Summer books

Politics and other passions

Michael Foot

Stendhal and the Age of Napoleon Gita May (Columbia UP £10.50) Stendhal and the Age of Napoleon does not fulfil the expectations roused by such a trumpet of a title. But how could it? For all its horrors and infamies and garishness, the age of Napoleon still retains its power to enthral; for multitudes of Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Englishmen and many more, and for some of the most daring and far-seeing spirits in their midst, it was an age, not only of war and cruelty but also of liberation. Stendhal watched the whole performance with just the right mixture of enthusiasm and astringency, and with a wit at his command not excelled by that of any Other observer whatever, even in a Europe Where he faced such competitors as Hemrich Heine or William Hazlitt.

The combination of scene and author should produce a book in a million, but, alas, Gita May has not achieved that. She has an excuse: Stendhal himself shied away from the full-scale development of the theme; he dallied with it, and yet he, the treat exponent of persistence in some other ields, set it aside quite inadequately attempted. One reason for his reticence, Maybe, is that, had he drawn his portrait of Emperor warts and all, he would have given aid and comfort to the great man's dwarflike successors, with whom the war was still on. Stendhal had many moods of waywardness; but he would never betray. It was one of his own confessions or boasts that he conducted his love affairs as if they were military operations, and it was Fertainly true that he went off to his wars as if they were love affairs: in short, an incurable romantic, if ever there was one, nurtured almost from the moment when he was t,brn from his loving mother's breast, on K.uusseau's La Nouvelle Heloise, the real 13. Ible of the Romantic movement. And yet, Stendhal's case, the words must be qualified the moment they are uttered. He could suddenly turn realist, in love or war. , No-one after the age of thirty he asserted lsPeaking obviously for himself) could tolejate any longer the flowery rhetoric of Anusseau's Heloise. And that, let it be n°ted, was not an older man's cynicism. Stendhal never grew old; despite all prosvocations and disappointments, he grew erene instead. With him the exhilarations

°f youth never faded, but his tastes and

understanding changed. In particular, his aPpreciation of the way to write formed Itself into his own style, so different from 1,,suusseau's. He would never abandon the _Kumantic faith of the Revolution: who 4Thungst those who had ever truly felt what

it was like to be alive in that blissful dawn would ever forget it? But he could not help seeing also the weaknesses and limitations of the cause, and more especially the deficiencies of those who espoused it with an egotistical obsession.

Besides, he had other distractions which surely involved no element of schizophrenia in his romantic ardour. Reading and writing and searching for his rightful place in literature, were agreeable pursuits, but real love affairs were better. Politics was always his passion, but unlike some politicians, he had room for other passions too. 'Whatever some hypocritical ministers of government may say about it,' he wrote, in one of those footnotes into which he could compress a whole novel, 'power is the greatest of all pleasures. It seems to me that only love can beat it, and love is a happy illness that can't be picked up as easily as a Ministry.' So even when he was dissecting the politicians so astutely, he retained a peculiar and, many would claim, a proper sense of priorities.

When Moscow was burning he could still be on his bed devouring one of the famous, gushing, successors to Rousseau's novel, Paul et Virginie, and when Napoleon was returning from Elba, the devoted disciple, Stendhal, spent most of the hundred days in a Venetian paradise, in the arms of the once inaccessible Angela Pietragrua, to an accompaniment, for good voluptuous measure, provided by the young Rossini prophesying the Italian risorgimento. Politics, despite Stendhal's evident addiction, were seen in proportion. Given the choice, would he not have preferred to have seduced Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski than to have conquered Italy, and given his hints and intimations of her ineffable, unattainable charms, who wouldn't? More than almost any other great writer, Stendhal had a premonition of how a much later generation would re-value his neglected work, but his extraordinary self-knowledge and confidence never deterred him from immediate pursuits, and the perils he might court and the follies he would commit in the process. Fame was not the spur; it was the sedative.

But again it is necessary to qualify the conclusion ' before it becomes settled.

(Never neglect Stendhal's own maxim: `I'll

nearly always be mistaken if I think that a man has only a single character'). Politics for him was never a side-show; it not merely filled the stage, but diffused its influence throughout the whole theatre and through out society itself. Wherever he turned, and all through his life, and in defiance of all the accusations of dilettantism, his political judgement was perpetually in action, sharp

and original. His political aphorisms retain a sensational potency. He was a kind of Machiavelli of the Left, whose exposure of the way the political mind works has a permanent validity. But, of course, like any good politician, he was concerned, not with the music of a distant drum, but with the immediate enemy, the one which had to be• fought and crushed here and now. His enemy was, first and foremost, the priestridden society of the restored Bourbons, and, thereafter, the seedy financial manipulators of the Orleans monarchy. He was much more concerned to give them their devastating due than merely to glorify the dead Napoleon. 'A Ministry cannot overthrow the Bourse, but the Bourse can overthrow the Ministry.' So he wrote with Marxist contempt and finality, decades before Marx.

However, considering how he despatched Napoleon's successors to eternal ignominy, it remains regrettable that he did not deal comprehensively with Napoleon himself. Clearly he pondered the possibility; consider, for example, an entry in his notebook, way back in 1805, soon after the Emperor-crowning ceremony which Stendhal might have been expected to deplore as fiercely as any of his fellowatheist republicans.

'When Milan (Napoleon) was thinking of re-establishing .religion in France, he employed some caution in dealing with the enlightened people with whom he had attempted to fortify his government; he consequently summoned Volney to his study and told him that the French people had asked for a religion and that he felt he owed it to their happiness to give them one. 'But, Citizen Consul, if you listen to the people, they will also ask you for a Bourbon.' Thereupon Napoleon flew into a rage, called his servants, had him thrown out, even — so they say — kicked him and forbade him to return. There is a good example of the ridiculousness of the advice-seeker. Poor Volney was ill as a result, but that didn't stop him, as soon as he had recovered, from drawing up a report on the matter, thinking that the affair would be brought up in the Senate. It became known, and he was told to desist if he didn't want to be assassinated; since then, he has scarcely left his home — If true, for a future Tacitus.'

But the new Tacitus held his hand. Napoleon was spared anything distantly tinctured with the full Stendhalian treatment. For that, the world had to wait for Tolstoy, who however had learnt much from Stendhal about war and military men, and all the various accompanying horrors and vanities. One of the reasons why Stendhal shrank from the full-hearted defence of his hero was that he had seen for himself, and understood better than anyone had given him credit for, what war was really like. It was that unromantic truth which he preferred to tell in the early chapters of The Charterhouse of Parma.

But of course there could and should have been a full-scale Stendhalian judge ment on the Age of Napoleon; no-one was so well qualified to do it. 'It was in France', he himself wrote, 'that the despotism of Napoleon was most poisonous; he feared the works and the memory of the republic over which the people stood guard; he hated the old enthusiasm of the Jacobins.' That was the discernment of Stendhal; he was a true son of the Revolution and of Rousseau, of whom his fellow-observer and kindred soul, William Hazlitt had written: 'He was the founder of Jacobinism which disclaims the division of the species into two classes, the one the property of the other.' Stendhal so well understood the driving force of that doctrine that he wrote his greatest work about it. Napoleon made his successors look like absurd and insignificant figures, but he could not blot out the stupendous events which had preceded his entry onto the stage. Stendhal treasured those memories as the inspiration of his youth, and perhaps that is a further reason why he would not trust himself to embark on such a Napoleonic study. Neither oppo nents of the Jacobin cause nor deserters from it would get any comfort from him.

Gita May's book is a straightforward biography of the subject rather than a special new estimate of Stendhal's Napoleonic associations. Yet it offers several excellent fresh glimpses of the world he gazed out upon, from the windows of Dr Gagnon's house in Grenoble, to the last days in Civitavecchia when he was still at work on 'an unfinished masterpiece', Lamiel. And if Lamiel eventually receives a belated elevation in the acclaim accorded to Stendhal's writings, as has happened previously to several of the others, Gita May will deserve some of the credit. Others before her have recognised Stendhal's championship of the rights of women. No-one has enlisted Lamiel in the service of that good cause in quite the same way, and it is fitting that the latest contribution to Stendhalian studies should seek to recruit him not as one parading the musty emblems of Napoleonic grsndeur but as a true prophet of twentieth-century liberation.