XXXI
“LIBERTY, EQUALITY, AND FRATERNITY”
WHEN I stayed with my father I missed my grandmother—her liveliness, her fancies, her caprices, her gracious tenderness, and her maternal feeling. Grandfather’s wit amused and rested me, and to be without Blondeau’s devotion and my friend Charles’s admiration was a great deprivation. But as soon as I returned to grandmother I felt myself an orphan. I was nervous, my mind was empty, I was stupefied, and became more childlike, more enervated, less fit for “the struggle for life,” a phrase which grandfather indulged in too frequently and used on all occasions.
These allusions to the “struggle for life” sometimes came up in such a droll manner in conversation that they made us all laugh, but I often thought that these same struggles did really exist, and were anything but droll. Had I not already experienced them? The memory of that scene of my father’s violence rose so tragically in my mind that it seemed to impress me much more when I invoked it than at the time when I endured the pain. Then, too, my father’s strange, insane idea of marrying me to a workman never left my mind.
I had sometimes dreamed of a cottage or a farm, with a gentleman for a husband, but never of a “lodging,” with a weaver’s loom or a carpenter’s block in the centre of the room, waiting for “my man” to return from taking his work home, having “finished his day.”
I could have no doubts about my deep and growing love for the people—a love which in my days of enthusiasm seemed capable of enabling me to sacrifice my very life for their cause; I wished to help them and to serve them, but to form a part of them,—I, whom generations of ancestors had elevated above them—that I could never do.
I recalled Saint-Just’s words, which his sister often repeated to me in speaking of the elegance of the young Jacobite, “the people’s friend.” He said:
“I wish to raise the people up to me, and desire to see them one day dressed as I am myself, but I will never lower myself to them nor wear their blue blouse.”
My father, on the contrary, delighted to wear the sayon of the Gauls, the peasant’s blouse, and workman’s smock-frock. He failed, however, to induce my mother to dress herself as a woman of the people.
To be sure, when I stayed with my aunts I gladly wore the peasant costume, which they had worn for years, but then they saw no one—they had retired from the world but had always remained gentlewomen. They had not chosen that mode of dress to become one of the lower class. Their ways, their conversation, their lives, showed the refinement of their caste. The contrast between their refinement and the peasant garb pleased them, because it was rustic and made them think of Trianon; whereas the contrast sought by my father would have made one think rather of the women who sat and knitted by the guillotine, the “tricoteuses” of the Revolution.
One day I had a discussion with my father on this subject, and told him I would much rather see the “white caps” (the name given in Picardy to the peasant women) wearing hats like mine—although at that time such a thing was not dreamed of, though doubtless they would have been pleased to don them—than I should care to wear their caps.
Notwithstanding reservations of this kind, or rather in spite of our different ways of interpreting the idea of equality, which I wished to be elevating and not lowering, I agreed entirely with my father as to the forms of republican principles and as to the social and democratic programme which I had accepted. I neither laid aside nor disowned my little book, wherein were inscribed the twenty-one principles of the future.
My mother and grandmother both reproached my father for forcing my young mind and causing it to ripen too soon, to which he replied:
“She can think what she pleases later. Either what I have taught her will satisfy her, as it satisfies me—and I think it will, for she resembles me more than any other member of the family—or she will throw off my ideas, as I threw off, in one night, the teachings of the seminary.”
The end of 1847 fixed in my mind the political convictions which I have kept, without modification, for more than thirty-five years. My father’s great abilities, his immense goodness, his love of the people, his disinterestedness, all of which filled up the void in his conceptions, made me for many years his disciple.
He believed, and made others believe, that the people possessed, in a latent degree, all the virtues, and that it would be necessary only to put them in possession of all their social and political rights for them to be worthy of both.
In my father’s enthusiasm for “the masses” there was both the affirmation of a strong ideal and also a great deal of ingenuousness. I see it now, alas! Our sentimentality was not made of false sentiment, but of a valiant faith in the necessity of justice and in a proper proportion of social benefits. For us of the “middle class” to contribute to the happiness of the people involved a certain sacrifice which was not lacking in generosity or grandeur.
The belief in universal fraternity, the hope that each nation might participate in the freedom of other nations, developed the finest of all qualities—abnegation and heroism in the men who filled prominent rôles in 1848.
It could not be truthfully said, however, that practical, feasible ideas possessed the minds of the revolutionists of 1847, since a young girl, eleven and a half years old, as I was at that time, could be initiated into all the revolutionary plans, could understand them, be enthusiastic about them, and strive for their accomplishment. These plans were undoubtedly somewhat infantile.
Grandmother, to whom I had talked a great deal, was quite taken with the sentimentality of the idea of regeneration and with the honest appearance of character of the Liberals and the Republicans, at that time united. She began to think that the “hirelings of royalty” were corrupted, and that Louis Philippe was too unyielding to reform and to progress. Little by little she was being brought around to my father’s way of thinking. Blondeau, although an office-holder, thought as I did.
Grandfather had received orders from his Bonapartist committee not to fear socialism, but, on the contrary, to encourage it, and he approved and supported my most eccentric ideas.
My father, to my great surprise, was not pleased with grandmother’s half conversion. I had thought he would rejoice in it.
“If the middle class, who yesterday were still royalists, become republicans, why, then, when we do have a republic they will spoil the country and turn it royalist. We shall do much better to go slowly and to form new generations according to our principles than to rally elements which will create a selfish and middle-class republic instead of a democratic-socialist—otherwise, generous—republic. I see already,” my father added, “all the harm that Odilon Barrot is doing.”
He expressed ideas entirely opposite to those of my aunts, who accused Ledru-Rollin of misleading the campaign of the reformists, while he accused Odilon Barrot of turning this campaign aside from its end.
My father became every day more fanatical in his ideas. His opinions became more and more intolerant. Was this the reason of the violence of his character? Whenever he spoke, either to friends or to myself, of the future, he always spoke of the rising tide which it would soon be impossible to stem.
“Our principles clash, all things are as yet in conflict; we ourselves are powerless to be logical, and our country is bringing forth monstrous things,” said my father. “Everything is abnormal, because too many things are being elaborated at the same time. There is such a thirst for reform that when the first one is made others will follow which will overstep all we have ever imagined. That is the reason why King Louis Philippe, very sensibly, for the sake of his own security, will have none. As to myself,” added my father, “would an electoral reform satisfy me, would the combination of other intellects satisfy me, either? What do I desire? To undermine everything, according to my master, Proudhon, in his ‘Economical Contradictions,’ or to renew everything, according to my other master, Victor Considérant, as he teaches in his ‘Principles of Socialism: A Manifesto of Democracy in the Twentieth Century’? What I do desire with all my heart, and that which is absolutely necessary, and without which we shall lose our heads, and exact from the revolution reforms on which no thought has been bestowed, and which are neither ripened nor likely to live—what I do desire is to make somewhere, anywhere, an experiment of socialism, of association, and of life in common, a phalanstery. Then, indeed, the possibilities of a social change might be proved.”