… when Napoleon seized power, thought was gagged. All that could be heard was a despotic voice that spoke only in praise of itself and did not allow anyone to speak of anything else. Truth disappeared.
The so-called authentic documents from this
time are corrupted. Nothing was
published, books or newspapers, except at the behest of the master. Bonaparte scrutinized the article in the Moniteur;
his prefects in the departéments sent back recitations, congratulations,
and felicitations exactly as they had been dictated and transmitted by the
Parisian authorities, exactly expressing a preauthorized public opinion
entirely different from the real public opinion. How can anyone write history using such
documents? To provide evidence of your
impartial studies, cite the authentic documents you have consulted, and you will
only be citing a lie in support of a lie.
If it were possible to call this universal
imposture into question, if men who have not lived through the days of the
Empire persisted in believing everything they came across in its published
documents – or even everything they might dig up in certain ministry files – it
would be enough to appeal to an unimpeachable witness, the Sénat “conservateur.” There in the
decree quoted above, you read its own words: “The freedom of the press had been
constantly subjected to the arbitrary censorship of the police, while he
himself had simultaneously made use of the same engine to fill the public ear
with fabricated facts and false maxims” …[1]
Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave,
1800-1815.
[1]François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815,
tr. Alex Andriesse (New York : New York Review of Books, 2022), pp.
671,672.
No comments:
Post a Comment