BOOKS.

VICTOR HUGO'S NAPOLEON THE LITTLE..

IT would seem as though the human mind were incapable of feel- ing, or even from mere reasoning of fully perceiving the truth, in the absence of facts which illustrate or impress it. From the time when the ratio-political commotions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries roused the European world to inquiry and criticism, the character of Brutus and similar worthies of anti- quity has been exposed to some obloquy, because, in our for the most part hereditary and always settled forms of government, we could not realize to our minds the crime which an ancient tyrant committed by seizing a state without shadow of right and against all law: as little, consequently, could we feel the universal hatred which such a crime excited. Immediately after " the 2d December " and its wanton massacres,—from the guilt of which, to say the truth, the tyrants of antiquity were free,—men could better un- derstand the feeling of Greece and Rome, which prompted them to regard the spoiler of a nation as the enemy of the human race, and to place him beyond the pale of law or mercy. The sense of personal honour derived from chivalry, and the pure morality of the New Testament, render an usurper of this kind safe from the blow of the modern patriot; but it is perhaps more from a sense of what is due to himself than from any regard to the criminal. " Speak daggers, but use none," is the motto of Victor Hugo in his diatribe descriptive of the character and crimes of Louis Na- poleon. So far as regards the President, it is probable that no de- nunciation can be too severe, or any exposition too minute; but there is a measure in these things for the mind of the reader. The poetic invention and fluency of Victor Hugo have run too far for literary effect, at least with English readers. As long as there is any foundation in fact for his dramatic or figurative personations, there is the interest arising from reality however elaborated; but some- times there is too much of the poet's " airy nothing," or at least the same generic idea is presented in too many variations of form or lan age. When the substance of Napoleon the Little is abstracted from its rhetorical rhapsodies or its poetical and philosophic ideas, it consists of a biography and character of the President, called "The Man" ;'in which his life and public career, especially since his first election, are minutely dissected and exhibited. " The Government" is a similar exposition of the new regime • too theatrical for Eng- lish tastes. is followed by " The regime; "; in which Victor Hugo gives a full account of the murders of December, from the observations of eye-witnesses ; which does not differ substantially from the narratives published at the time in the English news- papers. This is succeeded by the more political or social crimes that followed the seizure and the massacre ; an examination of French Parliamentarianism destroyed by the despot, and of the " absolving vote." The work concludes with a return to the subject . of Napoleon's character, and some indications of the writer's hopes for the future.

Throughout, there is the French vivacity and power of personi- fying, which often gives life to indifferent substance, while it as often dashes the Vest by directing attention to the artist. This picture of Napoleon has less of the last fault than almost anything in the book, but it is not perfectly free from it.

"Louis Bonaparte is a man of middle height, cold, pale, slow in his move- ments, having the air of a person not quite awake. He has published, as we mentioned before, a tolerable_ treatise on Artillery, and is thought to be ac- quainted with the maneuvering of 'cannon. "He is a good horseman. He speaks drawlingly, with a slight German accent. His histrionic abilities were displayed at the Eglintoun tournament. He has a thick moustache, covering his smile like that of the Duke d'Ar- tois, and a dull eye like that of Charles IX.

Judging of him apart from what he calls his necessary acts' or ' his grand acts,' he is a vulgar commonplace personage, puerile, theatrical, and vain. The persons who are invited to St. Cloud in the summer, receive with the invitation an order to bring a morning toilette and an evening toilette. He loves finery, trinketry, feathers, embroidery, spangles, grand words, and grand titles—the sounding, the glittering, all the glass-ware of power. In his quality of cousin to the battle of Austerlitz, he dresses himself up as a general. t' He cares little about being despised; he contents himself with the ap-

pearance of respect. "This man would tarnish the background of history; he absolutely sullies its foreground. Europe smiled when, thinking of Haiti, she saw this White Soulouque appear. But there is now in Europe, in every understanding mind, abroad as at home, a profound stupor, a feeling as it were of per- sonal insult ; for the European Continent, whether it will or no is a bound guarantee for France, and that which abases France humiliates Europe. " Before the -2(1 December, the leaders of the Right used habitually to say of Louis Bonaparte—'Tis an idiot. They were mistaken. Questionless, that brain of his is perturbed, and has large gaps in it; but you can discern here and there in it, thoughts consecutive and concatenate. 'Tis a book whence pages have been torn. Louis Napoleon has a fixed idea ; but a fixed idea is not idiotcy : he knows what he wants, and he goes straight on to it—through justice, through law, through reason, through honesty, through humanity,

no doubt, but still draight on. • • • "The great talent of M. Louis Bonaparte is silence. "Before the 2d December, he had a Council of Ministers who, being re- sponsible, imagined they were something. The President presided. Never, or.scarcely ever, did he take part in their discussions. While MM. Odilon Barret, Passy, Tocqueville, Dufaure, or Faucher was speaking, he occupied himself, says one of these Ministers, in constructing, tcith intense earnest- ness, paper figures, or in drawing men's heads on the documents before him.

" To feign death, that is his art. He lies mute and motionless, looking in the opposite direction to his object, until the hour for action comes ; then ho turns his head, and leaps upon his .prey. His policy starts out on you ab- ruptly, at some unheeded turning, pistol in hand, ut fur. Up to that point, • Napoleon the Little. By Victor Hugo. [Authorized Translation.) Published by Vizetelly and Co. there is the least possible movement. For one moment in the course of the three years that have just passed away, he was seen face to face with Chan- gamierwho himself; on his part., meditated an enterprise. Ibant obscuri, as Virgil says. France observed, with a certain anxiety, these two men. What was in their minds ? Was not the one, in thought, Cromwell ; the other, Monk ? Men asked one another these questions as they looked on the two men. In both of them' there was the same attitude of mystery, the same tactics of immobility. Bonaparte said not a word, Changarnier made not a gesture ; this did not stir, that did not breathe ; they seemed competing which should be the most statuesque.

" This silence of his Louis Bonaparte sometimes breaks; but then he does not speak, he lies. This man lies as other men breathe. He announces an honest intention—be on your guard : he affirms—distrust him he takes an oath—tremble for your safety.'

There is truth in the following criticism ; and in his incapacity for doing anything of greatness probably lurks the germ of the President's do " Let us 'forget this man's origin, and his 2d December, and look to his political capacity. Shall we judge of it by the seven months he has reigned ? On the one hand, look at his power, and on the other at his acts. What can he do ? Everything. What has he done ? Nothing. With his un- limited power, a man of genius, in seven months, might have changed the whole aspect of France, and of Europe perhaps. He could not, certainly, have effaced the crime of his commencement, but he might have covered it. By dint of material improvements, he might have succeeded, perhaps, in masking from the nation his moral abasement. It must even be admitted that for a dictator of genius the thing was not difficult. A certain number of so- cial problems, elaborated during these last few years by powerful minds, seemed to be ;lie for relative and actual solution, to the great profit and sa- tisfaction of the nation. Of this, Louis Bonaparte does not appear to have had any idea. He has not broached, he has not had a glimpse of one. He has not even found again at the Elyge some old remains of the Socialist meditations of Ham. He has added several new crimes to his first; and in this there is logic. With the exception of these crimes, he has produced no-

thing. * • " As for the budget—the budget controlled by the blind who are in the Council of State, and voted by the dumb who are in the Legislative Body— there is an abyss beneath it. There was nothing in it possible or efficacious but a great saving in the army ; two hundred thousand soldiers, left in their homes, would be two hundred millions of franca saved. Touch the army if you dare : the soldier, who would regain his freedom, would applaud the measure, but what would the officer say ? In reality, it is not the soldier but the officer that is caressed. Then Paris and Lyons must be guarded, and

all the other cities; afterwards, when the Emperor is proclaimed, a little European war must be got up. Behold the gulf! "

The facts of the author respecting the massacre are gathered from the reports of eye-witnesses and actors. It appears that there was a Committee of Resistance composed of Representatives, the author forming one. According to his account, the resistance at the barricades was so considerable that the success of the coup d'etat hung in the balance, and several of the President's tools thought that .all was over, and contemplated flight. This state of affairs, Victor Hugo says, was changed by the massacre on the boulevards : but this explanation we can hardly follow. In the first place, the troops were directed not against the barricades, but against peaceable citizens ; so that the Red Republicans were left at leisure either to complete their organization and defences, or to at- tack the soldiery. In the second place, we do not see how the cir- cumstance of Bonaparte's having massacred the bourgeois should have affected the Republicans ; nor can we account for these last, if so resolute as M. Hugo paints, not having attacked the troops, when they were so drunk as to be incapable of very effective re- sistance.

"The cannonade and the platoon firing crossed each other indiscriminately; at one particular period the soldiers were killing each other. The battery of the 6th regiment of Artillery, which composed part of Canrobert's brigade, was dismounted ; the horses, rearing up in the midst of the balls, broke the fore-carriages, the wheels and the poles ; of all the battery, in less than a minute, there only remained one gun fit for service. A whole sguadron of the 1st Lancers was obliged to seek refuge in a shed in the Rue Saint Fiacre. Seventy bullet-holes were counted the next day in the pennons of the Lan- cers. The soldiers had become wild with excitement: At the corner of the

Rue Rougemont, in the midst of the smoke, one 27th was waving his arms as if to restrain them ; a medical officer of the 27th was nearly killed by the soldiers whom he was endeavouring to check. A sergeant said to an officer who stopped his arm, ' Lieutenant, you are betraying us.' -The soldiers did not know any longer what they were about; they had, as it were gone mad with the crime they were ordered to commit. There is a certain moment when the disgust a man feels for what he is doing, makes him redouble his blows. Blood is a kind of horrible wine ; men get drunk with carnage.

"It seemed as if some invisible hand were launching death from the midst of a cloud. The soldiers were no longer aught but mere projectiles. "Two guns in the road of the boulevard were pointed at the front of a single house, that of M. Sallandrouze, and with their muzzles almost touch- ing it, or only a few paces removed, kept firing volley after volley as fast as it was possible to fire. This house, which is an old stone mansion, remark- able for the almost monumental flight of steps leading up to it, was split by the balls as if by so many iron wedges. It opened, gaped, and separated from top to bottom, while the soldiers redoubled their efforts. At every discharge the walls cracked again. All of a sudden, an officer of artillery galloped up, and exclaimed, 'Stop, stop!' The house was bending forwards ; another bullet and it would have fallen on the guns and the gunners. "The artillerymen were so drunk that many of them, not knowing what they were doing, allowed themselves to be killed by the rebound of their pm. The balls came simultaneously from the Porte Saint Martin, the Boulevard Poisaonniere, and the Boulevard Montmartre. The drivers, hear- ing them whizzing past their ears in every direction, lay down upon their horses, while the gunners hid underneath the caissons and behind the wag- gons : soldiers were seen, with their caps falling off their heads, to fly in dis- may to the Rue Notre Dame de Recouvrance; troopers, in a state of unconsci- ousness, fired their carbines in the air, while others dismounted and sought shelter behind their horses. Two or three of the latter, without riders, ran about here and there in the greatest state of terror."

If there is truth, in this description, which we dare say there 'is, it appears a great oversight in the leaders of men resolute and nu- merous not to have launched their followers against such a mob in uniform. But we incline to the opinion generally prevalent at the time, that the barricades were few in number, and their defenders of no account ; and that the massacre was not a necessary crime,

but a mere stroke of Presidential policy to strike terror. Had there been the resistance our author intimates, the soldiery would have had other employment than shooting passengers in the streets and citizens in their homes.

A similar deficiency of logic is sometimes visible in other places. Various principles of polity, and many of the institutions of France, destroyed, surviving, or newly created, are passed under review, with the large generalization of the Frenchman and the vivacious spirit of the poet. The following passage from his ex- amination of the value of the votes as absolving the President will give an idea of the author's manner of handling such matters; at the same time it shows how disposed he is to push his own arguments to the extreme. Victor Hugo allows to the uncultivated sense of mankind the faculty of judging of the most complicated questions, but not of deciding between right and wrong. " The notion of good and evil is insolvable by universal suffrage. It is not given to a ballot to make the false true, or injustice just. Human con- science is not to be put to the vote.

" Do you understand, now ? " Look at that lamp, that little obscure light, unnoticed, forgotten in a corner, lost in the darkness. Look at it ; admire it. It is hardly visible; it burns solitarily ; yet make seven millions five hundred thousand mouths breathe upon it at once, and you will not extinguish it. You will not even make the flame flicker. Get a hurricane to rage against it ; the flame will continue to burn upwards, straight and pure, towards heaven. " That lamp is conscience.

" That flame is the flame which illumes in the night of exile the paper on which I now write.

" Thus, then, be your figures what they may, counterfeit or genuine, true or false, extorted or not, matters little ; they who keep their eyes steadfastly on justice say, and will continue to say, that crime is crime, that perjury is perjury, that treachery is treachery, that murder is murder, that blood is blood, that mind is mind, that a scoundrel is a scoundrel, that the man who fancies he is copying Napoleon en petit is copying Lacenaire en grand ; they say that, and they will repeat it, despite your figures, seeing that seven millions five hundred thousand votes weigh as nothing against the conscience of the honest man—seeing that ten millions, that a hundred millions of votes, that the unanimity even of mankind voting en masse, would count as nothing against that alone, that part and parcel of God, the soul of the just man—seeing that universal suffrage, which has full sovereignty over political questions, has no jurisdiction over moral questions. "I put aside for the moment, as I did just now, your process of balloting, the bands over men's eyes, the gags over their mouths, cannon in the streets and squares, sabres drawn, spies, mournings, silence, and terror, leading the voter to the urn as a malefactor to the prison. I put these aside. I suppose, I repeat, I suppose the universal suffrage true, free, pure, real ; universal suffrage, sovereign of itself, as it ought to be ; the newspapers in everybody's hands, men and facts questioned and sifted, placards covering the walls, speech free everywhere l Well, to that same universal suffrage, submit peace and war, the army effective, credit, the budget, the public aid, the penalty of death, the irremoveability of judges, the indissolubility of marriages, di- vorce, the civil and political condition of women, free education, the consti- tution of the commune, the rights of labour, the payment of the clergy, free trade, railways, the currency, colonization, the fiscal code, all the problems the solution of which does not involve its own abdication,—for universal suf- frage may do everything except abdicate,—submit these things to it and it will solve them, not without errors, perhaps, in detail, but with all the grand total of certitude that appertains to human sovereignty ; it will solve them materially. Now, put to it the question whether John or Peter did well or ill in stealing an apple from an orchard : it's at a dead stop ; it can do no- thing in the matter. Why ? Is it because this question is too low for it ? No ; because it is too high. All that constitutes the proper organization of societies, whether you consider them as territory, as commune, as state, or as country, every political, financial, social matter, depends on universal suf- frage and obeys it; the smallest atom of the least moral question defies it."

" We still have judgment here." It is probable that the mass of the voters were not thinking of their functions or faculties, but of their fears. The crimes of the extreme Republicans during the first Revolution have left so deep a horror both historical and tra- ditional in the minds of Frenchmen, that they seem disposed to sub- mit to any tyranny or tyrant that seems to have the power and will to save them from another reign of terror. It may be said and truly by M. Victor Hugo, that he and his party do not desire a reign of terror : but they have associated with men who speak and even act as if they did. The clubs, the processions, the demands, the theories, the insurrections during March, April, and May 1848, crowned by the pitched battle in the streets of Paris, induced many to believe that the triumph of the Red Republicans would have led to the rule of men who had all the qualities of Robespierre except his honesty, and of Denton except his courage. It was this fear, we suspect, that rendered the Assembly unpopular, and enabled M. Bonaparte to succeed in his coup d'etat. That coup, indeed, was not the less a crime in itself, much more in the manner of its conduct; but this fear, pro- voked by extreme men, explains the submission of moderate and timorous men to anything that would save them from a Com- mittee of Public Safety at Paris, and its myrmidons visiting the provinces with an "ambulatory " machine.