meme
respect du fait accompli, le meme besoin d'idoles pour les detruire, la
meme haine de toute superiorite, le meme esprit de denigrement, la meme
crasse ignorance!" M. Renan also complains that during the Second Empire
the country sank deeper and deeper into vulgarity, forgetting its past
history and its noble enthusiasms. "Talk to the peasant, to the
socialist of the International, of France, of her past history, of her
genius, he will not understand you. Military honor seems madness to him;
the taste for great things, the glory of the mind, are vain dreams;
money spent for art and science is money thrown away foolishly. Such is
the provincial spirit." And if this is the provincial spirit, what is
the spirit of the metropolitan democracy? Is it not clearly known to us
by its acts? It had the opportunity, under the Commune, of showing the
world how tenderly it cared for the monuments of national history, how
anxious it was for the preservation of noble architecture, of great
libraries, of pictures that can never be replaced. Whatever may have
been our illusions about the character of the Parisian democracy, we
know it very accurately now. To say that it is brutal would be an
inadequate use of language, for the brutes are only indifferent to
history and civilization, not hostile to them. So far as it is possible
for us to understand the temper of that democracy, it appears to cherish
an active and intense hatred for every conceivable kind of superiority,
and an instinctive eagerness to abolish the past; or, as that is not
possible, since the past will always _have been_ in spite of it, then at
least to efface all visible memorials and destroy the bequests of all
preceding generations. If any one had affirmed, before the fall of Louis
Napoleon, that the democratic spirit was capable of setting fire to the
Louvre and the national archives and libraries, of deliberately planning
the destruction of all those magnificent edifices, ecclesiastical and
civil, which were the glory of France and the delight of Europe, we
should have attributed such an assertion to the exaggerations of
reactionary fears. But since the year 1870 we do not speculate about
the democratic temper in its intensest expression; we have seen it at
work, and we know it. We know that every beautiful building, every
precious manuscript and picture, has to be protected against the noxious
swarm of Communards as a sea-jetty against the Pholas and the Teredo.