THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL, II., NO. 9.—DECEMBER, 1865,
From Le Correspondant
GENERAL DE LA MORICIÈRE.
I.
It is the sad destiny of those who outlive their generation to be called upon to speak over the graves of friends, companions, and chiefs who have the happiness of being the first to depart. Forced to envy those who precede them their lot, they readily yield to the temptation of beguiling their regrets by recalling their memory; and while thus essaying to lighten their own griefs, they think, perhaps not justly, that they have something of which to remind forgetful contemporaries, or which they may teach an indifferent posterity.
The élite of the men who date from the early years of the century begin already to be decimated by death, and this death which strikes them with a premature blow, while in the full possession of the gifts which God had lavished on them, has often been preceded by a disgrace or a retreat so prolonged that we naturally regard them as having long since entered into history. Their stern and melancholy fate, aggravated by the inconstancy of their country, may at least serve to lengthen the perspective from which our eye contemplates them.
What can less resemble the times in which we live than those early and splendid years of the parliamentary royalty in which Léon de la Moricière was first revealed to France and to glory? A whole powerful generation, delivered from military despotism and the imperial censorship, enfranchised, brought up, or completed by the free and loyal régime of the Restoration, was then in full sap and full bloom. A constellation of rare men, men of original powers and popular renown, appeared at the head of all the great departments of the national intelligence, and fulfilled the first condition of the life of a people that are free and master of their destiny. The nation was governed or represented by its most eminent men. All its living forces, all its real wants, all its legitimate interests, were represented by men of an incontestable superiority. The names of Casimir Perier, Royer-Collard, Molé, Berryer, Guizot, Thiers, Broglie, Fitz James, Villemain, Cousin, Dufaure, gave to the contests of the tribune and to the country itself an éclat never surpassed, not even in 1789. Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset stamped poetry with a character as original as ineffaceable. Ary Scheffer, [{290}] Delaroche, Delacroix, Meyerbeer, in the arts; Cuvier, Biot, Thénard, Arago, Cauchy, in the sciences; Augustin Thierry, Michelet, Tocqueville, in history and political philosophy, opened new paths, into which rushed the ardent and high-spirited youth of the nation. Lacordaire and Ravignan made radiate from the Christian pulpit a halo of eloquence and popularity unknown since Bossuet.
Perhaps this fertile opening of political, intellectual, and moral life did not encounter an analogous development in the military life; perhaps this purely civil glory extinguished the necessary attraction of the glory of arms. To this doubt, the army of Africa takes upon itself to reply.
In the ranks of that army new men, predestined to glory, began forthwith to appear. Each year, each day, augmented their renown. The true soldiers of free and liberal France were found. We learned to greet in that army a new line of soldiers, as chivalric, as formidable, as brave, as the bravest among their fathers, and adorned with virtues but too often wanting in our soldiers in former times —modest and austere virtues, civic virtues, which were the honor, and in the hour of danger the salvation, of their country. The illustrious Changarnier is the only one of that glorious phalanx that can receive here below the homage of our loyal gratitude. Of his noble companions, some, like Damesme, Négrier, Duvivier, Bréa, gave themselves to be killed in the streets of Paris in 1848, so that France might remain a civilized country; others, and the most illustrious, Cavaignac, Bedeau, La Moricière, have died one by one, obscurely and prematurely, rendered by implacable destiny useless to the country they had saved. This oppresses the heart, and certainly does no honor to our times.