Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 | Page 9

anti-Albigensian crusader. Monsieur Romieu held up Le Spectre Rouge
to the eyes of a generation incapable, from fright, of distinguishing
between a scarecrow and the Apollo. The Red Spectre haunted him,
and the people for whom he wrote, as relentlessly as the Gray Spectre
came upon the chiefs of Ivor. He saw in the working classes--those men
who asked then, as in modern times they have only asked, "leave to
toil"--millions of creatures "regimented by hatred," and ready to throw
themselves upon society. In the past he saw nothing so much to be
admired as the Feudal System, it was so very summary and trenchant in
its modes of dealing with masses of men so unreasonable as to grumble
when they were starving. In the present, all that he could reverence was
the cannonarchy of Russia, which he invoked to restore to France that
golden age in which Crécy and Poictiers were fought, and when the
Jacquerie illustrated the attachment of the serf to the seigneur. How this
invoker of Cossacks and cannon from the Don and the Neva "to
regulate the questions of our age" on the Seine and the Marne would
have stared, could the curtain that hides the future have been drawn for
a moment, to allow him to see a quarter of a million of French, English,
and Italian soldiers on the shores of the Euxine, and eight hundred
Western cannon raining that "hell-fire" upon the august city of
Catherine under which it became a heap of ruins! Yet the man was
undoubtedly sincere, as political fools almost invariably are. He had
faith in nothing but armies and forts, but his faith in them was of the

firmest. He despised the Bourbons and the bourgeoisie alike, and
would be satisfied with nothing short of a national chief as
irresponsible as Tamerlane; and if he should be as truculent as
Tamerlane, it was not difficult to see that M. Romieu would like him
all the better for it. Your true fanatic loves blood, and is provokingly
ingenious in showing how necessary it is that you should submit calmly
to have your throat cut for the good of society. M. Marat was a logician
of this sort, and M. Romieu is, after all, only a pale imitator of the
cracked horse-leech; but as he wrote in the interest of "order," and for
the preservation of property, we rarely hear of his thirst for blood. Had
he been a disciple of Marat, his words would have been quoted
annually in every abode of civilized men from Sacramento to
Astrachan, as evidence of the desire of popular leaders to lap blood.
What has become of M. Romieu, and how he took Louis Napoleon's
energetic measures for laying the Red Ghost in the blood of aristocrats
as well as of democrats, we know not. He ought to have been charmed
with the _coup d'état_; for the man who conceived and executed that
measure for his own benefit professed to act only for the benefit of
society, the maintenance of the rights of property being kept by him
especially in view. He, too, charged his enemies, or those whom he
thought endowed with the desire and the ability to resist him, with
Agrarianism; and such Agrarians as Thiers and Cavaignac were seized
in their beds, and imprisoned,--to prevent their running away with the
Great Book of France, one is at liberty to suppose. There was
something shockingly ludicrous in charging the hero and victor of the
Days of June with designs against property; but the charge may have
led Cavaignac to have doubts whether he had not himself been a little
too ready to believe the charge of Agrarianism when preferred against a
large number of the people of France, whom he had treated with
grape-shot by way of teaching them respect for the rights of property.
There is nothing like bringing injustice home to a man to open his eyes
to its evil nature. Of all public men of our generation who have signally
failed, Cavaignac must be held the most unfortunate; for his intentions
were excellent, and he died just as circumstances were about to afford
him an opportunity to retrieve his fame. His last days must have been
the reverse of agreeable in their retrospect; for it must constantly have
been forced upon his mind that he had been made the chief instrument

in the work of fastening upon the country he loved the most odious of
the many despotic governments it has known,--a government that
confesses its inability to stand against the "paper shot" of journalists,
and which has shackled the press after the fashion of Austrian and
Russian dynasties; and all this had taken place, as he must have seen in
his retirement, as the consequence of his having