L. H. H.
FRANÇOIS BULOZ.
The man whose fortunes were to be during nearly half a century connected with the Revue des Deux Mondes was born in 1804 at Vulbens, a village in French Savoy. Without becoming anything of a savant, M. Buloz received the fair education then obtainable at the Collége Louis le Grand. After leaving school he was forced to take a situation at some chemical works in Sologne, but soon returned disgusted and without means to Paris. There we find him passing his days in a printing-office, and his evenings—and often, too, his nights—in miscellaneous reading. In all that he did he displayed that indomitable energy which characterized his entire subsequent career.
The Revue des Deux Mondes had been started in 1829. It was a sickly bantling, and had to change its name the following year to the Journal des Voyages. The new name, however, brought no fresh subscribers, and the Journal was dragging on a dreary existence when M. Auffray, the printer, bought it, and engaged his former schoolfellow, François Buloz, as editor of the new series of the Revue des Deux Mondes. His yearly salary was twelve hundred francs, and two francs for every subscriber. There were then but three hundred and fifty of these, but in 1834 the three hundred and fifty had become one thousand; in 1838 five hundred more had been added; in 1843 there were two thousand; in 1846, two thousand five hundred; and in 1851, five thousand. Long before this the Revue had become a power. Buloz remained as a partner, but M. Auffray had long since given up his interest in it: he had been succeeded by Alexander Bixio, and the latter by Messrs. Florestan and Felix Bonnaire, the owners of the Revue de Paris. Messrs. Bonnaire in 1845 proposed to buy out Buloz for a sum exceeding one hundred thousand francs. After consulting with Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve and others, Buloz declined the proposal, and with the aid of his friends bought out the brothers Bonnaire for a sum just double that which they had offered him. It was then, in 1846, that the new company was constituted, with Buloz as managing director, and M. Molé, M. d'Haussonville, M. de Saint Priest, Count Roger, the duc de Broglie, M. de Rothschild, M. Baude and others as stockholders. A number of writers too were interested in the concern, and were to pay for their stock in the shape of contributions. A year or two before, the Revue had been most violently attacked by persons ill disposed to bear with M. Buloz's firm determination to admit nothing into the Revue but what he considered up to the standard requisite to maintain its reputation. Alexandre Dumas led the coalition, which was in part made up of men who had been criticised by the Revue. As was natural, their enmity only advertised the periodical and increased its circulation. Still, his enemies managed in more ways than one to make him feel their power. Ever since 1838, M. Buloz, under the title of "commissaire du roi," had been manager of the Théâtre Français, but after the revolution of 1848 he was abruptly dismissed. Thenceforth he gave his attention exclusively to his literary enterprise, and the Revue gained thereby.
From the very first, Buloz had secured the rising literary talent of the day for the Revue. Alfred de Vigny contributed to it successively Stello, Laurette and Le Capitaine Renaud; Alexandre Dumas, whose jealousy was only aroused later on, published therein his Impressions de Voyage; Balzac wrote for it, as did also Nodier, Victor Hugo, Barbier, Brizeux, Mérimée, Lerminier, George Sand, Jouffry, Alfred de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Gustave Planche and Augustin Thierry, whose Nouvelles lettres sur l'Histoire de France first appeared in the Revue.
In 1840, M. Thiers, while president of the council, wrote an article for the Revue. Buloz, who greatly admired the statesman-historian, pressed him strongly the following year to write upon the Eastern Question. M. Thiers, then at Lille, was about to go to Germany in order to examine the battle-fields of Napoleon for his great work. We find him writing to Buloz a letter which is not less interesting at the present time than it was thirty-six years ago: "I often think of writing for you an article on the Eastern Question, but it is somewhat difficult for me to leave my work. However, I am preparing to put pen to paper in order to carry out my promise. I must tell you that with an ever-increasing taste for la grande politique, I daily care less and less for la petite politique, which consists in simply providing each day for the requirements of the hour. This daily bread upon which men live at Paris is repugnant to my tastes. I am a strong partisan of our institutions, for I know of none other possible, but they convert the government of the country into an association for the merest chit-chat.... It is therefore for me a real sacrifice to return to the narrow sphere of affairs of the present day, and to speak or write thereon. I am happy where I am, and in doing what I am now about.... Still, I will make an effort to write for you before leaving for Germany. I see nothing very important except the Eastern Question, which is not a question du moment, and which will outlive us."
It is truly wonderful how many men eminent in various departments Buloz managed to enrol among the contributors to the Revue. Of course, his strict adherence to the rule he had laid down of rigidly exercising his prerogative as director led many who had written a few articles for the Revue to abandon it in disgust. Still, many even of these returned after years of separation to their old love. Buloz maintained his even course undaunted by storms of criticism. He was to be found early and late at work, constantly reading, correcting proofs, busying himself as to the punctuation, the type, even the appearance of the title-pages. He himself was wont to define his position thus: "I am the public: all I ask is to be instructed or interested. If a work neither instructs nor interests me, the chances are that it will produce no better effect on the real public for whom it is written." He was always fearing that something would intervene to prevent the publication appearing by the 1st or the 15th of each month, and became almost feverishly agitated as the calendar pointed to the near approach of the day of publication.
He received a severe blow by the death in 1869 of Louis Buloz, an intelligent, active and devoted young man who had already become the sharer of his father's toils. He went off to the estate he had purchased in 1859 in Savoy, commanding a view of the Valley of Chambéry and the Lake of Bourget. While in this charming retreat the news reached him of the successive French defeats, culminating in the surrender of Sedan, the revolution of the 4th of September and the march of the Germans upon Paris. Without paying heed to his already weakened condition of health, he set out at once for Paris. Duty called him there, as he considered, and every other consideration was hushed. "What," his friends asked, "could the Revue do in a besieged city, separated from so large a proportion of its readers and contributors?" Buloz was deaf to their remonstrances, and, struggling bravely against the enormous difficulties of his position, he managed, with the aid of a few devoted writers like M. de Mazade and Vitel, to get the Revue out regularly during all those painful, weary weeks. When at length Paris capitulated, on the 28th of January, 1871, the world first knew to what straits the Revue had been reduced. Its means had become completely exhausted. There was no paper left, nor were there funds to replenish the stock of the printing-office, even supposing that such a stock could have been purchased at that time. Yet, terrible as had been the struggle to keep up the Revue during the siege, there was yet a harder task in store for M. Buloz and his family. After the capitulation he and his associates at once set about organizing afresh the entire machinery of the Revue. This occupied some six weeks, and when all the arrangements had been completed one contributor after another left the city. M. Buloz, too, went away. All at once broke forth, on the 18th of March, the Communist insurrection, and Paris for more than two months was in the hands of the rabble. It is not too much to say that but for the intrepidity and intelligent management of affairs by Madame Buloz the publication of the Revue must have been suspended during part, at least, of that period. She feared nothing, but, braving the danger of frequent journeys between Paris and Versailles, she summoned to her aid all the contributors and friends she was able to communicate with. Of course it was not long ere the Communist leaders perceived that true liberty, such as they understood it, was incompatible with the existence of such an outspoken periodical as the Revue. They arrested M. Émile Beaussaire for his courageous article entitled "Le procès entre Paris et la Province," and the other contributors, as well as M. Buloz himself, would have certainly shared the same fate could they have been found.
After the number of the 15th of May had appeared the rulers of the city voted that the continuance of the Revue was prejudicial to the interests of the Commune, and accordingly its suppression was decreed. On the 25th of May, however, Paris was again occupied by the government troops, and thus the number of the 1st of June was published as punctually as all its predecessors.
C. H. H.