XXXIII
“OTHER TIMES, OTHER MANNERS”
MY progress as a student suffered considerably from my serious political preoccupation.
My father came to see us every week, most anxious to keep me well advised of all passing events. He gave me cuttings, selected and cleverly classified, from the Democratie Pacifique, and brought me books, pamphlets, and proclamations. One would have thought that it was very necessary that I should be instructed about the acts of the members of the Provisionary Government and with the writings of those who showed themselves the most ardent among the reformers. The study of the French language, of history, geography, and literature, were secondary things to the author of my being.
Besides, in truth, who knew whether the French tongue might not become universal; whether the history of kings would be able to keep its footing amid the events of the great revolutionary outburst; whether the geography of our planet was not going to be changed in such a way by the fraternity of peoples that it would be almost useless to learn it under the form given to it by the odious past?
The future meant progress, light, new things! All the old forms were to be banished. But, by a strange contradiction, which, however, seemed to strike no one, this progress, this light, these new things continued to be based on the evangelical principles of liberty, equality, and on the morality of Christ, “the Precursor,” the first Socialist.
In the jargon of the epoch, the Republic of Pericles, of Socrates, of Plato, mingled its history with that of the great French Revolution. The beauty of Athenian art alternated with the porridge of Sparta; the naked feet, or the sabots, of the soldiers of the fourteen armies with the magnificence of the festivals of the Goddess of Reason.
There was no escaping the qualifications given to all men and to all things—what we call “saws” to-day. The integrity of Saint-Just’s character, Robespierre’s austerity, Danton’s power, Ledru-Rollin’s love of the people, Proudhon’s overwhelming courage, the sublime social theories of Pierre Leroux, of Cabet, of Louis Blanc, woman’s superiority as shown by Tousseuel in his Esprit des Bêtes, and by Fourier in his Phalanstère, and by George Sand—all this kind of talk studded the speeches of orators in small towns and villages to such a degree that many orations were almost identical, no matter what subject was treated. To improvise was easy; the speakers simply wove phrases together, and the sonority of the words lulled their listeners as a well-known air will do.
The oratorical art of the Republic of 1848 in the provinces was analogous to the music of the hand-organs which delighted the whole land at that time.
When grandmother or grandfather begged my father to lay aside his fine phraseology and do them the honour of initiating them into the details of such of his governmental conceptions as could possibly be realised, he answered:
“Anything is better than what existed before! we are about to take a plunge into the unknown; no matter what happens, we shall at least come out of the ruts in which the chariot of State has stuck in the mud for centuries. The French Revolution made a grand effort to urge the horses of the chariot to gallop, but Bonaparte bestrode them and drove them back. It is for us to drive them forward again.”
In spite of his increasing reservation of opinion on certain men whom he began to suspect of being lukewarm, my father’s optimism was as sincere as my own. Illusions, the love of the unforeseen, of the romantic, the absolute ignorance of the possibility of the realisation of an idea, the most infantile simplicity held sway in my father’s mind as it possessed the minds of the greater number of the men of 1848 whom I have known; but what a passion of devotedness moved them, what thirst for sacrifices to be made for the holy cause of the people, what generosity, what loyal abandonment of the privileges of their caste, what sincere fraternity, what conviction that “the humble class” was ripe for equality, what indignation against the appetite for enjoyment, against egotism, against Guizot’s celebrated formula, “Grow rich!”
The men of 1848 were apostles and saints. At no other epoch has there been more honesty, more virtue, more noble simplicity. They were not political men, they were souls in love with the ideal. They were all as sincere as my father; all have a right to absolute respect, and no one could have lived beside them without honouring and cherishing their memory.
They were old-fashioned, if you like. All parties become old-fashioned in time, but how few men, before and since 1848, have possessed their youthful hearts, their high inspirations, their love of devotedness and of sacrifice!
My memory preserves their noble faces crowned with laurels, while the lucky, the rich, opportunists, men of business and of politics, whose aim was personal gain, those who, victorious, said to one another: “It is our turn to enjoy!” who repeated among themselves: “The most important attribute of power is the spoils”—such men are as vile in my mind as is the vileness of their disciples.
Not one among the republicans of 1848 thought of obtaining a better position from his passage to power, not one grew richer. If they did not accomplish what they dreamed for the people, it was not because they threw their principles overboard when they obtained possession of the great city of Paris; it was because their conception of social and human happiness was too beautiful to be realised, and because the people, first of all, refused to make a trial of their theories.
Later, I knew the greater part of these “imbeciles,” as Ernest Picard called them. They resembled my father. Their doubts—and they had many!—were of too recent date to have dried up their souls; they no longer believed in a divine Christ; they still believed in a human one. They worshipped that mysterious Science which replaced for them the supernatural, and which had not then brought all its brutality to light in crushing man under machinery.
They were internationalists, not foregoing by so being their legitimate pride of race, not accepting without resistance being conquered by an enemy, not admitting or imitating the utilitarian ideas of national groupings morally inferior to themselves, but in order to infuse into other nations their principles of love and of regeneration.
My father said to me, towards the end of April, that he saw the distance grow wider every day between his hopes and the actual events taking place.
“I am afraid,” he added, “that our Republic will be only a rose-water Republic, of the kind which some day will be dyed with blood. The ‘yellow gloves’ of the National are the masters, and are delivering the Republic over to ambitious men.”
My grandmother, on the contrary, declared herself quite satisfied with the Republic, which she found in no wise frightful, as she had feared it would be.
“Jean Louis, I am getting on very well with your Republic!” she would say to my father.
At first my father answered: “Wait a little, mother;” later he replied: “You are more satisfied than I am.” One day he burst forth: “By Heaven! if the Republic suits you, it is because it is made for your benefit! The Orléanists might as well return; they will have nothing to change in favour of the middle class.”
My father became soon, in the most bitter sense of the word, a malcontent. Of course I became a malcontent also.