NAPOLEON'S CURE FOR SCEPTICISM.
AN odder prescription for failing faith has not yet been written in Europe than Louis Napoleon's contained in the letter to M. Rouher, which appeared in the Journal Dfficiel of Tuesday last. The Emperor remarks to his faithful Minister that the centenary of the birth of Napoleon I. will take place on the 15th August next, that while in the last hundred years " many ruins have been made, the great figure of Napoleon has remained erect. It still guides and protects us. It has made me that which I am. To celebrate the centenary of the birth of the man who called France the Great Nation, because ho developed in her those masculine virtues upon which empires are founded, is to me a sacred duty, in which the whole country will willingly assist." He proposes to mark the day by adding from the 15th August next a pension of £10 a year to the pensions of "all soldiers of the Republic and the First Empire." And then follows the remarkable passage in which the Emperor of the French endeavours to reconcile the Corps Legislatif to the proposal. "It will reflect with me," he says, "that at an epoch when complaints of the progress of scepticism are rife, it is good to recompense patriotic devotion and to remind the new generations of it. To recall grand historical memories is to strengthen faith in the future ; to do homage to the memory of great men is to recognize the most brilliant manifestations of the Divine Will." Surely no stronger illustration of the widely different genius of different nations can be conceived than this serious attempt of the Emperor's to recommend a money vote to his parliament by suggesting that a gratification to the old soldiers of the showy First Empire will tend to deepen young Frenchmen's faith in God ? Conceive the English Prime Minister gravely recommending a special vote for the veterans of the Nile, of Trafalgar, and the Peninsular War and Waterloo thus in a speech from the Crown ! — " Gentlemen of the House of Commons, the Estimates have been framed with a due regard to economy. You will observe in them a proposal, which I recommend heartily to your earnest consideration, to appropriate a moderate sum of money to an increase in the pensions of the veteran sailors of the Nile and Trafalgar, and the veteran soldiers of the Peninsular and Waterloo campaigns. You will probably be of opinion that in a day when complaints of the progress of scepticism are rife, it is good to recompense patriotic -devotion and to remind the new generations of it. To recall grand historical memories,—like those of our great naval and military feats in the first years of this century, is to strengthen faith in the future ;—to do homage to the memory of great men, like Nelson and Wellington, is to recognize the most brilliant manifestations of the Divine Will." It is scarcely too much to say that such a speech put into the mouth of the Queen by an English Minister, would be almost equivalent to his classification among political lunatics from that day forth, and yet very little remark is made, even by Englishmen, on its eccentricity in the mouth of the Emperor ; and probably to Frenchmen there will not seem anything very extraordinary in the Emperor's language. No doubt it is quite sincere. So far as Louis Napoleon believes in the Divine Government of the world at all, he believes that a meteoric and external glory like Napoleon Buonaparte's is its best visible symbol on earth ; and, doubtless, he considers a proposal to treat his Uncle's companions in arms somewhat as the early Christians might have treated the surviving brothers and sisters of the Apostles, —as clouds still faintly flushed with the light of the departed sun,—to be an act of genuine piety in the highest sense in which he understands that word. How could the world disbelieve in Christianity while there were still people living who could say, Peter, who was on Mount Tabor at the transfiguration, was my brother, and I have often talked with him of his vision 'I or, I saw the crucifixion of the first martyr Stephen, and I saw with my own eyes Saul, afterwards the great convert, holding the clothes of those who stoned him '? Would it not clearly be an act of piety to distinguish these lingering survivors of the great Christian drama with marks of that universal interest and sympathy which should point the attention of the world at large to the still existing monuments of the new faith ? Just so, Napoleon HI. thinks of that "great figure of Napoleon which still guides and protects me." So long as soldiers remain who were witnesses of his glory and participators in his victories, there will be faith in Napoleon, and so long as there is faith in Napoleon, there will be faith in that ultimate fountain of intellectual lightning-flashes and unconquerable energy, of which Napoleon was only a temporary
manifestation,—which is pretty nearly, we suppose, what the Emperor means by " the most brilliant manifestations of the Divine Will." The way in which he thinks his proposed pensions will tend to the glory of God is clear enough. The proposed pensions to the veterans of Napoleon's campaigns will vivify the memory of those splendid achievements. While Frenchmen vividly recall those achievements, their eyes will at least be dazzled by the corona of a superhuman glory. From superhuman glory of this nature the imagination leaps at once to the supernatural glory of a Lord of Hosts. Hence adding to the pensions of Napoleon's veterans will revive the worship of the Lord God of Sabaoth.
Such is the Emperor's " logic of facts," by which he hopes to make the rather vulgar fact of giving a few pounds a year extra to all the poor and worn-out witnesses of great battlefields and mighty pageants, the efficient cause of a consequent fact—which he calls diminution of scepticism or belief in the Divine Will. He wants to recall to the imagination of France deeds which once made France red-hot with a sort of rapture, —a rapture which, if it was not very religious, was at least decidedly superstitious, decidedly linked with a high belief in Destiny, or, as in his calmer official language the Emperor may prefer to call it, trust in Providence. The guardian angel' language to which even in so formal a State document as this, Louis Napoleon has recourse in reference to his uncle, shows how glad he is to foster that legendary spirit which is already springing up round the founder of his dynasty,—coming out, for instance, in a recent biography of the Great Napoleon by a M. Batjin, in the form of such fables as this,—that the infant Napoleon, on his birth, was received on to a piece of tapestry embroidered with those Homeric contests of gods and heroes recorded in the Iliad; and that Frederick the Great,—fact quite unknown to Mr. Carlyle,— dreamed a remarkable dream on the night of Napoleon's birth, 15th August, 1769 (by him confided to "one of his aidesde-camp"), wherein he saw a new star of remarkable brilliance fighting against the star of Prussia,—the star of his own house,—and for a time swallowing it up in its splendour, till at last the Prussian star emerged and shone on after the other had vanished from the sky.
That, by favouring this sort of national fanaticism, the Emperor of the French may do something to substitute a vulgar superstition for a vulgar scepticism,—and also to give, by the way, a keener edge to the incredulity of the educated, which is ever most contemptuous where the credulity amidst which it lives is most dense and hopeless,—we are far from doubting. . But as a patent cure for scepticism in any deeper sense, it strikes us that the Emperor's prescription is not very good,—unless, indeed, God be the God of vain-glory rather than glory. We do not mean to deny that Frenchmen who fought for the Empire may have gone through sacrifices as genuine and severe for a country they loved better than themselves, as did the Englishmen who fought under Nelson or Wellington. Nor do we mean to deny that it is well for both nations to cherish reverence for deeds of self-forgetful magnanimity and gallantry such as abound in all great wars. But certainly to set forth Napoleon as one of " the most brilliant manifestations of the Divine Will" does strike one as the most curious act of European idolatry which a ruler " who understands his age " has ever attempted in our time. That Napoleon was an instrument of the Divine Will in the same sense in which Sennacherib was an instrument of the Divine Will, we may all believe,—but a manifestation of it and a brilliant manifestation,—a brilliant manifestation of righteousness and mercy and love and self-sacrifice I Surely the quaintest superstition proclaimed in these days is that of the patient-minded, stony-hearted ruler, who boasts of the great devastator and plunderer of Europe as his guardian angel, and hopes to restore faith in Gcd by reviving the prestige of those useless hecatombs of human sacrifice.
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