NAPOLEONIC HISTORY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19844, 17 July 1926, Page 4

NAPOLEONIC HISTORY.

THE GENIUS OF FRANCE. By Constant Reader. I.—IN NAPOLEON’S DAYS. M. Maurice Barres, the distinguished French novelist, has edited, with an introduction, the memoirs of his grandfather, Jean Baptiste Barres, who was an officer in the Grand Army of Napoleon the Groat. The exact title of the original manuscript was: “Itinerary and recollections of a soldier who became a superior officer; a succinct picture of the days of march and sojourn in towns and villages, in garrison or on passage, in ramps and cantonments in France and also Germany, Poland, Prussia, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, from my entry into the service on the 27th Juno, 1804, to the Cth June, 1835, the date of my admission to retirement on half pay.” Mr Barres did not know his grandfather, who died thirteen years before the grandson was born; but when Maurice was a child his father used to show him fho greenish note boons containing tho Memoirs, in colour like the uniform of the Chasseurs of the Guard. “My veneration for the Army,’’ writes Mr Barres “for tho genius of the Emperor, and for military glory, seems to prolong the emotions that my grandfather felt, and the dazzling memories of a soldier’s life.” M. Barres confesses himself as under a deep obligation to all the people and influences which have made him what ho is. Artist and poet, he has published these Memoirs of his grandfather as a preface to, and an elucidation of, all that ho Has written. Of his grandfather he says: A young man is torn away, uprooted, ■by tho shocks of the Revolution, from a little town in which his forbears have lived, to their knowledge, for five hundred years. He roams the world, gathering memories of things that must have impressed him ali the more in that he belonged to a sedentary race and then, in the end, he returned to strike root once more in the heart of a Lorraine family, and a little _ town _ just like his own family and his native town. Such was my grandfather; such the origin of that handful of ideas and feelings to which I am so monotonously faithful. It is this inheritance of a fixed idea which renders these Memoirs of such profound interest. They assist in explaining the spirit of the France of to-day. In those days the little Eastern towns of France were full of the veteran officers of tho Grand Army._ “It was with such men,” says M. Barris, “that Erckmann-Chntrian used to talk. 1 am sure that in order to write their ‘Consrit de 1813’ the two Lorrainian novelists must have had at their disposal documents like that which I am publishing.” The grandson says of his grandfather:— Ho was a soldier of (ho Grand Army; one of those great and simple men who are tho eternal treasure of our race. Ho is an example of tho kind of men whom the small towns of France were producing at tho close of the eighteenth century. Wo could not possess a more reliable and efficient instrument for tho tasks of a great civilisation. While fashionable society, Paris and Versailles, had lost their inward equilibrium, what a fine type of man our provinces were still producing—a type whoso physical and moral energies are always ready to expend themselves with a controlled energy. No uneasiness, no hesitation no weakness, no “sickness of the age”; but an abundant store of quiet strength. No one who had not read these pages would have thought it possible to live a life so varied, so full of danger, so near the greatest genius of the age and yet to retain this exactitude of mind, sensible and severe and perfectly harmonious. These memoirs afford abundant illustration of the power possessed by Napoleon of charming tho men under him and sweeping them right off their feet. On tho eve of Austerlitz, when his men were asleep in the bivouac, Napoleon suddenly appeared before thorn holding a letter in his hand. One of us,” writes J. B. Barres, “took up a handful of straw and lit it to enable him to read it. From one bivouac ho wont to another. The soldiers followed him with blazing torches, shouting, ‘Long live the Emperor!’ These cries of love and enthusiasm spread in all directions like an electric dash; all the soldiers, noncommissioned officers, and officers provided themselves with improvised torches, so that for leagues, from our front to our rear, there was a general blaze, which must have dazzled the Emperor.” On which Maurice Barres comments;— “That was what my grandfather saw; the genius enveloped in the blaze of love and enthusiasm.” And on the day of the battle, when the French army was preparing to go into action, Napoleon, amid cries of “Vive I'Empereur!’ in a clear, vibrating voice which thrilled them through,” said to his soldiers: “Chasseurs, my Horse Guards have just routed the Russian Imperial Guard. Colonels, flags, guns, all have been captured. Nothing could resist their intrepid valour. You will imitate them.” It is these Memoirs and otheer like documents which, in tho opinion of M. Maurice Barris, “throw a little light on tho spiritual origin of the generations with whom we have made the journey through life and enable us to forecast the mysterious influence that may be exerted in 10 years’ time, on the French genius, bv the Groat War which we have lately witnessed I Ferments whose leaven is not yet active are at work for our sons in the fillcd-in trenches.” The fact that the English version of these Memoris is the work of Mr Bernard Miall is a guarantee of fidelity and literarv style. Tho book should bo studied by all who desire an adequate idea of the part which France is destined to play in the European future. M. Maurice Barris indicates this in his concluding words: “Of such publications, at once glorious and commonplace, there is no French family but can furnish file like, giving plain and tangible evidence of the eternal peril to which France is exposed and the necessity of maintaining our ancient ideal of honour.” lI—THE THIRD AND THE FIRST NAPOLEON Among the younger critics and historians in Britain Mr Philip Guedella has secured for himself a prominent place, this largely because of his brilliant book on “Tho Second Empire,” which has recently gone into a second edition. Mr Guedella, who has been compared to- Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle, divides his study into three payts, dealing consecutively with Bonapartism as set forth in the person of the first Napoleon, and going forward to the time when Louis Napoleon was acclaimed Emperor of the French with the title of Napoleon HI. Mr Guedella has n pungent style and his bonk is replete with passages of amazing brilliance. Take, for instance, tho following extract from the section on Bonapartism. which describee the state of things ir. Franco after St. Helena: — The destruction of the Empire left an odd gap in Franco, and it was hardly filled by the return of the Bourbons. The appearance in public life of large numbers of elderly gentlemen, speaking with the accent of the last century, and gloomily disapproving of the generation with which they found themselves surrounded, was an inadequate compensation for the disappearance of those bronze and hooted young men of the Empire, who had ridden into every capital in Europe. It cannot have been enlivening to bo governed by persons who regarded every achievement of the past thirty years as n manifestation of original sin; and for all the memories which it contained of the conscription and the invasion, the roll of the Emperor’s drums must have seemed a friendly sound, when it was compared with tho dry rustic of the parchments as the j King’s Ministers searched them for : royal precedents. Viewed from this standpoint, “ The j Restoration of Louis XVlft was as de- | pressing as any other triumph of age I over youth.” For eighteen years “ the : Orleans monarchy endeavoured to satisfy i the needs of France but it only re- j suited in tbo return of Bonapartism, in '

the person o£ Louis Napoleon, first as Prince, then as President, and finally as Emperor. All those periods are vividly sketched, and tho history has all the relish and flavour of a romance. Perhaps the culminating chapters, which describe the debacle of 1871 and the fall of the French Empire, are amongst the finest in the book. The history ends with tho death of the Prince Imperial in the Zulu war. III.—FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO NOW. Mr Richard Aldington carries weight both as a poet and as a literateur, and, under tho title " French Studies ami Reviews,” he has collected in volume form a numbers of papers originally contributed to The Times Literary Supplement and the Criterion—papers which reflect a valuable impression of France from the Middle Ages to now. If literature be accepted as the reflection of life, these glimpses of French poets’ and writers through the ages cannot fail to shed light upon the evolution of the French nation. In this book Mr Aldington presents a kinematograph picture, beginning with medieval French life, going on to tho Crusades, and the Troubadours, taking in Francois Villon, Maurice Score, the Lyons Poet, Jacques Grevin, an early dramatist, Robert Gamier, a member of I.a Pleiade, tho French satirists, Matnrin Regnier, Boileau, and the rest: “Lc Cabinet Satyrique,” a satiric and erotic anthology; Ninon Lancles, Paul Scarron, Rcstif de la Bretonne, Mcrrimec, Alfred do Vigny, and four modern poets, Rodenbach, Guerin, Renee Vivien, aud Maurice du Plessiys. Mr Aldington displays a thorough grasp of his subject, and his criticism of so many little-known writers should prove invaluable to students of French literature and language, IV.—MARX ON BONAPARTE. Karl Marx's famous book, “The Eighteenth Brumairo ot Louis Bonaparte,” was first published in the UnJcd States in 1852, and no complete edition has since appeared until .he present report. Marx completed this historical study of the events it. describes between February, 1848, and December, 1851, within a few weeks of tho close of that period. It comprehends what is generally spoken of as the materialist conception of an important period in tho history, not only of France, hut of the whole world. In a useful preface, tho translators noint out the lessons which this treatise has for Europe today. “The book is full of references to problems with which tho working-class movement is still wrestling, more than seventy years after it was written. That is why it is so fresh, so actual to-day.” The statement is also made, "‘The Eighteenth Brumairo’ is a text-book of unrivalled value for those who are using the lessons of recent history to intensify the revolutionary class-consciousness of tho workers.” Tho translators also remark that of the February days and Ihe demonstration of May If, 1848, were sketchy and frustrate anticipations of the November days in Russia, and the forcible dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolshevists, Louis Bonaparte and tho Societv of December the Tenth may bo regarded as foreshadowings of Mussolini and the Racist Organisation. Tho hook is of interest to all students of sociology and especially to those who delight to discover historical parallels. "\\hat a light,” exclaim tho translators, “is thrown on tho success of the Russian revolution and on the failure of the Italian revolution by tho following passage; ‘While the Parisian proletariat was still gloating over the great prospects opened up bv the revolution, and while the workers were engaged in the earnest discussion of social problems, tho old force* of society had come together, had taken counsel, and had secured unexpected support from tho masses of the nation—from tho peasants and the petty bourgeois.’ ” The conclusion of the whole matter i« that the “petty bourgeois, whether bv birth, occupation, or outlook, are always tools of the reaction, pawns in the capitalistic game,’’ a lesson "which remains ay topical to-day as It was when Marx sent Jt forth on ita voyage across tho Atlantic.”