The Prosecution of Montalembert

From the English.

*New-York Daily Tribune*, No. 5489, November 24, 1858

Paris, November 6, 1858

Among the men of some standing in France, Count Montalembert was the first to rally to Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’état. Under Louis-Philippe he had represented the Catholic party in the Chamber of Deputies; under the Republic he belonged to that reactionary party in the National Assembly which was composed of Orleanists and Legitimists and which outwardly accepted the Republic the better to undermine it, flattering itself with the hope of working for the one or the other line of Bourbons, but in reality playing into the hands of Louis Bonaparte, the very same man who one fine day had them all arrested and dispersed, and who, by the grace of a drunken soldiery, seized absolute power. Montalembert, who was not spared by this violent expulsion, was, although an Orleanist by his whole past, the first and, until today, the only parliamentarian of note—if one disregards the “one contemptible exception” of Monsieur Dupin—to go over to the Bonapartist camp. This desertion of Montalembert’s was a significant fact in the political impotence that had then seized all France; it was an important fact for the new government, which was still separated from the whole of France by a wall of soldiers that formed its protective barrier. Montalembert allowed himself to be bribed by the specifically Catholic orientation of Louis-Napoleon’s government. There is a rumour that more solid gifts changed hands as well. As a member of the Corps législatif, Montalembert supported the government for a time; he fawned upon and crawled before the man who had substituted military dictatorship for parliamentary debate; he was base enough to take it as an honour to be one of the straw men charged by the successful usurper to vote, according to his dictation, for laws and money grants—to vote and not to speak, unless it were to his glory. Yet Montalembert was not rewarded for his self-abasement; he had done his duty; he had alienated himself for ever from his former political friends; he was compromised for all time; he could never again become a dangerous adversary; he had been squeezed dry like a lemon—why make any further fuss about him? The discarded Montalembert discovered that, after all, it was not the right thing how Louis Bonaparte had saved France and continued to save it, with everything having to dance to his pipe. He could not help comparing his position in the Chamber of Deputies with that which he had held in the same building ten or twenty years before; and gradually he began to oppose the government. He was allowed a certain degree of latitude; the first two or three of his speeches were even permitted to be published. Since that time he, a few republican deputies who have taken the oath of allegiance, and a few discontented Bonapartists form a kind of opposition in this wretched assembly—an opposition every bit as wretched as the body to which it belongs.

This opposition to further encroachments of the Emperor has apparently earned Monsieur Montalembert a pale and fleeting sort of popularity with a certain section of the bourgeoisie. Evidently he has been waiting for an opportunity to build further on this advantage by a sudden bold stroke. He was connected with the *Correspondant*, a journal owned almost exclusively by the Broglie family and therefore pursuing an Orleanist policy. Montalembert took advantage of their absence from Paris and had an article of his own published under the title “A Debate on India in the British House of Commons,” an article that would not have appeared in its present form had the cautious and timorous Broglies been in Paris and made their influence felt. In this article Montalembert, by way of salvaging his honour, seeks to make amends for having gone over to Bonapartism. While extolling the parliamentary system of government of England to the skies, he condemns the present system of government in France quite unmistakably.

“When my head buzzes—sometimes from the hissing of the ante-room reporters, sometimes from the shouts of the fanatics who take themselves for our masters, or the hypocrites who take us for their fools; when I feel the oppressive atmosphere, laden with servile and poisonous exhalations, threatening to stifle me, then I hurry off to breathe a purer air and to take a full plunge bath in the sea of English liberties.... If among those who open these pages there should be some who stand under the sway of that fashion” (the Bonapartist and absolutist fashion), “I tell them without circumlocution: stop reading, do not go on; nothing I write will please or interest you; go and ruminate in peace on the fat pastures of your contented repose, and do not envy those who, without envying you, take pleasure in the right to remain faithful to their past, in their zealous effort for independent thought and in their aspirations for freedom.... For the first time I came away from this magnificent spectacle” (the debate in the House of Commons) “profoundly moved, as must everyone who sees in a government more than the waiting-room of lackeys, and seeks in a civilised nation something more than a flock of sheep good only to be shorn, or to graze mutely in the shade of an enervating absence of care.”

This sounds very pretty and is, indeed, not without euphony. John Bull, lately accustomed to hear nothing from the French press but mockery and abuse, is naturally extremely grateful for this flattery *en gros* with which Montalembert has showered him; so grateful that he has quite overlooked to cast a glance at that “past” to which Montalembert would have us believe he has remained faithful. The fact is that Monsieur de Montalembert voluntarily associated with those ante-room reporters, with those fanatics and hypocrites whose hissing and shouting now shriek in his ears; he can only blame himself, since he resolutely and consciously plunged into that atmosphere laden with servile and poisonous exhalations whose burden now stifles him. If it “is the fashion in France today to express abhorrence for everything that merely bears the semblance of a memory or a regret for an earlier political life,” Monsieur de Montalembert was one of the first to promote this fashion when, with flying colours and beating drums, he went over precisely to the camp that proclaimed a new era based on the complete and final destruction of “past political life.” As for those people who are content to ruminate on the fat pastures of their contented repose, Montalembert cannot blame them. The coup d’état was carried out precisely on the pretext of suppressing political passions and of ushering in just this peace and contented repose. And if Montalembert did not rally to the coup d’état for that very reason, for what reason did he rally to it at all? Certainly, whatever may be said against Louis-Napoleon, one cannot accuse him of having masked his policy or his intentions after the coup d’état. No mistake was possible—there was none, either—that he meant to transform the French people into a herd of sheep good only to be shorn, or to graze mutely in the shade of an enervating absence of care. Montalembert knew that just as well as the rest of the world. When he afterwards draws himself up to his full height and calls upon us to admire him as the man who, without envying his former Bonapartist friends, remains true to his past, we must ask him: Which past do you mean, Monsieur de Montalembert? Your past in the monarchist Chamber, where you used to speak and vote in the interest of reaction, oppression and priestly fanaticism? Or your past in the republican National Assembly, when you and many of your old parliamentary friends were scheming to restore the monarchy, when you voted away, piece by piece, the liberties of the people, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly and association, and when you yourself forged the arms for that very adventurer who drove you and your comrades into the street with those very arms? Or, finally, your past in the Bonapartist Corps législatif, where you humiliated yourself before that same successful adventurer and approached him obsequiously and deliberately as one of the lackeys in his waiting-room? In which of these three pasts, Monsieur de Montalembert, are your aspirations for freedom to be found? We are inclined to believe that it will cost most people a fair amount of “zealous effort for independent thought” to discover that. In the meantime, the government of Louis-Napoleon has taken its revenge on its unfaithful adherent through a judicial prosecution, and the trial is to take place in the course of this month. We shall have the opportunity to compare the moral indignation of a Monsieur de Montalembert with the moral indignation of a Bonapartist *procureur* [public prosecutor]; and we can already say that, so far as sincerity is concerned, one will be worth as much as the other. The trial itself will create some sensation in France, and whatever its outcome, it will constitute a significant fact in the history of the Second Empire. The mere fact that Montalembert has deemed it necessary to break with the existing government in so striking a manner and to challenge his judicial prosecution is significant proof that the French bourgeoisie is awakening to political life. The complete apathy of this class—its politically worn-out, *blasé* [jaded] frame of mind—was what enabled Louis-Napoleon to erect his power. Since he only the parliament against him

He had a regime that was supported neither by the bourgeoisie nor by the working class, he could count on the passive assistance of the bourgeoisie and the active help of the army. The parliamentarians were immediately beaten, but the working class only after a month-long struggle carried out throughout France. For a long time the bourgeoisie obeyed, grumbling, but it obeyed and regarded Louis Napoleon as the saviour of society and therefore as an indispensable man. Now it seems as if it has gradually changed its mind. It longs for the time when it, or at least a part of it, ruled the country and the speakers’ tribune and the press resounded only with its own political and social interests. It is evidently beginning to regain confidence in itself and in its ability to rule the country; and if that should be the case, it will also find the means to give expression to it. Thus we may expect a movement of the bourgeoisie in France corresponding to that which is now developing in Prussia, and which is as certainly the precursor of a new revolutionary movement as the movement of the bourgeoisie of 1846/1847 in Italy was the herald of the revolutions of 1848. Louis Napoleon appears to have grasped this perfectly. At Cherbourg he said to a man whom he had not seen for many years:

“It is a pity that the educated classes of the country do not wish to go with me; it is their own fault; but the army stands by me, and so I do not care.”

However, he will very soon discover what becomes of the army – at that, an army with such officers and generals as his – once the mass of the bourgeoisie places itself in open opposition. In any case, stirring times seem to be in store for the European continent.