Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 — John Shaqi
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
The two manners seem incompatible. Never mind. Use them both--both
freely, independently--just as occasion prompts, and the effect
requires. Flatter the philosophic taste that delights in generalities,
and please the childish wonder which loves to fancy that the whole
oak--trunk, branches, leaves--lay in the acorn. M. Louis Blanc has
certainly no idea of forfeiting either of these attractions by laying
claim to the other. Observe the ease and boldness with which he embraces
them in his narrative of the fall of Napoleon, and the restoration of
the Bourbons. He commences in the generalizing mood.
"The fall of Napoleon lay in the laws of the development of the middle
classes. Can a nation be at the same time essentially commercial and
essentially warlike? Napoleon must have renounced his great part of
military chieftain, or he must have broken with the spirit of
citizenship and commerce. It was madness to think of reigning by the
sword, and continuing the Constituent Assembly. France could not have,
at the same time, the destinies of Rome and Carthage. Napoleon
succumbed, and must have succumbed, to the Carthaginian party of the
people of France. But if the necessary development of the middle classes
called for the overthrow of the empire, it demanded also the return of
the Bourbons. To prove this, we have only to present, in its instructive
simplicity of detail, that narrative of the restoration which so many
historians have distorted."--(_Int._, p. 18.)
Well, he proceeds with this simple and instructive detail; and his
first object is evidently to deprive Talleyrand, to whom on all
occasions he manifests a singular bitterness, of the credit generally
given him of having aided materially in the recall of the Bourbons in
1814. But does he effect this by showing, as from this exordium we might
expect, that his countrymen of the middle class, wearied of the costly
triumphs and disasters of the empire, had begun to sigh for peace and
their old kings? Not at all. He transfers the personal share in the
drama from Prince Talleyrand to Baron de Vitrolles. The Duke d'Alberg
had introduced the baron to Talleyrand, whose intention was to employ
him merely to sound the views of the Allies. Talleyrand was to have
accredited him by some lines of his own writing, but ultimately refused
to commit himself. How was Baron de Vitrolles, who by no means limited
himself to the subordinate part designed for him, and on whom it will be
seen so much really depended, to get accredited to the Allies?
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