“And yet we are in the nineteenth century, and a few months ago the French did not even think of a war which has put their capital into a state of siege and traced around its walls a desert zone where he who sowed does not reap! And there are public universities where they teach the Beautiful, the True, and the Right.”
“Might goes before Right,” Bismarck said. A German journalist invented another phrase which went the round of Europe: “the psychological moment for bombardment.” On January 5, one of the first Prussian shells sank into the garden of the Ecole Normale; another burst in the very ambulance of the Ecole. Bertin, the sub-director, rushed through the suffocating smoke and ascertained that none of the patients was hurt; he found the breech between two beds. The miserable patients dragged themselves downstairs to the lecture rooms on the ground floor, not a much safer refuge.
From the heights of Châtillon the enemy’s batteries were bombarding all the left bank of the Seine, the Prussians, regardless of the white flags bearing the red cross of Geneva, were aiming at the Val-de-Grâce and the Panthéon. “Where is the Germany of our dreams?” wrote Paul de St. Victor on January 9, “the Germany of the poets? Between her and France an abyss of hatred has opened, a Rhine of blood and tears that no peace can ever bridge over.”
On that same date, Chevreul read the following declaration to the Academy of Science—
The Garden of Medicinal Plants, founded in Paris
by an edict of King Louis XIII,
dated January, 1826,
Converted into the Museum of Natural History
by a decree of the Convention on June 10, 1793,
was Bombarded,
under the reign of Wilhelm I King of
Prussia, Count von Bismarck, Chancellor,
by the Prussian army, during the night
of January 8-9, 1871.
It had until then been respected by all parties
and all powers, national or
foreign.
Pasteur, on reading this protest, regretted more than ever that he had not been there to sign it. It then occurred to him that he too might give vent to the proud plaint of the vanquished from his little house at Arbois. He remembered with a sudden bitterness the diploma he had received from the University of Bonn. Many years had passed since the time in the First Empire when one of the 110 French Departments had been that of Rhine and Moselle, with Coblentz as its préfecture and Bonn and Zimmern as sous-préfectures. When, in 1815, Prussia’s iron hand seized again those Rhenish provinces which had become so French at heart, the Prussian king and his ministers hit upon the highly politic idea of founding a University on the picturesque banks of the Rhine, thus morally conquering the people after reducing them by force. That University had been a great success and had become most prosperous. The Strasburg Faculty under the Second Empire, with its few professors and its general penury, seemed very poor compared to the Bonn University, with its fifty-three professors and its vast laboratories of chemistry, physics and medicine, and even a museum of antiquities. Pasteur and Duruy had often exchanged remarks on that subject. But that rivalry between the two Faculties was of a noble nature, animated as it was by the great feeling that science is superior to national distinctions. King Wilhelm had once said, “Prussia’s conquests must be of the moral kind,” and Pasteur had not thought of any other conquests.
When in 1868 the University of Bonn conferred upon him the diploma of Doctor of Medicine, saying that “by his very penetrating experiments, he had much contributed to the knowledge of the history of the generation of micro-organisms, and had happily advanced the progress of the science of fermentations,” he had been much pleased at this acknowledgment of the future opened to medical studies by his work, and he was proud to show the Degree he had received.
“Now,” he wrote (January 18, 1871), to the Head of the Faculty of Medicine, after recalling his former sentiments, “now the sight of that parchment is odious to me, and I feel offended at seeing my name, with the qualification of Virum clarissimum that you have given it, placed under a name which is henceforth an object of execration to my country, that of Rex Gulielmus.
“While highly asseverating my profound respect for you, Sir, and for the celebrated professors who have affixed their signatures to the decision of the members of your Order, I am called upon by my conscience to ask you to efface my name from the archives of your Faculty, and to take back that diploma, as a sign of the indignation inspired in a French scientist by the barbarity and hypocrisy of him who, in order to satisfy his criminal pride, persists in the massacre of two great nations.” Pasteur’s protest ended with these words—
“Written at Arbois (Jura) on January 18, 1871, after reading the mark of infamy inscribed on the forehead of your King by the illustrious director of the Museum of Natural History M. Chevreul.”