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

by Georg Brandes

So much for the words of the compact. What was really sincere and benevolent intention on the part of the foolish imperial enthusiast was sagacious hypocrisy on that of his brother monarchs. Who does not know the rest? Who does not know what the Holy Alliance came to mean—the introduction of a general European reaction, in essence barbarism, in its outward form a lie? It was in the name of the Holy Alliance that, during the saddest decades of our century, even the very feeblest endeavours in the direction of intellectual and political liberty were checked or crushed.

The Alliance received the voluntary adhesion of the potentate who had most to gain from it, the Pope. Without any petty consideration of his own position as head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pius lauded to the skies the resolution of his compeers—Alexander, the Greek Pope; the King of Prussia, the Lutheran Pope; and the King of England, the Anglican Pope. At the Congress of Vienna he proposed a plan of restoration in comparison with which the dreams of all the reactionaries of other days paled and all previous attempts to restore pre-Revolutionary conditions sank into nothingness. With one stroke of the pen the existence of the Revolution and the Empire was blotted out. The Holy Roman Empire was to be restored, and along with it all the social conditions and institutions of the Middle Ages—tithes, church property, exemption of the clergy from taxation, and the Inquisition.

The last years of Madame de Krüdener's life present no events of historical interest. She became ever more sincerely and fanatically religious, and her desire to display her faith in deeds became ever more ardent. It was now the one desire of her heart and object of her life to help the poor and the sick. She preached to the poor, founded churches, and proclaimed the advent of the kingdom of God. But from the moment when her Christianity took a practical form the character of her position changed. The royal personages, the authorities, all the great, who as long as she remained the court lady had smiled upon her, instinctively divined an enemy in her as soon as she began to address herself to the people. On one occasion she traversed Switzerland from frontier to frontier in a sort of mad religious triumphal procession; the next time she visited that country she was driven out of one town after the other. At Basle, where she distributed tracts among the soldiers and according to her own account converted half the garrison, the infuriated clergy succeeded in having her expelled from the town. In Baden, where her charities during a famine were truly munificent, her house was surrounded by gendarmes, and the people who had sought refuge with her were dispersed. She was expelled from Lucerne by the police authorities. When she tried to make her way into France through Alsace, she was turned back, and was at the same time forbidden to return to Baden. She was finally conducted under police escort to the Russian frontier, being passed on by the Würtemberg to the Bavarian, by the Bavarian to the Saxon, by the Saxon to the Prussian police, and by these last handed over to the authorities of her own country. She had lost Alexander's favour for ever, partly because she had been much too communicative about the origin of the Holy Alliance, partly because of the mixed and often bad company in which she travelled about. The accounts which she gave in her religious periodicals and pamphlets of social evils, of the boundless distress of the poor and the unjust oppressions of their rulers, were denounced as socialism and communism. Christianity as she understood it could not but be obnoxious to the authorities. She was, moreover, foolish enough to express her enthusiastic sympathy with the Greek war of independence in a very incautious manner, and presumptuous enough to declare openly that the Emperor, as founder of the Holy Alliance, was in duty bound to place himself in the forefront of a crusade against Turkey. Cast off by Alexander, she left St. Petersburg, and from this time onwards lived, as a missionary, a life of self-inflicted penance. She underwent all kinds of hardships, suffering voluntarily herself, and alleviating the sufferings of others whenever it was possible. She died in 1824 while on a missionary expedition in the Crimea.

An interesting contrast to the French-Russian Madame de Krüdener is to be found in the German-Russian Princess Galizin, a lady who belongs to the end of the eighteenth, as Madame de Krüdener does to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Madame de Krüdener's characteristics stand out more sharply on such a background as the life of Madame de Galizin. The Princess's is a genuinely German type of character. She is as simple as her younger contemporary is polished and complex; she is ingenuous and at the same time sentimental, full of soul and wanting in brain-power. Her husband was, like Krüdener, a man of the world. He was a friend and admirer of Diderot; it was, indeed, Diderot who first inspired the Princess with the desire and the courage to study, but she soon became that philosopher's ardent opponent. As careless of her feminine attractions as Madame de Krüdener was coquettish, Madame de Galizin had her head shaved to make it impossible for her to go into society, and from the age of twenty-four lived a life of seclusion. To cure herself entirely of egoism she "offered to the God of love the sacrifice of her understanding." As an instance of her ignorance of the world it may be mentioned that, when her son desired to enter the military service of a foreign country, she applied first to the Prussian, then to the Austrian commander-in-chief for permission to send along with him a tutor who was to guard him against the irregular habits of military life, and was astonished by receiving the answer from both that it was impossible for an officer to join the army accompanied by a male governess of this description.

In spite of Princess Galizin's warm-hearted sincerity, her tone is as pietistically supernatural as Madame de Krüdener's is mystically sensual.[4]

In Madame de Krüdener we have before us a being whose original equipment would seem to mark her as destined to act some important part. She possesses a vigour of life and a vividness of emotion sufficient for two ordinary human beings; only it is not healthy vigour and emotion, but an inward restlessness, an inward fire, which gives out sparks incessantly on every side. There is in her an original capital of Russian volatility and pliability, German sentimentality, French sense of proportion, and "Asiatic" sensual charm.

She enters life with no thorough education behind her, no serious aim before her, with a strong craving for happiness, and a poetic turn—predestined, therefore, to live in illusions. When she finds herself surrounded by admirers she gives herself up to dizzy enjoyment of this gratification, and begins to regard herself as a superior being. As long as she preserves outward fidelity to her husband she lives in the illusion that she is the heroine of duty. When she becomes unfaithful, she chooses a new model, and is transformed in her own estimation into another ideal, the ideal fair sinner. She writes of the ladies of Geneva, that they have neither the charm of virtue nor "the charm of sin." This latter she herself acquired. She continued to be ideal in so far as it is ideal to be the first of one's own species, unique. On this supposition of her own ideality is founded her belief that it was she who brought happiness (orders and titles) to her husband.

All illusion consists in a wrong association of cause and effect—religious illusion like the rest. But religious illusion is a double illusion; the individual subject to it does not trace the effect to its cause, but to a vague origin, the centre of existence—illusion number one—and in the centre of existence he places, not, as he imagines, the Deity, but himself—illusion number two. The beautiful wife believes that her husband receives his decorations direct from God, but also that she herself is the cause of God's bestowing them. She is the real cause, God is the means by which she works. She continues to lead her gay life as long as it continues to provide her with illusions. But a clever woman, with highly-strung nerves, tires in the long run of such a life, tires of the new admirer's jealousy of his predecessor, and of fooling herself and another for, say, the tenth time with the words: "You are the only man I have ever loved." After this life has lost its illusions, and existence for the time being its charm, the possibility of a new illusion presents itself. Madame de Krüdener regards the apoplectic shock which killed her lover in the same light as St. Augustine, Pascal, and Luther regarded similar occurrences. It is a hint, a warning to her. The happy shoemaker tells her of his certainty of being one of the elect of God. When she learns the secret of his happiness, she resolves that she too will be one of the elect.

Faith in God is in her case the satisfaction of the desire to be elect, to be the chosen one. She believes herself to be converted, and is, at the bottom of her heart, what she was. When she puts into the mouth of the Deity the words in which He assures her of His love, what is she doing but once again writing letters and elegies to Sidonie? The echo of her own self-adoration sounds to her like a voice from heaven, and she thanks God now as she did before for being thus distinguished—by herself. What she desires now as before is to be loved. As Chateaubriand proceeded to his earthly Alhambra via the earthly Jerusalem, she seeks her heavenly Alhambra by the way of the heavenly Zion. The only difference in their cases is, that he wishes to deceive others; she deceives herself. She is a coquette; so is he, and so is Lamartine; they are haughty coquettes, and she is a humble one.

What chiefly distinguishes her from them is, however, not her character, but her gifts and her feminine nature. Chateaubriand, as a man, has at least a sufficient glimmering of science to make it impossible for him to be imposed on by miracle-workers and village sibyls. Madame de Krüdener is a woman, and in a reactionary age the definition holds good: Woman is the natural prey of the priests. Destitute of any scientific basis of thought, she sooner or later, except in rare, unusually favourable circumstances, becomes a prey to her enthusiasm, which does not know on what to expend itself, to her vague longings after she knows not what, to her cowardice, which is terrified by the calamities of life, to her various illusions; and all these powers—enthusiasm, longing, fear, and imagination—deliver up their victim bound hand and foot as a prey to the Church, whose authority has, moreover, been imprinted upon her soul by her education from her earliest youth. Such was the case with Madame de Krüdener. All that she comes into contact with of the intellectual life of her day—its great wars of liberation, its research, its philosophy, its enthusiasm for enlightenment—passes by her without being understood; the one quality of the spirit of her age that she understands and appropriates is its dissoluteness. When the reaction against the 18th century sets in, and it is, naturally, first and foremost taxed with impiety and frivolity, Madame de Krüdener immediately joins in the cry, because she herself has had no eyes for anything else in it, has comprehended nothing in it but its frivolousness and loose morality.