26 THE PROBLEM IN TAINE 



in power [Louis-Napoleon, S.J.K.] has chances of surviving. He 

 rehes very ingeniously on the universal suffrage, which will 

 demand of him not liberties, but well-being. He has the clergy 

 and the army; add the name of his uncle [Napoleon Buonaparte, 

 S.J.K.], the fear of socialism, the divided opinions among those of 

 the opposition party. As a result, political life is barred to us for 

 perhaps a decade. 



'The sole road is pure science or pure literature. We have to 

 rely on those now.''^'^ 



On 2 December, 1852, first anniversary of the Coup, Taine's pro- 

 phecy was fulfilled: President Louis-Napoleon was proclaimed 

 Napoleon HI, and the Second Empire had been established. 



Despite the suppression of philosophy, Taine had hopes that 

 a psychological thesis on 'The Sensations' might be acceptable; 

 these hopes were soon dashed, however, and he was notified on 

 7 June, 1852, that he could not expect the 'agregation' that year.'^s 

 This second defeat provided the flame that melted the ice of 

 Taine's stoicism. He took, rather desperately, to rereading Hegel's 

 Philosophy of History for distraction, and, discovering Georges 

 Sand's Compagnons du tour de France, wrote to fidouard de Suckau 

 (15 June, 1852) that 'my soul is completely in eruption'. "^9 He saw 

 at last that his only hope for acceptance lay in more or less com- 

 plete conformity: 



Tf I take refuge in the Faculty, it will be by playing up 

 Descartes and Aristotle, by annihilating the atomistic materialists, 

 by preaching spirituality and disguising mortality. Let us think 

 for ourselves, let us do as Leibnitz did, who printed fifteen copies 

 of one of his works and sent them to his friends.'^ ^ 



With some bitterness, he quoted to his mother a cynical sentence 

 from Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme: 'Under an absolute 

 government, the first condition for success is to have neither 

 enthusiasm nor spirit.'^ ^ 



Finally, Taine decided on a French thesis on La Fontaine, 

 which, characteristically, was mentioned after 'something in the 

 field of aesthetics, a theory of the genres'. ^^ La Fontaine was one 

 of the classic writers of French tradition, and the subject was 

 literary, though, as we shall see, Taine used it for his own philo- 

 sophic purposes. For his Latin thesis, De personis Platonicis, Taine 

 returned to one of his early loves, the dialogues of Plato. 



