Viewed as a history, the recently published work bearing the name of Louis Napoleon is unworthy of our spending either time or words upon it. The summary of the history of Rome anterior to Caesar contains neither fact nor research that may not be met with in any good abridgment of Roman History; while the most important results of German criticism are neglected, the labours of English authors ignored, ancient writers frequently misunderstood, and the extracts given from their works incorrectly translated.
But the Preface contains a theory—the true purpose of the book—which the "Life of Caesar" is shaped and fashioned to support; a theory, the tendency of which is systematically to falsify history, to cancel its teachings, and to corrupt the inexperienced mind by depriving it of all moral doctrine and direction in its judgment of past events.
This theory, the same set forth in many historical works during the last quarter of a century, is derived from the philosophy of Hegel, the philosophy taught at the present day—such is the tenderness of our rulers for the education of rising Italy—in the University of Naples, and which instils into the youthful mind the adoration of Force, represented by the fait accompli. Against this theory, it is well that some one should protest in the name of Human Conscience and of offended morality.
I.
The theory is as follows:
When Providence raises up individual like Charlemagne, Casar, Napoleon, it it for the purpose of indicating to the people the path they are to follow; of putting their seal of their genius upon a new era, and completing the work of centuries in a few years. Happy are the peoples who recognise and follow them. Woe to those who misunderstand or resist them! They, like the Hebrews, crucify their Messiah.The practical application of this theory to the lives of great potentates consists in judging their actions, not from the height of a moral doctrine or rule, but by special rules applicable only to these few; in attributing to their every act some solemn ideal aim, unsuspected by the mass; in claiming as a special illumination in them that which is but the reflex of that sum of truth which was in fact a previous collective acquisition, and in pointing to the visible progress of the succeeding period as a direct consequence of their work. This is the method that has led to what is called the rehabilitation, in France of such men as Louis XIV., in England of Henry VIII., and in Germany of Nero and Cleopatra.
Both the theory and its application tend to produce the most disastrous consequences. If the actions of men of genius are withdrawn from all moral criterion or rule, a first success is sufficient to render it the duty of the peoples to follow them. Genius becomes a tyranny. Even though its actions should be unintelligible, though they should put down the free conscience of the community, and substitute individual for collective inspiration, every protest is culpable or foolish. What do we know of the mission confided to genius by God? What of the characteristics of that new era it is destined to initiate? It belongs to genius to guide; it is for us to follow.
A people in whom such a doctrine as this should take root for ten years would become incapable of freedom, would acquire the habit of awaiting every initiative from its ruler, of entrusting every progress to its Caesars, and, generalizing by degrees, would learn to see the Caesar of each social sphere in its minister, general, and prefect.
The doctrine is false; false morally and historically.
II.
[...]
I accept the doctrine that preaches sacrifice for the good of others—individual sacrifice for the collective good, the sacrifice of a generation for the generations to come. But that sacrifice, in order to be truly such, and sacred enough to deserve to achieve its aim, must be a sacrifice freely accepted, a sacrifice not to the will of others, but to the consciousness of a duty which would no longer exist if you cancel the moral criterium; a sacrifice not to the agent, but to the programme, the aim.
On these conditions alone is sacrifice a source of life for our fellow-men, and of a higher life, here or elsewhere, for him who performs it. The slave, the man who bows down before the nod of a man, simply because he recognises in him the symbol of power, is incapable of a religious act like that of sacrifice; with him the death of the soul has preceded the death of the body; the material of sacrifice no longer exists within him.
Anyone familiar with any part of my writings will surely not accuse me of irreverence toward genius, or of sharing in an anarchical tendency that is so conspicuous today, and which thwarts many a noble endeavour by inclining significant individuals to hold aloof, under pretext of personal independence, from any activity that implies orderliness, subordination and discipline. I respect authority and I am conscious of all the holiness that lies in obedience to a leader. However, authority resides in God, in His law, in the truth. When, therefore, a man bids me to follow him and says, "Authority lives in my person," I have the duty and the right to investigate and see whether virtue, the moral law, the capacity for self-sacrifice are in fact alive in his person, just whither he intends to lead me, and whether, finally, the sum of forces that he is in a position to apply to the achievement of the given purpose is larger or smaller than the resources possessed by some other individual. If those three researches turn out in his favour, I am ready to follow him in reverent and joyous trust, without holding the motives of his every act in suspicion, without requiring an explanation for his every gesture, without tormenting him with distracting queries or unworthy doubts.
The theory that is expounded in this book suppresses two terms of the above statement of the problem and holds that the third is alone sufficient to legitimize authority. We should fall on our. faces before authority, much as savages prostrate themselves before the flash of lightning, whenever, wherever and whithersoever authority announces itself. Attila would kill the conscience of the human race!
As a matter of fact, genius is nothing more than a resource, an instrument. It may be applied to evil. It may wallow in selfishness. It may promote the progress of all. Genius is not authority. It is the tool of authority. Authority is virtue illumined by genius. Genius increases duties and responsibilities. Duty is always something proportionate to the power or opportunity that an individual or a group of individuals has. Genius by itself does not constitute title or sovereignty. The purpose alone is sovereign. Anyone who loses track of these criteria of judgment is destined forever to misunderstand the history of men and of the world.
III.
It is not true that genius is always and by nature the motive force of new eras. Genius now initiates, now interprets, now epitomizes, now closes eras. At times, towards the end of an era, when the idea that has inspired it is exhausted, in the intellectual field at least, when the human spirit, under the drive of an inexorable law of progress, is beginning to hope and to seek for a new source of inspiration, some genius will suddenly appear and take his stand on the untrodden ground of the future — beyond the limits, that is, of the tradition that has hitherto prevailed. His soul will be seen to flame with boundless aspiration just as his brow is radiant with the glow of a new dawn. Holy through unconscious virtue and brotherly love, he will seem instinctively to formulate the synthesis of the future as he states its guiding ideal in words. Thereafter, ten, twelve, a score of centuries will talk of him.
Then again, at such times, in the period, that is, between a dying epoch and the new age that is coining on, another sort of man will appear, a man whose talents lie in capacities for action and for ruling others. He will summarize all that has gone before in his person, realize it in institutions, spread it, in its characteristic traits, over lands different from the ones in which it found its visible and triumphant expression. Such a man unwittingly prepares the ground for the idea of the future. He does not reveal it. He does not even know or understand it.
The man of the first type is an initiator. He is a prophet. The man of the second type is a summarizer. He epitomizes the thought of an era and spreads it abroad. He creates nothing new. There is so little of the creator in him that, as a rule, he takes with him to the tomb all the creative energy of the people from whom he derived his power and his glory. The mission that Greece had in the world perished for indefinitely long ages with Alexander. The lingering death agony of Rome began with Julius Caesar. The leadership of France in Europe ended with Napoleon.
Religious geniuses belong to the first category. Almost all conquerors belong to the second. The religious prophet generally meets the conditions of authority that I have specified above. He has a programme. His life is consistent with his preaching. He gives a pledge of moral potency through the spell he exercises over human souls. The conqueror, on the other hand, the only genius envisaged by the system that I am combating under the name of Caesarism, replaces the requirements mentioned with an energetic, over-bearing, assertion of self. To anyone who asks: Why should I believe in you? he invariably answers: ‘Because I believe in myself.’ Such a man can do startling things, but he cannot open an era. Initiative of that sort implies apostleship, armed or pacific, of a new ideal. If the conqueror had one, he would offer it as a bond for the trust he exacts.
Now people can serve ideas. People cannot, without playing false to their mission on earth, serve mere individuals. We can follow them as long as an ideal, which we are free to ponder by ourselves and accept if we choose, can be seen resplendent on the flags they wave. When there is no such flag, when there is no idea that gives bond for the leader’s intentions, incumbent upon us is the duty of examining each and every act of the man who bids us to follow him. It is our duty to preserve our freedom intact, as the guarantor and the instrument of our examination. It is our duty to protest with word and sword against every effort that is made to deprive us of that freedom. I believe in God and I worship His law. I abhor idolatry.
IV.
A deep and persistent confusing of two essentially different things lies at the bottom of Caesarism. The agent is inevitably confused with the objective results of his career, even the remote and incidental results. The instrument is confused with the law that should control the agent’s action. The man is mistaken for God. World history slowly evolves from the continuous interplay of two forces: the activity of individuals and the design of Providence. The word that defines the second is progress. Time and space are ours. We can retard or accelerate progress. We cannot prevent it.
Progress is the law of God. That law will be carried out, whatever we do. But its progressive fulfilment does not relieve us of responsibility for our acts or even reduce the amount of our responsibility. The sins and mistakes of one generation serve as lessons to succeeding generations; but the generation that sins or errs deserves blame or punishment, and punishment it will suffer, either here on earth or elsewhere.
The invasions of the Latin world by the races of the North destroyed Roman civilization. They gave Italy over to massacres and plunderings of every description and established conditions of semi-barbarism on lands that had once known free citizenship, art and industry. Some centuries later we find the Roman world replaced by a Latin-German world. Civilization had recovered in extension what it had lost in depth and intensity. The barbarians had carried back to their forests many influences from the civilization with which they had been at mortal grips. So a vast field had been opened and prepared for a new synthesis, in other words, for Christian civilization. Well, in view of that, are we to admire Alaric and Attila as standard-bearers of civilization? Should the sons of Romans have enrolled under the banners of the invaders?
During the later Middle Ages men who spilled oceans of blood to vent their thirst for dominion founded monarchies, and so unwittingly prepared the ground for our modern nationalities, which in turn today are summoning the peoples to a consciousness of their collective existence and so are preparing the ground for the destruction of monarchical dogma and for the triumph of republicanism. Should we on that account glorify and venerate the treachery and the cruelty of a Louis XI. or others like him?
Every tyranny, even the worst sort of tyranny, leads infallibly in ten, twenty, thirty years, to a greater development of freedom. By a law that seems to be basic in the nature of things, the human spirit proportions its activity to the pressure that is exerted upon it. Axe we therefore bound to raise altars to our tyrants? There was an ancient heresy that worshipped Judas; for, so it was argued, had it not been for Judas there would have been no crucifixion and therefore no redemption. Caesarism is an application to history of just such a heresy. No! We cannot confuse the acts of the free responsible creature with the objective workings of providential laws. Curses upon Judas, and glory be to God, who allows no Judas to change humanity’s destinies! That we raise that twin war cry is a vital condition to human living, if the achievement of those destinies is not to be too long postponed.
[...]
Those writers who teach us at the present day that every fact has its raison d'etre, and is therefore to be accepted by history as legitimate, forgot the law of life—of humanity. Evil exists on earth, but it exists to be combated; in order that we, by a determined struggle and resistance against it, may deserve the power to destroy it, and advance towards good. Without the existence of evil our life would have neither progress, aim, nor sanctification: we are bound not to accept evil, but to cry anathema upon it, and ceaselessly to struggle against it. The raison d'etre of evil lies in that holy warfare which its existence imposes as a duty upon humanity. The pretended philosophical formula is therefore immoral and absurd. The true pledge of future progress is the negation, not the acceptance, of Caesarism—inevitable, it may be, at certain periods, but never legitimate. To accept it as such would be to decree its perpetuity, to abolish human liberty and spontaneity, the sources of progress.
V.
Rome was expiring when Caesar arose. The corruption of manners; the adoration of material interests substituted for the Idea that had created the greatness of Rome; the tyranny of the Equestrian order, and of the farmers of public revenue; territorial possession based on usury and confiscation; the absorption of small proprietorships into large, and the reduction of these into pasture-land, whereby the slave-class took the place of the free cultivators of the soil; the aristocracy of wealth unaccompanied with activity of industry, and therefore without the means of renewing that wealth; the existence of a mass of freed slaves in Rome, servile of soul and careless of the future of the country; the poverty of the masses, and the consequent sale of votes; the poverty of the legions, and the consequent sale of the armed force to any ambitious man able to purchase it—all the causes of the dissolution of the State are well known to me. But, because Rome was doomed to perish, am I bound to hold up him who hastened her death as an example to the future? Because society, even at the present day, elevates the scaffold into an altar of expiation for the guilty, am I bound to bow down before the executioner, and teach my fellow-men that an act of justice is performed whensoever he appears?
No. The words of Ferrucci,—"Thou art come to slay the dead"—involuntarily rise to my lips as a formula of supreme contempt and reprobation for him who usurps the part of God, and ferociously strangles the dying.
Rome was expiring, Liberty was expiring; but was it not the duty of the most powerful son of Rome to strive to save her? I know not if it may be given to genius to vanquish death, and call back life already sinking into the tomb; but I do know that the endeavour is holy, and that every holy endeavour bears fruit. Caesar, who had power enough to impose his own tyranny upon the people, might have used that power in the attempt to inspire both senate and people with a noble pride in their ancient mission; in draughting among the legions the multitude of slaves who corrupted Rome; in resolutely combating the aristocracy of the few landed proprietors; in raising the banner of the social question—the sole important question of the period; in initiating a change in the distribution of property; and, without violent interruption of the Republican tradition, supported by the suffrages of the people, in restoring possession of the land to the sons of the ancient small cultivators and proprietors.
He might—probably he would—have failed in the attempt. But who can estimate the advantage to the future of the solemn spectacle of a terrible struggle sustained by genius in defence of the liberties of his country against death itself?
Fascinated by the strange power of the warrior and conqueror, we have all of us—adversaries and admirers—regarded him as a man who achieved a vast and decisive revolution. The truth is, that he hastened the last hour of Roman liberty—no more.
The social question, which was, as I have said, the only important question of the period, was left unsolved; the struggle between the rich and poor was not concluded. Writers have called Caesar the man of Democracy, because he leaned for support upon the Plebeians against the Patricians who stood in his way; but what real progress did he obtain for that people who hailed him "Father" and "Liberator"? What change, other than political, did he produce in Rome? The constitution of property remained the same; the consequences of war, of proscriptions, and of the largesse bestowed upon the legions, substituted a certain number of new proprietors for the old, but without any alteration of principle, without any system of choice, without the introduction of any new legality; and after him, as before him, every civil struggle led inevitably to the same results. Large landed proprietorships—the mortal disease of Italy—remained unchanged; slave labour, substituted for free labour, remained; an idle, hungry, plebeian class, clamorous for public alms, remained. Caesar intoxicated them with the spectacle of triumphs, naval fights, gladiatorial exhibitions, but did not relieve the misery of their condition. All the causes condemning Rome to dissolution remained unchanged.
Caesar did fulfil a mission, but it was an unconscious one, and therefore ho was utterly without merit in its accomplishment. It was the same that was fulfilled at a later period by the conquering barbarians.
The first epoch of the life of Rome—that in which unity of civilization was imposed upon the peoples by force of arms—was in course of conclusion. Caesar concluded it by his Gallo-Germanic wars, and his invasion of Britain.
Allowing for the diversity of the times and of the peoples, Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon may be said to have had the same mission. They did not, I repeat, initiate—they concluded an era. They summed up in themselves—and their greatness is to a large extent owing to this—the genius of the epoch to which they belonged. They introduced no new element into the civilization they represented; but, when its own progressive power was exhausted, they were impelled by Providence to diffuse it around; Alexander in Asia, Caesar in the Gallo-Germanic world, Napoleon in Europe. After this, corrupted by egotism and the servile adoration of the multitudes, they degraded even that mission to the narrow sphere of self, and perished: Alexander, probably by poison, in Babylon, midway in his career; Caesar, by the dagger of the conspirator; Napoleon, at St. Helena.
[...]
The prestige before which Alaric turned pale, and Attila drew back—which caused the barbarians to respect the bishops, and the Middle Ages to hail the Empire as sacred—was not the prestige of Caesar, but of Rome. The world forefelt the eternal life and eternal unifying mission of the Sacred City.
[...]
I have spoken of Caesarism, not of the writer of the "Life of Caesar." Let him do what he will, he is extraneous to the question treated of in these pages. Even if the doctrines of Csesarism were accepted, they could avail him nothing.
