Béranger wrote the soulful poem Les souvenirs du peuple, which perhaps gives us the simplest and most beautiful picture of the legendary hero, but also that which has least resemblance to the real man, for it makes him out to be as kindly as he is great. It is the poem which begins:
On parlera de sa gloire
Sous le chaume bien long-temps:
L'humble toit, dans cinquante ans,
Ne connaîtra plus d'autre histoire.
The reminiscences of the Emperor are put into the mouth of the old grandmother, who at different periods of her life has seen him—first as the victorious general, then as the happy father on his way to Notre Dame, then as the defender of France against the allied armies. A good specimen verse is:
Mes enfants, dans ce village,
Suivi de rois, il passa.
Voilà bien long-temps de ça:
Je venais d'entrer en ménage.
À pied grimpant le coteau
Où pour voir je m'étais mise
Il avait petit chapeau
Et redingote grise.
Près de lui je me troublai!
Il me dit: Bon jour, ma chère,
Bon jour, ma chère.
Il vous a parlé, grand'mère,
Il vous a parlé!
The young men who not long ago had been thankful to break their ranks and escape from the tyranny of military discipline, now began to look back with longing to the heroic days of the Consulate and the Empire. They had been dreaming, writes De Musset, of the ice of Russia and the sun of the Pyramids, and the world of the day seemed an empty, colourless world. "The King of France sat upon his throne, and some held out their hats for him to throw an alms into them, and others held out crucifixes, which he kissed. And when boys talked of glory, the answer was: 'Become priests!' and when they talked of honour, the answer was: 'Become priests!' and when they talked of hope, of love, of energy and life, it was still: 'Become priests!'"[2]
And so they became priests. Why and how they did it we can learn from the novels which describe the life of the period, such as Beyle's Rouge et Noire. This was undoubtedly the priests' golden age. On the 7th of June 1814, three days after the publication of the Charter, the notorious law was passed which prescribed compulsory observation of Sundays and holy-days. Frenchmen were to be Catholics under penalty of fine. Even the adherents of other creeds were obliged to decorate their houses on the occasion of processions of the Holy Sacrament. On the 7th of August 1814 the order of the Jesuits was solemnly re-established. The education of the country was placed in the hands of the clergy. As much of its power as possible was taken from the University, if for no other reason than because numbers of the students had taken part in the defence of Paris against the foreign troops, i.e. the allies of the monarchy.
At this time there begins within the Catholic Church itself a short process of fermentation (to which Joseph de Maistre's and Lamennais' feud with Gallicanism belongs), which in the course of a score of years produces the hitherto unknown phenomenon of perfect unity among Catholics. Catholicism and submission to Rome become one and the same thing. And another, kindred phenomenon, quite as unheard of, is witnessed in our century. Religious unity spreads even beyond the bounds of the Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant Church holds out its hand to the Catholic, which in days gone by it had abominated as the Babylonian whore. Glancing at the later religious development of the century, we find that in our days the difference between orthodox Protestantism and Catholicism is only an apparent difference, only the difference between faith in the infallibility of the Bible and faith in the infallibility of the Pope. The Protestants reject the reason of the eighteenth and the scientific criticism of the nineteenth century; they go back to the creeds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and do not consider even these orthodox enough; Luther is too advanced for them. Schleiermacher is regarded as a free-thinker by orthodox Germany; Bossuet's attitude is reprobated by French Catholics. He is considered a heretic, in as far as he asserted the independence of the French church. We remember that Joseph de Maistre disapproved of him. Even Montalembert, in his book on the interests of Catholicism in the nineteenth century, mentions him in a condemnatory tone. But the movement does not stop here. The contributors to the Catholic newspapers and periodicals take to writing historical articles which constitute a regular crusade against the great pagan geniuses who founded the civilisation of Europe, such as Pindar, Plato, Virgil. In Danish literature we have an equivalent in Grundtvig's earliest historical pronouncements.[3] Hence Montalembert, in the work just referred to, is able to declare triumphantly: "Lying history, parodied history, declamatory history, as written by Voltaire, Dulaure, and Schiller, the men who educated our fathers, would hardly be put up with to-day, even in a feuilleton." A glance through Lamennais' letters is sufficient to persuade us that one great cause of the Revolution of July was the behaviour of the clerical party. The Jesuits acted as the storming force of fanaticism. Missionaries, whose fervent faith was due to their gross ignorance, were sent to all parts of the country. They sometimes converted whole regiments at a time, and these were then led by their officers in a body to the altar.
The worship of the Virgin developed in a way it had never done before. Belief in Mary underwent the same change that belief in Christ had done in ancient days, only more quickly. She was gradually transformed from a human into a divine being.
Let us for a moment follow the course of the religious reaction beyond the period under consideration, and we shall see that this movement has progressed with giant steps. The dogma of Mary's immaculate conception, from which, in the twelfth century, the Middle Ages shrank, has been finally accepted and sanctioned. Mary imperceptibly supplants Christ and becomes the deity of France, as she already was of Italy and Spain. In one of the manuals used in the education of Catholic priests[4] we read: "The blessed Virgin is to be honoured as the spouse of God the Father, because with her and in her he begot our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; in her we honour all the divine and adorable perfections with which God has endowed her by communicating to her in abundant measure his fertility, his wisdom, his holiness, and his divine fulness of life." In a work on the immaculate conception written by Archbishop Malou, Mary is represented as being at one and the same time the daughter of God, the spouse of God, and the mother of God; so involved are his explanations of the relationships of the Trinity that one of the conclusions we arrive at is that she is the daughter of her own son. In a book by the Abbé Guillon, Le Mois de Marie, she is represented as a kind of chief divinity, to whom consequently it is safest of all to pray. "To be the mother of God means to have a kind of power over God, to retain, if it is permissible to use the expression, a kind of authority over him." Authority thus culminates in the Madonna.
The Mariolaters, in the manner of the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, set about collecting proofs of the immaculate conception from the writings of the Fathers. One ecclesiastic, Passaglia by name, collected 8000. Archbishop Malou declared himself able to produce not fewer than 800,000 proofs of it. One's head begins to swim. On Mariolatry followed, about the middle of the century, the recrudescence of the worship of relics; for the relics which had stopped working miracles at the time of the Revolution, began to work them again for the generation educated by the Jesuits. In 1844 Bishop Arnoldi of Treves began to exhibit the coat of our Saviour, a seamless linen garment which is mentioned in a falsified clause introduced (as is convincingly demonstrated by two German historians, J. Gildemeister and H. von Sybel) between 1106 and 1124 into a proclamation of Pope Sylvester (327) as having been given by the Empress Helena to the Cathedral of Treves. It is affirmed to be the garment mentioned in the 19th chapter of the Gospel of St. John as worn by Jesus before his crucifixion. But besides the sacred coat at Treves, there are some twenty more in other parts of the world, all claiming to be equally genuine. The one in Galatia is much older than the one at Treves. The genuineness of several of them is attested by papal briefs. In 1843 Gregory XVI. ratified the genuineness of the coat at Argenteuil; but Leo X. had already, in 1514, acknowledged the claim of the Treves coat, and its champions would not bow to the new decree; the consequence was that pilgrimages were made to both. Görres, in his Historisch-politische Blätter, rejoices at the success of the great pilgrimage to the sacred coat of Treves.