Charles Gounod-Part 1

1818-1893

"It is not labor that kills. It is sterility. To be fruitful is to be young and full of life."

The calamitous power of Napoleon Bonaparte came to an inevitable end with the mad flight of the French troops from Waterloo, June 18, 1815. The great devastator had for years drained France of its strongest and healthiest men to gratify his ambition for dominion and his appetite for military success. Singularly enough many of the most famous musicians were born during this period of great upheaval in Europe. Charles Francois Gounod came into the world to witness numerous wars and continual political turmoil in his own country where the government could turn from a monarchy to a republic literally over night. Nevertheless, he was an emissary of peace during his entire lifetime, and stood amazed at the continual reversion of man to the barbarisms of war. Indeed, we may well ask ourselves whether the man who could strike terror throughout Europe was as important to civilization as one who could produce the following thought found in one of the letters of Gounod written in 1870, just after our own civil war, and before the Franco-Prussian war.