INTRODUCTION XXI

sympathy of those scholars whom the Lettre à M, Renouard (see p. xvi) had not disgusted, and made of him an out-andout oppositionist * Le pas était franchi, il n'y avait plus à douter que l'humeur de Courier déciderait toujours de sa conduite, et que son plaisir d'écrire l'emporterait sur son désir de vivre^ en repos.' ^ So Paul-Louis defînitely assumed the rôle of village Hampden. From July 1819 to April 1820 he addressed to the Censeur européen^ a libéral daily of a serions type, a séries of ten letters (see pp. 11 6- 129) expressing in Inimitable form the narrow ideas of an * homme du peuple ' to whom Bonapartes and Bourbons, Church and Court, ministers and officiais, are ail objects of dislike and distrust. Of constructîve political ideas he is qui te innocent, and the larger aspects of statesmanship do not corne within his vision. His idéal is a state of things in which * la nation ferait marcher le gouvernement comme un cocher qu'on paie et qui doit nous mener, non où il veut, mais oii nous prétendons aller, et par le chemin qui nous convient,' 2 in other words, the delusion now labelled * démocratie control.'

In 1821 appeared the Simple Discours (see pp. 130-146), his masterpiece, which earned him two months imprisonment at Sainte-Pélagie, a sentence which evoked from his fellôwprisoner, Béranger, the remark, * A la place de M. Courier je ne donnerais pas ces deux mois de prison pour cent mille francs.' It should be said that the détention was of the mildest character ; the prisoners were practically the guests of the Government, visitors were welcome, the social life of the ' prison ' was cheerful and interesting, and hunger-strikes were unknown. His next pamphlet. Pétition à la Chambre des Députés pour des villageois que Von empêche de danser (1822), provoked by the intemperate zeal of some of the young reactionary priests, led to a fresh trial, which resulted only in the confiscation of the work. By this time Courier had moved very far from his original position. Beginning as an

^ Sainte-Beuve, op, cit. p. 346.

2 Lettres au Censeur, ix., see p. 127, 1. 381.

acrid critic of détails, he had come to be regarded by the public as a Jacobin, almost what we should now call a Bolshevist He even sank so low as to preach insubordination to the army.^ He had, in reality, no clear political ideas. His apparent leaning towards the Orléans branch in the Simple Discours^ and in some of his clandestinely printed brochures, was, like his savage attacks on the Church in the same documents, a mère falling into step with a popular movement.

In 1824 appeared his swan-song, Le pamphlet des pamphlets, Armand Carrel, writing (in 1829) with the enthusiasm of a political partisan, sees in this last work the suprême fruit of Courier' s genius : * La maturité un peu factice des premiers écrits de Courier a fait place à une maturité réelle, dans laquelle la vigueur est alliée à la grâce et l'originalité la plus âpre au naturel le plus parfait. On voit que ce lumineux et mordant génie a rencontré enfin la langue qui convient à ses amères impressions sur les hommes et les choses de son temps, et qu'il va marcher armé de toutes pièces. Dans le Pamphlet des Pamphlets ce n'est plus un villageois discourant savamment sur les intérêts publics, c'est Paul-Louis se livrant avec une sorte d'enthousiasme au besoin de dire sa vocation de pamphlétaire et de la venger du mépris d'une portion de la société. Il s'est mis en cause commune avec Socrate, Pascal, Cicéron, Franklin, Démosthène, Saint- Paul, Saint-Bazile ; il s'est environné des grands hommes, comme d'une glorieuse milice d'apôtres de la liberté de penser, de publier, d'imprimer ; il les montre pamphlétaires comme lui, faisant, chacun de son temps, contre une tyrannie ou contre l'autre, ce qu'il a fait du sien ; lançant de petits écrits, attirant, prêchant, enseignant le peuple, malgré les plaisanteries de la cour, le blâme des honnêtes gens, la fureur des hypocrites et les réquisitoires du parquet ; les uns allant en prison comme lui, les autres forcés d'avaler la ciguë ou mourant sous le fer de quelque ignoble soldat. Voilà le Pamphlet des Pamphlets, morceau d'un

^ ' Un vieux soldat à l'armée ' (1823), a pamphlet detached from the Livret de Paul-Loiiis Vigneron,

INTRODUCTION XXlll

entraînement irrésistible et dont le style, d'un bout à Pautre en harmonie avec le mouvement de l'inspiration la plus capricieuse et la plus hardie, est peut-être ce que Ton peut citer dans notre langue de plus achevé comme goût et de plus merveilleux comme art.' ^

If a foreigner may express an opinion on an author so essentially gaulois as Courier, I would say that the very qualities which Carrel finds in the Pamphlet des pamphlets are signs of décadence, proofs that the author had reached the limits of his powers and strayed into a realm not his own. Courier is a sardonic frondeur^ not an inspired prophet. Hc belongs, within the somewhat narrow bounds of his peculiar talent, to the line of Jean de Meun, Marot, Molière, La Fontaine, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Edmond About, and Anatole France, writers whose weapon is the rapier, not the bludgcon, and who do not cry on the house-tops. Just as most good Courierists agrée with Sainte-Beuve when he says, * Les vrais amateurs, aujourd'hui, et désormais, je le pense, aimeront mieux Courier dans ses Lettres que dans ses Pamphlets,' 2 so, in the pamphlets, they prefer the whimsical style of the Pétition aux deux Chambres and the vitriolic satire of the Simple Discours to the somewhat factitious éloquence of the Pamphlet des pamphlets. Success had infected Courier with a vice from which, with ail his faults, he was by nature free. He had leamt to strike attitudes. And when a Gaulois comes to that, he falls out of his rôle. Courier was on the way to be transformed from the Figaro of the Barbier into the Figaro of the Mariage. He might even hâve ended by becoming a bore. So it was perhaps fortunate for his literary famé that he was assassinated in his forest of Larçay on April lo, 1825.

There is tragic irony in the fact that this assailant of public tyranny was the victim of a batred inspired by his own ultratyrannical conduct in private life, and that his slayers were those greedy, brutish peasants, whom he loved to depict in his

1 Essai sur la vie et les écrits de Paul-Louis Courier^ prefixed to édition of 1829. ^ Op. cit. p. 360.

pamphlets as harmless Arcadians in danger of being corrupted by a vicious court and a debauched nobility (see p. 141). Carrel tells us that 'devenu dans ses dernières années d'une humeur assez difficile, il n'était pas sans ennemis dans son voisinage.' ^ M. Giraud puts it more bluntly : * A cause de son avarice, de ses exigences, de son caractère intraitable, le ** vigneron de la Chavonnière " était craint et détesté de tous ceux qui l'approchaient.' ^ The murder was an agrarian crime with ail the usual features — a band of miscreants priming themselves with drink before screwing up their courage to carry out the long-planned attack on one unarmed man, the accidentai présence of unseen witnesses too cowardly to speak, *the secret half a county kept, the murder in the lane,' even the timid or corrupt jury acquitting the only one of the assassins who was brought to trial — no feature is lacking. The facts of the crime are now well known,^ and it is to the grave suspicion of complicity that touched the victim's wife that Sainte-Beuve alludes covertly when he says : * Ainsi, dans ces bois si célébrés par Courier en ses Pamphlets et Gazettes villageoises, et dont il faisait un asile de bonnes gens, il y avait place, sous forme grossière, pour les Euménides.' ^

In this necessarily brief sketch the events of Courier*s life hâve been only vaguely touched on. The most important of them are indicated more or less clearly in the sélections from the Lettres and Pamphlets^ and in the Notes to the same. Little has been said also of the Hellenistic studies which occupied him at intervais throughout his military and civil life, and to which he might eventually hâve retumed. A full list of ail his Works appears on pp. 224-226. It is interesting to note that his first published wTitings were on classical subjects, and that, at the time of his death, he was projecting a transla-

1 Op. cit

" Œuz/res choisies de Paul-Louis Courier, Préface, p. 38.

• See Louis André, L Assassinat de Paul- Louis C<?«r*>r (19 13), and Gaschet, Paul-Louis Courier et la Restauration, ch. ix.

* Op. cit. p. 360.