End of the dictatorship. A whole European system crumbled away.
The Empire sank into a gloom which resembled that of the Roman world as
it expired. Again we behold the abyss, as in the days of the
barbarians; only the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its pet
name of the counter-revolution, was not long breathed, soon fell to
panting, and halted short. The Empire was bewept,—let us acknowledge
the fact,—and bewept by heroic eyes. If glory lies in the sword
converted into a sceptre, the Empire had been glory in person. It had
diffused over the earth all the light which tyranny can give—a sombre
light. We will say more; an obscure light. Compared to the true
daylight, it is night. This disappearance of night produces the effect
of an eclipse.
Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris. The circling dances of the 8th of July
effaced the enthusiasms of the 20th of March. The Corsican became the
antithesis of the Bearnese. The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was
white. The exile reigned. Hartwell’s pine table took its place in front
of the fleur-de-lys-strewn throne of Louis XIV. Bouvines and Fontenoy
were mentioned as though they had taken place on the preceding day,
Austerlitz having become antiquated. The altar and the throne
fraternized majestically. One of the most undisputed forms of the
health of society in the nineteenth century was established over
France, and over the continent. Europe adopted the white cockade.
Trestaillon was celebrated. The device _non pluribus impar_ reappeared
on the stone rays representing a sun upon the front of the barracks on
the Quai d’Orsay. Where there had been an Imperial Guard, there was now
a red house. The Arc du Carrousel, all laden with badly borne
victories, thrown out of its element among these novelties, a little
ashamed, it may be, of Marengo and Arcola, extricated itself from its
predicament with the statue of the Duc d’Angoulême. The cemetery of the
Madeleine, a terrible pauper’s grave in 1793, was covered with jasper
and marble, since the bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in
that dust.
In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth,
recalling the fact that the Duc d’Enghien had perished in the very
month when Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the
coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed his blessing on
the fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation. At Schoenbrunn there
was a little shadow, aged four, whom it was seditious to call the King
of Rome. And these things took place, and the kings resumed their
thrones, and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime
became the new regime, and all the shadows and all the light of the
earth changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer’s
day, a shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, “Go this way, and not
that!”
This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient unhealthy and
poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. A lie wedded
1789; the right divine was masked under a charter; fictions became
constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and mental reservations, with
Article 14 in the heart, were varnished over with liberalism. It was
the serpent’s change of skin.
Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this
reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of
ideology! It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future
into derision. The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so
fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he? What is
he doing? “Napoleon is dead,” said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo
and Waterloo. “He dead!” cried the soldier; “you don’t know him.”
Imagination distrusted this man, even when overthrown. The depths of
Europe were full of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous
remained long empty through Napoleon’s disappearance.
The kings placed themselves in this void. Ancient Europe profited by it
to undertake reforms. There was a Holy Alliance; _Belle-Alliance_,
Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said in advance.
In presence and in face of that antique Europe reconstructed, the
features of a new France were sketched out. The future, which the
Emperor had rallied, made its entry. On its brow it bore the star,
Liberty. The glowing eyes of all young generations were turned on it.
Singular fact! people were, at one and the same time, in love with the
future, Liberty, and the past, Napoleon. Defeat had rendered the
vanquished greater. Bonaparte fallen seemed more lofty than Napoleon
erect. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him guarded by
Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montchenu. His folded arms
became a source of uneasiness to thrones. Alexander called him “my
sleeplessness.” This terror was the result of the quantity of
revolution which was contained in him. That is what explains and
excuses Bonapartist liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to
tremble. The kings reigned, but ill at their ease, with the rock of
Saint Helena on the horizon.
While Napoleon was passing through the death struggle at Longwood, the
sixty thousand men who had fallen on the field of Waterloo were quietly
rotting, and something of their peace was shed abroad over the world.
The Congress of Vienna made the treaties in 1815, and Europe called
this the Restoration.
This is what Waterloo was.
But what matters it to the Infinite? all that tempest, all that cloud,
that war, then that peace? All that darkness did not trouble for a
moment the light of that immense Eye before which a grub skipping from
one blade of grass to another equals the eagle soaring from belfry to
belfry on the towers of Notre Dame.