‘On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth’ (1827) displays the stubborn aspect of Hazlitt’s character both in the positive sense of determination and the negative one of adherence to an exploded position. The necessity of the French Revolution and an acceptance of the Terror were never abandoned by him.
“The cant about the horrors of the French Revolution is mere cant - everybody knows it to be so; each party would have retaliated upon the other: it was a civil war, like that for a disputed succession; the general principle of the right or wrong of the change remained untouched. Neither would these horrors have taken place, except from Prussian manifestoes, and treachery within: there were none in the American, and have been none in the Spanish Revolution.” (from the essay ‘Reason and the Imagination’ in Plain Speaker collection vol.7 of his Collected Works)
That is true of course as the United Irishmen of the 1798 rising were executed whereas their French allies were treated as prisoners of war. All British wars of rebellion were dealt with in like manner. Its an implicit threat that keeps the natives in line.
Why though did Hazlitt continue his veneration of Napoleon when the defender of the Revolution turned into an Emperor subduing and plundering the enemies of France. Six million or more people died as a result of his campaigns. The defeat at Waterloo was a personal tragedy for Hazlitt and the general jubilation galled him. His bitterness against those who had abandoned their support for the revolution in France extended to the whole Lakes gang, vile tergiversates all.
In his ‘Life of Napoleon’ he claims:
“The French Revolution might be described as a remote but inevitable result of the invention of printing. The gift of speech, or the communication of thoughts by words, is that which distinguishes man from other animals. But this faculty is limited and imperfect without the invention of books, which render the knowledge possessed by every one int eh community accessible to all. There is no doubt, then, that the press (as it has existed in modern times) is the great organ of intellectual improvement and civilization.”
And Lies.
Hazlitt’s early hopes for the general spread of the Republican system were disappointed but he retained his loyalty to the ideal even ignoring Napoleon’s re-institution of slavery in 1804 (slavery had been abolished in 1794 ) to defray the costs of his campaigns. The sugar trade was very profitable.
In the same essay in which he descries the cant about ‘The Terror’ Hazlitt writes:
"Suppose, for instance, that in the discussions on the Slave-Trade, a description to the life was given of the horrors of theMiddle Passage (as it was termed), that you saw the manner in which thousands of wretches, year after year, were stowed together in the hold of a slave-ship, without air, without light, without food, without hope, so that what they suffered in reality was brought home to you in imagination, till you felt in sickness of heart as one of them, could it be said that this was a prejudging of the case, that your knowing the extent of the evil disqualified you from pronouncing sentence upon it, and that your disgust and abhorrence were the effects of a heated imagination? No. Those evils that inflame the imagination and make the heart sick, ought not to leave the head cool. This is the very test and measure of the degree of the enormity, that it involuntarily staggers and appals the mind.”
Further he adds:
“So with respect to the atrocities committed in the Slave-Trade, it could not be set up as a doubtful plea in their favour, that the actual and intolerable sufferings inflicted on the individuals were compensated by certain advantages in a commercial and political point of view—in a moral sense theycannot be compensated. They hurt the public mind: they harden and sear the natural feelings. The evil is monstrous and palpable; the pretended good is remote and contingent.”
The mirage of a Republican Utopia confounded his moral sense. Ideology has that effect. It even got into his prose. The little bit of ‘The Life of Napoleon’ that I have read is poor stuff.
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