Notwithstanding reservations of this kind, or rather in spite of our different ways of interpreting the idea of equality, which I wished to be elevating and not lowering, I agreed entirely with my father as to the forms of republican principles and as to the social and democratic programme which I had accepted. I neither laid aside nor disowned my little book, wherein were inscribed the twenty-one principles of the future.
My mother and grandmother both reproached my father for forcing my young mind and causing it to ripen too soon, to which he replied:
“She can think what she pleases later. Either what I have taught her will satisfy her, as it satisfies me—and I think it will, for she resembles me more than any other member of the family—or she will throw off my ideas, as I threw off, in one night, the teachings of the seminary.”
The end of 1847 fixed in my mind the political convictions which I have kept, without modification, for more than thirty-five years. My father’s great abilities, his immense goodness, his love of the people, his disinterestedness, all of which filled up the void in his conceptions, made me for many years his disciple.
He believed, and made others believe, that the people possessed, in a latent degree, all the virtues, and that it would be necessary only to put them in possession of all their social and political rights for them to be worthy of both.
In my father’s enthusiasm for “the masses” there was both the affirmation of a strong ideal and also a great deal of ingenuousness. I see it now, alas! Our sentimentality was not made of false sentiment, but of a valiant faith in the necessity of justice and in a proper proportion of social benefits. For us of the “middle class” to contribute to the happiness of the people involved a certain sacrifice which was not lacking in generosity or grandeur.
The belief in universal fraternity, the hope that each nation might participate in the freedom of other nations, developed the finest of all qualities—abnegation and heroism in the men who filled prominent rôles in 1848.
It could not be truthfully said, however, that practical, feasible ideas possessed the minds of the revolutionists of 1847, since a young girl, eleven and a half years old, as I was at that time, could be initiated into all the revolutionary plans, could understand them, be enthusiastic about them, and strive for their accomplishment. These plans were undoubtedly somewhat infantile.
Grandmother, to whom I had talked a great deal, was quite taken with the sentimentality of the idea of regeneration and with the honest appearance of character of the Liberals and the Republicans, at that time united. She began to think that the “hirelings of royalty” were corrupted, and that Louis Philippe was too unyielding to reform and to progress. Little by little she was being brought around to my father’s way of thinking. Blondeau, although an office-holder, thought as I did.
Grandfather had received orders from his Bonapartist committee not to fear socialism, but, on the contrary, to encourage it, and he approved and supported my most eccentric ideas.