Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859 Part 21

'Englishmen or Frenchmen,' he answered, 'who help Russia to make railways, put me in mind of the Dutch who sold powder to their besiegers.

'The thinness of her population--that is, the vast s.p.a.ce over which it is scattered--alone prevents Russia from being the mistress of Europe. If her 64,000,000 were as concentrated as our 34,000,000 are, she would be irresistible. She loses always far more men in marching than in fighting.'

'The events of the war,' I said, 'lead me to believe that the goodness of the Russian soldier is exaggerated. They were always beaten, often by inferior numbers.'

'In the first place,' he answered, 'those who were beaten at Sebastopol were not the best Russian soldiers. They were short small men, generally drawn from the neighbouring provinces. The Russian Imperial Guards and the Russian Army in Poland are far superior to any that we encountered in the Crimea. In the second place, they were ill commanded. The improvements of weapons, of science and of discipline, have raised the privates of all the great military nations to about the same level.

Success now depends on numbers and on generals.h.i.+p. With railways Russia will be able to bring quickly a preponderating force to any point on her frontier. Her officers are already good, and for money she can import the best generals; indeed, I do not see why she should not breed them. Russia is civilised enough to produce men of the highest military qualities.'

I asked Admiral Matthieu about the naval preparations of France.

'The "Moniteur,"' I said, 'denies that you are making any.'

'The "Moniteur,"' he answered, 'does not tell the truth. We are augmenting largely, both the number and the efficacy of our fleet.

'Four years ago, at the beginning of the Russian war, we resolved to build a steam fleet of 150 steam s.h.i.+ps of different sizes for fighting, and 74 steam s.h.i.+ps for the transfer service, and to carry fuel and stores. Though we set about this in the beginning, as we thought, of a long war, we have not allowed the peace to interrupt it. We are devoting to it sixty-five millions a year (2,600,000_l_.) of which from fifteen to seventeen millions are employed every year in building new s.h.i.+ps, and from forty to forty-two in adding steam power to the old ones. We hope to finish this great work in fourteen years.'

'What,' I asked, 'is the amount of your present fleet of steamers?'

'We have thirty-three screws,' he answered, 'fifty-seven paddles, and sixty-two sailing vessels in commission, and seventy-three, mostly steamers, _en reserve_, as you would say, in ordinary.'

'Manned by how many men?' I asked.

'By twenty-five thousand sailors,' he answered, 'and eleven thousand marines. But our _inscription maritime_ would give us in a few months or less one hundred thousand more. Since the times of Louis XVI. the French Navy has never been so formidable, positively or relatively.'

'How,' I asked, 'has your "Napoleon" succeeded?'

'Admirably,' he answered. 'I have not seen the "Wellington," but she is a much finer s.h.i.+p than the Agamemnon. Her speed is wonderful. A month ago she left Toulon at seven in the morning, and reached Ajaccio by four in the evening. But the great improvement is in our men. Napoleon knew nothing and cared nothing about sailors. He took no care about their training, and often wasted them in land operations, for which landsmen would have done as well.

'In 1814 he left Toulon absolutely unguarded, and sent all the sailors to join Augereau. You might have walked into it.

'In 1810 or 1811 I was on board a French corvette which fought an action with an English vessel, the "Lively." We pa.s.sed three times under her stern, and raked her each time. We ought to have cleared her decks. Not a shot touched her. The other day at Cherbourg I saw a broadside fired at a floating mark three cables off, the usual distance at which s.h.i.+ps engage.

Ten b.a.l.l.s. .h.i.t it, and we could see that all the others pa.s.sed near enough to shake it by their wind.

'A s.h.i.+p of eighty guns has now forty _canonniers_ and forty _maitres de pieces_. All practical artillerymen, and even the able seamen, can point a gun. Nelson's manoeuvre of breaking the line could not be used against a French fleet, such as a French fleet is now. The leading s.h.i.+ps would be destroyed one after another, by the concentrated fire. Formerly our officers dreaded a maritime war. They knew that defeat awaited them, possibly death. Now they are confident, and eager to try their hands.'

In the evening L. took me into a corner, and we had a long conversation.

He had been reading my 'Athens Journal.'

'What struck me,' he said, 'in every page of it, was the resemblance of King Otho to Louis Napoleon.'

'I see the resemblance,' I answered, 'but it is the resemblance of a dwarf to a giant.'

'No,' he replied. 'Of a man five feet seven inches high to one five feet eleven inches. There are not more than four inches between them. There is the same cunning, the same coldness, the same vindictiveness, the same silence, the same perseverance, the same unscrupulousness, the same selfishness, the same anxiety to appear to do everything that is done, and above all, the same determination to destroy, or to seduce by corruption or by violence, every man and every inst.i.tution favourable to liberty, independence, or self-government. In one respect Otho had the more difficult task. He found himself, in 1843, subject to a Const.i.tution carefully framed under the advice of England for the express purpose of controlling him. He did not attempt to get rid of it by a _coup d'etat_, or even to alter it, but cunningly and skilfully perverted it into an instrument of despotism. Louis Napoleon destroyed the Const.i.tution which he found, and made a new one, copied from that which had been gradually elaborated by his uncle, which as a restraint is intentionally powerless and fraudulent.

'A man,' he continued, 'may acquire influence either by possessing in a higher degree the qualities which belong to his country and to his time, or by possessing those in which they are deficient.

'Wellington is an example of this first sort. His excellences were those of an Englishman carried almost to perfection.

'Louis Napoleon belongs to the second. If his merits had been impetuous courage, rapidity of ideas, quickness of decision, frankness, versatility and resource, he would have been surrounded by his equals or his superiors. He predominated over those with whom he came in contact because he differed from them. Because he was calm, slow, reserved, silent, and persevering. Because he is a Dutchman, not a Frenchman.'

'He seems,' I said, 'to have lost his calmness.'

'Yes,' answered L. 'But under what a shock! And observe that though the greatest risk was encountered by _him_, the terror was greatest among his _entourage_. I do not believe that if he had been left to himself he would have lost his prudence or his self-possession. He did not for the first day. Pa.s.sions are contagious. Everyone who approached him was agitated by terror and anger. His intrepidity and self-reliance, great as they are, were disturbed by the hubbub all round him. His great defects are three. First, his habit of self-contemplation. He belongs to the men whom the Germans call subjective, whose eye is always turned inwardly; who think only of themselves, of their own character, and of their own fortunes. Secondly, his jealousy of able men. He wishes to be what you called him, a giant, and as Nature has not made him positively tall, he tries to be comparatively so, by surrounding himself with dwarfs. His third defect is the disproportion of his wishes to his means. His desires are enormous. No power, no wealth, no expenditure would satisfy them.

Even if he had his uncle's genius and his uncle's indefatigability, he would sink, as his uncle did, under the exorbitance of his attempts. As he is not a man of genius, or even a man of remarkable ability, as he is ignorant, uninventive and idle, you will see him flounder and fall from one failure to another.

'During the three years that Drouyn de L'Huys was his minister he was intent on home affairs--on his marriage, on the Louvre, on the artillery, on his _bonnes fortunes_, and on the new delights of unbounded expenditure. He left foreign affairs altogether to his minister. When Drouyn de L'Huys left him, the road before him was plain--he had only to carry on the war. But when the war was over, the road ended; neither he nor Walewski nor any of his _entourage_ know anything of the country in which they are travelling. You see them wandering at hazard. Sometimes trying to find their way to Russia, sometimes to England. Making a treaty with Austria, then attempting to injure her, and failing; attempting to injure Turkey, and failing; bullying Naples, and failing; threatening Switzerland, threatening Belgium, and at last demanding from England an Alien Bill, which they ought to know to be incompatible with the laws and hateful to the feelings of the people.

'He is not satisfied with seeing the country prosperous and respected abroad. He wants to dazzle. His policy, domestic and foreign, is a policy of vanity and ostentation--motives which mislead everyone both in private and in public life.

'His great moral merits are kindness and sympathy. He is a faithful attached friend, and wishes to serve all who come near him.

'His greatest moral fault is his ignorance of the difference between right and wrong; perhaps his natural insensibility to it, his want of the organs by which that difference is perceived--a defect which he inherits from his uncle.'

'The uncle,' I said, 'had at least one moral sense--he could understand the difference between pecuniary honesty and dishonesty, a difference which this man seems not to see, or not to value.'

'I agree with you,' said L. 'He cannot value it, or he would not look complacently on the peculation which surrounds him. Every six months some magnificent hotel rises in the Champs elysees, built by a man who had nothing, and has been a minister for a year or two.'

On my return I found Tocqueville with the ladies. I gave him an outline of what L. had said.

'No one,' he said, 'knows Louis Napoleon better than L.'

'My opportunities of judging him have been much fewer, but as far as they have gone, they lead to the same conclusions. L. perhaps has not dwelt enough on his indolence. Probably as he grows older, and the effects of his early habits tell on him, it increases. I am told that it is difficult to make him attend to business, that he prolongs audiences apparently to kill time.

'One of the few of my acquaintances who go near him, was detained by him for an hour to answer questions about the members of the _Corps legislatif_. Louis Napoleon inquired about their families, their fortunes, their previous histories. Nothing about their personal qualities. These are things that do not interest him. He supposes that men differ only in externals. "That the _fond_ is the same in everyone."'

_April 26_.--Tocqueville spent the evening with us.

We talked of Novels.

'I read none,' he said, 'that end ill. Why should one voluntarily subject oneself to painful emotions? To emotions created by an imaginary cause and therefore impelling you to no action. I like vivid emotions, but I seek them in real life, in society, in travelling, in business, but above all in political business. There is no happiness comparable to political success, when your own excitement is justified by the magnitude of the questions at issue, and is doubled and redoubled by the sympathy of your supporters. Having enjoyed that, I am ashamed of being excited by the visionary sorrows of heroes and heroines.

'I had a friend,' he continued, 'a Benedictine, who is now ninety-seven.

He was, therefore, about thirteen when Louis XVI. began to reign. He is a man of talents and knowledge, has always lived in the world, has attended to all that he has seen and heard, and is still unimpaired in mind, and so strong in body that when I leave him he goes down to embrace me, after the fas.h.i.+on of the eighteenth century, at the bottom of his staircase.'

'And what effect,' I asked, 'has the contemplation of seventy years of revolution produced in him? Does he look back, like Talleyrand, to the _ancien regime_ as a golden age?'

'He admits,' said Tocqueville, 'the material superiority of our own age, but he believes that, intellectually and morally, we are far inferior to our grandfathers. And I agree with him. Those seventy years of revolution have destroyed our courage, our hopefulness, our self-reliance, our public spirit, and, as respects by far the majority of the higher cla.s.ses, our pa.s.sions, except the vulgarest and most selfish ones--vanity and covetousness. Even ambition seems extinct. The men who seek power, seek it not for itself, not as the means of doing good to their country, but as a means of getting money and flatterers.

'It is remarkable,' he continued, 'that women whose influence is generally greatest under despotisms, have none now. They have lost it, partly in consequence of the gross vulgarity of our dominant pa.s.sions, and partly from their own nullity. They are like London houses, all built and furnished on exactly the same model, and that a most uninteresting one. Whether a girl is bred up at home or in a convent, she has the same masters, gets a smattering of the same accomplishments, reads the same dull books, and contributes to society the same little contingent of superficial information.

'When a young lady comes out I know beforehand how her mother and her aunts will describe her. "Elle a les gouts simples. Elle est pieuse. Elle aime la campagne. Elle aime la lecture. Elle n'aime pas le bal. Elle n'aime pas le monde, elle y ira seulement pour plaire a sa mere." I try sometimes to escape from these generalities, but there is nothing behind them.'

'And how long,' I asked, 'does this simple, pious, retiring character last?'

'Till the orange flowers of her wedding chaplet are withered,' he answered. 'In three months she goes to the _messe d'une heure_.'