Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the First Session Thirty-ninth Congress, Part III
Mr. Romero to Mr. Seward
Mr. Secretary: I have the honor of transmitting to yon, for the information of the United States government, the English translation of an article on French intervention in Mexico, written by that distinguished literary Frenchman Alphonse de Lamartine, and published at Paris last month, in his literary monthly magazine, entitled Literary Entertainments, (Les Entretiens Littéraires.)
The importance of this article is, that it expresses the real views of French intervention in Mexico, and is, in fact, more than anything else, a paraphrase of Emperor Napoleon’s letter to General Forey of the 3d of July, 1862, pointing out briefly, but plainly, the objects of intervention. I sent you a copy of this letter among the documents annexed to my note of the 26th of January, 1864.
[Page 662]As a proof of this assertion I think it convenient to mention that the semi-official press of France has greatly lauded the article, considering it as the genuine expression of the Emperor’s views.
With pleasure I accept this occasion to renew to you, Mr. Secretary, the assurances of my most distinguished consideration.
Hon. William H. Seward, &c., &c., &c.
M. Lamartine’s article.
I am not afraid to say it boldly, notwithstanding the natural opposition which may exist between the diplomacy of the republic and that of the empire: against interests so French, so elevated, so European, as those we defend in Mexico, there is no patriotic opposition possible. The conception of the policy in Mexico is a sublime conception, a conception misunderstood, (I shall explain further on why,) a conception as just as necessity, as vast as the ocean, as new as all that which is apropos, a conception of a statesman, fecund as the future, a conception of safety for America and for the world.
We must here raise ourselves to a great height in order to comprehend the full force of this policy. The first empire, a purely military empire, and which sold Louisiana for a piece of bread to feed its armies, was never capable of a conception which equalled this.
The idea of a bold and efficacious position to be taken in Mexico against the usurpation of the United States of America is a new but just idea. Europe has the right to take this position; France takes the initiative. Let us examine this right from the elevated point of view from whence we distinguish the legitimacy of things, and let us start from this true but not radical position:
The globe is the property of man: the new continent, America, is the property of Europe.
In starting from this principle, which has become at this moment a fact, that the American continent has become the collective property of mankind, and not of the disrupted Union of a single race, without title and without right, at least over Spanish America, and over the Latin race, mother of all civilization—the principle that the protection of Europe, and of its independence, at least in the seventeen republican states of South America, belongs evidently to us and all the powers of the Old World—we must be prepared for events; we must protect the Latin race; we must, in the first place, take position at the point menaced by the United States.
We must do this, or else we must declare that the new continent, the property of Europe, is to belong entirely in twenty-five years, perhaps, to the armed pioneers who recognize no other title for their usurpation than their convenience, and who permit their citizens, like Walker, to raise, individually, fleets and armies against Cuba, while their federal general enters, in the name of the Union, into Mexico, and from there into all the civilized capitals of South America!
Why, therefore, should Europe or the Old World recognize these rights of piracy by sea and land for the United States, whilst in the Old World we recognize not only the right of protecting such property as is useful to all, but further, the right to expropriate with indemnity the right of all states and individuals in things useful to all?
This principle of the protection of interests useful to all, which applies to a commune, does it apply with less right to a continent entire? Evidently not. We do not say, expropriate the United States of Spanish America; their proper organic anarchy will expropriate them sufficiently! But we say Europe has the right, and, we add, the obligation, of not giving over to them the Latin race, Spanish America, the half which still remains free and independent of that magnificent part of the globe, more than half of the heaven, the earth, and the population of the New World!
What are the collective, sacred possessions, the necessities of mankind at large, that the policy of the Old World cannot and ought not to be delivered up to the mercy of the United States of English America? These things are the capital of the entire world, used by a few, necessary to all, in our state of civilization and in our system of exchange, which renders to us all moneyed gold as necessary as bread. The mines of gold are there!
In the second place, the food of the Old World—the wheat, flour, corn, potatoes, on which people subsist, and of which the privation in the years of famine might produce in Europe incalculable calamities and destructions of populations.
In the third place, the industries which have become in the last few years especially, by the salaries they assure to at least forty millions of workmen in cotton, the veritable and indispensable stipendium of wages and of life.
In fine, commerce, which compels us to maintain a navy and sailors, a floating population, [Page 663] incalculable as a number of men fed under sails, still more incalculable as an element of our national power. To permit the United States to renew the folly of the first empire, to establish an anti-European blockade, no longer on their ports alone, but on the world, as they have just proclaimed it, is no longer a poltroonery; it is to accept what New York offers us, it is to abdicate navigation, commerce, cotton, free trade, the marine of the Old World; it is not to live but on the death of life.
Thus, who does not know that the grain of America, of the valley of the Mississippi especially, does constitute the world’s granary in case of famine, as Sicily was the granary of the Romans? Who does not know that the monetary capital of the universe is in the immense mines of Mexico, and Peru, and Sonora, and that these mines, given up to their natural productiveness by a good system of drainage, will place all the capital in gold and silver of the universe in the hands of the United States, masters of the two Americas? Who does not know that the master of capital is the master of interest, and that Europe, delivered up to this country of monopolies, will be forever subject to its despotism? Who does not know that, masters of the price of gold and silver, they will be masters also of our most vital industries, and that their coalition, already organized against our industry in silks, which rivals their industry in cotton, will ruin Lyons, the capital of tissues, and the second capital of France? Who does not know that in depriving us, or in depriving themselves by the extinction of the south, of the element of this industry in Europe, cotton, they will continue to starve, as they have already starved, eight millions of workmen in France, more than that in England, five millions in Austria, and thus take Europe by famine at every caprice of their arbitrary interests? Who does not know, in fine, that our commerce and navigation will be subject to the same destruction as our products?
In all this we discover evidently the secret thought which inspired the Mexican expedition, an expedition which bears the appearance of a temerity without compensation, and behind which I alone in France have seen the general utility.
France has not comprehended this expedition. Why? I will venture to reply: because on the commencement it was neither explained nor explainable. It was because this idea if taking a position in Mexico against the United States was not to be exclusively French, but European; it was necessary to consult together, to organize, to agree frankly on a ommon basis before acting, and this was not done. France, accused of secret intentions, was suspected by England and Spain. They believed that she simply desired to draw her two allies into a war of intervention for purely French and monarchical interests, instead of combining with London and Madrid an armed, disinterested, and European policy; and for this reason they suspected and at last abandoned France. But one of two things was true; either France was sincere and wished to act in the common interest, and in this case there ought to have been frank explanations in advance, and no action but after a diplomatic and military European agreement on an equal footing of force, which would thus give no motive for complaints of reticence or want of frankness against the intervention; or France, acting alone, ought to have acted with a force worthy of herself, and not commence by planting her protecting flag in Mexico with a handful of heroic men, abandoned by their auxiliaries, and insufficient for the accomplishment of the original conception.
In these facts lie the vice of the enterprise and the reasons why the people in France have not comprehended it, why Spain has had suspicions of it, and why England has abandoned it. France, when her loyalty in the matter is better understood, will bring back England and Spain to it, or she will act alone with preponderating forces. Spanish America will thus be protected, the United States will be repressed, Spain and England brought back, and this grand enterprise will turn out the honor of the century in Europe, and the honor of France in Spanish America.
One can easily understand that this people have yet scarcely any of the conditions of an American literature. The Mexicans before the conquest, the pretended savages of Montezuma, the Peruvians, with their poems of quippos, were in that respect much more advanced. The gigantic monuments of the Aztecs have left on the earth traces of intelligence and of force very much superior, thus far, to the exclusively utilitarian edifices of the Americans of the north. The pioneers of the north do not build for time; the log-splitters only know how to cut down in order to split up the grand aristocratic trees of the forests, which they see fall with the joy of men envious of the superiority of nature. Their eloquence is the struggle of their legislative assemblies, into which they carry the rudeness of their violent manners, and where brutalities of gesture and of the closed fist take the place of the beautiful moral violences which the great modern or ancient orators of Europe exercise by aid of persuasion or logic, or men of refinement assemble together for the purpose of seeking in common after the right and the justice of things.
Their journals, innumerable because they cost little or nothing, are only so many receptacles of advertisements of the charlatanisms recommended by the Barnums of the press—receptacles of calumnies and invectives thrown out daily to the various parties, in order to fasten upon them odious appellations or trivial accusations, so as to discredit one [Page 664] another, and to take away their subscribers. Their “salons” are held in hotels; their circles of men, which are tempered neither by good feeling nor by politeness toward women, are only so many clubs of eager tradesmen, utilizing even their hours of repose for their purses, proud to know only that which brings them in money, and entertaining each other only with real or illusory enterprises, by which they may centriple their fortunes. Their liberty, altogether personal, has always something about it hostile to some one; the absence of all kindness of manner gives them in general the air and the attitude of some one who is in the expectation of being insulted, or who seeks, by force of pride of manner, to prevent the insults that may be offered him. They have conscience themselves of the continual disagreeableness of their manners.
One of their rare political orators, (the most eloquent and most honest among them,) whom the envy of his fellow-citizens has always prevented from being elevated to the presidency of the republic, said to me one day: “Our liberty consists in doing all that may be the most disagreeable to our neighbors.” The art of being disagreeable is their second nature. To be willing to please is a symptom of love. They love no one; no one loves them. It is the expiation of egotists. History presents no parallel of such a physiognomy: pride, coldness, correctness of features, mechanism of gestures, munching of tobacco in the mouth, spit-box under the feet, legs perched against the chimney-jambs or doubled up on themselves without regard to the respect which man owes to man, an accent brief, monotonous, imperious, a disdainful air imprinted in every feature—this is the picture of one of these autocrats of money.
With few exceptions, which stand out and which suffer by the general pressure in an inferior atmosphere—exceptions so much the more respectable, inasmuch as they are more numerous in the individual—and there is the North American; there is the people to whom Mr. Monroe, one of their flatterers, said, in order to be applauded: “The time is come when you ought no longer to suffer Europe to mix in the affairs of America, and from which you ought to commence to exercise a preponderance in the affairs of Europe.”