So colossal an edifice, so admirably adjusted, so mathematical, could not wholly perish; its hewn stones were too massive, too nicely squared; too exactly fitted, and the demolisher's hammer could not reach down to its deepest foundations.—This one, through its shaping and its structure, through its history and its duration, resembles the stone edifices which the same people at the same epoch elevated on the same soil, the aqueducts, amphitheatres, and triumphal arches, the Coliseum, the baths of Diocletian and of Caracalla.
The medieval man, using their intact foundations and their shattered fragments, built here and there, haphazard, according to the necessities of the moment, planting his Gothic towers between Corinthian columns against the panels of walls still standing.[2337] But, under his incoherent masonry, he observed the beautiful forms, the precious marbles, the architectural combinations, the symmetrical taste of an anterior and superior art; he felt that his own work was rude. The new world, to all thinking minds, was miserable compared with the old one; its languages seemed a patois (crude dialect), its literature mere stammering or driveling, its law a mass of abuses or a mere routine, its feudality anarchy, and its social arrangements, disorder.—In vain had the medieval man striven to escape through all issues, by the temporal road and by the spiritual road, by the universal and absolute monarchy of the German Cesars, and by the universal and absolute monarchy of the Roman pontiffs. At the end of the fifteenth century the Emperor still possessed the golden globe, the golden crown, the scepter of Charlemagne and of Otho the Great, but, after the death of Frederick II., he was nothing more than a majesty for show; the Pope still wore the tiara, still held the pastoral staff and the keys of Gregory VII. and of Innocent III., but, after the death of Boniface VIII., he was nothing more than a majesty of the Church. Both abortive restorations had merely added ruins to ruins, while the phantom of the ancient empire alone remained erect amid so many fragments. Grand in its outlines and decorations, it stood there, august, dazzling, in a halo, the unique masterpiece of art and of reason, as the ideal form of human society. For ten centuries this specter haunted the medieval epoch, and nowhere to such an extent as in Italy.[2338]
It reappears the last time in 1800, starting up in and taking firm hold of the magnificent, benighted imagination of the great Italian,[2339] to whom the opportunity afforded the means for executing the grand Italian dream of the Middle Ages; it is according to this retrospective vision that the Diocletian of Ajaccio, the Constantine of the Concordat, the Justinian of the Civil Code, the Theodosius of the Tuileries and of St. Cloud reconstructed France.
This does not mean that he copies—he restores; his conception is not plagiarism, but a case of atavism; it comes to him through the nature of his intellect and through racial traditions. In the way of social and political conceptions, as in literature and in art, his spontaneous taste is ultra-classic. We detect this in his mode of comprehending the history of France; State historians, "encouraged by the police," must make it to order; they must trace it "from the end of Louis XIV. to the year VIII," and their object must be to show how superior the new architecture is to the old one.[2340] "The constant disturbance of the finances must be noted, the chaos of the provincial assemblies,... the pretensions of the parliaments, the lack of energy and order in the administration, that parti-colored France with no unity of laws or of administration, being rather a union of twenty kingdoms than one single State, so that one breathes on reaching the epoch in which people enjoy the benefits of the unity of the laws, of the administration, and of the territory." In effect, he breathes; in thus passing from the former to the latter spectacle, he finds real intellectual pleasure; his eyes, offended with Gothic disorder, turn with relief and satisfaction to majestic simplicity and classic regularity; his eyes are those of a Latin architect brought up in the "École de Rome."
This is so true that, outside of this style, he admits of no other. Societies of a different type seem to him absurd. He misconceives their local propriety and the historical reasons for their existence. He takes no account of their solidity. He is going to dash himself against Spain and against Russia, and he has no comprehension whatever of England.[2341]—This is so true that, wherever he places his hand he applies his own social system; he imposes on annexed territories and on vassal[2342] countries the same uniform arrangements, his own administrative hierarchy, his own territorial divisions and sub-divisions, his own conscription, his civil code, his constitutional and ecclesiastical system, his university, his system of equality and promotion, the entire French system, and, as far as possible, the language, literature, drama, and even the spirit of his France,—in brief, civilization as he conceives it, so that conquest becomes propaganda, and, as with his predecessors, the Cesars of Rome, he sometimes really fancies that the establishment of his universal monarchy is a great benefit to Europe.
2301 ([return])
[ De Tocqueville, "L'Ancien régime et la Revolution." p. 64 and following pages, also p.354 and following pages.—"The Ancient Régime," p. 368.]
2302 ([return])
[ "The Revolution," I., book I., especially pp. 16, 17, 55, 61, 62-65. (Laffont I., 326, 354, 357 to 360.)]