And Victor Hugo, whom one would have taken, judging by his début, to be more reliable, soon showed himself, not only by the style of his poems, but by their tone, to be a doubtful acquisition. In 1822, in the ode entitled Buonaparte, he had pronounced Napoleon to be a false god, an emissary of hell; and even as late as June 1825, in Les Deux Îles (Corsica and St. Helena), he had caused the nations to shout in chorus to the fallen Emperor: "Honte! Opprobre! Malheur! Anathême! Vengeance!" and the curses of the dead, as the echo of his fatal glory, to roll like thunder from the Volga, the Tiber, and the Seine, from the walls of the Alhambra, from the grave at Vincennes (Enghien's), from Jaffa, from the Kremlin which he had tried to destroy, from all his bloody battle-fields. Now, a year and a half later, Hugo suddenly strikes a different chord. In the first ode À la Colonne de la Place Vendôme, written in February 1827, Buonaparte has become Napoleon, and his glory the glory of France. The occasion of the ode was this. At the conclusion of peace in 1814, Austria had demanded that the Frenchmen to whom Napoleon had given titles which conveyed the idea of supremacy over any Austrian town or province should cease to bear these titles. This was all that was required, no objection being raised to titles which merely recalled the French victories in Austria. The French government had persuaded Austria to refrain from making the agreement arrived at public, and the Austrian ambassador contrived to avoid wounding French susceptibility by placing himself on his reception evenings so near the door that it was not necessary to announce the guests. But in the beginning of 1827 this ambassador was recalled, and his successor was ordered by the Austrian government to decide the matter finally. Consequently, on one of his reception evenings, Marshal Oudinot, Duke of Reggio, and Marshal Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, were simply announced by their military titles and their family names. They immediately withdrew, and the affair aroused a great sensation and considerable animosity. As the two officers in question were in high favour with the royal family, the royalist party took up their cause and made it the cause of France. Victor Hugo, who was created to give expression to every prevailing sentiment, and who was conscious before any one else of that movement in men's minds which in the course of a few years was to transform Napoleon into a legendary and national hero, made himself for the first time, in his ode À la Colonne de la Place Vendôme, the organ of the cult of the great memories of the Empire. The column, cast of the metal of conquered cannon, which roared as it was melted in the furnace, speaks to the poet in the silent watches of the night, in its character of last remnant of the great empire and the great army. He hears a murmur from the bronze battalions on its sides, hears the sound of names: Tarentum, Reggio, Dalmatia, Treviso, sees the eagles on the pedestal whetting their beaks, and feels that the immortal shades are awakening. Who dare think of wiping out this history of France written in blood with the points of swords! Who dare dispute the right of the old generals to the inheritance of Napoleon's glory! Who dare strike at the trophies of France! Every spark struck from the column is a flash of lightning. With magnificent eloquence and ardent enthusiasm Napoleon's history is evolved into a heroic poem, and any sagacious reader of that poem might have foreseen that in the course of a year Hugo (in his poem "Bounaberdi," in Les Orientales, the motto of which is: "Grand comme le monde") would go over to the veritable cult of Napoleon. And since Bonapartism and Liberalism, in those days shaded off into each other—vide Béranger, Armand Carrel, and Heinrich Heine—it would also have been easy to foresee the possibility of his defining Romanticism a few years later (in the preface to Hernani) as "liberalism in literature."
[1] See the notes to Lamartine's Chant du sacre.
[2] Alfred de Musset, Confessions d'un enfant du siècle.
[3] See Saisset, La philosophic et la renaissance religieuse. Revue des deux mondes, 1853, tome i.
[4] Manuel de piété à l'usage des seminaries, 7 éd. Paris, 1835.
[5] Journal d'un poète, 47.
[6] See Vinet's interesting essays on modern French lyric poetry.