Herein uncle and nephew are thoroughly at one. Both Lanfrey and the author of the 'Romans nationaux' remind us how constantly the first Napoleon displayed a cynical disregard for men's feelings, without apparently seeing that thereby he was giving irreparable offence. He looked on men as reasoning machines, and quite left out of account all the sentimental springs of action. Those whom he needlessly insulted would, he thought, recognise both his power to crush and also to benefit them, and therefore they would be his obedient servants. Such was the state of the Continent that he was scarcely disabused of this notion till he undertook to govern Spain. Italy submitted to exactions more galling though less ruinous than those which the Germans have been making upon France. Germany, thoroughly dissatisfied with its own serene highnesses and arch-dukes, and looking upon Napoleon as the true successor of Hoche and Moreau, and the others who had spread republican ideas through the Fatherland, was content to bear a great deal before she showed any signs of anger. Spain certainly set Continental Europe an example in this. Napoleon might prove beyond dispute that under his tutelage she would soon rise rapidly in position and wealth; but Spain had been cruelly outraged by the treatment to which her people as well as her royal family had been subjected; and Spain cared not a jot for either position or wealth compared with a successful revolt against French occupation. We know how wholly, in dealing with individuals, the uncle left the power of personal feelings out of account; the nephew, rarely forgetting this in regard to the individual, forgot it when dealing with classes. To the clergy for instance, he said, 'Italy must be reconstituted, and to that end the Pope must give up the Romagna and the Marches. You shall have our troops still in Rome, and I will arrange that you may control French education pretty much as you please.' The clergy, accepting what he gave, never even pretended to be grateful for the boon; they never forgave the 'spoliation of the Church;' and thus the ex-emperor's conduct, as usual, displeased both parties, and deprived him of any support except what it was manifestly men's interest to give him.
Then came the dread of Prussia, and the sudden attempt (almost as bad as deploying under fire) to reorganise that army for which so much money had been drawn that had really been expended on other objects. The severer conscription made the peasants restless; and the plébiscite was called for much in that spirit of distrust which set David numbering the people. When it was found that a considerable percentage of the army had voted the wrong way, it was felt that the pyramid, hitherto propped up on its small end by bayonets, was tottering; and the war, of which we have lately seen the sad issue, was hurried on as the sole change of retrieving the fortunes of the dynasty.
It is not our business to gauge the complicity of the French people in the affair of Benedetti and Gramont.[217] France, as we said, showed herself culpably passive; Paris, say the French 'irreconcilables,' was culpably complaisant. We may be thankful that here in England we have not for centuries seen twenty years of such a debasing system as that which made Paris what it was till it was purified in the furnace of affliction. We fancy that the reaction against the despotism of the capital will be very strong. There is far more independent life left than most people imagine in the French provincial cities, far more than in our large towns; and they were increasingly indignant at the pre-eminence which the imperial system gave to Paris in everything. This exaltation of Paris is natural in a dynasty which has no roots in France itself. Paris had proved herself in 1790 capable of taking the lead and giving the law to all France; Paris, therefore, must be kept strong in order that all France might be of one mind. How different from the days of Henry IV., or of any of the old race! To the Corsican intruder the peasant of Beauce was just the same as the peasant of the Bourbonnais—merely a fighting machine. Hence the real depression of the provinces, despite of some exceptional improvements in Brittany and in the landes of the Gironde. The first Napoleon's levies so reduced the relative strength of the country districts that Paris, in his time, gained a position which she has ever since held. Whatever form of government she chose the provinces echoed her choice. Disliking her, they still never thought of shaking off her yoke. That Paris, befooled by Béranger, by chauvinism, and by the popular fiction of imperialism, should have chosen such a President as she did, is a strange comment on all the bombastic nonsense which Victor Hugo talks about Paris-cerveau—Paris, the brain of the world. Paris now, conscious of her degradation, is avenging herself by heaping all sorts of abuse on the man of her choice—'the phlegmatic perjurer,' 'the silent Tartuffe,' as M. Leclercq calls him. But the choice was hers, and the degradation which resulted from the years of personal rule followed with peculiar rapidity owing to a want in the French character. The most 'logical' of nations is indeed terribly consistent; it always seems to want that happy power of stopping short before things have gone so far as to make a catastrophe inevitable.
The last years of the late emperor's reign were morally unhealthy beyond the average of the most immoral times since the Reformation. It is not that people were worse in their conduct: they were more cynical. They had got to laugh at everything, to despise all sanctions—even those shadowy ones which the first revolution substituted for the sanctions of religion. The years in which Cora Pearl and the rest of the demi-monde were the arbiters of fashion, in which Thérèse was the pet of drawing-rooms, and the younger Dumas the popular littérateur, saw the extinction of much that was noble in France, for they witnessed what we may call the apotheosis of epicureanism. Paris seemed to have lost all moral sense since the time that its government had ceased to have any. The efforts of Parisian talent resulted in nothing but ill-digested and unwholesome works. The upper classes did as the Court did—that crew of wholesale stock-jobbers, like the Duke of Morny, among whom, one who was a strange mixture of reckless extravagance and gross bigotry presided as mistress of the revels. The masses were sunk in ignorance, and lived a life—those Paris ouvriers who have so often taken in hand to regenerate the world—which it would terrify the average English workman to contemplate. The middle class, the Famille Benoîton of the play, vegetated, made money, and reasoned on false premises. It was Babylon over again, as poor Prévost-Paradol styles it. Tongue-tied on all high subjects, the Parisians flung themselves mad with delight upon that class of ideas which soon brings thought down to its lowest level, 'Make money, never mind how, and live simply to gratify your meanest instincts,' that was everybody's maxim—leur esprit s'était abâtardi.
At the same time Paris still asserted that superiority over all the rest of the world which her writers had first claimed when they began to write up the first empire. Her writers kept on blowing one another's trumpets, and crying out that theirs was the great nation, and that to the people among whom primary education is more deficient than even in Spain was entrusted the mission of indoctrinating Europe with ideas. Grossly ignorant of their own shortcomings the French were, last July, quite incapable of forming a fair estimate of any other nation. Because Napoleon III. had always managed to mystify his people as to what he was going to do, therefore they fancied he had mystified Europe. Because he had met Bismark at Biarritz, and had been always fond of personal conference with princes, therefore they dreamed of Tilsit over again, and refused to see that on every point their master was either outwitted or else over-mastered by other statesmen. All the follies which come of boasting, of contempt for one's adversary, of unmeasured self-esteem, of confidence in one's power of doing anything in any line whatever, seemed to have burst out at once into monstrous growth in the Paris of last July. M. Leclercq collects chronologically the choice passages from the Figaro, the Gaulois, &c., which show the feeling of those who claimed to be the leaders of thought; and surely nothing better than such a collection can justify the almost universal dislike to France which was felt at the beginning of the war. Belgian as he is, he knows how bad the supremacy of Paris has been for Brussels, her little imitator, and he hopes that this supremacy is gone never to be restored. In this hope he gives us page after page of blatant absurdity, of grotesque and childish rant, of transparent falsehood, from the inaugural 'leader' in Figaro down to the wild dithyramb which Victor Hugo published when he entered Paris after the 4th September.
It is worth while to quote a few sentences from Figaro of the 17th July:—
'Drums beat, trumpets sound—it is war.'
'France, France, righteous land, hospitable land, noble people; always thou shalt be first among the first ... thy name is Legion!'