Napoleon the Little
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Victor Hugo >> Napoleon the Little
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Really, when one has fixed one's eyes too long on certain aspects of
this spectacle, even the strongest minds are attacked with vertigo.
But does he, at least, do himself justice, this Bonaparte? Has he a
glimmering, an idea, a suspicion, the slightest perception, of his
infamy? Really, one is driven to doubt it.
Yes, sometimes, from the lofty words he uses, when one hears him make
incredible appeals to posterity, to that posterity which will shudder
with horror and wrath at him; when one hears him speak coolly of his
"legitimacy," and his "mission," one is almost tempted to think that he
has come to take himself into high consideration, and that his head is
turned to such a degree that he no longer perceives what he is, nor
what he does. He believes in the adhesion of the poor, he believes in
the good-will of kings, he believes in the fete of eagles, he believes
in the harangues of the Council of State, he believes in the
benedictions of the bishops, he believes in the oath that he has forced
people to take, he believes in the 7,500,000 votes!
He is talking now, feeling in the humour of Augustus, of granting
amnesty to the proscribed. Usurpation granting amnesty to right!
treason to honour! cowardice to courage! crime to virtue! He is to that
degree embruted by his success that he thinks this all very simple.
Singular effect of intoxication! Optical illusion! In his eyes that
thing of the 14th of January appears all golden and glorious and
radiant, that constitution defiled with mud, stained with blood, laden
with chains, dragged amid the hooting of Europe by the police, the
Senate, the Corps Legislatif and the Council of State, all newly shod.
He takes as a triumphal car, and would drive under the Arc de l'Etoile,
that sledge, standing on which, hideous, with whip in hand, he parades
the ensanguined corpse of the republic!
CONCLUSION--PART SECOND
FAITH AND AFFLICTION
I
Providence brings to maturity men, things, and events, by the single
fact of universal life. To cause the disappearance of an old world it
is sufficient that civilization, ascending majestically towards its
solstice, should shine upon old institutions, upon old prejudices, upon
old laws, and upon old customs. This radiation burns and devours the
past. Civilization enlightens, this is the visible fact; and at the
same time it consumes, this is the mysterious fact. Under its
influence, gradually and without a shock, that which should decline
declines, and what should grow old grows old; wrinkles appear upon
things condemned, on castes, on codes, on institutions, and on
religions. This work of decrepitude is, in some sort, self-acting. A
fruitful decrepitude, under which germinates the new life. Little by
little the ruin progresses; deep crevices, which are not visible,
ramify in the darkness, and internally reduce to powder the venerable
structure, which still appears a solid mass without; and suddenly, some
fine day, this ancient _ensemble_ of worm-eaten things, of which
decaying societies are composed, becomes shapeless, the nails come out,
the structure becomes disjointed, and overhangs. Then it no longer has
any solidity. Let one of those giants peculiar to revolutions appear;
let him raise his hand, and all is said. There was a moment in history
when a nudge of Danton's elbow would have shaken all Europe to its
foundations.
The year 1848 was such a moment. Ancient Europe, feudal, papal, and
monarchical, replastered so disastrously for France, in 1815, tottered.
But there was no Danton. The crash did not take place.
It has often been said, in the commonplace phraseology used on similar
occasions, that 1848 opened a gulf. Not at all. The corpse of the past
lay upon Europe; it lies there still at this moment. The year 1848
opened a grave wherein to throw that corpse. It is this grave that has
been taken for a gulf.
In 1848 all that still held to the past, all that still survived of the
body, had a close view of this grave. Not only the kings upon their
thrones, the cardinals under their hats, the judges in the shadow of
their guillotines, the captains on their war-horses, were thrown into
commotion; but he who had any interest whatever in what was about to
disappear; he who was cultivating for his own profit a social fiction,
and had an abuse to let out on hire; he who was guardian of some
falsehood, doorkeeper of some prejudice, or farmer of some
superstition; he who was taking advantage of another, or dealing in
usury, oppression and falsehood; he who sold by false weights, from
those who falsify a balance to those who falsify the Bible; from the
cheating merchant to the cheating priest; from those who manipulate
figures to those who traffic in miracles,--all, from the Jew banker who
feels that he is more or less Catholic, to the bishop who becomes more
or less of a Jew,--all the men of the past inclined their heads towards
one another and trembled.
This grave, which was gaping, and into which had nearly fallen all the
fictions--their treasure--which have weighed upon men for so many ages,
they resolved to fill up. They determined to wall it up, to pile rocks
and stones upon it, and to erect upon the pile a gibbet, and to hang
upon this gibbet, all bleeding and dejected, that mighty culprit,
Truth.
They determined, once for all, to make an end of the spirit of freedom
and emancipation, and to drive back and repress for ever the upward
tendency of mankind.
The enterprise was formidable. What the nature of it was we have
already indicated, more than once, in this book and elsewhere.
To undo the labour of twenty generations; to kill in the nineteenth
century, by strangulation, three centuries, the sixteenth, the
seventeenth, and the eighteenth, that is to say, Luther, Descartes, and
Voltaire, religious scrutiny, philosophical scrutiny, universal
scrutiny; to crush throughout all Europe this immense vegetation of
free thought, here a tender blade, there a sturdy oak; to marry the
knout and the holy-water-sprinkler; to put more of Spain in the South,
and more of Russia in the North; to resuscitate all they could of the
Inquisition, and to stifle all they could of intelligence; to stultify
youth, in other words to brutalize the future; to make the world a
witness of the _auto-da-fe_ of ideas; to throw down the tribune, to
suppress the newspaper, the placard, the book, the spoken word, the
cry, the whisper, the breath; to make silence; to pursue thought into
the case of the printer, into the composing-stick, into the leaden
type, into the stereotype, into the lithograph, into the drawing, upon
the stage, into the street-show, into the mouth of the actor, into the
copy-book of the schoolmaster, into the hawker's pack; to hold out to
each man, for faith, for law, for aim in life, and for God, his selfish
interest; to say to nations: "Eat and think no more;" to take man from
the brain, and put him in the belly; to extinguish individual initiative,
local life, national impulse, all those deep-rooted instincts which
impel man to that which is right; to annihilate that _ego_ of nations
which is called the fatherland; to destroy nationality among
partitioned and dismembered peoples, constitutions in constitutional
states, the republic in France, and liberty everywhere; to plant the
foot everywhere upon human effort.
In one word, to close that abyss which is called Progress.
Such was the plan, vast, enormous, European, which no one conceived,
for not one of those men of the old world had had genius for it, but
which all followed. As for the plan in itself, as for that
all-embracing idea of universal repression, whence came it? who could
tell? It was seen in the air. It appeared in the past. It enlightened
certain souls, it pointed to certain routes. It was a gleam issuing
from the tomb of Machiavelii.
At certain moments of human history, from the things which are plotted
and the things which are done, it would seem that all the old demons of
humanity, Louis XI, Philip II, Catherine de Medicis, the Duke of Alva,
Torquemada, are somewhere or other in a corner, seated around a table,
and taking counsel together.
We look, we search, and instead of the colossi, we find abortions.
Where we expected to see the Duke of Alva, we find Schwartzenberg;
where we expected to see Torquemada we find Veuillot. The old European
despotism continues its march, with these little men, and goes on and
on; it resembles the Czar Peter when travelling:--"_We relay with
what we can find," he wrote; "_when we had no more Tartar horses, we
took donkeys." To attain this object, the repression of everything and
everybody, it was necessary to pursue an obscure, tortuous, rugged,
difficult path; they pursued it. Some of those who entered it, knew
what they were doing.
Parties are kept alive by watchwords; those men, those ringleaders,
whom 1848 frightened and assembled, had, as we have said above, adopted
theirs: religion, family, property. With that commonplace adroitness
which suffices when one speaks to fear, they exploited certain obscure
aspects of what was called socialism. It was a question of "saving
religion, property, and the family."--"Save the flag!" they exclaimed.
The vulgar herd of terrified selfish interests threw themselves into
the current.
They coalesced, they made a stand, they formed in mass. They had a
crowd around them. This crowd was composed of diverse elements. The
landed proprietor entered it because his rents had fallen; the peasant,
because he had paid the forty-five centimes; he who did not believe in
God thought it necessary to save religion, because he had been forced
to sell his horses. They extracted from this crowd the force it
contained, and made use of it. They made everything contribute to
repression: the law, despotism, the assemblies, the tribune, the jury,
the magistracy, the police; in Lombardy the sabre, at Naples the
convict prison, in Hungary the gibbet. To remuzzle men's intellects, to
replace the fetters on men's minds, these runaway slaves, to prevent
the past from disappearing, to prevent the future from being born, to
remain kings, powerful, privileged and happy, all means were good, all
just, all legitimate. For the exigencies of the struggle, they
manufactured and spread throughout the world a sort of ambuscade-morality
against liberty, which Ferdinand put in action at Palermo, Antonelli at
Rome, Schwartzenberg at Milan and at Pesth, and later, at Paris, those
wolves of state, the men of December.
There was a nation among the nations, which was a sort of elder brother
in this family of the oppressed, a prophet in the human tribe. This
nation took the initiative of the whole human movement. It went on,
saying, "Come!" and the rest followed. As a complement to the
fraternity of men, in the Gospel, it taught the fraternity of nations.
It spoke by the voice of its writers, of its poets, of its
philosophers, of its orators, as by a single mouth, and its words flew
to the extremities of the earth, to rest, like tongues of fire, upon
the brow of all nations. It presided over the communion of intellects.
It multiplied the bread of life to those who were wandering in the
desert. One day it was enveloped in a tempest; it marched over the
abyss, and said to the frightened nations: "Why are you afraid?" The
wave of the revolutions it had excited subsided under its footsteps,
and, far from engulfing it, increased its glory. The suffering, infirm,
and diseased nations pressed around it; one was limping, for the chain
of the Inquisition, riveted to its foot for three centuries, had lamed
it; to this one it said, "Walk!" and it walked. Another was blind, the
old Roman papistry had filled its eyes with mist and darkness; to this
one it said, "Receive thy sight!" it opened its eyes and saw. "Throw
away your crutches, that is to say, your prejudices," it said; "throw
away your bandages, that is to say, your superstitions; stand upright,
raise your head, look at the sky, look at God. The future is yours. O
nations! you have a leprosy, ignorance; you have a plague, fanaticism;
there is not one of you but is afflicted with that frightful malady
called a despot; go, march, break the bonds of evil; I deliver you, I
cure you!" Throughout the earth a grateful clamour arose among the
nations which these words made sound and strong. One day it accosted
dead Poland; it raised its finger, and exclaimed, "Arise!" and dead
Poland arose.
This nation, the men of the past, whose fall it announced, dreaded and
hated. By dint of stratagem, of tortuous patience, and of audacity,
they ended by seizing it, and succeeded in throttling it.
For three years and more, the world has witnessed a tremendous agony
and a frightful spectacle. For three years and more, the men of the
past, the scribes, the Pharisees, the publicans, the princes of the
priests, have crucified, in presence of the human race, the Christ of
nations, the French people. Some furnished the cross, others the nails,
others the hammer. Falloux placed upon its forehead the crown of
thorns. Montalembert placed upon its mouth the sponge, dipped in gall
and vinegar. Louis Bonaparte is the miserable soldier who struck his
lance into its side, and caused it to utter the supreme cry: _Eli!
Eli! Lama Sabachthani_!
Now it is all over. The French nation is dead. The great tomb is about
to open.
For three days!
II
Let us have faith.
No, let us not be cast down. To despair is to desert.
Let us look to the future.
The future,--no one knows what tempests still separate us from port,
but the port, the distant and radiant port, is in sight; the future, we
repeat, is the republic for all men; let us add, the future is peace
with all men.
Let us not fall into the vulgar error, which is to curse and to
dishonour the age in which we live. Erasmus called the sixteenth
century "the excrement of the ages," _fex temporum_. Bossuet thus
qualified the seventeenth century: "A wicked and paltry age." Rousseau
branded the eighteenth century, in these terms: "This great rottenness
amidst which we live." Posterity has proved these illustrious men in
the wrong. It has said to Erasmus: "The sixteenth century was great;"
it has said to Bossuet: "The seventeenth century was great;" it has
said to Rousseau: "The eighteenth century was great."
Even had the infamy of those ages been actual, those great men would
have been wrong to complain. The man who thinks should accept simply
and calmly the surroundings in which Providence has placed him. The
splendour of human intelligence, the loftiness of genius, shine no less
by contrast than by harmony with the age. The stoic and profound
philosopher is not diminished by an external debasement. Virgil,
Petrarch, Racine are great in their purple; Job is still greater on his
dunghill.
But we can say, we men of the nineteenth century, that the nineteenth
century is not the dunghill. However deep the shame of the present,
whatever blows we receive from the fluctuation of events, whatever the
apparent desertion or the momentary lethargy of mental vigour, none of
us, democrats, will repudiate the magnificent epoch in which we live,
the virile age of mankind.
Let us proclaim it aloud, let us proclaim it in our fall and in our
defeat, this is the greatest of all ages! and do you know the reason
why? because it is the mildest. This age, the immediate issue, the
firstborn offspring, of the French Revolution, frees the slave in
America, raises from his degradation the _pariah_ in Asia, abolishes
the suttee in India, and extinguishes in Europe the last brands of the
stake, civilizes Turkey, carries the Gospel into the domain of the
Koran, dignifies woman, subordinates the right of the strongest to that
of the most just, suppresses pirates, mitigates sentences, makes the
galleys healthy, throws the red-hot iron into the sewer, condemns the
penalty of death, removes the ball and chain from the leg of the
convict, abolishes torture, degrades and brands war, stifles Dukes of
Alva and Charles the Ninths, and extracts the claws of tyrants.
This age proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen, and the
inviolability of life; it crowns the people, and consecrates man.
In art, it possesses all varieties of genius,--writers, orators, poets,
historians, publicists, philosophers, painters, sculptors, musicians;
majesty, grace, power, force, splendour, colour, form, style; it renews
its strength in the real and in the ideal, and bears in its hand the
two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful. In science it
accomplishes unheard-of miracles; it makes of cotton saltpetre, of
steam a horse, of the voltaic battery a workman, of the electric fluid
a messenger, of the sun a painter; it waters itself with subterranean
streams, pending the time when it shall warm itself with the central
fire; it opens upon the two infinites those two windows, the telescope
upon the infinitely great, the microscope upon the infinitely little,
and it finds stars in the first abyss, and insects in the second, which
prove to it the existence of God. It annihilates time, it annihilates
space, it annihilates suffering; it writes a letter from Paris to
London, and has an answer in ten minutes; it cuts off a man's leg, the
man sings and smiles.
It has now only to realize--and it has nearly done it--a progress which
is nothing compared to the miracles it has already wrought; it has only
to find the means of directing through a mass of air a bubble of
lighter air; it has already obtained the bubble of air, and keeps it
imprisoned; it has now only to find the impulsive force, only to cause
a vacuum before the balloon, for instance, only to burn the air before
the aerostat, as the rocket does before itself; it has only to solve
this problem in some way or other; and it will solve it, and do you
know what will happen then? At that instant frontiers will vanish, all
barriers will be swept away; everything that constitutes a Chinese wall
round thought, round commerce, round industry, round nationalities,
round progress, will crumble; in spite of censorships, in spite of
_index expurgatorius_, it will rain books and journals upon every
country under the sun; Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, will fall like hail
upon Rome, Naples, Vienna, St. Petersburg; the human word is manna, and
the serf will gather it in the furrows; fanaticism will die, oppression
will be impossible; man dragged himself along the ground,--he will
escape; civilization changes itself into a flock of birds, and flies
away, and whirls about and alights joyously at the same moment upon
every point of the globe. Lo! yonder it passes; aim your cannons, old
despotisms, it disdains you; you are only the bullet, it is the
lightning; no more hatreds, no more mutually devouring interests, no
more wars; a sort of new life, composed of concord and light, pervades
and soothes the world; the fraternity of nations soars through space,
and holds communion in the eternal azure; men mingle in the skies.
While we await this final progress, let us consider the point to which
this age had brought civilization.
Formerly there was a world in which people walked slowly, with bent
back, and eyes cast down; in which the Comte de Gouvon was served at
table by Jean-Jacques; in which the Chevalier de Rohan belaboured
Voltaire with a stick; in which Daniel Defoe was placed in the pillory;
in which a city like Dijon was separated from a city like Paris by the
necessity of making one's will, by robbers at every corner, and ten
days by stage; in which a book was a sort of infamy and filth which the
hangman burned upon the steps of the Palais de Justice; in which
superstition and ferocity shook hands; in which the Pope said to the
Emperor: "_Jungamus dexteras, gladium gladio copulemus_;" in which
one met at every step crosses hung with amulets, and gibbets hung with
men; in which there were heretics, Jews, and lepers; in which houses
had battlements and loop-holes; in which streets were closed with a
chain, rivers with a chain, and even camps with a chain (as at the
battle of Tolosa), cities with walls, kingdoms with prohibitions and
penalties; in which, with the exception of force and authority, which
stuck tightly together, everything was penned up, distributed, divided,
cut into fragments, hated and hating, scattered and dead; men were as
dust, power a solid block. But now we have a world in which everything
is alive, united, combined, coupled, mingled together; a world in which
thought, commerce, and industry reign; in which politics, more and more
firmly fixed, tends to an intimate union with science; a world in which
the last scaffolds and the last cannon are hastening to cut off their
last heads and to vomit forth their last shells; a world in which light
increases every instant; a world in which distance has disappeared, in
which Constantinople is nearer to Paris than Lyons was a hundred years
ago, in which Europe and America pulsate with the same heart-throb; a
world all circulation and all love, of which France is the brain, the
railroads the arteries, and the electric wires the fibres. Do you not
see that simply to set forth such a state of affairs is to explain, to
demonstrate, and to solve everything? Do you not feel that the old
world had an aged soul, tyranny, and that into the new world is about
to descend, necessarily, irresistibly, and divinely, a youthful soul,
liberty?
This was the work that the nineteenth century had done among men, and
was continuing in glorious, fashion to do,--that century of sterility,
that century of domination, that century of decadence, that century of
degradation, as it is called by the pedants, the rhetoricians, the
imbeciles, and all that filthy brood of bigots, of knaves, and of
sharpers, who sanctimoniously slaver gall upon glory, who assert that
Pascal was a madman, Voltaire a coxcomb, and Rousseau a brute, and
whose triumph it would be to put a fool's-cap upon the human race.
You speak of the Lower Empire; are you serious? Had the Lower Empire
behind it John Huss, Luther, Cervantes, Shakespere, Pascal, Moliere,
Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Mirabeau? Had the Lower Empire
behind it the taking of the Bastile, the Federation, Danton,
Robespierre, the Convention? Did the Lower Empire possess America? Had
the Lower Empire universal suffrage? Had the Lower Empire those two
ideas, country and humanity: country which enlarges the heart, humanity
which expands the horizon? Do you know that, under the Lower Empire,
Constantinople fell in ruins, and finally had only thirty thousand
inhabitants? Has Paris fallen so low? Because you have witnessed the
success of a pretorian _coup de main_, you liken yourselves to the
Lower Empire! 'Tis quickly said, and meanly thought. But reflect, if
you can. Had the Lower Empire the compass, the electric battery, the
printing press, the newspaper, the locomotive, the electric telegraph?
So many wings to bear man aloft, which the Lower Empire did not
possess! The nineteenth century soars, where the Lower Empire crawled.
Are you aware of this? What! Shall we see once more the Empress Zoe,
Roman Argyrio, Nicephorus Logothetes, Michael Calafates? Nonsense! Do
you imagine that Providence repeats itself so tamely? Do you believe
that God keeps repeating himself?
Let us have faith! Let us speak with decision! Self-irony is the
beginning of baseness. It is by speaking with decision that we become
good, that we become great. Yes, the enfranchisement of intellects, and
the consequent enfranchisement of nations, this was the sublime task
that the nineteenth century was performing in conjunction with France;
for the twofold providential work of the time and of men, of maturation
and of action, was blended in the common labour, and the great epoch
had for its true home the great nation.
O my country! it is at this moment, when I see you bleeding, inanimate,
your head hanging, your eyes closed, your mouth open, and no words
issuing therefrom, the marks of the whip upon your shoulders, the nails
of the executioner's shoes imprinted upon your body, naked and ashamed,
and like a thing deprived of life, an object of hatred, of derision,
alas! it is at this moment, my country, that the heart of the exile
overflows with love and respect for you!
You lie there motionless. The minions of despotism and oppression
laugh, and enjoy the haughty illusion that you are no longer to be
feared. Fleeting joy! The peoples that are in the dark forget the past;
they see only the present, and despise you. Forgive them, they know not
what they do. Despise you! Great Heaven! despise France? And who are
they? What language do they speak? What books have they in their hands?
What names do they know by heart? What is the placard pasted on the
walls of their theatres? What forms do their arts assume, their laws,
their manners, their clothing, their pleasures, their fashions? What is
the great date for them, as for us? '89! If they take France from out
their hearts, what remains to them? O my people! Though it be fallen
and fallen for ever, is Greece despised? Is Italy despised? Is France
despised? Look at those breasts, they are your nurse; look at that
womb, it is your mother.
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