Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 70, No. 433, November 1851

GERMAN LETTERS FROM PARIS.2

German Professors are altered men since those joyous days when we drank chopines and swang the schlaeger in the thirsty and venerable University of Saxesaufenberg. We remember them studious bookworms, uneasy when removed from library and lecture-room, their meerschaum their only passion, knowledge their sole ambition, beholding the external world through "the loopholes of retreat," – the said embrasures being considerably obscured by tobacco-smoke and misty philosophy. Such is the portrait our memory has preserved of them; and we doubt not that its fidelity will be recognised by our brother-burschen of bygone days. But great has been the change. The quality of a German professor now suggests the idea of a red-hot democrat, fanning revolution, pining in prison, or fugitive in foreign lands. The smoking-cap is exchanged for the bonnet rouge, and the silence of the sage for the clamour of the demagogue. This may not be true of all, perhaps not even of a majority, but it is true of a pretentious and prominent minority. The busy, bustling multitude knows nothing of the others.

Professor Stahr, of the University of Oldenburg, is a gentleman chiefly remarkable for his democratic tendencies, and for the fluent correctness of his literary style. Few men write better German, or profess doctrines more revolutionary. His reputation as a literary man rests principally upon a work on Italy, published after a twelvemonth's residence in that country.3 As a critic of fine art, he is not without merit. As a politician he is wild and speculative. The revolutionary coterie to which he belongs reckons amongst its members Fanny Lewald, the lively Hebrew socialist, and Moritz Hartmann, the bitter radical. Both of these, especially the former, are his intimate friends, and appear to have been his constant companions during two months of last autumn, spent by him in Paris, and which have given occasion and a title to his latest book. With Mr Hartmann he forgathered at Brussels, early in the month of September, and together they proceeded southwards. In consideration of Professor Stahr's acknowledged abilities, we will not apply to him a common rule, and judge him by the company he keeps. But, in spite of his well-turned periods and general moderation of expression, his book is not pleasant to read. There is an ill-conditioned tone about writers of his political class, extremely trying to the patience and temper of the reader. Convinced of the general unfitness of existing human institutions, and of the necessity for radical changes, they inevitably fall into a cavilling and censorious strain. Viewing the condition of society with a jaundiced eye, they adopt the maxim that whatever is, is wrong. Mr Stahr has hardly entered the railway carriage that is to transport him to Paris, when he shows himself querulous and a grumbler. He hoisted his colours before leaving Brussels. Had we never before heard either of him or his principles, we yet should have been at no loss to discover the latter by certain passages in his very first chapter. Sitting in his inn at eventide, after visiting the monument to the slain of 1830, he reads an account of the Belgian revolution. The Dutch troops, he finds, made but one hundred and twenty-two prisoners, whilst the insurgents captured four hundred and ninety-five. On the other hand, the Belgian killed and wounded exceeded by three hundred those of their opponents. Mr Stahr is ready with an inference from these statistics. It takes the form of a slur upon the soldiers who were doing their duty to their king and country. "The inequality in the number of prisoners may well arise from the circumstance that the Dutch, as fighters for loyal tranquillity and order, were least disposed to give quarter. And soldiers against men without uniform – one knows that!" Then he falls foul of the writer of the narrative, for attributing to Providence the preservation of the royal palace, and other public buildings, to which the Dutch attempted to set fire; and, gliding thence into religious speculations, he gets very profound, and rather profane, so that we are not sorry when the current of his ideas is diverted into a more commonplace channel, by the visit, at Valenciennes, of the French customhouse officers, on the look-out for Belgian cigars and reprints. He is sore at this irksome visitation – wonders that powerful France so long endures the literary piracies of her little neighbour – and finally prophesies the abolition of all customhouses. "A time will come," he says, "when this system of legally privileged waylaying will appear just as fabulous to the people of Europe, as do now to us the highway depredations of the robber-knights." Pending the advent of that desirable state of things, he revenges himself on a fellow-traveller for his customhouse annoyances. A German book which he had left in the carriage on alighting had disappeared, and could not be recovered. A douanier had perhaps taken it for a contraband commodity. He should have declared it, opined a fat Frenchman in the same carriage. Mr Stahr was indignant. It was a German book, he tartly replied, and was not printed at Brussels, but at Leipzig – a place, he added, which must still be pretty well remembered in France! A polite and tasteful allusion which did the German radical infinite credit, and to which the fat Frenchman might fairly have retorted, "Jena," and half a dozen other significant names, instead of holding his tongue, and leaving his fellow-traveller to digest at leisure his loss and his ill-humour.

Mr Stahr's volumes, composed of letters to friends, are desultory, and for the most part slight. Picture galleries are favourite haunts of his: now he criticises a pamphlet, now a play; he moralises, after his own peculiar fashion, in deserted palaces, assists at a banquet of workmen, witnesses extravagant dances at Mabille, sits by the bedside of the infirm and suffering Heine. His first walk in Paris was to the Palais Royal, after nightfall. "Stahr," said his companion to him suddenly, on the way, "this is the Place de Grève!" – "Were I to live a century," exclaims the impressionable professor, "I should never forget the shudder that came over me at these words." And he breaks into a tumid rhapsody about the lava-streams of the great European volcano, talks of the guillotine, tells the well-known story of Favras, and proceeds to the Palais Royal, where, at ten o'clock at night, he is unable to obtain a beef-steak for supper, and whose glory he accordingly declares departed. Returning to their quarters, at a hotel beyond the Seine, the two Germans get bewildered in the labyrinth of the Quartier Latin, and are indebted for guidance to some artisans, whose "Good night, citoyens!" at parting, again thrills the sensitive Stahr. The historical and fanciful associations that crowd upon his mind are of a less practical nature than the reflection suggested to his companion by the Republican mode of address – "We must exchange our grey Calabrian hats" (the sort of bandit sombreros affected by travelling students and red republicans) "for the loyal hats of order, or soon we shall have Louis Napoleon's police at our heels." Thus spoke Mr Hartmann – who has a natural aversion to all police, and who gladly sneers at the party of Order, and at Louis Napoleon as its representative. Mr Stahr professes no great liking or tenderness for the chief of the Republic – the first gendarme in France, as he calls him, meaning thereby to cast opprobrium on the President, gentlemen of his political complexion having an instinctive detestation of gendarmes. He saw him for the first time at the celebrated review held at Satory, on the 10th October 1850. On his way thither, Mr Stahr joined in conversation with peasants, who were flocking from all the country round to see the President and the military pageant. Many of them had sons in the regiments that were to be reviewed. They made no mystery of their political creed. It was simple enough: "Peace and moderate taxation," said they, "is what we want. He who gives us those two things is our man, whether as King or President matters not." The review over, the throng of spectators drew up to see Louis Napoleon. After the Minister of War, d'Hautpoul, and the then-all-powerful Changarnier, had passed, each with his staff, "there came by, mounted on a tall gray horse, the elect of six millions of voters. Judiciously-distributed adherents waved their hats and shouted, at the top of their voices, 'Long live the Emperor! Vive Napoleon!' The people were mute. It was a laughable farce. The hero of Strasburg and Boulogne, mounted on a tall charger, in a brilliant general's uniform, the broad riband of the Legion of Honour over his shoulder, in plumed hat and jackboots, was the very model of a circus equestrian." An air of helplessness and exhaustion, according to Mr Stahr, was the main characteristic of the President's appearance. "I stood near enough," he continues, "to see him well, and never did I behold a more unmeaning countenance. An unwholesome grey-brown is its prevailing tint. Of likeness to the great Emperor there is scarcely a trace." There is no chance, Mr Stahr declares, of such a person as Louis Napoleon putting the republic in his pocket. Having given his opinion of the President's exterior, he proceeds in the next chapter to sketch his character, as described by a person who had known him from his youth. "He is naturally goodtempered and harmless," said this anonymous informant, "and by no means without ability. But he is tainted with the moral corruption of all European societies, Italian, French, and English. He has the pourriture of the drawing-room education of all nations. Still he is not devoid of sense, nor of a certain goodness of disposition. He can weep, unaffectedly weep, over a touching case of wretchedness and misery, and he willingly shows clemency, when asked, even to political opponents. But no reliance can be placed in him. In a word, his character is that of a woman. As a result of his wandering and adventurous existence, he appears to-day as a German, to-morrow as a Frenchman, and the day after to-morrow as an Englishman or Italian. He is wholly without fixed principles, and without moral stay. If one represents to him the immorality of an act, he will laugh and say, 'Bah! what is that to me?' But the very next day you shall find him as much oppressed with moral scruples as any German candidate. He has the physical courage of his unusual bodily strength —corporis robore stolide ferox– supported by a fatalist belief in his star; and this belief, which has lately acquired increased strength by his extraordinary vicissitude of fortune, blinds him to his real position, and renders him deaf to the warning voices of his few honest friends. In this respect his mother, who unceasingly stimulated his ambition, did him much harm. Personally he is modest and unassuming, but he is madly vain of his name and of his legitimate claims. That he has done and continues to do himself grievous harm, as it is universally said, by excesses of the most unrefined description, and by opium-smoking, seems unfortunately to be only too true. For the change in him since his youth has been altogether too great. Nevertheless, he is much less the tool of others than might be supposed. He has a way of half-closing his inexpressive light-blue eyes, which he has adopted to prevent persons from reading his thoughts. His chief delusion is that the army is unconditionally devoted to him. This is by no, means the case." We give this curious sketch, in which truth and malignity are ingeniously blended, for no more than it is worth. The reader will have little difficulty in sifting the grain from the chaff, the idle or malicious gossip from the well-founded observations. Mr Stahr supports the assertion of the indifference of the French army to the commonplace nephew of their great idol, by anecdotes derived from personal experience. After the review, he dined for some days in company with three hussar officers, quartered in the house he lived in. His account of them hardly agrees with the popular notion of French officers. "They are modest, reserved, and serious in manner. Nowhere in Paris have I found a trace of that overweening presumption by which German officers, especially cavalrymen, seek to give themselves importance at tables d'hôte and other public places. We spoke of yesterday's manœuvres, and I paid them a compliment on the really splendid bearing of the troops and the capital equipments. There are no longer grounds to depreciate the French cavalry. Africa has been an excellent school for them. 'But there was one thing wanting,' I remarked – 'namely, enthusiasm.' 'You are quite right, sir,' replied one of the officers; 'but there is not much to be enthusiastic about in the position in which we are.' The speaker was a thorough soldier, and anything but an upholder of revolutionary or socialist-democratic ideas. The supporters of the latter he invariably spoke of as 'les Voraces,' and bitterly complained that for years past he and his comrades had had nothing else to do than to 'faire la chasse aux voraces!' But with the 'Nephew of the Uncle' none of the officers showed the least sympathy. Concerning him they all observed a very eloquent silence." In contrast to the ridicule and censure levelled by Mr Stahr at the more recent portion of Louis Napoleon's career, are some anecdotes he tells us of his earlier years. "In his youth," he says, "he must have been very amiable. I have had opportunity to look through a collection of letters written by him to a friend of his family, and extending over more than twenty years. It included even notes written when he was a boy of eleven, some of them in the German language and character. Louis Napoleon is known to be a perfect master of German. The most pleasing and amiable of these letters were a series written from his prison at Ham. Good feeling, hearty gratitude for proofs of faithful adherence and for affectionate little services, and a deep dejection at his lot, were the characteristics of these letters. He read and studied a great deal at Ham, especially military science, but also poetry and literature. Within those prison-walls he now and then began to distrust the 'star' of his destiny." These letters were doubtless the same spoken of elsewhere by Mr Stahr as filling several volumes, and as having been addressed to Madame Hortense Cornu, a well-known writer on fine art, who was long attached to the household of Queen Hortense. She had known Louis Napoleon from his childhood, and retained sufficient influence over him to obtain the rescue from the hands of the Roman priesthood of the Italian republican Cernuschi. The letters, says Mr Stahr, abound in evidence of the esteem and gratitude entertained by the French President for the staunch and trusty friend of his youth. "This correspondence, fragments of which I was favoured with permission to read, includes all the epochs of his adventurous life. It ceases with the day when the infatuated man, having attained to power, laid hands upon the right of universal suffrage which had raised him from the dust. Madame Cornu's last letter was a solemn exhortation to abstain from that step. She laboured in vain, for fate is stronger than humanity. But it is an honourable testimony to the originally good disposition of the blinded man that he did not withdraw his favour from his tried friend. A proof of this is to be found in Cernuschi's deliverance."

During a visit paid by Mr Stahr to Alexander Dumas, the French romance-writer told the German professor an anecdote of Louis Napoleon and the late Duke of Orleans, which is curious, if true. Perhaps it is as well to bear in mind, whilst reading it, that its narrator is a story-teller by profession, and the most imaginative and decorative of historians. Dumas, it appears, had been long acquainted with the imperial pretender and his mother; was aware of the rash schemes of the Prince, then meditating the Strasburg expedition; and advised him, by letter, to abandon them, or at least to adopt a totally different mode of carrying them out. If he would uproot (deraciner) the dynasty of Louis Philippe, wrote Dumas, he must try very different means. He must endeavour to obtain the revocation of his sentence of exile, get himself elected member of the French Chamber of Deputies, and so follow up his plans in opposition to the ruling dynasty. Deaf to this advice, which was certainly sensible enough, Louis Napoleon made his ridiculous attempt at Strasburg, and was taken prisoner. Thereupon his mother, Queen Hortense, hurried to the neighbourhood of Paris under an assumed name, and with one confidential attendant. This person she sent to Dumas, to entreat him to apply to his patron, the Duke of Orleans, to know what the Court had decided with respect to the prisoner's fate. Dumas wrote forthwith for an audience; the Duke received him with a smile. "Well!" he said, "so your protégé has not succeeded in uprooting us?" "Prince, you know – ?" stammered the terrified novelist. "Do you suppose we are so badly served for our money as not to know what brings you here, and where Queen Hortense is at this very moment?" After a short pause, during which he enjoyed the embarrassment of Dumas, the Duke continued, "Tell Madame Hortense," he said, "that the Orleans do not yet feel themselves strong enough to have their Duke d'Enghien."