Читать книгу France and the Republic - William Henry Hurlbert - Страница 11

This was stated, with great good sense and commendable courtesy towards the French Government responsible for the absurdity, by the Italian Premier, Signor Crispi, in the Chamber of Deputies at Borne, on June 25, 1887.

In reply to an interpellation of Signor Cavalotti, addressed to the then Foreign Minister of Italy, Signor Depretis, as to the intentions of the Italian Government with regard to the Universal Exposition of 1889 at Paris, Signor Crispi, then Minister of the Interior, made a striking speech (Signor Depretis being then ill of the disease of which he eventually died), in which he lucidly and forcibly gave the reasons of the Italian Government for declining to take any official part in the matter. He plainly intimated his conviction (which is the conviction, by the way, of a great many sensible people not premiers of Italy) that the business of Universal Expositions has been possibly overdone. But, without dwelling upon that point, he went on to show that it would be foolish for Italy to isolate herself from the other great powers by taking an official part in this particular 'Universal Exposition.' To the plea of Signor Cavalotti that liberated Italy ought to unite with France to celebrate 'the principles of 1789,' Signor Crispi thus replied; 'I agree with the honourable member that we are sons of 1789. But I must remind him that 1789 was preceded by the glorious English Revolution, and by the great American Revolution, in both of which had been manifested and established the principles which have subsequently prevailed throughout the world.'

Whether the treatment of the Sovereign Pontiff at Rome by the government of United Italy, since 1871, has been entirely consistent with the principles of the 'glorious English Revolution,' or of the 'great American. Revolution,' I need not now consider. But that all the living political doctrines of which intelligent Frenchmen mean to speak when they talk about the 'principles of 1789' are the American political doctrines of 1776, and the English political doctrines of 1688, admits of no question. As to this, Signor Crispi was absolutely right, and it is creditable to him, as an Italian statesman and an Italian patriot, that he should have thus early and publicly declined to attach the liberty and the independence of Italy as a bob to the tail of an electioneering Exposition kite at Paris in 1889. To France and to the French Republics—first, second, and third—Italy owes a good deal less than nothing. To two rulers of France, both of them of Italian blood, the first and third Napoleon, she owes a great deal. But her chief political creditor, and her greatest statesman, Cavour, drew his political doctrines, not from the muddy French pool of the 'principles of 1789,' but from the original fountains of 1776 and 1688. Had Cavour been living in 1887, to answer the interpellation of Signor Cavalotti, he might, perhaps, have defined more sharply than it was given to Signor Crispi to do, the real relations between the French Revolution of 1789 and the national developments of modern Italy. Had the French Revolution of 1789 been left to exhaust itself within the limits of France, it would probably have ended—as the friends of the misguided Duc d'Orléans almost from the first expected to see it end—in the substitution of a comparatively capable for a positively incapable French king upon a constitutional French throne. In that event it would have interested Europe and the world no less, and no more, than the Fronde or the religious wars which came to a close with the coronation of Henry of Navarre. It was the fear of this, unquestionably, which drove the conspirators of the Gironde into forcing a foreign war upon their unfortunate country. The legend of Republican France marching as one man to the Rhine to liberate enslaved Europe has much less foundation in fact than the legend of Itsatsou and the horn of Roland. It is a pity to disturb historical fables which have flowered into immortal verse, but really there was not the slightest occasion, so far as Europe was concerned, for France in 1790 to 'stamp her strong foot and swear she would be free.' M. de Bourgoing's admirable diplomatic history of those days makes this quite clear. No power in Europe objected to her being as free as she liked. On the contrary, England, even in 1792, was both ready and anxious to recognise the insane French republic of that day, and to see the French royal family sent away to Naples or to Madrid.

Pitt was too far-sighted a statesman not to be well aware that the commerce and the colonies of such a French republic were the natural prizes of English common sense and English enterprise. Nor was Austria indisposed to see the House of Bourbon, which had successfully disputed the supremacy of Europe with the Hapsburgs, humiliated and cast down.

The French Revolution became Titanic only when it ceased to be a Revolution and ceased to be French. The magnificent stanzas of Barbier tell the true story of the riderless steed re-bitted, re-bridled, and mounted by the Italian master of mankind, the Cæsar for whom the eagle-eyed Catherine of Russia had so quietly waited and looked when the helpless and hopeless orgie of 1789 began. The Past from which he emerged, the Future which he evoked, both loom larger than human in the shadow of that colossal figure. What a silly tinkle, as of pastoral bells in some Rousseau's Devin du Village, have the 'principles of 1789,' when the stage rings again with the stern accents of the conqueror, hectoring the senators of the free and imperial city of Augsburg, for example, on his way to Wagram and to victory twenty years afterwards!

'Your bankers are the channel through which the gold of the eternal enemy of the Continent finds its way to Austria. I have made up my mind that I will give you to some king. To whom I have not yet settled. I will attend to that when I come back from Vienna.'

And, as the faithful record of the Drei Mohren tells us, 'Messieurs the senators withdrew, much mortified, and not at all pleased.'

Nevertheless, when the conqueror kept his word, and having made a king of Bavaria to give them to, gave them to the king of Bavaria, Messieurs the senators, with a suppleness and a docility which would have done credit to Debry (who after proposing, as a republican, to organise 1,200 'tyrannicides' and murder all the kings and emperors of the earth, begged Napoleon to make him a baron), made haste to come and prostrate themselves before the new Bavarian Majesty and to protest that until the fortunate day of his arrival to reign over them they had never known what real happiness was.

If there is one thing more certain than another in human history, it is that but for the English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776 the world in general would know and care to-day very little more about the French 'principles of 1789,' and the French Revolution, and the First French Republic, than the world in general knows or cares to-day about the wars in the Cevennes or the long conflict between the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons.

Napoleon crumpled up the 'principles of 1789' and the Revolution and the Republic in his iron hand, and flung them all together into a corner. He meant that France and the world should think of other things. In 1810 Paganel, who, having been a 'patriot' of the Convention, had naturally become a liveried servant of the Emperor and King, thought he might venture to compose a 'Historical Essay on the French Revolution.' He dedicated it to the Imperial Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, and he wound up his preface with these words: 'And thus at last we see without astonishment, after this long series of errors, misfortunes, and crimes, the Republic disappear, and France implore the Supreme Being to vouchsafe to her the one great and potent genius who in these difficult circumstances was able to lift her up, to defend her, and to govern her!' The heart of Louis XVIII. would have been touched by the grateful humility of this repentant wretch. But the Emperor simply kicked him downstairs. He forbade the book to be published. The whole edition was put under lock and key, and never saw the light till liberty came back to France, with the white nag and the Bourbon lilies, in 1815. Surely here is a fact worth noting!

Had this first history of the French Revolution, written as Paganel, a member of the Revolutionary Convention, wrote it, been published under the First Republic, the author would infallibly have been sent to the guillotine. Writing it under the First Empire he was merely snubbed, despite his fulsome adulation of the Emperor. His book was finally given to the world under the restored historic monarchy in 1818!

In 1811, Chateaubriand, having been elected to succeed Marie-Joseph Chéniér, the brother of the republican poet André, murdered by the First Republic, as a member of the Institute, prepared a speech on the Convention, to be read before that august body. Napoleon heard of it and, without troubling himself to look at it, forbade it to be delivered. 'It is well for M. de Chateaubriand,' he said, 'that it was suppressed. If he had read it before the Institute, I would have flung him into the bottom of a dungeon, and left him there the rest of his natural life!'

Napoleon knew the First Republic thoroughly. He had measured all its men, and all its records were in his hand. He could not get into or out of his carriage without treading on some incorruptible 'patriot' prostrate between its wheels with a petition for a préfecture, a title or a pension. The crimes and follies of the First Republic had made France and the world sick of its name. Its true story was a tale of shame and humiliation, not fit to be dragged out into the blaze of the glory of Imperial France.

The First Republic was the deadly enemy both of liberty and of law. The conduct of its first envoy to the United States would have justified Washington in locking him up. When a stop was put to his mischievous impertinences, he preferred exile in America to the chance of the guillotine at Paris, and his name died out, I believe, curiously enough, with one of the chief instruments of the notorious Tweed Ring in New York.

The first shots fired in anger under the American flag after the peace of 1783 were fired against cruisers of the French Republic captured in the West Indies by American men-of-war, to put an end to the ignorant and insolent attempt of what called itself a government at Paris to issue letters of marque on American soil against English commerce.

So grateful was France to the Emperor for restoring the reign of law, that she never troubled herself about liberty, and but for the indomitable defence of constitutional liberty and national independence which England maintained, often single-handed, from the rupture of the peace of Amiens to the victory of Waterloo, the very names of the chief actors in the odious and ridiculous dramas of the Revolution would have long since faded, as Napoleon intended they should fade, out of the memory of the masses of mankind.