The Doctrinaires

Poem by Gérard De Nerval Period 19th century

To Victor Hugo

I

Oh! the twenty-seventh of July, when the cherished colors,
Joyful, fluttered on the sleeping roofs,
After in the Louvre and in the Tuileries
The enemies had been hunted down!
The hardest was done… what a beautiful night it was!
Near the barricade raised by our hands,
How proud we were to stand sentinel
Treading the unpaved ground!

O night of independence, and of glory and celebration!
Nothing above us!… not a single government
Dared yet show its head:
How one felt at every moment
The spirit unfolding in immense ideas…
We were seven cubits tall…
And we breathed deeply!

II

It is not license, alas! that I ask for,
But, if someone then had told us that soon
That Liberty, which was born full-grown,
Would be put back in swaddling clothes!…
That reactionary Ministers,
Inhabitants of palaces still poorly washed
Of the pure blood of our comrades,
Would see in the barricades
Only a disruption of paving stones!…

So they were not there, those men who, perhaps
Secret apostles of a detested power,
Have openly denied their master
Since the Cock crowed!…
They did not see beneath the gunfire
March the avenging ranks of a disarmed People…
At the fire of the burning battle
Their eye did not light up!

III

What! the Foreigner, laughing at so much vain glory,
At so much hope destroyed,
When he is told of the great week,
Would say: “You lie?”
All because of them! At the point where we are…
Despotism again… it is impossible… no
Down! Down then, little men!
We have seen Napoleon!

Little men! – You said it well, Victor, when of the Corsican
Your voice evoked the dreaded specter for them,
Showing that it is given only to men of his strength
To violate Liberty!
He is the last; we can predict it
And never any human power
Will know how to move this globe of the Empire
That he imprisoned in his hand!

IV

And, when all will be done…, when indignant France
Has well shaken off these cobwebs
That madmen still want to stretch;
Do not sing it to us anymore, Victor,
Him, whom we love so much, alas! despite crimes
Which are, for a vain and cold Majesty,
Of having repudiated two sublime wives,
Joséphine and Liberty!

But sing us a universal hymn, immense,
That through France, Belgium and Castile begins,
A national hymn for every nation:
May Liberty alone inspire you for that one,
May every revolution
Stretch a string of your lyre!

Gérard de Nerval

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-the-doctrinaires-gerard-de-nerval/