fear death,
for he feels that there are two things within him: one, his body, which
may be put to death, the other, justice, whose hands are not bound, nor
does its head fall beneath the knife.

They wanted to make Charlet ride in a cart. "No," said he to the
gendarmes, "I will go on foot, I can walk, I am not afraid."

There was a great crowd along his route. Every one in the town knew him
and loved him; his friends sought his eye. Charlet, his arms fastened
behind his back, bowed his head right and left. "Adieu, Jacques! adieu,
Pierre!" said he, smiling. "Adieu, Charlet!" they answered, and all of
them wept. The gendarmerie and the infantry surrounded the scaffold. He
ascended it with slow and steady steps. When they saw him standing on
the scaffold, a shudder ran through the crowd; the women cried aloud,
the men clenched their fists.

While they were strapping him to the plank, he looked up at the knife,
saying: "When I reflect that I was once a Bonapartist!" Then, raising
his eyes to Heaven, he exclaimed, "Vive la Republique!"

The next moment his head fell.

It was a day of mourning at Belley and through all the villages of the
Ain. "How did he die?" people would ask.--"Bravely."--"God be praised!"

In this wise a man has been killed.

The mind succumbs and is lost in horror in presence of a deed so
damnable.

This crime being added to the rest complements and sets a sinister sort
of seal upon them.

It is more than the complement, it is the crowning act.

One feels that M. Bonaparte ought to be satisfied! To have shot down at
night, in the dark, in solitude, on the Champ-de-Mars, under the arches
of the bridges, behind a lonely wall, at random, haphazard, no matter
whom, unknown persons, shadows, the very number of whom none can tell;
to cause nameless persons to be slain by nameless persons; and to have
all this vanish in obscurity, in oblivion, is, in very truth, far from
gratifying to one's self-esteem; it looks like hiding one's self, and
in truth that is what it is; it is commonplace. Scrupulous men have the
right to say to you: "You know you are afraid; you would not dare to do
these things publicly; you shrink from your own acts." And, to a
certain extent, they seem to be right. To shoot down people by night is
a violation of every law, human and divine, but it lacks audacity. One
does not feel triumphant afterwards. Something better is possible.

Broad daylight, the public square, the judicial scaffold, the regular
apparatus of social vengeance--to hand the innocent over to these, to
put them to death in this manner, ah! that is different. I can
understand that. To commit a murder at high noon, in the heart of the
town, by means of one machine called court, or court-martial, and of
another machine slowly erected by a carpenter, adjusted, put together,
screwed and greased at pleasure; to say it shall be at such an hour;
then to display two baskets, and say: "This one is for the body, that
other for the head;" at the appointed time to bring the victim bound
with ropes, attended by a priest; to proceed calmly to the murder, to
order a clerk to prepare a report of it, to surround the murder victim
with gendarmes and naked swords, so that the people there may shudder,
and no longer know what they see, and wonder whether those men in
uniform are a brigade of gendarmerie or a band of robbers, and ask one
another, looking at the man who lets the knife fall, whether he is the
executioner or whether he is not rather an assassin! This is bold and
resolute, this is a parody of legal procedure, most audacious and
alluring, and worth being carried out. This is a noble and
far-spreading blow on the cheek of justice. Commend us to this!

To do this seven months after the struggle, in cold blood, to no
purpose, as an omission that one repairs, as a duty that one fulfills,
is awe-inspiring, it is complete; one has the appearance of acting
within one's rights, which perplexes the conscience and makes honest
men shudder.

A terrible juxtaposition, which comprehends the whole case. Here are
two men, a working-man and a prince. The prince commits a crime, he
enters the Tuileries; the working-man does his duty, he ascends the
scaffold. Who set up the working-man's scaffold? The prince!

Yes, this man who, had he been beaten in December, could have escaped
the death penalty only by the omnipotence of progress, and by an
enlargement, too liberal certainly, of the principle that human life is
sacred; this man, this Louis Bonaparte, this prince who carries the
practices of Poulmann and Soufflard into politics, he it is who
rebuilds the scaffold! Nor does he tremble! Nor does he turn pale! Nor
does he feel that it is a fatal ladder, that he is at liberty to
refrain from erecting it, but that, when once it is erected, he is not
at liberty to take it down, and that he who sets it up for another,
afterwards finds it for himself. It knows him again, and says to him,
"Thou didst place me here, and I have awaited thee."

No, this man does not reflect, he has longings, he has whims, and they
must be satisfied. They are the longings of a dictator. Unlimited power
would be tasteless without this seasoning. Go to,--cut off Charlet's
head, and the others. M. Bonaparte is Prince-President of the French
Republic; M. Bonaparte has sixteen millions a year, forty-four thousand
francs a day, twenty-four cooks in his household, and as many
aides-de-camp; he has the right of fishing in the ponds of Saclay and
Saint-Quentin; of hunting in the forests of Laigne, Ourscamp,
Carlemont, Champagne and Barbeau; he has the Tuileries, the Louvre, the
Elysee, Rambouillet, Saint-Cloud, Versailles, Compiegne; he has his
imperial box at every theatre, feasting and music every day, M.
Sibour's smile, and the arm of the Marchioness of Douglas on which to
enter the ballroom; but all this is not enough; he must have the
guillotine to boot; he must have some of those red baskets among his
baskets of champagne.

Oh! hide we our faces with both our hands! This man, this hideous
butcher of the law and of justice, still had his apron round his waist
and his hands in the smoking bowels of the Constitution, and his feet
in the blood of all the slaughtered laws, when you, judges, when you,
magistrates, men of the law, men of the right...! But I pause; I shall
meet you hereafter with your black robes and your red robes, your robes
of the colour of ink, and your robes of the colour of blood; and I
shall find them, too, and having chastised them once, will chastise
them again--those lieutenants of yours, those judicial supporters of
the ambuscade, those soilers of the ermine,--Baroche, Suin, Royer,
Mongis, Rouher, and Troplong, deserters from the law,--all those names
which signify nothing more than the utmost contempt which man can feel.

If he did not crush his victims between two boards, like Christiern II;
if he did not bury people alive, like Ludovic the Moor; if he did not
build his palace walls with living men and stones, like Timour-Beg, who
was born, says the legend, with his hands closed and full of blood; if
he did not rip open pregnant women, like Caesar Borgia, Duke of
Valentinois; if he did not scourge women on the breasts, _testibusque
viros_, like Ferdinand of Toledo; if he did not break on the wheel
alive, burn alive, boil alive, flay alive, crucify, impale, and
quarter, blame him not, the fault was not his; the age obstinately
refuses to allow it. He has done all that was humanly or inhumanly
possible. Given the nineteenth century, a century of gentleness,--of
decadence, say the papists and friends of arbitrary power,--Louis
Bonaparte has equalled in ferocity his contemporaries, Haynau,
Radetzky, Filangieri, Schwartzenberg, and Ferdinand of Naples: he has
even surpassed them. A rare merit, with which we must credit him as
another impediment: the scene was laid in France. Let us do him this
justice: in the times in which we live, Ludovic Sforza, the
Valentinois, the Duke of Alva, Timour, and Christiern II, would have
done no more than Louis Bonaparte; in their time, he would have done
all that they did; in our time, just as they were about to erect their
gibbets, their wheels, their wooden horses, their cranes, their living
towers, their crosses, and their stakes, they would have desisted like
him, in spite of themselves, and unconsciously, before the secret and
invincible resistance of the moral environment, of that formidable and
mysterious interdiction of an entire epoch, which rises in the north,
the south, the east, and the west, to confront tyrants, and says no to
them.

III

WHAT 1852 WOULD HAVE BEEN

But, had it not been for this abominable 2nd of December, which its
accomplices, and after them its dupes, call "necessary," what would
have occurred in France? Mon Dieu! this:--

Let us go back a little, and review, in a summary way, the situation as
it was before the _coup d'etat_.

The party of the past, under the name of order, opposed the republic,
or in other words, opposed the future.

Whether opposed or not, whether assented to or not, the republic, all
illusions apart, is the future, proximate or remote, but inevitable, of
the nations.

How is the republic to be established? There are two ways of
establishing it: by strife and by progress. The democrats would arrive
at it by progress; their adversaries, the men of the past, appear to
desire to arrive at it by strife.

As we have just observed, the men of the past are for resisting; they
persist; they apply the axe to the tree, expecting to stop the mounting
sap. They lavish their strength, their puerility, and their anger.

Let us not utter a single bitter word against our old adversaries,
fallen with ourselves on the same day, and several among them with
honour on their side; let us confine ourselves to noting that it was
into this struggle that the majority of the Legislative Assembly of
France entered at the very beginning of its career, in the month of
May, 1849.

This policy of resistance is a deplorable policy. This struggle between
man and his Maker is inevitably vain; but, though void of result, it is
fruitful in catastrophes. That which ought to be will be; that which
ought to flow will flow; that which ought to fall will fall; that which
ought to spring up will spring up; that which ought to grow will grow;
but, obstruct these natural laws, confusion follows, disorder begins.
It is a melancholy fact that it was this disorder which was called
order.

Tie up a vein, and sickness ensues; clog up a stream, and the water
overflows; obstruct the future, and revolutions break out.

Persist in preserving among you, as if it were alive, the past, which
is dead, and you produce an indescribable moral cholera; corruption
spreads abroad, it is in the air, we breathe it; entire classes of
society, the public officials, for instance, fall into decay. Keep dead
bodies in your houses, the plague will break out.

This policy inevitably makes blind those who adopt it. Those men who
dub themselves statesmen do not understand that they themselves have
made, with their own hands and with untold labour, and with the sweat
of their brows, the terrible events they deplore, and that the very
catastrophes which fall upon them were by them constructed. What would
be said of a peasant who should build a dam from one side of a river to
the other, in front of his cottage, and who, when he saw the river
turned into a torrent, overflow, sweep away his wall, and carry off his
roof, should exclaim: "Wicked river!"? The statesmen of the past, those
great builders of dams across streams, spend their time in exclaiming:
"Wicked people!"

Take away Polignac and the July ordinances, that is to say, the dam,
and Charles X would have died at the Tuileries. Reform in 1847 the
electoral laws, that is to say once more, take away the dam, and Louis
Philippe would have died on the throne. Do I mean thereby that the
Republic would not have come? Not so. The Republic, we repeat, is the
future; it would have come, but step by step, successive progress by
progress, conquest by conquest, like a river that flows, and not like a
deluge that overflows; it would have come at its own hour, when all was
ready for it; it would have come, certainly not more enduring, for it
is already indestructible, but more tranquil, free from all possibility
of reaction, with no princes keeping watch, with no _coup d'etat_
behind.

The policy which obstructs the progress of mankind--let us insist on
this point--excels in producing artificial floods. Thus it had managed
to render the year 1852 a sort of formidable eventuality, and this
again by the same contrivance, by means of a dam. Here is a railway; a
train will pass in an hour; throw a beam across the rails, and when the
train comes to that point it will be wrecked, as it was at Fampoux;
remove the beam before the train arrives, and it will pass without even
suspecting the catastrophe recently lurking there. This beam is the law
of the 31st of May.

The leaders of the majority of the Legislative Assembly had thrown it
across 1852, and they cried: "This is where society will be crushed!"
The Left replied: "Take away your beam, and let universal suffrage pass
unobstructed." This is the whole history of the law of the 31st of May.

These are things for children to understand, but which "statesmen" do
not understand.

Now let us answer the question we just now proposed: Without the 2nd of
December, what would have occurred in 1852?

Revoke the law of the 31st of May, take away the dam from before the
people, deprive Bonaparte of his lever, his weapon, his pretext, let
universal suffrage alone, take the beam off the rails, and do you know
what you would have had in 1852?

Nothing.

Elections.

A sort of peaceful Sundays, when the people would have come forward to
vote, labourers yesterday, today electors, to-morrow labourers, and
always sovereign.

Somebody rejoins: "Oh, yes, elections! You talk very glibly about them.
But what about the 'red chamber' which would have sprung from these
elections."

Did they not announce that the Constitution of 1848 would prove a "red
chamber?" Red chambers, red hobgoblins, all such predictions are of
equal value. Those who wave such phantasmagorias on the end of a stick
before the terrified populace know well what they are doing, and laugh
behind the ghastly rag they wave. Beneath the long scarlet robe of the
phantom, to which had been given the name of 1852, we see the stout
boots of the _coup d'etat_.

IV

THE JACQUERIE

Meanwhile, after the 2nd of December, the crime being committed, it was
imperative to mislead public opinion. The _coup d'etat_ began to
shriek about the Jacquerie, like the assassin who cried: "Stop thief!"

We may add, that a _Jacquerie_ had been promised, and that M. Bonaparte
could not break all his promises at once without some inconvenience.
What but the Jacquerie was the red spectre? Some reality must be
imparted to that spectre: one cannot suddenly burst out laughing in the
face of a whole people and say: "It was nothing! I only kept you in
fear of yourselves."

Consequently there was a _Jacquerie_. The promises of the play-bill
were observed.

The imaginations of his entourage gave themselves a free rein; that old
bugbear Mother Goose was resuscitated, and many a child, on reading the
newspaper, might have recognized the ogre of Goodman Perrault in the
disguise of a socialist; they surmised, they invented; the press being
suppressed, it was quite easy; it is easy to lie when the tongue of
contradiction has been torn out beforehand.

They exclaimed: "Citizens, be on your guard! without us you were lost.
We shot you, but that was for your good. Behold, the Lollards were at
your gates, the Anabaptists were scaling your walls, the Hussites were
knocking at your window-blinds, the lean and hungry were climbing your
staircases, the empty-bellied coveted your dinner. Be on your guard!
Have not some of your good women been outraged?"

They gave the floor to one of the principal writers in _La Patrie_, one
Froissard.

"I dare not write or describe the horrible and improper things they did
to the ladies. But among other disorderly and villainous injuries, they
killed a chevalier and put a spit through him, and turned him before
the fire, and roasted him before the wife and her children. After ten
or twelve had violated the woman, they tried to make her and the
children eat some of the body; then killed them, put them to an evil
death.

"These wicked people pillaged and burned everything; they killed, and
forced, and violated all the women and maidens, without pity or mercy,
as if they were mad dogs.

"Quite in the same manner did lawless people conduct themselves between
Paris and Noyon, between Paris and Soissons and Ham in Vermandois, all
through the land of Coucy. There were the great violators and
malefactors; and, in the county of Valois, in the bishopric of Laon, of
Soissons, and of Noyon, they destroyed upwards of a hundred chateaux
and goodly houses of knights and squires, and killed and robbed all
they met. But _God_, by his grace, found a fit remedy, for which all
praise be given to him."

People simply substituted for God, Monseigneur le Prince-President.
They could do no less.

Now that eight months have elapsed, we know what to think of this
"Jacquerie;" the facts have at length been brought to light. Where?
How? Why, before the very tribunals of M. Bonaparte. The sub-prefects
whose wives had been violated were single men; the cures who had been
roasted alive, and whose hearts Jacques had eaten, have written to say
that they are quite well; the gendarmes, round whose bodies others had
danced have been heard as witnesses before the courts-martial; the
public coffers, said to have been rifled, have been found intact in the
hands of M. Bonaparte, who "saved" them; the famous deficit of five
thousand francs, at Clamecy, has dwindled down to two hundred expended
in orders for bread. An official publication had said, on the 8th of
December: "The cure, the mayor, and the sub-prefect of Joigny, besides
several gendarmes, have been basely massacred." Somebody replied to
this in a letter, which was made public; "Not a drop of blood was shed
at Joigny; nobody's life was threatened." Now, by whom was this letter
written? This same mayor of Joigny who had been _basely massacred_, M.
Henri de Lacretelle, from whom an armed band had extorted two thousand
francs, at his chateau of Cormatin, is amazed, to this day, not at the
extortion, but at the fable. M. de Lamartine, whom another band had
intended to plunder, and probably to hang on the lamp-post, and whose
chateau of Saint-Point was burned, and who "had written to demand
government assistance," knew nothing of the matter until he saw it in
the papers!

The following document was produced before the court-martial in the
Nievre, presided over by ex-Colonel Martinprey:--

"ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE

"_Honesty is a virtue of republicans._

"_Every thief and plunderer will be shot._

"_Every detainer of arms who, in the course of twelve hours, shall
not have deposited them at the mayor's office, or given them up,
shall be arrested and confined until further orders._

"_Every drunken citizen shall be disarmed and sent to prison._

"_Clamecy, December 7, 1851._

"_Vive la republique sociale!_

"THE SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE."

This that you have just read is the proclamation of "Jacques." "Death
to the pillagers! death to the thieves!" Such is the cry of these
thieves and pillagers.

One of these "Jacques," named Gustave Verdun-Lagarde, a native of
Lot-Garonne, died in exile at Brussels, on the 1st of May, 1852,
bequeathing one hundred thousand francs to his native town, to found a
school of agriculture. This partitioner did indeed make partition.

There was not, then, and the honest co-authors of the _coup d'etat_
admit it now to their intimates, with playful delight, there was not
any "Jacquerie," it is true; but the trick has told.

There was in the departments, as there was in Paris, a lawful
resistance, the resistance prescribed to the citizens by Article 110 of
the Constitution, and superior to the Constitution by natural right;
there was the legitimate defence--this time the word is properly
applied--against the "preservers;" the armed struggle of right and law
against the infamous insurrection of the ruling powers. The Republic,
surprised by an ambuscade, wrestled with the _coup d'etat_. That
is all.

Twenty-seven departments rose in arms: the Ain, the Aude, the Cher, the
Bouches du Rhone, the Cote d'Or, the Haute-Garonne, Lot-et-Garonne, the
Loiret, the Marne, the Meurthe, the Nord, the Bas-Rhin, the Rhone,
Seine-et-Marne, did their duty worthily; the Allier, the Basses-Alpes,
the Aveyron, the Drome, the Gard, the Gers, the Herault, the Jura, the
Nievre, the Puy-de-Dome, Saone-et-Loire, the Var and Vaucluse, did
theirs fearlessly. They succumbed, as did Paris.

The _coup d'etat_ was as ferocious there as at Paris. We have cast
a summary glance at its crimes.

So, then, it was this lawful, constitutional, virtuous resistance, this
resistance in which heroism was on the side of the citizens, and
atrocity on the side of the powers; it was this which the _coup
d'etat_ called "Jacquerie." We repeat, a touch of red spectre was
useful.

This Jacquerie had two aims; it served the policy of the Elysee in two
ways; it offered a double advantage: first, to win votes for the
"plebiscite;" to win these votes by the sword and in face of the
spectre, to repress the intelligent, to alarm the credulous, compelling
some by terror, others by fear, as we shall shortly explain; therein
lies all the success and mystery of the vote of the 20th of December;
secondly, it afforded a pretext for proscriptions.

The year 1852 in itself contained no actual danger. The law of the 31st
of May, morally extinct, was dead before the 2nd of December. A new
Assembly, a new President, the Constitution simply put in operation,
elections,--and nothing more.

But it was necessary that M. Bonaparte should go. There was the
obstacle; thence the catastrophe.

Thus, then, did this man one fine morning seize by the throat the
Constitution, the Republic, the Law, and France; he stabbed the future
in the back; under his feet he trampled law, common sense, justice,
reason, and liberty; he arrested men who were inviolable, he
sequestered innocent men; in the persons of their representatives he
seized the people in his grip; he raked the Paris boulevards with his
shot; he made his cavalry wallow in the blood of old men and of women;
he shot without warning and without trial; he filled Mazas, the
Conciergerie, Saint-Pelagie, Vincennes, his fortresses, his cells, his
casemates, his dungeons, with prisoners, and his cemeteries with
corpses; he incarcerated, at Saint-Lazare, a wife who was carrying
bread to her husband in hiding; he sent to the galleys for twenty
years, a man who had harboured one of the proscribed; he tore up every
code of laws, broke every enactment; he caused the deported to rot by
thousands in the horrible holds of the hulks; he sent to Lambessa and
Cayenne one hundred and fifty children between twelve and fifteen; he
who was more absurd than Falstaff, has become more terrible than
Richard III; and why has all this been done? Because there was, he
said, "a plot against his power;" because the year which was closing
had a treasonable understanding with the year which was beginning to
overthrow him; because Article 45 perfidiously concerted with the
calendar to turn him out; because the second Sunday in May intended to
"depose" him; because his oath had the audacity to plot his fall;
because his plighted word conspired against him.

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