Chapter 3

1

THE EXILES IN LONDON—THE GERMANS AND THE FRENCH—PARTIES—VICTOR HUGO—FELIX PYAT—LOUIS BLANC AND ARMAND BARBÈS

‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’

If any one from outside had conceived the idea of writing the inner history of the political exiles and refugees from the year 1848 in London, what a melancholy page he would have added to the records of to-day! What sufferings, what privations, what tears ... and what triviality, what narrowness, what poverty of intellectual powers, of resources, of understanding, what obstinacy in quarrelling, what pettiness in wounded vanity!...

On the one hand, those simple-hearted men, who have accepted the cause of revolution through heart and instinct and have made for its sake the greatest sacrifice a man can make, that of voluntary poverty, form a small group of the righteous. On the other hand, there are men, actuated by disguised and ill-concealed ambition, for whom the revolution meant office, _position sociale_, and who were driven into exile without attaining such position. Then there were fanatics of all kinds, monomaniacs of every sort, men who were insane with every variety of insanity. It was due to this nervous, strained, hysterical condition that table-turning numbered so many victims among the exiles. Almost every one was turning tables—from Victor Hugo and Ledru-Rollin to Quirik Philopanti—who went further still and found out everything that men were doing a thousand years ago.

And with all that not a step forward. They were like the court clock at Versailles, which pointed to one hour, the hour at which the King died.... And like the clock, they had not been wound up since the death of Louis XVI. They point to one event, the end of some event. They talk about it, they think about it, they go back to it. Meeting the same men, the same groups,—in five or six months, in two or three years—one feels terrified: the same arguments are still going on, the same personalities and recriminations, only the furrows drawn by poverty and privation are deeper; jackets and overcoats are shabbier; there are more grey hairs, and everything about them is older and bonier and more gloomy ... and still the same things being said over and over again.

The revolution has remained the philosophy of social order with them, as it was in the ’nineties, but they have not and cannot have the naïve passion for the struggle which in those days gave vivid colour to the most meagre generalisations and body to the dry outlines of their political skeleton; generalisations and abstract ideas were a joyful novelty, a revelation in those days. At the end of the eighteenth century, men for the first time, not in books but in actual fact, began to free themselves from the fatal, mysteriously oppressive world of theological tradition, and were trying to base on conscious understanding the whole political system which had grown up apart from will or consciousness. In the attempt at a rational state, as in the attempt to found a religion of reason, there was in 1793 a grand titanic poetry, which bore its fruits, but has for all that grown meagre and threadbare in the last sixty years. Our heirs of the Titans do not observe this. They are like the monks of Mount Athos, who busy themselves about their own affairs, deliver the same speeches which they delivered in the time of Chrysostom, and keep up a manner of life superseded ages ago by the Turkish power, which is now itself drawing to its end ... while they go on meeting together on certain days to celebrate certain events with the same ritual, the same prayers.

Another bane of the exiles is the constant defending of themselves against each other; this is terribly destructive of intellectual effort and every sort of conscientious work. They have no objective purpose at all, the parties are obstinately conservative, any forward movement seems a weakness to them, almost a desertion; if once you have taken your stand under the banner you must go on standing under it, even if in the process of time you may have discerned that its colours are not quite what they seemed.

So the years pass—gradually everything changes about them. Where there were snowdrifts, the grass is growing; where there were bushes, there is a forest; where there was a forest are only tree-stumps—they notice nothing. Some gateways are completely fallen and are blocked up, they go on knocking at them; new outlets have opened, the light streams through them, but they look the other way.

The relations formed between the different exiles and the English might furnish wonderful illustrations of the chemical affinity of various nationalities.

English life at first dazzles the Germans, overwhelms them, then swallows them up, or rather dissolves them into inferior Englishmen. As a rule, if a German undertakes any kind of business, he at once shaves, turns his shirt collar up to his ears, says _yes_ instead of _ja_ and _well_ where there is no need to say anything at all. In a couple of years, he writes his letters and his diary in English, and lives entirely in an English circle. Germans never treat Englishmen as equals, but behave with them as our workpeople behave with officials, and our officials behave with noblemen.

Though they enter English life, Germans do not really become Englishmen, but affect to be English, and to some extent cease to be German. The English are as whimsical in their relations with foreigners as they are in everything else; they rush at a new arrival as they do at a comic actor or an acrobat and give him no peace, but they hardly disguise their sense of their own superiority and even a certain aversion they feel for them. If the foreigner keeps to his own dress, his own way of doing his hair, his own hat, the offended Englishman jeers at him, but by degrees grows used to recognising him as an independent person. If in his first panic the foreigner begins to adapt his manners to the Englishman’s, the latter does not respect him but treats him superciliously from the height of his British haughtiness. It is sometimes hard, even with the greatest tact, to steer one’s course so as not to err either on the minus or the plus side; it may well be imagined what is done by Germans who are devoid of all tact, and are familiar and cringing in their manners, too stiff and also too simple in their deportment, sentimental without reason and rude without provocation.

But if the Germans look upon the English as upon a higher species of the same race, and feel themselves to be inferior to them, it by no means follows that the attitude of the French, and especially of the French refugees, is any more intelligent. Just as the German respects everything in England indiscriminately, the Frenchman detests everything English and protests against it. This peculiarity sometimes, I need hardly say, is pushed to the most comically grotesque extreme.

The Frenchman cannot forgive the English, in the first place, for not speaking French; in the second, for not understanding him when he calls Charing Cross Sharan-Kro, or Leicester Square Lessesstair-Skooar. Then his stomach cannot digest the English dinner, consisting of two huge pieces of meat and fish, instead of five little portions of all sorts of ragouts, fritters, salmis and so on. Then he can never resign himself to the ‘slavery’ of restaurants being closed on Sundays, and the people being _bored to the glory of God_, though the whole of France is bored to the glory of Buonaparte all seven days of the week. The whole _habitus_, all that is good and bad in the Englishman, is detestable to the Frenchman.

The Englishman pays him back in the same coin, but looks with envy at the cut of his clothes and attempts like a caricature to imitate him.

All this is of great significance for the study of comparative physiology, and I am not describing it in order to amuse.

The German, as we have observed, recognises that he is, in political capacity at any rate, an inferior specimen of the race to which the Englishman belongs, and subordinates himself to him. The Frenchman, belonging to another race, not so completely different as to prevent comparison, as is the case with the Turk and the Chinaman, detests the Englishman, especially because both nations are each blindly convinced of being the foremost people in the world. The German, too, is inwardly convinced of this, particularly _auf dem theoretischen Gebiete_, but is ashamed to own it.

The Frenchman is, indeed, the opposite of the Englishman in every respect. The Englishman is a solitary creature, who likes to live apart, obstinate and impatient of control; the Frenchman is a gregarious animal, impudent but easily driven. Hence two completely parallel lines of development with the Channel lying between them. The Frenchman is for ever running ahead of things, meddling in everything, training everybody, giving instructions about everything. The Englishman waits to see, does not meddle at all in other people’s business and would be readier to be taught than to teach, but has not the time—he has to get to his shop.

The two corner-stones of English life, personal independence and family tradition, hardly exist for the Frenchman. The coarseness of the English manners drives the Frenchman frantic, and it really is disgusting and poisons life in London, but behind it he fails to see the stern power with which this people has stood up for its rights, the stubbornness of character which makes it impossible to turn an Englishman into the slave who delights in his flunkey’s livery and hugs his laurel-crowned chains, though by flattering his passions you may do almost anything else with him.

The world of self-government, decentralisation, developing in all directions capriciously, of its own initiative, seems to the Frenchman so savage, so incomprehensible, that, however long he lives in England, he never understands its political and civic life, its rights and its judicial forms. He is lost in the incongruous multiplicity of precedents on which English law rests, as in a dark forest, and does not observe the immense and majestic oaks that compose it, nor see the charm, the poetry and the significance of its very variety. His little Codex with its sanded paths, its lopped trees and police-gardeners in every avenue, is a very different matter.

Shakespeare and Racine again.

If a Frenchman sees drunken men fighting in a tavern and a policeman looking at them with the serenity of an outsider and the interest of a man watching a cock-fight, he is furious with the policeman for not flying into a rage and carrying off some one _au violon_. He does not reflect that personal freedom is only possible when a policeman has no parental authority, when his intervention is reduced to passive readiness to come when he is summoned. The confidence that every poor fellow feels when he shuts the door of his cold, dark, damp little den transforms a man’s attitude. Of course, behind these jealously guarded, strictly watched rights, the criminal sometimes escapes—and so be it. It is far better that the clever thief should go unpunished than that every honest man should be trembling like a thief in his own room. Before I came to England, the appearance of a policeman in the house in which I lived gave me an overwhelmingly nasty feeling, and morally I stood _en garde_ against an enemy. In England the policeman at your door or within your doors only adds a feeling of security.

In 1855, when the Governor of Jersey took advantage of the especial _lawlessness_ of his island to persecute the journal, _L’Homme_, for Felix Pyat’s letter to the Queen, and, not daring to take legal measures in the matter, ordered Victor Hugo and the other refugees who had protested against the treatment of the journal to leave the island—the common sense of the public, and all the opposition newspapers, told them that the Governor had exceeded his powers, that they ought to remain and take legal proceedings against him. The _Daily News_, together with other papers, undertook to bear the expense. But this would have been a lengthy business; besides, was it possible to win a case against the Government? The refugees published another ferocious protest, threatened the Governor with the verdict of history and proudly retreated to Guernsey.

I will describe one example of the French comprehension of English manners. One evening a refugee ran in to see me and, after a perfect volley of abuse against England and the English, told me the following ‘monstrous’ incident.

The French exiles had that morning been attending the funeral of one of their _confrères_. I must mention that in the dull and gloomy life of exiles the funeral of a comrade is seized upon as almost a festive occasion—an opportunity for making speeches, for waving their flag, for getting together, for walking through the streets, for noting who was there and who was not, and so the forces of exiled democracy rallied _au grand complet_. An English clergyman with a prayer-book appeared at the cemetery. My friend observed to him that the dead man was not a Christian and that therefore he did not need his prayers. The clergyman, a pedant and a hypocrite, like all English clergymen, answered with affected humility and the national phlegm, ‘that possibly the dead man did not need his prayers, but that it was an essential part of his duty to accompany with his prayers every dead man to his last resting-place.’ A dispute arose and, as the French began to get excited and shout, the obstinate clergyman sent for the police. ‘_Allons donc, parlez-moi de ce chien de pays avec sa sacrée liberté!_’ added the gentleman who took the leading part in this scene, next to those of the dead man and the clergyman. ‘Well,’ I inquired, ‘what was done by _la force brutale au service du noir fanatisme_?’

‘Four policemen arrived _et le chef de la bande_ asked: “Who spoke to the clergyman?”

‘I stepped forward at once,’ and, as he said it, my friend who was dining with me looked as Leonidas must once have looked when he set off to sup with the gods; ‘“_C’est moi, Monsieur_,”[45] _car je me garde bien de dire “citoyen” à ces gueux-là_. Then the _chef des sbires_ said to me with the utmost impudence: “Tell the others not to make a row, bury your comrade and go to your homes. But if you make a row, I shall order you all to be turned out.” I looked at him, and taking off my hat, I shouted at the top of my voice, “_Vive la République démocratique et sociale!_”’

Hardly able to restrain my laughter, I asked him: ‘What did the _chef des sbires_ do?’

‘Nothing,’ the Frenchman replied, with self-complacent pride. ‘He looked at his companions, said, “Well, get on, get on with your job!” and remained quietly waiting. They knew very well that they were not dealing with English rabble ... they have sharp noses!’

What was passing in the soul of the grave, stolid, and probably slightly tipsy constable during this performance? My friend did not dream that he might have afforded himself the satisfaction of uttering the same shout outside the Queen’s window at the railings of Buckingham Palace without the slightest inconvenience. But what is still more remarkable is that neither my friend nor any of the other Frenchmen ever reflect under such circumstances that in France for a similar freak they would have been sent to Cayenne or Lambessa. If one reminds them of that fact their answer is ready: ‘_Ah bah! C’est une halte dans la boue ... ce n’est pas normal!_’

And when has their freedom been normal?

The antagonism at one time expressed by a _practical_ Martin Luther, and a _consistent_ Thomas Münzer, lies like a germ in every embryo: the logical development, the growth of every party inevitably leads to its manifestation. We find it equally in the three _impossible_ Gracchi, counting Gracchus Babœuf among them, and in the only two _possible_ Sullas and Soulouques[46] of all shades. Nothing is _possible_ but the middle line, the compromise, hackneyed and mediocre in class, fortune, and understanding. Lilly and the Huguenots paved the way for Henry IV., the Stuarts and Cromwell for William of Orange, the Revolution and Legitimism for Louis-Philippe. After the latter, antagonism arose between the practical republic and the consistent one; the practical one was called the Democratic, the logically-consistent the Socialist; their contests led to the Empire, but the parties remained.

The uncompromising extremists found themselves in Cayenne, Lambessa and Belle-Île, and to some extent in foreign countries, especially in England.

As soon as the exiles had recovered their breath in London, and their eyes had grown used to distinguishing objects in the fog, the old quarrel was renewed with the peculiar intolerance of exiles and the gloomy character of the London climate.

The President of the Luxemburg Committee[47] was _de jure_ the leading figure among the Socialist exiles in London. The representative of the organisations of labour and the working-class _égalitaire_ societies, he was beloved by the working men; strict in his life, of irreproachable purity in his views, always at work himself, sober, a first-rate speaker, popular without familiarity, bold and at the same time cautious, he had every qualification for influencing the masses.

On the other hand, Ledru-Rollin represented the religious tradition of 1793; for him the words _Republic_ and _Democracy_ embraced everything: the feeding of the hungry, the right to work, the emancipation of Poland, the crushing of Nicholas, the brotherhood of nations, the downfall of the Pope. There were fewer workmen about him, his circle consisted of _capacités_—that is, of lawyers, teachers, journalists, _clubistes_ and so on. The division between these parties is distinct, and so I could never understand how it was that Mazzini and Louis Blanc ascribed their final breach to personal dissensions. The split lay at the very root of their outlook, in the task they set before themselves; they could not go hand in hand, but perhaps it was not necessary to have quarrelled in public.

The difference between the cause of Socialism and the cause of Italy was rather one of order or degree. Political independence was bound to come before economic reconstruction in Italy. We saw the same thing in Poland in 1831, in Hungary in 1848. But in that there is no ground for polemics, it is rather a question of division of labour in time than of mutual annihilation. Socialist theories hindered the direct concentrated activity of Mazzini, hindered the military organisation which was essential for Italy; he was angry at this without reflecting that a similar organisation could only be mischievous to the French. Carried away by his intolerance and his Italian blood, he attacked the Socialists, and Louis Blanc in particular, in a little pamphlet which was offensive and unnecessary. Incidentally he fell foul of others too; thus, for instance, he speaks of Proudhon as ‘a demon’.... Proudhon thought of answering him, but confined himself in a later pamphlet to calling Mazzini ‘the Archangel.’ On two occasions I said to Mazzini in jest, ‘_Ne réveillez pas le chat qui dort_,’ for with such warlike combatants it was hard to get off without severe wounds.

The London Socialists answered him with equal venom, with unnecessary personalities and rudeness.

The hostility between the French of the two persuasions was of a different kind and more fundamental. Every effort to reach an understanding between formal Republicanism and Socialism was unsuccessful, and only made the insincerity of concessions and the irreconcilable difference more obvious; an agile acrobat had flung his plank over the abyss that separated them and upon it proclaimed himself emperor.

The proclamation of the Empire was a galvanic shock which horrified and disheartened the exiles.

Their faces showed the melancholy, dejected conviction of the sick man that he will never walk again without crutches. Weariness, concealed hopelessness began to master both parties. Serious argument lost its colour, was reduced to personalities, to reproaches and recriminations.

For two years longer both the French groups maintained themselves in aggressive readiness, one celebrating the 24th of February, the other the days of July. But at the outbreak of the Crimean War and Napoleon III.’s triumphal procession with Queen Victoria across London, the impotence of the exiles became evident. Even the chief of the London Metropolitan Police, Sir Robert Maine, testified to it. When the Conservatives thanked him after Napoleon’s visit for the skilful measures by which he had prevented any demonstration on the part of the exiles, he replied: ‘I have done nothing to deserve these thanks. Thank Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc.’

A still more ominous symptom of their approaching end was apparent about the same time in their splitting up into parties for no serious reasons, merely on personal grounds.

These parties were formed in the same way as ministries or departments are invented in Russia to find a job for some superfluous personage; or as composers sometimes invent parts for Grisi or Lablache in operas, not because those parts are needed, but because Grisi or Lablache must be employed....

* * * * *

They stayed on till late at night recalling the year 1848; when I had seen them into the street, and gone back into my room, I was overcome by an immense sadness, I sat down at my writing-table and was ready to weep.

I felt what a son must feel on returning to the parental home after a long absence: he sees how everything has grown dingy and warped in it; his father has grown old without being aware of it, but the son is very well aware of it, and he is cramped, he feels that the grave is not far off and conceals the feeling, but the meeting depresses him instead of cheering and rejoicing him.

Barbès, Louis Blanc! Why, they were old friends, honoured friends of my effervescent youth. _L’Histoire de Dix Ans_, the trial of Barbès before the Chamber of Peers—all that had so long ago been absorbed into my brain and my heart, we were so closely akin to all these men, and here they were in person.

Their most malicious enemies have never dared suspect the incorruptible honesty of Louis Blanc, nor cast a slur on the chivalrous valour of Barbès. Every one had seen, had known both men in every position, they had no private life, they had no closed doors. We had seen one of them a member of the Government, the other half an hour from the guillotine. On the night before his execution, Barbès did not sleep, but asked for paper and began to write: those lines have been preserved, I have read them. They are full of French idealism, of religious dreams, but there is not a trace of weakness; his spirit was not troubled nor cast down; with serene consciousness he was preparing to lay his head on the block and was calmly writing when the gaoler’s hand rapped violently at the door. ‘It was at dawn, I was expecting the executioners’ (he told me that himself), but his sister rushed in instead and flung herself on his neck. She had without his knowledge entreated from Louis-Philippe a commutation of his sentence and had been galloping with post-horses all night to reach him in time.

Louis-Philippe’s prisoner rose some years later to the pinnacle of civic glory, the chains were struck off by the rejoicing populace, and he was led in triumph through Paris. But the upright heart of Barbès never wavered, he was the first to attack the Provisional Government for the murders of Rouen. The reaction grew up beside him, the republic could only be saved by reckless audacity, and, on the 15th of May, Barbès dared what neither Ledru-Rollin nor Louis Blanc did, what Caussidière was afraid to do. The _Coup d’État_ failed and Barbès, this time prisoner of the Republic, was again on his trial. At Bourges, just as in the Chamber of Peers, he told the lawyers of the petty-bourgeois world, just as he had told the old sinner Paquier: ‘I do not recognise you as judges, you are my enemies, I am your prisoner of war; do with me as you will, but I do not accept you as my judges.’ And again the heavy doors of lifelong imprisonment were closed upon him.

By chance, against his will, he came out of prison. Napoleon III. thrust him out almost in mockery, after reading, during the Crimean War, the letter in which Barbès in an access of Gallic Chauvinism speaks of the military glory of France. Barbès retired to Spain, but the scared and dull-witted government expelled him. He went to Holland and there found a tranquil and secluded refuge.

And now this hero and martyr, together with some of the chief leaders of the February Republic, together with the foremost statesman of Socialism, had been recalling and criticising the past days of glory and misfortune!

And I was oppressed by a weight of misery, I saw with unhappy clearness that they, _too_, belonged to the history of _another decade_, which was finished to the last page, to the cover. Finished, not for them personally, but for all the exiles and for all the political parties of to-day.

Living and noisy ten, even five, years before, they had passed out of the channel and were lost in the sand, imagining that they were still flowing to the ocean. They had no longer the words which, like the word Republic, have stirred whole nations, nor the songs like the Marseillaise which have set every heart throbbing. Even their enemies were not of the same grandeur, not of the same quality: there were no more old feudal privileges of the Crown with which it was hard to do battle, there was no king’s head which, rolling from the scaffold, would bear a whole system with it. You may execute Napoleon III., but that will not bring you another 21st of January, pull Mazas[48] to bits stone by stone, and that will not bring you the taking of the Bastille! In those days, amid those thunders and lightnings, a new revelation was made, the revelation of the State founded upon Reason, a new means of redemption from the gloomy slavery of mediaevalism. Since those days, the redemption by revolution has been proved unsound, the State has not been founded upon reason. The political reformation has degenerated like the religious one into rhetorical babble, kept up by the weakness of some and the hypocrisy of others. The Marseillaise remains a sacred hymn, but it is a hymn of the past, like _Ein’ feste Burg_; the strains of the same song evoke even now a series of majestic images, like the procession of shades in _Macbeth_, all kings, but all dead.

The old is almost passed out of sight, but of the new there is still only rumour. We are in an interregnum; till the heir arrives the police have seized everything in the name of external order. There can be no question here of rights; it is lynch law in history, it is a case of temporary necessity, of executive measures, police cordons, quarantine precautions. The new régime, combining all that is oppressive in monarchy and all that is ferocious in Jacobinism, is defended, not by ideas, not by conventions, but by terrors and uncertainties. While some were afraid, others fixed bayonets and took up their positions. The first who should break through their chain might capture the chief place that had been taken by the police, but would at once become himself a policeman.

It recalls to us how on the evening of the 24th of February, Caussidière arrived at the Prefecture with a gun in his hand, sat down in the chair just vacated by the escaping Delessert, called the secretary, told him that he had been appointed Prefect, and bade him give him his papers. The secretary smiled as respectfully as to Delessert, as respectfully bowed and went to fetch the papers, and the papers went their regular course, nothing was changed, only Delessert’s supper was eaten by Caussidière. Many discovered the password to the Prefecture, but never learned the watchword of history. When the time came they behaved like Alexander I. They wanted a blow to be struck at the old régime, but not a mortal blow; and there was no Benningsen nor Zubov[49] among them.

And in all this there is a vast deal of _naïveté_. Behind the declamation in the foreground there is the _mise en scène_.

The antique draperies and triumphal setting of the Convention have so impressed the French mind by their menacing poetry, that with the name of the Republic, for instance, its enthusiastic supporters call up, not an inner change, but the fête of federalisation, the beating of drums and the dismal notes of the tocsin. The country is proclaimed in danger, the people rise up in a mass to defend it while they are celebrating the triumph of Republicanism around the trees of freedom; girls in white frocks are dancing to the strains of patriotic hymns, and France in a Phrygian cap sends forth immense armies for the deliverance of the nations and the overthrow of sovereigns.

The large majority of the refugees, particularly of the French, belong to the bourgeoisie, their characters are at once defined by the fact. The mark or stamp of the petty-bourgeois is as hard to efface as the imprint of the gift of the Holy Spirit which our seminaries lay upon their pupils. Of actual merchants, shopkeepers and business men there were few among the exiles, and those few had come there as it were by accident, for the most part thrust out of France after the 2nd of December because they did not grasp the fact that upon them lay the sacred duty of changing their constitution. They were the men to be pitied, because their position was absolutely comic; they were lost in the ‘Red’ surroundings of which they had known nothing at home, and were simply scared; by virtue of their national weakness, they longed to display themselves as far greater radicals than they really were; but not being accustomed to the revolutionary jargon, they were always falling into ‘Orleanism,’ to the horror of their companions. Of course, they would all have been delighted to return home, if the _point d’honneur_, the one binding moral force of the modern Frenchman, had not forbidden their suing for permission.

The class next above them consisted of the bodyguard of the exiles’ community: lawyers, journalists, literary men and a few officers.

Most of them had been aiming at nothing in the revolution but to improve their social position, but with the rapid turn of the tide they had found themselves stranded on the English beach. Others were disinterestedly absorbed by club life and agitation; their rhetoric had brought them to London, partly of their own will, but quite twice as much against it. Among them there were many single-minded and honourable men, but few of any capacity; they had dropped into the revolution through temperament, through the recklessness of a man who, hearing a shriek for help, flings himself into the river, forgetting that it is deep and that he does not know how to swim.

Behind these infants whose pointed beards, alas, were rapidly turning grey, and whose conical Gallic skulls were somewhat short of hair, stood several groups of far more serious workmen, who were held together not so much by external bonds as by spirit and general interest.

Fate itself has made them revolutionaries, poverty and enlightenment have made them practical Socialists; hence their thought is more realistic, their resolution is firmer. These men have suffered many privations, many humiliations, and, moreover, in silence, which develops greater fortitude; they have crossed the Channel not with phrases but with passions and hatreds. Their oppressed position has saved them from the bourgeois _suffisance_, they know that they have not had time to be educated, they want instruction, while the bourgeois has learnt no more than they, but is perfectly content with his attainments.

And that is why if they come into the arena again they will be horrified by the ingratitude of men. And may they think it is only ingratitude! That is a gloomy thought, but easier to bear than many others.

But they had much better not go back at all; let them stay and tell us and our children of their great deeds. There is no need to resent this advice; what is living changes, and the unchanging becomes a monument. They have left their trace, just as those who come after them will leave theirs, and in their turn will be overtaken by the drifting snow, and then all traces, present and past, will be hidden in the universal amnesty of eternal oblivion!

Many are angry with me for saying these things openly. ‘In your words,’ a very worthy man said to me, ‘one hears the disinterested spectator speaking.’

But I did not come to Europe a spectator. I have been turned into one. I am very long-suffering, but at last I am worn out.

For five years I have not seen one bright face, I have not heard spontaneous laughter, I have not met a glance of understanding. I have been surrounded by _feldshers_[50] and _prosectors_.[51] The _feldshers_ have been continually trying their remedies, while the others have been proving to them on the corpse that they have blundered—until I too have snatched up the scalpel; perhaps through lack of practice I have cut too deeply.

I have spoken not as an outside spectator, not to find fault: I have spoken because my heart was full, because the lack of general understanding has driven me out of all patience. That I was sobered earlier than the rest has been no comfort to me. Only the very lowest of _feldshers_ can smile with satisfaction as they look at the dying patient and say: ‘Didn’t I tell you he would turn up his toes by the evening? and you see he has.’ Why, then, have I endured?

In 1856 the best of all the German refugees, Carl Schurz,[52] arrived in Europe from Wisconsin. On his return from Germany, he told me how impressed he was by the moral desolation of the Continent. I had translated to him aloud my _West European Sketches_. He tried to ward off my conclusions, as though they were a ghost which a man fears, though he is unwilling to believe in it.

‘Any one who understands contemporary Europe as you do,’ he said to me, ‘ought to abandon it.’ ‘That is what you have done,’ I observed. ‘Why is it you don’t do so?’ ‘It is very simple. I can answer you as an honest German in a fit of proud independence has answered before me. “I have a king of my own in Swabia.” I have my own people in Russia!’

Coming down from the heights to the middle levels of the refugee community, we see that most of the refugees have been drawn into exile by a generous impulse and by rhetoric. These men sacrificed themselves for words, that is, for their sound without ever giving themselves a clear definition of their meaning. They loved them ardently and believed in them, as Catholics believe in their Latin prayers, though they do not know Latin. _La fraternité universelle comme base de la république universelle_—that is final and accepted, _point de salariés, et la solidarité des peuples_! And you may blush, but that is enough to send some men to the barricades, and if a Frenchman goes to the barricade he does not run away.

‘_Pour moi, voyez-vous, la république n’est pas une forme gouvernementale, c’est une religion, et elle ne sera vraie que lorsqu’elle la sera_,’ a man who had taken part in all the risings from the day of Lamarque’s funeral said to me: ‘_Et lorsque la religion sera une république_,’ I added. ‘_Précisément!_’ he answered, much pleased at my having turned his phrase inside out.

The lower ranks among the refugees provide something like an ever open sore of conscience before the eyes of the leaders. In them all their own defects reappear in the exaggerated and ridiculous form in which Paris fashions appear in some Russian district town.

Ill-used from childhood, they hate the social injustice by which they have been so greatly oppressed. The corrupting influence of town life and of the universal passion for gain has in many of them converted the hatred into envy. Without clearly facing the fact, they try to become bourgeois though they detest them, just as we detest a lucky rival, though passionately longing to take his place, or to punish him for his success.

But whether animated by hatred or envy, whether by the thirst for comfort or for revenge, they are all to be dreaded in the future upheaval of Western Europe. They will be in the foreground. What will the Conservatives and rhetoricians do, confronted by their workmen’s muscles, their gloomy recklessness and rankling thirst for revenge? And what will all the town-dwellers do when at the workers’ call the locusts of the fields and villages rise up? The Peasant Wars are forgotten; the latest fugitives among land workers date back to the days of the Edict of Nantes: the Vendée vanished in the smoke of guns. But we are indebted to the 2nd of December for the sight of refugees wearing sabots.

The country people in the South of France, from the Pyrenees to the Alps, lifted up their heads after the _Coup d’État_, as though asking: ‘Has not our time come?’ The rising was suppressed at its very outbreak by masses of soldiers, who were followed by military tribunals; a herd of tracking gendarmes and police were scattered all over the cross-roads and little villages. The peasant’s hearth, his home—the things he holds sacred, were desecrated by the police; they demanded the wife’s evidence against her husband, the son’s against his father, and on one doubtful word from a kinsman, on the mere denunciation of a _garde-champêtre_, dragged to prison fathers of families, old men grey as badgers, lads, women; they were tried after a fashion, wholesale, and then at random some released, some sent to Lambessa, to Cayenne, while others escaped to Spain, to Savoy beyond the bridges over the Var.[53]

I do not know much about these peasants. In London I saw several men who had escaped from Cayenne in an open boat; the very recklessness, the madness of this adventure displays more of their character than whole volumes. They were almost all from the Pyrenees. Broad-shouldered, well grown, with large features, an utterly different race, not fined down like the meagre Frenchman of the towns, with his thin blood and poor little beard. The destruction of their homes and their stay at Cayenne had educated them. ‘We shall go back some day,’ a Hercules of forty, usually silent (they were none of them very talkative), said to me, ‘and pay off our score!’ They looked upon the other refugees, on their meetings and speeches, as somehow foreign ... and three weeks later they came to say good-bye to me.

‘We don’t want an idle life, and besides it’s dull here—we are going to Spain, to Santander. There they have promised to give us work as woodcutters.’ I glanced once more at the rough, manly figures and muscular hands of the future woodcutters—and thought, ‘It will be as well if their axes cut down nothing but chestnuts and oaks.’

Of the wild, devouring energy rankling in the breasts of the town workmen, I had a closer view later.

2

FELIX PYAT—VICTOR HUGO AND OTHERS—LOUIS BLANC AND THE FRENCH REFUGEES

The French refugees, like all the other groups, carried with them into exile and jealously maintained all their dissensions, all their parties. Their nervous irritability was increased by the gloomy environment of an alien and hostile country that did not conceal that it maintained its right of asylum for the sake of its own self-respect, and not for the sake of those who seek it.

And then they are cut off from their people and from their habits, and they cannot move about freely. Misunderstandings become more spiteful, upbraidings for past mistakes more merciless, parties are so sharply divided that old friends drop all relations and cut each other in the street....

There were real differences, theoretical and of every other description also. Together with ideas there were personalities, together with party badges there were individual names, side by side with fanaticism there was envy, and with candid enthusiasm there was naïve vanity.

A year and a half after the _Coup d’État_, Felix Pyat arrived in London from Switzerland. A lively journalist, he had become well known through his trial, through the dull comedy _Diogenes_, which the French liked for its thin, dry apophthegms, and finally by the success of _The Rag-Picker_ on the stage of Porte St. Martin. I have written a whole article[54] on this play in another place. Felix Pyat was a member of the last Legislative Assembly, sat with the Montagne, had a fight in the Assembly with Proudhon, was mixed up in the protest of the 13th of June 1848, and was in consequence obliged to leave France in secret. He got away, as I did, with a Moldavian passport, and went about in Geneva disguised as a Moor, probably in order that every one might recognise him. In Lausanne, to which he moved, a small circle of admirers from among the French exiles formed around him and lived on the manna of his witty sayings and the crumbs of his ideas. It was painful for him to pass from being the leader of a canton into being a member of a London party. There was no party that had a vacancy for a great man; his friends and admirers rescued him from this difficulty; withdrawing from the other parties, they formed themselves into the so-called _London Revolutionary Commune_.

_La Commune Révolutionnaire_ was to represent the reddest section of Democracy and the most communistic one of Socialism. It regarded itself as for ever on the alert, in the closest relations with ‘Marianne,’[55] and at the same time as the most faithful representative of Blanqui _in partibus infidelium_.

In the form of Felix Pyat the gloomy Blanqui, the austere pedant and doctrinaire of his cause, the ascetic emaciated in prisons, smoothed away his wrinkles, dyed his black thoughts crimson, and set the Parisian Commune shrieking with laughter in London. Felix Pyat’s sallies in his letters to the Queen and to Walewski,[56] whom he called an _ex-réfugié_ and _ex-polonais_, not a prince and so on, were very amusing; but where the resemblance to Blanqui came in I never could grasp; and altogether it was not easy for a plain man to see what was the characteristic difference that distinguished him from Louis Blanc, for instance.

The same thing must be said of the Jersey party of Victor Hugo.

Victor Hugo never was in the true sense of the word a politician. He was too much of a poet, too much under the influence of his imagination, to be one. Of course, I do not say this in disparagement. A Socialist and an artist, he was at the same time a worshipper of military glory, of the republican upheaval, of mediaeval romanticism, of the white _fleur-de-lys_, was a _vicomte_ and a _citoyen_, a peer of Orleanist France and an agitator of the 2nd of December. He was a great, exuberant figure, but not the head of a party, in spite of the positive influence he exerted over two generations. Who has not been set thinking over the death penalty by _Les Derniers Jours d’un Condamné_? Whose conscience has not been stirred by his striking pictures of the social sores of poverty and fatal vice, full of the strange, terrible lights and shadows of a Turner?

The February revolution caught Hugo unawares; he did not understand it, was amazed, was left behind, made an infinite number of blunders, until the Reaction went too far for him. Roused to indignation by the censorship of his plays and by the proceedings at Rome, he appeared on the platform of the Assembly with speeches that resounded throughout France. Success and applause carried him on and on. At last, on the 2nd of December 1851, he rose to his full stature in face of bayonets and loaded guns, he summoned the people to revolt—under showers of bullets protested against the _Coup d’État_ and withdrew from France, when it was no longer possible to act there. He retreated like an infuriated lion to Jersey; whence, hardly taking breath, he flung at the Emperor his _Napoléon le Petit_ and then his _Châtiments_. Napoleon’s agents tried in vain to reconcile the old poet with the new court. They could not. ‘If but ten Frenchmen remain in exile, I, too, will remain with them; if three, I will be among them; if one, I will be that one—I will not return except to a free France.’

Hugo’s moving from Jersey to Guernsey more than ever persuaded himself and his friends of his political significance, though it should, one would have thought, only have convinced them of the opposite. The position was as follows. When Felix Pyat wrote his letter to Queen Victoria after Napoleon’s visit to her, he read it at a meeting and sent it to the editor of _L’Homme_. Swentoslawski, who published _L’Homme_ at his own expense in Jersey, was at that time in London, and he came to see me, together with Felix Pyat; as he was leaving, he drew me aside and said that a lawyer of his acquaintance had told him that the journal might easily be prosecuted for this letter, as Jersey was in the position of a colony; but that Felix Pyat insisted on its appearing in _L’Homme_. Swentoslawski hesitated, and wanted to know my opinion.

‘Don’t publish it.’

‘Yes, that is just what I think myself, only the worst of it is he will think that I am afraid.’

‘Who wouldn’t be afraid of losing some thousands of francs under present circumstances?’

‘You are right, that I cannot do. I ought not to do it.’

Swentoslawski, after reasoning so sagaciously, went back to Jersey and published the letter.

There were rumours that the Ministry meant to do something. The English were offended at the tone in which Pyat addressed the Queen. The first result of the rumours was that Felix Pyat ceased to sleep at home—he was afraid _in England_ of a _visite domiciliaire_ and arrest at night for publishing an article! The Cabinet did not dream of a legal prosecution; the Ministers gave a hint to the Governor of Jersey, or whatever he is called there, and the latter, taking advantage of the illegal privileges that exist in the Colonies, ordered Swentoslawski to leave the island. Swentoslawski protested, and with him a dozen Frenchmen, among whom was Victor Hugo; then the Napoleon of the police of Jersey ordered all those who signed the protest to leave. They ought to have disobeyed the order to the last moment, let the police seize some one by the collar and fling him off the island, then it would have been possible to have brought the question of the legality of banishing them before a court. This was the course urged upon them by the English. Legal proceedings are disgracefully expensive in England; but the editors of the _Daily News_ and other Liberal papers promised to collect whatever sum was needed, and to procure capable lawyers to defend them. To the French the path of legality seemed dull and long, revolting, and they proudly left Jersey, taking with them Swentoslawski and S. Téléki.[57]

The police order was delivered to Victor Hugo with peculiar solemnity. When the police official went in to him to read the order, Hugo summoned his sons; he sat down, motioned the official to a chair, and, when all were seated as in Russia before a journey, he rose to his feet and said: ‘_M. le Commissaire, nous faisons maintenant une page de l’histoire_. Read your order.’ The policeman, who had expected to be kicked out of the house, was very much surprised at the ease with which he had gained the day; he bound Hugo by his signature to leave, and went away doing full justice to the courtesy of the French, who had even offered him a chair. Hugo did go, and the rest with him left Jersey. Most of them went no further than Guernsey. Others went to London; their cause was lost, and the right of expulsion remained unassailed.

There were only two real parties, _i.e._ the party of formal Republicanism and of violent Socialism: Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc. Of the latter I have not yet spoken, though I knew him better than almost any other of the French exiles.

It could not be said that Louis Blanc’s outlook was indefinite, it was sharply cut on all sides as with a knife. In the course of his exile, Louis Blanc gathered a great deal of information (in his own line, that is, the study of the first French Revolution) and became a little more settled and tranquil; but in reality his views never moved one step from the time when he wrote _L’Histoire de Dix Ans_ and _L’Organisation de Travail_. What was settled and clarified was exactly the same as had been fermenting from youth.

In Louis Blanc’s little body there lives a bold spirit firmly fitted together, ‘_très éveillé_,’ with a strong character, with its own sharply cut quality, and at the same time absolutely French. His quick eyes and rapid movements give him an air at once mobile and highly finished, which is not without grace. He is like a man of concentration reduced to its least dimensions, while the colossal character of his opponent, Ledru-Rollin, makes him like a swollen child, like a dwarf on an immense scale, or seen through a magnifying glass. They are both splendidly fitted to take parts in _Gulliver’s Travels_. Louis Blanc—and it is a great power and a very rare characteristic—has complete self-control; he has a great deal of reserve and, in the very heat of discussion, not only in public but in friendly talk, never forgets the most complex aspects of a question, never loses his temper in argument, never leaves off smiling good-humouredly and never agrees with his opponent. He is a master at telling stories, and, in spite of the fact that, like a Frenchman, he talks a great deal—yet, like a Corsican, he never says a word too much.

He is interested in nothing but France, knows nothing but France. The events of the world, the discoveries of science, earthquakes and inundations interest him only in so far as they affect France. Talking with him, listening to his subtle observations, his interesting stories, one may easily study the character of the French intellect, and the more easily as his soft and cultured manners do not provoke sarcastic irritation.[58]

Sometimes in jest I would pull him up in the generalisations which he had probably been repeating for years, never questioning them nor supposing that any one could question such respectable truths as: ‘A man’s life is a great social duty; a man _ought_ to be continually sacrificing himself to society.’

‘Why so?’ I would ask suddenly.

‘Why so? Upon my word: why, the whole aim, the whole significance of the individual is the welfare of society.’

‘It will never be attained if every one is to be sacrificed and no one is to enjoy himself.’

‘That is playing with words.’

‘A barbarian’s confusion of ideas,’ I said laughing.

‘I can never understand the materialistic view of the spirit,’ he said once. ‘Spirit and matter are after all distinct; they are closely connected, so closely that they are not manifest apart, but yet they are not the same thing’—and seeing that his exposition was not going well, he added at once: ‘Now, I, for instance, shut my eyes and imagine my brother; I see his features, I hear his voice; where is the material existence of that image?’

At first I thought that he was joking; but seeing that he was speaking quite seriously, I observed that the image of his brother was at that moment in a photographic studio known as the brain, and that Charles Blanc’s portrait could hardly be said to exist apart from that photographic apparatus.

‘That is quite a different matter. The picture of my brother has no material existence in my brain.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Why, how do you?’

‘From induction.’

‘By the way, that reminds me of a most amusing anecdote....’ And then, as always, followed a story about Diderot or Mme. Tencin, very charming, but not in the least to the point. As the successor of Maximilien Robespierre, Louis Blanc worshipped Rousseau, and was somewhat cold in his attitude to Voltaire. In his history he has divided all leading men into two flocks in Biblical fashion—on the one hand, the sheep of brotherhood, on the other, the goats of envy and egoism. For the egoists such as Montaigne he had no mercy, and they caught it severely from him. Louis Blanc did not stick at anything in this classification, and meeting the speculator, Law, he boldly counted him among the sheep, which the reckless Scotsman had certainly never expected.

In 1856 Barbès arrived in London from the Hague. Louis Blanc brought him to me. I looked with emotion at the martyr who had spent almost his whole life in prison. I had seen him once before, and where? At the window of the Hôtel de Ville, on the 15th of May, a few minutes before the National Guard broke in and seized him.[59]

I invited them to dine with me next day; they came, and we sat on till late at night.

Before we pass on to the savage elemental force quivering in darkness, enchained by man’s violence and its own ignorance, and at times bursting like destructive fire through cracks and crevices, and arousing horror and alarm, let us linger once more over the last knights-templars and classic figures of the French Revolution, over the cultured and democratic middle classes made up of exiles, republicans, journalists, lawyers, doctors, professors of the Sorbonne, who for ten years took part in the conflict with Louis-Philippe, were carried away by the events of 1848, and remained true to them, both at home and in exile.

In their ranks there are intelligent, keen-witted men, very good-hearted, animated by ardent religion and readiness to sacrifice everything to it; but men of understanding, men who could analyse their own position, their own problems, as the man of science investigates a phenomenon or a pathologist investigates disease, are almost entirely lacking.

They prefer complete despair, contempt for men and the cause, they prefer the idleness of reproaches and recriminations, stoicism, heroism, every privation, to analysis. Or they have the same complete faith in success without weighing means, without making clear a practical object. Instead of it, they are satisfied with a flag, with a badge, with a stock phrase—the right to work, the abolition of the proletariat, the republic and order, brotherhood and the solidarity of all peoples. But how is all this to be arranged, to be realised? That is the last consideration. Only to get the power; the rest would be done by decrees, plebiscites, and if there were disobedience—_grenadiers, en avant armes! pas de charge ... baïonnettes!_

And glimpses of the religion of terror, of the _Coup d’État_, of centralisation, of military intervention show through rents in the carmagnole and the blouse. In spite of the pedantic protest of some Attic minds of the Orleans party, the Terror was grand in its menacing suddenness, its unprepared colossal vengeance; but to dwell upon it with love, to invoke it without necessity is a terrible blunder for which we are indebted to the Reaction.

On me the Committee of Public Security always produced the same impression as Charrière’s shop, Rue de l’École de Médecine; on all sides there are straight or curved sabres, scissors, saws glittering ominously, probably instruments for saving men, but certainly for hurting them. Operations are justified by success, but the Terror cannot boast of that. With all its surgery it did not save the Republic. With what object was Dantonotomy, Herbertotomy performed? They hastened the fever of Thermidor; and in it the Republic wasted away; as before and even more so, men went on raving over the Spartan virtues with Latin mottoes and classicism _à la David_; they raved on till one fine day they translated _Salus populi_ into _Salvum fac Imperatorem_, and chanted it with full ecclesiastical rites in Notre Dame.

The Terrorists were not ordinary men. Their stern, austere figures stand out vividly in the fifth act, and will survive in history for ages, so long as human records last; but the French republicans of to-day do not look at it like that—they see in them patterns to be imitated, and try to be bloodthirsty in theory and in the hope of practice.

Repeating _à la Saint-Just_ affected maxims from anthologies and Latin classics, moved to enthusiasm by the cold rhetorical eloquence of Robespierre, they will not allow their heroes to be judged like other mortals! Any one who should begin to speak of them without the dutiful words of eulogy which are applied to the ‘illustrious dead,’ would be accused of being a renegade, a traitor, a spy.

I did, however, now and then meet eccentric men who had broken away from the common path trodden by the crowd.

But even in such cases, when Frenchmen have taken the bit between their teeth and bolted with some idea that does not belong to the received currency of ideas and thoughts, they carry it to such an extreme that the man who has given them the idea defends himself with horror.

In 1854, Dr. Cœurderoi, who had sent me his pamphlet from Spain, wrote me a letter. I have rarely heard so exasperated a protest against contemporary France and its latest revolutionaries. It was the answer of France to the _Coup d’État_ dealt her so lightly; he doubted the intelligence, the blood of his race; he invoked the Cossacks for the correction of the ‘degenerate population,’ he wrote to me because he found in my articles ‘the same standpoint.’ I answered that I did not go so far as advocating transfusion of blood as a remedy, and sent him _Du Développement des Idées révolutionnaires en Russie_.

Cœurderoi repaid the debt; he answered that he rested all his hopes on the troops of Nicholas, who would raze to the ground without pity or sparing the effete and corrupt civilisation which had not the strength to renew itself nor to die a natural death.

I append one of his letters which has been preserved.

M. A. HERZEN.

SANTANDER, _Mai 27_.

MONSIEUR,—Que je vous remercie tout d’abord de l’envoi de votre
travail sur les idées révolutionnaires et leur développement en
Russie. J’avais déjà lu ce livre, mais il ne m’était pas resté
entre les mains, et c’était pour moi un très grand regret.

C’est vous dire combien j’en apprécie la valeur comme fond
et comme forme, et combien je le crois utile pour donner
conscience à chacun des forces de la Révolution universelle,
aux Français surtout qui ne la croient possible que par
l’initiative du faubourg St. Antoine.

Puisque vous m’avez fait l’amitié de m’envoyer votre livre,
permettez-moi, Monsieur, de vous en témoigner ma gratitude
en vous disant ce que j’en pense. Non que j’attache de
l’importance à mon opinion, mais pour vous prouver que j’ai lu
avec attention.

C’est une belle étude organique et originale, il y a là
véritable vigueur, travail sérieux, vérités nues, passages
profondément émouvants. C’est jeune et fort comme la race
slave; on sent parfaitement que ce n’est ni un Parisien, ni
un Paléologue, ni un Philiste d’Allemagne qui ont écrit des
lignes aussi brûlantes; ni un républicain constitutionnel, ni
un socialiste théocrate et modéré—mais un Cosaque (vous ne vous
effrayez pas de ce nom, n’est-ce pas?) grandement anarchiste,
utopiste et poète, acceptant la négation et l’affirmation la
plus hardie du XIXᵉ siècle. Ce que peu de révolutionnaires
français osent faire.

... Sur le point particulier de la Rénovation ethnographique
prochaine, j’ai trouvé dans votre livre (surtout dans
l’Introduction) bien des passages qui semblent se rapprocher
de mon opinion. Quoique vos conclusions ne soient pas
très-nettement formulées sur ce point, je crois que vous
comptez pour le succès de la Révolution sur la fédération
démocratique des races slaves qui donneront à l’Europe
l’impulsion générale. Il est bien entendu que nous ne différons
pas pour le but: la résurrection du Continent sous la forme
démocratique et sociale. Mais je crois que le sac de la
civilisation sera fait par l’absolutisme. Là je vois toute la
différence entre nous.

Oui, j’ai conçu ces convictions qu’on dit malheureuses, et j’y
persiste parce que chaque jour je les trouve plus justes:

1. Que la force a quelque chose à voir dans les affaires de
notre microcosme.

2. Qu’en étudiant la marche des événements révolutionnaires
dans le temps et dans l’espace on se convainct que la force
prépare toujours la Révolution que l’idée a démontrée
nécessaire.

3. Que l’idée ne peut pas accomplir l’œuvre de sang et de
destruction.

4. Que le despotisme, au point de vue de la rapidité, de la
sûreté, de la possibilité d’exécutions, est plus apte que la
démocratie à bouleverser un monde.

5. Que l’armée monarchique russe sera plutôt mise en mouvement
que la phalange démocratique slave.

6. Qu’il n’y a que la Russie en Europe assez compacte encore
sous l’absolutisme, assez peu divisée par les intérêts
propriétaires et les partis pour faire bloc, coin, massue,
glaive, épée et exécuter l’Occident et trancher le nœud gordien.

Là. Là. Là.

Qu’on me montre une autre force capable d’accomplir une
pareille tâche; qu’on me fasse voir quelque part une armée
démocratique toute prête et décidée à frapper sur les peuples,
les frères, et à faire couler le sang, à brûler, à abattre
sans regarder derrière elle, sans hésiter. Et je changerai de
manière de voir.

Avec vous je voulais seulement bien spécifier la question et la
limiter sur ce seul point, le moyen d’exécution générale de la
civilisation Occidentale.

Je n’ai pas besoin de vous dire que notre appréciation sur le
Passé et l’Avenir est la même. Nous ne différons absolument
que sur le Présent. Vous, qui avez si bien apprécié le rôle
révolutionnaire de Pierre Iᵉʳ, pourquoi ne pourriez-vous pas
penser que tout autre, Nicolas ou l’un de ses successeurs, put
avoir un formidable rôle à accomplir? Quelle autre main plus
puissante, plus large, plus capable de rassembler des peuples
conquérants, voyez-vous à l’Orient? Avant que la démocratie
slave ait trouvé un mot d’ordre et traduit le vague secret de
ses aspirations, le tsar aura bouleversé l’Europe. Le sort des
nations civilisées est dans son bras, s’il le veut. Le monde
ne tremble-t-il pas parce qu’il a parlé un peu plus haut que
d’habitude? Je vous l’avoue, cette force me frappe tellement,
que je ne puis concevoir qu’on cherche à en voir une autre.
Et les révolutionnaires sentent tellement la nécessité d’une
dictature pour démolir qu’ils voudraient l’instituer eux-mêmes
dans le cas de réussite d’une nouvelle Révolution. A mon sens,
ils ne se trompent pas sur la nécessité du moyen, seulement il
n’est ni dans leur rôle, ni dans leurs principes, ni dans leurs
forces de l’employer. Moi j’aime même voir le Despotisme se
charger de cette odieuse tâche de fossoyeur.

Cette lettre est déjà bien assez longue. Je voulais seulement
préciser avec vous le point débattu. Ce qu’il faudrait
maintenant entre nous, je le sens: ce serait une conversation
dans laquelle nous avancerons plus en une heure que par
milliers de lettres. Je n’abandonne pas cet espoir, et ce
jour sera le bienvenu pour moi. Avec un homme de révolution,
de travail, de science et d’audace je crois toujours pouvoir
m’entendre.

Quant aux sourds ou muets de la tradition révolutionnaire
de ’93, j’ai grand’ peur que vous n’en fassiez jamais des
socialistes universels et des hommes de liberté. Encore moins
des partisans de la possession, du droit au travail, de
l’échange et du contrat. C’est tellement séduisant que de rêver
une place de commissaire aux armées ou à la police, ou encore
une sinécure de représentant au peuple avec une belle écharpe
rouge autour des reins, comme disait Rabelais, beaux floquarts,
beaux rubans, gentil pourpoint, galantes braguettes, etc., etc.
La plupart de nos révolutionnaires en sont là!

Les hommes ne sont guère plus sages que les enfants, mais
beaucoup plus hypocrites. Ils portent des faux cols et de
décorations et se croient illustres. Les enfants jouent plus
sérieusement aux soldats que les grands monarques et les
énormes tribunes que les peuples admirent.

Vous voudrez bien me pardonner de vous avoir écrit sans avoir
l’honneur de vous connaître personnellement.

Vous m’excuserez surtout de m’être permis de vous donner
sur vos ouvrages une opinion qui n’a d’autre valeur que la
sincérité. J’estime d’après mes propres impressions que
c’est le moyen le plus efficace pour reconnaître un don, qui
vous a fait plaisir. D’ailleurs notre commun exil et nos
aspirations semblables me semblent devoir nous épargner à tous
deux les vaines formules de politique banale. Je termine
en vous résumant mon opinion par ces deux mots: La Force
et la Destruction demain par le tzar, la Pensée et l’Ordre
après-demain par les socialistes universels, les Slavs, comme
les Germano-Latins.—Agréez, etc.

ERNEST CŒURDEROI.

J’espère vous publierez en volume vos lettres à Linton Esqʳᵉ.
que le journal _l’Homme_ a données à ses lecteurs.

Pourriez-vous me dire s’il existe des traductions françaises
des poésies de Pouschkine, de Lermontoff et surtout de Koltzoff?
Ce que vous en dites me fait désirer infiniment de les lire. La
personne qui vous remettra cette lettre est mon ami L. Charre,
proscrit comme nous, à qui j’ai dédié _Mes Jours d’Exil_.