Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 3. The Reaction in France

by Georg Brandes

Napoleon, who kept a keen eye upon journalistic literature, at last lost patience. A written communication has been preserved which was put into the hands of one of the Emperor's officials, to be by him transmitted to Fiévée, the publisher of the Mercure (a man with whom the Emperor sometimes corresponded privately). Every word in this paper is significant; note particularly the change from the impersonal third to the first person singular. There is no direct indication as to who is the writer of the document; in the beginning it is that indefinite, anonymous being, the Government, that speaks; then all at once we feel who is wielding the pen—the lion shows his claws. "Monsieur de Lavalette will go to Monsieur Fiévée and say to him that in the Journal des Débats, which is read with more attention than the other newspapers, because it has ten times as large a circulation, articles have been found, written in a spirit altogether favourable to the Bourbons, consequently with complete indifference to the welfare of the state; say that it has been determined to suppress any articles in this paper that are too ill-affected; that the system pursued is undoubtedly a system of long-suffering; that it is, however, not enough that they should not be directly hostile; that the Government has the right to demand that they shall be entirely devoted to the reigning house, and that they shall not suffer but oppose everything which can add lustre to the cause of the Bourbons or evoke reminiscences favourable to them; that as yet no decisive step has been determined on; that the inclination is to permit the Journal des Débats to continue to appear if men are presented to me in whom I can have confidence, and to whom I can entrust the editorship of the paper."[1]

We observe the direction which events were taking. During the course of the Emperor's reign Neo-Catholicism lost ever more and more of that favour which it at first enjoyed, and not until the return of the Bourbons did it once more completely triumph. Immediately after the accession of Napoleon, Chateaubriand, Bonald, and De Maistre have full liberty to write, the Journal des Débats is encouraged to undertake its crusade against the philosophy of the eighteenth century, the Pope visits Napoleon in Paris, all honour is shown to the clergy, Frayssinous preaches where and what he pleases. During the last years of the Empire the leaders of the Catholic party are compelled to be silent, the Journal des Débats is suppressed, the Pope is a prisoner, the clergy are in deep disgrace, and Frayssinous may not preach at all.—Not until the monarchy was restored was there a rehabilitation of ecclesiasticism, a confirmation of what had been begun by the Concordat.

It has been said, and said with truth, that no real poetry was written under the rule of Napoleon; nevertheless an attempt, and by no means an insignificant attempt, was made at this time to give to the France of the nineteenth century what Voltaire in his Henriade had attempted to give to the France of the eighteenth—neither more nor less than a great national epic.

It cannot be denied that the task was a tolerably hopeless one. At a time when all Europe was resounding with the names of the heroes of the new empire, and Napoleon was, as has been said, "binding the open wounds of France with the flags of her enemies," when the doings of the day were throwing all the doings of times past into the shade, where was an author to find a hero for an epic or deeds that would enthral the reading world?

The enterprise was undertaken by no less a man than Chateaubriand, the successful initiator of the literary movement of the period, the most admired author of his day. It was not only inclination but also a certain feeling of duty which induced Chateaubriand to undertake a great epic work. In his first work he had maintained that the legends of Christianity infinitely surpassed in beauty those of heathen mythology; that they appealed far more strongly to the poet; that the Christian, as father, husband, lover, bride, was more admirable and of more value to art than the mere natural being. He felt obliged to follow up his rule with an example, his theory with proof; and for this reason, and also to show what he was capable of, he determined to write a Christian epic.

True to the intellectual tendency of which he had been the first distinguished exponent, he did not choose modern or active heroes, in fact did not choose heroes at all, but martyrs as his theme. They also give the name to his work, Les Martyrs ou le Triomphe de la Religion Chrétienne, which, written as it is in prose, produces more the effect of an ordinary two-volume novel than of an epic. To understand this choice of subject we must remember that the point of view of the men of this school was not really that of the Empire at all, but that of the returned émigrés. They had not yet recovered from the horror excited in them by the deeds of the Revolution. In the leaders of the Revolution they saw only men of blood, in the vanquished party only hapless victims. In their eyes the real hero was not the conqueror, not the adventurous soldier, but Louis XVI., the innocent sufferer. What were they if not martyrs, all those Christian priests who in the Days of September were murdered for the sake of their religion, all those men and women who died in La Vendée for their loyalty to the King by the grace of God! Victims as innocent as the Princesse de Lamballe, or the maidens of Verdun, or the lately executed Duke of Enghien, were heroines and heroes a thousand times more worthy to be sung than the men who were defiling themselves with blood on all the battle-fields of Europe.

In 1802 Chateaubriand conceived the idea of his epic; in 1806 the first cantos were ready for publication. But the events of the epic were to happen in all parts of the world known to the Romans. Chateaubriand was not indolent by nature; it was not his aim to finish the work as quickly as possible in order to rest upon his laurels. He stopped short, and in July 1806 went off to travel in Greece, Syria, Egypt, and Carthaginian Africa, returning through Spain. The one object of this tour was, he himself gives us to understand in the prefaces to Les Martyrs and the Notes of Travel (Itinéraire), the perfecting of his work. In the one preface we read: "This journey was undertaken for the sole purpose of seeing and painting those districts in which I intended to lay the scenes of Les Martyrs"; in the other: "I did not undertake this journey in order to describe it. I had a purpose, and that purpose I have accomplished in Les Martyrs; I went in quest of pictures—that was all."

No, that was not all—neither all that Chateaubriand proposed to himself in taking the journey, nor even all that he wished others to see in it. Chateaubriand is Childe Harold before the real Childe Harold; he is a legitimist and Roman Catholic Byron. His René is the forerunner of the Byronic heroes; he himself, in his pilgrimages, is a forerunner of that half-fictitious, half-real Harold whom love of adventure and longing for new impressions drive from land to land. But the Byron of the ecclesiastical revival could not, like the English nobleman who still felt the blood of the Vikings in his veins, rest satisfied with the honest confession of such a simple motive as this for his wanderings. It would not have been at all in the spirit of Chateaubriand's period, nor would it have been in keeping with the part he played in that period, for him to go to Jerusalem to study landscape, to cover his palette with colours, and fill his sketch-book with sketches. When Childe Harold talks of his pilgrimage, he employs the word in its secondary meaning. Chateaubriand uses it in its original meaning. He tells every one that he is going to the Holy Land to strengthen his faith by the sight of all the holy places. He brings back with him water from the Jordan, and when the Comte de Chambord is born it is with this water that the royal infant is baptized. He himself says: "It may seem strange nowadays to speak of sacred vows and pilgrimages, but in this matter, as every one knows, I have no feeling of shame; I long ago took my place in the ranks of the superstitious and weak-minded. I am perhaps the last Frenchman who will set out for the Holy Land with the ideas, aims, and feelings of a medieval pilgrim. And though I do not possess the virtues which so conspicuously distinguished the De Coucys, De Nesles, De Chatillons, and De Montforts, I have at least their faith; by this sign even the old crusaders would recognise me as one of themselves."

There is an awkward discrepancy between this utterance and the words quoted above: "I went in quest of imagery—that was all." And in Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe we find a confession of yet another object in his quest of pictures, which throws a curious light upon the feelings and motives of the would-be pilgrim. He hoped by his efforts after fame, by his studies and his travels, to win the favour of a lady with whom he was in love. Taken in itself this is most natural. Chateaubriand was an ardent lover and frantically ambitious. It is not surprising that he should have said to himself: Fame, greater, more deserved, that I may deserve her better, that I may show her my ardent desire to render myself worthy of her favour! The lady herself appears to have been ambitious for him, and to have allowed him to view the possession of herself as a possible, far-off reward of new efforts. Though we may acknowledge that there is something medieval and chivalrous in such a relationship as this, an extraordinary confusion of ideas is none the less proved in the man who talks of a crusade and a pilgrimage. And yet Chateaubriand was no priestly casuist; he was a haughty, self-important, cynical aristocrat, who defiantly attached the colours of the church to his helmet and wore them not only at every joust but at every rendezvous.

In his Mémoires d'outre-tombe he writes: "But have I in my Itinéraire really told everything about that voyage on which I embarked from the port of Desdemona and Othello? Was it in the spirit of repentance that I sought the sepulchre of Christ? One single thought consumed me; I counted the moments with impatience. Standing on the deck of my ship, with my eyes fixed on the evening star, I prayed for a fair wind to carry me swiftly onwards, for fame—in order that I might be loved. I hoped to win fame in Sparta, at Mount Zion, at Memphis, at Carthage, and to carry it with me to the Alhambra. Would another remember me with as great steadfastness as mine under my probation?... If I secretly enjoy a moment's happiness, it is disturbed by memories of those days of seduction, of enchantment, of madness."