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Napoleon The Little, a fiction by Victor Hugo |
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Book 2 - Chapter 5. The Liberty Of The Press |
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_ BOOK II V. THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS We have now seen what the legislature is, what the administration, and what the budget. And the courts! What was formerly called the _Cour de Cassation_ is no longer anything more than a record office of councils of war. A soldier steps out of the guard-house and writes in the margin of the book of the law, _I will_, or _I will not_. In all directions the corporal gives the order, and the magistrate countersigns it. Come! tuck up your gowns and begone, or else--Hence these abominable trials, sentences, and condemnations. What a sorry spectacle is that troop of judges, with hanging heads and bent backs, driven with the butt end of the musket into baseness and iniquity! And the liberty of the press! What shall we say of it? Is it not a mockery merely to pronounce the words? That free press, the honour of French intellect, a light thrown from all points at once upon all questions, the perpetual sentinel of the nation--where is it? What has M. Bonaparte done with it? It is where the public platform is. Twenty newspapers extinguished in Paris, eighty in the departments,--one hundred newspapers suppressed: that is to say, looking only to the material side of the question, innumerable families deprived of bread; that is to say, understand it, citizens, one hundred houses confiscated, one hundred farms taken from their proprietors, one hundred interest coupons stolen from the public funds. Marvellous identity of principles: freedom suppressed is property destroyed. Let the selfish idiots who applaud the _coup d'etat_ reflect upon this. Instead of a law concerning the press a decree has been laid upon it; a _fetfa_, a _firman_, dated from the imperial stirrup: the regime of admonition. This regime is well known. Its working is witnessed daily. Such men were requisite to invent such a thing. Despotism has never shown itself more grossly insolent and stupid than in this species of censorship of the morrow, which precedes and announces the suppression, and which administers the bastinado to a paper before killing it entirely. The folly of such a government corrects and tempers its atrocity. The whole of the decree concerning the press may be summed up in one line: "I permit you to speak, but I require you to be silent." Who reigns, in God's name? Is it Tiberius? Is it Schahabaham? Three-fourths of the republican journalists transported or proscribed, the remainder hunted down by mixed commissions, dispersed, wandering, in hiding. Here and there, in four or five of the surviving journals, in four or five which are independent but closely watched, over whose heads is suspended the club of Maupas,[1] some fifteen or twenty writers, courageous, serious, pure, honest, and noble-hearted, who write, as it were, with a chain round their necks, and a ball on their feet; talent between two sentinels, independence gagged, honesty under surveillance, and Veuillot exclaiming: "I am free!" [1] The Prefect of Police. _ |
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