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XIII.

PREVOST-PARADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR

1. Elisabeth et Henri IV. 1595-1598.

2. Essais de Politique et de Littérature. 3 vols.

3. Quelques Pages d'Histoire Contemporaine: Lettres Politiques. 4 vols. 4. La France Nouvelle. Par M. Prevost-Paradol de l'Académie Française. Dixième Edition. Paris, 1869.1

PREVOST-PARADOL is the second of French diplomatists who have died, within the last three-and-twenty years, by their own hands, and whose deaths have happened in coincidence and in supposed connection with the presaged fate of personal and dynastic policy. The first was M. Bresson, who had been French Minister at Madrid during Louis Philippe's Spanish-marriage intrigues, pregnant with such fatal consequences to the reigning houses of both France and Spain. In the second instance of strange and sudden death 1 From the Quarterly Review, October 1870.

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2 Amongst the documents plundered from the French palaces in February 1848, and published in M. Taschereau's Revue Rétrospective of that revolution year, was a very remarkable confidential letter of the Prince de Joinville to the Duc de Nemours, dated from the fleet off Spezzia, November 7, 1847, from which we translate the following passage:-The death of Bresson has struck me like a fatality [m'a funesté], and I fancy it has had the same effect on you. Setting aside the unfortunate effect produced at Naples, where the laws are so severe against suicide, what I apprehend most is research into the causes which may have produced this unhappy event. Bresson was not ill; he executed his purpose with the sang-froid of a man determined on death. I have letters from Naples from Montessuy and others, which leave me in no doubt about the matter. He was exasperated [ulcéré] against le Père [King Louis Philippe]. He had held strange language about him at Florence: “the King is inflexible, he no longer listens to any counsel-his will must carry everything before it," &c. All this will not fail to be repeated, and--which I regard as our great danger-the action le Père exerts on all subjects will be put in the strongest light-an action so inflexible that, when a public man who has committed himself on our side cannot overcome it, he has no resource left but suicide.'-Revue Rétrospective, 1818, No. 31, p. 481.

now before us it is impossible to say what effect the startling arrival of the war news from Europe may have had on a sensitive mind, coupled with a frame already in a state of suffering from unusually intense heat in a foreign climate. Prevost-Paradol's published writings, however, of two years previously, prove that he had long regarded war with Prnssia as a question only of time. Had his bodily health, under the burning sun of Washington, been in its normal condition, it is hard to believe that the mere fulfilment of his own predictions could have so affected his mind as to have driven him to seek refuge in suicide from the possible consequences, whether to his country or to himself, of military and political calamities, which could not then be contemplated as inevitable, least of all by Frenchmen. Whatever indeed might ensue could only by the most malignant ingenuity be made to reflect discredit on a man whose Liberal literary antecedents had occasioned his selection by a professed Liberal cabinet to bear the olive-branch from Imperial France to the great transatlantic Republic. Even if the new Minister at Washington had come to think M. Ollivier's Liberalism the hollow and broken reed it has since proved, and his own position, by consequence, more or less a false one, the late example of another literary Imperial convertite relapsed might have assured him that the French Liberals would receive him with open arms again, whenever, like Sainte-Beuve, he returned to his premiers amours.

From our passing notice of Prevost-Paradol's death we turn to the labours of his life, which obtained for him before the middle period of manhood the position of a great publicist

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-to say nothing of that of an Academician-due mainly to his brilliant contributions to the newspaper press. From causes which perhaps may count amongst the perils of French politics, but which are certainly sources of singular distinction to French political writers, those writers exert an individual influence, and acquire an individual reputation, to which the system of anonymousness precludes any parallel in English journalism. The gradual recovery of its freedom of late years by the French newspaper press has been due in

great measure to the distinguished ability and independence of individual journalists; while the full recognition of those qualities has in like measure been due to the publication of the names of French newspaper writers at the foot of their articles. That publication was rendered legally compulsory by a law passed by the National Assembly of the short-lived Republic of 1848, on the motion of a certain M. de Tinguy, whose name is not otherwise illustrious. Whatever its origin, we have always regarded its effect as favourable to the individual weight and influence of the higher class of writers, whose contributions to the press have mainly or exclusively raised them to reputation. Of these, facile princeps in late years was Prevost-Paradol.

The peculiar faculties which fitted Prevost-Paradol for his literary conflict with power have been a traditional distinction of French athletes in that arena from Pascal to Voltaire-from Voltaire to Paul Louis Courier (a name little remembered now) and Cormenin, and from these (we should have added before some late escapades) to Edmond About. Frenchwomen were said to owe their tripping elastic step to the dire necessity of acquiring the art of saving their delicate chaussures from the pitfalls and puddles of French streetpavement, as French street-pavement was of yore. In like manner, French writers have had to learn the art of harassing power by a light ironical handling of its perverse doctrines or more perverse practices. From the Provinciales downwards, the best weapon of French polemics and politics has been a keen and polished irony against authorities, whether spiritual or secular, whose forte was not reasoning, but silencing reason when it became seriously offensive. Prevost-Paradol was the last of a long line of French writers whose sarcasms cut with razor keenness into those who wielded the axes and the rods which awe mankind.' It is quite a peculiar art of writing, for which there is really no demand in a free country, where neither writers nor readers have had any occasion to acquire the skill or taste for ingenious and indirect modes of conveying censure on powers that be. As Frenchmen are the best cooks. for extracting

exquisite flavours out of dubious viands-as they are the best dancing-masters for extracting artificial graces out of movements in which natural grace is no ingredient-so are they the most accomplished literary artists in turning diseases to commodity '-forging the most effective weapons against power out of its own jealous restrictions, and telling it ses vérités in turns of phrase adroitly avoiding to call a spade a spade or a rogue a rogue. Such literary fencing, indeed, with the master of thirty legions' generally ends one way: those who are adepts in it are themselves apt to get tired of tolerance, and wish to assure themselves that they have cut their tyrants to the quick by provoking some hasty stroke of vengeance from high places. Thus Chateaubriand, apparently to refresh the public memory of his rupture with the first Napoleon on occasion of the murder of the Duke d'Enghien, got inserted in the Mercure de France' (in 1807) that covert but audacious parallel of the age of Napoleon with the age of Nero (and, by implication, of Tacitus with Chateaubriand) which caused the instant suppression of the 'Mercure.' Thus Prevost-Paradol, in 1866, found in Gulliver's voyage to Laputa a prototype less stately, but not less insulting to the Second Empire, of the depraved taste of France for the Imperial régime and its organs, in the court lady whose story is told in that voyage

'Très belle, aimée par les plus galants hommes, qui s'enfuit pour aller vivre avec un palefrenier. Elle est dépouillée, battue, abêtie un peu plus tous les jours: mais c'en est fait, elle y a pris goût et ne peut être arrachée à cet indigne amant.'

This was followed, in like manner, by the instant suppression of the Courrier du Dimanche,' a short imprisonment of the author, and moderate fines on himself and publisher. It may be questioned whether either Chateaubriand or Prevost-Paradol would have been quite pleased by the policy of entire forbearance on the part of the power attacked.

In a very brief biographical notice in a monthly periodical, which has the merit of being founded on personal acquaint

ance with Prevost-Paradol, we find the following passage from a letter written by him to an English friend in 1868:

I envy your country, to be busy only with such questions as the Irish difficulties and competition of Parliamentary parties; while we are here struggling for life in the midst of foreign and internal perils. German unity abroad; universal suffrage, domination of the illiterate classes, and absolute power of a slumbering madman at home: such are the diseases of my country, by the side of which your troubles sink into insignificance.

Waiving all question as to our English exemption (since 1866) from the domination '-potential at least of the illiterate classes,' we must say, with reference to the above application of such a phrase as 'slumbering madman,' that Napoleon III., like every ruler of France since her revolutions, had slumbering madness to manage in the French nation, and did manage it with success for a longer period than any previous French ruler. If he failed at last, and wrecked his dynasty in his failure, it was less by indulging any individual mania of his own than by indulging a notoriously universal and inveterate mania of his subjects. Whatever right dispassionate foreigners may have to visit with reprobation his unprovoked raid on Germany, passionate Frenchmen--and all patriotic Frenchmen were more or less inflamed with passion in that direction-have no right to denounce it, and in fact, speaking generally, have not denounced it, unless on the score of deficient preparation and pretext. The determination to draw the sword on Germany rather than see Germany complete her national union had been incessantly inculcated by M. Thiers in the Legislature, and by PrevostParadol in the press, for at least four years before, in an evil hour, it was put in execution by the Emperor's Government. Alexis de Tocqueville, whom we always have to quote for calm speculation on the turbulent vicissitudes, remote or recent, of French politics, declared repeatedly that, whenever any ruler of France should give the word to march on the Rhine with a definite aim of re-conquest, the whole nation. would rise and march on the Rhine, as it had done before.