A Basic Condition of International Reconstruction: Freedom of Opinion and Press

Extract

I

Distinguished American and foreign scholars are studying in this symposium various aspects of the weighty problem of international reconstruction. All of the other writers have chosen problems that are essentially political, and on that account it has seemed to me appropriate that I discuss a topic of a more broadly moral nature, i.e., the issue of freedom of opinion and press in the world of tomorrow. The fact that I have spent my life in diplomacy and politics may make up for my lack of personal importance if I can demonstrate that cynics and profiteers will prevail in politics unless we comprehend that in any sphere of international relations only those solutions will be adequate that are grounded upon the most complete security of opinion and press.

II

Exiled pretenders to thrones nearly always exhibit a liberalism both promising and reassuring. But this was not true in the case of Prince Victor-Napoleon, whom I knew quite well because of his ties with Italy—ties that consisted more in his vast estates in the Po valley than in his dynastic alliances. Faithful to the princely rule according to which the son has to affect views different from those of his father, Prince Victor was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. His father had acquired a well-known reputation for liberalism (or even Jacobinism?) during the Second Empire—and afterwards. But Prince Victor-Napoleon had assumed the habit of speaking to me in frankness. And I did not doubt for a moment his sincerity on that evening when, listening under plane trees to an open air concert in Constantinople, he made the following remark on the founder of his family: “There is one thing about the Emperor (like all the Bonapartes, he said “Emperor” only when referring to the first; the one of December 2, he called Napoleon III) which is more inexplicable to me than anything else: that with his wonderful perspicacity, with his mistrust of men, whether flatterers or not, he should have attributed so much importance, at a certain moment, to the manifestation of lyrical enthusiasm of which he read summaries.