LAFAYETTE[57] (1833)
By HEINRICH HEINE
TRANSLATED BY CHARLES GODFREY LELAND
PARIS, January 19, 1832.
The Temps remarks today that the Allgemeine Zeitung now publishes articles which are hostile to the royal family, and that the German censorship, which does not permit the least remark to be leveled at absolute kings, does not show the least mercy toward a citizen-king. The Temps is really the shrewdest and cleverest journal in the world! It attains its object with a few mild words much more readily than others with the most blustering polemics. Its crafty hint is well understood, and I know of at least one liberal writer who no longer considers it honorable to use, under the permission of the censorship, such inimical language of a citizen-king as would not be allowed when applied to an absolute monarch. But in return for that, let Louis Philippe do us one single favor—which is to remain a citizen-king; for it is because he is becoming every day more and more like an absolute king that we must complain of him. He is certainly perfectly honorable as a man, an estimable father of a family, a tender spouse and a good economist, but it is vexatious to see how he allows all the trees of liberty to be felled and stripped of their beautiful foliage that they may be sawed into beams to support the tottering house of Orleans. For that, and that only, the Liberal press blames him, and the spirits of truth, in order to make war on him, even condescend to lie. It is melancholy and lamentable that through such tactics even the family of the King must suffer, although its members are as innocent as they are amiable. As regards this, the German Liberal press, less witty but much kinder than its French elder sister, is guilty of no cruelties. "You should at least have pity on the King," lately cried the good-tempered Journal des Débats. "Pity on Louis Philippe!" replied the Tribune. "This man asks for fifteen millions and our pity! Did he have pity on Italy, on Poland?"—et cetera.
I saw a few days ago the young orphan of Menotti, who was hanged in Modena. Nor is it long since I saw Señora Luisa de Torrijos, a poor deathly-pale lady, who quickly returned to Paris when she learned on the Spanish frontier the news of the execution of her husband and of his fifty-two companions in misfortune. Ah! I really pity Louis Philippe.
La Tribune, the organ of the openly declared Republican party, is pitiless as regards its royal enemy, and every day preaches the Republic. The National, the most reckless and independent journal in France, has recently chimed in to the same air in a most surprising manner. And terrible as an echo from the bloodiest days of the Convention sounded the speeches of those chiefs of the Société des Amis du Peuple who were placed last week before the court of assizes, "accused of having conspired against the existing Government in order to overthrow it and establish a republic." They were acquitted by the jury, because they proved that they had in no way conspired, but had simply uttered their convictions publicly. "Yes, we desire the overthrow of this feeble Government, we wish for a republic." Such was the refrain of all their speeches before the tribunal.
While on one side the serious Republicans draw the sword and growl with words of thunder, the Figaro flashes lightning, and laughs and swings its light lash most effectually. It is inexhaustible in clever sayings as to "the best republic," a phrase with which poor Lafayette is mocked, because he, as is well known, once embraced Louis Philippe before the Hôtel de Ville and cried, "Vous êtes la meilleure république!" The Figaro recently remarked that we of course now require no republic, since we have seen the best. And it also said as cruelly, in reference to the debates on the civil list, that "la meilleure république coute quinze millions." The Republican party will never forgive Lafayette his blunder in advocating a king. They reproach him with this, that he had known Louis Philippe long enough to be aware beforehand what was to be expected of him. Lafayette is now ill—malade de chagrin—heart-sick. All! the greatest heart of two worlds must feel bitterly the royal deception. It was all in vain that he in the very beginning continually insisted on the Programme de l'Hôtel de Ville, on the republican institutions with which the monarchy should be surrounded, and on similar promises. But he was out-cried by the doctrinaire gossips and chatterers, who proved from the English history of 1688 that people in Paris in July, 1830, had fought simply to maintain the Charter, and that all their sacrifices and struggles had no other object than to replace the elder line of the Bourbons by the younger, just as all was finished in England by putting the House of Orange in place of the Stuarts. Thiers, who does not think with this party, though he now acts as their spokesman, has of late given them a good push forward. This indifferentist of the deepest dye, who knows so admirably how to preserve moderation in the clearness, intelligence, and illustration of his style, this Goethe of politics, is certainly at present the most powerful defender of the system of Périer, and, in fact, with his pamphlet against Chateaubriand he well-nigh annihilated that Don Quixote of Legitimacy, who sat so pathetically on his winged Rosinante, whose sword was more shining than sharp, and who shot only with costly pearls instead of good, piercing, leaden bullets.
In their irritation at the lamentable turn which events have taken, many of the enthusiasts for freedom go so far as to slander Lafayette. How far a man can go astray in this direction is shown by the book of Belmontet, which is also an attack on the well-known pamphlet by Chateaubriand, and in which the Republic is advocated with commendable freedom. I would here cite the bitter passages against Lafayette contained in this work, were they not on one side too spiteful, and on the other connected with a defense of the Republic which is not suitable to this journal. I therefore refer the reader to the work itself, and especially to a chapter in it entitled "The Republic." One may there see how evil fortune may make even the noblest men unjust.
I will not here find fault with the brilliant delusion of the possibility of a republic in France. A royalist by inborn inclination, I have now, in France, become one from conviction. For I am convinced that the French could never tolerate any republic, neither according to the constitution of Athens or of Sparta, nor, least of all, to that of the United States. The Athenians were the student-youths of mankind; their constitution was a species of academic freedom, and it would be mere folly to seek to introduce it in this our matured age, to revive it in our senile Europe. And how could we put up with that of Sparta, that great and tiresome manufactory of patriotism, that soldiers' barrack of republican virtue, that sublimely bad kitchen of equality, in which black broth was so vilely cooked that Attic wits declared it made men despise life and defy death in battle? How could such a constitution flourish in the very foyer of gourmands, in the fatherland of Véry, of Véfour, and of Carême? This latter would certainly have thrown himself, like Vatel, on his sword, as a Brutus of cookery and as the last gastronome. Indeed, had Robespierre only introduced Spartan cookery, the guillotine would have been quite superfluous, for then the last aristocrats would have died of terror, or emigrated as soon as possible. Poor Robespierre! you would introduce stern republicanism to Paris—to a city in which one hundred and fifty thousand milliners and dressmakers, and as many barbers and perfumers, exercise their smiling, curling, and sweet-smelling industries!