Part 19

It is the characteristic of all conventional praise to exaggerate not only the tone, but even to deceive itself sometimes in the amount; there is perfume and ashes in incense, said the ancients, and there is something equivocal also in the usual manner of congratulating the Russian chancellor on his "triumph" in the question of the Euxine. To pretend that Prince Gortchakof did not favor the audacious designs of Prussia in order to free Russia from its bonds in the Black Sea, that he delivered Europe in advance to Prince Bismarck in the sole hope of some day repudiating to his advantage the act of 1856, is in truth to pay as little honor to his genius as to his patriotism. Certainly the eminent statesman whose "prophetic glance" the grandchildren of Washington[108] celebrated at St. Petersburg in the year of Sadowa, supplicating the eternal God, "who had made the sun stand still for Joshua," also to suspend the course of life for Alexander Mikhaïlovitch, "so that the eyes of the world might long remain fixed on him,"[109] the consummate diplomat who, in the spring of 1867, slighted the important advances made by the cabinets of Vienna and the Tuileries,--certainly this minister did not fail at this moment to put aside with a disdainful smile, the petty hypothesis, that in the approaching and foreseen overturning of Europe, there would be assigned to Russia as its sole victory and conquest, the abolition of any wounding article of a treaty which events had long before rendered "invalid." It was not for such a "plate of lentils," to use the language of M. de Bismarck, that Prince Gortchakof intended to cede to the Hohenzollern the fixed _birthright_ of the Romanof; he did not think of abandoning the Occident for such a ridiculous price: he looked higher, and expected to have the lion's share in the quarry to come. Fortune has deceived his hopes, defeated his calculations, and forced him to bend to many unforeseen necessities; but, if it is puerile to allow him to have made virtues of all these vexatious necessities, and to form for him a sort of aureole of lightnings and thunderbolts of the war of 1870, history, in its impartiality, must not the less take into consideration the intentions of Prince Gortchakof, which were as great as the events themselves, and, without denying his defeat, nevertheless accord him the full benefit _in magnis voluisse_.

They cherished, in fact, great, gigantic projects on the banks of the Moscova and the Neva, in all this agitated and feverish epoch which separated Sedan from Sadowa; they deluded themselves with enchanting dreams; they divided the world between Sclavians and Germans, and the "national" minister responded to the ardent wishes of the entire nation in making the Prussian alliance the pivot of its policy, in seeing in it the absolute condition and the sure pledge of a future of glory and prosperity for Russia. We must look back on the universal mental agitation in consequence of the equally prodigious and unforeseen victory of Prussia in 1866, on the innumerable fantastic plans which were then suddenly formed for the reconstruction of empires and races; it is necessary to recall this endless flight of Minervas all armed, whom the blow of the German Vulcan's hammer caused to spring forth from so many cracked heads who thought themselves Olympian,--the general _remoulding_ which our poor philosophy of history, at once so cutting and so malleable, undergoes in the twinkling of an eye,--to appreciate justly the current of strange and impetuous ideas which then seized the people of Peter the Great and of Catherine II. "An irresistible power forces the people to reunite in great masses, making the secondary States disappear, and this tendency is perhaps inspired by a sort of providential prevision of the destinies of the world." This, on the day after Sadowa, was the expression of an official document of incontestable authority, a diplomatic manifest which announced _urbi et orbi_ the profoundest thoughts of the imperial government of France.[110] How can one be astonished, then, that the children of Rourik followed the same reasoning, and asked themselves with candor if the battle of Koenigsgraetz did not entirely deliver Central Europe to the Hohenzollern and Oriental Europe to the Romanof? After some moments of hesitation and surprise, Muscovite patriotism resolved therefore, to take no umbrage at the ambition of King William I., but it immediately proclaimed that Russia also had a mission to fulfill, an "idea" to realize, and that the sun of national unities and grand combinations shone for all the world.

There was in the old capital of the czars a celebrated journal whose power has since greatly declined, and which, although now an ordinary paper only, but still important, then exercised a preponderant, tyrannic influence, from the Dwina to the Ural: it was occasionally called, and without malice, "the first power in the state after the emperor." From the time of the fatal insurrections of Poland, the "Gazette of Moscow" was in truth the monitor of the popular passions of Holy Russia, the office from whence the word of command for public opinion went forth into the vast empire of the North, and it often issued formal instructions for the directing ministers at St. Petersburg. Even at this time the all-powerful organ of M. Katkof made itself the mouth-piece of the nation, and imperiously traced the programme of the policy of the future. Only a short time after the conclusion of the peace of Prague, the journal of Moscow laid down "as an incontestable truth, that the march of events has produced interests which invite the two Powers of Russia and Prussia to ally themselves still more actively than in the past;" it affirmed, moreover, that overtures on this point had been made by M. de Bismarck, "overtures the more acceptable as Prussia has no interests in the Orient; on this question, the cabinet of Berlin could take, in concert with Russia, such an attitude as suited it." The theme was again taken up and developed under many a form and in many an article, until a leader of the 17th February, 1867, impressed on it the great consecration of a speculative and humanitarian principle.

"The new era is at last sketched," one reads there, "and for us Russians it has a peculiar bearing. This era is truly ours; it calls to life a new world kept until now in the shadow and expectation of its destinies, the Græco-Sclavic world. After centuries passed in resignation and servitude, this world at last reaches the moment of renovation; what has so long been forgotten and down-trodden, comes back to the light and prepares for action. The present generations will see great changes, great facts, and great formations. Already on the peninsula of the Balkan, and under the worm-eaten couch of Ottoman tyranny, three groups of lively and strong nationalities are being formed, the Hellenic, Sclavic, and Roumanian groups. Closely bound among themselves by the commonalty of their faith and their historical destinies, these three groups are equally connected with Russia by all the ties of religion and national life. These three groups of nations once reconstructed, Russia will reveal itself in an entirely different light. It will no longer be alone in the world; in place of a sombre, Asiatic power, as it now seems to be, it will become a moral force indispensable to Europe, a Græco-Sclavic civilization completing the Latin-German civilization, which without it would remain imperfect and inert in its sterile exclusiveness." Soon after descending from these rather abstract heights to the more practical ground of ways and means, the fiery apostle of the _new era_ exclaimed on the 7th April: "If France sustains by arms and by its political influence the _renaissance_ of the Latin races, if Prussia acts in the same manner _vis-à-vis_ to Germany, why, then, should not Russia, the only independent Sclavic Power, sustain the Sclavic races, and should it not prevent foreign Powers from placing obstacles in the way of their political development? Russia should employ all its powers to introduce in its neighbors of the South a transformation similar to that which took place in Central and Occidental Europe; _vis-à-vis_ the Sclavians it should take, without the least hesitation, the rôle which France has taken in regard to the Latin races and Prussia _vis-à-vis_ the German world. The task is a noble one, for _it is exempt from egotism_: it is beneficial, for it will achieve the triumph of the principle of nationalities, and will give a solid basis to the modern equilibrium of Europe; it is worthy of Russia and of its greatness; it is immense, and we have the firm conviction that Russia will fulfill it."

It was under the stimulant of such theories, hopes, and passions, that, in the spring of the year 1867, the strange _ethnological exposition of Moscow_[111] was instituted, which soon became the pretext for a great demonstration from without, sufficiently inoffensive in appearance to remove all diplomatic embarrassment, well calculated, however, to produce its effect on _naïf_ and inflammable minds, to fascinate unfortunate, disinherited people, richer in imagination than in culture. Certainly, true science would draw very little profit from this projected reunion in the _manége_ of Moscow of all the Sclavic "types" with their costumes, their arms, their domestic utensils, and their flora; but the undertaking was considered not the less worthy of the most august protection. The emperor and the empress offered considerable sums to defray the costs of the work, the Grand Duke Vladimir accepted the honorary presidency of it, the high dignitaries of the court and the church charged themselves with its direction. Warm appeals were addressed to the Sclavians of Austria and Turkey, to their different historical, geographical, or other learned societies, to add by numerous contributions to the magnificence of the exposition, and a cloud of emissaries collected in the countries of the Danube and of the Balkan in search of adhesion, samples, and "types." Committees were formed in different parts of the empire, in order to worthily prepare the reception of the "Sclavic guests," who did not fail to swarm to the "national jubilee," and soon a _congress_ was spoken of, in which should be discussed the wants and the interests of so many "brother peoples," the hopes and the griefs of the great common country, of the _ideal_ country. It was the moment, it is necessary to recall it, when the Cretan insurrection, always persistent, stirred up by Greece, and exaggerated by the journals too little or too well informed, kept the Christian populations of Turkey in alarm and on their guard; the moment, also, when the Czechen of Bohemia; urging on in consequence almost all the Sclavians of Austria, protested against the Cisleithan constitution, and refused to sit in the representative chambers of the empire. The _Kremlin_ thus became the _mons sacer_ of the _intransigeans_ of the two banks of the Leitha, the _congress of Moscow_ had all the appearance of an _opposition parliament_ opposed to the Reichsrath of Vienna, and the language held by the authorized organs of the cabinet of St. Petersburg was not calculated to calm the susceptibilities of the interested governments, nor to dissuade vexatious manifestations. Speaking of the pious _pilgrims_ of Turkey and Austria who were preparing to visit Moscow, "that holy Mecca of the Sclavians," the "Correspondance Russe," the ministerial journal _par excellence_,[112] thus expressed itself in the month of April, 1867: "One cannot reasonably demand of us that we abjure our past. We will let, then, our guests believe that they have come to a sister nation _from whom they have everything to expect_ and nothing to fear; _we will listen to their grievances_, and the recital of their evils can only tighten the ties which unite us with them. If now they intend to establish a comparison between their political state and ours, _we will not be foolish enough_ to prove to them that they are in the most favorable conditions of Sclavic development. These conditions, we believe, on the contrary, to be bad; we have said so a hundred times, and we can well say so again."

Without doubt the Russian intrigues in the countries of the Danube and the Balkan were not of very recent invention; they even dated back very far in the past, from the reign of the great Catherine. Underhandedly and secretly, the Pan-Sclavic propaganda had been encouraged or protected for nearly a century; but it was for the first time, in this summer of 1867, that the government of St. Petersburg thus loftily assumed the responsibility of such a propaganda, and unfurled in its states the flags of Saints Cyrille and Methode. In an empire where all is watched, regulated, and commanded from the throne, where nothing is done spontaneously, where all is arranged and _devised_, "foreign Sclavians," subjects of two neighboring and "friendly" Powers, were admitted, encouraged to come to expose their grievances, to bring complaints against their respective governments, to demand assistance and deliverance in the name of a new right of nations, of a principle lately discovered of great combinations and national unities. _They were not foolish enough_ to dismiss these foreign "deputies," to counsel reason and resignation to them; on the contrary they spoke to them of a "better and approaching condition," they took them through all the cities of the empire amidst enthusiastic manifestations directed by the colonels and archimandrites, they overwhelmed them with testimonies of sympathy, ovations and demonstrations, in which the army, the magistrates, and all the higher official world took part. Generals, admirals, and ministers presided at banquets where the disaster of Sadowa was celebrated as a providential and happy event by the subjects of the Emperor Francis Joseph, where appeals were addressed to the czar "to revenge the secular outrages of the White Mountain and of Kossovo, and to plant the Russian banner on the Dardanelles, and on the basilica of St. Sophia." The shock given by such demonstrations to a whole race, to a whole religious world, was profound and prolonged, and certainly the contemporaneous annals have rarely known a period as _incorrect_ in point of view of international right and of the usages of the chancellors' offices as that which had for its starting point the congress of Moscow and for its end the conference of Paris on the subject of Greece. It was a strange one in truth, this epoch, with such presidents of the council as Ratazzi, Bratiano, Koumondouros, with generalissimos like Garibaldi, Pétropoulaki, and "Philip the Bulgarian;" with these expeditions of Mentana, of Sistow, of the _Arcadion_ and _Enosis_; with these agitations, to mention all, German, Italian, Czech, Croatian, Roumanian, Servian, Bulgarian, Grecian, and Pan-Sclavic. Without entering farther into the tiresome history of these complex and not yet explained events, it suffices, in order to appreciate the general character of them and to comprehend their close ties, to re-read with all the attention which it merits the report, already mentioned, of the ambassador of France to the court of Berlin, dated the 5th January, 1868. "M. de Bismarck must have," wrote M. Benedetti, "a disturbed Italy, in permanent disagreement with France, to constrain us to maintain forces more or less considerable in the States of the Holy See, to be able, if necessary, to excite, by the aid of the revolutionary party, a violent rupture between the government of the emperor and that of King Victor Emmanuel, to neutralize, in a word, our liberty on the Rhine.... And I would not be surprised if M. de Bismarck were the instigator of the new impulse given since last summer to the Pan-Sclavic propaganda; he finds in it the immediate advantage of disturbing Austria by Russia. Russia will assuredly show itself less enterprising, and Prussia on its part will not encourage it (Russia) to renew the question of the Orient, for the simple reason that it itself (Prussia) would gain no advantage in it, if it did not think it indispensable to pay with this price for the liberty which it claims in Germany. The uncertainty of the situation only tightens every day the ties which unite Prussia with Russia and solidifies the ambitions of the one in Germany with those of the other in the Orient."

A _permanent committee for the interests of Sclavic unity_ was formed on the day after the congress of Moscow, under the auspices of a grand duke, and his action was not slow in making itself felt among the Ruthenes, the Czechen, the Croatians of Austria; but it was especially in the tributary or subject provinces of the Ottoman Porte that the agitation became as chronic as it was perilous. The unfortunate Turk was assailed on all sides: one day it was the Vladika of Montenegro who demanded of him in a menacing tone some port of the Adriatic, another day the Prince of Servia demanded the evacuation of some fortress, enforcing his request with extraordinary armaments. Numerous convoys of arms arrived from Russia in the Danubian Provinces under the false designation of material for the construction of railroads,[113] while the Greek ships of war did not cease to wish to rekindle with all their strength in the isle of Crete an insurrection about to be extinguished and which, in truth, never was of very great extent. It was the epoch of "committees of aid" and "liberating bands" now overrunning the States of the Pope with the cry "_Roma o Morte!_" now making incursions in Thessaly to revenge "the outraged manes of Phocion and Philopoemon," or again freeing five times in the space of a year the Danube from the side of Roumania only to awaken in the Balkans "the lion with the golden mane!" "To-day it is our duty, brothers, to prove to European diplomacy that descendants of the terrible Krum still exist; the lion with the golden mane and the trumpet of war call you." Thus read in the month of August, 1868, a proclamation dated from the "Balkans," and signed "_Provisional Government_."[114] "It is a fact," wrote on the 6th February, 1868, in a curious report addressed to Count de Beust by the agent of Austria in the Principalities, Baron d'Eder,--"it is a fact that at Bucharest, as in the different cities on the banks of the Danube, there exist Bulgarian committees; their object is to provoke troubles in Bulgaria, to aid them, to give them more extended proportions than those of the past year. Only quite lately they were persuaded here that on the return of pleasant weather serious complications would break out in Occidental Europe which would permit Russia to declare war against Turkey, and, foreseeing these events, they have made preparations to influence with energy the Bulgarian rising. Although the government of the Principalities is in the hands of a party (radical) traditionally hostile to Russia, it has nevertheless for some time inclined towards this Power, and expects from it the realization of its efforts and its hopes. The journals of the opposition (conservative) combat these Russophile tendencies of the government; they reproach it with acting in concert with Prussia and with preparing difficulties for Austria in case of a conflict between France and Prussia. The journals of the government reply by saying that the national party is from principle the adversary of no Power, and that there is no reason for combating Russia from the moment that this Power defends the cause of right and of oppressed nationalities."

Assuredly it would be unjust to throw on the Russian government the responsibility of all the disorderly agitations of this epoch in the Sclavic-Græco-Roumanian world, but it is not the less true that it did nothing to stop or even disown them. In looking over the parliamentary documents of this time,--the different blue, red, green, and yellow books of the years 1867-1869,--one is struck at meeting at every step repeated and energetic representations, addressed by the cabinets of London, of the Tuileries, and of Vienna to Servia, Roumania, and to Greece concerning their military preparations, the clandestine shipments of arms and marauding bands, while the cabinets of St. Petersburg and Berlin carefully abstained from any proceeding of this sort. By a piquant change of things here below, which must have astonished the Nesselrode and the Kamptz in their heavenly abode, the Occidental Powers now, England and France, to whom also Austria joined itself, denounced to the world the revolutionary practices of the European demagogic party, while Prussia kept silent, and Russia refused to deny the fact or to plead extenuating circumstances for it. The excuses for the government of Athens Prince Gortchakof kindly found in the Hellenic constitution: "This constitution," said he, "gives to all Greeks full liberty to leave their own country and to take part in any conflict such as existed in Crete;"[115] and that was truly an original spectacle, that of a minister of an autocracy displaying before an old whig like Lord Clarendon the inexorable conditions of a parliamentary and legal _régime_. The Porte, it will be remembered, wished to know nothing of a legality which destroyed it; it ended by losing patience, by addressing an _ultimatum_ to the government of Athens, and a conference assembled at Paris "to seek for means to smooth over the difference between Turkey and Greece." Some good people apprehended an embarrassed attitude on the part of the Russian chancellor before such areopagus, they even believed him capable of trammeling the labors of this reunion: this was to ignore the resources of a mind as crafty as cultivated, and which profited by the occasion to venture his famous _mot_ on Saturn. "I remember," he wrote to Baron Brunnow, at London, 13th January, 1869, "that there are some persons who accuse Russia of wishing to render the conference abortive. One is not ignorant that the conference emanates from the mind of the emperor. The fable of Saturn has no application in the wanderings of the policy of the imperial cabinet." Alexander Mikhaïlovitch was not at the end of his boldness; he became bitter, almost aggressive; he spoke of the "excitement from without," of a "process of progress," of the "distrust which was attached to every step of Russia," and went so far as to denounce a great conspiracy contrived by the Occidental Powers against the peace of the Levant. "It is impossible for us not to remark," he said, in a dispatch to Baron de Brunnow, of the 17th December, 1868, "that this discordant note is not the only one which has come to _disturb the echoes of the Orient_. It is thus that we have first seen Servia become the end in view of an agitation which, originated with the press, ended by gaining over diplomacy; Prince Michael Obrenovitch was suspected, and nothing less than his tragic end was necessary to disarm the hostilities directed against him. Soon after, accusations were directed against the government of the united Principalities: the Bulgarian bands became a motive for incrimination, it was reproached with having tolerated them, it was accused with having encouraged them. This complication was scarcely removed, before a new crisis arose in the relations of Turkey with Greece, a crisis still more grave and more dangerous to the general peace." Decidedly, in absence of the "fable of Saturn," that of the wolf and the lamb had its application in the wanderings of the policy of the imperial cabinet of St. Petersburg.