I felt what a son must feel on returning to the parental home after a long absence: he sees how everything in it has grown dingy and warped; his father has grown old without being aware of it, but the son is very well aware of it, and he is cramped, he feels that the grave is not far off; he conceals this, but the meeting wearies him instead of cheering and rejoicing him.
2 The pitch reached by the ferocity of the guardians of order on that day may be j udged by .the fact that the National Guard seized Louis Blanc on the boulevard, though he ought not to have been arrested at all, and the police at once ordered him to be released. On receiving this order the National Guard who held him seized him by the finger, thrust his nails into it and twisted the last joint backwards.
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Barbes, Louis Blanc! Why, they were old friends, honoured friends of my effervescent youth. L'Histoire de dix ans, the trial of Barbes before the Chamber of Peers-all that had so long ago been absorbed into my brain and my heart, we were so closely related to all this-and here they were in person.
Their most malicious enemies have never dared suspect the incorruptible honesty of Louis Blanc, nor cast a slur on the chivalrous valour of Barbes. Everyone had seen, had known both men in every situation; they had no private life, they had no closed doors. One of them we had seen, a member of the government, the other half an hour from the guillotine. On the night before his execution Barbes did not sleep, but asked for paper and began to write: those lines3 have been preserved and I have read them. There is French idealism in them, and religious dreams, but there is not a trace of weakness; his spirit was not troubled nor cast down; wi�h serene consciousness he was preparing to lay his head on the block and was calmly writing when the gaoler's hand knocked loudly at the door. 'It was at dawn, I was expecting the executioners' (he told me this himself), but his sister came in instead and flung herself on his neck. Without his knowledge she had begged from Louis-Philippe a commutation of his sentence and had been galloping with post-horses all night to reach him in time.
Louis-Philippe's prisoner rose some years later to the pinnacle of civic glory ; the chains were removed by the exultant populace, and he was led in triumph through Paris. But the upright heart of Barbes was not confused: he was the first to attack the Provisional Government for the killings at Rauen. The reaction grew up round him, the republic could only be saved by impudent audacity and, on the 1 5th of May, Barbes dared what neither Ledru-Rollin nor Louis Blanc did and what Caussidiere was afraid to do. The coup d'etat failed and Barbes, now a prisoner of the republic, was once more before the court. At Bourges, just as in the Chamber of Peers, he told the lawyers of the petit bourgeois world, as he had told the old sinner Pasquier:
'I do not recognise you as judges: you are my enemies and I am your prisoner of war; do with me what you will, but I do not recognise you as my judges.' And again the heavy door of l ifelong imprisonment closed behind him.
By chance, against his will, he came out of prison. Napoleon III thrust him out almost in mockery, after reading during the 3 Probably the pamphlet of Barbes, Druz ;ours dr condamnation a mort, written in prison at Nimes in March 1847. (A.S.)
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Crimean War the letter in which Barbes, in a fit of Gallic chauvinism, speaks of the military glory of France. Barbes tried retiring to Spain, but the scared, dull-witted government expelled him. He went to Holland and there found a tranquil, secluded refuge.
And now this hero and martyr, together with some of the chief leaders of the February Republic, together with the foremost statesman of socialism, had been recalling and criticising the past days of glory and misfortune!
And I was oppressed by a weight of distress; I saw with unhappy clarity that they, too, belonged to the history of another decade, which was finished to the last page, to the cover. Finished, not for them personally but for all the emigres and for all the political parties of the day.
Living and noisy ten, even five years before, they had passed out of the channel and were being lost in the sand, imagining that they were still flowing to the ocean. They had no longer the words which, like the word 'republic,' roused whole nations, nor the songs like the Marseillaise which set every heart throbbing.
Even their enemies were not of the same grandeur, not of the same standard: there were no more old feudal privileges of the Crown with which it would have been hard to do battle; there was no king's head which, rolling from the scaffold, would have carried away a whole ruling system with it. You may execute Napoleon III, but that will not bring you another 2 1 st of January; pull the Mazas Prison to bits stone by stone, and that will not bring you the taking of the Bastille! In those days, amid those thunders and lightnings, a IH'W discovery was made, the discovery of the State founded upon Reason, a new means of redemption from the gloomy sla..-ery of mediaevalism. Since those days the redemption by revolution has been proved insolvent: the State has not been founded upon Reason. The political reformation has degenerated like the religious one into rhetorical babble, preserved by the weakness of some and the hypocrisy of others. The Marseillaise remains a sacred hymn, but it is a hymn of the past, like Ein' feste Burg; the strains of both songs evoke even now a row of majestic images, like the procession of shades in Macbeth, all kings, but all dead.
The last is hardly still visible from behind, and of the new there are only rumours. We are in an irzterregrzum; till the heir arrives the police have seized everything in the name of outward order. There can be no mention here of rights; it is lynch law in history, a case of temporary necessities, of executive measures, police cordons, quarantine precautions. The new regime, com-
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bining all that is oppressive in monarchy and all that is ferocious in Jacobinism, is defended, not by ideas, not by prejud ices, but by fears and uncertainties. While some were afraid others fixed bayonets and took up their positions. The first who breaks through their chain may perhaps even occupy the chief place, which is occupied by the police; only he will at once become a policeman himself.
This reminds me of how on the evening of the Z4th of February Caussidiere arrived at the Prefecture with a rifle in his hand, sat down in the chair just vacated by the escaping Delessert, called the secretary, told him that he had been appointed Prefect and ordered him to give him his papers. The secretary smiled as respectfully as he had to Delessert, as respectfully bowed and went to fetch the papers, and the papers went their regular course; nothing was changed, only Delessert's supper was eaten by Caussidiere.
Many have found out the password to the Prefecture, but have never learned the watchword of history. These men, when the time came, behaved exactly like Alexander I. They wanted a blow to be struck at the old regime, but not a mortal blow; and there was no Bennigsen or Zubov4 among them.