Napoleon with France

or against France?

Foreword The Bonaparte question is treated here in cold blood. The author of this book is one of those who can write:

- We are neither a coterie, nor a caste, nor a "world". All the varieties of the country and the history of the country share in our friendships. We want it to be, and believe it is good.

A friend, dearest, most eminent, told us around 1904:

- My pretender died in 1878 1 …

His mourning for the little prince did not prevent him from joining the Duke of Orleans when his reason showed him that the interest of the nation was there and was only there. Another founder of Action française, Léon de Montesquiou, would have found family memories very well in Coppée's last poem on the King of Rome:

… He must remember That the poor little one was crying with his arms around his neck Of worthy Menneval by shouting: "Maman Quiou" 2 .

And all of us who are new men, those whose grandparents held neither high war office nor court office,would perhaps exhume, from their old drawers, almost as many Saint Helena medals that Bonapartist chefs collect from their own homes.

I will be allowed to add:

—- This way of thinking and discussing by categories of families and by waves of traditions is absurd. We are what remains of a people that enormous nonsense, accumulated, capitalized, led to the lowest. What we all need, Republicans, Bonapartists or royalists, is to find the conditions of life and the conditions of common strength:

Millions of golden birds, oh future vigor 3 !

We are looking for traditions, yes; but the traditions of power and not of defeat or ruin, the general traditions of our people and not those of our particular families.

He does not argue for agreement, the one who begins by declaring: "I am better than you", "The tradition of mine must prevail over that of yours".

The basics of the nationalist method is to begin by making a clean sweep of preferences of this kind, and to place ourselves at the only useful and practical point of view: that of French interest. From there,one can opt with complete impartiality and, for any reason, without having to sacrifice anything absolutely, or radically from the past. A conventional nephew like the founder of the French Action Henri Vaugeois only had to go back beyond the errors and revolutionary agitations to find in his line only very pure royalists, as were all our French from 1750 or even from 1780.

The movements of our thought are perfectly free. We would have concluded with Bonapartism if this idea seemed to us reconcilable with the national interests which guide us alone. Certain elements wouldhave tempted us. The legend of a Brumaire accomplished by the union of the Institute and the Army is not a bad page; we have more than sympathies for the December coup that imprisoned talkers. But one would have to be very ignorant to believe that this way of leading parliamentary assemblies to the post was invented by the Bonapartes. The authoritarian method is as old as our royalty; Henri IV, Louis XI, Charles VII, Charles V, were not badly able to carry out, in their time, more or less rough police operations. Without counting Louis XIV, whose whip whistled well on a pile of robins!

But here is the difference: the royal coups were useful for something, they ensured order and prosperityfor a long time. Bonapartist coups, or found nothing. That of 1851 brought back, from 1860, to parliamentary and liberal vomiting. That of 1799 created the regime which dismembered the rural family and ruined local life. It is by results that a policy is judged.

We would not be nationalists if we were not sensitive to the splendid military history of the First Empire, to this beautiful French sound of the great titles of Marengo and Austerlitz, of Jena and of Wagram, case where ever to repeat: " Everything national is ours. As a French thing the Emperor is ours. It is ours by Choiseul who acquired his native Corsica, by Brienne where the young officer was educated; it is also ours by the powers of all kinds drawn from a soil which our kings unified, but which they did not create from nothing. By writing it, I remain in the true royalist tradition. Joseph de Maistre rejoiced in the success of the arms of the Revolution and of the Empire, because they were French weapons. What keeps us from doing like him?

Yes, he was a very great general. This is still taught at the Institut d'Action française, but our teachers do not fail to add that this great chef is dead. France can no longer call on its talents. His certain death is as unfortunate for France as was his life as a sovereign who only served him.

He was a man of energy and imagination. But he is dead. He was active, penetrating, quick in his advice, lightning in execution. He is dead. When one crushes his grave with all the adjectives, none would arouse it. He is dead. This man of war held, brilliantly after many others, better than anyone, the sword of France, he is none the less dead and all the rhetoric in the world will not return it to us. The tributes paid to this shining sword are ingredients of patriotism, they pour strength into the heart of each of us; but they would pour a lamentable weakness into it if they made us lose sight of the difference between its Gallic wars, which produce only the golden smoke of glory, and the fruitful wars, the mother wars, the great generative wars which found, consolidate, protect or extend the domain of the fatherland.

After the enormous moral and physical expense represented by so many campaigns, this great man left France smaller than he had found it. Therein lies the national, inexpiable grievance. One can, rightly or wrongly, regret some of the wars of Louis XIV. Case of moral or literary criticism. But Franche-Comté,Flanders and Alsace united to France, the constitution of Spanish independence and neutrality are trophies that remain, lasting compensators of ephemeral evils. One can deplore the misfortunes of the reign of Louis XV: the increase of territory towards the East and in the Mediterranean establishes that, even then, the royalty remained national and continued its old historical program. The splendours of royalty were useful to us. Were the splendours of Bonapartism so? Even in its reverses, the Monarchy will have been able to preserve or reconquer the borders of the fatherland. Did the Bonapartes have thisfaithful protection genius? The kings made France and the emperors defeated it. In two words, as in a hundred, that's the truth.

I A centenary full of oblivion When, on May 5, 1921, the first centenary of the Emperor's death, our Republicans celebrated, willy-nilly, this glory and this mourning, we had to tell them a formidable truth that we will have to tell them again without tiring . Their action, their words, especially those of their words which tend to act, have brought ratifications full of dangers to the principles which have just diminished France and torn Europe apart.

This, without exception, from the Republicans of the right to those of the left.

M. Poincaré abandoned the doctrine of Thiers, the far left disavowed the doctrine of Proudhon, on the points where Proudhon and Thiers supported the doctrine of France; a doctrine which had saved us in the past and which would have saved us from real catastrophes in what was then the future.

Bad sign that this Napoleonic preference to which our Republicans were obstinate! How could they be right against a millennial and happy experience, verified by the counter-tests of 1815, 1870 and the firstdisastrous consequences of the 1919 treaty?

It was difficult to believe that the routine of a Tardieu could succeed where the genius of Bonaparte, served by exceptional circumstances, had failed miserably.

There is, however, some swell.

Mr. Edouard Herriot absolutely wants us to separate man from everything in the work. Admirable man, execrable work; as if one and the other were not standing! Mr. Albert Mathiez 4 wants to oppose the emperor of democracy the dictator of the Republic, to Bonaparte Robespierre; as if Bonapartism and Robespierrism were not strictly equivalent in broad outline of their principles, apart from the circumstances which made the First Consul a Robespierre on horseback, while the lawyer of Arras had only the time and the means of an Emperor on foot. Such distinctions or oppositions feel the cabinet and even the faction.

We will pay more attention to the protest, truly energetic and motivated, that the Positivist Popular Education Society wanted to raise in its turn. This manifesto, to which MM. Corra, Grimanelli, Keufer 5 have affixed their signatures, refers in part to the revolutionary and primitive element of the philosophy of Auguste Comte. However, among other rather curious critical considerations, we invoke the origin of the emperor, born barely a year after the reunion of his province, and thus "a man almost foreign to France", said Auguste Comte, and "born of 'a backward civilization'. The same document also points out the negative result of this brilliant career, which ultimately "left our homeland invaded, diminished, exhausted and long languid".

Others finally say:

- Despite all his genius, Napoleon did not understand that a robust France could not without stretching from the Elbe to the Tiber. All reasonable Frenchmen admit today that there was in this magnificent extension a real excess of political thoughtlessness. Louis XIV had known this error for a moment when he thought of uniting France and Spain under his scepter or that of his grandson. He recovered in time when he consented to the wise renunciations of Philippe V.

The 130 departments of the First Empire were a mistake, even and above all from a national point of view. Error, the successive annexation of so many provinces and kingdoms! A country must be homogeneous and coherent. Its parts must have the habit of holding and living together; one does not improvise this difficult habit for fifteen or twenty million men. As much as it is legitimate that the radiant and peaceful influence of a protective monarchy and a great civilization can gradually

agglomerate around it small countries attracted by affinities of language, race or thoughtful will, as much it is absurd and dangerous to want to impose, sword in hand, a way of living or speaking, a language or a culture.

Much less great men will have made much better leaders.

This one had tired France. He had smashed it. According to her word, she says "phew", like the World. To understand this, it is necessary to refer to certain contemporary testimonies. The young Lamartine, as he dreamed of and reproduced in the Nouvelles confidences , kept the pain very fresh, and also the young Thiers describing, at the head of one of the chapters of his Empire , his native port 6 , formerly king of the Mediterranean and master of the Levant, then crowded with the hustle and bustle of ships that had been rotting there for years, the keel at the quay, like the living corpses of commerce, navigation, the breath of France! The country was slowly dying of economic and civic suffocation, all of its youth was exported to Spain or Russia for wars that no one understood. If anything had been able to kill French patriotism, it was the romantic and revolutionary amplification made by the genius and the demon of the great emperor.

Such grievances are serious. Are they exaggerated?

One could find there certain attenuations of the truth. It was not only for the aftermath of a twenty-year battle that Napoleon exhausted our country; the social history of the nation will be much harder for him, the nineteenth century French suffered from something quite other than its bleeding from the start!

Napoleon's genius filmmaker brought into custom and into life everything that delirious individualism of the eighteenth century entailed viable and thus mortal. The French birth rate dates from its Civil Code. What he massacred of human beings is of little consequence to those whom he prevented from being born. It is understandable that in a day of abandonment and deep sincerity he allowed himself to be entrusted to the Marquis de Girardin 7 , after the famous exclamation "Rousseau et moi", this judgment of high philosophy:

- It would have been better if we hadn't existed.

The germs it lays down in our internal politics are those of destruction. Outside also, it is from him that the boost given to all the national impulses comes. Through him, these disturbances are promoted to thedignity of principles. French citizens who want to get a clear idea of this serious subject will do well to refer to the first of the great books of Jacques Bainville. Published in bookshops in 1906, composed of studies written in previous years, his Bismarck and France prepares for the motivated conclusions of Napoleon who is from 1931.

This Bismarck and France already shows the essentials on German and French relations, as they were altered by the Napoleon. For the old favor shown to Prussia, the hostility to Austria, with which our Treaty of Versailles was felt, had been inspired in the nephew by all the traditions of the uncle. If the vanquished of Sedan did not open his eyes to the obvious experience of his own ruin, it is (he admits it himself, in the brochure Gricourt 8 analyzed by Bainville), because Napoleon I spiritual infallible presumed, had removed from the map of Germany "two hundred fifty-three independent states!" As Bainville says, "the will of Wilhelmshöhe 9 repeated the will of Saint Helena". Inseparable conceptions: “The Napoleonic system suffers all the names: we can call it liberal, revolutionary, cosmopolitan, humanitarian, idealist. Europe, the real Europe, that of balance and order, protests that it has never been European. Its principles and its fatal consequences show enough that he had nothing French. »

Bainville adds in a precious note on the Cloud of "Nationalities" taken for the Goddesses of a new world:

Proudhon objected with reason: "Who can pride himself on never satisfying these wishes?" By laying down the principle, you make nationalities insatiable. All of them will raise their claims in turn. There will no longer be tranquility for Europe or for the world. »

And Proudhon prophesied that the principle of nationalities, supposedly humanitarian, would cause torrents of blood to flow in Poland and in the Balkans (see his brochure If the Treaties of 1815 ceased to exist?, Response to the imperial discourse of Auxerre).

The Principle therefore hurts a European, planetary and human interest.

The French interest is nonetheless bruised:

The fall of the old regime marked the end of this prudent and wise policy, constantly followed by the French monarchy, which had consisted in putting the German colossus to sleep, dividing it, weakening it, profiting from religious quarrels, territorial divisions, princely rivalries, lack of money, the backward state of civilization. The wars of the Revolution and the Empire are glorious. It would be absurd to disdain the luster that they cast on the French nation. But in fact of positive result, they had that to unite what it was necessary to continue to keep divided, to awaken what it would have been better to let sleep. Napoleon committed recklessness on recklessness and nonsense on nonsense. He did not even profit from his victories, did not know how to break the Hohenzollern dynasty or to immediately carve up his territory when he held it at his discretion. The work of the electors of Brandenburg and of the great Frederick could be destroyed after 1806. However, Napoleon contented himself with diminishing it and humiliating Frédéric-Guillaume. And what is more, he formed, he rounded off with his hands, near Prussia, other kingdoms which, simplifying the Germanic chaos, were to make unity easier when the time came. These are the real consequences of the Revolution in Germany.

The Revolution and Napoleon. Because, absolutely, it's all one.

Bainville also says:

Bismarck, founder of German unity, clearly discerned the service that the Napoleonic intervention rendered to the work of the Hohenzollerns. One could believe that the emperor had forever destroyed Prussia that he held under his boot the dynasty of which he had the power to overthrow the throne. On the contrary, it opened up unexpected destinies for Prussia and Germany. Bismarck testified to this by pronouncing these words, on October 31, 1892, on the market square in Jena:

- Without the collapse of the past, the revival of German national sentiment in the Prussian country, of that national sentiment which originates from an era of deep shame and foreign domination, would not have been possible.

This is the true political moral of the centenary of Jena. And Bismarck's words will be singularly supplemented by this passage from the Memoirs of a Soldier of Napoleon. The brave Marbot 10 , an excellent horseman, a valiant courier and a great saber-giver, was not a first-rate intelligence. However,equipped with common sense, he judged his master's policy and measured all its imprudence. It was therefore Marbot, a horse and bivouac man, who wrote this in his memoirs :

"Although I was still very young at that time, I thought that Napoleon was committing a great mistake in reducing the number of small principalities in Germany. Indeed, in the old wars against France, the eight hundred princes of the Germanic body could not act together. On the first setback, the thirty-two sovereigns, having agreed, united against France, and their coalition with Russia overthrew the emperorNapoleon, who was thus punished for not having followed the old policy of the kings of France. »

I believe that the final result of the brilliant campaign of 1806 cannot be said or summed up better.

And all the foreign policy of the Empire.

And all that of the Revolution.

And all that inherited from the Revolution and the Empire Wilson, Tardieu, Loucheur and their comrades; for our misfortune!

Our soldiers fought with the blood, the heart, the patriotism and the impetus of eternal France.

Our negotiators had only the ideas of a fragmented and transitory France, dissociated and brainless; ideas that reflect our decline for over a hundred years.

From our point of view, which is the national point of view, should we minus sign any Napoleonic commemoration?

No: Napoleon had received the science and military art of old France, and his fiery soul carried this rich and powerful capital to the sublime degree of incandescence.

His Victories are at the "Museum", as Bonald said; is ! they did not remain fruitless there.

They had first of all this fruitfulness of glory which it would be miserable to neglect. They have earned us a positive prestige which has long covered very large deficits. And finally, these learned and beautiful victories, as we have said, like masterpieces of a reason that passion multiplied, aroused students who became masters; these masters, the great defenders, the direct saviors of the country.

Foch was the pupil of Napoleon Bonaparte, that is what the country cannot forget.

It has a duty to take into account all the wounds that the Napoleonic idea and fact bore it; but the recognition must persist towards the brilliant military spirit of the Campaign of Italy, of the Campaign of France, works very useless in themselves, but which, after a century, will have been used, on the twoMarnes, to save altars and homes, freedoms and flags.

There is another reason not to exclude us from the national choir; it is our piety for an ideal France to which Napoleon is not useless and which his image decorates, which his name glorifies. I think of the French of our distant colonies, and I imagine those who live in London, New York, Buenos Aires, Canton, Yokohama, all looking in the writings from France for any sound that is first French. They are no more than us imperialists. But between newspapers and newspapers, between writers and writers, they distinguish the defenders, the servants of what they call "the great France" and its enemies. Well ! these French people are like the old historian Victor Duruy; they suffer in their hearts, when they are told too badly of Napoleon or Louis XIV.

All the different just must be established between the great Capetian, heir to Richelieu, who left a kingdom increased by four vast provinces and who bequeathed to us, for two centuries, complete security on the side of the Pyrenees; high figure of the classic national and royal genius, who led for more than sixty years the broadest harmony of all history, and the romantic demi-god whose greatness is made of the consumption of the flesh of a people, I isolated, I devouring who had to devour himself, in accordance with laws stronger than him, but who left on earth a large pyre with beautiful flames, dyed in three colors, in which crisscross, among confused voices, the most magnificent lessons in international fencing, Tactics and Strategy that ignorance or ignorance of Politics alone had sterilized.

Let's make these differences. Let's measure these distances. But let us not be insensitive to the terms thus compared.

Knowing the hierarchy of magnitudes does not destroy any of their terms. Feeling the difference in usefulness of two great chefs does not remove their values, but fixes and registers them.

France must know that Napoleon used it and that Louis XIV served it; but before that of these two heroes whom she judges and must judge inferior to the other, she must also repeat the impartial word, the national word of equity:

- Again, I find it great.

II A Napoleonic error Mr. J.-M. Bourget, military specialist, is the author of a very amusing book, Si Napoléon in 1914… dialogue of the dead between Marshal Foch and the Emperor 11 .

For some three hundred pages, the god of war inquires; he questions, turns, turns, apostrophe the victor of 1918, who looks like an apprentice , as Mathurin Régnier says, before this lord and this master. We can imagine that I will not intervene between the beautiful shadows of Art, Science and Military History, and I stick to the very lively pleasure that give ten chronicles dialogued on all these successive themes of the battle borders or the race to the sea, the victory of the Marne, the assaults of Verdun or the battle of Foch. But, in the last chapter, "the bitterness of glory", which concerns the misuse of a victorious war, it will not be forbidden to look for my little quarrel.

The Emperor's tone towards the Field Marshal was unpleasant from the beginning to the end. The author himself notices it. He did his best to give, as best we could, to our contemporary, a small advantage on the question of railways which seems, in fact, to have hampered as much as served the strategists of 1914–1918, and before which the great man seems to admit that he could have been embarrassed. We would have been less! This is not what I blame him, or Mr. Bourget ... But let's come to the very curious passage of the coincidences of the Civil and the Military:

Foch - … I envied you, sire. I have always admired you. But on the hill where we began to work on the peace treaty, I envied you.

Napoleon - And why then?

Foch - In a peace treaty there are political considerations and also military considerations. You have always been able to argue with each other. With us, the former have taken over. Because the seconds were also treated by civilians unfamiliar with them.

Napoleon - I cannot understand that figures who call themselves statesmen neglect military questions. They would blush to appear to ignore anything about finance or political economy. But strategy is a reserved area, they think, where it is not good to venture out.

Foch - Why, then, did the peace negotiators not want to listen more to the soldiers? I have been given anaudience solemnly. I only found closed faces, sewn mouths. I was not honored to discuss my conclusions.They listened to me, then they threw me out.

Napoleon - What? The representatives of France let that happen? Didn't they see the resources that yourintervention brought them? The intervention of the commander-in-chief of the Allied armies. What the hell ! It was an incomparable means of pressure.

So many "incomparable means of pressure" have been neglected by the authors of the Treaty! Neither Clemenceau, Poincaré, nor Tardieu even thought of relying on the public opinion of the French nation, when even such a royalist begged them. "We alone", they said, "and that is enough", even if it means showing what their sufficiency was insufficient!

Let's go back to our dead . The emperor continues to win every time:

Foch - See how the situation of France has been decreasing since the peace! how many concessions she has made! how many amputations she suffered in her rights! We had to endure everything without saying

anything, or almost.

Napoleon - But, Monsieur le Maréchal, why didn't you say anything? Above all, why did you do nothing?

Foch - And what could I do?

Napoleon - Simply impose your ideas.

Foch - Impose them? How? 'Or' What ? A coup, perhaps?

Napoleon - You said it. When I reminded you earlier that I had put the ancestors of your parliamentarians to reason, you replied that I had victories behind me. You also had them. And you did not act. Complaints are useless.

Duriuscule! Even hard! But I have heard that Marshal Foch has a bad temper. Has he changed his moodamong the Dead? His response would have been easy, on the poor quality of the politico-military education given by the Emperor, on the bad politico-military traditions which date from him.

Since Napoleon, almost all French generals have been of the opinion of settling the question of force between Germany and its victor, by means of military conventions. General Bonnal 12 , at the start of the war, still taught that it was the satisfactory solution: optime! Foch, after the victory, hesitated between such and such a military regime to impose on Germany! Not one of these illustrious specialistswho saw that this type of solution did not stand up, that the best was worthless , that the experience of the conventions imposed on Prussia by the Emperor after Jena (after Jena!) Demonstrated this peremptorily , Prussian politics having gnawed and destroyed, with extremely simple ruses, the whole series of conditions of the Napoleonic treaty, because they were military and not political .

But, for many military leaders, what comes from the Emperor remains enveloped in a kind of golden mist, smoke of glory and victories which dazzles them, to the point of blinding them even on the pointswhere the method of the god has most completely failed.

There was a principle of reason long before Napoleon; to know that, in Germany, an element is more dangerous than the military element, and it is the political element. It was necessary to attack, in 1806, the Prussian political entity, as it was necessary to attack, in 1918, the German political entity. Napoleon had covered this truth with such disdain that he had not hesitated to simplify, to unify, to strengthen the German political apparatus, against the wise efforts of fragmentation established by the treaties of Westphalia; we can say of our victorious leaders that they copied their master in this. They wanted the Rhine, with reason, as they wanted Alsace and Lorraine. They did not see that neither the Rhine nor Alsace would really be theirs until a certain degree of political power had been left to the unitary German Reich.

Semi-divine specialists, or even fully divine, if you will, but specialists, the Emperor and his most famous disciples have lost sight, in every matter, of the general axiom which dominates military, maritime, economic applications : Politics first.

And the disdained axiom takes revenge in a way that manifests, in all clarity, the very objective conclusion and, also, very old France, very Richelieu, very Mazarin, of current experience; Germany's political recovery envelops and stimulates its ambitions in all orders, fleet and armies, finances and diplomacy.

Fools, schemers, pranksters, sheep, will say what they say: no forehand to German unity would have been, in 1918, "possible", what they know nothing about, what they n'ont pas la mesure, et tous les faits

connus, ou reconnus depuis, viennent établir la possibilité du point contesté.

To someone who spoke of this alleged impossible on April 26, 1930, I happened to show by the newspapers of the day and those of the day before that after twelve years, Germany was still at debate in the inextricable difficulties of its unification; an article in L'Homme libre , signed "Gaulois", said it in full. And the Weekly Review thus recounted the German crisis of October 1918 when the authorities to obtain the Emperor's resignation had been made in the name of the danger run by the unit:

Scheidemann 13 having suggested imposing his abdication on William II, Erzberger 14 protested with all his might. On which Scheidemann energetically justified his view:

"Abdication has become," he cried, "a historic necessity." Southern Germany is unanimous in demanding it. The peasants of Bavaria are already roaming the countryside shouting: Los von Preussen!William II has a rigorous duty to bow to the popular verdict which condemns him.

" Los von Preussen. Separation from Prussia! Unit break! Not a critical hour when these ideas were not agitated in Germany. Let us therefore leave the question of possibilities; the way has not even been attempted! We lacked a statesman and a state doctrine to make us think about it.

Ours followed the Napoleonic tradition. It was possible, after Jena, to defeat a state as artificial as Prussia. It was possible, after the flight of William II, to exploit in Bavaria, in Hanover, on the Rhine, inLusatia, the most diverse feelings (revolutionaries, legitimists, Catholics) against the unity of the Reich.However, we did not want it. Thus Napoleon did not want to destroy the unity of Prussia. He thought he was doing better than his predecessors, and he hurt more. That its failure has served as a lesson neither to our civilians nor to our soldiers, it is prodigious.

II Bonaparte's diplomacy Albert Vandal 15 knows very well the history of the relations of our France and Austria. As we will see from an old fragment, Albert Vandal was quite right with some of our most pronounced tastes and our most lively disgusts. He thus collaborated, unwittingly perhaps, but not without knowing it, in the general rehabilitation of old France, its government, its traditions or its political mores, even in the most decried times.

We can never say enough what harm France, considered in its external interests, the historians and the polemicists of the revolutionary school. Their fault, their error was to bring, in their way of conceiving and treating international questions, preoccupations of internal policy, the spirit and the dogmas of theirparty.

In hatred of ultramontane Austria, they continually praised Protestant Prussia, daughter and pupil of the philosopher king. This blinding conception led them to erect anachronism into a system. Because theAustria of Charles V and Ferdinand, whose states alone formed a coalition, had weighed heavily on our borders, they concluded that Austria remained in front of us the traditional rival, the enemy of all the time, on which the blows were to strike. It is in this sense that we learned history in college, and it is under the influence of this hallucination that generations have lived. However, since the beginning of the18th century century, Austria separated from Spain, contained in Italy, counterbalanced in Germany, no longer threatened us, and an agreement with this power on the return, but still imposing, would have served us to repress young and dangerous greed .

In the aftermath of the Treaties of Utrecht, after the liquidation of the Spanish heritage, Torcy 16wrote, with a marvelous foreknowledge of the future, that the rivalry of the houses of Bourbon and Habsburg should henceforth be relegated to the number of historical facts, which the deeply modified situation

called for new combinations. It is true that French royalty did not first understand this prophetic word. In 1741, during the war of the Austrian succession, Louis XV anticipated the fault of Napoleon III on theeve of Sadowa; letting himself be taken in by the advances of Frederick II, who knew how to velvety his iron hand, he helped Prussia to enlarge at the expense of Austria. Marshal Noailles had said to him, however, this profound word: "Sire, beware of states whose fortune is not made." »

We have often taken the trouble to specify our conception of royal errors. The hereditary prince is certainly not infallible. But, by position, by function, he is more interested than anyone in correcting hisfaults as soon as he has discovered them, an act contrary to the national good also being an act contraryto his own good.

Napoleon III, who allowed the creation of German unity, had acted as a humanitarian philosopher, a lieutenant of the European Revolution, a romantic statesman, not a prince, nor a Frenchman. Louis XV's fault was an accident, born of a material error; the fault of Napoleon III, a dynastic system, born of its own illegitimacy. The assimilation of two such different facts is the only point that is subject to criticism in this just page by Albert Vandal, quickly corrected in these terms:

French royalty nevertheless had the merit of acknowledging its error and it tried to repair it, when it made an alliance with Marie-Thérèse in 1756 to stop Prussia and curb the ambitions of its king. This agreement, concluded under the principality of M me of Pompadour, was qualified by the revolutionary school policy alcove . It must be said, however, the Pompadour advisers, Bernis and Choiseul, were rightagainst Voltaire, against philosophers and encyclopedists, against these masters of opinion who organized a colossal claim in favor of Frederick and Catherine II upsetting Europe to the detriment of our traditional interests. The most prominent representatives of the French spirit then made themselves the great enemies of French power.

After 89, in spite of Valmy, in spite of the Brunswick manifesto, the policies of the Revolution were constantly oriented on the side of Prussia. The prejudice was such that the day Bonaparte was awarded consular power, he gave the troops of Paris, as the first order, these two names Frederick II and Dugommier .

In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand had the good sense to return to the tradition which he had gathered from the lips of Choiseul under the shade of Chanteloup. France was defeated, exhausted; however, he did not hesitate to link up with Austria and England to protect Saxony from the Prussian voracity. He believed that the best way to gain respect when you are not the strongest is to be the most honest. The event of the Hundred Days and the demands of public opinion almost immediately brought our politics into other directions.

At Louis-Philippe, the Austrian alliance was thought from behind the head; the mutual prejudices between the two countries made it impossible.

The Crimean War seemed to offer the opportunity to carry it out. Drouyn de Lhuys 17, who had inherited from Talleyrand the tradition received from Choiseul, the tradition of the wise opposed to the tradition of error, saw in the affairs of the East a ground of rapprochement with Austria and a means of fixing France to a policy of European conservation. After the Peace of Paris, in 1856, if Napoleon III had the courage to stand up as a defender of these treaties of Vienna which guaranteed the security of our borders by organizing the fragmentation of Germany and Italy, he had endeavored to maintain this Austrian power which remained the keystone of the old European edifice, he would probably have restored normal destinies to France and, in any case, he would have spared him disasters. The nephew then had the more beautiful part than the uncle didhad never had at the time of its most prestigious power. Napoleon III had not overcome Europe, but he was persuading it, and everyone would have bowed to his moderation, if he had been able to show, after Napoleon the Great, Napoleon the Wise.

The emperor suffered the fatality of his origins , and our policy fell back into the revolutionary rut. We

went to Solferino for the benefit of Italy, we let Prussia go to Sadowa and assemble Germany. A man I knew said to Napoleon III before 1866 “Sire, we are still talking to you about the house in Austria against which Richelieu was fighting; this Austrian house is no longer in Vienna, it is in Berlin ”. But the advanced party, its newspapers, its speakers, the major part of the intellectuals, remaining under theempire of the Protestant and revolutionary prejudice, continued to exalt Prussia at the expense of Austria, a force of resistance and conservation; they were the unconscious accomplices of our downfall. Sedan was not only the result of immediate faults, faults of government, faults of the opposition; it was the culmination of a whole century of revolutionary politics.

Albert Vandal's testimony is very clear and extremely serious. Sedan was "the culmination of a whole century of revolutionary politics". Emperor Napoleon III "suffered the fate of his origins". There is a "revolutionary rut". There is also a "tradition of wisdom as opposed to the tradition of error". Drouyn de Lhuys had it from Talleyrand, who had inherited it from Choiseul, who himself had it from Noailles,from Torcy and these from the firmest and most intelligent disciples of Richelieu; venerable procession of the best practitioners in the history of France! When "the demands of opinion", as Albert Vandal still says, are unleashed against national salvation, we must give a memory and ask for advice from these great shadows.

IV Napoleon's genius and the Napoleonic question An illustrated newspaper has staged in an antique dialogue two of our famous contemporaries, whom I prefer not to name. The extracts from it surprise me very much.

Until proof to the contrary, I will never believe that two great Frenchmen could have spoken five minutes of Napoleon as one would do Shakespeare or Baudelaire, that is to say in himself, without studying it by compared to France.

Certainly, man is intoxicating. There's the man, said Marshal Lyautey. And on that, we would not dry up: immense memory, genius of organization, critical mind and psychologist, working power, extent and spring of will, the subject is inexhaustible and, if we exhausted it, it would remain the charm, the romantic charm, of a unique career by the abrupt savagery of the starting point, the vertigo of the apogee, the distance from the point of fall. Combine the prestige of a military and civil royalty with warm and vibrant humanity, familiarity, passions, the flame, the smoke of the bitter demon. We can reason and reason about it indefinitely.

But after all, that's not what it is!

This man held the fate of our fathers and ours in his hands.

He owned France.

What did he do with it?

With all his magnificent gifts, what has earned him for good, for evil?

If the question is asked in a public place, it receives quite a number of members who testify to the progress of French opinion. It is rare, however, that a sighing voice does not rise:

- Ah! if only we had someone like him ...

And this seems to go without saying, so much so that everyone, or almost everyone, agrees. Another sign of progress, however, is hesitation. Not because of despotism. We don't care. Authority for the order of things promises such goods that everyone is ready to sacrifice an especially theoretical freedom to it. The authority of such a genius seems unanswerable. What makes the audience pensive

and tempers the enthusiasm is the management problem. Govern either, but to drive; drive where? Or ?This is the problem ! Dictatorship, but in what sense? For which projects? And as for the dictator of 1799–1815, there is, in the public, this confused feeling that his record, if it shines, shines quite false.

The balance sheet shines false, and its splendor covers a disaster. This is what it is important to demonstrate without respite for general education. No Frenchman should speak or write of Napoleon without having in his ear the famous word of Lord Castlereagh 18 at the time of the Treaties of 1815. While the Prussian wanted to finish dismembering us, the Englishman replied phlegmatically:

- Leave it, leave it, France is quite weakened by its inheritance system.

It is to the consular regime, to the institutions of the year VIII, that it owes the double scourge of centralization and depopulation, this slowing down of local life which anemia civic spirit, this fragmentation of homes which dries up our families and killed in their germs millions of individuals, possible French, unborn French and who were not born because the conditions of being were denied to them by this code of laws of which Renan spoke, made for an ideal citizen " being born a child found and dying unmarried ".

No Frenchman should speak or write of Napoleon without realizing that the worst violence done to the body and soul of the fatherland by the Constituent Assembly and the Convention, either administrative centralization or departmental division, could only last thanks to the energetic hand of the First Consul.

No French person should speak or write of Napoleon without remembering that he was the first author of the concentration and unification of Germany.

A general policy which, having won its battles, loses its wars and which ultimately paralyzes a country, the depopulated, gives its most formidable neighbors the means to grow and prosper at its expense, deserves no other flowers or crowns than the funeral garlands that are placed on tombs. French people may continue to have fever in the name of Napoleon alone. France, which it left smaller than it received, must say to itself that in the last analysis this sublime spirit functioned in the reverse of our interests.

There is no need to judge or condemn intentions or feelings . There is to see the results.

Let us take an example capable of clarifying everything. Napoleon had received from the Revolution and also from the Monarchy, let us say from the nature of our territories and our coasts, serious difficulties with England. The Revolution, by its disorder and its waste, by the prior destruction of the war fleet, had lost the game; the Monarchy had, on the contrary, supported it for a long time, powerfully, with ups and downs no doubt, but the last engagements had been favorable to it, and its warfor the Independence of America was a happy revenge of its war of Seven Years, which moreover our official historians forget to teach their sad readers.

No sooner had he put some of the powerful means of the Monarchy on his side, Napoleon wanted to return to the great days of Louis XVI and the bailiff of Suffren. It's a fact ; he couldn't.

He could not have a fleet which rocked the English fleet. He could not win definitively without a navy. The seafarers chased him and defeated him on their continent. The two names of Aboukir and Trafalgarmark the main road of Waterloo.

Triple term of a just liberation effort, and three times unhappy.

We are by no means those who reduce all of history, all of psychology, all of criticism to the question of success or failure. But in political history success is the judge. If the theorist is to be right, the practitioner must succeed. The Napoleon practitioner, perhaps the greatest practitioner, failed.

A sign that the enterprise (traditional in France) that he had honored with his mighty toil, was inspired

by false principles or conducted in reverse of the national sense that the vulgar attributes to him.

I will explain myself by asking a question.

Or Napoleon made war on the English as a disinterested artist, and he wielded this great thing, the interests of a people, with the simple desire to play it, a great player who had forgotten to say: "I have ahundred thousand annuity men. »

Or, as Jacques Bainville established, without possible reply, he was a prisoner of the conquest of Belgium operated by the Jacobins and that England felt incompatible with his own safety, and then the robespierriste and the "roussien", the romantic and revolutionary ideologist who was in him, however attentive he was to the law of real things, demanded too much from France and violated it in line with fundamental principles.

Just one.

To make war on the English, we had to try to improvise a navy. You don't improvise a navy. The experience was made by another romantic, William II. Matter rejects the work, stronger than the strongest worker. It has been seen, will be seen again. Men will have to tell themselves.

All this is explanation and, to a certain degree, conjecture. The fact remains. It is huge. The exemplary and monumental fact is the failure of the prodigious Napoleonic labor. It is its sterility or its general malfeasance for the fatherland.

Generality which includes the intellectual and technical exception already marked.

Studied with disinterestedness by a foreigner like Jomini 19 , then by the Prussian staff, finally penetrated and dug thoroughly by the masters of our military science who were to be the victors of 1914–18, the Napoleonic conception has revealed the secret of '' a maneuver whose purity, simplicity and classic speed inevitably awaken all the great memories of masterpieces of art. Bonaparte's spirit, nourished and imbued with our war traditions, transformed and perpetuated them.

As we have seen, in a certain sense, the country was therefore saved by it; but it was outside his personality, his will, and dare I say, almost outside his popular imagery, because if the serious studies ofBonaparte's campaigns were very thorough in 1914, it was no longer the same of his worship in the country.

The young men of Barrès, who belonged to the generation of 1890, went to ask for their exciting life at the tomb of the Emperor.

The young men of 1914 no longer thought of it.

L'Action française formed the whole beautiful race of its young warriors without having to speak to them especially about the imperial legend or the revolutionary legend, Valmy or Marengo.

The fervors of national sentiment were drawn from otherwise vast and deep sources, which the names of Bouvines and Denain sufficiently characterize. This youth had believed us. She considered the old Napoleonicism unhealthy. Not that it should be prohibited at its dose and at the desired point. Everything serves, or can, or should serve. But the golden cyanide useful to photographers does not deserve to be spread on our bread.

Lamartine is perhaps one of our poets who best lives the judgment to be rendered on the emperor when he wrote the famous verse, rectified since:

And you, plagues of God, who knows if genius is not one of your virtues 20 ?

Napoleon is conceived in terms worthy of him only outside the framework of this French or European interest from which it is necessary to judge him severely. How to speak, for a scourge of God, virtue or humanity, patriotism or national law? It must be seen as a way of cosmic free force, to which the gamesof destruction and construction mattered in their mode, not in their result. Kind of missionary of paternal Chaos. Armed, booted Apostle of Democracy.

In an interesting study given formerly to the Review of the week , on "Napoleon and the empire of the sea", Lacour-Gayet 21 reported that one of the officers seconded to Corfu from the army of Italy had founded a club Constitutional for the use of which he wrote egalitarian reasonings in the taste of this one: "At the entry and the exit of the life, we are equal. It's well worth arguing about the interval! " Theinterval, that's life. Philosophically, Life is little. It is the one thing that cannot be overlooked in Politics.

But democracy neglects it, because it is foreign to this policy. The Corfu philosopher was right in his point of view. Democracy is the cemetery. Unus interitus hominum et jumentorum , said the Hebrew moralist 22 .

By lying in the tomb of millions of men, by drying up the natural sources of existence, by organizing a strictly individualist and egalitarian conception of civil life, by preparing outside and inside all the conditions of a little France , by Resulting, after twenty years of struggles, in fact reducing it , this greatman of action will have perfectly illustrated the circle in which is called to turn this doctrine of nationaland social suicide that Rousseau and Robespierre flourish: the politics of Death .

We can add to this background all the embroideries of the word and the image. Let's celebrate France Christ of the Nations or compare Saint Helena to the pyre of Hercules, but if the problem of French politics includes the art of life and the prosperity of the French state, revolutionary or Napoleonic democracy has nothing to do with this great art.

V Napoleon and the Restoration The best way to complete Napoleon's political image to understand it may be to add to justified and deserved criticism the picture of what a less brilliantly gifted but much better placed Prince did after him: his successor, Louis XVIII.

The difficult mission of the King of France was to repair by peace the ruins of war and by order the disorders of the revolution. Lest we expose ourselves to the grievance of bias. Let us quote the page, now classic, of Marshal Lyautey in his praise, at the French Academy, of the Bonapartist historian Henry Houssaye 23 :

It is customary when talking about the treaties which ended the wars of the Revolution and the Empire, to speak only of the treaties of 1815. We too often forget, it seems to me, that there had been first the treaty of 1814…

The treaty of 1815 is the ransom of the Hundred Days.

It is therefore the treaty of 1814 that must be examined in order to fairly judge the conditions in which France, in short, pulled herself out of these twenty years of wars and revolutions, and in which seemed to strike a balance European. After the war, so completely lost, could we really win peace better?

The Allies had entered Paris intoxicated with success, eager for revenge and reprisals, their demands allready. Of course, the Prussians, moreover contained by the generous moderation of Alexander, spoke

only of fragmentation.

And yet, by the treaty of May 30, 1814, we returned to our former borders, those of the 1 st January 1792, with increases that were far from negligible, Savoy, Landau, Saarbrücken. We kept the treasures and trophies won over Europe. we did not pay war indemnity, and, less than two months after the capitulation of Paris, the last foreign soldier had left French soil.

It was because a great historical and moral force was there: the king of France, the son of the Race who,for almost nine centuries, had formed piece by piece the national domain, so identified with France that their very names merge. While everywhere else, without exception, the surnames of the dynasties, all imported, were distinct from those of the country, she was the house of France. It was his patronymic name, the name of its founders, Hugues, Duke of France, Robert, Count of Paris, and these were not courtesy titles, but the name of their own domain. From the banks of the Seine, in the most continuous ofdesigns pursued under the worst reigns themselves patiently rounding the territory, this breed had made France, carrying the limits, century by century, to the Alps, to the Pyrenees,in the two seas, eyes now fixed on the only natural border that remained to be reached: the Rhine.

And it is by this tenacious and continuous toil that it had formed this State of twenty-five million inhabitants, the most unified, the only unified one that existed in Europe, the most coherent, the best administered even, despite the abuses that no one misunderstands and that the march of time was bound to reform, and it bequeathed to the Revolution, with the royal army, a whole set of organized forces which, of course, greatly helped it stand up to Europe ...

The king is Louis XVIII…

Let us think of what would have happened in great disarray, when there was no longer either government or organized force, if there had not been someone to intervene between France disarmed and the victors, talk to them as equals; what did I say ? of all the superiority of his race.

Admittedly, Louis XVIII did not know much about interior France, but he knew Europe superiorly. And that may not be to be despised, since it was with Europe that we were negotiating. He was there, moreover, singularly helped by the minister whom he had the wisdom to choose and whom he knew how to trust, the negotiator par excellence, Talleyrand. Again, is there not a legend revision to do? One of those whom your Company is most proud of, Albert Sorel 24 , was attached to it, and the thought which is inspired is entirely national. As he writes: “Talleyrand's public history is a part of ours; all that raisesin him the statesman elevates the state he served. »

If, at the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand never stopped negotiating in good French, it was because he was a great European. He had a deep feeling that ensuring Europe a lasting balance was the best way toguarantee France's security. It was in this spirit that he entered Congress, and, if I dare use that expression, that he "maneuvered" it with superior skill.

Prevent the strong from becoming too powerful, maintain a balance of power among all which, while guaranteeing peace, would ensure France, alongside fragmented Germany, an influence all the more effective as it is more moderating, such were the directions traced by the instructions of September 1814,composed under the direct inspiration of Louis XVIII. "In Germany," they said (in a passage that today it is certainly not without interest to reread), it is Prussia that must be prevented from dominating by opposing its influence with contrary influences. The physical constitution of this monarchy made of ambition a kind of necessity. Any pretext is good for him. No scruples stop him. Convenience is his right.»

As soon as the Congress opened, Talleyrand took a stand. As he invoked public law "What is public law doing here?" Cried the Prussian Humboldt 25 .

"You are there," replied Talleyrand.

And the secretary of Congress, Gentz 26 , wrote:

- Talleyrand's intervention furiously upset our plans.

The object which the king and his minister proposed above all was to open the breach through which France could return to Europe and dissolve the coalition formed against it. They achieved this goal by concluding this secret treaty of January 3, 1815 between France, England and Austria, the latter power having to serve as a counterweight and support against Prussian ambitions.

It is certainly not to insult Napoleon's epic grandeur to do justice to those who worked to save France from the consequences of his fall. Under various labels, there is only one France. Don't deny it. As Albert Vandal, the good traditional Frenchman who honors me today with his sponsorship, said here 27 “By a sad singularity, our country is the only one which has abhorred its past and which, having behind it the most glorious history of the world, take pride in dating only yesterday or the day before yesterday… ”

There were many reasons for writing these words at a time when the French did not love each other 28 .

The French, who had loved each other during the epic days of 1914-1918, began to fall in love again. Itdoesn't help their business in the world. But if this disarray is their law, why do they not understand it! What do they draw from it, the political and practical conclusion! Let them imitate their wise ancestors!Let a hereditary specialist, chained by his egoism to the public interest, discharge them from a daily concern whose experience shows them decidedly a little too incapable!

VI From Napoleon to Lenin, or the nerve of revolutions The Centenary of May 5, 1821 could be useful if the living of 1921 found there a subject of meditation capable of clarifying their destiny, that of their fathers and their nephews.

The sign of Napoleon corresponds to the fact of the establishment of a new regime in our old country. The Emperor, the First Consul, consolidated the spirit of the revolution which, without him, would probably have vanished like a bad dream. The violent energy and the deep cunning of this vast genius succeeded in making possible and lasting a system of administration which it is no exaggeration to call unnatural. Before him, before the Revolution which engendered it and which in its turn regenerated, France was governed by one; but it was regulated, it was administered by the diversity of customs and laws specific to each of the communities that composed it.

The monarchy introduced a general minimum which was necessary; and, from time to time, she added to it, at variable doses, what was suitable for each moment. This administrative monarchy therefore created uniform authority without unduly destroying the peculiarities of the past. Each party having organized as it pleased had its quota of franchises and natural autonomy claimed by the territory and the race; configuration of the present, movements of the past.

Families, workshops, parishes, boroughs, villages, companies, provinces, bodies and orders of state, these were living units, between which there was no equality, but which enjoyed magnificent liberties. It was not without wrinkles and abuse. But against abuse and crumpling, there was a scale of natural remedies and constant appeals that resulted in the king's officers, his counsels, the king himself.

Thus the individuals were surrounded by solid communities which supervised them; the strength of these frameworks, which were sometimes too stiff, was due to the fact that they had to contain singularly energetic and original personalities. The possible excess was, in turn, tempered by the existence and development of a police force, a justice system, a state magistracy, which, interested in the maintenance of executives, were even more so. to the protection of the beings who lived there.

We will not write anything excessive by saying that this system, at once one and plural, comprising a high degree of social vitality and personal defenses, was susceptible of indefinite improvements.

He could even perfect himself outside of the will to progress that sometimes animates men, through thegame of ventilation and the selections of history.

A reign, a generation, a century could give the advantage to the royal control, under the empire of necessities such as great wars or sharp interior tremors. Another age, another regime could tip the scales on the side of the genitor and tutelary organizations. Without achieving perfection, which is not of this world, one could reasonably count on the duration of the double element of this harmony.

Revolutionary disease arose. It could have been just a crisis quickly wiped out. Once again, the genius, the violence, the passion and the will of the Napoleonic commanders caused a theory, a system, a view of the mind to which things did not comply, to be put into practice and to run in use. France remained crippled and all withered.

This last point is so certain that, after the secular oscillation, the natural course brings us back along theentire line preceding the institutions of Year VIII. In the words of Mr. Gaston Morin 29 , the law, day by day, rebelled against the Code. Reason: you had to live well!

But, without the iron hand of the First Consul, beneficial for one day, harmful for a century, evolution would have been ten times faster. A famous page by Renan has shown the difference between the old France and the new. You always have to come back to it:

By keeping only one inequality, that of fortune, by leaving only one giant, the State, and thousands of dwarfs; by creating a powerful center, Paris, in the middle of an intellectual desert, the province; by transforming all social services into administrations, by stopping the development of the colonies and thus closing the only way by which modern states can escape the problems of socialism, the Revolution created a nation whose future is not very secure, a nation where wealth alone has its price, where nobility can only fall. A code of laws which seems to have been drawn up for an ideal citizen, born a found child and dying unmarried; a code that makes everything life, where children are a disadvantage for the father, where all collective and perpetual work is prohibited,where the moral units, which are the true ones, are dissolved at each death, where the wise man is the selfish one who arranges to have the least duties possible, where the man and the woman are thrown into the arena of life under the same conditions, where property is conceived, not as a moral thing, but as the equivalent of an enjoyment always appreciable in money, such a code, I say, can only generate weakness and smallness.I say, can only generate weakness and smallness.I say, can only generate weakness and smallness.

The head-to-head of the monster state and the dwarf citizen comes from the destruction of the intermediary societies which balanced the state, which created, sheltered, protected people.

But, after this destruction had been accomplished, how was it possible to supply some of the functions whose organ had been broken?

This is the problem of our republican and imperial revolution. But it is also the central problem of all other revolutions.

A party promises equality and uniformity to a people; this allows him to replace the old organizations and the former chiefs. But uniformity does not involve organization; in the general breakdown, how to maintain or restore the functioning of the State?

They preached the absence of order. They largely established the disorder. How do they get at least an organizational facade? The question is general, we can give a general answer.

Almost always, let's say boldly: always, the preachers of democratic equality belong personally to very strongly organized social groups. So strongly organized that, despite destructive laws and prohibitive regulations, they maintain among themselves or maintain around them social ties which, obscure or apparent, clandestine or public, allow them to bring with them a living remedy for their proven doctrines. Open Les Déracinés de Barrès, or refer to such a preface by Frédéric Masson 30; you will see that the first character, the distinctive character of Napoleon, very young, barely on the way to breaking through, was to be the man of a clan, of a small clan very united, very tight, very active, very hierarchical, where mutual aid was more than the law: custom; more than usual: heredity. From the Corsican clan, from which he emanated, to revolutionary society, the transitions and the connections were fatal, almost compulsory. It was this clan, this group, this party, attached to him by the powerful relations of spirit and blood, which enabled him to create from scratch a stable and strong government in the dissociated and atomized France of 1799. He knew that very well. And he knew that, if his Civil Code dissociated and atomized the country, he must, he Power, he State,him a new government, to build up around him coherent and agglutinative elements and organs which were attached to him instinctively, heart, body. Reached the summit, he legislated for them as for him.

As Alfred de Vigny said:

All democracy is a sandy desert ,

but one builds and establishes oneself on this desert only on the condition of not being oneself a democracy and of possessing the virtues and properties most directly contrary to the dust of this desert. Napoleon recorded this truth in the famous letter to his brother Joseph, then king of Naples, on June 5, 1806:

I want to have a hundred families in Paris, all having risen with the throne and remaining alone considerable, since they are only trusts and that which will not be they will be disseminated by the effect of the Civil Code. Establish the Civil Code in Naples. Everything that is not attached to you will then be destroyed, in a few years, and what you want to keep will be consolidated. This is the great advantage ofthe Civil Code. It is necessary to establish the Civil Code at home, it will consolidate your power since by it all that is not trusted falls, and that there remain more large houses only those which you will erect in fiefs. This is what made me preach a Civil Code and led me to draw it up.

Divide and conquer is a maxim.

But, to keep a reign, to continue to reign, you must yourself belong to a coherent organism and know how to tighten it in accordance with the eternal laws of force and health, even if you contradict its own principles. Equality will be for the mass of the people; but the differentiation, the organization, the hierarchy will be severe and powerful for the benefit of the small number in which one will choose its agents.

It would be easy to show that the process is contemporary with the ancient ages, because history, like nature, varies very little its processes. Have we not had new examples before us since Napoleon? Perhaps less striking, they are more general and more demonstrative still.

I am thinking of the mechanism of the Jewish conquest. Among all the peoples of the world (see the book by Bernard Lazare, L'Antisémitisme et ses causes , published in 1894), the Jew is at the forefront in asking for the equality of individuals, the uniformity of institutions. He is the holder of the single rule and the universal waffle iron. Democracy has no more devoted or more passionate craftsmen. However, the Jew, for his part, is of a narrow, closed, jealous clan, he is of a very strict particular law;

and it is because he is that, and because he knows it, because he feels very well that his Jewish community, his Jewish fraternity, his Jewish mutual aid, his Jewish custom will resist, for a long time, through them -same, to the uniformity of laws and to the equality of conditions, thathe asks this and that for others.

The others will be victims, but he will be kept away; his particularism will remain unscathed, and it is through him that he will reign.

The Jewish conquest would never have started the old France, so solidly differentiated, as it penetrated and exploited the new, which is open to all comers; but it was to open it up so that a handful of Jews lent such ardent and resolute support to the Revolution first, to the Empire afterwards. It was the same under Bismarck. The Jew counted very little in the secondary states. He became everything he wanted in the Reich. The verification of the same law is more clearly observed in Bolshevism Russia.

Despite everything, it was a great thing that the Empire of the Tsars.

To ruin it first, then to somehow take the place of the old governing organizations, it was necessary, in general eversion and leveling, a group whose main being was united and linked. The Jewish world provided this group. It is not possible to deny the enormous preponderance of the Jewish element in thegovernment and administration of the Soviets. The proportion of Jewish officials establishes and shoutsit. But it was only visible after the revolution was completed.

As long as we were in the period of claims, conspiracies, riots, these "oppressed" appeared to be simpleexplosive elements. It was difficult to distinguish the tenuous, secret and strong bond that united their army of oriental destroyers. To change the natural and national order of the Russian nation, they brought three things: their preaching of anarchy, which always tempted Man, their Marxist order intended to forge a harder chain than all that we had seen under the tsars, and last but not least the solidarity of their blood.

Egalitarianism is a mask. As soon as we see it appear, the experience of history allows us to foresee what it covers: a face of tyrant who will pierce it.

VII State school In ancient France, universities were independent institutions from each other, each with its own status. During the Revolution, there were twenty-one. Most of them, born of the Church, had been endowed with lands and privileges by individuals, communities and kings.

The universities were a true corporate association of professors.

It is understandable that with such a center of activity each province had its own intellectual life.

The University of Paris hastened, from the beginning of the Revolution, to present its congratulations to the National Assembly, ensuring that it would constantly remind "in memory of its students the names and the benefits of the illustrious representatives of the nation… and all the virtues of which they were the model ”.

The University was well paid for this sycophancy! In fact, it constituted an association, a free body; However, as Le Chapelier said, "the annihilation of all kinds of corporations of citizens of the same status and profession was one of the fundamental bases of the French Constitution". The universities were subject to the common law. They were dissolved. The Constitution of 1791 laid down the principle that public education common to all citizens would be created and organized. It is the one thattaxpayers have been paying for a good 140 years.

Napoleon re-established the University, but on the revolutionary type, as a state institution and also as ameans of government. Today one no longer preaches in schools respect and fidelity to the emperor and his dynasty, but, which amounts to the same thing, dogma and the worship of the Republic; in the smallest classroom is displayed the Declaration of the Rights of Man, disowned by science and reason, but symbol of the faith of a sect. The state therefore allows itself to teach what it likes. It brings together teachers and professors with tendentious works, full of interested errors; it intends to shape theintelligence of the nation as it pleases by imposing on it the study programs it defines. So, by the whim of a minister, thestudy of Latin or Greek classics was sabotaged or ridiculously limited in 1902.

It will be said that education is free. Those who do not want to send their children to state high schools only have to place them in private educational homes. But already these parents who do not use state education pay for it out of their own pockets. No subsidy is granted to educational or training establishments foreign to the State. Then, the State is not satisfied to establish the teaching programs, it reserved the right to give the sanction of this teaching. In order to issue a diploma, it requires that the candidate not justify that he is educated, but that he is educated as to what the state wants us to know, and as he wants us to know or to know. 'we believe. So,are private establishments obliged to comply with official programs, and, as these are extremely busy, it is not possible to overload them further by introducing into them what they do not foresee.

It is clear that a private establishment which does not succeed in getting any of its students to receive a baccalaureate would be reduced to closing its doors. In addition, as this teaching is often suspect to the official examiners, he tries to weaken them by adding to the spirit of the State School. One could almost say that certain “free” schools and colleges are more infected with Liberalism than high schools,because they have to be forgiven for the shade of independence that has been left to them.

This state control of secondary education has very serious consequences. They are worse for primary education. The teacher in a village is a power. The state cannot neglect it. He uses it as an electoral agent. The teacher, dependent on the prefect, being appointed or displaced by the prefect, is subsequently at the discretion of the prefect.

Either he accepts servitude, and he lends himself to all electoral fiddling, to all acts of administrative power, the latter being particularly facilitated by the situation of town hall secretary; in many municipalities, the real mayor is the teacher. Or the teacher does not accept the prefectural yoke, and then it will be broken. Unless he trembles authority by the means at his disposal when he joins a revolutionary union. These are the two ways open to the teacher under our regime: enslavement or insurrection.

A situation where tyranny can only be fought by anarchy would be incomprehensible if the cause of this tyranny was not mentioned.

As we have seen, this historical cause is Napoleonic.

But if the democratic idea coincides with Bonaparte's action, we must know why. Who says Democracy says Stateism, and does not say the opposite of Caesarism. Democracy, to last, needs the vote of the citizens; plebiscitary or parliamentary, cesarean or popular, democracy is only sure of the vote of the citizens on the condition of kneading their intelligence and conscience, almost as the nurses of Auvergne kneaded the brains of their newborns. The government of the parties, the government of opinion can play free thinker and neutral; in reality, it is less neutral than any other, being less free to beuninterested in what is going on in the heart and in the brain of those who are its masters, since its law makes it depend on their votes,that come out of their feeling and their thought.

It was believed to be freed, by democracy, from accidental and transient tyrannies. But thanks to it, we fell under a necessary and lasting tyranny. The democratic state must add to all its natural functions

functions which are not, and that of the school is one of the first that it must fulfill. But he cannot stop there; the school master state is forced to make itself moralist, historian and theologian, or, indifferently, counter-moralist, counter-historian, counter-theologian. He has neither the means nor the right to abstain. He is incapable of respecting any spiritual doctrine, any philosophical, historical, moraltheory which threatens him in his being of Democracy. This born liberal is condemned to defend himself by means of hundredfold authorities.

It is understandable that such authoritarianism is not professed. He would inevitably be swept away if he made a direct admission of his claim; it is all the more formidable by the concrete effects of its hidden action: lowering of intelligence, oppression of characters, the number of illiterate increasing likecrime. The state school teacher does not do or does badly his job as a teacher, but exercises too well hisfunctions of exciter and corruptor.

VIII The share of French interest So there is a kind of citizen who is concerned with the public interest; the XVII th century called them "republicans". They place themselves neither from the point of view of glory, nor that of human grandeur, nor that of aesthetics or heroic psychology; these essentially political animals like to reason from the point of view of France.

Let's recap their thoughts on Napoleon.

France has received incomparable prestige from Napoleon; in the centenary year, she considered that she had to grieve.

France received from Napoleon incomparable lessons in military art; although already internationalizedas works of the mind, although they were first understood and explained by outsiders, although they were turned against us in 1870, they bear the mark of critical genius, rational, simplifying of France, and it is finally France which was the most recent beneficiary.

This is enough, more than enough, to justify the murmur of national consent. The man whose name makes France a halo, the man whose thought studied closely contains an immortal lesson in arms can inspire on other points discordant judgments which will be severe; there is no possible discordance on his instrument of public salvation, nor on the gratitude which he has thus twice earned, as a great artist and greatest teacher. Mediocre French people will doubt it alone.

Beyond the two points raised, the field of discussions begins.

We allow Brumaire (or December) to deplore the fools who imagine the Consulate or the Empire as more tyrannical governments than that of the club of the Jacobins or the Paris Commune.

We are careful not to imagine that the whole of Napoleon's wars was the result of his pure ambition or of a more outrageous will than his genius. Albert Sorel's book sufficiently establishes foreign excitement and provocation; that of Bainville, the Jacobin necessity of keeping the conquest of the Belgian provinces. The reproach addressed to the foreign policy of the Emperor is no more founded than the complaint of the Liberals, insofar as it is made a personal and moral grievance.

But this double policy incurs outside and inside another reproach, purely political, that which decides and regulates everything; Napoleon, like Napoleonism, ultimately failed. It has failed everywhere, on sea, on land, in institutions, in laws, in customs. At what price ! at the end of what an effort!

Personal genius effort. Tense, extreme effort from an entire nation decimated, bled, exhausted for generations. No matter how we look at the dazzling cloak of glory, it cannot cover the disproportion of

the two infinities; huge expense, product worse than none.

No doubt it is the fault of the Revolution, of democracy. But it is impossible to separate Napoleon emperor from it. Of its essential characteristics, none would exist without the social subversion which bore it as its fruit.

When therefore a people threw for fifteen years their energies on the battlefields of the continent and the sea, under the leadership of the most dazzling military spirit that the world has ever known; when, after these fifteen years of struggle, this people must greet, on the waves which beat its banks, a foreignpower, the English, that, from this moment, and from this one moment, it will not equal no more, nor will they dream more of matching or swinging, being absolutely put out of action on this side; when this people, on the side of the firm lands, must contemplate a Prusso-German unity in the process of being constituted by the stages of 1803, 1805, 1813, and whose completion will be pursued because of the democratic impulse and in the name of the Napoleonic ideas in 1866, in 1870, then in 1918–1919, these people,the French people can no longer award to Napoleonism the least patent of satisfaction.

He is obliged to tell him:

"You are the greatest captain of all time, but in the end you led us to Trafalgar, Leipzig and Waterloo, and it was your doctrine that reduced your successors, imitators, nephews to the same disaster , disciples, heirs. So there has to be something vicious down there. By noting this vast and complete maritime and continental retreat, it is impossible not to mention the regular progress obtained under thekings of France. »

- You are doing party work.

It is the ritual interruption that I know well.

I don't do party work. I don't care about parties. But your parties are rebelling against the evidence of ideas and facts.

I would have been more imperialist, more Bonapartist than you, if the data of Bonapartism resulted in abalance sheet favorable to the nation. The facts are the facts. I cannot change them. Textbooks can distort these facts and especially their reports. It only takes a little intellectual rigor in thinking to restore them to their truth.

Certainly, the Seven Years' War was a serious setback, and the treaty of 1763 was very unhappy; but, a few years later, the revenge began, and what a brilliant revenge, prepared by Louis XV (yes, by Louis XV), completed by Louis XVI, crowning by the separation of America and England a long effort, tenacious and happy. I would add that the value of these close facts is accentuated and multiplied by theattitude of lawyers for the opposing system; it is not once, it is ten times that the polemists of democracy were of pre-competition for all this great work of Louis XVI and Vergennes, Grasse and Suffren.

These are the party men. For us, we do justice to everyone and pay homage to who deserves it; it is a son of France, the Prince of Joinville, who, in 1840, brought back to the Invalides the ashes of the unhappy Caesar. But, between the honors dedicated to genius, to glory, to heroism, and the thoughtful judgment carried on the whole of a work in relation to the good that the country has derived from it, there are differences that nature imposes and that reason verifies.

We will maintain them.

It is to maintain them that we cannot vary either on the legislative and administrative effects of this deployment of political authority inside. To suppress anarchy without reaching its causes is, as one of our late friends, Octave Tauxier, had perfectly felt and said, secretly fomenting a new and more

formidable anarchy.

That centralization and authority were needed in 1799, no one denied it. It would be difficult to demonstrate that it was necessary to give them this violence, this heaviness, this durability.

That equality and the other chimeras of the Social Contract were fashionable in 1800, no doubt either. But that the authority of the most voluntary of men has served to realize these crazy laws, to give flesh and life to these subversive and depopulating imaginations, it is impossible to name this a benefit.

A friend who was kind enough to write to me that it was not the fault or the intention of the emperor was completely mistaken about the meaning of our reflections. Let us repeat that it is not a question here of voluntary faults nor malicious intentions. We are counting results. They are disastrous. The France which he anemic through the war suffered long and deeply from the Napoleonic regime in peace. Let this scheme correspond to common errors, so be it! But, (refrain) these errors would not have passed in the laws, in manners with this force, they would not have been carried out with this painful perfection, without the brazen hammer of the will of the "Titan"; our XIX th century, whose social, administrative and legislative history makes a long reaction against these errors, would not have had so much difficulty in overcoming them if it had not been to overcome in them the crystallized energies of this demigod .

IX The dynastyThe members of the French Academy who threw the last flowers on Frédéric Masson's grave could not avoid the Bonaparte cenotaph. And the main interested in high memory, the high intelligence of the History of France gained something from the testimony of the speakers.

Summarizing the countless volumes of Frédéric Masson, Georges Lecomte 32 said of the great Emperor and his own:

Ah!what a good brother, gentlemen, and what an excellent son! Never more vigilant and more active affection, never more misplaced and rewarded!

Joseph, light, lazy, recalcitrant, conceited, tortuous and greedy, protective and to the end of Napoleon's worst enemies, always inclined to shirk, to cabal, to push prudence to cowardice, to invoke strict obedience to color his hints of betrayal.

Lucien, whose qualities and services, but at certain decisive moments we cannot ignore, but rough, boastful, dry, ungrateful, prodigiously infatuated with himself, convinced that his genius designates him for the highest rank, not knowing no rules, no laws, no duties, except for the mothers of her children.

Louis, so long Napoleon's favorite and whom he loved like a son, a taciturn dreamer, atrabilar, worried and suspicious, selfishly and painfully withdrawn, constantly changing his fixed idea; a morally and physically ill patient, at once grotesque and touching, anxious and gullible prey of all inventors of remedies, but through all his fugues and therapeutic fantasies, invariably and sneakily reticent to the policy of the emperor.

Jérôme, presumptuous, irascible, cheeky, pusillanimous, prodigal and libertine, who only redeemed on the battlefield of Waterloo the exasperating series of his pranks, his disobedience and his faults.

Everyone keeps their own physiognomy. But they have one common and most marked trait: envy, jealousy, ingratitude. And to whom? Towards their benefactor. No more than the viaticum taken from his meager salary as a second lieutenant, they did not thank him for embassies and ministries, duchies and

kingdoms. "I can not do more than I do for all," admits Napoleon in an hour of weariness, and he beginsto do more. He is sometimes irritated by this excessiveness:

- Listening to you, you would think I stole the inheritance from the late King our father!

The funny gallery! And the strange family! We smile. Even we laugh. However, the show must have itslesson. She is, I think, quite sensitive. It accounts for the rapid political exhaustion of the Napoleonids. This race so strong, and which has since given rise to so many curious originals and prominent characters, did not hold out, as a dynasty, because it could not hold out.

It lacked the founding virtues, the cardinal virtues, which impose themselves on the human tide and which alone make it possible to dominate it. Which ones? Quite simply those who oppose the chain of vices pleasantly underlined by Georges Lecomte: envy, jealousy, ingratitude.Selflessness, generosity, loyalty, honesty, these are the main features, general and distinctive, of the elders of the great royal races. They can, in the long run, weaken or diminish; then, everything rolls a little by the sole principle of acquired speed, which makes one of the great joys of the laws of life and being, the benefit of the monarchical institution compensating, and by far, the weaknesses or even sometimes the indignities of the monarch. But, in the cradle, originally, you need good men, you need prud'hommes, you need, I sayit all at night, heroes and saints, and perhaps saints more than heroes.

Open in Auguste Longnon the admirable study of the first Capetians, you will see how their honesty and their personal dignity flourished in a world where it gave rise to astonishing contrasts, provided thefirst bases of the influence and authority of descendants of Robert the Pious. Their prestige was there, and the confidence they inspired; from there came the strong impulse given to the sublime millennium of their reigns builders and generators.

The Lessons of Fustel de Coulanges à l'Impératrice 33 confirm and extend this point of view; the virtueof Saint Louis served as a religious and moral guarantee for his descendants.

If Mr. Georges Lecomte should be thanked for having directed us towards this reflection on the Dynasty, what congratulations to refuse to Jean Richepin 34 for the additional idea that he gave us dreams of the Dynaste?

Oh !a simple quote from Napoleon was enough. Jean Richepin has picked up this textual extract from the philosophies of Saint Helena.

The war will become an anachronism. If we fought battles all over the continent, it is because two companies were in presence, that which dates from 1789 and the old regime. They could not exist together; the youngest devoured the other. I know very well that in the end the war overthrew me, the representative of the French Revolution and the instrument of its principles, but no matter! It is a lost battle for civilization; civilization, believe me, will take its revenge. There are two systems, the past and the future; the present is only a painful transition. Who must triumph? The future, right? Well, the future is intelligence, industry, peace; the past was brute force, privilege and ignorance.Each of our victories was a triumph of the ideas of the Revolution. Victories will one day be accomplished without cannons and bayonets.

Thus spoke the promoter of these Wars of Hell that strongly described Alphonse Séché 35 ! Thus thought the man who opened the XIX th century the flood of national wars which continued the bloodshed. No one will have thought more clearly against the future; a future where the industry had to manufacture mainly cannons; where peace should flourish only under the three kings Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis-Philippe, given here as representatives of the past; where intelligence was to undergo,

and precisely by war and industry, the deepest humiliation, the most impure humiliation, the last step back.

Conclusion, which hardly varies: the royal monarchy of the Capetians had shown itself, from its dawn, the initiator of the new times. She had marched in front of the peoples, at the forefront of the movementof the spirits, and one can say that, from Louis VI to Louis XIV and Louis XV, up to Louis-Philippe, her occupation of the present was doubled by '' a real and constant anticipation of the future. It was anticipation, it was movement, progress, at the same time as order. In working to make what was prosperous and happy, the third dynasty tried to guess and accentuate what was to be, what was to be. We cannot give the same praise to that which our little treatises on the history of France call the chief of the fourth race. There is onlya man who is more contemptuous than Napoleon in the art of qualifyingand judging the rest of things and it is his poet, the poet ofFull sky , it's Victor Hugo.

What reactionaries, both!

X What remains alive from the Napoleonic tradition On May 5, 1921, Mr. Louis Barthou 36 delivered his Centenary speech under the Arc de Triomphe.

At the same time as laudable and banal maxims of French continuity, we had to take note of the precious words by which a representative of the government of the Republic ratified the rapprochements that were made by us, Action française, between Prussia in 1807 and that from 1918:

He believed, in September 1806, to muzzle the Prussian army by a military convention which limited his forces. But he counted without Prussian hypocrisy and, it must be said, without the tenacity of a people who never admit defeat. Scharnhorst 37, to avenge léna, had, since 1807, set to work. He did so well that, reduced to 42,000 men by the terms of the treaty, the Prussian army did not have less than 280,000 in August 1813. By what means? There is no point in looking for it in yesterday's story; today's one is enough. Prussia has more tenacity than imagination; it does not make any coquetry not to repeat itself, when the repetition of a process serves its purposes. Ludendorff copies Scharnhorst; he borrows from him his means of concealment, his oblique combinations, his instructions and even his expressions. Prussia, defeated, prepares, under his orders, the revenge of which he will fix the hour and of which she acclaimed, in Potsdam, the threat and the hope. We will not let her start again. TheNapoleon's error must be a sufficient lesson to us.

This political lesson is often given by Action Française.

Only the connections noted by Mr. Barthou, these imitations of Scharnhorst by Ludendorff were with us predicted and announced well before the end of the war, when it was time to notice and warn them.

Since then, the event has verified what we are planning. We have seen and touched the certain nullity of any military convention made with Prussia. But as Ludendorff thus plagiarized Scharnhorst, the inconsistent Republic which dreams only of original inventions, will have plagiarized the Napoleonic conventions, and that was enough to excuse our enemy from putting itself in costs of imagination. Our fats at Tardieu did not want to listen to a reasonable opinion. They rushed into the system of ideas from which the great emperor, with all his genius, had only experienced setbacks. What had failed, what had to fail, they wanted to try once again, and one can still doubt that this pitiful repeated failure taught them nothing. On the other hand, they absolutely refused to grant a moment ofbeware of another method, that which had succeeded from Julius Caesar to M. de Talleyrand.

A great specialist in military art is not necessarily a great politician, despite the frequent resemblances of these two arts.

Neither Rome nor the Capetian imposed vain treaties on Germany, limiting its military power; it was divided politically, the reduction of its bellicose means followed almost automatically.

"Napoleon's mistake must be a sufficient lesson to us," says Barthou.

Doubled by the error of Tardieu, the lesson is superabundant, indeed. The error did not cease to be repeated from 1921 to 1930, until the evacuation of Mainz and even beyond.

"Napoleon is no longer a political tradition," said Barthou. I beg your pardon. Napoleon remained a tradition of foreign policy. This tradition is the tradition of the Third Republic. The tradition of Mr. Barthou. Unlike Mr. Barthou, we see it and we judge it. And more than him, we pay it. Until when?

Charles Maurras