Alphonse de LAMARTINE (1790-1869), poet and politician. L.A. - Lot 338

Lot n° 338
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Alphonse de LAMARTINE (1790-1869), poet and politician. L.A. - Lot 338
Alphonse de LAMARTINE (1790-1869), poet and politician. L.A., London May 21, 1831, [to Armand SAULLAY DE L'AISTRE]; 4 pages in-4 (small cracks in folds; portrait enclosed). Magnificent profession of political faith. [Saullay de l'Aistre, former sub-prefect of Hazebrouck, had resigned in 1830 but remained influential in the North, where he had encouraged the political beginnings of Lamartine]. He was in London, and evoked his constituents of Bergues and Dunkirk, while affecting some indifference about the possible success of his candidacy. "I put in my nomination to the House neither the interest of ambition since I withdrew from business since the revolution and I do not want to ask again what I rejected, nor the interest of a parliamentary taste, I do not know of a life worse than that of the deputy, but I put in it with the energy that you know me the interest of the doctrines that the men of my age and my political conviction will be called soon to put forward to the tribune. It is a duty for the man who has a political thought, a social thought, to raise his voice in our days of skepticism and controversy; these controversies where the spirit of party is always mixed need to be cleared up and brought back to their true goal (the interest of the country) by frank, intrepid voices that can rally all the sincere opinions. I will perhaps be one of these voices, the weakest without doubt, but it will be numerous, and I have no doubt that once the country has heard us, this opinion, unnoticed at first, will become a majority in a few years; there is a principle of life and growth in everything that is true; time develops it and Providence makes it fruitful. Now there is truth in us because there is a sincere and disinterested love of the general good, because there is an absence of all prejudice of doctrine and party. We are perhaps the first ones who will have fully understood this liberty, which has been made an offensive weapon or a derisory toy, we want to do everything through it and for it, it is the only great means of action of modern times, because it is the only great common thought; but this thought contains all of them, and this is what we would like to prove, both in the discussion of our laws and our destinies, and in the practice of the organizing power, if ever this power falls into our hands; Separated from the liberalism now called as such, liberalism which has been most often only a spirit of destruction and oppression, we would like to found and associate to all the moral and monarchical religious ideas a creative and vivifying liberalism which must renew and reconstitute the political world on the broad basis of the most general liberty and the interests of all".... Etc. Former Alfred DUPONT collection (II, 161).
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