Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  Lincoln attempted to solve the problem of disillusion by giving the country a new method of understanding its problems—or rather, by reviving an old method. In the theory of history then held by many free-state men (it is sometimes called the “Whig interpretation of history”), the story of man is a providential drama of the progress of liberty. Lincoln had, before his death, come to regard this theory as naïve and Panglossian. The progress of freedom, he contended, is morally complicated; it is intimately connected to the processes of redemption, and directly related to the purification of souls. Sin must be expiated in suffering, and crime must be remitted in punishment. Only then is progress possible.

  Lincoln’s insight into the reality of evil and the possibility of grace distinguished his statesmanship from that of the other pivotal leaders of the decade. In Germany, Bismarck sought to divorce morality from politics; he developed the morally agnostic science of Realpolitik. In Russia, no statesman emerged capable of bridging the chasm between the ethical yearning of the people for the New Jerusalem and their secular and pragmatic desire for the mundane forms of freedom: between Dostoevsky and Alexander lay a gulf of misapprehension. In America, by contrast, Lincoln united the two apparently antithetical conceptions of moral and material progress. He painted the free state in the light of an ongoing struggle in every soul between good and evil, and he connected that struggle to (what he argued was) a providential design in which, after a period of suffering and expiation, man’s better impulses would prevail. In doing so he gave Americans a moral ideal, a shaping fantasy, one that kept alive, in a barren time, the country’s faith in its future.44

  Versailles and Paris, January-March 1871

  IN THE HALL OF MIRRORS Bismarck read aloud the proclamation of the new German Empire. A tremendous “Hoch” shook the old mirrors, and the assembled princes and generals sang “Now Thank We All Our God.” King Wilhelm of Prussia was proclaimed Kaiser Wilhelm of the German Reich.

  Some witnesses were moved by the pageant. Others were repelled. A Bavarian observer shook his head—it was all “so cold, so proud, so glossy, so strutting and boastful and heartless and empty.”

  Wilhelm himself was in a foul mood on the day of the investiture. It was, he said, the most unhappy day of his life. The title “King of Prussia” was dear to his heart; the imperial dignity meant little to him. It seemed to him yet another of his Chancellor’s conjuring tricks. But if he must after all be Emperor, he was determined to be “Emperor of Germany.” Bismarck, however, maintained that the territorial title was impermissible: Wilhelm, a national sovereign, must be the “German Emperor,” the ruler not of a particular extent of land but of an entire people. The King thought that he had got his way. When, however, the decisive moment came round, he heard himself saluted, in the Sun King’s hall, as the “Emperor William.” Wilhelm seethed with indignation, and when he stepped down from the dais he refused to shake his Minister’s outstretched hand.

  Ten days after the ceremony Bismarck concluded an armistice with the French. The defeated country was exhausted by the ordeal through which it had passed. More than 100,000 Frenchmen had fallen since July. Half a million German troops were bivouacked on French soil. Gambetta had fled, and Paris had been bombed. The Panthéon had been damaged, hospitals had been shelled, and civilians had been killed—among them a number of children. Yet it was hunger, not bombs, that broke the spirit of Paris; to survive the Parisians had been forced to eat their cats and their dogs, the animals in the zoo, and the rats in the sewers.

  Favre, the chief French negotiator, was standing on a balcony of the Quai d’Orsay with his fifteen-year-old daughter when, at midnight, the armistice took effect. He burst into tears. The price his country paid for peace was high. The terms of the armistice, afterwards embodied in the Treaty of Frankfurt, fastened on France a huge indemnity, and provided that German troops should remain on French soil until it was paid. The loss of Alsace and Lorraine was a heavier and more humiliating forfeiture. The French were permitted to retain Belfort in Alsace; but in exchange for this concession they were obliged to allow a German army to goose-step through the streets of Paris. The settlement, however, was not nearly as draconian as the one Moltke hoped to obtain. Bismarck prevailed over the Chief of the General Staff. At the behest of Wilhelm, two Cabinet decrees were promulgated: the limits of Moltke’s jurisdiction were acknowledged and the supremacy of the Chancellor was confirmed. It was a personal rather than a constitutional victory. Bismarck fought the last battle of his revolution for the sake of his own honor and prestige, not in order to vindicate the principle that the army must answer to civilian leaders. Lincoln’s revolution confirmed the subordination of the army to the constitution; Bismarck’s confirmed the subordination of the army to Bismarck himself.

  For a moment the Chief of the General Staff was disposed to sulk; the King, he said, had treated him “ungraciously.” But no sooner had the emotion of resentment made itself felt than Moltke mastered it. During the armistice negotiations he acted, without a trace of bad temper, as the Chancellor’s subordinate rather than as his co-equal; duty required no less. Bismarck, whose revenges were mild unless policy dictated otherwise, behaved handsomely towards his defeated rival, and did not abuse the victory he had gained. Although he doubted the wisdom of retaining Metz as a spoil of war—“I don’t like so many Frenchmen in our house who don’t want to be there”—he demanded that the French cede the city to Germany. It was a concession to Moltke.

  Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, three Prussian Hussars rode into Paris by the Porte Maillot. They cantered up the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. More Germans followed—Bavarian riflemen, Prussian Uhlans, “Bismarck cuirassiers” with white coats and waving plumes. Some rowdy youths known as tapageurs (noisies) hurled insults at the invaders. The Germans halted and methodically loaded their pieces. The tapageurs fled.

  At last came the Prussian Royal Guard. The music of military bands filled the air, and as Parisians looked on in awe and hatred Bismarck himself entered the city. He found himself, after the victory parade, in the Place de la Concorde, where he was accosted by a crowd of hostile Frenchmen. His sang-froid did not desert him. Turning to one of the angry faces, he took out a cigar and asked for a light.

  Paris was impressed.

  London, December 1870-February 1871

  THE FALL OF FRANCE awakened Mr. Gladstone from his dream of reform. He was dismayed by the mutilation of France. The cutting away of Alsace and Lorraine heralded a return, he said, to “the old and cruel practice of treating the population of a civilized European country as mere chattels.”

  The nature of the German revolution began to dawn on “Professor Gladstone,” as Bismarck called him. “I have an apprehension,” Mr. Gladstone said, “that this violent laceration and transfer is to lead us from bad to worse, and to the beginning of a new series of European complications.” The Prime Minister had earlier supposed the emerging American empire to be the greatest threat to England’s grandeur, and he had worked strenuously to wreck Lincoln’s work. But he now foresaw that Germany rather than the United States would pose the real threat to his country’s liberties in the coming decades.

  Mr. Gladstone’s great rival was similarly alive to the danger of Bismarck’s statecraft. The Prussian’s triumph “represents the German Revolution,” Benjamin Disraeli said, “a greater political event than the French Revolution of the last century. . . . You have a new world. . . . The balance of power has been entirely destroyed.”

  Brooklyn, August 1870

  Walt Whitman was gloomy. He was bringing out a book, Democratic Vistas, in which he hoped to refute European critics of the free state. Matthew Arnold, twisting his mouth contemptuously, declared that America had no poetry in it. The British prophet Thomas Carlyle went further. There was no poetry in any free state, and never could be.

  Whitman in rebuttal invoked the beauty of the American man and the American woman. They were, he said, “freedom’s athletes.” Bu
t the more he looked about him, the more he began to doubt his own premises. “Are there, indeed, men here worthy of the name?” he asked in Democratic Vistas. “Are there athletes? Are there perfect women, to match the generous material luxuriance? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are there crops of fine youths, and majestic old people? . . . Confess that to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities, crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms . . . everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon’d, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceas’d, shallow notions of manners. . . .”

  The poet wondered whether there was not something ruinous in the very success of Lincoln’s revolution.

  Paris and Lyons, September 1870-May 1871

  While the Germans marched home under the banners of romantic nationalism, the Parisians raised aloft another romantic standard.

  Shortly after the last Prussian dragoons left Paris, the French General Claude-Martin Lecomte, acting on the instructions of the newly installed President of the French Republic, Louis-Adolphe Thiers, rode up to Montmartre at the head of a body of troops. M. Thiers had ordered General Lecomte to retrieve assorted pieces of artillery which were then in the possession of the National Guard. A hostile crowd watched the troops march in. The poorer Parisians bore the line army little love; but they sympathized with the National Guard, a body imbued with the spirit of revolution.

  An altercation ensued; a member of the National Guard was wounded. A woman with a red belt and a rifle ran through the streets crying treason. Her name was Louise Michel. The natural daughter of a French aristocrat, she was known, among the habitués of radical circles, as “la Vierge rouge” (the Red Virgin). The mob went wild. General Lecomte was dragged from his horse and savagely beaten. Afterwards he was taken to a nearby house, at the back of which lay a garden of gooseberries and clematis. A second General, Clément Thomas, was also captured, and he too was brought in. The young Mayor of Montmartre rushed over; his name was Georges Clemenceau. He begged his constituents to be merciful. “No blood, my friends, no blood,” he implored. But he was too late. Montmartre had new martyrs. The officers were dead in the garden, and drunken harridans were squatting over their corpses.

  Georges Clemenceau burst into tears.

  All Paris was soon in ferment. M. Thiers fled with the rest of the magnificoes of the Third Republic to Versailles. A red flag was hoisted over the Hôtel de Ville. The Commune had begun.

  The greatest terror prevailed in the city, one diplomat wrote, as the Communards moved from the theory of extermination to the practice. The new masters of Paris were unable indeed to agree on a policy concerning the spoliation of private property; but where human life was concerned they were decisive. Citizens who gathered to protest the illegality of the Commune’s authority were massacred in the street. A Committee of Public Safety was established; and the cruel and lascivious Raoul Rigault became director of police. Those accused of being enemies of the Commune were hunted down like animals, among them many Catholic priests, who were paraded through the streets wearing placards which declared them to be thieves. By the middle of May 1871 more than three thousand people had been taken into custody by the new régime. Some of these victims the Communards executed, others they kept as hostages. Among the hostages was Monsignor Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, who was seized in his episcopal palace and carried off to prison.

  The Commune controlled Paris; but Adolphe Thiers controlled France. The seventy-four-year-old President of the Republic was, in intellect and judgment, one of the first statesmen of the age. His mind, like his pen, was bold, copious, and penetrating; and it was richly stocked with information gathered during a long course of study and scholarship. But the brilliant qualities of M. Thiers were overbalanced by an imagination which, though singularly rich and fertile, was at the same time violent, peremptory, and unforgiving. Light vied with darkness in that complicated intelligence; and though it is not easy to say which of the two contending forces got the upper hand, their friction endowed M. Thiers with remarkable powers of command, and enabled him to perform, not merely with resolution, but with a strange elation the work of putting to the sword those of his fellow citizens who had raised the standard of rebellion. An army was organized at Versailles. Marshal MacMahon, who had recently been released from German captivity, was placed at its head.

  In the third week of May the army of Versailles entered Paris through the gate of Point-du-Jour at the western limit of the city. The Communards, in an act of romantic extravagance, determined to destroy the city rather than surrender it. The column of triumph in the Place Vendôme was toppled. Barrels of gunpowder were ignited in the Tuileries. Flames appeared in the windows of the Palais-Royal and the Palais de Justice. In a short time the Hôtel de Ville itself was on fire, as was one of the wings of the Louvre. “Paris,” an English resident wrote, “is burning.”

  The Communards next took steps to ensure that the enemies of the régime did not survive its demise. Paris swam in blood. Mr. Washburne, the American envoy, was greatly affected by the report of illegal executions. He obtained from the Communards a permit to visit the most illustrious of the prisoners, Archbishop Darboy, who was incarcerated in the Mazas. The American Minister was one of the few diplomats then remaining in Paris; he had determined to follow the precedent of his predecessor, Gouverneur Morris, the only envoy who, eight decades before, had remained in the city during the darkest days of Robespierre’s Terror. Washburne found Archishop Darboy in a small and gloomy cell. “I was deeply touched,” the diplomat said, “at the appearance of this venerable man . . . his slender person, his form somewhat bent, his long beard, for he has not been shaved apparently since his confinement, his face haggard with ill health.” But although the priest was broken in body, he was in spirit unbowed. Washburne was charmed by his cheerful animation. The Archbishop was prepared for the worst; but he “had no word of bitterness or reproach for his persecutors.” On the contrary, the prelate said, the world judged his captors “to be worse than they really were.” Before Washburne left the cell, he gave the priest a bottle of Madeira. A short time later Darboy was taken by cart from the Mazas to the bastion of La Roquette. On a May evening he was taken out into an alley and shot.

  Versailles, October 1871-December 1873

  Unable to avenge themselves against the Germans, Frenchmen turned against those of their own who, they believed, had brought about their defeat. Louis-Napoleon and his Empress, dethroned and disgraced, were, indeed, beyond the reach of their former subjects’ vengeance. Eugénie had made her way to the coast of Normandy, where a yacht conveyed her safely to England. Louis-Napoleon joined her there after his release from his prison in Hesse-Cassel. The last of the imperial Napoleons and his consort were soon settled comfortably at Chislehurst in Kent, under the personal protection of Queen Victoria.

  Disappointed of revenge against the Bonapartes, angry Frenchmen turned their eyes towards Marshal Bazaine. It must have been with a degree of trepidation that the soldier returned to France after his internment in Germany. Raoul, a Constable of France, had been put to death for having allowed himself to be taken alive by the enemy. Six centuries later the processes of retribution in France were scarcely less medieval. Bazaine, however, was determined to vindicate his honor.

  The mandarins of the Third Republic plunged into “I’affaire Bazaine.” There was to be a trial: and the proceeding must satisfy the public craving for a sanguinary revenge. There was no question of the offense which was to be brought home to Bazaine: it was in its nature capital. The questions with which the bureaucrats struggled pertained rather to the style than the substance of the court-martial. In lengthy memoranda they debated where the proceeding could best be staged. The château at Compiègne? Fontainebleau? Blois? How many stenographers would be n
eeded? Where were the newspapermen to sit? Eventually a body called the Permanent Council of War was seated in the Grand Trianon at Versailles.

  A verdict was handed down. French military tradition required that the Marshal quit the room before judgment was pronounced; Bazaine accordingly retired with his family to an upper chamber of the pavilion. He was there talking freely, as though unaware his life was at stake, when his adjutant, Colonel Villette, came in together with his advocate, M. Lachaud. Bazaine turned, and saw Villette stagger. He advanced toward Lachaud, who informed him of the verdict.

  “A mart,” the lawyer said. “To death.”

  Bazaine grasped Lachaud’s hand.

  “By what majority?” he asked.

  “Unanimously.”

  “Ah,” the Marshal said.

  Bazaine resumed the conversation he had broken off, but his family was by this time in tears. Colonel Villette went to grasp his commanding officer’s hand but collapsed in the attempt; and the Marshal betook himself to another room to conceal his emotions.

  Bazaine had been condemned “à mort et à la degradation militaire”— to death and to military degradation—for treating with, and capitulating to, the enemy before doing all that was prescribed by duty and honor. His defense—that he had surrendered Metz because his men were starving and that a further effusion of blood would not have changed the result of the war—was dismissed. Pursuant to the Code of Military Justice, he was to be stripped of his epaulettes before being shot, and compelled to relinquish his truncheon. His sword was to be broken before his eyes, and he was simultaneously to be ejected from the Legion of Honor and shorn of the Médaille Militaire which had been conferred upon him for his valor and conduct in Mexico.

  Bazaine went downstairs, where he found twelve soldiers of the line armed with rifles, together with their officers. He bore himself with a Stoic self-mastery not unworthy of a Marshal of France. Where, he asked, was he to stand? He took his place, and said that he was ready.