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

by Georg Brandes

He was again and again imprisoned for his pamphlets; but he did not allow this to intimidate him. In his Réponse aux anonymes qui ont écrit des lettres he writes: "It is not my cleverness, but my stupidity which has landed me in prison. I have put faith in the Charter (la Charte); I confess it to my shame.... If it had not been for the Charter I should never have dreamt of talking to the public of the things that occupy my thoughts. Robespierre, Barras, and the great Napoleon had taught me for twenty years to hold my tongue.... But then came the Charter, and people said to me: 'Speak, you are a free man; write away, print; the liberty of the press is secured along with every other liberty. What are you afraid of?' ... So I said, with my hat in my hand: 'Will you graciously grant us leave to dance in our market-place on Sunday?'.... 'Gendarmes—off with him to the lock-up. The longest possible term of imprisonment, a fine besides,' &c., &c."

In another letter he writes with perfect calmness, and yet with biting severity, of the consequences of the celibacy of the priesthood. One of the priests who had inveighed most fiercely against the harmless peasant dances is discovered to be a seducer and murderer. Some years back he had murdered a woman who had been his mistress. In this case his fellow-priests attempted to throw the blame of the murder on her husband. Since then he has murdered and cut in pieces a young girl whom he had seduced. His superiors have sent him, unpunished, across the frontier, so that he is now an honoured preacher of the Gospel in Savoy. Courier shows what crimes, born of superstition and covetousness, are committed in districts where the inhabitants are so orthodox that nothing would induce them to eat meat on Friday; he says: "This is the true faith—honest, childlike, without suspicion of hypocrisy," and adds laconically: "They say that morality is founded upon this."

The little satire entitled Pièce diplomatique he was obliged to publish privately. It is a letter supposed to be written by King Louis to his cousin, Ferdinand of Spain, in 1823, after the war undertaken by France to restore that depraved Bourbon to his throne had been brought to a successful conclusion. In it Courier satirises Louis's attitude to the constitution. His cousin will not hear of a constitution, but Louis maintains that, far from being burdensome, it is agreeable and advantageous to the king.

Extremely witty is the pamphlet Simple Discours, in which Courier ventured to express his disapprobation of the proposal made by the court party to raise a national subscription for the purpose of purchasing the property and castle of Chambord for the heir to the throne. The delicate little Duke of Bordeaux, afterwards Comte de Chambord, was born so long after his father's death that his birth was regarded as a miracle. Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and De Musset all sang of this wonderful event, Lamartine and Hugo comparing the child to Joash. The proposal to raise the national subscription was, thus, made at a time when an enthusiastic feeling prevailed in loyalist circles; but Courier, true to his principles, opposed it from his peasant standpoint.

Soon all the historians, with the exception of Michaud, began to write in a spirit ominous of danger to the restored monarchy. In 1823 Thiers published the first part of his history, which produced much the same effect as Béranger's songs.

The government of France had always been in the habit of supporting literature. All the rulers of France had done so, with the exception of Napoleon, and the Bourbons were expected to follow the example of their ancestors. But they gave sparingly, in spite of the enthusiastic welcome and homage which they received from both poets and prose writers. On the few disaffected authors they revenged themselves to the best of their ability; to punish Béranger, his rival, Désaugiers, was made a court favourite; Delavigne was punished with the loss of his post as librarian.

But more dangerous than the attacks from without were the germs of dissolution which appeared within the school of authority itself. The authors, both prose writers and poets, who formed the Immanuelist or Legitimist group, felt their principles wavering.

We have already seen that Lamennais was on the verge of defection. And his plight was the plight of all the others; the germs of the new were stirring within them in spite of their sincere desire to defend the old.

This is particularly observable in the case of Alfred de Vigny, who belongs to a generation a little younger than Lamartine, a little older than Victor Hugo. His family, as we have seen, was royalist. His father, who had been an officer and a brilliant courtier in the days of Louis XV., lost all his property at the time of the Revolution. After the fall of the Empire, Alfred, then sixteen, was equipped at his father's expense and enrolled in the gendarme corps of the guards. When the Hundred Days came, he attended the king on the first stages of his flight; when they were over, he was made a lieutenant in the royal foot-guards. But the time of active service was past, and nothing remained but the tedium of garrison life; the young man sought compensation in unremitted intellectual activity.

In his boyhood everything had been done to keep his thoughts from turning to Napoleon and all that concerned him. Hence almost before his schooldays were over he donned the white cockade and entered the guard of the Bourbons. But the ungrateful Bourbons, ungrateful because they believed that people owed everything to them, kept him waiting nine years for promotion, when he became captain by seniority.