THE EMPEROR'S PREFACE.

Press, Volume VII, Issue 830, 28 June 1865, Page 3

THE EMPEROR'S PREFACE.

The following is a translation of part of an article byM. E. Forcade upon the Emperor Napoleon's preface to his " Life of Gtesar" which appears in the current number of tbe Revue dcs Deux Monies. After remarking on the peculiar advantages for his proposed task which the Emperor enjoys from the various experiences of his extraordinary career, M. Forcade goes on to enter a resolute protest against the Imperial theory as to tbe causes that 'produce great men, and the homage that should be paid to them by the rest of the speciee :— We will make our confession boldly : this religious sentiment in politics, and this worship of great men, meet in us resolute protestants and determined unbelievers. In no time, in no country, will we consent to turn the real great men of history after they are gone into demigods imposed on the superstitious obedience of nations. Wβ are not on the side of the Mahomete. In raising history to the height of a religion, and of an authoritative religion, having infallible organs in great men, was not the Emperor afraid of committing an anachronism ? Is it not in an opposite direction that all the tendencies of our age tend ? It is attempted to banish the supernatural from the religious order j is it possible to introduce it thu3 into the political order? The rigorous methods of historical criticism are applied with excessive severity, as it seems to us, to the study of religions ; is it the moment to bring the illusions of religious sentiment into historical study and political controversy ? We are in the presence of a new Arianism, which disputes the divinity of Jesus Christ, and we are to set about deifying Csßsar. Weshall not be accused here of forcing the thought of the Emperor. The illustrious writer plainly gives us great men as a kind of prophets. He represents them as raised up by Providence to trace to nations the way they should follow ; the nations are bound to them by imperative duties. They are happy or accursed, according as they are faithful or unfaithful to these duties. Nations who are refractory to their great men are likened to the Jews crucifying the Messiah. Those nations are blind, and they are guilty. This apotheosis of great men and these judgments launched against nations seem to us incompatible either with philosophy or historical justice. Let us speak at first of the great men. There is not one of them of whom human intelligence cannot take the exact measure. It is not, perhaps, necessary that they should, in order to appear our superiors, surpass very far the ordinary etature. Their intellectual faculties, however lofty, remain within our range ; their character, and the aesthetic side of their nature, are easily intelligible to our sympathies. As to tbe morality of their acts, it remains subject to that law of justice which finds sovereign organs even in the most humble of human consciences. Without doubt, armed with the forces of which their genius avails itself, they make great events, and thus mark periods of history with their name ; but it is at this point that we must guard against being mistaken as to their power of creation, and as to the extent of their influence. The} are, above all, the product of previous events, and of the situations by which they, more than all others, are governed. In the great chain of causes and effects which forme history, they are but a link, themselves by turns effects and causes. They are accidents which fall under the general laws that govern history with the same necessity as other laws regulate nature. Arising in epochs when the lawa of historical nature are manifested by revolutions, they are less indispensable than the vulgar imagine. Montesquieu has said with his usual sagacity—"lf Cfflsar had thought like Cato, others would have thought like Ceesar, and the republic, fated to perish, would have been dragged to the precipice by some other hand." The , most engaging side of great men is less what they do than what they are ; it is less their intellect and their power of action than their character and their aesthetic personality. From this point of view the Emperor's hero, Caesar, is incomparable. A man of high birth, and a popular agitator, becoming the type of a dictator after having been the most ardeat ar d most able leader of public seditions, a consummate man of letters before being an unrivalled general, enveloped, so to speak, in his person, in his acts, in his words, with a sort of generous brilliancy— -forma mag' nificaet generosa quodommodo. But all this greatness which superior men draw from themselves and borrow from the situations which they are called upon to govern is no sufficient sanction for their career and for their work. Before imposing upon nations the religion of obedience to these glorious instruments of historic necessity, we must examine the morality of their acts ; and then it is that the human conscience, enlightened by justice, regains its imprescriptible rights against those all-powerful creatures of a day. Before this tribunal we lose the right of denouncing as guilty the nations who have withstood a great man ,- we must not talk of nations who crucify their Messiahs, unless we can prove that the great man succeeded only by honest means, that the great man I was also the just man. *To act otherwise wonld be to introduce into politics and morals the fatalism of history. We regret to find in the Emperor's preface so much indulgenoe for great men, so much severity towards nations. Can one form a conception of a guilty nation ? Is it not one of those mystical expressions which we should do well to leave in the Bible, and not introduce into the exact language of politics and history? How, in the epochs agitated by revolutions and great wars, could all the individuals who compose a nation have enough intelligence to distinguish truth from error, to foresee future vicissitudes j and by what secret electricity would we have them unite to choose by one and the same movement the cause to which auecew is legitimately reserved? Where the Eomans who withstood Cesar guilty for remaining faithful to the best traditions of their country, ami for being ignorant of the secrets of the future? 'Vyhen Vercingetbrix and hie Gauls combated the conquering foreigner with that chivalrous perseverance which moves us even now—wejw they guilty for not having penetrated the decree of destiny against their race? The writer of these Knee cannot forget how, seeking to comfort in his exile an aged prince whom a revolution had just hurled from the first throne in the world, and foreseeing all the cheeks which that revolution threatened to liberty, he repeated thoughtlessly the eorry commonplace of the time, "France has bees

very guuty. The aged King Tepliea Kincuy. j "My friend," said he, " nations are never guilty." t That humane speech of a shepherd of peoples cured { us for ever of the mania of theorists for sententiously y accusing nations in a macs during the darker mo- J mente of their history. In like manner we would s turn aside the comparison between the murder of y. Caesar and the captivity of St. Helena—the France of o 1739 bears no resemblance to the Rome of Cavarv ii The republic at Rome was nothing but a discordant a and ruined constitution, which had no more than a o nominal existence when Caesar's power, produced by v the corruption of laws and manners, began. France, t: on the contrary, has been since 1789 a really young g nation, raising itself by incessant progress, and seek- a ing free institutions which shall shelter its future a course from the accidents of power. It was not by v developing the inner political life of France, it was by t; pursuing combinations abroad on which France had g not beea consulted, that JTapoleon fell a victim to w military accidents. His fat* would hare been very si different if he had practiced upon the throne tl the liberalism which he professed at St. o Helena. Lastly, we cannot admit that the fault of c Brutus in killing Caesar was that of rendering possi- 1 ble the reigns of Caligula and STero. The great lesson ti and the moral punishment of the deed of Brutus consist in the uselessness of his patriotic crime ; but t< the horror and shame of the reigns of Caligula and v Nero are also the lesson and the moral chastisement ii of the great man who founded the tyranny, placed in b the hands of a single person all the powers of the si empire, and lent the might of his name for ages to Ii the arbitrary caprice of his unworthy successors. The h dagger of Brutus has at last ennobled the death of S Ceesar ; it gires a pathetic end to that great life —it l< is the catastrophe of a sublime drama of the human n conscience. Galba slaughtered on the ground at the - corner of a street by drunken soldiers, Heliogabalus emothered by freedmen in a shameful refuge, might 1 envy Caesar the dagger of Brutus ; but the tyranny p had performed its work of degradation —the mum-n derers were worthy of the -victims. c . t