The second french republic 1848-1852: a political reinterpretation 1st edition christopher guyver (a
The Second French Republic 1848-1852: A Political Reinterpretation 1st Edition Christopher Guyver (Auth.)
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The 2017 French Presidential Elections: A Political Reformation? 1st Edition Jocelyn Evans
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For my parents, Robert and Margaret Guyver. With love and gratitude
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has been long, far too long, in the coming. And the number of people who have helped, encouraged, and (quite rightly) cajoled me is large.
Professor Nigel Aston, Dr. Gábor Bátonyi, Dr. Bernard Cadogan, Dr. Ambrogio Caiani, Dr. Iain Chadwick, Professor Martin Conway, Dr. Michael Drolet, my D.Phil. supervisor Dr. Geoffrey Ellis, Professor Robert Gildea, Dr. Sheridan Gilley, Dr. Sudhir Hazareesingh, Dr. David Parrott, Professor Pam Pilbeam, Professor Munro Price, Professor Nicole Roger-Taillade, and Dr. Brian Sudlow.
The Maison de France granted me permission to consult the manuscripts of the Orléans family, kept at the Archives nationales de France. The Rothschild Foundation allowed me to consult the letters from General Changarnier to Betty de Rothschild at the Centre des Archives du Monde du Travail at Roubaix. In 2002 the late comte Charles de Montalembert gave me access to the Montalembert archives at the château of La Rocheen-Brenil. Historical research has been immeasurably eased by the mass digitization of both printed and manuscript sources. I should like, therefore, to acknowledge the work of the staff at the Bodleian Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, The Times Digital Archive, and the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique.
Researching a historical work is demanding, not least on those who have given me their hospitality in Paris and elsewhere over the years. I should like to thank Henri Adam de Villiers, Dr. Mark Atherton, Dr. Ayelet Banai, Thomas Boucheron, Mlle Monique Dacharry, Fr. Mark Drew, Julie Dyson, Jean and Élisabeth Flory, M. and Mme Jacques Gommy,
Dr. Peter and Mme Maryvonne Home, Mike McDonough, the late comte and comtesse Emmanuel de Montalembert, Anna and Sebastian Sales, Dr. Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, Rachael and Oliver Watson.
I have been fortunate in my friends who have put up with me and this book for far longer than they deserve: Dr. Olympia Bobou, Dr. Nazan Çiçek, Dr. Martine Fiore, Menyhért Horváth, and Fergus Parnaby. Rachael Watson combined her skills as historian and proofreader. Kristin Purdy and Michelle Smith at Palgrave have provided exemplary editorial support. All errors that remain are mine alone.
Lastly, this could not have been possible without the love and support of my parents, Robert and Margaret Guyver.
L IST OF F IGURES
Fig. 2.1 Odilon Barrot (1791–1873), after the 1832 portrait by Ary Scheffer, was the leader of the Dynastic Opposition during the July Monarchy. He served as President of the Council of Ministers between December 1848 and October 1849 (Private collection)
Fig. 2.2 Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, duc d’Isly (1784–1849), depicted here at the end of his career, was a highly effective if brutal soldier, who had been a pillar of the July Monarchy and was a powerful voice in the Second Republic till his death from cholera in June 1849 (Private collection)
Fig. 4.1 Comte Frédéric-Alfred-Pierre de Falloux (1811–86) was the rising star of the Party of Order during the Second Republic and a clever spokesman for both the Catholic Church and the legitimist cause (Private collection)
Fig. 5.1 Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877), here depicted c. 1860, had a long career in French politics. During the Second Republic, he was an able negotiator and a power behind the scenes before being outmaneuvered by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (Private collection)
Fig. 6.1 General Nicolas-Anne-Théodule Changarnier (1793–1877) was the most important military figure of the Second Republic. This portrait captures well both his dandyism and his inflated selfconfidence (Private collection)
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The history of France after 1814 is a catalogue of instability, fear, hope, and failure. This instability is a constant theme in the literature of the period, and contemporaries often yearned for more heroic eras. Many of those who lived through this period hated it. Historians can take the very different view that this was one of the most fascinating periods to study. Many of the themes beloved of historians—continuity, change, the enacting of revolutionary ritual, violence, and fear—leap out from this epoch.
The revolutionary destruction of the ancien régime after 1789 and the succession of constitutions did not solve the problem of how to rule France. This problem did not go away with the either the Terror, the coup of Thermidor, the coup of Brumaire, the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor, or his abdication in April 1814 when the Bourbons were recalled to France. The compromise of July 1830 pleased the ruling class of notables (a term that came into usage under Napoleon to designate the new ruling class, an amalgam of the pre-revolutionary nobility and the new men who made up the “masses of granite” of society).
We now know that France has been a Republic ever since 1870, with the important exception of the period 1940–44. This was not, however, inevitable as there were other traditions that had a strong grip on loyalties within the political class, and as the suffrage extended, among all (male) voters. Royalism was divided between fidelity to the elder branch of the Bourbons (legitimism) or to the cadet branch (Orleanism). Both branches had had their time in the sun: the senior branch ruled from 1814, interrupted by the Hundred Days of 1815 and fell in 1830, to be replaced by
the junior branch of the Orléans family, which fell in turn in 1848. Even after these two revolutions, there was still a strong possibility that France could have become a monarchy once more in the early 1850s. The last and, in 1852, triumphant political tendency was Bonapartism, which was itself a product of the Revolution of 1789 and fed as much on bitterness against the monarchies of 1814/15–48 as any variant of republicanism. Even after the proclamation of the Republic in September 1870, it took nearly half a decade for the republican form of government to be given definitive constitutional form.
After the bloodshed of the First Republic, the founders of the Second wanted the world to see that the republican form of government was profoundly humanitarian and a break with the corruption of the monarchical form of government. Of all the regimes of the period 1814–70, the Second Republic (1848–52) has left the greatest legacy in France: not least of which was the abolition of slavery in the colonies and the abolition of the death penalty for political offenses. The introduction of universal manhood suffrage involved millions of Frenchmen in the political decisions of their nation. The novelty of this system gave the Second Republic’s elections a greater urgency than they had before in the period of restricted suffrage. Understanding the fear that the word “democracy” caused to the political elites requires a leap of historical imagination. But although the stakes were higher, decisions made at the top were still just as important: thus five-and-a-half million votes may have opened the doors of the Élysée Palace to President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in December 1848, but the decision to have a coup d’état three years later in December 1851 was his, and his alone.
For the majority of the Second Republic’s existence, France was not governed by convinced republicans. If Pierre Rosanvallon has qualified the constitutional monarchy of 1814–48 as the “impossible,” the Republic of 1848 was no less impossible.1 Republicanism’s capital was the highest during periods of revolutionary instability, as was seen in 1830, 1848, and 1870, but as a system of government it only scraped through third time lucky when all other possibilities had been exhausted.
This book’s focus is the fears and plans of the political elite displaced in February 1848 but absorbed back into power in the following months and years, and why suspicion of and indifference toward the Republic as a form of government and fear and hatred of the new ideas of socialism were what divided them the least. We are offered the intriguing, if unedifying, spectacle of men and women often described as liberals being ready to sacrifice
all the principles they had tended before 1848 in order to preserve society as they knew it during the longest political crisis of the nineteenth century. The general trend in historiography over the last century and a half has been first to dismiss the Republic as a futile endeavor and later to embrace it as the harbinger of social democracy. Its futility was most powerfully illustrated by three of the most influential works written on it: two were written during its short existence and the third soon after its extinction: Tocqueville’s Souvenirs, Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx’s true fame was to emerge in the 1860s at the time of the First International and the publication of Capital. Tocqueville, who had served as Minister of Foreign Affairs during the summer of 1849 and had already written the two books of Democracy in America, needed no such introduction to contemporaries, but his Souvenirs were written in the seclusion caused by the early stages of the tuberculosis that was to kill him in 1859.
Having produced the Communist Manifesto with Engels in January 1848, which eagerly predicted the impending revolution of the proletariat, Marx needed to explain why the outcome of the revolutions of 1848 had been so different from his confident forecast. Unlike his conservative contemporaries, for whom the 1848 revolution was a meaningless interlude, Marx had to tread the line of emphasizing both why it was important in the history of the class struggle (a concept he borrowed from the liberal French historians Thierry and Guizot) and why its failure was historically necessary, through building up a powerful counterrevolution that could in turn produce a stronger revolutionary force. The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, was Marx’s first historical work and was published first in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850, based on his own reporting for that newspaper.2 The ultimate answer to Marx’s conundrum of how to account for the failure of a necessary revolution was in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, produced straight after the coup d’état of 2 December 1851. In what is generally reckoned to be his most brilliant political pamphlet, he developed the themes already latent in the earlier work, namely, the conservatism of the peasantry and the cravenness of the bourgeoisie, as well as the divisions of the ruling class.3 Much of his account was based on his own firsthand observations, correspondence with people on the spot, and on a wide-ranging reading of the daily press.
Tocqueville’s Souvenirs, written partly while he was convalescing from tuberculosis, have been equally influential on our understanding of the Republic. Tocqueville had a satirist’s eye for the foibles of his contempo-
raries (and very often for those of his close friends). Although he came to very different conclusions, Tocqueville had drunk from the same historical springs as Marx: he, too, believed in the role of class struggle in history; where he, the aristocratic liberal and the exiled socialist journalist Marx agreed, it could be powerful, for instance in their analysis of the June Days.
Marie d’Agoult, famous to posterity as the mistress of Franz Liszt and mother of Cosima Wagner, writing as Daniel Stern, quickly produced her Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, based on eyewitness testimony, written sources from newspapers, and help from leading republicans and socialists. It covered the period of the Republic to the presidential election of 10 December 1848 (and as the third and final volume was published in the very different world of the France of Napoleon III of 1853, it is not surprising that the history ended at that point). The first volume of the three-volume history was published in 1850, when it was clear that the democratic and social Republic she had welcomed in February 1848 was dead, if not formally buried. This was a work of faith in the people, whose “naive enthusiasm of fraternity, a proud disinterest, delicate courtesy, natural generosity, and humanity” had been betrayed by the old Orleanist political class and a minority of secret society members.4 As she admitted in the preface to the second edition in 1862, this was a work that was written in the heat of the moment.5 So well written was this book (her account of the February Revolution is still the most gripping to date), and so forgotten its author, that subsequent historians have had little scruple in lifting sections of her work (she, in turn, lifted passages from Charles Robin’s Histoire de la Révolution française de 1848).6 Her grand philosophical theme that the Revolution was an ineluctable historical process (she was well read in German philosophy, Hegel above all, something that was rare among her French contemporaries) would have to be put on hold by the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in December 1848, when the history ended.
The first wave of semi-official publications on the Republic’s history that soon followed were nearly all written from a standpoint almost unknown today: the triumph of authority embodied in Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte against socialist anarchy and parliamentary intrigue. Many of these were rushed into print in December 1851 and January 1852 as justifications of the coup or biographies of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Granier de Cassagnac’s later histories were the official, almost monolithic history of the Republic, published by Henri Plon, which boasted its patronage by
the Emperor. Not till Eugène Ténot’s critical accounts of the coup were published in France in the 1860s could an alternative voice be heard.7
We are lucky that the Second Republic’s history is abundant in primary sources. Among the most important are newspapers. France had one of the liveliest public spheres of the nineteenth century, even in periods of censorship. The importance of these dailies is in their ownership and political allegiance: the Journal des Débats littéraires et politiques (often shortened to the Débats, a usage which this book follows) had been the most prominent newspaper to support Guizot’s government in the 1840s; the Constitutionnel was owned by Thiers till early 1849, when it switched its allegiance to President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. The Presse, a loose cannon among the newspapers, but owned by the commercially able Émile de Girardin, swerved from conservatism to republicanism during the Republic’s history. The Univers, edited by Louis Veuillot, was one of the first media-savvy organs of the Catholic Church. The leading articles of all these newspapers were a daily feed of opinion in the battle to influence the public. This was also an era of cosmopolitan media and The Times and the Indépendance belge both help the historian because their reports were not subject to censorship within France, and even if their editorial lines were conservative, they did not always scruple to sit on uncomfortable facts.
Balzac, the dominant literary genius of the July Monarchy, was too worn out by his labors to write after 1848 and died in August 1850. Without him, the Second Republic has still left its mark on literature. The most famous novel to deal with the period is Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, first published in 1869. This cruel, cynical work about the lost opportunities of youth is still cited as a primary source. Flaubert’s other novel that passes through the period of the Republic is the satire Bouvard et Pécuchet, in which political events hardly impinge on the lives of the two characters. Émile Zola’s first novel of the massive RougonMacquart cycle, La Fortune des Rougon, told the story of the Second Republic in the small Provençal town of Plassans, in which the Republic is assassinated symbolically at the end. As soon as he left France after the coup of 1851, Victor Hugo produced a collection of invective poetry, Les Châtiments, and his autobiographical novel, Histoire d’un crime, written after he returned in 1870.
Lamartine, Marc Caussidière, and Hippolyte Carnot, all out of power by the summer of 1848, put their versions into the public gaze very quickly. Proudhon also rushed his memoirs of 1848 into print.8 Others were only published a century after their composition: Charles
de Rémusat’s remarkable Mémoires de ma vie, edited by Charles Pouthas, were published in seven volumes between 1958 and 1967, and the unpublished sections are still frequently consulted in the Bibliothèque nationale. We have memoirs by, among others, Barrot, Maxime du Camp, Falloux, Guizot, Maupas, Persigny, either published posthumously or many years after the events.9 Naturally, the use of memoir literature is problematic, especially since we all know that memory is fallible and malleable, and often becomes more so when politicians put pen to paper. Nevertheless, there are gems of description of places and of the main players (this is one of Rémusat’s star turns). Most of these works were, to judge from internal evidence, composed during the Second Empire: the memoirists were not worried about explaining away the repressive policies they sponsored but rather how they had let themselves be defeated by the wiles of LouisNapoleon Bonaparte. The self-justification is, however, part of the story: it shows how the Second Republic mattered in the decades that followed. Diaries, so helpful in recording the vicissitudes of mood, conversations, and speculations about the future as well as humor (often not concordant with twenty-first-century tastes), tell us a great deal. We have an abundance of diaries from the elite world, from Austrian diplomats, Rodolphe Apponyi (the nephew of the ambassador) and Baron von Hübner, the ambassador from 1851, to the well-connected English political economist Nassau Senior; high-ranking soldiers such as the Marshal de Castellane; literary figures such as Edmond Got, Victor Hugo, and Xavier Marmier; the great historian Jules Michelet; the salonnière the duchesse de Maillé; and the mother-in-law of Thiers, Madame Dosne. This fund has been further enriched by recent publications. Charles de Montalembert’s Journal intime edited by Nicole Roger-Taillade is a hugely useful resource, not least because of his accounts of the incessant meetings and frustrations and compromises of being a major figure in the Party of Order. Long believed lost but found in the Archives of Lucca by Philippe Delorme and published in 2009, the Journal of the comte de Chambord has helped to cast light on a personage long deemed too enigmatic for serious analysis; even though Chambord tended in his earlier diaries to be discreet to a fault, they still yield some suggestive nuggets about legitimist policy. This list is not complete without the diaries of Queen Victoria, digitized for the Diamond Jubilee in 2012.10
Although the papers of General Changarnier, an important figure in the Second Republic, cannot be traced, the letters he wrote to Betty de Rothschild are invaluable.11 The correspondence of Adolphe de Circourt
to Henry Reeve, covering the period 1849–53 and kept at the British Library, offers crucial insights into Parisian society and political life. Barrot’s letters to an “Anglaise,” kept at the Archives Nationales and copied in a secretary’s hand, are, I believe, genuine.12 The archives of General de La Moricière, Minister of War twice during the Republic, can now be consulted at the Archives Nationales, in the Fonds Dampierre (289 AP). The correspondence of Léon Faucher, twice Minister of the Interior, was published in 1867, 13 years after his death. I have used the printed correspondence of other notable figures, such as Prosper Mérimée, SainteBeuve, and Alfred de Vigny, who were not members of the Assembly or of the government but were part of high society.13
By the end of the nineteenth century, as the events of 1848–52 receded from living memory, a new generation of writers concentrated on the Second Republic. The prolific historian Pierre de La Gorce (1846–1934), whose sympathies were with the Catholic right, produced his Histoire de la Seconde République française in 1887.14 On the brink of the Boulanger crisis, this work implicitly predicted that the Third Republic would suffer the same fate as the Second (by 1887 the Third Republic’s duration had nearly reached the maximum for any regime so far in the nineteenth century). This was above all a political history, of changes of ministry and with scant discussion of the variants of republicanism. Socialism, a major theme in the Republic’s history, was covered in a chapter after the coup d’état in the second volume of his Histoire de la Seconde République française.
Contemporary to La Gorce’s work was Eugène Spuller’s Histoire parlementaire de la Seconde République, suivie d’une petite histoire du Second Empire (1891). Like La Gorce, the interest of Spuller (1835–96) was the Republic’s political history. A politician to his finger tips, having served in government in the 1880s and 1890s, he consciously wanted to show how the romanticism of the republicans of 1848 was totally misplaced in the face of the cynical, hardened politicians of the Party of Order, whose efficiency and organization, if not their beliefs, Spuller admired.15 A counterpoint to this overly political approach was George Renard’s volume on the Republic in Jean Jaurès’s Histoire socialiste (1901).16
In the second half of the twentieth century, André-Jean Tudesq’s work on the grands notables during the period 1840–49, published in 1964, cannot be gainsaid, above all in empirical scope.17 Nevertheless, the chief limitation of Tudesq’s work for the purposes of this book is that it ends in 1849, when the Barrot Ministry was summarily dismissed by Louis-Napoleon on 30 October. As we shall see, the influence of the notables was felt till 1851.
If there is one scholar who can be said to have made the Second Republic his own, it is the late Maurice Agulhon. His work La République au village showed the deep roots republicanism had planted in the department of the Var. His general history of the Republic, 1848, ou l’apprentissage de la République (1972), translated as The Republican Experiment in 1983, sought to rescue the regime as a valid republican government and to give the leaders of the Provisional Government of 1848 their full due.18
What Agulhon himself called a “pléiade” of English-speaking scholars in the 1970s concentrated on exploiting the Archives Nationales in order to de-victimize the growth of democracy.19 John Merriman’s The Agony of the Republic looked at the police repression of republicans during the presidency of Louis-Napoleon. Ted W. Margadant’s work on the provincial resistance to the coup d’état of 2 December 1851 gave a thorough account of rural republicanism.20 Through the work of Roger Price since the 1970s we have been able to read a series of studies of the interaction between the social classes and political power.21 In 1981, French Provincial Police and the Fall of the Second Republic, Thomas R. Forstenzer’s study of the prefectoral corps, commented on the “scant interest in the counterrevolutionary side of the Second Republic” shown by American and British historians, and punctured the myth that social fear was a hoax, an invention of cynical bureaucrats obeying the orders from the President, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.22 Forstenzer overstated his case, as we shall see, but he exposed an important chink in the armor of the prevailing historiography. More recently, we now have a far clearer understanding of what motivated insurgents in Paris to mount the barricades thanks to the recent works of Louis Hincker and Jill Harsin.23
The growth of socialism as a thought system is a major theme of nineteenth-century history. Recent studies have been boosted, above all, by Jonathan Beecher’s biographies of Fourier and Considerant; Pamela Pilbeam’s work on republicanism, socialism, and Saint-Simonism; and Michèle Riot-Sarcey’s essay on social fear in the July Monarchy.24 This book will follow these findings by asking how far socialism was misunderstood and how far this misunderstanding affected political choice.
The 150th anniversary of the February Revolution in 1998 and of the coup d’état in 2001 produced fruitful and interesting conference proceedings. Especially important for this book is François Fourn’s paper, “1849–1851: l’anticommunisme en France. Le Spectre rouge de 1852,” which systematically explored for the first time the mass pamphleteering campaign against socialism.25 Jean-Claude Caron’s study, Frères de sang,
about civil war in France in the nineteenth century emphasized the presence of violence within the state.26 William Fortescue’s France and 1848: The End of Monarchy (2005) has provided a cogent narrative analysis based on wide reading of the French press.
Biography has the virtue of emphasizing the contingency of many decisions in politics, and historians of nineteenth-century France have been well served by, among others, Éric Anceau’s biography of Napoleon III, based closely on newly available primary sources; Laurent Theis’s of Guizot and Brogan’s of Tocqueville; and Munro Price’s biography of Louis-Philippe.27
The hardy perennials of conspiracy theory and rumor dominated people’s minds and determined decision-making, as François Ploux’s De bouche à l’oreille has shown.28 How far conspiracies did exist is harder to ascertain: papers got burnt when it was thought that their continued material existence would be compromising, or far more often conversations never reached paper. Following the Chinese whispers of planned coups d’état and of insurrections is an often confusing and fruitless process for the historian. The fact remains, however, that such rumors were taken seriously at the time and were more compelling for the historical actors over a century and a half ago than they seem today under scholarly scrutiny.
In the first chapter, we shall look at how the fears provoked by the Republic were conditioned by the events and practices of the Restoration and the July Monarchies. Chapter 3 will show the abatement of the elites in the months that followed the February Revolution of 1848. Their bounce back and fight against the crowds on the barricades during the June Days will be documented in Chap. 4. Chapter 5 will follow the conservative republic under Cavaignac and the advent of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte as a successful presidential candidate in December 1848. The two Ministries of Barrot, populated mainly by Orleanists, will be covered in Chap. 6 The new government, installed by a President fed up with men of the old order, is covered from November 1849 to January 1851, when the President dismissed his main internal military rival, General Changarnier. Finally, I shall follow the path to the coup of 1851 and beyond, to the formal destruction of the Republic in 1852.
1.1 NOTE ON NAMES AND TRANSLATION
Where possible I have used the version of the names used by the actors themselves: thus Considerant instead of Considérant, La Moricière instead of Lamoricière. The exception to this rule is Louis-Napoleon: although
some English-language writers now use “Louis-Napoléon” I have preferred the more traditional spelling. I have translated most of the passages from the original French; in the remaining cases where English was used originally (for instance by Circourt, Mérimée, and Montalembert), I have left them in their pristine state.
NOTES
1. Pierre Rosanvallon, La Monarchie impossible: les Chartes de 1814 et de 1830 (Paris: Fayard, 1994).
2. Engels, cit. D. Fernbach, introduction to K. Marx, Surveys from Exile (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 9.
3. David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (London: Macmillan, 1973), 221; Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York and London: Liveright Publishing, 2013), 289.
4. Stern, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 (3 vols, Paris: L. Martinet, 1850–3), 1: 270; see also Jacques Vier, La Comtesse d’Agoult et son temps (4 vols, Paris: Armand Colin, 1959–63), 3: 71; Charles Dupêchez, Marie d’Agoult, 1805–1876 (Paris: Perrin, 1989), 204; Phyllis Stock-Morton, The Life of Marie d’Agoult alias Daniel Stern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2003), 153.
5. Stern, Histoire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Charpentier, 1862), vol. 1, p. v.
6. E.g. D. C. McKay, The National Workshops: A Study of the French Revolution of 1848 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1933), Jules Bertaut, 1848 et la Seconde République (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1937), 40 cf. Stern, 1: 100–1. For Stern’s own plagiarism, see Vier, La Comtesse d’Agoult, 3: 80–2.
7. B.-A. Granier de Cassagnac, Histoire de la chute du roi Louis-Philippe, de la République de 1848 et du rétablissement de l’Empire (1847–1855) (2 vols, Paris: Librairie de Henri Plon, imprimeur de l’empereur, 1857); Eugène Ténot, La Province en décembre 1851: étude historique sur le coup d’État. (Paris: chez les principaux libraires, 1865) and idem, Paris en décembre 1851: étude historique sur le coup d’État, 6th ed. (Paris: Le Chevalier, 1868).
8. A. de Lamartine, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 (2 vols, Paris: Perrotin, 1849); Marc Caussidière, Mémoires de Caussidière (2 vols, Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1849); H. Carnot, Le Ministère de l’Instruction publique et des Cultes depuis le 24 février jusqu’au 5 juillet 1848 (Paris: Pagnerre, 1848); L. Blanc, La Révolution de février au Luxembourg (Paris: Michel Lévy, frères, 1849); P.-J. Proudhon, Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution de février (Paris: Bureau du journal La Voix du peuple, 1849).
9. Odilon Barrot, Mémoires posthumes de O. Barrot, ed. P. Duvergier de Hauranne (4 vols, Paris: Charpentier et Cie, 1875–6); F.-A.-P. de Falloux, Mémoires d’un royaliste, ed. G. de Blois (2 vols, Paris: Perrin et Cie, 1888); François Guizot, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps (8 vols., Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1858–67); Charlemagne-Émile de Maupas, Mémoires sur le Second Empire, 4th ed. (2 vols, Paris: E. Dentu, 1884–5); Mémoires du duc de Persigny, publiés avec des documents inédits, 2nd ed. (Paris : E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1896); C. de Rémusat, Mémoires de ma vie, ed. C.-H. Pouthas (5 vols, Paris: Plon, 1958–67).
10. Rodolphe Apponyi, Vingt-cinq ans à Paris (1826–1852): Journal du comte Rodolphe Apponyi, attaché de l’ambassade d’Autriche à Paris, publié par Ernest Daudet (4 vols, Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1913–26), vol. 4: 1844–1852 (1926); Graf Alexander von Hübner, Neuf ans de souvenirs d’un ambassadeur d’Autriche à Paris sous le Second Empire 1851–1859, publiés par son fils le comte Alexandre de Hübner (2 vols, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1905–8); Nassau William Senior, Journals kept in France and Italy from 1848 to 1852 (2 vols, London: Henry S. King and Co., 1871); idem, Conversations with M. Thiers, M. Guizot and Other Distinguished Persons during the Second Empire, ed. M. C. M. Simpson (2 vols, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1878); Paris Journals of Nassau William Senior, Bodleian MSS. Eng, hist. d. 259–60; Esprit-Victor-Élisabeth-Boniface de Castellane, Journal du maréchal de Castellane 1804–1862 (5 vols, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1895–7), vol. 4: 1847–1853 (1896); Edmond Got, Journal de Edmond Got, sociétaire de la Comédie-Française, 1822–1901, ed. Médéric Got (2 vols, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1910); Victor Hugo, Choses vues, ed. H. Juin (Paris: Gallimard, 1972; new ed. 2002); Xavier Marmier, Journal (1848–1890), Eldon Kaye (ed.) (2 vols, Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1968); Jules Michelet, Journal: Texte intégral établi sur les manuscrits autographes et publié pour la première fois, avec une introduction, des notes et de nombreux documents inédits par Paul Viallaneix (4 vols, Paris: Gallimard, 1959–76); duchesse de Maillé, Mémoires de la duchesse de Maillé 1832–1851, ed. Xavier de La Fournière (Paris: Perrin, 1989); Eurydice Sophie Matheron Dosne, Mémoires de Madame Dosne l’égérie de M. Thiers, publiés avec une introduction et des notes par Henri Malo (2 vols, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1928); C. de Montalembert, Journal intime inédit, eds L. Le Guillou and Nicole Roger-Taillade (8 vols, Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1990–2009); comte de Chambord, Journal (1846–1883): Carnets inédits. Texte établi et annoté par Philippe Delorme (Paris: François-Xavier de Guibert, 2009); Queen Victoria, RA VIC/MAIN/QVJ (W) (Princess Beatrice’s copies), http://www. queenvictoriasjournals.org/search/browseByDate.do
11. The letters to Betty de Rothschild are conserved at the CAMT in Roubaix.
12. The detail presented in the letters is supported by much outside evidence; moreover, Barrot sometimes lets slip comments that he would not have liked to have inserted in the Mémoires posthumes.
13. Léon Faucher, Léon Faucher (2 vols, Paris: Amyot), vol. 1: Correspondance (Paris, 1867). Prosper Mérimée, Correspondance générale, ed. Maurice Parturier (17 vols, Paris: Le Divan, 1941–64), vols 5: 1847–1849 (1946) and 6: 1850–1852 (1947); Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Correspondance générale, new series, ed. J. Bonnerot (19 vols, Paris: Stock, 1935–83); Vigny, Correspondance de Alfred de Vigny 1816–1863, recueillie et publiée par Emma Sakellaridès (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, [1906]).
14. Pierre de La Gorce, Histoire de la Seconde République française (2 vols, Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1887).
15. Eugène Spuller, Histoire parlementaire de la Seconde République, suivie d’une petite histoire du Second Empire (Paris: Félix Alcan, éditeur, 1891), vii–viii.
16. G. Renard, La Deuxième République française (1848–1851) (Paris: J. Rouff, 1901), vol. 9: L’Histoire socialiste 1789–1900, sous la direction de Jean Jaurès.
17. A.-J. Tudesq, Les Grands Notables en France : Étude historique d’une psychologie sociale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964).
18. Agulhon, La République au village (Paris: Plon, 1970); 1848, ou l’apprentissage de la République, 3rd ed. (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002).
19. Agulhon review of Agony of the Republic by John Merriman in Annales HSS 35 (1980): 1306.
20. Ted W. Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
21. This theme is especially evident in Price’s works The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Power and Politics in France, 1848–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
22. Thomas R. Forstenzer, French Provincial Police and the Fall of the Second Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
23. L. Hincker, Citoyens-combattants à Paris: 1848–1851 (Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2008); J. Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–1848 (New York: Macmillan, 2002).
24. Beecher, J., Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); idem, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); P. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France, 1814–1871 (London: Palgrave, 1995); idem, French Socialism Before Marx: Workers, Women and the Social Question in France (Teddington: Acumen, 2000); idem, Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-
Century France: From Free Love to Algeria (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014); Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Le Réel de l’Utopie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998).
25. François Fourn, “1849–1851: l’anticommunisme en France. Le Spectre rouge de 1852,” in Société d’histoire de la révolution de 1848 et des révolutions du XIXe siècle, sous la direction de Sylvie Aprile, Nathalie Bayon, Laurent Clavier, Louis Hincker et Jean-Luc Mayaud, Comment meurt une République: autour du 2 décembre 1851 (Paris: Créaphis, 2004), 135–51.
26. Jean-Claude Caron, Frères de sang: la guerre civile en France au XIXe siècle (Seyssel: Éditions Champ Vallon, 2009).
27. E.g., his Talleyrand, le prince immobile (2003); Éric Anceau, Napoléon III: un Saint-Simon à cheval (Paris: Taillandier, 2008); L. Theis, François Guizot (Paris: Fayard, 2008); H. Brogan, Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in an Age of Revolution (London: Profile, 2007); M. Price, The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions 1814–48 (London: Macmillan, 2007).
28. François Ploux, De bouche à oreille: naissance et propagation des rumeurs dans la France du XIXe siècle: collection historique dirigée par Alain Corbin et Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris: Aubier, 2003).
CHAPTER 2
The Limited World of the Constitutional Monarchy
The Second Republic was founded by republicans and killed by Bonapartists. In between, however, its politics was dominated by former constitutional monarchists. The period 1848–51 cannot be understood without taking into account the continuities and discontinuities with the two monarchical regimes of the Restoration and the July Monarchy that ruled France between 1814 and 1848. The political practices, the provisional rallying of notables to the Republic, and the social fear and anxieties that dominated decisions and policy during the short span of the Republic were conditioned in the half century of constitutional monarchy that preceded 1848.
In the beginning was the Restoration. Like the regimes that followed it, its origins were messy and its founding principle was ambiguous. Imposed by a mixture of luck, diplomacy, and military conquest, the Restoration was based on both the dynastic legitimacy of the Bourbons, returned from their long exile, and on the Constitutional Charter, which guaranteed limits on the monarchy as well as a representative government. There had been no guarantee that either the Bourbons would rule after Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814 or there would be a written constitution. The republic was not considered the natural successor to Napoleon, even if Tsar Alexander talked about it in passing.1 A republic could only conjure up fears of dictatorship and terror in the memories of the ruling elites— not just of France but of Europe; a monarchy was deemed a far safer guarantee of moderation.
It was the French Revolution that established parliamentary government in France, but its more durable foundation dates from 1814. All parties were keen that France have some form of constitutional rule, which was extraordinary given that most other European monarchies would have to wait at least two generations themselves to become constitutional. Even if Louis XVIII brushed aside the constitution drafted by Talleyrand and the Senate, and granted his own Constitutional Charter to the French nation on 4 June 1814, to give the impression that he was issuing a constitution by his free will, the fact remains that France was one of the most liberal states in western Europe, where Frenchmen enjoyed greater freedoms than even in the much vaunted British system (for example, French Protestants had greater rights than did British Catholics at that time).2 Among his powers, the king appointed and dismissed his ministries, a power that remained in the hands of Louis-Philippe after 1830, and LouisNapoleon after 1848. The legislature was bicameral, divided between the Chamber of Peers and the Chamber of Deputies. The Charter stipulated that any male voter over thirty who paid over 300 francs annual tax was eligible to vote, and that electoral candidates had to be over forty and pay over 1,000 francs direct tax.3
The most visible and tangible part of the state’s power was the army. In the aftermath of Waterloo, the army was reduced drastically and many officers were put on half pay. This was not the case for many of Napoleon’s generals and marshals. While it cannot be denied that some had been either shot (Ney) or massacred by crowds (Brune), many more survived the change of regime with their prestige, titles, rank, and wealth intact, and, in a few cases, enhanced. Indeed, it was a group of marshals who pushed Napoleon to abdicate in April 1814. The role played by high-ranking military officers in political life between 1814 and 1851 was not defined in any constitution or law, but they were present and influential throughout—far more so than they had been under Napoleon, who had fobbed off his marshals and generals with titles, land, and money. Louis XVIII set a precedent for appointing a high-ranking soldier to a caretaker ministry when he made General Dessolle Minister of Foreign Affairs and caretaker président du conseil des ministres (President of the Council of Ministers, which was the term then used for head of government: premier ministre (prime minister) came into current use in France only under the Third Republic) on 29 December 1818.4 Louis-Philippe would also resort to appointing marshals on several occasions, as we shall see. The apogee of the power of the generals in the nineteenth century was to be the Second Republic.
In spite of the installation of a constitutional system by the Charter, the court remained the pinnacle of both politics and society.5 Napoleon himself had kept a sumptuous court, stiff with hierarchical ritual. This suited Louis XVIII, though he had a lighter touch with public opinion. Nevertheless, even more traditionally perhaps, the king’s brother, Charles the comte d’Artois (who would succeed as Charles X in 1824), established a rival court in the pavillon de Marsan in the wing of the Tuileries Palace where his apartments were. Indeed, the fact that the Bourbons did not return to the neglected Versailles, but kept their principal royal residence as the Tuileries in the very center of Paris meant that, with the fall of the Empire, Parisian civil society was fused with the court. The phenomenon of an alternative court would not recur during the July Monarchy, but its ghost haunted the political world after 1848.
After the grimness of the Empire, elite civil society revived, with its literary and political salons, where there were, in Jeremy Jennings’s words, “significant levels of continuity” of the practice of the ancien regime 6 The salons, the pinnacle of elite society, were hardly democratic. As Steven D. Kale has pointed out, the elite world more or less equaled the number of people enfranchised in the Charter.7 But within them they provided space for discussion of all manner of literary and political topics. Often presided over by a woman, which made them a target of the hypermasculine left republicans, the salon was the hub where social and political matters met.8
The inexperienced deputies of different parliamentary factions started to meet in réunions, often in larger rooms than salons because of their numbers. From September 1815, ultra deputies, so called because of their ultra-royalism, would meet in a room on the rue Thérèse rented in the name of Jean-Pierre Piet-Thardiveau, deputy for the Sarthe9; in 1818, liberals, who supported the Charter but not necessarily the king’s inalienable right to rule, organized their election campaign in the réunion Laffitte. When a large number of men new to parliamentary life arrived in Paris in 1848, the réunions would come into their own.
If the Charter could not function without a monarch, it was worryingly clear that the monarchical system could function without the Charter. Although Louis XVIII honored the Charter, his brother the comte d’Artois inspired fear for the future. Artois himself would be forever linked to the shadowy ultra group the Chevaliers de la Foi (Knights of the Faith).10 Even if he was not the ultras’ puppet master, it says much about the fears and rumor that circulated at the time that so many thought
he was leading a nationwide conspiracy from his quarters in the pavillon Marsan in the Tuileries.11 The man who as king banished the Society of Jesus from France was often thought himself to be a Jesuit.12 As Geoffrey Cubitt has shown, the Jesuit conspiracy was taken seriously. The fears that rose after the Hundred Days that the Bourbons, in spite of all evidence, were plotting to restore a feudal theocracy run by the hated Jesuits and the Inquisition continued for generations and reemerged at times of stress and discord.
Even in an era of parliaments, newspapers, and revolutions, dynastic politics still mattered. Indeed, not since the sixteenth century had the question of which dynasty ruled France mattered so much. Since at least 1814, some hoped, and others feared, that the distant cousin of Louis XVIII and Charles X, Louis-Philippe, the duc d’Orléans would one day be king.13 In ultra circles, the Orléans family was dubbed the branche régicide (the regicide branch), as Orléans’s father had voted for the death of Louis XVI in 1793.14 Orléans coming to the throne was not just a distant possibility. Until 1820, neither of the two sons of Charles, the duc de Berry and the duc d’Angoulême had produced a son. When the duchesse de Berry gave birth, seven months after her husband’s assassination, to Henri, duc de Bordeaux, later known as the comte de Chambord, the duc and duchesse d’Orléans took it badly, even insisting on pulling the umbilical cord.15 Even so, if the duc de Bordeaux had not been born, Orléans would have had to have waited for his near contemporary, the duc d’Angoulême (born 1775, two years after Orléans), to die before he could ascend the throne. But Orléans was thinking in the long term, not just of himself but of his own branch of the family. Partly to show his cousin Louis XVIII that it was still possible for a prince to associate with such men, Orléans stayed in close contact with many liberal politicians, journalists, and above all, Napoleon’s former marshals, whom he invited often to his soirées at his residence in the Palais-Royal, which was decorated with Horace Vernet’s giant paintings of Napoleonic victories.16 From the summer of 1829, it was received wisdom that only the Orléans family would ultimately benefit from the actions of the king and his chief minister Jules de Polignac.17
By the Restoration, the word “liberal” had come to have connotations of opposition to the ultras and support for the Charter as the bedrock of the regime and for an unembarrassed acceptance of the constitutional and economic gains of 1789, especially in the face of the ultras. We must, however, banish from our minds the connection between liberalism and social
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Peterson; then—you know where we nooned in 1913? It’s right east of that; and then, you can’t miss it—it’s right over from there—” the whole distance being sixty miles, and no water in the first five townships.
One plunges deeply on the optimism indicated by “you can’t miss it,” and starts. At midnight, with a tired team and no blankets, one suddenly realizes that he has missed it, and missed it bad. The sun sinks to rest, the desert grows black and threatening, he is off the main-traveled road, and no candle-lights are gleaming through the dark. There he remains until morning, when, cold and cramped, having kindled a fire to warm a can of beans that a more sensible man had slung under the seat, he finds that he has invited in the whole Navajo tribe. Five minutes after the wisp of smoke and the aroma of the burnt beans, comes an Indian, and another, and another, each looking earnestly for breakfast. It never fails. Between many signs and all the beans, not forgetting the passing of “thathli ibeso,” which is one dollar in hard, bitable silver, he finds that he is only five miles off the road, and that his original destination is “right over from there.”
On the cook-side of the board I played in luck. A row occurred in the short-order section of a Harvey House, and one first-class itinerant cook was flung headlong out [41]of a job on the morning I reached town. It might never happen again. And knowing nothing of the backcountry, and especially being ignorant of an Indian Service mess, he embraced the opportunity to sign up for a desert cruise. It was necessary for him to pack his belongings, the most precious of which were a trick dog and a phonograph, together with one record entitled: “She Is the Ideal of My Dreams”; and this he insisted would occupy him several days. I arranged for him to meet a team at the Agency freight-station, and next day he assisted me in the purchase of supplies for the coming month. We bought nearly a ton of
foodstuffs. My vehicle was one of those light spring wagons, a “desert hack,” rated to carry about one thousand pounds. Like an Indian freighter who loads pig lead, we never tallied the dead weight, but piled it in. The wagon groaned in its every joint under the load; and so I began the return trip.
One could not miss the right direction, for there were the distant mountains to point it, with the river as an eastern boundary. So long as one remained west of the river he must arrive somewhere. True. But for that river, and my sensible determination not to cross its halfdry bed, I might still be en route.
The roads of the desert are many, and all converge toward a settlement. Proceeding to town is very simple. But on leaving it the roads begin diverging in a most puzzling fashion, and there is a decision to be made at each departure. Of course the main-traveled road is usually plain and definite—usually. About half way to the Agency I was deceived by ten yards of bunch grass at a road juncture, and blithely accepted the branch leading to a river-ford. Nearing sunset, I had reached the river,—which was no place to be at that time. [42]
“If alone, always tie the horses to the wheel.”
There isn’t anything else in the Desert to tie them to. So I did it, and started on foot for the nearest rise to make a reconnaissance. The scene of empty desolation, blurring in the first grays of twilight, was not inspiring. The scarlet and gold of the sunset behind the ’Frisco Range did not awaken poetry within me. I was thinking about something else, and joyfully I hailed a faint gleam on the far middledistance, the last rays gilding the Agency tank-roof.
Between my position on the river, and that haven of rest, as the crow would negotiate it, stretched at least five miles of the Desert. So
short a distance caused me to snort at my former fears. I went back to the wagon and found that the impatient horses had wound the lines around that wheel until they resembled a chariot pair reined in at the finish of an exciting race. With some difficulty I managed to release them, and climbed in as they plunged off seeking their feed.
The shortest distance between two given points is a straight line, or so the books have it. I followed my early schooling, and headed straight for the tank.
The shortest distance between two points in the Desert is not a straight line. I there and then learned this lesson. Between that riverford and the main road, meandering somewhere to the left, were at least a thousand different obstructions, skillfully concealed by Nature, deceptive in the half dark, and treacherous traps when night came on: sand dunes that were as bogs; wide, shallow arroyos; scrubby slopes cut by wicked little gullies, all flanked and faced by other sand-meshes. In and through all this the team tugged wearily, at times stopping of themselves for breath, at times plunging desperately. A dozen times I [43]lashed the horses to the wheel and went ahead to plot the way; a dozen times I returned to find them wound back on their haunches, in their efforts to free themselves from the overloaded wagon and the fool that had come out of the East. About midnight, after traveling to every point of the modern compass, I tried a last rise, determined, if this failed, to unharness and ride in, trusting to the horses to find their oats. And topping this little ridge was an old, half-hidden road. It angled away from the river toward the place where a real road ought to be. We swung down it, and an hour later, at an easy jog, the axles holding- and groaning-out to the last, we reached the Agency gate. The sleepy barn-man, an Indian, came out to meet me.
“Where you been?” he asked, with that innocent curiosity his tribe is noted for. “Have trouble findin’ the road?”
“No,” I told him, feeling a confidence born of relieved anxiety. “Nope! just started from town late.”
There is nothing like assurance after a distressing evening. And too, had I not landed a cook? I could not spoil such a triumph by admitting that I had been lost. [44]
[Contents]
DESERT LIFE AND LITERATURE
The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe. T. B.
M : Johnson
Life in the little stone house to which I had now removed was filled with books and tobacco smoke and belated plans in futures—that time when I should be strong again. I had regretted the impossibility of my packing out a Washington library, but my old friend and bitter critic, the now astonishing Mr. Mencken, kept my intelligence alive by sending parcels of the latest publications, and these arrived fresh and unscorched, though having passed beneath his searing eye and ruthless pen. Later, my faithful typewriter, a relic of newspaper days, was sent forward in defiance of medical advice, and I wrote a few stories that, with their magazines and editors, are now forgotten.
Evenings, swung in a hammock, I studied sunsets and their glories, masked and reflected by the magnificent San Francisco Range, and gradually began to absorb the desert peace. To know its moods, those swift and unexpected changes, having in them often a dream’s stealthiness and unreality, one must live for a year in a little house built low against the brown bosom of the Desert.
I remember the peculiar silvern radiance of one evening. [45]The light came through dust-screens and, filtering across brown levels, limned patches of greasewood in a lemon pallor. The sentry cottonwoods of the riverbank were picked out as brilliant etchings of gray trunks and
lacy branches in a glow of apple-green. Night swarmed out of the east in great blue clouds. Flying before it were cottony puffballs, white and twisting into the sunset, like masses of fleece, newly washed. But in the northwest swung a dun-colored curtain, lighted by the afterglow, suspended from the higher sky, a drifting, heavy drapery, its ragged edges trailing the tops of the blunted buttes with filmy rain-tresses. Between this curtain and the middle distance the mesa barricades had not yet darkened, and they were sharply outlined as gaunt shapes of red and saffron sandstone.
Now the peaks cooled and the great mountain-range lived in silhouette, its backbone etched with a line of electric blue. Early night swept overhead, and a few timid stars peeked out, as if fearing the thunder-mutter that came on the night wind, sullen herald of a desert storm. Now pale red flames reflected in the far-away dun-colored curtain. The storm rushed eastward across the northern heavens, while above me the night rolled west, bringing its stars into a brighter glow.
But this storm was fifty miles away and had its prescribed circle to complete. Soon its gathering vanguard began blotting out the stars. Now came a dusty shrieking wind; now the purple belly of the sky was rent by a white-hot wire, and like the crash of a thousand cannon followed the voices of the storm; now fell a few drops of cold rain, fanned on the wind into spray; and then—the deluge—a silvery curtain in the half-light, like a river turned over a new brink, drenching the Desert, beating all weak things [46]into the sand. Parched as the ground was, the water could not be absorbed at once, and soon stood as lakes in the hollows.
It seldom rains in the Desert; but when it does!—One may drown in arroyos that carry tearing leaping torrents immediately after such
cloud-bursts, and at the same point next day the sand will be steaming in the hot sunlight.
Within the space of three hours I have observed a beautiful sunset, an afterglow, twilight with a storm brewing, stars and night overhead; then the flood of water, lighted by crisp terrifying flashes and bringing the noise of Niagara; to be followed by calm night again, the stars returning to see their reflections in the desert pools. But the observer had the advantage of a view embracing one hundred miles between the mountain range and the country of the buttes. The wonders of the heavens passed around him in full circle.
And where could one find such another place for the sight? Probably nowhere else in this hemisphere, save with a slight advantage in height and atmosphere at the Lowell Observatory, about sixty miles away, where the astronomer may have viewed the same spectacle from his study, perched on a shoulder of the San Francisco Range, having below him that mystic world of the Indians, the dim, illimitable stretches of the Painted Desert.
The New England States, all of them, could be gently eased into Arizona, and there would remain room for Pennsylvania and little Delaware without crowding. The one reservation that I had charge of from 1911 to 1919 embraced 3863 square miles, a trifle smaller than Connecticut, and it was a postage stamp on the broad yellow face of Arizona, which is in area one twenty-seventh of the entire United States. One hundred thousand persons, or [47]one fourth of the state’s estimated population, live in eight of its towns, leaving much less than three persons per square mile, including Indians and Mexicans, to inhabit the remaining emptiness. One tenth of the population is Indian, and one fourth of Arizona’s land area is “Indian country.” The reservations have 1.5 persons per square mile. The fastest train of the Santa Fe system requires ten hours to cross
Arizona from its eastern boundary to the Colorado River, a distance of 386 miles. Arizona has mountains that lift their crests more than 12,000 feet above the sea; and to present a perfect contrast, it has Yuma and Parker, towns of the Mohave Desert, cozy places in summer, close to sea level, with temperatures of 116° to 120° in the shade. Yes, you can eat oranges from the Phœnix trees while listening to the story of the Yuma man who found Hell chilly; and you can find snow in June on the upper levels of the Apache Indian Reserve without scaling a mountain peak. In the northern Navajo country I have twice experienced thirty degrees below zero in February, while there is no doubt the American Beauty roses were blooming in Phœnix gardens. Once I nearly froze to death on the nineteenth of May in Arizona, the place of palms, and figs, and pomegranates!
I had expected to be sadly bored, but the steady routine of each reservation working-day ate up the hours. Time does not hang on one’s hands; a strange thing too, considering the silence and solitude and lack of action in the Desert. Some writer has sought to picture this bustling, speaking emptiness:—“It is a land where one always expects to find something just around the corner; and there is never anything around the corner.” Quite so. Therefore, it is a magic place, an Enchanted Empire, [48]filled ever with a wistful anticipation that lures without the bitterness of disappointment. There is always another corner, and another beautiful possibility.
A multitude of office duties caused the four morning-hours to seem as one. Lunch time, and a bit of gossip with a dozen strange beings, and the quaint humor that isolation creates. Then the afternoon, filled with the shrieking wind and the hiss of sand against the panes. A passing traveler would stop to ask about the river fords and roads to nowhere; and those employees coming to requisition supplies, whether engineer or school matron or farrier, would have their talk
out. The warehouses always presented the fascinating search for something, just to learn if indeed it was there, as the account stated, and in the exact quantity as the Bureau minutely charged; and when not found, there would be ample time for the cursing-out of the fellow who had used it and failed to make the credit to protect the Chief.
“That fencing!” wrathfully declared the Boss. “That wire was issued five years ago. I remember old Becode Bega got the last spool of it. It has rusted out by now in the Corn Creek. Hawkins was clerk then, and damn his eyes, he never expended anything. He had rheumatism, and sang hymns, and was always telling me that
Congressman Floyd Witherspoon, of Spokane Flats, had married his wife’s second cousin. Send a policeman up to Becode’s camp, and have that old sinner ride in thirty miles to sign for that wire. It’s a shame to do it, but who cares in Washington! They sent Hawkins out, and have him still, somewhere else, twisting somebody else’s accounts. What’s the next item?”
And so it went. Because under the accounting system then in vogue —a relic of the War Department days, [49]and which ate up oodles of time and thousands of dollars in checking and balancing—everything from a quart of shoe pegs to a locomotive-type of stationary boiler had to be located and tested and receipted for by the Chief every three months, come Hades or come high-water!
Without this intense supervision by mail and blue pencil, through exceptions to accounts submitted, and silly questions, and equally silly answers, the Chief might have eaten either the shoe-pegs or the boiler during that odd time when he should have been making brick for lack of something to occupy him. The state of the Indians themselves, physically or mentally; the state of their holdings in stock, implements or gardens; the actual efficiency of the employee corps; the quality of supplies, and whether on hand or not in
sufficient amount to insure a standard system—no one of these things particularly interested any Eastern authority to the point of correction; but the property accounts and the cash accounts were checked until the paper wore out, and until the Chief neglected everything else to satisfy them.
And dear old careful Uncle, who has wasted more cold cash in archaic systems than any other organization known to ancient or modern history, checked the spigot drainings every three months, unmindful of the bung, and scrupulously filed away the results in the catacombs of Washington, unaware of the negligence of Hawkins, the clerk, but always decidedly mindful of that worthy’s relationship to the elected genius of Spokane Flats. One may now remark that the accounting systems have changed. They have—after years of travail. But Hawkins and his benevolent influence have not changed; Uncle has not changed; and the Chief’s time is still spent checking inefficiency at home and reporting to ignorance abroad. [50]
Three times a week, in late afternoon, a solitary horseman, jouncing above his laden saddlebags, would appear over the slight rise beyond the trading-post, coming from the railroad; and a cry would go up from the campus:—
“The mail!”
That call would cause a stir. What a thing of interest is a newspaper five days old, a fresh magazine or catalogue, in those waste places! And a letter from a friend or loved one is a thing golden. Scarcely would the distribution have ended, with joy or disappointment, when it would be sunset, and the Desert cooling and browning into dusk as the red ball plunged downward into the caverns of the range, trailing behind it a glory that often compensated for the trials and little evils of the day.
Sunday brought a pause that seemed unreal, an enforced halt, a marking of time. For those who did not sing “Beulah Land,” it was a long-drawn-out monotony. A thousand miles from anywhere inviting a visit, often without the solace of a kindred spirit, the silence and loneliness settled into one. The clanking pump was hushed, the boiler no longer hissed steam, the whistle did not summon, the mail did not arrive. Everyone arrayed himself in latest fashion, as mailorder catalogues decreed, and sat around in great discomfort. Where to go? There was no hunting, fishing—nothing. One had photographed everything above ground five thousand times. The nearest town was twenty-six miles off, and on Sunday as dead as Julius Cæsar.
On such a day I became acquainted with the post trader, a halfbreed Navajo, handsome and smiling. I found this lovable fellow in his quarters off the store. The place was bare enough of comforts, but along one wall ran shelves, piled with books and magazines— and such books and [51]magazines! There I found the famous fivefoot shelf extended many feet. And old files of Harper’s Monthly, the Atlantic, and Scribner’s. Among the books my hand touched Boswell’s Johnson, and I knew that the volumes I had left behind would be no longer missed. And Dickens, and Irving, and Macaulay, and Spencer, and Huxley, and Darwin.
“Why, I had not expected to find such books—here—”
He thanked me with a smile.
“Help yourself when you’re lonely,” he said. “Most of the employees lack reading matter only when Montgomery Ward’s bible fails to come in.” He noted the book in my hand. “Now that Johnson—he was a great old guy, wasn’t he?”
Criticism, à la Navajo!
Years before, he had been a student at Hampton Institute, that excellent institution of the South where Negroes and a few Indians were trained. The books were his prizes, won in scholastic debates, and they had returned with him to the edge of the Enchanted Empire. Here he could feel the white man’s presence, enjoy a little of his society, read his books, and still be within call of his desert people. I have known Indian athletes who bartered their trophies when they returned to the old life. This strange Indian had kept his treasures, and at night, those long desert winter nights, when he tired of the Alhambra he could talk with Doctor Johnson (“a great old guy”); he could follow Macaulay down the ages to visit London in the days of Charles the Second; and sometimes he permitted Darwin to tell him of his beginnings. He knew the books, each and every one. He had stepped from paganism into a gentle skepticism, and his armor was [52]not dented by snatches of the Scriptures. The good missionary people sighed about it; but they could be defeated by a quotation, and were.
His comments on those novelists who treat the Desert as a stage and people it with costumes tricking out traditional characters, were acrid and amusing. A certain very popular writer would have been humbled after a short session with this half-savage critic. What he left of that writer’s Navajo picture was very little, and that little in shreds.
As for his own people, their customs and superstitions, he had an equally sane view of them, and would explain many things that, farcical to the alien’s first thought, were no stranger when resolved than our own wives’ tales. He pictured for me the actual worthlessness of native policemen, a system that Washington is devoted to, while admitting all their skill as trackers and gobetweens. As an interpreter at trials, he was invaluable, and his
knowledge of what a Navajo would do under given conditions was almost uncanny.
Occupying the position of field-interpreter and chief of range police, this man would have been worth a very creditable salary, because he was undeniably honest, progressive, and without deceit. I urged him to accept such a position with me in later years, and when he gave his reasons for declining, one of them was the analysis of the superstitious native who would have to serve under him, and the other was the abject parsimony of the United States Government.
I shall always remember and be grateful to that Navajo gentleman. He is dead. I do not know how he died. Perhaps he relented, and for his pagan jests begged forgiveness; perhaps he died to the Medicine Man’s chanting[53]—counting, counting, as they always die in the Desert—calling on his tribal gods.
But I know that he met the answer with a smile. For so he would have joined the long shadowy line of weaving plumes and tossing lances as the tribe sought new and happier hunting-grounds; or would have entered the council ring of the chiefs, to advise in reviewing their material errors, when they saw the white man as a conqueror, rather than as a friend, and matched his evils with their savage ingenuity. [54]
[Contents]
A NORTHERN WONDERLAND
“To those unaccustomed to desert lands the Navajo country presents in form and color and grouping of topographic features a surprising and fascinating variety; and those familiar with arid regions will find here erosion features of unusual grandeur and beauty ” G : The Navajo Country
The nearest place of change was the town, with a dinner at the Harvey House. I planned to make this trip each month, to have a food spree, quite as on a time rude gentlemen of the cattle days came in from the ranges, hungry for sights and pleasures, and devoted themselves to the swift consumption of raw liquors. But four hours of dragging through heated sand and sunlight, from one lonely landmark to another, with nothing of interest between, destroyed much of the anticipated satisfaction. I recall a bit of Washington advice.
“You will find that country,” said the well-meaning fellow, “covered with black gramma grass. Buy a pinto pony the very first thing you do. Its keep will be negligible. A saddle will cost but a few dollars. Thus you will have transportation at all times. It will be a pleasure to ride into town after office hours. You’ll enjoy riding above all things.”
Twenty-six miles—fifty-two miles there and back!
Now I had read Western stories, written by O. Henry and others who knew less about the subject. Playing the [55]sedulous ape, I had written a few myself. These epics all mentioned areas of black gramma grass, and made much of swift-footed cayuses that were camouflaged by Nature and possessed Dantelike noses and broom tails. There is a wondrous lot of this in the movies, too, and the joyous bounding of the aforesaid animals, from prairie rise to prairie rise, pressing the miles behind them, and the carefree demeanor of their riders, surrounded as they are by creaking leather, wide-barred shirts, and jingling spurs, appeals to one.
But when you learn that a cayuse-bronk in northern Arizona eats imported hay at forty and sometimes sixty dollars the ton, the black gramma grass and pastures all being three hundred miles to the south; and when you find that the
devil is not to be trusted for an instant, and that he has to be flayed constantly to produce even an amble; and when you feel—“feel” is the word—the misery twitching completely throughout the human system from pounding on the wooden anatomy of the brute, a large part of this paper-and-film appeal vanishes. Moreover, dusty shirts, alkali-impregnated handkerchiefs, and the smell of a harness shop do not combine to flavor one’s meals delicately. Big Bill Hart may have my share of this, and he is welcome.
But there does come a longing “for to admire and for to see” what is actually out back. That adventure and romance are not to be found in the beautiful desert distances seems impossible. The dim blue buttes of the north, mysterious altars of the gods, promised to yield something from the land they guarded. And when an Agency mechanic told me that he had orders to visit the Castle Butte station, a far-away outpost, I recommended myself as a standard camp-cook, recalling the early mornings [56]of newspaper days when I fried eggs on a gas-stove. We did not go to the horse-corral and lay our ropes over two spirited steeds, but at an early hour wended to the barn and harnessed two sturdy old plugs to a twelve-hundred-pound farm wagon. They were capable of making four miles an hour, and the wagon had capacity for a grub-box, for blankets, shovels, rope, and all the things necessary—perhaps—to our getting there first, and to accomplishing something afterward.
Have you never wondered how those adventurous fellows of the yarns, outfitted with nothing but a handkerchief, a saddle, and a lariat, manage to cover leagues upon leagues with the one horse, and never stop overnight? A Navajo Indian can do with one blanket and a sheepskin lashed behind his saddle; but even he contrives to find the trading-posts of the Desert for his grub, and he always reaches a friendly camp at nightfall.
Smith cautioned me to take a heavy coat, which I would not have thought of. Right at the start I committed a serious blunder, one that caused me to suffer bitterly, and one that I have not repeated since. Expecting to return next day, I persuaded myself that two sacks of beck-a-shay nahto, or genuine “cattle” tobacco, would be sufficient for the trip. But desert plans are subject to change, and desert wisdom is painfully acquired. I now have drilled myself never to forget matches and a filled canteen, baling-wire,—otherwise “Arizona silk,”—repair parts for the lizard, a piece of rope, tools, and a heavy coat of sheepskin, plus a tobacco factory unless the route is marked by trading-posts every thirty miles. I
arrange these things automatically, because on that trip I tried to smoke powdered alfalfa in a cob pipe.
Northward we wended all day, one rugged mesa slope [57]and huge flat succeeding another, always rising. After passing Lone Cottonwood Spring, where the water was an excellent imitation of thick gray pea-soup that the horses disdained, we lunched at a delightful place known as Coyote Springs, one of the ten thousand Southwest waterholes so named. In the naming of springs and precious water it would seem that the vocabulary of the pioneers was decidedly limited. But it would have been the same by any other name. A hole scooped in a soft rock and sand hill, fenced with crooked and cracking cottonwood branches, as the Navajo build their corrals, with not a vestige of relieving green within miles of it. All around the sand was packed hard by the flocks of sheep that came to water. Overhead was a broiling sun, and this barren area reflected every bit of the glare and heat that it did not hold as a stove. The air was heavy with the aroma of sheep, and alkali showed ghastly white in the spring’s overflow. Nevertheless, it was an oasis and held water. Here and there were picked and bleaching bones. The coyotes knew its name.
Many buttes not to be seen from the Agency were now in sight. One lumpy mound resembled a coiled snake—Rattlesnake Butte; another was shaped as a pyramid, although no one had heard of Cheops or Chephren; and a third, which had crumbled, was like a huge four-poster bed that some forgotten giant had wrecked.
A bite to eat, and on again, lumbering down the yielding banks of washes, and scrambling up and out of them. Truly a couple of sturdy plugs were required to drag the wagon up those heavy slopes. Providing the traveler has time and patience, and is built with a steel-riveted frame, the old-time farm wagon with three-inch tires is the surest method of making such a journey. It rolls [58]and pitches as a squat lugger in a choppy sea, but it gets there.
