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 A COLLECTION MADE BY 
 
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 CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
 
Cornell University Library 
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 France since the first empire. 
 
 3 1924 028 170 110 
 
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PRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
FRANCE 
 SmCE THE FIRST EMPIRE 
 
 JAMES MACDONELL 
 
 HSITED BY BIS WIFS. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 1879. 
 
 The Bight of Translation is reserved. 
 
CHABLES BICKENS iJTD ETiNS^ 
 CETSTAL PALACE PRESS. 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 It seems necessary to say a few words to explain 
 liow this book was written. I am conscious 
 tliat it is not what it would have been had my 
 husband lived to finish it. 
 
 He meant it to be a complete history of the 
 different parties^ which for centuries in France 
 have struggled and fought^ each one in turn 
 gaining supreme power by trampling the others 
 under foot, and which still represent political life 
 and feeling in France. 
 
 He loved France with an ardent love. He 
 longed to make his countrymen just to her, to 
 make them understand her history and sympathise 
 with her difficulties. He studied her history and 
 her literature with ceaseless interest. Newspapers, 
 essays, memoirs, histories were carefully read, 
 and from them were volumes of notes taken. 
 The time, however, which he could give to this 
 
vi PEEFACE. 
 
 beloved work was but scanty^ and probably many 
 years would have passed, bad be lived, before 
 the book could have been finished. One chapter 
 only, "Eevival of the Legitimist Monarchy," 
 has that finish which he ever strove should be 
 in all which he gave to the public. The other 
 chapters lack the completeness he meant they 
 should have, but I send them out as they were 
 left by him. 
 
 My husband''s intention was to describe fully 
 the four great parties which govern. France : the 
 Legitimist, the Orleanist, the Bonapartist, and 
 the Republican. Only the first three of these 
 find their place in this volume. The chapters 
 devoted to the Republican party were to have 
 been the most important in the book. In this 
 party my husband felt the keenest interest, and 
 the description of its sufferings and its victories, 
 its hopes and its fears, its past and its future, 
 would have filled more than half the book, and 
 would have been written only after many months 
 of careful reading. The writing of this portion 
 was never even begun. I have a volume of notes — 
 all that is left of countless hours of patient study, 
 and of conscientious research ! 
 
 The last chapter, however, gives an account of 
 the present position of the Republic. This chapter 
 
PEEFACB. vii 
 
 I owe to the kindness of my liusband^'s much-prized 
 friendj Mr. Meredith Townsend. I am very glad 
 to have this opportunity of saying how grateful I 
 feel to Mr. Townsend and the other friends who 
 have so freely given me help. 
 
 Something else I must mention. The labour 
 ■of this book was done in my husband^'s leisure 
 hours. He was a journalist. And no man was 
 prouder of his profession, no man ever strove 
 harder to put his conscience into all that he did. 
 His indefatigable energy never ceased. In the 
 years that we were together, I know that this 
 untiring zeal never relaxed. Personal comfort, plea- 
 sure, health, all were disregarded until the full 
 claims of his professional duties had been fulfilled. 
 
 In spite, however, of the exhausting labours of 
 his profession — and journalists • alone know what 
 they are — he managed to put together the 
 materials of this book, a fragment merely, I sadly 
 feel, of what it was meant to be. 
 
 Annie H. Macdonell. 
 
 Bbokenham : November, 1879. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 EIs^GLlSH IXTEREST IJI PKENCH POLITICS ... ... ... 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 EEVOWTIONAUT CAUSES OP DISPEACE ... 6 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 THE POLITICAL lEXDENCIES OP THE CATHOLIC CHURCH... PiJi 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 THE CLERICAL rASTY ... 62 
 
 CHAPTER T. 
 EEVIVAL OP THE LESITI3IIST ilOSARCHT ... 92 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE LEGITIMISTS ... loS 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 THE ORLEASISTS 164 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 BONAPARTISTS 226 
 
 CHAPTER IS. 
 
 THE BONAPARTISIS 275 
 
 THE REPUBLIC 295 
 
FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ENGLISH INTEREST IN PEENCH POLITICS. 
 
 If the Frencli like the flattery of attention, they 
 have good reason to be pleased by the notice which 
 they get from England^ in their darkest as in their 
 brightest years. Sedan, the Commune^ the loss of 
 Alsace and Lorraine, and the payment of the in- 
 demnity to Germany seemed, for a moment, to 
 strike their country from the hst of Great Powers, 
 and, at any rate, those events made the sceptre of 
 political power pass beyond the Ehine ; yet none the 
 less did the English people continue to think and 
 
2 FRANCE SINCE THE FIKST EMPIRE. 
 
 read a hundred times more about Paris tlian 
 Berlin. 
 
 Our newspapers followed all tlie windings in the 
 long strife which was closed by the establishment 
 of the RepubUc. The attempts of the Legitimists 
 and the Orleanists to bring about a fusion, in 
 which they should put the accusing memories of 
 1830 out of sight for the sake of overthrowing their 
 common enemy the Republic ; their long strifes with 
 M. Thiers; their dismissal of that statesman and 
 their choice of Marshal MacMahon; the quick 
 passage of the Due de Broglie, M. Buffet, and 
 M. de Fourtou across the field of intrigue; the 
 restraining and guiding influence of M. Gambetta; 
 the establishment of the Republic by its enemies ; 
 the last desperate effort of Royalists, Bonapartists, 
 and Clericals to entrust the citadel of power to the 
 sworn foes of the constitution ; the defeat of that 
 scheme by the union of peasant with artisan votes 
 — all that tangled story was told by our chief 
 journals with at least as much minuteness as 
 the less exciting narrative of our own domestic 
 
ENGLISH INTEREST IN FRENCH POLITICS. 3 
 
 history. Even the danger and excitement of the 
 war between Russia and Turkey failed to draw 
 English eyes away from the battle between 
 parliamentary and personal forces in France. 
 M. Thiers, Marshal MacMahon, Due de Broglie, 
 M. de Pourtou, M. Buffet, and M. Gambetta are 
 at least as vivid figures to Englishmen as the 
 secondary personages of our own Parliament. 
 
 The general wish to watch the political life 
 of France comes partly from the charm which has 
 been cast over civilised mankind by her grand 
 and tragic history, by the brilliancy of her 
 literature, the fascination of her manners, and 
 the rich store of graces which lift her above the 
 prose of hfe. Partly, it is a tribute to the 
 interest of national calamity. Partly, it springs 
 from the anticipation of some new and great 
 change in a history which has been already 
 seamed with revolutions. Partly, it is the fruit 
 of the dulness which has settled in the domestic 
 policy of our own country. Satire has said that 
 the only thing which all the members of the 
 
4 FRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIEE. 
 
 Liberal party have heartily agreed to support is 
 Mr. Osborne Morgan's Burials Bill. But it is 
 not very easy even for the most conscientious 
 Liberal to spend aU his enthusiasm on the right 
 of Dissenters to bury each other without the aid 
 of a surplice and the Prayer - book. Political 
 excitement must be sought elsewhere when the 
 domestic affairs of England do not rise above the 
 sedate respectability of a select vestry. Hence 
 we naturally look to the more troubled field of 
 France, because she is stiU a country of unsolved 
 political problems which go down to the roots of 
 governmentj religious convictions^ and society. She 
 has more open questions than any other land, and 
 she often handles them with a logical fearlessness 
 which, if sometimes fatal to her governments^ 
 is profoundly instructive to all political students. 
 For eighty years she has been the great field 
 of experiments in the art of shaping and ruling 
 society. 
 
 The tissues of the national life have been 
 laid bare by the surgery of revolution, so that 
 
ENGLISH INTEEBST IN FEENCH POLITICS. 5 
 
 tlie diseases of civilised communities and their 
 sources of yigour may be more clearly seen in her 
 annals than in those of any other country. She 
 has repeated, in larger form, some of the perils 
 through which we have passed ; she has also 
 foreshadowed, perhaps, the dangers which we may 
 have to meet in. no distant future. Her history 
 is a magnifying mirror in which we may see a 
 lesson and a prophecy. The best way to profit 
 by both reflections is to glance at her political 
 and religious parties, and to trace the parentage 
 of each even at the cost of going over some 
 well-worn scenes of history. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 EETOLUTIONAET CAUSES OP DISPEACE. 
 
 Let anyone go into the Chamber of Deputies at 
 Versailles during a stormy debate, and be "will 
 get a more yivid idea of the profound differences 
 of opinion, and tbe implacable bates wbicb bave 
 tossed France from one revolution to another, 
 than be would obtain from volumes of philo- 
 sophical analysis. Tbe scene — wbicb has been so 
 often described that I need not repeat the picture 
 — may appear to be a satire on representative 
 government. When Eepublicans insinuate that 
 the Royalists are priest-ridden or hypocritical, 
 and that the Bonapartists are a gang of uncon- 
 victed criminals ; when Royalists and Imperialists 
 
EEVOLTJTIONABY CAUSES OF DISPEACB. 7 
 
 insinuate that tlie Eepublicans are Communards 
 at heart, and responsible for the massacre of the 
 hostages J when such invectives awaken a tempest 
 of interruption which the president's bell and 
 threats cannot still, and when he can sometimes 
 restore order only by stopping the business of 
 the day, the nation might appear to be on the 
 brink of civil war. 
 
 Such is the Chamber of Deputies and such is 
 France. In her parliament we see the picture of 
 the discords which have made her the sport of 
 revolution for eighty years. We see, not one 
 France, but several Frances, each unable to live 
 at peace beside the others. 
 
 Englishmen usually explain such outbursts of 
 temper, such discordant aims, such a tendency to 
 seek refuge in barricades and military conspiracies, 
 by a theory which flatters their national pride. 
 The French, it is said, are flighty and fickle; 
 always rushing from one extreme to another ; and, 
 as they never know when they are well off, the 
 only way to keep them quiet is to keep them down. 
 
8 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 A Frenchman mighty however, recall some passages 
 in our own history which suggest that Enghshmen 
 do not always confine their words or their conduct 
 within the bounds of dignified repose. Some of 
 the scenes in the Long Parliament were as stormy 
 as any in the recent National Assemblies of Prance. 
 Even in our own decorous days, when the House 
 of Commons is agitated by no controversies of 
 high moment, the noise and the temper of 
 both sides have sometimes been qualified as 
 scandalous. The truth is, that the decorum in 
 our own House of Commons springs in great part 
 from the dulness of our political existence. We 
 fight about none of the things which go down 
 to the roots of a nation's life. The monarchy 
 and religion are as much beyond the pale of 
 parliamentary discussion as if they were in the 
 moon. But they were not always fixed in such 
 serenity. Frenchmen may well marvel at the 
 complacency with which we lecture their country 
 on its turbulence, when they call to mind how 
 prone we were to revolutionary courses whUe 
 
EEVOLUTIONAKY CAUSES OF DISPEACE. 9 
 
 they were the quietest, the most loyal, and the 
 most stable nation in Europe. The French were 
 pnce as peaceful as we are now, and we were 
 once almost as turbulent as they are to-day. 
 Somewhat ■ more than a hundred years elapsed 
 between the quarrel of Charles I. with the Long 
 Parliament and the battle of Oulloden ; and during 
 air that time the history of quiet, respectable, 
 money-making, rehgious, stable England is the 
 history of revolution, civil war, plots at the court, 
 dynastic intrigue, popular violence, and foreign 
 invasion. A king was beheaded and the throne 
 overturned. A republic was set up, and the chief 
 power fell into the hands of a man whose con- 
 summate practical genius included all the highest 
 gifts of the soldier, the prince, and the statesman. 
 We had a restoration with which the Restoration 
 of France need fear no comparison. Another 
 king was sent into exile. The treachery of trusted 
 statesmen nearly led to another restoration; and 
 the second of two Jacobite rebellions did not 
 seem to be very far from the brink of triumph. 
 
10 FKANOE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEE. 
 
 It took US a hundred years to find calm after 
 our own small revolution ; and yet we are the 
 most practical nation on the face of the earth. 
 And what was the cause of all our troubles ? It 
 was the agitation of the English mind by two 
 hostile, profound, and incalculably important con- 
 victions, which seemed to admit of no com- 
 promise. Men believed, on the one hand, that 
 the prerogatives of a court and a sacerdotal 
 church were worth dying for. Men believed, on 
 the other, that without civil and religious free- 
 dom life was not worth having. For the moment, 
 we have practically solved these fundamental 
 differences of opinion. Fighting about little 
 more than details, we are now able to lead a 
 quiet life. 
 
 Such facts might suffice to silence some of the 
 easy moralising on the fickleness of France. She 
 has not yet taken so long to recover from the 
 tremendoiis shock of her Revolution as we took 
 to repair the comparatively feeble violence of ours. 
 It is probable, however, that she has still to reach 
 
BEVOLUTIONART CAUSES OP DISPEACE. 11 
 
 a day of peace. It would be no wonder, indeed, 
 if she should be disturbed for another generation 
 by the subsiding waves of the most tremendous 
 political storm that ever broke over modern 
 society. We have had no experience of the 
 misrule and the misery, the savage discontent 
 and the wild remedial theories, which were the 
 heralds of their revolution. Partly, it is true, 
 those evils may be connected with some organic 
 weakness in the character of the French people 
 themselves ; and the root of that weakness can 
 be removed, perhaps, by nothing but the surgery 
 of experience. Another cause of the calamities 
 may be found in the fact that, as a continental 
 state. Prance was always open to invasion ; that 
 she needed a standing army at an early period 
 of her history, and that the court was thus able 
 to crush both feudal and municipal freedom. 
 Not less important was the fact that a military 
 court was able to throw its weight into the 
 scale of Catholicism, at a time when Protestantism 
 seemed to have a fairer prospect than in any 
 
12 FRANCE SINCE TEE FIRST EMPIEB. 
 
 other part of Europe ; when it was drawing to 
 its side the flower both of the common people 
 and of the nobility^ and when a spirit of national 
 devotion was thus preparing a safe outlet both 
 for religious enthusiasm and critical inquiry. 
 The Eevolution was calamitous also because the 
 most Catholic and profligate of courts was thus 
 able to destroy the best of the middle class 
 aud the most powerful barrier against the vio- 
 lence of mobs and soldiers. The Catholicism 
 of Louis XIV. and his Jesuit confessors had, 
 by revoking the Edict of Nantes, left France 
 no Puritanism. Thus, on the eve of the Eevo- 
 lution, the frivolity of the nobles, the extra- 
 vagance of the court, the slavishness of the 
 Church to the king and his ministers, the misery 
 of the people, the discontent, and the Utopian 
 theories of reform made up a scene of social 
 anarchy, to which there is no parallel in the 
 troubles preceding the rise of our own Common- 
 wealth. A great convulsion was inevitable. Unless 
 the French had been made of more seraphic stuff 
 
EEVOLUTIONAEY CAUSES OF DISPEACE. 13 
 
 than common mortals, it was impossible] for the 
 Revolution to be effected without terrible calamities 
 and crimes. M. Taine^s book, "Les Origines de 
 la France Contemporaine," gives a masterly and 
 merciless picture of the follies, the blunders, the 
 charlatanism and the villainy of the revolutionists ; 
 but it is an indictment of human nature rather 
 -than of his own countrymen. Nor has anyone 
 been able to point out how the torrent could 
 have been stopped by such resources as lie at 
 the command of statesmanship. It is sometimes 
 said that everything might have been changed, 
 if the court had given its confidence to Mirabeau 
 at the outset of the struggle, if Mirabeau had 
 lived a little longer, or if the king had taken 
 his advice by leaving Paris immediately after he 
 was brought from Versailles. But it is little short 
 of ridiculous to believe that such petty expedients 
 could have materially broken the force of the 
 storm. Mirabeau's correspondence shows that 
 even he had not correctly measured the tremen- 
 dous power of the passions which had been let 
 
14 FRANCE SINCE THE TIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 loose. He had to fight against the passions, not 
 merely of the inexperienced crowd, but of kings, 
 courts, nobles, soldiers, and priests, who, in all 
 parts of the Continent, thought that there 
 would be an end of political Europe if the enemies 
 of the king should succeed. We may see how 
 helpless was mere routine statesmanship at such 
 a crisis if we look at the career of the Girondists. 
 Those men were the Whigs of France. They had 
 so far formed a true idea of political progress, as 
 to see that they must not cut the historic thread 
 of the national life on pain of bringing on a 
 great convulsion. They dimly saw that the moss 
 of tradition and sentiment and religious faith, 
 which gathers round an historic monarchy, cannot 
 be removed by a parliamentary decree : that a 
 republic could not be made without repubhcans, 
 and that republicans could not be manufactured 
 by law. They dimly saw, in fact, that to retain 
 the throne in some modified form would be 
 better for the cause of progress, than to try the 
 ■experiment of a commonwealth. 
 
BEVOLUTIONAEY CAITSES OF DISPEACE. 15 
 
 They themselves would gladly have been 
 moderate. But the monarchy had a set of friends 
 to whom all the democratic work was bad and 
 impious ; who believed that the elements of the 
 revolt might have been kept in hand, if the king 
 had never yielded an inch to the clamour of 
 reform ; and who thought that there was still 
 time to win back by swift peremptory force of 
 steel the old rights of the court, the nobles, and 
 the Church. Hence, Eadical reformers saw every- 
 where signs of plots against the Revolution ; 
 plots at the court, plots in the Church, plots 
 among the nobles. They were quite right; such 
 plots did exist, and must have existed. Thus, 
 the Radical reformers said that they were fight- 
 ing with halters round their necks, and that, if 
 they did not put down the king's party, the 
 king's party would put down them. Again they 
 were perfectly right. The Comte d'Artois and 
 the leaders of the foreign armies would have 
 been miracles of forbearance if, in the event of 
 a victory over the enemies of the throne, they 
 
16 FEAJSrCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEE. 
 
 Lad not dealt out signal vengeance among a set 
 
 of men whom they thought^ and must have 
 
 thought, ■worse than the worst of criminals. The 
 
 dainty distinction between criminal and political 
 
 offences is good for quiet times ; but how little 
 
 it stands the strain of civil strife, even in our 
 
 own philanthropic days, we may see from the 
 
 way in which M. Thiers and the Royalists put 
 
 down the Commune and punished its defenders. 
 
 Thus, there was real practical logic in the cry 
 
 of the Mountain that they must tie the hands of 
 
 the court and the aristocracy. Girondists could 
 
 not resist that cry without seeming to be traitors, 
 
 and perhaps they spoke more vehemently than 
 
 they felt in order to answer the imputations cast 
 
 on their own sincerity. Hence, they joined in 
 
 the howl against the sovereign. It is melancholy 
 
 to thiak that the most passionate as well as 
 
 eloquent speeches against the king came from 
 
 Vergniaud. Thus were the moderate Liberals 
 
 hurried with the stream of terror and ferocity 
 
 which was to cover the Republic with infamy. 
 
RETOLUTIONAEY CAUSES OF DISPEACE. 17 
 
 They no doubt repented before the end. When 
 they saw that they had gone too far; when old 
 champions of the Mountain like CamUle DesmouUns 
 came forward to denounce the prevailing reign of 
 ferocity; when Danton himself turned away from 
 the work of butchery like one sick of life — the 
 Girondists chose to die rather than submit any 
 longer to the hideous authority which they had 
 helped to create. But it was then too late; they 
 themselves were already doomedj and the Republic 
 was doomed too. And yet, I repeat, it is impos- 
 sible to see the exact point at which the descent 
 from reform to crime and ruin could have been 
 stopped. Whole masses of men seemed to be the 
 sport of a dark fate, which drove them blindly 
 and helplessly to destruction. No series of events 
 in modern history would appear to have been so 
 little capable of management by any one man or 
 group of men. 
 
 To do such men as Robespierre justice, it 
 must be admitted that they set less store by the 
 safety of their own necks than by the good of 
 
18 PEANCE SIKCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 the Eepublic. They looked on the Eepnblic with 
 a species of reHgious ecstasy. Democracy had 
 given them a kind of spiritual creed — the only 
 faith suitable for minds which had been nourished 
 by the gospel of Rousseau and the apologetics of 
 Diderot. StUl greater enthusiasm perhaps did 
 the declaration of the rights of man^ and the 
 institution of the EepubliCj excite among the 
 unlettered crowds who nightly filled the Jacobin 
 and the Cordeher clubs. They really seemed to 
 believe that the abolition of the throne and 
 the banishment of the nobles, the destruction of 
 the Church, the institution of legal equality, and 
 the general triumph of democracy would heal 
 half the evils of humanity. The hard eternal 
 realities of life — poverty, pain, and sorrow, bad 
 passions, the misery which men make for them- 
 selves, and which renders them slaves — seem to 
 fly away into some dark dreamland of the past, 
 ia the midst of eloquent talk. Much of that vision 
 began and ended no doubt with the moment of 
 oratorical excitement; much of the accompanying 
 
EEVOLUTIONART CAUSES OF DISPBACE. 19 
 
 oratory was purely artificial ; some of it must 
 have teen mendacious j and in time the grim 
 experience of depreciated paper money and dear 
 tread chilled the enthusiasm awakened by the 
 gospel of democracy. But there remained a 
 real, intense, fanatical, aggressive faith in the 
 power of the EepubHc to heal the woes of France 
 and of mankind. Justice cannot be done to the 
 chiefs of the Eevolution if we do not bear in 
 mind that they saw, in its principles and practice, 
 the beginning of a new time for this heavy- 
 laden earth. It was the fanatical strength of 
 that belief which made them ruthless. Robes- 
 pierre was a priggish country lawyer, puritanical 
 in language and even in conduct. Danton had 
 many virtues as well as vices. Even Marat, the 
 most repulsive of the whole band, might, if cast 
 in quieter times and employed in some petty sect 
 or parochial legislature, have been enabled to 
 escape any worse reproach than that of being a 
 self-conceited and intolerable bore. All th,<5 
 scoundrelism of France, as well as all the 
 
 c 2 
 
20 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 enthusiasm, was placed at the service of the 
 Revolution. Rascality always conies to the 
 surface in moments of sudden, even i£ beneficent, 
 change. 
 
 Notwithstanding all the crimes of the Revo- 
 lution, it did bring a new time to the common 
 people. By freeing the land from the burden of 
 feudal dues and multiplying the number of small 
 cultivators, it did more than any other act in 
 the history of any nation to lift the peasantry 
 above the curse of poverty. That result was, no 
 doubt, but the natural close of a tendency which 
 existed long before 1789, and the sources of 
 which must be sought in the twilight of French 
 history. 
 
 The French peasant has for centuries had a 
 passionate desire to get possession of the little 
 piece of land which he has tilled. Hence he 
 pinched and hoarded during the most miserable 
 periods of a history which for him was never 
 bright. Thus great portions of the land passed 
 into his keeping, in spite of hardships which seem 
 
EEVOLUTIONARY CAUSES OF DISPEACE. 21 
 
 to cast tlie very shadow of death over the annals 
 of the most brilliant and the gayest of nations; 
 in spite of tax-gatherers hy whonij to use the 
 Hebrew metaphor, the people were eaten as 
 though they were bread ; in spite of pestilence 
 and famine ; in spite of all the evils which promise 
 to live in the vivid memory of the latest genera- 
 tions of Frenchmen. It is astonishing to find the 
 amount of land which had passed to the peasantry, 
 before the Revolution came to deliver them from 
 the bondage of feudal exactions. Thus in the 
 country districts of France the course of the 
 poor people was precisely the opposite of what 
 it was in England. In France they went towards 
 the land ; in England they went away from it. 
 And the Eevolution did but express the general 
 tendency of the nation when it provided that the 
 property of each person should, after his death, 
 be divided amongst his heirs in nearly equal 
 portions, and that he should possess freedom of 
 bequest only over one share. The law expressed 
 a stiU profounder tendency of the French mind. 
 
22 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 and that was a passion for equality. At one time 
 the Frencli people may have been as fond of an 
 aristocracy as our own people are of theirs ; but 
 the behaviour of the French nobles cured them of 
 that passion. Causes which I cannot stop to point 
 out made the nobles gradually neglect those feudal 
 duties which, at one period, were the service done 
 in return for feudal dues. They went to court and 
 wasted their money in the gaieties of Versailles. 
 When they lived on their estates, they spent their 
 time in hunting, and they had a supreme disregard 
 for the havoc done to the crops of the peasantry 
 by game. The Crown systematically broke their 
 power in order to strengthen its own, and it 
 replaced them by its intendants, who were the 
 forerunners of the prefets. Thus the peasant 
 labourers and peasant proprietors came to regard 
 the lords of the soil as the worst kind of drones. 
 Long before the Revolution they had completely 
 lost that feeling of personal loyalty with which 
 they had followed their chiefs to Agiucourt and 
 Cressy; and in truth it had been replaced by a 
 
EEYOLtlTIONARY CAUSES OF DISPBAOE. 23 
 
 passionate hatred of inequality. "Why," was 
 the instinctive idea of the peasant, " should I pay 
 dues, or lift my hat, or feel any reverence for a 
 man who lives upon the sweat of my brow?" 
 That question was certaialy not an exhaustive 
 summary of proprietorial rights, but misery is a 
 bad philosopher. 
 
 The rebellious instincts of the peasant were 
 strengthened by the writings of Rousseau, who 
 stated the floatiag principles of a destructive 
 philosophy in a logical shape which was very 
 fascinating to the French, and clothed them 
 with consummate literary form. Thus they 
 speedily helped to make one of the profoundest 
 changes recorded in the history of literature. 
 Niae readers out of ten could easily understand 
 the doctriue that men were naturally equal, that 
 all society was founded on a contract, and that 
 aristocracy was a usurpation unless the common 
 people chose to part with their natural rights. 
 The soil was ready to receive such ideas, and 
 they speedily sprouted up iato very grim practical 
 
24 PRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 form. Before all the other things, indeed, the 
 Eevolution enforced the demand for equality. That 
 claim is serenely treated in England. It is some- 
 times said to be based on envy ; and such a passion 
 is no doubt powerful in all democratic struggles. 
 But it would be more correct to say that it 
 sprang, in the first place, from the recklessness 
 with which the old French nobles abused their 
 power. They were the most irritating set of 
 tyrants that the caprices of destiny ever set 
 over a quick-witted people. The very keenness 
 of the national intelligence, its ready sympathy, 
 its passion for social intercourse, made the 
 tyranny of the feudal classes more dangerous 
 in France than in any other country. The 
 people were more quick to ask questions, and 
 they more speedily reached a high idea of human 
 dignity. Indeed the sertee of human dignity is 
 the tap-root of the spirit of equality. 
 
 That sense of human dignity may equally be 
 seen iu the national politeness. French peasants 
 and artisans address each other in the same 
 
EEVOLUTIONAEY CAUSES OF DISPEACE. 23 
 
 phrases of courtesy as they apply to men of 
 "wealth and education, because they have a high 
 idea of self-respect. They are quite at their ease 
 in the presence of the greatest noble, because 
 they have cast off the inherited feelings of serf- 
 dom. They are naturally polite because they 
 instinctively give the respect which they exact; 
 and their sense of equality is seen in the courtesy 
 which they offer as well as that which they 
 demand. The same feehng, far more than any 
 mere lurking envy, makes them revolt against 
 the idea that any class may be their rulers by 
 right of birth. And surely there is something 
 worthy of respect ia their refusal to let another 
 make laws for them simply because he can trace 
 his ancestry farther back than they, or because 
 he is richer, or because he lives among greater 
 people. After all, it is nothing more than a 
 demand that the man who seeks to rule should 
 produce credentials of his fitness. At all events, 
 the sense of equality is the deepest feeling of 
 the French people. It is the rock on which all 
 
26 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 tlieir legislators must build. Althougli Napoleon 
 tried to fritter it away by the creation of new 
 nobles, and althougli tbe restored Bourbons at- 
 tempted to bring back as mucli as tbey dared of 
 tlie old edifice, tbe passion for equality always 
 reasserts itself. 
 
 So far tlie work of tke Revolution was 
 done for ever. Occasionally we may stiU find 
 in tbe windows of Legitimist and Catbolic 
 booksellers a pamphlet proposing to re-establish 
 the droit d'ainesse; but the French pay as little 
 heed to such a demand as we should give to 
 the prayer of a Eitualistic high- churchman that 
 Convocation should get back such legislative 
 power as it possessed in the time of the Tudors. 
 The French Revolution, M. Prevost Paradol said, 
 has failed to found a government, but it has 
 founded a society. The second part of the pro- 
 position at least is true. All Frenchmen, except 
 an insignificant minority, agree that, whatever 
 parts of the revolutionary work may be touched, 
 the laws of inheritance shall and must be 
 
EBVOLTJTIONARY CAUSES OF DISPEACE. 27 
 
 sacred. No part of their political creed is more 
 puzzling to an average Englishman, and it can- 
 not be understood without such a glance as 
 I have given into the distant recesses of their 
 history. 
 
 The French people steadily drifted to uni- 
 versal suffrage; the Royalists learned this with 
 the emphasis of ruin after two generations of 
 effort to support a throne by means of a limited 
 franchise. The artisan fiercely resented his ex- 
 clusion from political power, not merely because 
 he was prevented from gaining some definite 
 ends, but because the voters were an aristocracy ; 
 and the same passion would have disturbed the 
 peasantry so soon as they had learned to take 
 an interest in anything beyond their own fields. 
 Thus the pays legal, or the small number of 
 persons who held the electoral power during the 
 reign of Louis Philippe, could only be a halting- 
 place in a democratic country. It is quite pos- 
 sible that too sudden a leap was made in 1848, 
 when the Provisional Government of the Eepublic 
 
28 PRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 established universal suffrage. It was a tre- 
 mendous experiment to cast the supreme authority 
 into the hands of an ignorant peasantry at one 
 stroke. And the first consequences of the act 
 were disastrous; for it was the strength of rural 
 votes that armed Louis Napoleon with power to 
 overthrow the Republic. Still universal suffrage 
 was inevitable^ and on the whole the result of it 
 has been good. 
 
 English readers would go very far astray if 
 they were to draw inferences on that subject 
 from the experience of their own country. 
 They may think it reasonable, and even necessary, . 
 that the suffrage should be given only to persons 
 who have lived for a certain time in a particular 
 place, who are the heads of households, who pay 
 a certain amount of taxes, or who possess some 
 other " stake in the country." Household suffrage, 
 it may be said, would be better than universal 
 suffrage. No doubt it would be in many countries. 
 But the question whether it would serve as well 
 in France cannot be decided by an appeal to 
 
REVOLUTIONARY CAUSES OF DISPEACE. 29 
 
 English, customs. An immense difference between 
 the two nations is made^ in the first place^ by 
 the fact that France has four millions of peasant 
 proprietors. Unlike our own agricultural labourers, 
 they are not mere hired men, with no land or 
 houses of their own, with no savings, with no 
 future, and with a tendency to look for a haven 
 of rest to the workhouse. Industry is their 
 master passion, and they have almost succeeded in 
 converting frugality into a vice. However ignorant 
 such a peasantry may be, they are models of 
 Conservatism, and they form the broad basis on 
 which the political fabric of France must rest. 
 The ownership of the soil must be the main 
 steadying power of a nation, the anchor by which 
 it must ride through the gales that meet every 
 State; but the ownership of a hundred thousand 
 great proprietors is not quite the same thing as 
 that of several millions of peasants. Those of 
 France form the Conservative back -bone of 
 universal suffrage. In her case, therefore, the 
 institution is steadied by an amount of social 
 
30 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 ballast whicli would not exist in England. It is 
 quite true, no doubt, that the most solid part of 
 the peasantry would retain their votes even if a 
 high qualification of age and residence should be 
 exacted for the exercise of the franchise, and that 
 the stroke of disfranchisement would fall most 
 heavily on the labourers of the towns, who go from 
 one arrondissement to another in search of work. 
 Such is the very reason which causes the Royalist 
 to be in favour of disfranchisement. The work- 
 men of the towns have shown in the street fights 
 of half-a-dozen revolutions how ready they are to 
 die for a republic. So long as they have votes, 
 the Republican party will always be victorious in 
 the great cities. But the very cause which makes 
 the Royalists eager to sweep away millions of 
 electors renders the Republican party equally 
 determined to resist such a disfranchisement. 
 So far, the contest is a fight for the supremacy 
 of the parties. But much may be said for the 
 individual capacity of the artisans to form sound 
 political opinions. They know the history of 
 
EEVOLUTIONARY CAUSES OP DISPEACE. 31 
 
 France far better than our own working men 
 know that of England. They take a deeper 
 interest than ours do in pubHc affairs. A glance 
 at the favourite newspapers of the two classes will 
 show how much more highly taught^ how much 
 more alive, is the Frenchman. The Bappel is 
 usually political from end to end, reports of 
 police cases being pushed into a comer. The 
 corresponding newspapers of England fill 
 their space with records of criminal causes and 
 horse races. The betting ring and the police 
 court are at present the great teachers of the 
 English lower class. But the chief and conclusive 
 argument against any limitation of the suffrage 
 in France is, that such a step would shock the 
 national sentiment of equality. Nothing did so 
 much to weaken the Repubhc of 1848 as the 
 decree of the Royalist maiority that some millions 
 of men should lose their votes. Nothing did so 
 much to strengthen the hands of Prince Louis 
 Bonaparte as that decree, because, although it was 
 proposed by his own ministers and with his own 
 
33 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 consent, ho shrewdly denounced it the instant 
 he saw the signs of popular disgust. In the 
 proclamation announcing the dissolution of the 
 National Assembly^ he skilfully made that fact one 
 of the chief iadictments against the deputies, 
 and he declared that he himself would restore 
 universal suffrage. For a moment, as Victor 
 Hugo confesses in his " Histoire d'un Crime," the 
 Parisian workmen were misled by the skilful 
 mendacity of that plea, and they would not rise 
 to defend the deputies or the law. 
 
 Let universal suffrage be good or bad, it is a 
 necessity in France. And to do it justice we 
 must admit, that it has not yet produced those 
 degrading political effects which are assumed to 
 be inseparable from democracy. "Whether it is that 
 the French peasantry are guided by a keen sense of 
 interest, or that the quickness of the national 
 intellect renders it able to see the good of 
 mental power, or that the intense fascination of 
 political combat draws a disproportionately large 
 number of able men to the National Assembly, 
 
EEVOLUTIONAET CAUSES OF DISPEACB. 33 
 
 it is certain that the Frencli Chamber of Deputies 
 need fear no comparison with our own House of 
 Commons in all the qualities which make great 
 legislative bodies. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE POUTICAl TENDENCIES OP THE CATHOLIC 
 CHUECH. 
 
 The full effect of universal suffrage cannot Be 
 seen unless we look from political to religious life. 
 It is little better than a truism to say tliat there 
 is a close connection between the religion and 
 the politics of a people. Both spring from the 
 same stock of circumstances, tendencies, and 
 traditions. Let us see the one and we can 
 guess the other. That truth may be observed 
 with special vividness in France. The political 
 passions of the country have been twisted into 
 a particular channel by its religious wars and 
 the fate of its Protestantism. At one time the 
 
POLITICAL TENDENCIES OF CATHOLIC CHURCH. 35' 
 
 Frencli people tade fair to be the most Protes- 
 tant of peoples, and no more beautiful or in- 
 spiring cbapters have been added to the history 
 of the Church than the pathetic and heroic 
 annals of the Huguenots. Had the Huguenots 
 not been slaughtered on the night of St. Bar- 
 tholomew, had the Edict of Nantes been replaced 
 by a decree of complete toleration^ or even 
 perhaps had that edict not been revoked, Pro- 
 testantism would have left a rehgious outlet for 
 the aggressive forces which, from the Eenais- 
 sance to our own day, have been at war with 
 the traditional authorities of mankind. Such 
 an outlet was given iu England by the loose 
 theology of the English Church and the poHtical 
 temper of Puritanism. Hence the Deists of 
 our own land never made many converts 
 beyond a small philosophical coterie. They never 
 made such a change ia the popular faith as to 
 provide the requisite number of applauding readers 
 for a Voltaire, and thus no violent break took place 
 in the religion of the country. But from causes 
 
 D 2 
 
36 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 which, it would take too long to trace, the 
 Huguenots were crushed, and the destruction of 
 French Protestantism left no religious safety- 
 valve for the criticism of the most intellectually 
 aggressive of peoples. Practically, Catholicism in 
 its worst form, became for them the only form 
 of Christianity. Men like Voltaire had either to 
 submit their opinions of Newton^s philosophy, 
 their views of history, their conceptions of 
 morality to a church which had profited by 
 the iniquities of the Inquisition, and which was 
 responsible for the spirit that had broken Galas 
 on the wheel, or they had to cast themselves 
 loose from religion altogether. What their 
 choice would be could admit of no doubt. Pride 
 of intellect, a sense of human dignity, a hatred of 
 cruelty, a contempt for what would now be 
 roughly called the humbug displayed by pam- 
 pered and licentious prelates in claiming the 
 authorities of the apostles — all these sentiments 
 made the literary men break out into open 
 war against the Church. The conflict was in- 
 
POLITICAL TENDENCIES OP CATHOLIC CHURCH. 37 
 
 evitable, and tte store of Christian graces on 
 tlie side of the Voltaireans was at least as 
 apostolic as the array of those qualities on the 
 side of the Church. But the conflict was none 
 the less disastrous ; coming at such a time, it put 
 the vast sources of Catholicism and even the 
 sanctities of religion at the service of political 
 and intellectual bondage, and it tended to fill 
 Liberals with the spirit of irreverence. 
 
 The political importance of Catholicism has 
 been greatly increased in France by the change 
 which has come over the temper and the discipline 
 of the whole Papal Church. Few things, in 
 the history of that community, are more remark- 
 able than the growing tendency to centralise 
 its power in Rome. At one time each national 
 Church had peculiarities of ritual and a great 
 measure of independence. The Galilean Church, 
 in particular, made good its claim to have a 
 large degree of freedom in theological as well 
 as in practical affairs. The charter of that 
 Church was for a century those famous articles 
 
38 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 whicli declared the Pope to be infallible only 
 when he spoke as the organ of an CEcumenical 
 Council; and the clergy never forgot that their 
 Church was French as well as Catholic. It is 
 true that the chief author of the Gallican articles 
 and the most illustrious defender of Gallican 
 liberties, Bossuet himself, practically admitted 
 that Eome was the court of last appeal, 
 in the dispute between himself and Fenelon 
 respecting the theology of the Quietists. In 
 all such moments of trial, the most intrepid 
 champions of Gallican freedom found themselves 
 forced, in practice if not in theory, to confess 
 the infallibility of Rome. It is true that the 
 absolute assertion of the principle was fated to 
 follow the unvarying example. Still the French 
 clergy had once a large amount of independence, 
 and hence a distinctly national character. In 
 some ways Catholicism was a federation of 
 national churches, each possessing such state 
 rights as greatly limited the power of the 
 central government. But GalHcanism is now as 
 
POLITICAIi TENDENCIES OF CATHOLIC CHURCH. 39 
 
 mucli a thing of the past as the regal splen- 
 dour of Versailles. If there are any Gallicans 
 among the clergy of France they hide in corners, 
 and they can scarcely speak without being 
 called heretics. The Eoman Breviary has now- 
 taken the place of the GaUican; the Gallican 
 articles would be accounted heresy by the most 
 lax of French theologians; and the Pope is as 
 absolutely the master of the several bishops as 
 the bishops are the masters of the inferior 
 clergy. No prelate would now dream of resisting 
 even the political dictation of the Vatican; and 
 the dependence of the priests is described with 
 as much truth as vividness by the famous boast 
 of Cardinal de BonnechosCj Archbishop of Kouen. 
 " Mon clerge," he said, " sont un regiment, et 
 quand je lui dit, ' Marcliez,' il marche." The 
 first Napoleon imagined that he could prevent 
 the clergy from being dependent upon Rome by 
 means of the Concordat, which virtually enables 
 the civil power to fill up every diocese by 
 presenting to the Pope the ecclesiastic whom 
 
40 FRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIEE. 
 
 it wishes Mm to install and by making tlie 
 clergy look to the State for their stipends. But, 
 in one all-important respect, that compact is 
 fatally different from the old Galilean guarantees. 
 Before the Eevolution, the clergy owned a large 
 part of the soil, and hence they were a feudal 
 aristocracy as well as a sacerdotal caste. Nothing 
 did so much to make them remember that they 
 were Frenchmen as their immense stake in the 
 material interests of their country. But no such 
 memory is aroused by the pinched salaries which 
 are annually doled out to them by the State, 
 which they believe to be a beggarly restitution 
 for the robbery of their lands, and which, as 
 they are constantly warned by the Eadicals, and as 
 they learn from the signs of the times, may be 
 stopped by a vote of the Chamber. The Con- 
 cordat would have failed, however, even if it had 
 re-endowed the Church with her ancient 
 property. It has failed because no artificial 
 compacts can resist the force of general ten- 
 dencies; and for centuries the general tendency 
 
POLITICAL TENDENCIES OF CATHOLIC CHURCH. 41 
 
 of Catholicism has been to concentrate power 
 in the hands of Eome. In that respect the 
 Catholic Church repeats with extraordinary and 
 instinctire closeness the later history of the 
 empire of which she was the heir. As Eome 
 grew in size^ she had to lodge more and more 
 power with some one man, in order that he 
 might curb the anarchical tendencies of the 
 capital and keep in check the distant pro- 
 vinces. That necessity became overmastering 
 when the Barbarians began to assert their power 
 on the frontiers, to wrest back the conquests 
 of the empire, and even to threaten the old 
 home of the repubhc. The central power had 
 to be strengthened, until the whole Roman world 
 was the slave even of a Nero or a Domitian. 
 Nor could the process of centralisation cease until 
 the fabric of imperiahsm toppled and fell to ruin. 
 Whatever Burke may say, the medicine of the 
 constitution must sometimes be made its daily 
 food, even at the cost of ultimate decay. 
 
 The laws of human nature do not change 
 
42 FRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 merely because men invent steam-engines and 
 read daily newspapers. The necessities of 
 imperial power and their attendant maladies will 
 live as long as human passions and interests. 
 The necessities of imperial Rome are repeated 
 in the daily life of its theocratic successor ; 
 in the Papacy as in the Empire^ the first condi- 
 tion of rule is unity. But there is an immense 
 tendency towards disintegration in a dominion 
 stretching to the end of the earthy and including 
 a hundred nations, and tongues, and races, and 
 histories, and masses of inherited traditions. 
 Every national church is liable to drift towards 
 independence. Every great leader of every 
 national church is prompted to be a reformer, 
 and is therefore liable to be a heresiarch. Since 
 the Reformation, and in particular since the 
 French Revolution, the perils of disunion have 
 been multiplied by a process which repeats in a 
 spiritual form the irruption of the Barbarians. 
 The many and vigorous sects of Protestantism, 
 the motley bands of Rationalism, the aggressive 
 
POLITICAL TENDENCIES OF CATHOLIC CHUEOH. 43 
 
 Voltaireans, tlie dreamy disciples of Rousseau, tlie 
 evangelists of tte ideas sown by the French 
 Revolution, all the young, unorganised, hungry, 
 bold spirits in the empire of intellect and belief, 
 are to the Papacy what the Goths and the Vandals 
 were to decaying Rome. They have wrested from 
 it some of its vast dominions. They are settling 
 in its oldest provinces. , They are defeating its 
 trained legions ; and they believe that they are 
 the heirs of the great theocracy. The only way 
 to keep the spiritual empire together is to tighten 
 the bonds of discipline even at the cost of stifling 
 all provincial independence, and to give the Papacy 
 a power at once clear and absolute of stopping 
 all disputes. As the centrifugal forces of the 
 Church constantly tend to make the outlying 
 planets of the Papal system iiy into heretical 
 space, proportionably greater must be made the 
 centripetal power of Rome. That necessity has 
 the strength of an instinct rather than a theory, 
 and the Pope would have grown into a Csesar 
 even if he had sought to guard provincial liberties. 
 
44 TRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 Such was tlie root of De Maistre's argument thatj in 
 a divinely ordered cliurcli, the Pope must be in- 
 fallible, because all sovereigns must act as if they 
 could not err, and because the infallibility of a 
 single ecclesiastical ruler is more convenient than 
 that of the six or seven hundred prelates who 
 form the cumbersome divinity of an Ecumenical 
 Council. Such was also the origin of the Vatican 
 Council and the Decree of Infallibility. Such is 
 the reason why all the Roman Catholic clergy are 
 now Ultramontane in temper. Ultramontanism- 
 can be explained without the aid of Jesuit con- 
 spiracies, for it simply expresses the collective 
 instincts of self-interest in the greatest organisa- 
 tion which the world has seen since the fall of 
 imperial Eome. 
 
 The change, however, is none the less important 
 for Prance, because it has weakened and almost 
 destroyed the secular ties which bound the clergy 
 to the nation. They have ceased to understand 
 what patriotism means when it comes into conflict 
 with loyalty to Rome. In vain does the Govern- 
 
POLITICAL TENDENCIES OF CATHOLIC CHURCH. 45 
 
 ment nominate the bishops ; it must nominate 
 Ultramontanes now tliat tlie Gallicans are extinct. 
 In vain are they reminded of their duty to the 
 State. What is their duty to an infidel Govern- 
 ment in comparison with their duty to the Vicar 
 of Christ ? Their country is the Churchy and they 
 will not again be Frenchmen until France shall be 
 Tuledj as she was in the days of her old kings, by 
 the light of Catholicism. 
 
 The political importance of the change in the 
 spirit of the Roman Church has been further 
 increased by one of the most interesting move- 
 ments of our time. This has been an age, not 
 only of scientific inquiry but of religious revival, 
 and the spiritual emotion has been spread at least 
 as widely as the reverence for inductive truth. Just 
 as maladies mysteriously pass from land to land, the 
 seeds of them appearing to float in the air and 
 to be borne by unseen currents ; just as new ideas, 
 ■the seeds of a Renaissance or a French revolution, 
 burst out at nearly the same time in widely separated 
 .centres of thought, so has this age seen the great 
 
46 FEANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIEE. 
 
 old religions of Asia and Europe quickened by 
 tlie pulse of a new life. India and the Turkish 
 Empire, America and England, have all been 
 powerfully moved by the wave of passion; and 
 on France it has left as deep traces as in any 
 other land. Just as the rise of the Jesuits 
 followed the first triumphs of Protestantism, and 
 just as the Church of Eome wrenched back by 
 one evangel much of what she had lost by 
 another, so has French Catholicism drawn new 
 vigour, power of expression, and depth of piety 
 from the triumphant irreverence of the French 
 Revolution. A fresh political as well as religious 
 force was thrown into her public hfe by the 
 outburst of fervour which will for ever be con- 
 nected with the names of Lamennais, Montalembert, 
 and Lacordaire. Better than any abstract dis- 
 sertation does the life of Lamennais show the 
 longing felt by great masses of the French 
 people for a worthy spiritual belief, the fervour 
 which a new faith has brought to some, and 
 the hopeless disappointment with which it has 
 
POLITICAL TENDENCIES OP CATHOLIC CHUKCH. 47 
 
 embittered others. Wten Lamennais's mind was 
 filled witli all the political ideas of democracy, 
 Ms temper was despotic, and so were his methods. 
 In the early part of his career it was the absolutism 
 of the Church which he strove to establish; but 
 she was to enforce the principles of modern 
 Liberalism. In his later days, after he had failed 
 to convert the Pope to the political faith of the 
 French Revolution, and after he had drifted far 
 away from Eome, he equally sought to set up 
 the despotism of democracy and the Republic. 
 Such compromises between religion and the 
 world as Grallicanism or the Concordat were not 
 more hateful to the theological austerity of his 
 younger days, when Pope Leo XII. called him 
 " the last of the Fathers,''^ than- the constitutionalism 
 of Louis Philippe was to the Repubhcan fervour of 
 his later faith, when the people had taken the 
 place of the Church in his heated and gloomy 
 imagination, when he thought kings the chief 
 scourges of mankind and democracy the evangel 
 sent for the healing of the nations. Lamennais 
 
48 FEAi^'CB SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 may take rank with Joseph de Maistre as the 
 great preacher of Ultramontanism in its modem 
 and its extreme form. An extraordinary force 
 was given to his teachings not less by its aptness 
 for a time in which masses of men were sick of 
 political and religious compromise, than by the 
 strength of his individualityj and by an elo- 
 quence, destitute indeed of French lightness and 
 pliancy and sunny ease, but Hebrew in the 
 richness and the majesty of its imagery, and 
 steeped in the gloom of Breton woods and 
 melodious with the wail of Breton seas. Altogether 
 he is the most impressive figure amongst recent 
 Prenchmen. Around him gathered, in Lacordaire 
 and Gerbet and Montalembert, ardent, young, 
 aggressive souls. Like him, they were disgusted 
 by Voltaireanism and all forms of impiety. Like 
 him, they were sick of the hallelujahs sung 
 over the triumphs of material progress. They 
 would not admit that the best part of man had 
 been made a whit better by big factories or 
 steam-engines, and they went back for their ideals 
 
POLITICAL TENDENCIES OF CATHOLIC CHURCH. 49 
 
 to the despised ages of faith, and for their esemplars 
 to the saints of the Catholic calendar. At the same 
 time those young soldiers of the Church fancied 
 like Lamennais himself that they could unite the 
 rebellious principles of the Revolution with the 
 doctrines which they had inherited from the 
 remote days of authority. How gallantly they 
 battled to persuade the Church that she should 
 abandon the pay and fling off the restraints of 
 the State ; how they strove to make education 
 clerical by making it free ; how, above all, they 
 went to Rome to defend their creed before the 
 Pope himself and to enlist him in the Liberal 
 camp — all this forms the most beautiful and not 
 the least noble chapter of religious Quixotism in 
 the history of modern France. Of course they 
 failed. The Church would not give up her pay; 
 the State would not abandon its scholastic hold 
 on the young; and ecclesiastics would not rub 
 shoulders with Mirabeau and Danton. Hence 
 Lamennais drifted away to more congenial work, 
 leaving Montalembert and Lacordaire to fight, with 
 
50 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 their right hands tied, for what they deemed the 
 twin cause of Catholicism and Liberty. 
 
 Of course they failed again ; the life of both 
 was embittered by the discovery that the official 
 teachers of Catholicism were implacably hostile to 
 all kinds of Liberalism. Lacordaire was silenced; 
 Montalembert fell away for a time from the Liberal 
 camp, and took service under the grimy banner of 
 Louis Napoleon. Repenting of that unworthy 
 alliance with the hero of the pact between the 
 sacristy and the barrack-room, he nevertheless re- 
 mained in his strange position. The evening of his 
 too short and not unchivalrous life was darkened 
 by the proclamation, in the Syllabus and the 
 dogma of infallibility, of decrees which, he feared, 
 would cut off the Church from all contact with 
 modem liberty. No doubt his apprehensions 
 ought to have presaged those codifications of 
 old claims; but the awakening from his dream- 
 land was none the less rude. Both he and 
 Lacordaire had attempted an impossible task. 
 Nevertheless, they and Lamennais had helped to 
 
POLITICAL TENDENCIES OF CATHOLIC CHURCH. 51 
 
 produce a vast effect on tlie private and public 
 life of their country. Before their active years^ 
 church-going had no doubt been made fashion- 
 able by the courts of Louis XVIII. and Charles X. 
 It had been made so fashionable, that rough 
 blaspheming generals^ who had learned their 
 manners under the Empire, found it necessary 
 to become regular attendants at mass, and to 
 learn the superficial ways of good Catholics. 
 Montalembert was the sign rather than the cause 
 of the great reaction. But he did powerfully 
 help to enlist the enthusiasm of the young on the 
 side of CathoKcism. The fervour of the French 
 nobles for the Pope, the readiness of their sons 
 to serve in the ranks of the Papal Zouaves, and 
 their pilgrimages to Lourdes, cannot be thoroughly 
 understood without a survey of the religious 
 movement which was partly symbolised, and partly 
 led by Lamennais and Montalembert. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE CLEEICAL PAETT. 
 
 Feom that . movement we may date the rise of a 
 party which deserves to be closely studied; a 
 party which has its members among the Legiti- 
 mists, the Orleanists, and the Bonapartists, and 
 which will soon have them among even perhaps 
 the Republicans ; a party which is much less 
 careful about its weapons than about its ends — 
 and that is the Clerical party. Its purpose is to 
 strengthen the power of the Catholic Church. 
 Many of its members are guided, of course, by a 
 spirit of pure religious devotion, or by a fanaticism 
 which, if unreasonable, is fi-ee from any taint of 
 political ambition. Such men trace most of the 
 
THE CLERICAL PAHTT. 53 
 
 evils wliicli Have befallen Prance to the impiety 
 ■which was the herald and the follower, the cause 
 and the effect, of the Revolution. Voltaire, they 
 think, sneered away the reverence of the people 
 for king, country, family honour, all the sanctities 
 which ennoble life. He was a grinning devil, 
 and De Maistre, the ablest of the Clerical teachers, 
 said that everyone who liked him was a bad 
 man. Hence the recent outburst of CathoKc wrath 
 against the celebration of the hundredth anniver- 
 sary of his death. Diderot and the band of the 
 Encyclopaedists finished the work which the master 
 spirit had begun. Thus, losing the tie of morality 
 and religion, the French, we are told, became 
 a herd of struggling, warring units, who pulled 
 down throne, aristocracy, and Church in sheer 
 wantonness. Nor has France — add the Clerical 
 party — yet reaped the full harvest of the seed 
 sown by Voltaire and his fellow-labourers. She 
 is still irreverent and irrehgious. There are 
 grave blots on her family life. She has no ideals 
 higher than military glory or secular repubhcs. 
 
54 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEE. 
 
 Honeycombed by practical atheism, she has nothing 
 to purify her private or public life, nor anything 
 to bind her together as she was clasped by the 
 dogmas and the hierarchies of the mediaeval Church. 
 Hence her factions fight with each other for 
 selfish supremacy, political warfare is a game of 
 vile passions, and the great France of other days 
 drifts from one revolution to another. Secular 
 teaching is the nurse of atheism, which is the 
 parent of republicanism, which in turn generates 
 anarchy. There is only one way to purify and 
 exalt and strengthen the nation, and that is to 
 restore its old religious faith. Therefore, the 
 Catholic Church must take her ancient place at 
 the head of society, and above all she must be 
 entrusted with the duty of teaching the young. 
 
 Such is the doctrine of those political Catholics, 
 who sincerely believe in the doctrines of their 
 own Church. But all the members of the Clerical 
 party are not religious enthusiasts. On the 
 contrary, unless their good name is made the 
 sport of calumny, a great many of them have as 
 
THE CLEKICAL PARTY. 55 
 
 little real belief in the dogmas of the Clmrcli as 
 the open followers of Voltaire. Victor Hugo, in 
 his " Quatre-Vingt Treize/' describes such a 
 character in a Breton noble^ the Marquis de 
 Lantenac. A fanatical champion of the Church 
 as well as of the monarchy, he regards the enemy 
 of both as vermin, to be stamped out rather than 
 argued with or converted. But he puts aside, with 
 a grand and slightly satirical bow, the vulgar ques- 
 tion, whether the Church is rightly informed 
 about everything which she teaches. A gentleman 
 might have thoughts of his own on that subject, 
 but he must keep them to himself. To recite his 
 sceptical musings in the hearing of the mob 
 would be to cast reproach on the throne and the 
 nobHity, because the Church had taken those 
 institutions into her keeping, and was their chief 
 guardian. Christianity was revealed, in fact, to 
 provide the French nobles with private chaplains, 
 and to keep the multitude in awe of their betters. 
 Such characters as Lantenac, reduced from the 
 Michael Angelo-like proportions of Victor Hugo 
 
56 FBANCB SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEE. 
 
 to the petty scale of ordinary life, may still be 
 found among the Legitimists. Prenclimen would 
 smile at tlie idea that some noted members of 
 the Clerical party really believed the Pope to 
 be infallible^ or to be anything else than the 
 spiritual head of an international Scotland Yard. 
 Their feelings are partially expressed with brilliant 
 cynicism by Heine, who was as little of a be- 
 liever as Voltaire himself, although his Hebrew 
 blood gave him a profoundly deeper sense of 
 spiritual things. He was an atheist, he said, 
 so long as atheistical theories were confined to 
 philosophic supper-parties; but when they passed 
 to the smoky meetings of vulgar artisans, and 
 when grimy mechanics chattered materialistic 
 doctrines, he was converted by his sense of refine- 
 ment, and he awoke out of his irreligious dream. 
 He saw that dogmatic religion, whether true or 
 not, helped to keep down the surges of pinched 
 ferocity. Heine's example has been largely fol- 
 lowed in Prance. Her ofiicial religious ceremonies 
 are demurely attended by men who, if we may 
 
THE CLERICAL PARTY. 57 
 
 trust the voice of satire^ do not know how to use 
 the holy water brush. But it may be admitted 
 that such ignorance is very exceptional. Even 
 the incredulous members of the Clerical party 
 have perfectly learned the drill of their faith. 
 
 The Clerical faction^ such as we know it, 
 was not organised until the Republic of 1848 
 had been established. Down to that time, the 
 little group of parliamentary statesmen who 
 "managed" the pays legal of two hundred 
 thousand voters had not lost the old jealousy 
 of priestly influence. The Revolution of 1830 
 had been made by the middle class, which had 
 been profoundly moved by the spirit of Voltaire. 
 The leaders of the movement which overthrew 
 the throne of Charles X. were all eager to keep 
 the clergy away from the polling-booths and 
 from the National Assembly. Louis Philippe 
 himself was in religious creed a good-humoured 
 tolerant cynic of the eighteenth century. The 
 note of the movement is sounded in Beranger's 
 songs, which express with incomparable power 
 
58 PRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 the lightness, the gaiety, and the hard common- 
 sense of his countrymen. He is never more 
 effective than when he satirises the pretensions 
 of the priests. The bishops instinctively felt 
 that the new monarchy was less favourable to 
 the Church than the old, and for a moment 
 some of them were disposed to treat Louis 
 Philippe as a usurper. But the rebellious prelates 
 were soon brought to reason by the Minister of 
 Public Worship, the Due de Broglie, the father 
 of the statesman who lately led the Clerical 
 party with a skill untempered by scruple. The 
 Government, the House of Peers, and the 
 Chamber of Deputies also showed how deter- 
 mined they were to uphold the secular spirit 
 of the State by their refusal to let Montalembert 
 and Lacordaire open an infant school without the 
 warrant of the university. 
 
 But a vast change in that temper was made 
 by the Eevolution of 1848. Hitherto the 
 rebelhous instincts of the artisans had been 
 kept pretty weU in hand. Although they had 
 
THE CLERICAL PARTY. 59 
 
 shed their blood during the days of July^ they 
 had not been rewarded with power. Their 
 dream of a republic had been rudely broken 
 by the intimation that Louis Philippe was " le 
 meilleur des rejpubliqiies," and all their attempts 
 to shake his power had been defeated with an 
 iron hand. But meanwhile they had been 
 greedily listening to the Socialistic teachings of 
 the St. Simonians and of Louis Blanc. They 
 had been taught to believe that the work of 
 1789 would be incomplete so long as the old 
 forms of society were left unchanged. They 
 had been encouraged to think that the State 
 could abolish pauperism and even poverty, 
 Louis Napoleon himself had given some en- 
 couragement to that idea in one of the dreamy 
 pamphlets which he composed during his im- 
 prisonment at Ham. Wlien the constitutional 
 monarchy was thrown down, the Socialistic mob 
 of Paris seemed to threaten the very existence 
 of society. In M. Louis Blanc it had an eloquent 
 and devoted representative in the Provisional 
 
60 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 G-overnment itself. Thus the rich feared that 
 the SociaHstic teaching would make the poor 
 rise against the rich, that there would be a 
 systematic attack on property, and that France 
 would be shaken by the worst of all convulsions 
 — a war of classes. 
 
 That fear was deepened by the first great 
 act of the Provisional Government, which was 
 the establishment of universal suffrage. Thus 
 had the waves of democracy swept away that 
 little pays legal which was the masterpiece of 
 Louis Philippe's government. Thus had the 
 supreme power been transferred at one stroke 
 from two hundred thousand voters to eight 
 millions. Ledru Rollin, who was the chief author 
 of that change, eifected perhaps as great a revo- 
 lution by a stroke of his pen as the Convention 
 did when it beheaded the king. Henceforward 
 all the towns would be ruled, not by a group of 
 essentially Conservative, if somewhat Voltairean, 
 shopkeepers, but by an unknown throng of 
 artisans, steeped in the violent traditions of 
 
THE CLEEICAL PARTY. 61 
 
 the first Eepublic, and deluded by tlie Socialistic 
 fancies of more dangerous, if less gifted, leaders 
 tlian Rousseau. 
 
 But Ledru Eollin's act lias created a still 
 more important political class in the peasantry. 
 Universal suffrage may almost be said to have 
 called into political being that great and hitherto 
 inert mass which is the foundation of French 
 society. In the peasantry, as I have already said, 
 we find that marvellous industry which is as. 
 characteristic of the French people as their 
 gaiety ; that thrift which has been the wonder of 
 Europe ever since the war with Germany; that 
 Conservatism which has anchored France to the 
 social institutions of 1789 in spite of all her 
 changes of dynasty. But there also may be 
 found in equal measure an ignorance which casts 
 its shadow over the most highly polished and 
 cultivated of nations. That ignorance, however, 
 had been good for the Catholic Church, since it had 
 kept them free from the aggressive scepticism of 
 the great towns. Voltaire and Diderot and Rousseau 
 
62 FEANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 were almost as little known in the Dordogne as in 
 the wilds of Inverness-shire. The peasants still went 
 to mass on Sundays and saints'-days ; their wives 
 and daughters went to confession ; and the whole 
 class was Catholic in a quiet way. Here there- 
 fore seemed a vast unorganised throng, which 
 would follow the Clerical party in political things, 
 which would outweigh the democratic scepticism 
 and radicalism of the great towns, and which 
 might give the Conservative managers more than 
 an equivalent for the loss of the pays legal. Here 
 then was a common ground of action for such 
 statesmen as M. Thiers and M. de Montalemhert, 
 although the Orleanist chief was notoriously a 
 Yoltairean rather than a Catholic in theology. 
 Like the Catholic leader, he was afraid of the 
 many-headed monster of democracy which the 
 Eepuhlic had unchained. Terrified by the philo- 
 sophic attacks on the institution of property and 
 by the Socialistic temper of the artisans, he no 
 longer dared to despise the political power with 
 which the Clerical party offered to arm the enemies 
 
THE CLERICAL PARTY. 63 
 
 of the Republic, if they would help it to reach 
 some of its political ends. M. Thiers was a very 
 different man in 1848 from what he became on 
 the morrow of a mighty national calamity, when 
 as President of the Republic he found that freedom 
 might give a nation more stability than an 
 alliance between the priests and the police. From 
 a union of the old parliamentary chiefs with the 
 leaders of the political Catholics came two 
 m.emorable events — the expedition to Eome and 
 a change in the system of national education. 
 But for M. Thiers and his party, the forces of the 
 French Republic would not have been used to crush 
 the Repubhc of Rome. In his interesting con- 
 versation with Mr. Nassau Senior, he said that 
 he favoured the sending of the French troops 
 to prevent Austria from gaining a hold over Rome. 
 The purpose of that expedition, he declared, was 
 to defend French interests. " It was for the sake 
 of France he maintained; it was to plant the 
 French flag in the castle of St. Angelo; it was 
 to maintain our right to have one half of Italy 
 
64 FRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 if Austria seized the other. Rather than see the 
 Austrian eagle on the flagstaff that rises above 
 the Tiberj I would destroy a hundred constitutions 
 and a hundred religions." But M. Thiers and 
 the other Orleanist chiefs had a much more power- 
 ful reason for proposing to fit out the expedition 
 to Rome. He and they wished to put down the 
 secular republic which, by pushing aside the 
 temporal power of the Pope, had trampled on 
 the chief symbol of vested interests and the 
 monarchy. That republic unpleasantly recalled 
 the Convention of 1793. Mazzini and G-aribaldi 
 bore an uncomfortable likeness to the better chiefs 
 of that grim body, and their republic would 
 have been an aggressive reality. It would have 
 speedily destroyed all the smaller states of Italy, 
 fired the Republican party of France with 
 the energy of a great example of weakened 
 authority in every part of Europe. Secular and 
 sceptical minds like M. Thiers could so far join 
 with Catholic minds like M. de Montalembert, 
 as to admit that if the Roman revolutionists 
 
THE CLBEICAL PARTY. 65 
 
 should succeed, a fatal blow would be struck at 
 the system of treaties which he thought determined 
 the boundaries of modern states and helped to 
 keep kings on their thrones. M. Thiers knew 
 that several of the European states were in great 
 degree built artificially. At the same time he 
 was the very type of the man who fearlessly 
 sits down at a council table to decide with map 
 and pencil how people shall be grouped and whom 
 they shall obey. The principle that they should 
 be grouped according to their nationalities, and 
 be asked to say under what government they 
 should like to live, was a principle which, in the 
 opinion of M. Thiers, would lead straight to 
 anarchy. Thus all the Whigs of France — and 
 he was the chief of the sect — believed that with 
 the establishment of the Eoman repubhc would 
 begin the destruction of monarchical arrangement 
 for the bridling of democracy. The members of 
 the Clerical party were led by simpler motives. 
 To them the blow aimed at the temporal power 
 of the Pope seemed struck at religion itself, and 
 
66 FKANCB SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 it would be followed, they thought, by attacks 
 on the temporal possessions of the Catholic Church 
 throughout the world. Thus the expedition to 
 Rome was a bond of union between the secular 
 Conservatives and the Catholics. A Eepublican 
 would not scruple to add that it was the sacrament 
 of their joiut infamy. At least it had a profoundly 
 disastrous effect on the future fortunes of France, 
 both abroad and at home. 
 
 The Clerical party won a still greater triumph 
 by attacking the system of public instruction, 
 which bears the marks of Napoleon's genius for 
 despotism. The Revolution swept away the old 
 provincial colleges, and when Napoleon reached 
 the Consulate the time had not yet come for 
 applying the gratuitous and obligatory system 
 which had been among the good dreams of the 
 Convention. So he founded a series of lycees, or 
 great pubhc schools, and endowed them with a 
 multitude of scholarships. He established, or he 
 shaped, the colleges for technical instruction; 
 finally, when he became emperor, he grouped 
 
THE CLERICAL PARTY. 67 
 
 all these institutions under a central university, 
 wMcli alone could give certificates of competence 
 to teach, or to practise any of the higher pro- 
 fessions. His half-military lycees, as M. Renan 
 has pointed out, were founded on the model of the 
 Jesuit colleges ; and, in truth, the genius of the 
 Jesuits was closely akin to his own. His hope 
 was that the children of all classes and political 
 parties should be found on the same benches; 
 that all should be taught by professors devoted 
 to the Eevolution and to him; that the spirit of 
 his rule should thus reach the homes of the Bour- 
 bonists, the devotees of the Church, and the 
 puritans of the RepubHcj and that thus the dis- 
 cords of France should at last be healed. The 
 influence of the Revolution, and its Napoleonic 
 corrective, would also, he thought, be felt in the 
 humblest of village schools, because the central 
 university — which would only be the State under 
 another name — should dictate what each child 
 should learn. Such was, perhaps, the most gi- 
 gantic and searching of intellectual despotisms ever 
 
 F 2 
 
68 B'RANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIEB. 
 
 fashioned outside the Church of Eome. In effect 
 it has been a naighty secular propaganda, because 
 it has been set in motion by essentially secular 
 statesmen. If it has not served the purpose of 
 the Empire, it has, at least, helped to deepen the 
 lessons of the Eevolution. But the Catholic Church 
 could not be expected to tolerate rivalry in her 
 own field with weapons bori'owed from herseK, and 
 she has made ceaseless war agaiust the autocratic 
 university. Lacordaire and Montalembert were 
 punished for attempting, in 1831, to open an infant 
 school without the license of the State j but the 
 celebrated prosecution of these young zealots led 
 the way to a breach in the Napoleonic system. 
 During the reign of Louis Philippe the clergy saw 
 more and more clearly that they had everything 
 to learn from freedom of teaching. The prowess 
 of their order in Belgium showed them how they 
 might thus use the revolutionary weapon of liberty 
 for the ends of a despotic Church. Many secular 
 minds, for the reasons which I have already stated, 
 were won over to their side. M. de Falloux, the 
 
THE CLEEICAE PARTY. 69 
 
 political cliief of the Clerical party, when Louis 
 Napoleon made him Minister of Public Instruction 
 in 1849, was able to form a commission which made 
 a serious inroad in the old monopoly. It did so 
 by giving the higher clergy seats in the Council 
 of Public Instruction and in the academical 
 councils of the provinces. It did so, above all, 
 by providing that certificates of competence from 
 the university should no longer be exacted from 
 all teachers. These changes, which were sanctioned 
 by an essentially Royalist assembly, enabled the 
 B-oman Catholic clergy to gain a powerful hold 
 over the springs of popular teaching. The Bro- 
 thers of the Congregation — a half-priestly body, 
 wearing almost the same garb, and taking nearly 
 the same vows as the clergy — are now spread over 
 the whole of France. They teach in the elementary 
 schools. As they are unmarried, and do not follow 
 their calling for the sake of profit, they cost the 
 communes less than secular teachers. > The Jesuits^ 
 who busy themselves with the higher education, 
 have planted colleges in several parts of France; 
 
70 TRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 and they almost exclusively instruct the sons of 
 the richer Royalist families. In one of their 
 Parisian houses they also prepare, with much 
 success, young men for the Polytechnic and the 
 mihtary colleges. In 1875 the Clericals made a 
 determined effort to destroy the remains of the 
 academical monopoly by demanding power to insti- 
 tute independent universities, which should have 
 the right, not merely to teach, but to grant 
 degrees. They were successful. One section of 
 the Republican party is enraged at what it holds 
 to be a crusade, not for education but for the 
 Church; and for the Church, not as a spiritual 
 but as a political body. 
 
 A sketch of the Clerical party would be 
 incomplete without some account of two remark- 
 able men who, each in his own way, have 
 been its guides. I mean M. Dupanloup and 
 M. Louis Veuillot. The Bishop of Orleans was 
 at one time supposed to be a Gallican, and he 
 did show signs of independence at the Council 
 of the Vatican, by stoutly contending that to 
 
THE CLEEICAL PARTY. 71 
 
 proclaim the infallibility of the Pope would be 
 inopportune. He sometimes even betrayed a spirit 
 of independence and even waywardness, which 
 made the Frenchman gleam through the Catholic. 
 But no one was more persuaded than he that all 
 the calamities of France dated from the rejection 
 of the Cathohc faith, and he carried on an un- 
 pitying war against every form of infidelity. He 
 left the French Academy because it elected, in 
 M. Littre, a man who has no behef in any 
 higher teaching than that of science, and who 
 thinks that evolution explains the myriad varieties 
 of organic life and the discordant crowd of 
 religions and morahties. At the same time 
 Monseigneur Dupanloup was a man of hterary 
 culture, and he was not afraid to contend, against 
 the bigotry of his order, that the Roman and 
 the Grecian classics must have a place in any 
 scheme of Christian education. He was supposed 
 to be the Bossuet of these latter days — the only 
 kind of Bossuet which the new GaUican Church 
 is able to fashion. His style is not quite such 
 
72 rilANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 a model of all the higlier rhetorical qualities as 
 that of the man who wrote the " Oraisons 
 Funebres ; " but it is vigorous, terribly ready, 
 and as free from ambiguity as the scolding of 
 the street. If not quite a Bossuet^ he was a 
 superior " Henry of Exeter." A trenchant pam- 
 phleteer of the old school — an incarnate denial 
 of the precept, " Blessed are the meek " — the 
 bishop was ever warring against some form of 
 practical scepticism, and the centenaire festival in 
 honour of Voltaire drew from him a characteristic 
 explosion of wrath against the supreme literary 
 enemy of his Church. But he was much more 
 than a master of fluent vituperation. He was 
 a man of some political sagacity, and he had so 
 much force of character that he might have had 
 a considerable career as a statesman a hundred 
 and fifty years ago. His native shrewdness freed 
 him from a bigoted liking for any one form 
 of government, and he would have supported 
 the Eepublic if it would have given itself into 
 the hands of the Church. But, as a Liberal 
 
THE CLERICAL PARTY. 73 
 
 Republic must be auti - Catholic^ Monseigneur 
 Dupanloup pursued the goveriinient with pas- 
 sionate hostility. It had no more relentless foe ; 
 and, as he was certain that it was doing the 
 work of the devil, he was able to attack it 
 without the hindrance of scruple. Such was his 
 influence over the women who were highly placed 
 in political society, and over the men whom they 
 guided, that he wielded a great deal of unseen 
 power; and it is supposed that he did as much 
 as any person to bring about the combination 
 which, on the 16th May, 1877, attempted to 
 overturn the Republic. What he wanted was 
 a government which, whether imperial or 
 monarchical. Legitimist or parhamentary, should 
 be Clerical; a government which should give 
 the education of the young into the hands of 
 the priesthood, and virtually make the Jesuits 
 the academical iustructors of Prance ; which 
 should befriend the Pope and watch for a 
 chance of restoring his temporal power ; and 
 which, in one word, would make constant un- 
 
74 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 pitying war against the accursed principles of 
 tlie ReTolution. 
 
 The editor of the TTnivers has much less 
 influence amongst political men than had the 
 Bishop of Orleans, but he more faithfully reflects 
 the true spirit of his Church. Although a 
 secular writer, he is more theological than the 
 prelate, and indeed he has no other canon of 
 belief than the wiU of the Pope. No political 
 difiiculties come in his way, for political diffi- 
 culties are infinitely contemptible in the eyes of 
 a man to whom the Church is all in all. 
 What does it matter if so wretched a thing as 
 a republic or a parliamentary monarchy should 
 perish in striving to wrest the heritage of the 
 Papacy from robber hands ? A Legitimist 
 monarchy is more respectable than the Republic, 
 because, like the Church herself, it is built 
 on the spirit of obedience to authority. Thus 
 it smites the impious self-conceit of mankind, 
 and thus its interests would force it to do 
 battle for religion and the Holy Father. But 
 
THE CLEEICAL PARTY. 75 
 
 France will not accept a Legitimist king. She 
 will not so far bend lier proud and anti-Chris- 
 tian spirit as to recognise her rightful masters. 
 She has ceased to believe in God. She is 
 given over to the lust of the eye and the pride 
 of life, and hence there will come to her such 
 vengeance as awaits the enemies of Heaven. 
 M. Veuillot^s speculations are disturbed by none 
 of the vain subtilties which perplex men who 
 call themselves thinkers or philosophers. He 
 knows such men; he has found them out. They 
 are all charlatans, fools, or knaves. It is the 
 wickedness of their hearts which keeps them 
 away from the fold of the Church, or makes them 
 question her divine right to tell Mr. Darwin 
 that he is a presumptuous fool for pretending 
 to trace the pedigree of good Catholics back to 
 apes. 
 
 Had M. Veuillot no other distinction than 
 such ideas, he would be as vulgar a personage 
 as any priest who delivers a Lenten discourse on 
 the atheistic tendencies of science. But he 
 
76 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEE. 
 
 has moral and literary distinctions. He brings 
 into religious discussion the malignity and the 
 invective of which he made himself a master 
 when he was still in the camp of the uncon- 
 verted, and a writer for the petite presse of 
 Paris. As his change of life and creed was 
 very sudden, he had no time, in the middle 
 passage of repentance, to get rid of the bad 
 passions, or to blunt the unscrupulous epigrams, 
 which gave him daily bread when he trifled 
 for the Figaro. " So his writings," as I have 
 said elsewhere, "are the most wonderful pieces 
 of rhetoric ever laid at the feet of the Church. 
 They are such as might be written by a haunter 
 of cafes and theatres, a fast man about town, 
 a reader of loose novels, a master of profane 
 swearing, an orator of the democratic clubs, 
 if all these personages were rolled into one 
 tremendous compound, and if the corporate pro- 
 fanity were to be converted in a single night 
 to the faith that all Voltaireans are scoundrels, 
 that the real crown of thorns is kept under 
 
THE CLERICAL PASTY. 77 
 
 lock and seal hj the Archbishop of Paris, that 
 crowds of miracles are worked at LourdeSj and 
 that forty-nine people haye been raised from 
 the dead at Notre Dame de Lumieres of 
 Marseilles. The conversion of a single night 
 would, of course, leave many traces of the last 
 night's merriment, riot, or debauch. . . . The 
 convert would display no change of spirit, but 
 only a change of antipathies. He would curse 
 what he had been wont to bless, and bless what 
 he had been wont to curse ; but that would be 
 all. . . . Thus the editor of the Univers gives us 
 a Christianity which has been soaked in the mud 
 of the Quartier Latiu and the cafes cliantants, 
 a Christianity which has kept late hours, and 
 has been about town for a few centuries. Its 
 best quality is its virile and frank ferocity, for 
 it gives the new commandment, that if a man 
 strike thee on the one cheek thou shalt hit 
 
 him back, and hit hard In his old state 
 
 he believed nothing in particular, because the 
 Quartier Latin, the cafes and the petite presse 
 
VS FKANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 were armed with no OEcumenical Council. But 
 he is now as definite as if he kept an CEcumenical 
 Council in his inkbottle." * 
 
 M. Veuillot is eagerly read by the uncon- 
 verted throng of Frenchmen because he writes 
 an admirably vigorous^ glowing^ and epigram- 
 matic style. There is, on the whole, no more 
 effective journalist in Europe; and Frenchmen 
 would not be such literary artists as they are, 
 if they did not like to see themselves damned 
 in the best of French. But he is not so much 
 admired by the more Liberal of the Catholic 
 clergy, and, in truth, he has pursued them with 
 relentless calumny, jeering, and invective, because 
 his shrewd mother wit makes him see that they 
 are blinded by mischievous delusions. He has 
 said that " there is not, and that there cannot 
 be, such a thing as Liberal Catholicism." "A 
 Liberal," he adds, with pungent truth, " is not a 
 Catholic, and a Catholic is not a Liberal." Thus 
 does M. Veuillot strike the real note of his 
 * Spectator, Deo. 6, 1873. 
 
THE CLEEICAL PARTY. 79 
 
 Churcli. A Liberal Archbishop of Paris, Mon- 
 seigneur Sibour, was once so enraged at his 
 tone and temper as to prohibit the clergy from 
 reading the Univers. But the journalist was 
 defended by other prelates and sheltered by 
 the Vatican. There could be no more eloquent 
 sign of episcopal subjection than the fact that 
 a distinguished prelate, in the greatest diocese 
 in the world, should thus have been igno- 
 miniously compelled to withdraw from a contest 
 with an unsanctified layman. Thanks to the 
 protection of the Papacy, and to his own literary 
 talents, M. Veuillot has become a more important 
 power in France than any of the bishops them- 
 selves. He gives the law to the country clergy 
 and he dictates to their episcopal superiors. 
 The Vatican makes such use of him as it used 
 to make of the preaching friars, who, directly 
 commissioned by itself, might go into every 
 diocese, might teach without fear of episcopal 
 censure, and if they were hindered by bishop 
 or king, might carry their complaints direct to 
 
80 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 Rome. The Cliurch has no longer the old 
 employment for the Franciscans and the Domi- 
 nicans. The preaching friars of our day are 
 the writers for the Cathohc presSj and the chief 
 of them is M. Louis Veuillot. He is the 
 St. Dominic of these days, and he has discovered 
 no contemptible substitute for the thumb -screw 
 of the Inquisition in the invectives and the 
 calumnies which he learned to wield when he 
 lived in the literary slums of unbelief, and was 
 an inspired gamin de Paris. The editor of the 
 Univers is about the last person to whom the 
 devout would go for the charities of the Gospel, 
 and it is a satire on the Church of Bossuet 
 and Fenelon that its most effective pen should 
 be wielded by a man whom nature intended to 
 be a writer for the Figaro. Nor would anyone 
 dream of finding in his rich prose a gleam of 
 philosophical understanding. He is the Cobbett 
 of his Church. But his impatience of subtilties 
 makes him a better representative of average 
 Catholicism than men of finer spirit. If we 
 
THE CLEKICAIi PARTY. 81 
 
 would see what must be the pohtical temper 
 ■of Catholicism in this age of rationalistic Goths 
 and Vandals, we cannot afford to miss the pic- 
 turesque and perfectly convinced malignity of 
 M. Louis VeuiUot. 
 
 Such men as M. VeuiUot have their anti- 
 theological counterparts in the camp of the Repub- 
 licans. Indeed^ the enemies of the Clerical 
 party are quite as fanatical as the members of 
 that party itself. And^ just as the one faction 
 gathers round the most compact, skilful, worldly, 
 and successful of religious orders, so does the 
 other find a symbol of combat in the name of 
 the man who, taught in youth by that order, 
 became the greatest hterary enemy of its Church. 
 The influence of that society and of that writer 
 is felt everywhere in France. At the end of 
 every avenue to political power stands Loyola 
 or Voltaire — Loyola disguised and Voltaire dis- 
 guised, but as characteristic in their vehemence 
 as when in life they battled for supremacy. 
 The more scoffing kind of Voltaireanism, it is 
 
 G 
 
82 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 true, has gone out of fashion. Men of culture, 
 even when they do honour to Voltaire's mar- 
 vellous gifts, admit that his critical methods 
 would now be coarse and ineffective. The finer 
 sceptical minds are quick to confess the debt, 
 which Europe owes to the mediaeval Church. 
 Much of M. Littre's book, " Etudes sur les Bar- 
 bares et le Moyen Age," might have been written 
 by a devout Catholic, and Montalembert himself 
 has paid no higher tributes to the sanctity of 
 mediaeval Catholicism than M. Renan. Even 
 a fervid friend of the Church might scruple to 
 say, with the author of " Etudes d'Histoire 
 ReHgieuse," that, if he were condemned for 
 life to read but one book, he would choose the 
 Bollandist Lives of the Saints. The cultivated 
 critics of the Church are careful to mark the 
 contrast between the religion which expressed 
 the highest teaching of a past age and the 
 religion which is contradicted by the highest 
 teaching of ours. They oppose Catholicism chiefly 
 because they think that its political and moral 
 
THE CLEEICAL PARTY. 83 
 
 influence is hurtful to tlie best tendencies of 
 our time. In practice they do not fight it the 
 less vigorously because they see what good it did 
 centuries ago. Many of them feel conscientiously 
 bound to leave directions in their wills that they 
 shall be buried with purely civil rites. Such 
 was the command of Lamennais ; such was the 
 command of St. Beuve ; and such is the order 
 left by all the more fervid members of the Radical 
 party. They would be accounted renegades if 
 they did not thus protest against the spiritual 
 and poHtical claims of the Church with all the 
 solemnity of the grave. And a fiercer spirit is 
 found in the ranks which furnished the Commune 
 with its more ardent spirits. The artisans of 
 the great towns regard the Eoman Catholic 
 clergy with a feeling which is softened neither 
 by respect for rehgion itself^ nor by any knowledge 
 of what the Church has done for civilisation. 
 It is a feeling of something like sheer hatred. 
 M. Jules Favre was once asked to subscribe a 
 declaration of atheism, in order to show that he 
 
 G 2 
 
81 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 was wortliy to be trusted by the democracy o£ 
 Lyons. Such a demand is not uncommon among 
 the class which furnish the material of volcanic 
 passions, and it betrays a temper which left 
 terrible memorials of its fury in the last days 
 of the Commune. That spirit springs in part 
 from the tradition, that the priests have ever 
 taken the side of the rich and the powerful 
 against the poor and the lowly. It is also caused 
 by the inevitable interference of the clergy with 
 private as well as public life. The priest lays 
 claim to mystic graces infinitely more exalted than 
 any that Bossuet ever attributed to Louis XIV. 
 The French bear such pretensions less patiently 
 than any other people, because they have a 
 stronger sense than any other of human equality. 
 And they have seen too many proofs that the 
 claims of the priesthood are no empty show. 
 They know that the influence of the Church has 
 been used to buttress a hated monarchy, and to 
 overthrow a passionately loved republic. They 
 believe that it has produced wars which have 
 
THE CLBEICAL PARTY. 85 
 
 brought incalcula'ble woes to France. But the 
 main root of their dislike springs from a pro- 
 founder soil. It springs from the instinctive 
 feeling that, resting on authority and relying 
 on absolute obedience, the Church must wage 
 a war to the death against the spirit of the 
 Revolution, because that spirit is essentially 
 rationalistic, because it will have no hierarchies 
 save such as depend on free election or personal 
 quahties, and because it will recognise no 
 transmitted claims to exact obedience. Thus the 
 Church has not only taken the side of absolutism, 
 military rule, and privileged classes, but, by 
 nursing the spirit of obedience to inherited 
 authority, she has given the majority of her 
 devotees a powerful bias against the Republic. 
 
 The Catholic Church has built one type of 
 society; the spirit of the Revolution is building 
 another ; and in France, at least, the two are 
 profoundly and implacably hostile. Ultimately 
 they will not be able to live together unless 
 one or other should greatly change. Either 
 
86 TEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 Catholicism must give up its political pretensions 
 or tlie Democratic Republicans must abandon 
 their ideals. 
 
 Liberal Catholics^ it is truej hope for a day of 
 reconciliation between the two camps. In the 
 doctrines and the constitution of the Church there 
 is nothingj they say, hostile to a democratic 
 society or a repubhcan government. She finds 
 herself at home in America; why should she not 
 find herself at home in Prance^ when the memory 
 of old strifes shall have become dim ? Books have 
 been written to show that the " principles of '89," 
 if properly understood, might be taught from the 
 pulpit. The political difiiculties of the Syllabus it- 
 self have been explained away by intrepid casuists. 
 Father Curci, one of the ablest as well as the 
 boldest of the reconcilers, would entrust the future 
 of the Papacy itself to the good- will of the Italian 
 democracy. To discuss these speculations would 
 lead the present writer far beyond the purpose 
 of this sketch. It is enough to say that they 
 seem to be very far indeed from the eve of 
 
THE CLERICAL PARTY. 87 
 
 fulfilment. Men like M. Gambetta laugh, at tlie 
 Liberalism of sucb Catholics as M. de Montalembert 
 and M. de Palloux, wbo in the last resort are as 
 obedient to the Vatican as M. Veuillot himseK. 
 M. Veuillot, as we have said before, roundly 
 asserts that a Liberal Catholic is no Catholic at 
 all, and it must be confessed that the daily 
 practice of his Church lends too much colour 
 to this theory. She has no time to iuquire 
 what the Eepublic might do if it were suddenly 
 to become Catholic. Is the Repubhc, it asks, 
 hostile to the Church at this moment ? Does 
 the Republic seek to make education compul- 
 sory, and therefore secular? Does it debar the 
 priests from giving the peasantry political com- 
 mands when some one has to be sent to the 
 Chamber of Deputies ? Is it as favourable as a 
 monarchy or an empire would be to the territorial 
 claims of the Papacy? Is it more likely than 
 a monarchy or an empire would be to lend an 
 ear to those Radicals who, by stopping the salaries 
 of the clergy, would give the last touch to 
 
88 FRANCE SmCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 tlie pillage of the Eevolution ? If the answer 
 to such questions is unfavourable, the theological 
 temper will prefer a military despotism to a 
 reign of what it would call impiety. It is 
 futile to wonder at such a choice, and to blame 
 it would be unjust. As well might the raven 
 be blamed for its note or the rattlesnake for 
 its fangs. 
 
 It is not too much to say that all the deeper 
 disputes of France are rooted in theological 
 animosities. She is disturbed chiefly because the 
 religious fervour of her people has been cast into 
 the practical strifes of politics, instead of finding 
 an outlet in the speculative controversies and the 
 schisms of the Churches. Her parliamentary 
 factions are sects rather than parties. 
 
 The machinery of the Government wiU never 
 work smoothly until one or other of the two 
 belligerent minorities shall have perished, or 
 both have been softened by indifference. France 
 will be as peaceful as England when her active 
 
THE CLERICAL PARTY. 89 
 
 minorities shall care as little as our own about 
 the disputes -wliicli go down to the depths of 
 society. Compromise, it has been said, is the 
 soul of politics. It is equally true that indif- 
 ference is the soul of compromise. But Praace 
 is interesting as well as troublesome, because she 
 is not a Gallio. 
 
 There could be worse things than the frank 
 hostility of the Radical Republicans to the Church. 
 StiU worse would be a conspiracy of silence for 
 the purpose of putting rehgion at the service of 
 some unscrupulous saviour of society and his atten- 
 dant gamblers in the Bourse. Nevertheless, an 
 indescribably great and irreparable loss must fall 
 on that country which has ceased to be fired by 
 religious traditions and ideals. A nation cannot 
 live on the glories of art, or the good bargains 
 which are tabulated by Boards of Trade. A 
 nation must pursue ideals and be animated by 
 unca/lculating enthusiasm, or it will soon become 
 the stunted slave of its appetite for comfort 
 
so FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 and pleasure. Happily France lacks neither ideals 
 nor entliusiasm. The political part of the com- 
 munity is stirred by the story of the Revolution, 
 and by the glow of hope which centres in the 
 Eepublic. The Republic, be it a Moloch or 
 the symbol of beneficent rule, has already had 
 as many martyrs as some religions. But, after 
 all, the traditions of secular history can have 
 no such purifying or ennobling influence as the 
 deposit of spiritual life left by the great streams 
 of Christianity. The examples of Robespierre 
 and Danton are not quite so inspiring as the 
 lives of St. Francis or St. Bernard. As we 
 reflect on that fact, we must also think what 
 might have been if priests and courts had not 
 closed the avenues of rational devotion. It is 
 bitter to remember what loss was inflicted on 
 the political as well as the religious life of France 
 when her Protestant communities were destroyed 
 by massacre, by breach of solemn compacts, by 
 an exodus of disastrous magnitude, by all the 
 
THE CLERICAL PARTY. 91 
 
 ages of persecution which make up the pathetic 
 and awful records of the Huguenots. It is bitter 
 to recall such lost possibilities in the midst of 
 acrid impiety and unscrupulous fanaticism. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 EEVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAECHT. 
 
 One of the most interesting experiments in 
 all tlie history of France was the attempt to 
 revive a Legitimist monarchy amid the ruins 
 left by the Revolution. The most briUiant 
 nobility and the most powerful Church in 
 Europe had been effaced. The most aristo- 
 cratic of societies had been pulverised into 
 untitled units by the tremendous roller of the 
 Republic. And the Republic itself was gone; 
 the Consulate was gone; the Empire was gone. 
 The revolutionary names had become but 
 memories ; and a lonely rock in the Atlantic 
 was about to be the prison^ and was soon to 
 
EEVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAECHY. 93 
 
 be tlie gravBj of the great man wliose selfishness, 
 and disdain for suffering, and passion for glory, 
 were scarcely less wonderful than his mighty 
 genius. But amid all this ruin the Revolution 
 had left a form of society, bound together by 
 instincts of equality, and planted on something 
 like equality of inheritance. The Revolution 
 had placed, not indeed the government, but 
 what is incomparably more important, the 
 social constitution, on foundations of adamant, 
 and had given France a greater promise of 
 stability in the future than any other country 
 of Western Europe. 
 
 Such was the France which the Bourbons 
 saw when they came back from their long 
 esUe in 1814, and a second time in 1815. It 
 has been said that they were exactly the same 
 when they returned as they had been when 
 they went away, having "^ learned nothing and 
 forgotten nothing" from the terrible calamities 
 which had been largely brought about by their 
 own folly. But that taunt is not quite true. 
 
94 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 SO far at least as regards tlie new king, 
 Louis XVIII. No one knew better how 
 hopeless or how fatal would be any attempt 
 to turn back the democratic stream, and build 
 anew the whole of the ancient society. He 
 was the cleverest and most cultivated man of 
 his family. He used to study and write in 
 the old days of Louis XV. when he was 
 the Comte de Provence, when the most potent 
 personage at the court was Madame Dubarry, and 
 when none but philosophic dreamers feared a 
 revolution. "You must put that question to 
 the Comte de Provence," his brother, the 
 Due de Berri, would say when he was asked 
 about something within the compass of printed 
 books. The Comte de Provence read much, 
 and wrote pretty well for a prince. He wrote 
 squibs against Turgot. He wrote plays at the 
 old court ; during his exUe and after the 
 Restoration he wrote an astonishing number 
 of neatly- expressed letters. He was the polite 
 letter-writer in person. And he was also as 
 
EEVITAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 95 
 
 free from what some people call superstition 
 and otters belief as many an abbe of the old 
 French Church. It was whispered that he 
 was a Voltairean, and his favourite author 
 was well known to be Horace. A culti- 
 vated man of the world, a cynic, and a 
 cold voluptuary, he was a king in whom 
 it is difficult even for the spirit of loyalty 
 itself to find a hero. But he had a hard 
 clear brain ; he really saw some of the deeper 
 meanings of the Revolution ; and he was in 
 no mood for tilting against the windmills of 
 democracy, Hke his Quixotic brother and 
 successor, the Comte d'Ajtois. So he gave 
 his subjects the assurance of many liberties in 
 the form of a charter or constitution. 
 
 At the same time no Bourbon was ever 
 prouder of his lineage, or more tenacious of 
 all the forms which expressed the majesty of 
 the French throne. He never allowed even 
 the obscurity and the privations of exile to- 
 lower the dignity of the phrases which befitted 
 
96 . FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 tlie head of the greatest family in Earope. 
 When the Doge of Venice, at the bidding of 
 Napoleon, had invited him to quit Verona in 
 the darkest days of his fortunes, he proudly 
 answered that he would leave the town, but 
 that six names of his family must be erased 
 from the golden book of the Venetian nobility, 
 and he demanded the return of the sword which 
 his ancestor, Henry IV., had presented to the 
 Venetian Republic- When Napoleon promised 
 to give him great territorial estates if he would 
 surrender his claims to the French throne, he 
 answered that, as the successor of Francis I., 
 he wished, at least, to keep the power of 
 saying: " Nojis avons tout perdu, fors I'honneur." 
 
 Such a prince was true to the character of a 
 lifetime when, on coming to the Tuileries, he 
 restored much of the stately pomp which had 
 made Versailles the most brilliant court in Europe. 
 Some of the greatest nobles in France actively 
 performed such duties as seem to have a menial 
 air when unsanctified by courts. The master of 
 
EEVITAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 97 
 
 the household was the Due d'Bscars^ -whom the 
 king called his grand maitre de la cuisine. That 
 great noble^ it is said, had profoundly studied 
 the art of cookery, was proud of the original 
 genius with which he could minister to the 
 subtleties of taste, and gave, it has been said, 
 as much thought to the plan of a dinner as a great 
 general would give to the plan of a campaign.* 
 Another noble, M. de Cosse Brissac, had the 
 direction of the paneterie. A third, the Oomte 
 de Rothe, was the king's chief cup-bearer. A 
 fourth, the Marquis de Montdragon, had the 
 honour of asking his Majesty what he would 
 have for dinner. And the grand chamberlain 
 of the king, the great noble who stood behind 
 his chair at dianer, and who had the privilege 
 of aiding him in the sacred mysteries of his 
 toilette, was the ex-bishop, ex-revolutionist, ex- 
 confiscator of the Church' lands, ex-servant of 
 the Directory, ex-spy, ex-Foreign Minister of 
 
 * " Histoire de la Restaxu-ation. Par nn Homme d'Etat." 
 P. 233. 
 
 n 
 
98 PRANCB SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 Napoleon, ex-betrayer of Napoleon, ex-ambassador 
 at Vienna, ex-Foreign Minister of Louis XVIII. 
 himself, ex-everytbing ; tbe coldest heart and 
 keenest tongue in Europe ; tbe arcb intriguer 
 wbo bad deserted every master tbat be bad 
 served, and wbo bad still to desert another ; 
 whose vulpine sagacity took him more swiftly 
 than an intellect like Bonaparte's, to tbe place 
 where booty lay; whose life was one long 
 incarnate refutation of the maxim that '''' honesty 
 is the best policy ; " the consummate diplomatist 
 who bad enriched himself with the pillage of 
 commissions on the diplomatic work which he 
 bad done for his imperial master, and whose 
 career was furrowed with lies; but who always 
 told his falsehoods, and stole, and gave his bene- 
 factors up to tbe police, and got to the right 
 side of the hedge, with the consummate grace 
 and good-breeding of a grand seigneur of old 
 France. No man ever lifted bis bat so grace- 
 fully to tbe devil as M. de Talleyrand. He 
 kept his place at tbe Tuileries chiefly for a 
 
EEVITAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 99 
 
 reason wHcli he himself expressed, when Louis 
 XVIII. flattered him by asking how he had 
 managed to trip up both the Directory and 
 Napoleon. " Mon Bieu.sire," he modestly replied, 
 ^'je n'ai rien fait pour cela. C'est quelque chose 
 d'inexplieahle quej'ai en moi, et qui porte malheur 
 aux gouvernements qui me negligent." Accordingly 
 the Bourbons did not neglect Talleyrand. But 
 even he might have found his tenure of 
 courtly office less secure if his skill in the 
 courtier's art had not been equal to his disdain 
 for the moral law. For at the Tuileries reigned 
 much of that matchless ease, and dignity, and 
 grace of manner which had been the chief 
 distinction of Versailles. The court of the re- 
 stored Bourbons was incomparably the finest 
 school of ceremonial poHteness in Europe. Per- 
 haps our own may have been slightly like it in 
 the days of the Stuarts. The courtiers had much 
 of that composed serenity which enabled Talleyrand 
 to bear in silence a shower of Napoleon's ferocious 
 itaunts, and then say to a companion as he limped 
 
 H 2 
 
jOO FEAiTCB SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 downstairs : " What a pity it is tliat so great a 
 man should be so badly bred." 
 
 The king and the princes of the blood showed 
 for the monarchy and all its hierarchies a degree 
 of devout respect such as humbler folk keep for 
 the sanctities of religion. Louis XV III. went 
 through the ceremonies of the Tuileries, and 
 uttered regal words of greeting to his courtiers, 
 and presided at the couacU table, even when so 
 paralysed by disease that he had to be wheeled 
 about in a chair, and when his limbs were already 
 stifiening into death. "A king of France dies, 
 but he is never ill," was his reply to the entreaties 
 of ministering affection a few days before the 
 close. And the majesty of the courtly etiquette 
 would not unbend even in the presence of death 
 itself. One night the end came to the proud 
 spirit of the old king ; the public gardens of the 
 Tuileries were filled with people watching for 
 the token that he had passed away; couriers 
 were ready to speed through France with the 
 message that the people had a new master; the 
 
REVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 101 
 
 heralds were waiting in tlie ante-ctambers for 
 the summons to proclaim^ " Le Boi est mort ! 
 Vive le Boi ! " the courtiers were preparing to 
 bend before their new sovereign ; and, amid all 
 these accompaniments of natural suspense, the 
 king's brother and heir, the Comte d'Artois, his 
 nephew and his niece, the Due and the 
 Duchesse d'Angouleme, knelt beside the bed of 
 the dying monarch. After he had passed away, 
 the new king, the new dauphin, and the new 
 dauphiness rose to quit the room; and, as they 
 were about to leave it, what was the first impulse 
 of the rehgious, austere, sorrowful Duchesse 
 d'Angouleme ? It was a grand tribute to etiquette. 
 Hitherto, as the daughter of Louis XVI., she 
 had possessed the right of preceding her husband, 
 who had only been the nephew of a king; but 
 that right ceased from the moment at which 
 his father inherited the throne; and, as the 
 tearful group of mourners were about to go out 
 of the room in which Louis lay dead, the duchess 
 was the first to signify the change in her rank 
 
102 FRANCE SINCE THE FIKST EMPIRE. 
 
 with the words : " Passes, Monsieur le Dauphin." 
 Nothing could bend the etiquette of Bourbon 
 dignity. One may smile at such a worship of 
 form, and wish for a little more naturalness. 
 Some of us may say that the graces of Versailles 
 and the TuHeries could have been learned only 
 by making the little elegancies of speech and 
 form more momentous than the larger things of 
 public duty. Yet nations lose something when 
 they give up, as they must do in the midst of 
 modern hurry, the grand air of the old society. 
 Life should be gracious as well as enlightened, 
 the friction of unlimited competition should be 
 eased by those courtesies which are the codiiied 
 marks of self-respect or good-will, and we should 
 ever keep in mind the civilising influence of 
 dignity. Let us not forget that the old courts, 
 if they spent our money and shed our blood 
 without our leave, did teach us manners. 
 
 But the French court of the Eestoration had 
 to think of more serious things than deportment 
 and the plenary inspiration of court circulars; 
 
REVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 103 
 
 and, in trath, the social side of the Tuileries 
 was of small account compared with the political. 
 While Louis XVIII. was as nearly a Liberal as 
 providential arrangements would, allow a crowned 
 Bourbon of the elder branch to be, his brother, 
 the Comte d^Artois, had all the grand pretensions 
 of the old court, which assumed that the rule of 
 the Bourbons was cunningly interwoven with the 
 final arrangements of the universe, and that a 
 main purpose of the Christian revelation was to 
 provide the kings of France with an apostolical 
 succession of private chaplains. Of the Comte 
 d^Artois it was really true that he had learned 
 nothing and forgotten nothing from the calamities 
 of exile. His stormy and pleasure-loving youth 
 at Versailles had left him neither time nor taste 
 for the studies and the society which had softened 
 the inherited ideas of his elder brother, and 
 made many of the young nobles disciples of 
 Voltaire. He had hated the Eevolution from 
 the outset. He would not have given way one 
 inch to Mirabeau and the other revolutionists 
 
104 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 wlio tad come to Versailles, with insolent demands 
 that the pinched common people should hare 
 some power of saying how far they might be 
 fleeced for the benefit of the courtiers. He 
 fancied that his brother, Louis XVI., might have 
 died quietly in bed, and that there would have 
 been no Revolution, and no Napoleon, and no 
 upheaval of European society, if Mirabeau and 
 other troublesome talkers had been locked up. 
 A German is said to have reasoned in the same 
 fashion about the source of the water in the 
 Danube. The great river is said to rise in the 
 pleasure-grounds of a gentleman in the Black 
 Forest. On seeing the little bubbling spring, 
 the countryman clapped his hat upon it, held 
 back the water for a minute or two, and exclaimed : 
 "Won't the people of Vienna be astonished at 
 the stoppage of the Danube ! " A great many 
 political reasoners are like that profound rustic, 
 and the Comte d'Artois was one of them. 
 Hence, when the Bastile fell, and the court 
 bowed before the democratic storm, he saw 
 
REVITAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 105 
 
 tliat Prance was no place for Mm, and lie 
 secretly quitted Versailles with Ms two sons, 
 the Due d'Angouleme and the Due de Berry. 
 Exile, the beheading of the Mng and the queen, the 
 Reign of Terror, and the Empire, only deepened 
 his hatred of all that was meant by the symbol 
 of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Eeligious 
 feelings gave in time a touch of spiritual fervour 
 to Ms Bourbonic creed. A strange story is told to 
 mark the turning-point of Ms life. His ' mistress, 
 Madame de Polastron, when on a penitent death- 
 bed, is said to have made him take the communion 
 along with her, share with her one consecrated 
 wafer, and vow, amid all the solemnity of the 
 viaticum, that he would henceforth be true to 
 her metaory and live in the sight of the Church, 
 He is believed to have kept his word. At all 
 events, he felt bound by all the sanctities of 
 religion to put down the revolutionary spirit, 
 which had made the France of St. Louis set 
 up the Goddess of Reason. But outwardly he was, 
 when he returned to Paris, the same charming. 
 
106 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 gracious, lively being as he had been in the 
 court of Marie Antoinette. He had the same 
 vanity and love of applause ; the same passion 
 for the chase ; the same fervent belief in the 
 magical power of good breeding. He meant to 
 conquer the people by his smiles and gestures 
 and light words of courtesy. Sometimes he was 
 compared to our own Prince Regent. As 
 Thackeray has said, it was a matter of dispute 
 which of the two princes was the first gentleman 
 in Europe. Even the most patriotic loyalty must 
 admit, however, that our own gracious prince 
 would have stood the comparison better, if he 
 had paid some slight heed to the imperative 
 part of the twentieth chapter of Exodus, and 
 possessed a trifling pinch of the virtues which 
 could have been found among the least of his 
 own lackeys. The Comte d^Artois at all events 
 was a model of gracious courtesy, and when he 
 entered Paris amid a crowd of the Royalists who 
 had been waiting for the return of their old 
 princes, he seemed to smile forgiveness even 
 
REVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. lOT 
 
 upon the agents of revolution. " Plus cle 
 divisions : la paix et la France ; je la revois 
 enfin, et rien n'y est change," he is reported to have 
 said, " si ce nest qu'il s'y trouve un FranQais cle 
 plus." He never did utter these words ; they 
 were made up for him in the house of M. de 
 Talleyrand, ty M. Beugnot, a well-known French- 
 man, who was set by the arch-master of deception 
 to give a glowing account of the royal entry, 
 and put into the prince's mouth some such mot 
 as all Frenchmen could quote. "That is what 
 Monsieur said/' exclaimed Talleyrand, as soon 
 as the words were read to him ; " I will answer 
 for him." So the phrase was put into the 
 Moniteur. The French were delighted by the 
 charming verbal grace of the heir to the crown; 
 the prince himself never denied that he had 
 spoken with a royal command of his native 
 language, and I daresay that in time he as 
 firmly fancied himself to be the author of 
 Beugnot's mot as our own Prince Regent believed, 
 in certain, stages of convivial faith, that he had 
 
108 FRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 been at the battle of Waterloo. Nay, it is said 
 that M. Beugnotj again at the prompting of 
 Talleyrand, coined the almost equally famous 
 boast with which Louis XVIII. is stated to have 
 met the threat of the Prussians to blow up the 
 bridge of Jena. The king was said to have 
 declared that they would have to blow him into 
 the air with it, for he would take his seat upon 
 the emblem of the great Erench victory. That 
 vaunt, it is said, was composed for him, or at 
 least put into the concise form which would 
 please the most literary nation in the world. 
 The kings of France were as well served by the 
 loyalty of wit as less favoured monarchs are by 
 the mechanical loyalty of illuminations. 
 
 But the court soon found sterner work to do 
 than dispensing smiles and accepting the paternity 
 of foundling mots. The Comte d^Artois was sure 
 that his brother was going the way of Louis XVI. 
 by dabbling in constitutions. He had a true 
 Bourbon contempt for that ministerial responsibility 
 of which we in this country are so proud. He 
 
EEVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 109> 
 
 would govern as well as reign. He would command, 
 and Ms ministers should obey. "1 would rather 
 saw wood," he said, " than be a king on the same 
 conditions as the King of England." 
 
 At first the Comte d'Artois would not take that 
 oath of constitational fidelity which was exacted 
 from all the peers and the deputies. Even his final 
 consent was only of that reluctant kind which 
 leaves a keen scent for the possibilities of evasion. 
 Eound him gathered a group of persons as con- 
 vinced as himself that the only way to keep 
 down the spirit of revolution was to revive the- 
 kingly temper which had enabled Louis XTV. to 
 m.eet the Parliament of Paris with a riding switch 
 in his hand. Among others was a princess, who is,. 
 perhaps, the most pathetic figure among all the 
 courts of this century. Daughter of Louis XVI. and 
 Marie Antoinette, the Duchesse d^Angouleme had 
 been imprisoned with her parents in the Temple. 
 Her father and mother and aunt had perished under 
 the guillotine. Her brother, the dauphin, had died 
 of cruel treatment in the revolutionary prison.. 
 
110 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 Already her cup of sorrow was so full that she 
 had been called the Antigone of France. Grief 
 had hardened her political ideas into austerity, 
 and her strength of spirit would have made her 
 a formidable power if her cousin and husband, 
 the new dauphin, had ever reached the throne. 
 Napoleon said that she was the only man of her 
 family. Pity for her immense misfortunes and 
 her really noble character was mingled with 
 irritation at the stinging words which she threw 
 at all who declined to be abjectly submissive to 
 the throne and the Church. She was so sincere 
 that, although a Bourbon, she often forgot to be 
 pohte. One day she was at the Tuileries when 
 Charles X. was receiving the chief dignitaries of 
 France, and among others the judges of the highest 
 court of appeal in Paris. Those magistrates had 
 deeply offended the king and his friends by giving 
 a decision which asserted the freedom of the press, 
 at a time when the court had tried to crush liberty 
 •of speech. When they came to make their bow 
 to the Dachesse d'Angouleme, she made a quick 
 
EEVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. Ill 
 
 gesture ■with, her f aiij and angrily said : " Passea ! " 
 The memory of such words lived longer than that 
 of real injuries. 
 
 Eound the duchess and her father-in-law, the 
 Comte d'Artois, gathered many congenial spirits 
 in that part of the Tuileries which was called the 
 Pavilion Marsan. There was to be found a rival 
 court to that of the king. It was a court com- 
 posed in part of nobles who had once listened to 
 the promptings of a passion for reform or change. 
 Some of them may have spoken lightly of the 
 clergy amid the fatal irreverence which, they 
 thought, had ruined the monarchy. Some of them 
 m.ay have enjoyed the scofl&ng epigrams of Voltaire. 
 Some may have chatted with courtiers who had 
 gone to those select little atheistical supper parties, 
 m one of which our own countryman, David 
 Hume, found himself the most orthodox man in 
 the room. But in exile all of them had learned 
 to believe that the Church had been the very 
 keystone of the social fabric which had borne the 
 court and the aristocracy. It was the revolt 
 
112 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 against religious tradition, they were convinced, 
 that had made peasant and artisan pull down the 
 great hierarchy of social ranks which had been 
 bound together by inherited beliefs, aifection, and 
 loyalty — in one word, by the mysterious cement 
 of tradition. It was criticism divorced from the 
 guidance of the Church, it was arrogant philosophy, 
 it was impiety that had turned the French people 
 against the rulers and the social superiors who had 
 been set over them by Heaven. Thus many of the 
 emigres, as they were called, came to see in all 
 forms of liberty so many kinds of revolt against 
 divine order. Their hatred of Voltaireanism and 
 of Liberalism gathered a religious intensity as they 
 lived, poor and neglected, in the back streets of 
 London, and it might be said that their mourning 
 for the old lost gaiety of Versailles had something 
 of Hebrew bitterness. A poet might say that 
 they tuned their harps sadly to the strains of the 
 Church, and that by the waters of our own Babylon 
 they sat down and wept as they remembered 
 the Zion of the Seine. 
 
EEVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAEOHT. 113 
 
 Men and women who came back in tliat temper 
 were not inclined to tolerate either the manners 
 or the claims of the masters who had grown up 
 in France daring their absence. So aristocratic 
 a court as that of the Tuileries naturally disdained 
 the plebeian nobles^ whom Napoleon had lifted to 
 the highest ranks of his brand-new peerage for 
 their prowess on the battle-field. The smallest 
 sprig of ancient nobility affected to look down 
 on the rough soldiers whose fame had been carried 
 to the ends of the earth by the victories of the 
 Grand Army. In one case there is reason to believe 
 that disdain did much to shape a great and me- 
 morable tragedy. When the emperor was banished 
 to Elba, the most briUiantj if not the ablest^ of all 
 his commanderSj Marshal Ney, naturally put his 
 sword at the service of a court which had be- 
 come the governing symbol of the nation. When 
 the emperor broke away from Blba^ Ney boasted 
 to the king that he would bring Bonaparte 
 back to Paris in a cage. But on leaving the 
 capital to take command of the army^ the 
 
 I 
 
114 FEAJSrCB SrsrCB THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 marslial poured out a torrent of reproaches 
 against the Bourbons. "I will not be humi- 
 liated I" he exclaimed to one of his old comrades. 
 He bitterly complained that his wife came home 
 to him with tears in her eyes, on account of 
 the indignities to which she was subjected ia 
 the Tuileries; and he did not choose that the 
 wife of Michael Ney, Marshal of France, Due 
 d'Elchingen, Prince de la Moskowa, the victor 
 of Ulm and Friedland, the hero of the retreat 
 from Moscow, "the bravest of the brave," should 
 be insulted by the wives of nobles who were 
 personally unfit to command a corporal's guard, 
 and who owed their social position to an acci- 
 dent. He also complained that the king meant 
 to set aside the generals of the Empire. " It 
 is only with Bonaparte," he added, "that we 
 can have consideration." Thus was Ney induced 
 to betray his trust by going over to the side 
 of Napoleon. The result was those Hundred 
 Days of imperial power, which were cut short 
 by the battle of Waterloo and the banishment 
 
EBYIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 115 
 
 of Napoleon to St. Helena^ That Ney had 
 committed a crime is indispntable ; but excuses 
 might be found in the conflict of authority in 
 France; and at all eyents his comrades, as well 
 as himself, beheved that he was entitled to 
 the benefit of an amnesty by the conditions on 
 which Paris was surrendered to the allied armies. 
 Even if he had not been sheltered, the king 
 and the courtiers might have been expected to 
 remember that Ney was among the greatest of 
 Frenchmen, and that clemency peculiarly became 
 Bourbons who had encouraged the enemies of 
 their own country. But the courtiers said that 
 Ney should die; the ladies of the palace were 
 even more bitter than their husbands ; the 
 Duchesse d^Angouleme, sad to say, vehemently 
 insisted that the marshal should be shot ; 
 Madame Ney passionately appealed to the Duke 
 of Wellington, who only referred her to the 
 king, and the king would speak no word of 
 mercy. So Michael Ney died one morning 
 under the balls of a firing-party in the gardens 
 
 I 2 
 
116 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 of tte Luxembourg. He died as became "^tbe 
 bravest of tlie brave." And it would have 
 been better for the Bourbons to bave lost a 
 great battle, than to have left such a memory 
 of their inability to forgive a great foe. 
 
 The king equally refused to pardon another 
 of the soldiers who had helped Napoleon, Colonel 
 Labedoyere, in spite of the frantic entreaties of 
 his wife. A civilian who had been convicted 
 of the same crime, M. de Lavalette, was saved 
 from death only by the romantic heroism of 
 Madame de Lavalette, who went to his cell, 
 changed clothes with him, and thus enabled 
 him to escape. Many more — generals and 
 officials — would have died if the king and his 
 ministers had not at last resolutely set themselves 
 against the avenging spirit of the courtiers. 
 The most reckless of all judges and politicians 
 are not ambitious kings, or even vapouring 
 ministers, but the idlers of courts, the loafers 
 in clubs, and the wealthy horse - jockeys, who 
 shout appeals for the excitement of vengeance 
 
BEVrVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAECHT. 117 
 
 or war from the back benches to which they 
 are banished by their own intellectual feeble- 
 ness. The French ministers could show clemency 
 at Paris, but they were not so well able to keep 
 down the fury of the Eoyalists in the provinces. 
 Thus was the Red Terror succeeded by the 
 White. It is a sickening story of assassination 
 and massacre. Violence, unhappily, is not con- 
 fined to any one faction ; reaction may leave 
 as dark traces as revolution ; and neither a 
 courtly manner nor loyalty to kings is proof 
 against the plebeian impulses of passion. 
 
 Among the party which gathered round the 
 Comte d'Axtois, and which thought that it was 
 the last hope of the monarchy, the temper of 
 intolerance was curiously stimulated by the spirit 
 of theology. When the emigres returned to 
 Prance, they found that the religious character 
 of their pohtical creed was already embodied in 
 an organisation which was to grow until it should 
 almost overshadow the State itself. That was 
 the famous Congregation. Many of us when 
 
118 EEXNCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 we read tie Republican ioumals of France, may 
 wonder ab the space whicli they give to the 
 denunciation of the Clerical party or the Jesuits. 
 In this country we are inclined to doubt the 
 political sagacity of any member of Parliament 
 who rises in his place to blame the Jesuits for 
 anything that may happen to have gone wrong 
 in Church or State. We have come to admit, 
 in fact, that Jesuits are pretty much like other 
 people, and even to suspect that Pascal did 
 them some injustice in his " Lettres Ecrites a 
 un Provincial." We cannot understand, there- 
 fore, why one French statesman says, " Le cleri- 
 caKsme, c'est Vennemi ; " why Prince JTapoleoTi 
 exclaimed, " Semen le Jesuite, et moissonnez la 
 revolte;" or why so able a newspaper as La 
 B'eptMiqiiB Frangaise, lately the organ of 
 M. Grambetta, should spend columns in the 
 denunciatioxi of the political power of the 
 French priests, who, in all the private relations 
 of hfe, are really very good sort of people. 
 We cannot understand these things, nor can we 
 
REVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAEOHY. 119 
 
 trace the causes whicli ruined the monarchy 
 of the Eestoration^ unless we cast a glance at 
 that mysterious, renowned, and hated Congrega- 
 tion, which the emigres found budding into power 
 when they returned to France. 
 
 When that country was blockaded during the 
 wars of Napoleon, the Societe des Missions 
 Etrang^res found itself nearly cut off from its 
 old ground of work in pagan countries. So it 
 turned its attention to the paganism of France. 
 Soon there gathered round it many of those 
 Eoyalist nobles who sincerely believe that the 
 restoration of religion must go hand in hand 
 with the restoration of monarchy. Placed under 
 the authority of a Jesuit, the society was speedily 
 organised with aU the skill which never fails his 
 great order. It had secret relations with all the 
 departments of the State even in the time of the 
 Empire; and it was enabled to become a great 
 political as well as a religious power by the 
 return of the king. Its aims were to overcome 
 the still powerful Voltaireanism, to make the 
 
120 FRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 FrencL. people loyal to the Crown, and to give to 
 devotion to the Bourbons a religious fervour. 
 In order to escape criticism it was organised as 
 a secret society. A distinguished ecclesiastic was 
 at the head of the order^ and round him were 
 gathered a group of trusted priests and laymen. 
 The inner circle was scarcely ever reached except 
 by men of the highest social station and unim- 
 peachable devotion to the Church. Next came a 
 much larger group of devotees who were going 
 through the duties of a novitiate. These two 
 groups were really the Congregation, and they 
 secretly met in the Eue du Bac for religious 
 worship and consultation on the political pros- 
 perity of the Church. In a looser way were 
 affiliated a crowd of the men who held the 
 highest posts in the court, the army, and the 
 public service. Gradually indeed the Congre- 
 gation included all the men who were at once 
 intensely Catholic and iatensely Legitimist. It 
 is said to have included three members of the 
 royal family, one prince outside that circle, twa 
 
EEYIYAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAEOHT. 121 
 
 dukeSj fifteen marquiseSj thirty-four counts^ eight 
 viscountSj twenty-one barons, and thirty-five cheva- 
 liers, beside a crowd of generals, judges, barristers, 
 and deputies. They formed literary societies for 
 the spreading of healthy doctrines ; others for the 
 dehvery of lectures to the working people; and 
 others, under the patronage of Saint Joseph, to 
 help the industrial poor. Thus were loyalty to 
 the Pope and the king, the cause of religion and 
 of the Bourbons, divine duty and divine right, 
 spread abroad in fly-sheets, insinuated in popular 
 discourses, broadly taught in the pulpit, and doled 
 out by charity organisation committees. The 
 Congregation had its own wine-shops, the keepers 
 of which had to see that their clients were loyal 
 and religious as well as thirsty. The Congre- 
 gation gave certificates of character to domestic 
 servants, and thus turned itself into a register 
 office for the propagation of the faith. The 
 Congregation had enabled the Jesuits to come 
 back to Prance under the shadow of courtly 
 favour, although their presence was forbidden 
 
122 FKANCB SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 by lawj and, under fanciful titles, they planted 
 colleges to whicli aU tlie great Catholic families 
 sent their sons. The Congregation laid its hand 
 on a vast number of the elementary schools by 
 founding a half-clerical and celibate brotherhood 
 of teachers, who are to this day the propagandists 
 of Catholic doctrine in the class-rooms of the 
 poor, and whom the Republican party is eager 
 to drive from the communal schools. Perhaps 
 the Congregation crowned its work by buying 
 Mont Valerien. At that time Mont Valerien was 
 merely a rounded eminence, and not, as it is now, 
 a great fortress frowning in grim strength over 
 the exquisite valley and beautiful windings of 
 the Seine. A retreat was built on the top of 
 that hill, and it took the form of a remarkably 
 comfortable and decidedly expensive hotel, with 
 a good billiard-room and a first-rate cellar. 
 Thither rich penitents might go to profit by the 
 counsel of the Jesuit fathers. If they sought to 
 give special proofs of devotion to the Queen of 
 Heaven, and therefore to the King of France, 
 
EEVrVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONABCHT. 123 
 
 tlie strength, of their obedience was tried by 
 menial offices, and, when found sufficiently sub- 
 missive, they reached that renowned company of 
 devout and well-born Legitimists who were called 
 Jesuites a robe courte. 
 
 But the chiefs of the Congregation were too 
 shrewd to fancy that they could bring back the 
 Catholicism and the loyalty of France by the 
 hidden dictates of religious Carbonari. They 
 knew that their sails must be ffiled by the wind 
 of popular enthusiasm, and they systematically 
 tried for years to preach the people into a great 
 religious revival. Bands of eloquent priests went 
 from town to town, and their coming was sig- 
 nalised by prodigious advertising. Known to 
 be the favourites of the court, they were often 
 escorted into a town by the prefect, the magis- 
 trates, the mnnicipal officers, and the garrison 
 of the place. The streets were lined with en- 
 thusiastic Eoyalists, who had been obliged to hide 
 their loyalty in the dark days of the Empire 
 and the Eepublic. White-robed priests and 
 
124 TEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEE. 
 
 maidens wound througli the streets in long pro- 
 cessions, singing penitential psalms, and with them 
 went men bearing huge wooden crosses, until 
 they came to the spot in which the Revolution 
 had planted one of its trees of liberty, and then 
 — that symbol of destructive equality having been 
 uprooted — the missionaries planted the symbol of 
 salvation. In this case, unhappily, it was also a 
 symbol of vengeance. The preachers lashed the 
 hearers into a frenzy by sermons against the 
 wickedness of the Eevolution; the pathos of the 
 Christian religion was made to find a centre in 
 the prison of the Temple, its maledictions in the 
 Convention ; and the twin poles of piety and 
 infamy were found in Louis XVI. and Robespierre. 
 Towns often wore an ascetic air during the visits 
 of the missionaries, and all the theatres were shut 
 by order of the municipal authorities. A pulpit 
 war was waged against books as well as principles 
 and memories, for processions were formed to 
 fling the works of Voltaire and Rousseau into a 
 loyal bonfire in the chief square of the town. 
 
EETIVAL OF THE LSaiTIMIST MONARCHY. 125 
 
 Nor did the missionaries disdain to go for the 
 
 stimulus of religious loyalty to the opera and the 
 
 vaudeviUej for, as some other revivalists have 
 
 done, they often set hymns to lively secular airs, 
 
 and sometimes they parodied in words of Catholic 
 
 loyalty the songs of the Revolution. But there 
 
 was one revolutionary song which they did not 
 
 parody, and that was the so^g which had rung 
 
 through Europe like the blast of a trumpet, 
 
 carrying a sentence of doom to the enemies of 
 
 liberty. It would not have been easy to attune 
 
 the feeble words of sacerdotal loyalty to the fierce 
 
 chant of the Marseillaise, nor well to awaken by 
 
 its terrible music a host of accusing memories. 
 
 Such was the machinery of the mysterious 
 society which had borrowed the devices of the 
 Carbonari for the sake of the monarchy and the 
 Church. It was very powerful, even though some 
 of its devotees coolly denied that it had any 
 existence. After a time the Congregation became 
 supreme at the court. It guided the. Ministry ; it 
 directed what professors should be appointed by the 
 
126 FEAJSrCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEE. 
 
 Ministry; it made war upon the disloyal influence 
 of science; it dictated to the magistracy; it laid 
 its liand upon the army ; it controlled the edu- 
 cation of the young ; and it had the honour of 
 conducting the dynasty by the shortest way to 
 ruin. 
 
 As a compact hody the Congregation ceased 
 to exist long ago, but the memory of its power 
 envenoms the political contests of France to this 
 hour, and helps to explain the popular hatred 
 which defeated the Due de Broglie's attempt to 
 substitute himself and his Clerical friends for the 
 Eepublican constitution. The Liberals naturally 
 declared that the members of the Congregation 
 were hypocrites. There were doubtless many 
 hypocrites among them. It is not necessary to 
 believe that all the Puritans were saints because 
 they quoted the Book of Kings in the heat of 
 fight, and wrestled in prayer when about to make 
 a motion in Committee of the whole House. It is 
 equally unnecessary to assume the absolute sincerity 
 of judges who went regularly to mass when they 
 
REVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAKCHT. 127 
 
 found that the shortest cut to the higher courts 
 lay through the sacristy. While Talleyrand was 
 seen walking in a religious procession^ it was im- 
 possible to forget the memorable occasion when, 
 as Bishop of Autun, he had said mass at the 
 f^te of the federation on the Champ de Mars, in 
 much the same leering fashion as Mephistopheles 
 might have said it before Faust and Marguerite. 
 But hypocrisy will account only for a small part 
 of the power wielded by the Congregation. 
 Hypocrisy wiU explain very little in the life of 
 nations. Tartuffe has but a small diocese. Most 
 members of the Congregation were undoubtedly 
 sincere, and we cannot wonder that, believing what 
 they did, they should have striven to plant the 
 Church and the throne on the rock of absolute 
 obedience to visible authority. But sincerity can- 
 not overcome the infirmities of human nature, and 
 when religion tries to put down impiety by political 
 power, or when pohtical power tries to keep up 
 thrones and ministries by the help of bishops, the 
 State is apt to become unctuous, the Church to 
 
128 FEANCB SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 become grimy, and both to become so unscrupulous 
 as to shock ■worldlings. Nor can sincerity defeat 
 those general tendencies which are to the moral 
 world what the law of gravitation is to the 
 physical. The Congregation could no more turn 
 back that stream of general tendency which broke 
 into foam in the Eevolution, than the Society of 
 Jesus could stem that kindred torrent which was 
 signahsed by the destructive force of the Ee- 
 formation. 
 
 The missionaries were not France, nor was the 
 Congregation, nor was the court, nor was the 
 king. There was another and greater and more 
 intelligent France, which gloried in the Revolu- 
 tion, ridiculed divine right, detested the Clerical 
 party, and supported the monarchy only because 
 it was constitutional. A distinguished visitor to 
 the Tuileries could readily reach the centre of 
 that other France, for he had only to cross the 
 street and enter the Palais Royal. There he 
 would have found another cou^-t, and the head of 
 it was another Bourbon. If a Liberal, and espe- 
 
REVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 129 
 
 cially if an intelligent Liberal, tHe visitor would 
 have been cordially welcomed by a prince wbo 
 had once been called tbe Due de Valois, who at 
 this time was styled the Due d'Orleans, and who 
 lives in history as King Louis Philippe. Descended 
 from a younger son of Louis XIII., and also by 
 the female side from a legitimised son of 
 Louis XIV., he had a large share of Bourbon 
 blood, and at least one of his sons, who is still 
 alive — the Due de Nemours — is a walking image 
 of his great ancestor, Henry of Navarre. The 
 son of that Duo d'Orleans who was called 
 Egalite, who voted for the death of his kinsman, 
 Louis XVI., and who yet perished on the revo- 
 lutionai'y scaffold, Louis Philippe had been taught 
 in early youth the philosophic precepts of the 
 eighteenth century, had been among the first to 
 welcome the glories of the Revolution, had attended 
 the meetings of the Jacobin Club, and fought 
 gallantly in the armies of hberty against the 
 coalition of the kings. But the Eeign of Terror 
 frightened him away from the field of the Ee- 
 
130 FRAiTCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEB. 
 
 public, andj flying from its vengeance, lie had. led 
 for years a life of privation and adventure. He 
 had taugM mathematics under an assumed name 
 in a Swiss boarding-school, he had visited America, 
 wandered about Europe, and lived quietly at 
 Twickenham, before the fall of the Empire had 
 allowed him to return to France. He had made 
 his peace with the elder Bourbons, in much the 
 same way as some of his sons and his grandsons 
 went a few years ago to Prohsdorf to pay homage 
 to the Comte de Chambord. But Louis XV ill. 
 never believed the conversion to be complete, and 
 he signified his distrust both by denying his cousin 
 the title of Royal Highness, and giving him merely 
 the usufruct of the vast estates which had belonged 
 to his family. The more generous Charles X. did, 
 however, grant the coveted title, and the stiU more 
 coveted fee- simple of the paternal possessions. 
 Thus did the king minister to his kinsman's 
 well-known passion for making himself and his 
 numerous family as comfortable as might be in 
 this uncertain world. 
 
EBVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 131 
 
 Fondness for money was the chief hlot on 
 Louis Philippe's character, and it made him 
 the theme of a thousand satires. After he had 
 become King of the French, it once made him 
 the subject of grave calumnies, when the poor 
 old Due de Bourbon, the last of the Princes 
 of Conde, was found hanging dead from the 
 window-cord of his bedroom ; when suspicion 
 fell upon a too well-known Englishwoman, the 
 Due de Bourbon's companion, Madame de 
 Feucheres ; and when it was found that by 
 her persecutions he had been induced to leave 
 part of his vast wealth to her, and by far 
 the largest share of it to Louis Philippe's fourth 
 son, the present Due d'Aumale. But if Louis 
 Philippe liked money better than became a 
 prince, he also showed an unprincely and 
 admirable respect for those homely virtues 
 which are more important than thrones. He 
 set a good example to the whole of France 
 as a husband and a father. And his very 
 faults had their political uses, for although his 
 
 K 2 
 
132 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 loyalty could be sycophantic at court, he 
 happily found it easy to display a robust in- 
 gratitude at the call of political duty. As his 
 personal interests were in the same line as 
 those of France, he was fortunately able to 
 show that, by forgetting the kindness of the 
 king and listening to the voice of sheer 
 selfishness, he could display the highest 
 patriotism. A very clever, well-read, travelled 
 man, a student of political history, sceptical 
 rather than devout, fond of intellectual society, 
 and skilled in discussion, he had naturally a 
 contempt for the bigotry, the ignorance, and 
 the political blindness of the court. Bluff and 
 hearty, and yet wheedling in manner, he had 
 always the air of a person who wants to sell 
 something. He looked, in fact, like a princely, 
 but advertising, commission agent, eager to 
 dispose of a large stock of national happiness, 
 and not unwilling to accept the usual percentage 
 on the sale. He had admirable sons to offer 
 to such great princesses as were in need of 
 
REVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAECHY. 133 
 
 husbands. He was mortified because one of 
 them, the Due de Nemours, did not get a chance 
 of marrying our own Queen ; and he fancied 
 that he had put another of them, the Due de 
 Montpensier, on the steps of the Spanish throne 
 by that grimiest of all diplomatic intrigues 
 which goes by the name of the Spanish 
 Marriages. Nor did he forget that his father, 
 and even he himself, had once been democratic 
 chiefs ; for he sent his sons to the pubUc schools 
 of Paris, and even after he had become the 
 ruler of France, he was so ostentatiously a 
 citizen king as to be fond of shaking hands 
 with the least select of his subjects. But Heine 
 maliciously said that he kept a glove for the 
 purpose. 
 
 The Duke was more at home among the 
 people who had learned politics out of books. 
 They whispered in his ear that his countrymen 
 would some day be glad to make a bargain 
 with him, since he was to France what William 
 of Orange had been to England. Their heads 
 
134 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 were full of our Whig revolution^ and they 
 could spin off at a moment's notice a parallel 
 between James II. and Charles X. The 
 Due d' Orleans did not make a comparison 
 between himself and "the glorious and im- 
 mortal memory " of our own Dutch king, 
 but he knew that such a comparison was made. 
 He did not attack the court, but he allowed 
 his attendants to say what they liked about 
 its folly. He did not denounce the bigotry 
 of the king, but he listened with virtuous 
 encouragement when his visitors showed that 
 it was again leading to the way of exile. Let 
 it be said to his credit that he did warn the 
 king in private of the fate which the monarchy 
 was preparing for itself by allowing parliamentary 
 majorities to be over-ridden by heralds and 
 priests. But those who take their political 
 opinions from heralds and priests are not to be 
 checked by worldly wisdom. At last, then, when 
 the court was obviously losing its sense of what 
 was firm ground, and was said to be dancing on 
 
EEVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 135 
 
 a volcanOj tlie Due d'Orleans put aside his airs 
 of reticence and openly exclaimed^ "Au moins 
 la faute n'est pas a moi; •/e n'aurai pas a me 
 reprocher de n'avoir pas essaye d'ouvrir les yeux 
 au roi. . . . Mais que voulez-vous ? Bien n'est 
 ecoute ; et Dieu sait ou Us seront dans six mois ! 
 Mais," added the Dulce, " je sais bien oil je serais. 
 Dans tons les cas, ma famille et moi, nous restons 
 dans ce palais. Quelque danger qu'il puisse y avoir, 
 je ne iougerai pas d'ici. Je ne separerai pas mon 
 sort et celui de mes enfants die sort de mon pays." 
 His sagacious and vigorous sister, Madame 
 Adelaide, said the same thing during the Revo- 
 lution of 1830j when she declared that the French 
 might make either a king or a national guard 
 of her brother, if they did not make him an 
 exile. 
 
 Being determined to stay in France, whoever 
 else might leave it, he naturally made himself 
 agreeable to all who might be expected to remain 
 after the king should go. Thus the Palais Royal 
 threw open its doors to the members of the con- 
 
136 FKANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 stitutional opposition, and to all tlie clever men 
 who did not put their talent under the wing of 
 the Church. If the chief judges of Paris 
 were offended at the Tuileries by the scorn 
 of the Duchesse d^Angouleme, they had only to 
 cross the street to get a boisterous welcome 
 from her Liberal cousin. If the orators of the 
 Opposition were hooted in the Chamber, they 
 were soothed and praised and petted in the draw- 
 ing-rooms of the Palais Royal. Thither came 
 those Doctrinaires who understood the British 
 constitution, and prescribed its balm for all the 
 woes of France. Thither came Benjamin Constant, 
 the cleyerest literary and parliamentary teacher 
 of the sect ; and Manuel, the best debater of the 
 Liberal party, and General Foy, its most eloquent 
 orator, and Casimu- Perier, the great banker and 
 statesman, who was to be the chief Minister of 
 Louis Philippe, and LafStte, the other great banker 
 and political manager, who was to do more than 
 any other man to give Louis Philippe a throne. 
 The Palais Eoyal was a coterie of skilful Whigs, 
 
REVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 137 
 
 firmly convinced that they, and they alone, could 
 "manage" France. 
 
 On going a little way farther from the 
 Tuileries, and caUing at the hospitable mansion 
 of M. Laffitte himself, we should have found 
 the same personages, mixed with younger, bolder,, 
 franker enemies of the Crown. You would have 
 seen among others three men, who, each in his 
 way, was to leave a profound mark on the 
 history of France, and to be imperishably con- 
 nected with her revolutions. One, who was made, 
 noticeable by his shrewd, sagacious face, was^ 
 Beranger, the best political song-writer in the 
 world. His light, airy, perfectly-finished verses 
 had carried on the wings of music the praises 
 of liberty, and of Napoleon, and of the Grand 
 Army, along with satire of the court and the 
 priests, to the homes of every artisan, peasant,, 
 shopkeeper, and man of culture. Such songs as 
 Octavie and Le Sucre de Gliarles le Simple made 
 him more formidable to the Bourbons than a 
 whole heavy brigade of parliamentary debaters. 
 
138 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 In the same room you would liave seen the 
 austere^ haughty face of another man who, 
 although still young, had already displayed com- 
 manding literary and political talents, who was for 
 years to be the Prime Minister of Louis Philippe, 
 and who, after pulling down the constitutional 
 throne by his disdain for popular impulses, was 
 to redeem many political errors by the green 
 and revered old age which some of us have 
 seen, and which all of us connect with the 
 great name of M. Guizot. And there was a 
 third personage, who died only a short time 
 ago, and who is almost as well known in 
 England as in France — a little, squat, restless, 
 undignified figure; a round, spectacled face, blazing 
 with vivacity, self-confidence, vanity, boundless 
 curiosity, boundless talent ; a young plebeian 
 from Marseilles, who astonished everybody by 
 his brilliant talk, and who, as Lamartinc said, 
 had sufficient gunpowder in his nature to blow 
 up ten houses of Bourbon; the journalist who 
 was puUing down the throne with the lever 
 
REVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAEOHY. 139 
 
 of his own maxim, that the king should reign, 
 but not govern ; the political leader who was 
 soon to be the most prominent and the most 
 mischievous minister in Europe ; the historian 
 who should afterwards debauch the minds of 
 Frenchmen by writing the praises of Napoleon 
 in twenty volumes ; the patriot who was to learn 
 political wisdom amid the gilded degradation of 
 the second Empire ; the great citizen and states- 
 man who, chastened by the mighty misfortunes 
 of his country, was, under the weight of eighty 
 years, to leave a name which will be gratefully 
 remembered by the latest generations of French- 
 men as the liberator of their territozy and the 
 first Pi-esident of their Eepublic. 
 
 At the house of M. Lafiitte and the palace 
 of the Due d'Oi'Mans one would have met only 
 the serious political natures, who, like M. Thiers 
 and M. Gaizot, had mastered the art of carrying 
 motions in the Chamber of Deputies. All 
 visionaries were coldly warned to be gone. But 
 neither the Due d'OrMans nor M. LaflStte could 
 
140 PEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 speak for tlie whole of that France which, lay- 
 outside the court. One great relic of revolution 
 still existed in M. de Lafayette^ whose enthusiasm 
 for the triumphs of 1789 had never been chilled 
 even by the Eeign of Terror, and who was stUl 
 the same ardent, flighty Eepublican as he had 
 been when he escorted Louis XVI. to the 
 Tuileries. And there were many still more fervid 
 Frenchmen, who thought that the promise of 
 the millennium had been cut short by the 
 fall of the Convention. There were men who, 
 like Godefroy Cavaighac, found a religion in a 
 Democratic Republic, and who would have gone 
 as gladly to die as any martyr if they might 
 thus plant such a Republic in France. There 
 were not a few devotees of Napoleon who 
 remembered nothing of the Empire but its 
 glory. And outside these small minorities lay 
 that great mute, mysterious mass of Frenchmen 
 who had no political power. Nay, the qualifi- 
 cation for the franchise was so high that some 
 of the most eminent Frenchmen might, so late 
 
EEYITAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 141 
 
 as the closing years of Louis Philippe's reign, 
 have no votes if their wealth was not equal to 
 their ability. One of these men, M. Cousin, on 
 being asked for his vote by a candidate for 
 a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, satirised 
 the system in words of characteristic scorn : 
 " Monsieur, je suis jprofesseur a la Faculte des 
 Lettres, je suis membre de VAcadeniie des Sciences 
 Morales et Politiques, je suis membre de I'Academie 
 FranQaise, je suis memhre du Conseil Royal de 
 I'Instruction Puhlique, je suis pair de France, j'ai 
 ete ministre, je puis le redevenir, mais je ne suis 
 pas electeur." Such a system could not last long 
 in a country which has a greater respect than 
 any other for purely intellectual distinction. Nor 
 could the artisans and the peasantry long be 
 denied pohtical power iu a land which more than any 
 other is democratic. Universal suffrage was fated 
 to come by the French love of political equality. 
 We shall all of us do weU to reflect on the 
 meaning of that love. We sometimes hear that 
 it springs from envy, which is said to be as 
 
142 FKANOE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIKB. 
 
 much the vice of democracies as sycophancy is 
 the vice of aristocratic countries. If such an 
 explanation were true it would be very sad, 
 because nothing can be clearer to any student 
 of history than the fact that the growing 
 and spreading love of equality is the master 
 spirit of this age, and that sooner or later it will 
 revolutionise every land in Europe. But the 
 love of equality has, happily, a worthier root 
 than envy. It comes from a rationalised sentiment 
 of human dignity. It was against the sentiment 
 of equality that the monarchy of the Restoration 
 made war, by reviving as many as possible of 
 the old forms of kingly and aristocratic power. 
 And against the cliff -like strength of that senti- 
 ment, the monarchy shattered the fabric of divine 
 right for ever. 
 
 Charles X. found out the significance of that 
 fact during the closing years of his reign, for in 
 spite of the Congregation, and of his ceaseless 
 attempts to pack the Chamber of Deputies, the 
 Liberal majorities were constantly increasing. It 
 
EEVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAECHT. 143 
 
 became clear to Mm that if lie did not put 
 down tlie Parliament, the Parliament would put 
 down him, hy making him as dependent on 
 Ministries as he supposed the King of England 
 to be. He did make a small concession for a 
 moment in allowing a cabinet to be formed by 
 a liberalised Conservative, M. de Martignac. He 
 sent for that eloquent deputy in much the same 
 spirit as Marshal MacMahon sent for M. Jules 
 Simon, and then he dismissed him as summarily 
 as Marshal MacMahon sent off the equally 
 eloquent Republican chief. His motto was, 
 j'y suis, fy rests. Resolving to assert his kingly 
 power once for all, he summoned to the head of 
 his council the Prince de Polignac, a less intel- 
 hgent and more fatal Due de Broglie. M. de 
 Polignac was one of those gallant, honest, sHghtly- 
 confused, polite, sincere, perfectly impracticable 
 zealots, without whom no country would be 
 complete, but who are more dangerous than 
 the most hare-brained or unscrupulous dealer 
 in the drugs of popular violence. Believiag 
 
144 FEANCE SINCE THE FIKST EMPIRE. 
 
 that the Frencli Eevolution had opened the 
 doors of the nether pit, and that they might 
 be opened again by Parliamentary majorities, he 
 determined to keep them shut with the strong 
 liand of kingly power. At the same time he 
 meant to be perfectly loyal to the constitution, 
 and he passionately assured his friends and his 
 ioes that he was an honest man. But he put 
 Tiimself on the slippery incline of personal 
 government, and he forgot that a very slight 
 movement, an involuntary step, the push of an 
 ■enemy, the pull of a friend, might serve to 
 make him illustrate the law which marks the 
 momentum of falling bodies. 
 
 No sooner had he become Prime Minister, 
 than everybody foresaw a struggle which might 
 end in civil war. " Unhappy Prance ! unhappy 
 King ! " was the prophetic exclamation of the 
 Journal cles Bebats. The Chamber of Deputies 
 made a memorable protest; the king answered 
 by an equally memorable dissolution ; and the 
 country retorted by sending back a still more 
 
REVITAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 145 
 
 niemoral)le majority of Liberals. Charles opened 
 the session in a menacing speech ; but it was 
 noticed thatj as he was about to step down from 
 the throne, his hat feU off, and that it was picked 
 up by the Due d^ Orleans, who returned it on 
 bended knee. Bad omens go for much in a 
 feverish atmosphere. 
 
 M. de Polignac tried, meanwhile, to charm 
 the constituencies by the glories of a spirited 
 foreign policy. Believing that France had been 
 degraded by ignoble peace, and that the people 
 were disgusted by the cowardice of past ministers, 
 he wanted to change the map of Europe by the 
 force of the Eastern Question. But, as the rulers 
 of other lands were unwilling to hazard universal 
 war, he resolved that, rather than waste the 
 running force of military ambition, he should 
 "drive into something cheap." So, taking ad- 
 vantage of a wretched little dispute with a 
 wretched little potentate in Algeria, he fitted out 
 a big expedition amid the sound of many trumpets, 
 won a tremendous victory over his half-barbarous 
 
146 FRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIEB. 
 
 ioe, and annezed the territory whicii lie tad in- 
 vaded for the defence of Froncli interests. But 
 the Liberals and the great mass of the people 
 refused to be pacified by the splendid possession 
 ■which they had found on the other side of 
 the Mediterranean. They wanted some homely 
 rights, rather than the right to spend money 
 and be despots among tribes whom most of them 
 should never see. Another dissolution brought 
 up an equally compact Liberal majority. So 
 the Mug thought that the only way to " save 
 society " was to make a coup d'etat. Accordingly, 
 at the Palace of St. Cloud, near Paris, after 
 hearing mass on Sunday, the 25th of July, 1830 
 — a memorable day in the history of Europe — 
 he and his ministers signed three famous or- 
 dinances — stopping the freedom of the press, 
 dissolving a Chamber which had never met, 
 and radically changing its composition. Had he 
 any constitutional right to make ti&ese edicts ? 
 The Liberals said that he had not; But he 
 appealed to an ambiguous clause in- the charter. 
 
EETITAI, OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAHCHT. 147 
 
 There is, however, such a thing as political at- 
 mosphere, no less than political edicts. What a 
 nation may languidly allow when its moral pulse 
 is feeble, it will fight to stop when the iron of a 
 sense of duty has entered into its soul. 
 
 That is what the king was now to find. 
 When the ordinances were published on the 
 morning of Monday, the 26th of July, they in- 
 stantly threw Paris into a state of revolutionary 
 turmoil. The chief journalists, with M. Thiers 
 at their head, met and signed a famous declara- 
 tion that they would not obey edicts which, they 
 maintained, broke the pledges of the charter. A 
 court of justice took occasion to affirm that the 
 ordinances were illegal. When the police came 
 to break, and' thus stop, the printing-press of a 
 rebellious journal, the manager confronted them 
 with the crimiual code in his hand, and warned 
 the workman whom they employed that he was 
 making himself liable to imprisonment with hard 
 labour. M. Laffitte, M. Casimir Perier, M. Gnizot, 
 and the other leaders of the Opposition met with 
 
 L 2 
 
148 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 some vague and contradictory ideas of protesting- 
 or insisting. Scenting revolution, M. de Lafayette 
 ran to Paris, and his great reputation gave a 
 central figure to tlie party of resistance. All 
 business was at a standstill; tlie manufacturers 
 closed their doors and poured their workmen into 
 the streets ; the chief thoroughfares were thronged 
 with an angry multitude ; the students of the 
 Polytechnic School broke out of bounds and 
 offered to lead the people; the National Guards 
 seized their weapons to protect their property ;: 
 squadrons of dragoons tried to clear the streets; 
 a shot went off near the Theatre Francais ; the 
 first blood was spilled; and the tempest of civil 
 war was let loose. For three days did the capital 
 ring with that terrible conflict which is com- 
 memorated by the proud column that now rises 
 from the Place de la Bastile, in Paris. 
 
 Charles had no sooner signed the ordinances 
 than he had gone to hunt at Eambouillet, but 
 his attendants noticed that for once he was listless 
 amid the pleas ares of the chase, and that he 
 
EETIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAECHT. 149 
 
 allowed the stag to get away. His ill-luck in 
 the forest was emhlematic of his misfortunes in 
 Paris. The number of troops in the capital was 
 not sufHcient to put down the crowds of armed 
 Parisians — boys and old men, artisans and shop- 
 keeperSj and fashionably-dressed youths^ grave 
 fathers of families, barristers, young pupils of the 
 military schools, and young students of law, among 
 whom was, it is said, Jules Grevy, now the President 
 of the French Republic. These volunteers fought 
 with desperate courage. The troops had neither 
 provisions, water, good guidance, nor the sense that 
 right was on their side. It was clear that the 
 victory would fall to the Parisians even before 
 the Louvre was taken; it was clear that nothing 
 could save the monarchy but the instant with- 
 drawal of the ordinances and the dismissal of the 
 Ministry; and the best friends of the throne sent 
 one frantic message after another to St. Cloud, 
 "where Charles was staying. And what, mean- 
 while, was his Majesty doing, as the dull roar 
 ■of the cannon was borne to the palace, as hundreds 
 
150 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 of brave men were dying in defence of his throne 
 or of their own civil rights, as the courtiers formed 
 silent and anxious groups, and as messengers came 
 blact with powder and half famished from the 
 warring capital ? His Majesty was playing whist ! 
 He was every inch a Bourbon. That rubber will 
 remain among the sublimest examples of stately 
 decorum in all the history of royal houses. Would 
 it not have a grand air in a court circular along 
 with a record of the taking of the Louvre ? 
 
 Even Charles had to give wa,y at last, and, 
 roused from his bed on the night of Friday, the 
 30th of July, he signed a decree revoking the 
 ordinances, and forming a Liberal Ministry. But 
 it was too late. The Parisians were determined 
 that he should never come back to the capital. 
 Going to Eambouillet, he tried to save at least 
 his dynasty. He himself abdicated on the 2nd 
 of August. On the same day his unpopular but 
 obedient son, the Due d'Angoul^me, renounced 
 his rights as the heir. At the same time the 
 throne was conferred on the king's young grand- 
 
UEVIYAL OP THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 151 
 
 son, tlie Due de Bordeaux, now known as the 
 Comte de Ciiambord, and the Due d^Orleans was 
 appointed Lieutenant-General of tlie kingdom until 
 the prince should come of age. All that was 
 done on paper, but again it was too late. The 
 Liberal Deputies passionately urged the Due 
 d' Orleans to accept the vacant throne in order 
 to prevent the estabhshment of a Republic. La- 
 fayette was won over to their side, and the 
 Due d^Orleans was styled the best' of Republics. 
 Talleyrand, the undertaker of every fallen govern- 
 m.ent, sent the little message, Qu'il accepte. The 
 duke, after a struggle with the claims of grati- 
 tude which he owed to Charles, did accept; the 
 Chamber of Deputies proclaimed him King of 
 the French, and the power of the grandest of all 
 dynasties passed away for ever. 
 
 But Charles acted with kingly stateliness down 
 to the very day when he left the soil of France 
 for the last time. It was necessary that he 
 should quit the country, and it was arranged 
 that he should embark at Cherbourg. From his 
 
152 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 starting-point at EamlDouillet to tliat port, the 
 distance, as the crow flies, may be about one 
 hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy 
 miles ; but the ex-king went with royal slowness 
 of pomp, and it took him almost a fortnight to 
 reach the place of embarkation. He went, accom- 
 panied by his family, by the members of his 
 household, by his guards, and by the commis- 
 sioners of the new sovereign, who, in truth, were 
 his only real protection. He went at a foot-pace, 
 sometimes through pitying, and sometimes through 
 sullen crowds ; but he met with no insult, although 
 most of the people would have lynched the Priace 
 de Polignac and his colleagues. He was saved 
 from injury by the popular comprehension of the 
 maxim which he himself had denounced, that the 
 king reigns, but does not govern. Perhaps the 
 king's stately slowness was partially caused by a 
 hope that Brittany and La Vendee would be fired 
 by the memory of Charette and Cathelineau, and 
 would have time to strike for the throne of Saint 
 Louis; but in the main it was doubtless a pure 
 
REVIVAL OF THE LEGITIMIST MONAHCHT. 153 
 
 token of the king's respect for lis office. One 
 of his attendants was so shocked by the refusal 
 of the people of Dreux to treat it with equal 
 respectj that he went out of his mind. That was 
 a beautifully sincere and complete expression of 
 loyalty. At Laigle other attendants found that 
 the king could not dine, because the hotel in 
 which he lodged had only round tables, and no 
 tables, therefore, of which his Majesty could take 
 the head. But the democratic curves were speedily 
 cut away by Eoyalist saws, and the extemporised 
 rectangles allowed the king to dine without a fatal 
 loss of dignity. The little fair-haired Due de 
 Bordeaux and his sister, meanwhile, added an in- 
 fantile pathos to the wreck of royalty, for they 
 had been taught to bow to the people in their 
 better days, and, thinking that the procession to 
 the coast was nothing more than a stately pageant, 
 they cast their small smiling gestures among the 
 crowd that lined the highway, and made tears 
 start to the eyes of the rough Norman folk. Poor 
 little remnants of a great dynasty, they were 
 
154 FEANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 shedding their childish bounties for the last time 
 among their own people. The Dnchesse d^An- 
 gouleme, meanwhile, went with austere and sUent 
 grief, amid pitying enemies, on the way to her 
 third and final exUe. And the king, before part- 
 ing with Louis Philippe's protecting commissioner, 
 M. Odillon-Barrot, left a touching token of the 
 political philosophy which had lured Mm to ruin. 
 Speaking of the Eevolution, he said : " I know 
 all the threads of the conspiracy which has been 
 woven. I could name the banker who has paid 
 for the whole of the popular moyement.-" That 
 is to say, men had died by hundreds in the streets 
 of Paris, and a throne had been flung down, our 
 own first Reform Bill had been brought nearer to 
 triumph, and Europe had been shaken from end 
 to end, because M. Laffitte had flung about some 
 gold ! It would not be easy to find a more in- 
 structive comment in the whole range of courtly 
 literature. Poor king ! th.e influences which drove 
 him out of Prance were atmospheric. They were 
 the subtile product of the social wrong which had 
 
EEVIVAIi OF THE LEGITIMIST MONARCHY. 155 
 
 accumulated for centuries under his own family, 
 of the revolt against the Church which had 
 preached obedience to Bourbon commands, of the 
 sceptical philosophy which was a revolt against 
 spiritual tyranny, of his inability to understand 
 the new time, and of the care for that common 
 people to whom, we are finding, many of the most 
 prized things must belong. Charles felt bound 
 by motives of kingly and Catholic honour to cure 
 those impulses of freedom which mean the im- 
 pulses of human dignity. He was the best judge 
 of his own honour. But the French were also 
 the best judges of their own dignity ; and there 
 was no room in France for him and them. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE LEGITIMISTS. 
 
 Closely connected with tie Clerical party are 
 the Legitimists, a party which is the oldest in 
 point of time, and certainly not the least worthy 
 of respect. 
 
 They may be divided into two classes. First, 
 there is the smaU sect who fill nearly the same 
 place as the non-jurors of our own history. 
 They demand the estabhshment of little less 
 than the old monarchy, with the white flag for 
 its symbol, and with the power of the king as 
 unrestrained as it was before Louis XVI. yielded 
 to the demands of the National Assembly. The 
 king — such is the reasoning of the high Legiti- 
 
THE LEGITIMISTS. 157 
 
 mists — may grant sucli rights to the Senate and 
 the Chamber of Deputies as may commend them- 
 selves to his sovereign wisdom, and since Henry V. 
 is an enlightened prince, he would grant as much 
 liberty as would be good for France. But every- 
 thing must come from his free will. If there 
 should be another charter, it must be granted, not 
 exacted. Although the king would not attempt 
 to restore the old feudal rights, he would bring 
 back with him aU the personal power which 
 perished in the Revolution of 1830. 
 
 Universal suffrage is in the eyes of the extreme 
 Legitimists the very sacrament of infamy — the out- 
 ward and visible sign of all the calamities which 
 have befallen France. They may be excused for 
 having no very tender feelings to lavish on what 
 they call the rule of the mob, when the chief days in 
 their historical calendar are days of mourning for 
 a throne and a dynasty which fell by the hand 
 of the populace. The taking of the Bastile, 
 the slaughter of the Swiss Guards, the trial 
 and the murder of the king and queen, the 
 
158 FEANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIEE. 
 
 massacres of September^ tlie tumbrels which 
 carried loads of victims to the Place Louis XV., 
 the dethronement of Charles X. — such, they think, 
 are the results of that mob rule which is 
 organised in the form of universal suffrage. 
 
 The religious Legitimists, as they may be 
 rightly called, would make no compromise with the 
 spirit of revolution. Their ideal is such a. court 
 as that of Louis XIV., freed of course from the 
 profligacy which lay beneath the splemiour of 
 Versailles, but as Catholic and as ostentatiously 
 observant of the old' stiff etiquette as tihat of 
 the Grand Monarcpie. The temper of the men 
 who demand such a restoration is essentially theo- 
 logical in its disdain for the teachings of experience, 
 its abhorrence of compromise, and its determination 
 to import into poHtical discussion the rigid dogmas 
 which befit assemblies of divines. Practical men 
 find it difficult to credit the sincerity of poH- 
 ticians who believe that the monarchy of France 
 will' ever be' restored' on such terms. They are 
 apt to think that the Comte de Chambord and 
 
THE LEGITIMISTS. 159 
 
 Ms deTotees must be cliarlatans. But men of 
 tlie world are not good judges of the political 
 spirit wMcli is- noiirished in solitude upon the 
 legends of a Clerical loyalty. The religious 
 Legitimists may say, that France has not yet 
 seen the worst, consequences of her departure 
 from what they hold to be the one great principle 
 of social stabiEty. They may think that she 
 will one day be sick of all the revolutionary 
 expedients for curing the evils of revolution^ and 
 thatj having tried republics, and military empires, 
 and constitutional monarchies, she will go back 
 to hereditary kingship.. Or, even if they despair 
 of such a day, they may feel a proud disdaiu 
 for any compromise with false doctrine, and say 
 ihst the issues of the fiiture must be left in the 
 hands' of Providemce- 
 
 The victory of the Legitimists, even for a 
 singler year, would doubtless be a great calamity. 
 But let ifr. not be forgotten that they have some 
 political virtues with which society can ill afford 
 to* dispense, and which- m^y be rudely nipped by 
 
160 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 the frost of democracy. Their loyalty even to 
 a false ideal is better than no loyalty at all; 
 their disdaia for the vulgar promptings of self- 
 interest is not to be lightly passed by, in these 
 days of yearning for the bliss of heavy dividends ; 
 their readiness to fight for lost causes is better 
 than the laborious waiting for Providence in 
 the shape of parliamentary majorities ; and, now 
 that the restoration of their political power is 
 happily impossible, some material for admiration 
 may be found in the religious temper which 
 they bring into politics. 
 
 Such are the high Legitimists. They may 
 pair with those Bourbons of the Republic, who 
 have forgotten nothing and learned nothing since 
 they set forth the rights of man; who think that 
 the chief break in the stream of French history 
 was made, not when the monarchy was destroyed, 
 but when the Convention overthrew Robespierre; 
 and who would govern by the organisation of 
 anarchy. 
 
 The ordinary Legitimists are not unlike the 
 
THE LEGITIMISTS. 161 
 
 very tigh. Tories of our own country. While 
 they do not say much about the divine right of 
 the Comte de Chambord, they think that nothing 
 can save France from a new series of convulsions 
 but strict adherence to the principle that sovereign 
 rule should be hereditary. They are strong Church 
 and State men. They hate all forms of democracy. 
 They would give as high honours and as much 
 political power as they dared to the wearers of 
 historic titles. They would try to restore or erect 
 some form of political peerage which would do 
 for France what the House of Lords does for 
 England. Englishmen may naturally think that 
 such a scheme would not be unwise. Some 
 capacity for rule they might say will usually be 
 found in any member of a family which has for 
 generations or centuries been accustomed to 
 make laws and wield power. Such a man will 
 be guided by those incommunicable traditions 
 and instincts of a governing class, which are 
 laden with more practical wisdom than the most 
 elaborate code of written laws. He will be free 
 
162 FRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIEE. 
 
 from corruption, and he will always act in the 
 spirit of a gentleman, because the dignified society 
 to which he belongs can punish any breach of its 
 canons with the tremendous force of banishment 
 from its ranks. Hence it might be said that 
 the chances of an aristocratic life would give a 
 better Second Chamber than the choice of 
 democratic units. I need not stop to ask 
 whether that theory entirely agrees with ex- 
 perience. It is enough to say that France has 
 no aristocracy like that of England. More than 
 a century before 1789 the work of levelling had 
 been commenced, and the Revolution finished 
 what Richeheu had begun. A crowd of gentle- 
 men stiU retaia the titles of dukes, marquises, 
 and counts, but they form a mere coterie, which 
 is cut off from the rest of the nation by a 
 spanless abyss of religious bigotry and hatred 
 of democratic rule. Most of them live in the 
 last century. Most of them have no aristocratic 
 qualities, except personal gallantry and fine 
 manners. Collectively, they are as imprudent as 
 
THE LEGITIMISTS. 163 
 
 any set of men in Europe. To give theni special 
 legislative power would be suicidal. Thus nothing 
 remaias to break the even flow of that passion 
 for equality which is natural to all civilised meUj 
 and which wiU. grow with the spirit of human 
 dignity. 
 
 M 2 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE OELEANISTS. 
 
 Side by side with the Legitimists stands a party 
 which was once the hope of France, which still 
 represents much of her ability and moral worth, 
 and which is interesting to Englishmen because 
 it does them the honour of trying to import their 
 constitution. I mean, of course, the Orleanists. 
 They are the heirs of Mirabeau and the enlightened 
 nobles, lawyers, and men of letters, who in 1789 
 sought by timely concessions ,to stem the tide 
 of violence. They are also the heirs of the 
 Girondists. Many political descendants of that 
 interesting group were so dazzled by the splendid 
 gifts and triumphs of Napoleon, that they con- 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 165 
 
 sented to wear his livery. Most of them, never- 
 theless, still dreamed of a constitutional monarcty 
 untainted by tlie vices either of military rule 
 or of democracy. The faU of Napoleon brought 
 to the throne a priiice, who had been free at 
 least from Clerical bigotry when he was the 
 Comte de Provence. Louis XVIII.j as has already 
 been observed, was pretty well known to be a 
 man of the world, a devotee of pleasure, and a 
 Voltairean. It was also assumed that he would 
 make his peace with the political and social 
 spirit of the Revolution. In reality he had no 
 such wish; but he was certainly more Liberal 
 than the mob of nobles and priests who had 
 hved abroad rather than submit to the rule 
 of a usurper. He accepted, or, as the champions 
 of Legitimacy would say, he granted, a con- 
 stitution which, with all its defects, was an 
 immeasurable advance on the despotism of the old 
 monarchy. Still, neither the constitution itself 
 nor the king's fondness for Voltaire could liberate 
 the nation from the ride of nobles and priests. 
 
166 FRANCE SIITCB THE FIEST EMPIEE. 
 
 who had been hardened in their bigotry by the 
 bitterness of exile. Even the faint gleam of 
 Liberalism which came from the personal qualities 
 of the sovereign faded away with the accession 
 of his brother. Charles X. pitched his ideas of 
 kingly prerogative as high as those of Louis XIV. 
 himself. But the Eevolution of 1830 seemed 
 to bring the parliamentary Royalists to that 
 promised land^ which their leaders had seen 
 only from the top of some distant Pisgah^ while 
 yet they wandered in the desert of opposition. 
 The Constitutionalists had now their Joshua in 
 the Due d'Orleans^ their captains of the host 
 in Casimir Perier and Laffitte, their prophets in 
 Guizot and Thiers, their fightiag-men in the 
 hourgeoisie to whom they entrusted the suffrage. 
 At last, they- thought they had entered into 
 the possession of the Promised Land. But in truth 
 the Promised Land was a mirage. The artisans, 
 who did as much as the shopkeepers to fight 
 the battles in the streets, found that Louis 
 Philippe was very far indeed from berag the 
 
THE OELEAiTISTa. 167 
 
 best of all republics. They had exchanged the 
 rule of the court for that of a middle class, as 
 little disposed as any people to put trust in the 
 Utopias of the faubourgs, and they discovered 
 Louis Philippe to be as fond of personal power 
 as Charles X. himself, although readier to use it 
 for popular ends. He made boisterous attempts to 
 win favour of the crowd, but they were defeated by 
 the suspicion that he was very much of a hypocrite. 
 At all events the Republican working men soon fell 
 away from his government, if, indeed, they ever 
 could have been counted among its supporters. 
 Nor had the king any allies among that old 
 Eoyalist party which had followed Louis XVIII. 
 into captivity, and been faithful to him amid 
 all the glories of the Empire. Louis Philippe had 
 broken the Royalists into two camps by accepting 
 the throne from the Revolutionists, instead of 
 obeying the wish of Charles X. to become 
 lieutenant-governor of the kingdom, and guardian 
 of the young lineal heir, the Due de Bordeaux, 
 now the Comte de Chambord. Whilst the Liberal 
 
168 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 Royalists went with the constitutional monarchy, 
 the older and more enthusiastic supporters of the 
 throne stood fast by the Legitimist king, and 
 all attempts to close the breach between the two 
 factions have failed. The only real supporters of 
 Louis Philippe were the middle class, the shop- 
 keepers, the crowd of officials who are on the 
 side of every government, and the theorists, who 
 had convinced themselves that it was possible 
 to give Prance the blessiags of the British con- 
 stitution. The directing power lay with the small 
 group of interesting and able men, who beheved 
 that they could thus transplant the most dis- 
 tinctively national, not to say provincial, among- 
 all forms of government. Unfortunately, many 
 of them profoundly misunderstood the nature 
 of the British constitution. They took the 
 school - book theory that it is a balance of 
 powers, represented by king, lords, and commons. 
 Some of them seemed to fancy that it was a 
 sort of cunningly-devised machine, which could 
 be multiplied indefinitely by the skill of political 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 16^ 
 
 engineers. The doctrinaires forgot that our 
 form of government suits ourselves because it 
 represents the collective feelings^ wishes, ideas, 
 and instincts, of a thousand years. But to 
 establish the mere constitutional forms in another 
 country might be ruinous, because they do not 
 carry with them the thing itself. Our con- 
 stitution is the most mysterious of all political 
 products. Nobody can exactly define it. Eoughly 
 speaking, we may call it the rule of the most 
 despotic elective body that the world has ever 
 known. The drapery of the throne and the 
 House of Lords are historical relics which hide the 
 despotism of the House of Commons. No despotism,, 
 however, is absolute, and that of the Lower House 
 is tempered by the friction of respect for a dynasty 
 which is mastering the art of gracefully effacing 
 itself, by the immense social power of an old 
 landed aristocracy, by the subtle influence of an 
 essentially aristocratic church, and by the tranquil 
 Conservatism of the English people. Prance, on 
 the other hand, has no such dynasty ; she has 
 
170 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 no such aristocracy ; she has no such church. All 
 those agents of Conservatism were swept away 
 for ever by her great revolution, and the unity of 
 her people has yet to come. Thus all the tra- 
 ditional supports of her monarchical institutions 
 having been cut away, her governments must rest 
 on the broad level basis of democracy. The fact 
 may be lamentable or not, but, at all events, it 
 is one of those realities with which statesmen must 
 count. An aristocracy, such as that which perished 
 in the storm of the Revolution, can grow only in 
 the twilight of feudalism, untended and almost 
 unseen. It grows because it is the necessary 
 link between separate clusters of humanity. And 
 so also arise national churches. They likewise 
 grow in the shadow, from little sproutings of piety, 
 nourished by the social as weU as religious needs 
 of mankind, and watered by its benedictions. 
 No one can teU when they first become great or 
 powerful, and it is often difficult to say when they 
 were established. We only know that when first 
 established and endowed, they expressed the 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 171 
 
 nation's higliest sense of good. But sucli cturclies, 
 or such aristocracies, if once pulled down, can 
 no more be set up again than a thousand uprooted 
 forest trees. Something may be put in their 
 place, such as the Church of the Concordat, or 
 a Second Chamber; but it is no more a church 
 which the nation will obey, or an aristocracy 
 which it will follow, than a thousand upright 
 stakes are the original forest. The nobles of 
 the Empire were flung down with contemptuous 
 ease, and the Church of the Concordat hurts 
 every dynasty that it seeks to serve. 
 
 The French admirers of the British constitution 
 fail to observe that, if it is apparently the 
 most successful of pohtical fabrics, it is also 
 the most delicate in its present form. It has never 
 withstood the shock of such tempests as have 
 swept over France. If England were to be 
 agitated, as she has been already, and as she 
 might be again, by controversies going down 
 to the depths of national convictions ; if the 
 mysterious currents of the future should bring 
 
172 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 back sucli fervour as that wMch shook the land 
 in the time of the Puritans ; if sacerdotal castes 
 were to become powerful as well as aggressive, 
 and if the advancing spirit of equality should 
 find political as well as economic disadvantages 
 in the present distribution of the land — then, 
 we may be sure, the constitution would be twisted 
 into some new reality. Either the power of 
 the Crown would be greatly increased, or the 
 House of Commons would beat down the checks 
 which usage still puts on the free play of its 
 power. The constitution would then be more 
 akin to that of an empire or a republic. It would 
 have little likeness to the pretty thing of paper 
 equipoises, which the Orleanists fashion in their 
 studies and call parliamentary government. 
 
 It is quite true that the monarchy of Louis 
 Philippe lasted for eighteen years. But the 
 experiment was practicable only so long as the 
 throne rested on a small body of obedient electors. 
 The qualifications for the franchise was so high 
 that it was held only by two hundred thousand 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 173 
 
 people. So small a constituency could be "ma- 
 naged" by the skill of M. Guizot or M. Thiers. 
 It could be " managed " through gifts of 
 places, bribes, the influence of local magnates, and 
 the pressure of public officials. There was 
 never perhaps so corrupt an electoral body, 
 Prudhon said, in his own savage way, that the 
 king, a model husband and a model father, 
 was " nalvement, consciencieusement corrupteur." 
 "Louis Philippe, pere de famille, severe dans 
 son interieur, maitre de lui-meme, a fait un pads 
 avec I'enfer pour la damnation de son pays." 
 M. Guizot, who was an austere puritan at home, 
 and who has entered into a competition with 
 Saint Augustine as a writer of religious meditations, 
 raised many sneers to the lips of worldlings, 
 not only by lending his hand to the infamous 
 intrigue of the Spanish Marriages, but by 
 allowing his subordinates to traffic in places for 
 the sake of getting votes. His own hands, of 
 course, were clean ; no one spoke a whisper 
 against his personal purity. But he seemed to 
 
X74 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 have mucli practical sympathy with the advice 
 which Pitt, in one of Landor^s " Imaginary 
 Conversations/' gives to his young disciple 
 Canning. 
 
 Pecuniary corruption was the very breath of 
 life to the constitutional monarchy. The voters 
 were bought as freely as if they had stood in 
 the market-place. The system admirably suited 
 the purpose of the Kttle family party of princes 
 and parliamentary chiefs who ruled the country. 
 But it was as artificial and fleeting as the sand 
 castles which a child builds on the edge of the 
 advancing tide. When it was swept away by 
 the democratic flood in 1848, a small knot of 
 sknful doctrinaires found their occupation gone. 
 Universal suilrage baffled the petty arts of 
 intrigue, which had been found triumphant when 
 France was like a close borough. In truth, the 
 Orleanists say almost as hard things about it 
 as the Legitimists themselves. Both regard it 
 as a kind of terrible monster, guided by bad 
 instincts, liable to fits of ungovernable passion^ 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 175 
 
 and strong with tlie strengtli of anarchy. "The 
 people," some of them say, "is a wild beast, 
 which must be tied down." To put it directly 
 under the restraiat of the army might, they 
 admit, be almost as bad as to leave it at large; 
 at least a military empire would be scarcely less 
 fatal to their hopes than a republic. They are 
 not so chimerical ; they fancy it could be disarmed 
 by a multitude of artificial checks. They would 
 tie the wild beast of democracy with such ropes 
 of straw as electoral restrictions and Second 
 Chambers. Such a process recalls the ex- 
 perience of Gulliver on his first arrival in 
 Lilliput. After he had fallen asleep, his gigantic 
 strength was no match for the ingenuity of the 
 little creatures who discovered his monstrous 
 bulk, and when he awoke he saw that he was 
 bound by a multitude of threads, which, indi- 
 vidually weak, were collectively as strong as a 
 ship's cable. The sleeping GulHver is the 
 gigantic form of inert democracy, bound with 
 the threads of a Second Chamber and a restrictive 
 
176 PKANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 suffrage, and prevented from moving until lie 
 promises to obey the master spirit of Lilliput, 
 the Due de Broglie; who, at the distance of 
 a few yards, can give the signal to bind or unloose 
 the captive. The analogy is not quite reassuring. 
 Gulliver was released on his own recognisances to 
 keep the peace, and ultimately he ran away with 
 the Lilliputian fleet. In France, democracy has 
 always been able to wriggle out of such re- 
 strictions, and to run away with the aristocratic 
 machinery. 
 
 If we look at the character of the theorists, 
 who held that they could defy the French 
 instincts of equality and transplant the British 
 constitution, we shall easily see how and why 
 they were misguided. It was not for want of 
 study or ability. They were the most cultivated 
 body of men in France. Although some of them 
 had a proud lineage, they felt an honourable 
 contempt for the ignorance which is said to 
 mark some aristocracies. Many of them were 
 distinguished writers of the second class. They 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 177 
 
 filled most of the chairs in the French Academy ; 
 and indeed that eminent tody was little more 
 than a group of Orleanists for years after the 
 fall of Louis Philippe. Since their existence as 
 a party depended on their mastery of the art 
 of parliamentary management, even their literary 
 studies took more or less of a political turn. 
 They sometimes seemed to think that the uses 
 of history were exhausted when it had taught 
 them to disarm the spirit of democracy, and they 
 appeared to believe that the aim of political 
 philosophy was to lead up to the throne of Louis 
 PhiUppe. In the Revue des Deux Mondes, they 
 lectured from an Olympian height on all the 
 political institutions in the world. Perhaps their 
 favourite text was the British constitution, and 
 any one of them could have filled a professorial 
 chair in the Sorbonne for the exposition of such 
 of its mysteries as can be found in books. 
 Some of them were admirable writers on the 
 events of the day, and in the Journal des Dehats 
 they discussed pohtical affairs with such well- 
 
178 FRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 bred ease and delicate irony, as the heavier pens 
 of Englisliinen hare still to acquire. Many of the 
 Orleanists were equally effective as parliamentary 
 orators. If France could have been ruled by 
 means of brilliant speeches and dainty epigrams^ 
 she would long ago have reached a haven of 
 peace. Perhaps the devotees of the constitutional 
 monarchy shone still more brightly in the 
 drawing-room, when the talk turned on some 
 political combination of last night or last century. 
 They were the best talkers in Europe. They 
 were matchless in their command over the re- 
 sources of conversational strategy. Cromwell, 
 Bolingbroke, and Voltaire were systematically 
 routed over cups of tea. No people in the world 
 knew so well the precise point at which their 
 own Revolution had gone astray, and most of 
 them, in truth, had written big or little books 
 to show that it had gone straight to ruin when 
 it turned aside from the principles of the British 
 constitution. Their leaders were proud to be 
 called Doctrinaires, and that name justly described 
 
THE OELEAITISTS. 179 
 
 their character, for they were men of books 
 rather than of practice. They would have been 
 great statesmen if they could have abolished 
 three-fourths of human passions, and guided 
 stormy nations by the tranquil mechanism of 
 select committees. Being much too fine for this 
 rough world, they mistook phrases for things, 
 and their neat little constitutional philosophy 
 was suddenly shattered by that unparliamentary 
 mob with which they had forgotten to count. 
 
 Nobody, perhaps, was more surprised by the 
 result than the chief schoolmaster of the Orleanist 
 sect, M. Guizot. Nature and education had 
 curiously fitted him to believe that half the 
 evils of Prance could be removed by a cunningly- 
 balanced mechanism. He was too able and far- 
 seeing a man, it is true, to think that France 
 could go back to the practice of feudalism or 
 divine right. His fine philosophical under- 
 standing had been strengthened by the long 
 a,nd profound study which he had given to 
 the early history of European civilisation, and 
 
 M 2 
 
180 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 his great book on that subject must be placed 
 among the chief contributions to the literature 
 of our time. Few Englishmen have been so 
 well acquainted with the history of England. 
 And he knew the political spirit of our country 
 as well as it can be known by any mere literary 
 student. He knew it so imperfectly, in other 
 words, as to believe that the delicate fabric of 
 the British constitution could be made to rest 
 on the volcanic soil of France. His passionate 
 love of order was, no doubt, rooted in the 
 memory of his father, who perished on the 
 scaffold amid the madness of the Eevolution. 
 Had he been a Catholic instead of a Protestant, 
 his love of system and his domineering spirit 
 would have given the Clerical party a fatally 
 great chief. His ability and his temper would 
 quickly have led it to destruction. Stiff and 
 dogmatic, he was not made to be a successful party 
 leader. Although his disposition was leavened 
 by such Liberalism as he drew from Genevan 
 doctrines and forms of church government, he 
 
THE OELEANISTS. ISl 
 
 was able nevertheless to leave a good deal of 
 ruin behind him. Essentially a professor, before 
 all things a lecturer, he lectured his country into 
 revolution. His obstinate belief in the strength 
 of a parliamentary system gave him the honour 
 of destroying his master's throne ; and the same 
 strength of conviction was curiously shown in 
 almost the last year of his life, when his trust 
 in a hard theological creed made him bring 
 the Protestant Church of France to the verge 
 of disruption. 
 
 One of the most distinguished of the Orleanists 
 is the present Due de Broglie. In some ways 
 the Due de Broglie is a miniature copy of his 
 gTeat master. Lessen but do not destroy the 
 philosophical understanding of M. Guizot; nourish 
 it on the counsels of the Church and the 
 subtilties of theology, the legends of ecclesias- 
 tical fancy and the casuistry of the confessional, 
 more than on the harder facts of secular history; 
 give it the curb of a Liberal Catholicism instead 
 of a Conservative Protestantism, and we get 
 
182 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 the philosophical pedantry of M. de Broglie, 
 Pat infinite superciliousness in the place of that 
 haughtiness which would have made Guizot lecture 
 an angel on the discipline of heaven, and we find 
 the equally rasping, but not so dignified, dictation 
 of the Due de Broglie. Both master and disciple 
 are alike in disdain for small scruples. Personally 
 pure, M. Guizot served himself with all the vast 
 machinery of corruption which set in motion the 
 constitutional monarchy ; and his negotiation of the 
 Spanish Marriages is made the more amazing by 
 contrast with the beauty of his own family life. 
 M. de Broglie is also a man of honour, and his 
 friends say that he has a passionate belief in 
 the goodness of parliamentary government ; yet 
 the trickery and the corruption of his ministerial 
 career could not be matched in our time out- 
 side the range of Orleanist management. Perhaps 
 he thinks that political corruption is made classic 
 by the example of Walpole, who first eased the 
 friction of party government by the lubrication 
 of bribes. Perhaps it is merely a heritage from 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 183 
 
 the constitutional monarchy. At all eventSj 
 Louis Philippe was a sincere imitator of Walpole. 
 He systematically assumed that convictions were 
 for sale. The Due de Broglie, it must be 
 admitted, assumed that they must usually be 
 stifled. Thus he shows that he is a pupil of 
 the constitutional monarchy as well as of the 
 emperor. 
 
 No description of the Orleanist party is com- 
 plete without mentioning their great leader, 
 M. Thiers. 
 
 M. Thiers was born in 1797, when the Revolution 
 had already done the whole of its destructive 
 work. The storm had swept away the grandest 
 and most culpable of all European monarchies, 
 the most brilUant, fascinating, and worst of all 
 aristocracies, and the greatest, the most guilty, 
 of all national churches. Louis XVI., Marie 
 Antoinette, great nobles, beauties of the court, 
 poets, philosophers, orators, statesmen, priests, 
 had died under the guillotine. The remaining 
 princes and most of the aristocracy were living 
 
184, FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 in exile, plotting against the revolutionary govern- 
 ment, and preparing for the restoration of the 
 dynasty which Providence had appointed to rule 
 over France. But, before the birth of Thiers, 
 the destructive machinery of the Revolution had 
 perished too. The nation had awakened from the 
 dream of enthusiasm into which it had been cast 
 by the Eevolution. It had found that the hard 
 facts of daily life — sorrow and suffering, vice and 
 misery, poverty, ambition, and crime — would 
 survive all declarations of the rights of man. 
 But the army still obeyed the stimulus of a 
 fervour which had made it more than a match 
 for the whole of monarchical Europe, and, led by 
 Napoleon, it had already astonished the world 
 by the campaign in Italy. Victory had given 
 France a master, whom fear of disorder and the 
 loss of cherished illusions had made her but too 
 ready to accept. In a little while the RepubUc 
 was to be overthrown, and replaced by the greatest 
 military despotism which the world had seen 
 since the fall of imperial Eome. When M. Thiers 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 185 
 
 was a childj Napoleon was carrying the eagles 
 of Prance to half the capitals of Europe, and 
 debauching the nation by deep draughts of 
 military glory. He was reviving the forms of 
 the old court with the addition of much tinsel 
 splendour. A new aristocracy, mostly trained 
 in the barrack-room, and bearing traces of that 
 school of manners, was to take the place of 
 nobles who were at least examples of consummate 
 good breeding. A new church, under the orders 
 of Napoleon, and largely the creature of his 
 win, was to rise on the ruins of an institution 
 which had given teachers and companions to 
 kings. 
 
 Such was the Prance into which Thiers was 
 born, in 1797. His birthplace was Marseilles, 
 then, as now, one of the most fervidly political 
 towns in France. On both sides his ancestry 
 was remarkable. On that of his father, he came 
 from an old family which had lived in Marseilles 
 for many generations. His great-grandfather had 
 been a rich and well-known merchant, who was 
 
186 FRANCE BINGE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 ruined by an unlucky speculation. His grand- 
 father was keeper of the archiTes of the munici- 
 pality, and a man of literary culture. His father 
 was a clever scapegrace, now a merchant, now 
 an army contractor, now the manager of a 
 travelling band of actors, now the lessee of 
 gaming-tables, and again nothing in particular. 
 He was always turning up in the wrong place, 
 and he was usually in difSculties. Strange stories 
 are told of his powers of talking about everything 
 with perfect fluency, with absolute confidence, 
 and with an interesting disdain for truth. He 
 was by anticipation a caricature of his famous 
 son. Although the family was Royalist, the 
 father of Thiers was a partisan of the Revolu- 
 tion. I fear I must add that he was profoundly 
 disreputable. At least he was a bad husband. 
 He had deserted his wife at the time his son 
 Adolphe was born. On the mother's side, M. Thiers 
 came from a family of Greek origin. Thus 
 perhaps a touch of Levantine vivacity and 
 shrewdness was added to the kindred qualities 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 187 
 
 which he had inherited from his Proven9al 
 blood. 
 
 His maternal grandmother, a Madame Amie, 
 was the aunt of Andre Chenier, the poet, who added 
 imperishable things to the literature of the Revo- 
 lutiouj and who perished on the scaffold when 
 the madness of the Eeign of Terror smote down 
 the Girondists. When mounting to the guiHotuie, 
 "To die so young P^ he exclaimed; and then, 
 striking his forehead, he said : " There was some- 
 thing there." 
 
 Madame Thiers and the whole of her family 
 were Royahsts. Had her son followed her counsel, 
 he would, in the most important periods of his 
 life, have been a partisan of the Comte de 
 Chambord and the white flag. She was a de- 
 voted mother. Deserted by her worthless husband, 
 and dependent on her own family for bread, 
 she gave herself up to the education of her boy. 
 Through the influence of her cousin, Joseph 
 Chenier, the brother of the poet, she got for 
 him one of those scholarships which Napoleon 
 
188 TRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 had established in the public schools of France. 
 Thus Thiers was, in a way, indebted for his 
 education to the man whose marvellous history 
 he was afterwards to write. At the Lycee, or 
 high school, of Marseilles, Thiers was as bright 
 and vivacious as in after life. As in after life, too, 
 he displayed strong military tastes, devoting 
 himself especially to studies, such as mathematics 
 and history, which would fit him to be a soldier. 
 Indeed, the style of education in the public 
 schools was largely military, in order to give 
 Napoleon a constant supply of instructed officers. 
 The scholars were fed on the stories of the 
 great imperial victories. Austerlitz and Jena 
 had been won shortly before Thiers went to 
 college as a lad of eleven, and when he was 
 there, the Moniteur brought the chequered story 
 of the Peninsular War. It told also of the in- 
 vasion of Russia, the tremendous battle of 
 Borodino, the burning of Moscow, the awful 
 retreat to the borders of Poland. It described 
 the emperor's vain efforts to make head against 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 189 
 
 the coalition of Europe, his abdication, his exile 
 to Elba, his triumphant return to France. It 
 recounted the crowning judgment of Waterloo, 
 and the expiation of St. Helena. It is difficult 
 for this generation to call up, by any effort of 
 imagination, the fever in which the youth of 
 France were kept in that season of victory, 
 defeat, invasion, with the empire of the world for 
 the prize, and the restoration of an odious 
 dynasty for the penalty of failure. It was a time 
 such as comes only once in centuries, and to the 
 latest hour of his Hfe Thiers bore the mark of 
 its exciting lessons. 
 
 The year before Waterloo put an end to his 
 career at school and also to all his hopes of 
 entering the army ; the Bourbons, who had now 
 returned to France, sought only aristocratic 
 officers. His mother did not know what to do 
 with her brilliant son, and the number of avail- 
 able careers was sadly limited by her poverty, 
 which was such that she had to eke out 
 a living by her needle. At one time she 
 
190 FEANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 thouglit of putting her boy into a merchant's 
 office. But she was too intelligent not to see 
 his wonderful talents, and not to sympathise 
 with his ambitious hopes. Her own mother, who 
 lived with her and had also become poor, was 
 devoted to the young boy, and by the sale of 
 a little property she got the funds requisite 
 for making him a barrister. The whole family 
 went to the town of Ais, which was the 
 seat of a law school. Aix had long had its 
 provincial gentry and its lawyers of repute. 
 The same families had lived there for genera- 
 tions. The society was cultivated, and its tastes 
 literary. There was a literary academy as well 
 as courts of justice. Thiers, who was eighteen 
 years old when he went to Aix, soon became 
 the best-known young man in the town. He 
 studied little law, but he read widely in history 
 and literature. 
 
 Then, as ia after life, he had amaziag power 
 of talk. He would speak for hours about art, litera- 
 ture, politics, military tactics, religion, philosophy. 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 191 
 
 finance — anything that came in his way. Eich 
 cultivated people iavited him to their houses^ 
 and were delighted by his intellectual brilliancy, 
 as well as amused by his boundless self-confidence. 
 The more Conservative families, on the other 
 hand, were shocked by the freedom of his 
 Liberalism. "He writes well," they said, "but 
 he thinks badly." Among the lads of his own 
 age, he was an intellectual leader, and even 
 then he had boundless ambition and confidence 
 in his own powers. The career of Napoleon 
 seemed to make anything possible to a gifted 
 young man, and Thiers was already bent on 
 governing France. " We shall see when we 
 shall be ministers," he used to say to his fellow- 
 students. At that time, he gained his first hterary 
 distinction. The Academy of Ais had offered a 
 prize of twenty pounds for the best essay on the 
 life of the great moraUst, Vauvenargues, who 
 had lived in the neighbourhood. Thiers, among 
 others, handed in an essay, and it was by far 
 the best. It was unsigned, of course, but it 
 
192 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 was accompanied by a sealed enTelope containing 
 his name. Without breaking the envelope, the 
 judges learned the secret of the authorship, and 
 some of them were too Conservative to like his 
 defiant Liberalism. They did not dare to give 
 his essay a second place, but they made a 
 compromise by declining to award any prize, 
 and inviting a second competition. Thiers was 
 more than a match for their craft. Writing, in 
 hot haste, another essay on the same subject, 
 he sent it to a friend in Paris, who reposted 
 it to Aix. The members of the academy were 
 delighted to see from the post-mark that such 
 notice of their academy had been taken in the 
 capital, and they were far more delighted to find 
 the essay so good as to merit the prize. So 
 they gave the first place to it, and the second 
 to the essay of Thiers. When they opened the 
 envelopes containing the names of the writers, 
 they found that the first as well as the second 
 essay had been written by their troublesome 
 young townsman. The essay merited a prize. 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 193 
 
 if I may judge from the only passage of it 
 whicli ever seems to have been published. It 
 was a bright, lively production, and it con- 
 tains one saying that may be taken as the 
 motto of its author's life. "Since man," he 
 said, " has been created for action, the more he 
 acts the more he fulfils his destiny." Such, at 
 least, was the belief on which Thiers shaped 
 his career. A less contemplative nature never 
 lived; he did not understand day-dreaming j he 
 was consumed with a passion for work ; and 
 at the age of eighty he worked harder than 
 most men can do at the age of thirty or twenty- 
 five. 
 
 The writing of the essay on Vauvenargues 
 determined the immediate future of Thiers. The 
 most intimate of his friends at Aix was a young 
 man, a year older than himself, who was to be 
 bound to him through life by a tie of beautiful 
 devotion, who was also to earn an illustrious 
 name, and who still lives amid the respect and 
 admiration of France — M. Mignet, the distinguished 
 
194 FEANCB SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEE. 
 
 historian, and perpetual secretary of the French 
 Academy. 
 
 Mignet had ah-eady gone to Paris, and he 
 had won a prize of sixty pounds offered by the, 
 French Academy for the best essay on the 
 institutions of St. Louis. It was he who put 
 Thiers's essay on Vauvenargues in the post for 
 Aix. Fired by the example of Mignet, Thiers 
 also went to Paris, carrying with him the twenty 
 pounds which he himself had won, and he made 
 his way to the very humble lodgings of his friend, 
 who had already found congenial work as a 
 writer for the Gourrier de France, to which he 
 contributed articles on foreign politics. 
 
 Here let me say something about the state 
 of France and Paris in 1821, the year in which 
 Thiers came to the capital. The court, the 
 nobles, and the clergy were all back. They 
 were more bigoted than they had been before 
 the Revolution, because they had taught them- 
 selves to believe that the throne would never 
 have perished, and they themselves would never 
 
THE OELEAl^ISTS. 195 
 
 have been exiled, if they had not trifled with 
 the spirit of philosophical inquiry, and bent before 
 the mob. Democracy had become formidable, 
 they thought, because they had not gone zealously 
 to mass, because they had allowed Voltaireanism 
 to sneer away the sanctity of the priesthood, 
 because many of them had courted the society 
 of briUiant sceptics hke Diderot, because they 
 had forgotten that the Church was the mainstay 
 of social order. The king and the queen had 
 been beheaded because concessions had been 
 made to what was called the spirit of reform. 
 The States-General ought to have been shut up 
 when the deputies became insolent ; Mirabeau 
 should have been made to cool his ardour in 
 prison; and the mob of Paris should have been 
 shot down before it was insolent enough to 
 attack the Bastile. Thus would France have been 
 saved from the scourge of Robespierre and Danton, 
 from the Eeign of Terror, from the wars of the 
 Empire. Rough old soldiers of the Empire learned 
 the forms and the phrases of devoutness, the 
 
196 FRANCE SINCE THE FIKST EMPIRE. 
 
 chaplains of tlie regiments were potent masters 
 of promotion^ and the dignity of the Church 
 was protected by laws of atrocious severity 
 against sacrilege. The court could not indeed 
 undo the rough work of the Revolution by re- 
 viving the law of primogeniture, or by giving 
 exclusive rights of State pay to the Oathohc 
 Church. So far, the fruits of the Revolution 
 were guarded by the Charter or Constitution 
 which had been signed by Louis XVIII. But 
 the charter gave the suffrage to a very small 
 class of the community, it restricted the choice 
 of deputies, and the court did all in its power 
 to fritter even that little Magna Charta away. 
 The courtiers said that the king had "granted" 
 it of his own free will, thus implying that what 
 he had given he could take away. 
 
 Such was the court down to 1830; and the 
 picture has a more than historical interest. But 
 outside the court was the real Paris, that 
 wonderful centre of intellectual life, to which 
 we can find no parallel nearer than mediaeval 
 
THE ORLBANISTS. 19T 
 
 Florence or ancient Athens. The rich middle 
 class was full of ambition and of hope. It 
 wanted to establish a real parliamentary govern- 
 mentj which should perpetuate the freedom with- 
 out the follies of the Revolution. It wanted 
 a parliamentary and constitutional monarchy. It 
 despised the divine right of kings as much 
 as it detested the rule of priests, and the 
 French love of equality was cut to the quick 
 by the pretensions of the patrician families. The 
 political feelings, and hopes, and beliefs of this 
 class were expressed by Beranger, whose light, 
 airy, perfectly-finished verses seem still to be 
 the very voice of pleasure-loving, brilliant, intel- 
 lectual, democratic, sceptical Paris. The cultivated 
 classes had a great Conservative leader in 
 Casimir Perier, and the Liberals had a less 
 great but more amiable chief in M. Laffitte. 
 M. Talleyrand was still vigorous, and he made 
 war on the court in his scoflBng epigrams. At 
 the same time, there was a wonderful outburst 
 of literary and intellectual power. Never, in. 
 
198 PEANCB SINCE THE TIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 factj has the literary genius of Prance been 
 more brilliant since the days of Louis Quatorze, 
 Chateaubriand^ Benjamin Constant, Paul Louis 
 Courier^ Lamartine, Lamennais^ Victor Hugo, 
 Guizot, Vniemain, Cousin, Saint Beuve, Alfred 
 de Vignet ; all these men, and many others, 
 were already pouring out prose and poetry, 
 philosophy, criticism, political dissertation. Even 
 when nominally on the side of the court, they 
 were making Liberal ideas spring up by the 
 mere stimulus which they gave to thought. The 
 working classes were less of a power, for they 
 had not yet received the suffrage, nor had the 
 cause of that Republic, to which they still fondly 
 clung, been freed from the stains of blood 
 with which it had been splashed by the Reign 
 of Terror. Nor again had they yet any consider- 
 able leader except in Lafayette, the remaining 
 hero of the Revolution. The triumph of the 
 Republic had yet to come- 
 
 Such was the Paris to which Thiers came 
 in 1821, in which he was soon to exercise a 
 
THE ORLBANISTS. 199 
 
 profound influence. Tlie beginning of Ms splendid 
 career in the capital was very humble. He went 
 to live in the same abode as his friend Mignet. 
 His chamber was in the fourth floor of a dingy 
 house in the Passage Montesquieu, which is 
 situated in one of the most noisy and populous 
 quarters of Paris. The furniture of the room, 
 as it is described by an eye-witness, was com- 
 posed of a modest chest of drawers and a 
 wooden bed, two chairs, and a rickety black 
 table. A few books lay at hand, and the only 
 ornament was a bad engraving of Madame de 
 Stael's heroine, Corinne. In little more than 
 ten years the occupant of that poor Httle room 
 was to hve in one of the mansions which are 
 allotted to the ministers of state. 
 
 But Thiers can never be said to have had 
 a battle with real poverty, for he began to be 
 successful only three weeks after he came to 
 Paris. Partly from necessity and partly from 
 choice, he flung himself into a career for which 
 he had consummate aptitude, and which at that 
 
200 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 time was tlie strongest road to power in Prance. 
 He became a journalist. Introduced to tte editor 
 of the Constitutionnel, wUcli was then the chief 
 organ of public opinion^ he was at first set to the 
 task of writing articles on art. He happened to 
 be peculiarly well qualified for that work. In the 
 houses of his rich and cultivated friends at Aix he 
 had studied paintings, etchings, statues, medals, 
 many of which were the spoils of Napoleon's cam- 
 paigns. He was passionately fond of art. He 
 could paint with some skill, and one of the first things 
 he did on coming to Paris was to visit the great 
 galleries. At last he was entrusted with political 
 writing, and he speedily became the first political 
 writer of a country which has a genius for dis- 
 cussion. Compared with the great Parisian 
 journals of our own day, not to speak of 
 others nearer home, those to which Thiers con- 
 tributed were, it is true, unimportant. The 
 Constitutionnel was a small sheet of four pages, 
 and the leading articles were short and fragmen- 
 tary. But the character of the writing improved 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 201 
 
 as the struggle with the court became more 
 dangerous. 
 
 In order to get the power of directing the 
 Oonstitutionnel, Thiers bought a share in it with 
 money borrowed from a friend. On the eve of 
 1830j when the combat was becoming critical, and 
 when the proprietors of the Gonstitutionnel would 
 not permit him to risk the safety of a valuable 
 property by sufficiently bold writing, he founded 
 another journal in concert with his friend Mignet 
 and Armand Carrel, who was afterwards to 
 become even a greater political writer than him- 
 self. That journal was the famous National, 
 which powerfully helped to pull down the throne 
 of Charles X. Thiers's articles were often made 
 masterpieces of political writing by the closeness 
 of their argument, the perfect lucidity of 
 their style, the aptness and brilliancy of their 
 illustrations. Take this one example of the 
 manner in which he shows the superiority of 
 representative over despotic government. " It also 
 has its Caesars, but they are Chathams, Pitts, and 
 
202 PRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIBE. 
 
 Cannings. They come at the head, not of 
 armies, but of majorities. We do not assassinate 
 them; we send them to the House of Lords." 
 In another article in the National, Thiers laid 
 down the famous maxim, borrowed from the 
 practice of our own constitution : " Le roi regne et 
 ne gouverne pas ! " Thiers's articles supplied not 
 only political instruction, but the pithy maxims 
 which are the current coin of political reflection. 
 The writing of his leading articles would have 
 given ample work to an able man of ordinary 
 strength. But Thiers was a prodigy of physical 
 endurance as well as mental activity, and he 
 speedily set himself to write the history of the 
 great Eevolution. That book, which he pub- 
 lished in monthly parts, made him famous. 
 After a short time of neglect, the Parisians, 
 or rather the French people, read it with pro- 
 found interest. It was sold by thousands. People 
 were fascinated by the charm of the narra- 
 tive, rapid, lucid, full of incidents and glowing 
 with bright intelligence. They began to discuss 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 203 
 
 once more the crimes of that old monarchy 
 which Charles X. and his courtiers sought to 
 revive. They were reminded of what could be 
 said iu favour even of Ro'bespierre himself. 
 They were taken once more over those battle- 
 fields of the Repubhc which the later military 
 glories of the Empire had been permitted to 
 obscure. Thus Thiers, by writing his history 
 of the Revolution, did much to produce that 
 change of feeling which brought on the Revo- 
 lution of 1830. Nor did even the writing of the 
 history exhaust his activity. He deliberately 
 tried to become an accomplished man of the 
 world, a feat made difficult by many physical 
 defects. He was scarcely five feet high, and his 
 figure was short, squat, and ungraceful. The 
 nearness of his sight obliged him to use 
 spectacles, and the bright intelligence of his 
 square compact face was set off by no grace of 
 feature. His voice was shrill, and he spoke with 
 a southern accent, amusing to fastidious Parisian 
 ears. His gestures were awkward, incessant. 
 
204 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 almost grotesque. He was absolutely wanting- 
 in tliat repose and ease of manner which form 
 the crowning grace of good breeding. Yet he 
 overcame many of these defects by laborious 
 attention to the small as well as to the great 
 accomplishments of life. He made himself a good 
 rider at the expense of some faUs, and also of 
 acquaintance with men whose talk was of nothing 
 but horses. He dined out a great deal. He 
 frequented those cafes which are the clubs of 
 the Parisians, and astonished people by the 
 abundance and eloquence of his talk on every 
 subject under the sun. He was to be seen night 
 after night in the drawing-room of M. Laffitte, 
 gesticulating, declaiming, denouncing the Grovem- 
 ment, pouring out epigrams, explaining the 
 details of finance, dogmatising about the mysteries 
 of military strategy, or discussiag the artistic 
 monuments of the Renaissance. Talleyrand, the 
 shrewdest spirit of the time, predicted that he 
 would become great; and made him the subject 
 of one of his mots. Thiers, he said, is not 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 205 
 
 a parvenu; he is an arrive. There was also a 
 touch, of romance in his career at this time, for 
 he had to fight a duel with the father of a 
 young lady at Aix whom he was said to have 
 jilted, and he was nearly shot. He became, in 
 short, one of the hest-known men in Paris. 
 
 He happened to dine one night at a 
 restaurant in the Palais Eoyal in company 
 with Lamartine, who was then on the side of 
 the Bourbons; and the poet has left a 
 brilliant, if rather sarcastic, picture of the 
 young journalist. Perhaps, he hints, Thiers, 
 being full of southern heat, had too good 
 an opinion of his own abilities. "Modesty," 
 demurely adds Lamartine, " is a northern 
 virtue, or an exquisite fruit of education. 
 Thiers spoke first, he spoke last, he scarcely 
 listened to what was said in reply, but he 
 spoke with a justice, an audacity, a fertility 
 of ideas, which made it easy to pardon the 
 volubility of his lips. . . . He had enough 
 of gunpowder in his nature to blow up ten 
 
206 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 governments. I went away^" says Lamartine, 
 "more than ever convinced that the monarchy 
 was doomed because it had pleased Providence 
 to give it snch an enemy .^' 
 
 Such was Thiers on the eve of 1830. 
 Charles X. had made what he called a last 
 concession to the Liberals by giving the place 
 of Prime Minister to M. de Martignac, one 
 of the most illustrious men that ever adorned 
 the French bar ; a cultivated, gentle, noble 
 spirit, endowed with a flowing and persuasive 
 eloquence which, in some of its higher notes, 
 recalled the grand declamation of the most 
 gifted of the Girondists, Vergniaud. But it 
 was not intended that M. de Martignac should 
 succeed, and a trivial check on the subject of a 
 petty municipal bill sufficed to throw him from 
 power. The king then gave his confidence to 
 the Prince de Polignac, who was the ambassador 
 in England, who had studied our institutions 
 and could talk glibly about the British con- 
 stitution; who admired our Tory party, and 
 
THE ORLEAIflSTS. 207 
 
 thought that the Duke of Wellington was a 
 great statesman^ but who hated liberty with 
 an inexpressible hatred; who was a fanatic in 
 the cause alike of Absolutism and Catholicism; 
 who was convinced that Liberalism meant 
 anarchy, and that the art of government was 
 summed up in the devices of intrigue and the 
 word of command; who had no iear because 
 he saw no consequences, and who strung aU 
 these qualities together by a serene, unchange- 
 able, smug, smiling faith in the goodness of his 
 own intentions. 
 
 Before the appointment of the Prince de 
 PolignaCj Thiers had intended to accompany 
 Captain La Place in a naval expedition round 
 the globe, with the object of getting materials 
 for a general history of the world. That was one 
 of the many objects which his bright restless 
 brain took up and threw away. But the Ministry 
 of the Prince de Pohgnac was, he knew, a 
 signal for war to the knife against the constitution, 
 and the herald of a coup d'etat. Thiers, who was 
 
208 FBANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 essentially a journalist and a political leader, felt 
 tliat he liad more important work to do in Paris 
 tlian lie could find in the South Seas. He stayed 
 at home, and, by doing so, he helped to over- 
 throw the monarchy. The time for action soon 
 came, for the Chamber of Deputies passed a 
 vote of no confidence in the Ministry, and ex- 
 pressed its condemnation in a celebrated address 
 to the king himself, signed by two hundred and 
 twenty - one deputies. The king answered by 
 dissolving the Chamber, and the country answered 
 by re-electing the two hundred and twenty- 
 one deputies. Still the kiug would not submit. 
 He appealed to his honour, to his sovereign right, 
 to his good intention, to his duties. He refused 
 to accept the dilemma either of se demettre or 
 se soumettre. He was encouraged by the Prince 
 de Polignac, who declared that order, property, 
 and religion were all at stake ; that war to the 
 death must be waged against latent Radicalism ; 
 that the contest lay between the king and the 
 Gambettas of the period. Nor did the king and 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 209 
 
 Ms ministers content themselves with mere protests, 
 for, stepping beyond the limits of the constitution, 
 they, on the 26th July, suspended the freedom 
 of the press, and decreed a second dissolution 
 by the famous ordinances, which were mere records 
 of the king's personal will. But the king and 
 his ministers did not know the pohtical temper 
 with which they had to deal. I daresay they 
 never gave a thought to the fiery young political 
 leader, who had sufficient gunpowder in his mind 
 to blow up ten Bourbon governments. Instead of 
 obeying the illegal decrees, M. Thiers made them 
 the subject of a protest, which may rank with the 
 most memorable acts of aU his life. Calling a 
 meeting of his fellow-journalists at the office of 
 the National, he insisted that they should publicly 
 and collectively refuse to obey the ordinances. 
 Some of them were too timid to follow him. While 
 they were resisting his fiery gesticulation, his 
 young friend and fellow- journalist, M. de Remusat, 
 came into the office, and Thiers said to him : 
 "We must not submit to the ordinances; we 
 
210 EEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 must oppose them by an act. Will you sign 
 the protest?" The young aristocratic man of 
 letters instantly said that he would, and the 
 douhting spirits followed his example. Then 
 Thiers drew up the famous refusal to obey the 
 ordinances, and it was signed by himself, Mignet, 
 Armand Carrel, De Eemusat, and the chief 
 political writers of France. That document is 
 the Magna Charta of French journalism, and it 
 gave the signal for the Eevolution of 1830. It 
 was signed on the 27th July, little more than 
 twenty-four hours after the appearance of the 
 illegal decrees, and on the same day barricades 
 arose throughout Paris. The ministers had, mean- 
 while, been living in such a fooPs paradise that 
 they had not thought it needful to fiU Paris 
 with troops. The king and the court were at 
 St. Cloud, a few miles from the capital, and 
 Charles, as I have said elsewhere, quietly spent 
 his evenings at the card-table. He smiled blandly 
 now and then when he heard that the insurrec- 
 tion was spreading. Polignac, who was also at 
 
THE OELEANISTS, 211 
 
 St. Cloud, was equally infatuated. Hearing that 
 some of the troops would not fire on the people^ 
 he said : " Then we must fire on the troops.^' But 
 the rebellion spread from hour to hour; the 
 soldiers had neither food nor ammunition, and many 
 of them joined the defenders of the barricades. 
 The Louvre was taken by assault, and the soldiers 
 were driven from the Taileries. The contest was 
 no longer a revolt, it was a revolution. A few 
 days after the publication of the ordinances, 
 Charles X. had to fly to Eambouillet. In two 
 days more he abdicated in favour of his young 
 grandson, the Due de Bordeaux, now known as 
 the Comte de Chambord. Immediately afterwards 
 lie took his way to England, the great harbour 
 •of refuge for the victims of regal infatuation. 
 Thus disappeared from France the last legitimate 
 representative of the most illustrious of all European 
 dynasties. 
 
 Meanwhile Thiers had displayed even more 
 than his usual activity, and had given a decisive 
 turn to the Eevolution. The leaders of it had 
 
212 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EilPIRE. 
 
 three courses before them. They could try to 
 establish a republic, or allow the Due de 
 Bordeaux to take the place of his grandfather, 
 or finally give the throne to the king's cousin, 
 the Due d'Orleans, better known as Louis 
 Philippe. M. de Lafayette was in favour of a 
 republic, and the young enthusiastic partisans 
 of that cause had already seized the Hotel de 
 Ville, the civic symbol of French sovereignty. 
 But Thiers, Guizot, Casimir Perier, Laffitte, and 
 the more responsible leaders of the Revolution 
 had inherited a distrust of a republic, and 
 there can be little doubt that the time had not 
 yet come for setting up such a government. 
 Thiers himself had audaciously tried to close 
 the controversy, by rushing away to JSfeuilly, 
 the residence of the Due d'Orleans, and 
 beseeching him to be the William III. of 
 France. His journey was a curious freak of 
 audacity, for he had to ride through barricades 
 manned by Repubhcans, and in order to reach the 
 gates of the chateau he had almost to ride for 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 213 
 
 tis life. Even when he got there, it needed, in a 
 young political writer, a good deal of courage — 
 some people would say a good deal of impudence — 
 to offer the throne of France with no other 
 warrant than that of a little meeting held in the 
 Eue de la Ville TEv^que. At first the mission 
 threatened to be a failure, for Louis Philippe 
 himself was not at home, or at least he was 
 conveniently invisible, and his pious decorous 
 wife, Marie Amehe, was shocked by the proposal 
 to betray a king who had covered her husband 
 with kindness. But Louis Philippe's sister, 
 Madame Adelaide, was made of more ambitious 
 stuff. She was one of those women who have 
 played a great part in the strifes of France, 
 and she instantly declared that her brother 
 would accept the throne. Meanwhile, the king 
 had tried to tie the hands of the Due d'Orleans, 
 by appointing him the guardian of the Due de 
 Bordeaux and lieutenant-governor of the kingdom. 
 Had that position been accepted, it would 
 possibly have been well for France, as the 
 
214 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 Eoyalist party would have been saved from 
 a sclaisni which has never yet been repaired, 
 and which has wasted the national strength in 
 barren contests. But Thiers and the rest of 
 the Liberals wanted to have done with the 
 elder branch of the Bourbons. They wanted 
 to stamp out every vestige of Legitimacy. They 
 wanted, as they said, to do for Prance what 
 our own Whig aristocracy had done for England 
 in 1688. They wanted to find a William III. 
 After some hesitation, which is variously ex- 
 plained by the natural necessities of thought or 
 the promptings of hypocrisy, Louis Philippe 
 accepted the throne, which was offered by 
 the Chamber of Deputies. It will ever be a 
 serious question whether he should have allowed 
 himself to be made more than lieutenant-governor 
 of the kingdom, and the guardian of Henry V. 
 According to one party, he had no right to 
 let his conduct be guided by the debt of grati- 
 tude which he owed to Charles X. According 
 to another, he had been actively iutriguing for 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 215 
 
 the possession of the throne^ and his absorbing 
 selfishness^ which was the basis of his character, 
 made him mistake the promptings of interest 
 for the call of duty. But, at all events, if he 
 erred, he met with a crushing punishment eighteen 
 years later, when his own obstiuacy provoked 
 a revolution, and when he had to follow 
 Charles X. into lifelong exile. 
 
 The Eevolution of 1830 closed the second 
 chapter in the career of Thiers, leaving him at 
 the age of thirty-three among the most famoas 
 men in France. He might at once have entered 
 the Cabinet, and indeed he was invited to 
 become Minister of Finance a few months after 
 the accession of Louis Phihppe. "Are you am- 
 bitious, M. Thiers ? " asked the king, as he 
 proceeded to offer him that brilliant position. 
 Of course Thiers was ambitious, so ambitious 
 that, according to the gibes of his friends at Aix, 
 he would be content with nothing short of a 
 marriage with one of the king's daughters. 
 But, as his very ambition taught him to be 
 
216 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 moderate^ lie declined to be minister until lie 
 should have gained further official experience. 
 So he remained for a time in the position of 
 what we should call Secretary of the Treasury. 
 But the court could not afford to dispense with 
 his brilliant qualities, and he became Minister of 
 the Interior in 1832. He was then scarcely 
 thirty-six years old. 
 
 I cannot pretend to sketch even in strokes of 
 miniature his brilliant career as Minister of the 
 Interior, Minister of Commerce, Minister of 
 Foreign Affairs, and President of the Council. 
 It is impossible to describe how he dealt with the 
 insurrection in La Vendee, nor how he arrested its 
 leader, the adventurous princess, the Duchesse de 
 Berri, mother of the Oomte de Chambord ; how he 
 encircled Paris with its great fortifications; how 
 he completed such public monuments as the Arc 
 de Triomphe, and the Madeleine; how he con- 
 structed canals and roads; how he had much to 
 do with bringing the remains of Napoleon from 
 St. Helena to Les Invalides ; or how he nearly 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 217 
 
 plunged France into a war with England on account 
 of Mehemet AH and the Eastern Question. I can 
 only just allude to the brilliant and sometimes the 
 reckless way in which he led the opposition to his 
 great rival Guizot, during eight years' exclusion 
 from power. I cannot stop to discuss even this 
 last and greatest period of his life, when^ chas- 
 tened by age and the mighty calamities of a 
 country which he passionately loved, he set him- 
 self to repair the ruin left by the Empire. 
 
 A few words, however, must be said about 
 the general character of his home and his foreign 
 policy. For a time after the Revolution of 1830, 
 he profoundly disappointed his Liberal friends 
 by his trust in the swift rude devices of mihtary 
 rule. Some of the laws for which he was re- 
 sponsible unpleasantly recall the acts of Charles X. 
 In some degree the blame of the laws, if 
 blame there be, must rest on his own domi- 
 neering character. Prom his youth he had a 
 passion for command, a determination to have 
 his own way in the least as well as the greatest 
 
218 PEANOE SINCE THE EIEST EMPIEE. 
 
 of things. A Frendi wit satirised his craving 
 for command, by saying that the ministry of 1840 
 was wholly made up of Thiers under different 
 names. All his highly respectable colleagues 
 were assumed to be mere clerks. Nay, Louis 
 Philippe, the vainest and most self-sufScient of 
 kings, sometimes found that he had a master 
 as well as a minister. Thiers once flung down 
 his portfolio ia a pet^ and darted out of the 
 council chamber, because the king had dared 
 to interfere with the details of some petty diplo- 
 matic arrangement, and for three whole days 
 his colleagues could not prevail on him to come 
 back. The same spirit was displayed under the 
 Republic of 1848, Thiers lecturing and domi- 
 neering all round. Even when age had mellowed 
 his spirit, he would scarcely brook opposition in 
 his own Cabinet. Yet such was the gaiety of 
 his spirit, such the light and almost boyish 
 vivacity of his tone, and such the real goodness 
 of his heart, that people did not mind his in- 
 tellectual tyranny. They laughed at it, and put 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 219 
 
 Up with. it. That domineering spirit did at one 
 period of his life^ however^ give him a dangerous 
 hking for the devices of military rule. 
 
 But the truth is that, even if he had been 
 as serene a constitutionalist as our own Sir Robert 
 Peelj he could not have governed Prance with 
 the quiet methods that do very well in England. 
 In the days of Louis Philippe, the war of factions 
 made it appear necessary for constitutional ministers 
 to pass laws which in their hearts they must have 
 condemned. 
 
 Thiers did much to increase the troubles of 
 his own country by the chief literary devotion 
 of his life. He did iucalculable mischief by 
 strengthening the idolatry of a man who has 
 been the evil genius of Prance. Napoleon's con- 
 summate faculty for war blotted out half the good 
 of the Revolution, by debauching the French 
 people with a passion for military glory. His con- 
 summate faculty for despotism knit the already 
 centralised institutions of Prance into a system 
 which affords the most powerful lever ever 
 
220 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIHE. 
 
 fashioned for tlie liaiid of illegal violence. It 
 is he more than any other person who has placed 
 the French at the mercy of mobs and soldiers. 
 The worship of Napoleon^ was comparatively feeble 
 from the battle of Waterloo to the rise of the 
 constitutional monarchy. He had left too many 
 mourning homes, and the memory of too many 
 disasters, to stir the pulses of his countrymen 
 as he had done on the morrow of Jena and 
 Austerlitz. But Thiers addressed a generation 
 which had grown up since the Grand Army perished 
 in the snows of Russia, and since Paris was 
 occupied by the troops of the coalition. His 
 own early training, his military tastes, his historical 
 studies, all tended to make him find a hero in 
 the great dictator, and the Napoleonic legend 
 again grew beneath his hands. His history of 
 the Eevolution, and of the Consulate, and the 
 Empire, revived the passionate admiration for 
 the man who had shed the blood of his country- 
 men like water, who had extinguished their 
 liberties, who had dwarfed their literature, and 
 
THE ORLEANISTS. 221 
 
 made France an intellectual desert^ but who had 
 given them a power and a glory which had made 
 Paris think herself the heir of ancient Rome. It 
 was fitting that Thiers should make his govern- 
 ment bring back the ashes of Napoleon to the 
 banks of the Seine. He acted like a devotee 
 who should build a shrine for the relics of his 
 patron saint. The revived worship of Napoleon 
 has done incalculable injury to France. But for 
 that new example of military force the Republic 
 of 1848 might have withstood conspiracy^ and 
 France might have been saved from that second 
 empire which began in crime and proceeded by 
 steps of fate-like necessity to the capitulation 
 of Sedan. Thiers was more responsible than 
 any other man for the depraved ideals which 
 made that empire a possibility. Indeed, it is a 
 question whether he had not done at least as 
 much evil as good down to that moat illustrious 
 season of all his life, when he set himself to 
 retrieve a vast military disaster, when he refused 
 to be a tool of dynastic selfishness, when he 
 
222 PEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 fought against that very imperialism which his 
 eulogies had nursed, and risked everything to 
 give France the priceless boon of a parliamentary 
 republic. 
 
 One word must also be said about his 
 foreign policy. It was closely connected with 
 his idolatry of Napoleon, and it may be 
 described as a passionate, blind, absorbing 
 determination to sacrifice .everything for the 
 sake of French interests. The interests of 
 other nations were of no account in comparison 
 with the interests of France. If they stood 
 in the way, they must disappear. Nay, they 
 ought to disappear; for was not France the 
 leader of civilisation, the most brilliant and 
 cultivated of nations ? Should not all other 
 peoples copy the graces of her life ? At all 
 events, she must not allow her interests to be 
 touched in any part of the world ; and her 
 interests were to be defined by the minister 
 of the day. 
 
 She had interests in Spain, interests in 
 
THE OKLEANISTS. 223 
 
 Italy, interests in Egypt, iaterests in Con- 
 stantinople. Thiers calmly told Talleyrand that 
 it was essential to the safety of Prance to keep 
 the Spaniards under her control, and that 
 every French government must put down 
 every Spanish constitution, or, in other words, 
 keep the Spanish people in subjection. On 
 another occasion he defended in memorable 
 terms that military expedition to Rome by 
 which the temporal power of the Pope was 
 re-established, and which was the final barrier 
 to the unification of Italy. 
 
 But do not let us judge M. Thiers solely 
 from the evidence of that explosion of cvnical 
 and shallow selfishness. It was after all a 
 national feeling ; it was called patriotism by the 
 fanatics of French interests; and it met with 
 a tremendous chastisement at Gravelotte and 
 Sedan. The loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and 
 the fine of two hundred millions sterling, are 
 the price which France had to pay for the 
 erection of French interests into the supreme 
 
224 FRANCE SINCE THE PIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 law of national existence. That trutli may have 
 dawned on Thiers himself^ on the evening of 
 his long life. 
 
 It is a question whether Thiers was a great 
 man or a great minister. But he was, at leasts 
 a typical Frenchman. Possibly he was, on the 
 whole, the most really typical Frenchman of this 
 century. Not that he had all the best qualities 
 of his race. He lacked the profound passion 
 which gives incomparable grandeur to some of 
 the darkest as well as the brightest periods of 
 French history. He lacked that blind faith in 
 ideals which pai-tially explains the political failures 
 of his countrymen. He lacked that fanaticism 
 which is as visible in the Reign of Terror and in 
 every Parisian revolution as in the French wars 
 of religion. He lacked that readiness to die for 
 lost causes, that martyr spirit, in which the French 
 people, with all their irreverence, are richer, 
 perhaps, than any other nation. Thiers was not 
 a good type of the more heroic qualities of 
 his people. Bat heroic qualities are the gift of 
 
THE OELEANISTS. 225 
 
 a iappy or unhappy few. And Thiers did 
 represent a great part of what is best in French 
 character. He reflected^ with marvellous vividness, 
 the intellectual brightness, the vivacity, the ardour, 
 the culture, the courage, of his countrymen; their 
 cheerfuhiess under adversity; their faith in the 
 great future which awaits France ; their rich 
 store of the social qualities which make her the 
 most interestiag of nations, and which light up 
 the most sombre passages of her grand history. 
 
CHAPTEK VIII. 
 
 BONAPAETISTS. 
 
 It needed no bloodslied to pull down the Empire. 
 The Empress and the courtiers knew that it was 
 detested by the great mass of the Parisians, 
 and that they could not rely on the army. 
 The army of Prance always tends in the long 
 run to be on the same side as the people, in 
 spite of the military maxim that the first and 
 last duty of a soldier is to obey the word of 
 command. As for the officials and the courtiers, 
 and the petted shopkeepers, and the speculators 
 on the Bourse, who had been the mainstay of 
 the Empire, the Government knew that it could 
 not count on them. They vanished at the 
 
BCXNAPAIITISTS. 227 
 
 first touch of misfortane. And for some of 
 thenij in truth, France might not hare been a 
 very safe place after the disappearance of their 
 protector. When the news of the capitulation 
 of Sedan reached Paris in the eveningj every- 
 one knew that there would he a revolution next 
 day. The only un.certainty was, what form 
 it would take. Some Eepuhlicans imagined 
 that it would be best to let the Empire finish 
 the war which it had begun, to bear the igno- 
 miny and the chastisement of defeat^ and then 
 to overthrow it amid the indignation of the 
 country. Some people, without being Bona- 
 partists, would have preferred to have the Empu-e 
 standing, provided the emperor himself should 
 abdicate. But the clearer of the Eepublicans 
 did not confuse themselves with nice calcula- 
 tions ; they saw a bad government tottering 
 and they struck it down. For good or evil, 
 France must accept a democratic government. 
 Hence she must elect between one of two 
 
 systems — an Empire and a Repubha. The 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEE. 
 
 cMef strength of the Empire lies, no doubt, in 
 the fame of the great man by whom it was 
 founded. Vigorous attempts have recently been 
 made to show that he is after all but a foul 
 and misshapen idol. M. Lanfrey in particular 
 has mercilessly stripped off the covering of 
 romance which has been wrapped round the great 
 conqueror. That Napoleon had no sense of 
 honour, that he never scrupled to gain his ends 
 by lying or treachery, that he was cruel, and that 
 history presents no more striking example of 
 selfishness — all this historians say and go far to 
 prove. No doubt, also, he has lost his hold 
 over the imaginations of the French workmen. 
 They, at least, have learnt that the Eepublic has 
 had no such deadly enemy as the great soldier 
 who drowned the nation's memory of freedom in 
 a flood of military glory. The Communists did no 
 capricious act when they mischievously pulled down 
 the Vendome column. Heine, with the strangely 
 prophetic sagacity of the poet, foretold that the 
 mob of Paris would some day thus insult the 
 
THE BONAPAeTISTS. 229 
 
 memory of the emperor, and that they would 
 complete their vandalism by flinging his ashes 
 into the Seine. The first of the predictions 
 has been fulfilled to the letter, the second may 
 equally come to pass if Paris should fall into 
 the hands of another Commune. Heine wrote 
 before the coup' d'etat had overshadowed the 
 glories of the First Empire with the guilt and 
 ignominy of the Second. But the memory of 
 the uncle now suffers for the sins and misfor- 
 tunes of the nephew, and at this day no family 
 is more bitterly hated by the Eepublicans than 
 the Bonapartes. Nevertheless the name of the first 
 Napoleon continues to fascinate a large part of 
 the French people. In him the peasantry 
 possess their only great personal memory. 
 While Danton and Robespierre have bequeathed 
 but vague memories, the " Little Corporal " has 
 left vivid traditions in every cottage. Strangely 
 enough, they forgave him although he took away 
 their sons from the vineyard and the cornfield, 
 and thus offended against the strongest passion 
 
230 PKANCE SISCE THE YTRST EMPIRE. 
 
 of nature — tteir avarice. Some portion of the 
 admiration springs, no doubt, from traditions left 
 by those soldiers wlio came back to peasant homes 
 after the glories of Jena and Austerlitz. Much 
 of it is the remnant of a mistaken belief that 
 it -was Napoleon who broke the bonds of their 
 feudalism, and assured to them the possession 
 of their lands. Much of it is likewise rooted in 
 the fancy that his government put down and kept 
 down the mob of Paris, and all the other mobs 
 which prevented the peasantry from making money. 
 Such, at least, was the conviction which proved 
 most serviceable to his nephew, after the Eevo- 
 lution of 1848 had frightened the class which 
 cares more for its land than for any other 
 thing in the world. Nothing did so much to 
 reassure . the peasants as the showers of grape 
 with which the troops of Louis Napoleon shot 
 down hundreds of innocent men, women, and 
 children, on the boulevards; and the peasants 
 were comforted rather than shocked by those 
 mixed commissions which banished thousands of 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 231 
 
 persons, equally innocent, to Cayenne. His inef- 
 faceable crimes commended him to the ignorant 
 vine-dressers. In his misdeeds, or at least in 
 the strength of purpose and the freedom from 
 scruple which they implied, a class of higher 
 social station and more knowledge, found 
 proof that the Empire was the best of all 
 governments for France and for them. In return, 
 the nation was to put its liberty into the 
 hands of a mihtary chief, who was widely sup- 
 posed to be half a charlatan and haK a knave. 
 
 The way to the Empire was smoothed, and, 
 indeed, rendered possible by the Radical Ee- 
 publicans, when they made a change which they 
 had believed would found the Republic on the 
 adamant of the popular will. At last, it is true, 
 the Republic has gained by the wild leap into 
 universal suffrage. But at first that leap landed 
 the nation in the lap of the Empire. Prince 
 Louis Bonaparte and his little group of shrewd 
 followers saw that the time was come for the 
 establishment of an earthly providence compounded 
 
232 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 of ignorance, superstition, fear, vanity, and greed. 
 They miglit have succeeded in the end, even if 
 they had been less skilled in the art of the con- 
 spirator ; for the country had but a small minority 
 of convinced Republicans; and powerful classes were 
 eager to settle down beneath the quietude of military 
 rule. The Republic might no doubt have been 
 saved by the National Assembly if the Legitimists, 
 the Orleanists, and the Republicans had laid aside 
 their animosities in order that they might work 
 together, on the common ground of parliamentary 
 rule. But it would have been about as hopeful 
 to expect that a set of warring divines would lay 
 aside their rival dogmas for the sake of their 
 common Christianity. The Legitimist was more 
 anxious to restore the elder branch of the Bourbons, 
 the Orleanists to restore the younger, and the 
 Republicans to buttress the Republic, than to act on 
 the common ground of parliamentary government. 
 In truth, the Legitimists cared little for parlia- 
 mentary government, save in so far as it would help 
 them to throw the ruling power into the hands 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 233 
 
 of fhe lineally descended king. The Orleanists 
 Lad not fully considered how it could be worked 
 without the leverage of the middle class. For the 
 moment^ the Republicans equally put parliamentary 
 rule in the second place^ knowing that it would 
 be established when the Eepublic should be 
 secure. Thus all the parties intrigued against each 
 other. M. Thiers, M. de Falloux, M. de Montalem- 
 bert, M. Mole, M. Ledru Rolling and M. Lamartine 
 ^ were all guilty of that error. It must be admitted 
 that the several parties committed many blunders. 
 It was extremely foolish of the Royalist majority, 
 as I have already said, to lay a rude hand on 
 universal suffrage, by imposing such conditions 
 on the right of voting as to disfranchise several 
 millions of people. Equally great was the error 
 of refusing to increase the President^'s salary. 
 The Assembly might have reflected that to keep 
 such a man as Louis Napoleon short of money 
 was more dangerous than to give him ample sums. 
 The Republicans blundered most flagrantly by 
 voting against the proposal to revise the constitu- 
 
234 FEANCB SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 tion. But they also prevented the National 
 Assembly from repealing the curious law which 
 debarred the president from being re-elected. 
 Such a prohibition^ if it were to be enforced, 
 would be a political death-blow to Louis Napoleon 
 and his personal followers, because he and they 
 had staked everything on the chances of his 
 continuation in power. All the money that could 
 be got by all the ways known to men of keen 
 wits and small scruples, had been invested in the 
 presidential election. Louis Napoleon and his 
 little gang of followers were over head and ears 
 in debt. The imperial ring therefore would be 
 ruined if the National Assembly should not allow 
 him to be re-elected, and they were made desperate 
 by the refusal to amend the constitution. But 
 the National Assembly committed the greatest of 
 all its errors when, on the 17th of November, 
 1851, it rejected a motion for giving its own 
 President authority to go directly to any of the 
 military commanders, and demand such a force 
 as he might deem needful to protect the Chamber. 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 235 
 
 Tke purpose of ttat motion was to guard the 
 deputies against Louis Napoleon, wlio was noto- 
 riously eager to overthrow the constitution. But 
 the Republicans feared that' if the Royalists had 
 any power over the army, it would be used to 
 restore the monarchy. They feared the Legitimists 
 and the Orleanists more than they dreaded even 
 the conspirators of the Blysee. In union with 
 the BonapartistSj they were able to defeat the 
 motion, and thus, with the best intentions, they 
 delivered the Republic into the hands of its 
 deadly foe. 
 
 It is true that the National Assembly had 
 not gone a step beyond its strict rights, that 
 Louis Napoleon had not the faintest legal ground 
 for complaint, that his accusations, against the 
 deputies were falsehoods, and that, in all proba- 
 bility, they would have repaired some of their 
 errors if the hfe of the Chamber had not been 
 cut short by violence. Universal suffrage might 
 Iiave been re-established, the President's pay in- 
 creased, and the constitution revised. It is true. 
 
236 FEAKCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 alsOj that the Assembly would have had good 
 right to count on the fidelity of the President 
 if he could have been bound by the most solemn 
 of pledges and oaths. 
 
 But it remains true that the Republican party 
 erred and was punished. 
 
 It is not very easy to anyone to speak about 
 Louis Napoleon or his associates in a spirit of 
 franknesSj without seeming to repeat echoes from 
 the slums of scandal. He was the ally of this 
 country, and was believed to be the friend of 
 England. He was held by many people to be 
 the greatest statesman of a generation which has 
 produced Bismarck and Cavour. Yet he and his 
 personal followers and his party are viewed by 
 a great part of the French people with a mingled 
 hatred and contempt to which there are not many 
 parallels in the records of political detestation. 
 M. Gambetta, in one of his addresses^ did not 
 speak more bitterly than a vast nuinber of French- 
 men feel when, after respectfully describing the 
 Legitimists and the Orleanists, he came to the 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 237 
 
 Imperialists, and said of them lie would not 
 speak, because they were not a party but a horde. 
 We must try and understand the causes of such 
 a hatred. We must look, therefore, at the personal 
 character of Napoleon and his associates, at the 
 way in which they gained power, and the use to 
 which they put it. All these facts are living forces 
 at this moment. 
 
 Prince Louis Napoleon himself was an in- 
 teresting man even before he became President 
 of the Eepublic. His intellect, if very far from 
 being first-rate, had the strength which comes 
 from profound study of one great career. He 
 had pored over the scriptures of the first Napoleon 
 as devoutly as the old puritans nourished their 
 souls on holy writ. His character had also gained 
 an unusual power of waiting from long practice 
 in the school of adversity. Nay, it sometimes 
 profited by its curious mixture of definite aims 
 and habitual irresolution. While he pressed 
 towards the ends which he called his destiny, 
 he hesitated from day to day and hour to hour 
 
238 FEANOE SINCE THE PIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 as to the ctoice of instruments and opportunities. 
 Usually it seemed impossible for him to make 
 up his mind. Sometimes he gained a reputation 
 for sagacity, because his indecision made him wait 
 until the na,tural course of things did for him 
 what he could not have done for himself. But, 
 like many irresolute people, he would sometimes 
 suddenly shut his eyes and rush to a decision; 
 and then it was necessary for a Napoleon to 
 speak with a Jove-like purpose. Nothing could 
 be more Olympian in clean-cut peremptoriness 
 of phrase than some of the decrees which were 
 bom of the travail of baffling changeableness. 
 But he was chiefly distinguished because he had 
 studied the art of conspiracy as laboriously as other 
 men study the art of painting, or the practice of 
 the law, or the theory of cuneiform inscriptions. 
 He was as truly a plotter as Mazzini himself, with- 
 out any of the disadvantages which came from 
 Mazzini's highly-wrought moral sense. Like all 
 bom plotters, he had a positive liking for tortuous 
 ways, even wheu the high-road lay clear before 
 
BONAPABTISTS. 239 
 
 Mm. When - lie was emperor, and as absolute 
 as any man can be in Prance, lie did not deal 
 frankly "witb his own ministers or diplomatic 
 agents, bnt gave them varying instructions, so 
 that the real lines of his policy should be hidden 
 from all eyes save his own, and that he might 
 intervene with providential decision and swiftness 
 at the last moment. His policy with respect 
 to the temporal power of the pope was a miracle 
 of ambiguity. He gave one description of it 
 in Eome, another in Vienna, a third in Paris, a 
 fourth to anybody with whom he confidentially 
 talked, and a fifth perhaps to the members of 
 his own family. But it was not such a master- 
 piece of craft and success as the plot which bore 
 fruit ia the coup d'etat. Even the victims of 
 that conspiracy could not help admiring the 
 minute attention which had been paid to its 
 details, the foresight with which provision had 
 been made for a multitude of dangers, and the 
 skill which had been shown in the choice of the 
 human instruments of treachery. The work was 
 
240 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 artistically complete. But Louis Bonaparte had 
 more ttan one advantage, wMcli considerably takes 
 away from the intellectual merit of the deed. 
 He was armed with a supreme want of scruple 
 at those moments when the knot of a difficulty 
 must be cut. He did not appear to see moral 
 restraints when the fruits of a plot could not 
 be reached by the artifices of the law. At such 
 times he was capable of doing deeds of perfidy 
 and blood, which offer perhaps the best grounds 
 for believing that he was really a Bonaparte by 
 race as well as by name. At critical moments 
 he had, therefore, an immense advantage over 
 honest men. Very soon after he became President 
 he began to undermine the Republic, and then 
 he brought into play his power over the art of 
 the conspirator, and his freedom from the 
 prejudices of the moral law. He threw his 
 temptations far and wide. He tried to catch 
 the commander-in-chief. General Changarnier, with 
 a golden bait; but, although that soldier was 
 as fond of power as Louis Napoleon himself, and 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 241 
 
 a good deal more vain^ he had a considerable 
 share of the professional honour which is no bad 
 substitute for a moral sense, and he was also 
 as fastidious in the choice of his companions as 
 in the fashion of his dress. Louis Napoleon was 
 more fortunate in his attentions to lesser people. 
 " Si nous faisons les generaux," he is said to have 
 carelessly observed to his man of all work, Floury, 
 and straightway the lax moral school of Algeria 
 was ransacked for soldiers who might be trusted 
 to shoot down any rash defenders of the law. 
 The search was eminently successful. Louis 
 Napoleon also tampered with the common soldiers 
 and with petty officials. And his whisperings, 
 his promptings, and the open treachery of his 
 agents, were no secret to his political opponents. 
 It was perfectly well known that he was trying to 
 overthrow the Eepubhc. His doings were freely 
 canvassed in the lobbies of the National Assembly, 
 and they were made the subject of menacing 
 hints even in the speeches from the tribune. 
 Colonel Charras, one of the Eepublican leaders. 
 
242 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 slept with loaded pistols by Ms bedside^ because 
 lie anticipated that the agents of the Elysee 
 would try to seize him and the other prominent 
 deputies. He was one of the few Eepublicans 
 who voted for the proposal to give the President 
 of the National Assembly the power of calling for 
 the protection of an armed force; M. Grevy, 
 the present President of the Eepublic, was another ; 
 and it is amazing that these eminent men were 
 not followed by their colleagues at a time when 
 the rumours of a coming coup d'etat were among 
 the commonplaces of the street. Perhaps Eepub- 
 lican enthusiasm made it difficult for the members 
 of the Left to beheve that the head of the State 
 could be guilty of such perfidy as he was about 
 to commit. 
 
 But even Louis Bonaparte's readiness to tell 
 a lie and shoot down innocent people would have 
 been unavailing, if he had not been aided by an 
 admirable band of friends ; and it ought to be 
 admitted that he drew them to him by the 
 influence of his good qualities. It is of course a 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 243 
 
 vulgar error to suppose that a man may not be 
 a charming companion because lie has done some 
 deeds of superlative wickedness. There is a grim 
 story that " dans la vie privee, M. Rohesjpierre 
 etait un homme fort aimahle ; " and it is an inte- 
 resting psychological fact that Tropmann murdered 
 five persons to provide for his poor relations. 
 Louis Napoleon, who was neither a Eobespierre 
 nor a Tropmann, was in many ways a very amiable 
 person. M. Bmile Ollivier, in the address which 
 the Academy would not allow him to deliver, said 
 that, when he came to know Napoleon III., his 
 regard for him. deepened into affection. Although 
 a renegade would naturally magnify the idol 
 for which he had left his old gods, there is no 
 reason to doubt the sincerity of a tribute which 
 might be matched by compliments to all the 
 equivocal characters of history. Louis Bonaparte 
 deserved to be liked : he was an agreeable host, 
 an indulgent friend, and a kind master. There 
 must have been real goodness of heart in a man 
 
 whose followers clung to him through the worst 
 
 E 2 
 
244 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEE. 
 
 as well as tte best of his fortunes, and wlio 
 forgave tHem even when they dipped their hands 
 into his purse by shorter ways than those of waste. 
 Attempts have doubtless been made to lessen th& 
 merit of their fidelity. Some of them, it has 
 been said, were of such a moral hue that they 
 could have found employment in no party with 
 a character to lose ; and others, even when living- 
 in exile, may have shrewdly guessed that the 
 constitutional monarchy would lead to the Empire, 
 and thus to a paradise of adventurers. When he- 
 reached the throne, they clung to him of course^ 
 because his fall would cast them adrift on a world 
 which has only a limited need for men like- 
 M. de Persigny. Such suppositions may explain 
 why particular men were faithful to the emperor, 
 and why others worked for the restoration of 
 his dynasty. But it is nevertheless true that h& 
 was a kindly chief, that he had a long memory 
 for personal services, and that he had the heart 
 of making his attendants like as well as serve 
 him. He was never unscrupulous except when 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 245 
 
 he had a purpose to serve. Thus, during his 
 exile in England and his tenure of the presidency, 
 he gathered round him a band of devoted and 
 admirable followers. There was, for example, 
 M. de Maupas, who, as his President of Police, 
 did much credit to his powers of selection. It 
 was M. de Maupas who had to arrest the most 
 dangerous members of the National Assembly, 
 and the safety of the plot greatly depended on 
 him. He did the work very neatly indeed, and 
 he has lived to reap the fruits of his skill. At 
 the late general election, when a coalition of 
 Orleanists and Bonapartists tried to strangle 
 the Republic, he had the courage to become 
 an official candidate, and he had the honour 
 of receiving support from the government of the 
 Due de Broglie, whose father he put in prison 
 for defending the law. Persigny was a real 
 believer in the gospel of Bonapartism. To 
 him it was a kind of religion, and it paid for 
 his devotion by brushing away his poverty and 
 making him a duke. The imperial gold which 
 
246 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 lie put into his pockets was as good as other gold ; 
 it bore the mark of the mint. The dukedom was 
 not quite so good as some other dukedoms; it 
 bore the mark of the Empire. General Fleury, 
 another of the conspirators, did good work in a 
 smaller way than Persigny or Maupas. Louis 
 Napoleon found him a bold adventurer, who knew 
 the points of a horse, and could profit by them, 
 who had seen Parisian life, and, being innocent 
 of political restraints, could admirably fetch and 
 carry for the chief conspirators. It is sometimes 
 said that he played a small part in the night of the 
 coup d'etat; but his friends give some reason for 
 beheving that statemenb to be a calumny. They 
 rebut it, telHng a curious and well-known story. 
 Louis Bonaparte, they say, showed signs of flinch- 
 ing at the last moment, after he had risked his 
 own life and the lives of his associates by dis- 
 tributing the proclamations, in which he announced 
 that the Assembly was dissolved and that the presi- 
 dent had made himself a dictator. It was Colonel 
 Fleury who, at that critical moment, took out a 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 247 
 
 pistol and dared him to draw back. So, at least, 
 say Fleury^s friends, and there is no sufficient 
 reason why he should be robbed of that distinction. 
 There is no less reason because the boldness which 
 he then displayed in a back room of the Blysee 
 seems to be the only military distiaction that he 
 gained during the Napoleonic reign. He won 
 his promotion in the drawing-room of the Tuileries, 
 and he is still a general. Saint Arnaud was made 
 of different stuff. He was a bright clever man, 
 who could wield a sparkling pen and play on the 
 fiddle. His freedom from scruples had brought 
 him into collision with the scruples of the law. 
 But he was, nevertheless, a bold dashing soldier. 
 There are men, whose whole life is a preparation 
 of some masterpiece of evilj and Algerian war- 
 fare, as practised by Saint Arnaud, was no bad 
 apprenticeship for the service which began with the 
 shooting of innocent Parisians on the boulevards. 
 But the most important of aU. the conspirators, 
 the very brain and nerve of the plot, was Louis 
 Napoleon's illegitimate half-brother, Morny. He 
 
248 FEAJ^CB SINCE THE FIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 was in many ways a very interesting character, 
 and lie had long heen admired or feared by a 
 certain class of the higher society in Paris. His 
 life had been enlivened by what is called " intrigue," 
 and he had earned a good deal of condemnation, 
 but no contempt. His whole career was striking, 
 for he was a personage whose clear and hard 
 brain would have made him distinguished even 
 if he had been an honest manj whose finished 
 politeness and self-control were rooted in a con- 
 tempt for mankind ; whose cold, insatiable, artistic 
 appetite for pleasure has made him a profitable 
 theme of study to the writers of fiction ; who 
 never allowed the rushes of the Decalogue or 
 even of the criminal law to stop the short 
 cuts to fortune open to the cool and the bold; 
 who practically disdained the fastidious maxims 
 which forbid a minister to play on the gambling- 
 table of the Bourse, with the loaded dice of 
 early information ; and who did not escape the 
 imputation of having helped to push Prance into 
 the Mexican War at the bidding of pecuniary 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 249 
 
 motives. There was notliing commonplace about 
 the illegitimate son of Queen Hortense. As 
 Minister of the Interior^ he managed the coup d'etat 
 with a coolnesSj a freedom from scruple, a skill, 
 and a success, which drew words of reluctant 
 admiration even from his victims. Had he been 
 less careless of praise, he might have urged that 
 it was he, rather than his brother, who ought 
 to receive the chief praise for the deeds done on 
 the 2nd of December ; and we may admit that had 
 he been as responsible as Louis Napoleon, he 
 would have been as infamous. He was, at least, 
 the genius of the Second Empire. Morny was, 
 in fact, a self-contained, cultivated, polite, agree- 
 able, clever, perfectly finished blackguard. 
 
 Such are specimens of the men who enabled 
 Prince Louis Bonaparte to destroy the Eepublic. 
 It will be seen that they were not a very reputable 
 set. That fact, indeed, was the sting of the 
 coup d'etat. Constitutions have been overturned 
 and oaths broken before 185L France had been 
 ruled by fanatics and ruffians, as well as by 
 
250 FEANCB SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 respectable and. great men. But never before had 
 she fallen into the hands of adventurers, who 
 treated her as a mine, out of which they were 
 to dig their fortunes. For the first time, the 
 country which thought itself the most brilliant in 
 the world, and which could never forget its grand 
 history, was to be exploite, France was to be ruled 
 by men some of whom the better sort of people 
 would decline to meet at dinner. But Napoleon 
 III., as he came to be styled, soon found that 
 it was no light thing to hurt the self-respect of 
 the most sensitive society in Europe. Although 
 as anxious as the first emperor had been to 
 draw the historic families to the Tuileries, he 
 could not persuade them to come. They ''cut" 
 the Emperor and the Empire too. One of the 
 greatest of them, when asked why he never 
 went to the Tuileries, said that his coachman 
 could never find the way. They laughed at his 
 Napoleonic airs, and always spoke of him as 
 " celui-ci." Hence, he had to fill his reception- 
 rooms with the men who represented the wealth 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 251 
 
 and the adventurous spirit^ rather than the rank 
 or the culture of Paris. He was equally slighted 
 by another class which is of more lasting im- 
 portance in France. As the Augustus of the 
 Empire^ he wished to be the patron of art and 
 letters, and he gathered round him some artists 
 and hterary men. The artists were among the 
 best of their kind, for art has no pohtics. But 
 the men of letters were not quite so emblematic 
 of France. Peculiar reasons, it is true, made a 
 writer of such brilliant talents as Merimee a 
 domesticated pet of the Tuileries, and he cor- 
 rectly styled himself " fou de I'Imperatrice '' 
 when sending that lady the manuscript of a very 
 clever and not very decent story. The author 
 of "Mademoiselle de Maupin" also found the 
 Empire a suitable kind of government. Some of 
 the dramatists earned its decorations by epigram- 
 matically hinting that the first duty of power 
 was to make things pleasant ; and for a time 
 Edmond About lent his bright pen to the better 
 part of its policy. But these were exceptions. 
 
252 PRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 Most of tlie best writers disdainfully held aloof from 
 a government wliioli was splashed with, the blood 
 of the coup d'etat, and from the adventurers who 
 had taken the France of Moliere and Voltaire 
 into their keeping. Nothing hurt Napoleon III. 
 more grievously thau the scorn of the literary 
 class^ for his own instincts were almost as literary 
 as they were political. He had a literary rather 
 than a political way of looking at public affairs. 
 The merit of his state papers lay in the phrases, 
 the allusions, the form of the expression — in a 
 word, the literary qualities rather than the ideas. 
 He had published some little books, containing 
 thoughtful sentences, and a passable imitation of 
 good writing. He .had composed part of a big 
 book on Cgesar, which, although a dull specimen 
 of historical literature, and an immense indiscre- 
 tion, was not commonplace. Such labours were 
 supposed to denote a keen ambition to find a 
 seat among the forty of the French Academy. 
 But he never had a chance of getting into good 
 society at the Palais Mazarin. He would have 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 25a 
 
 given much for tie power to turn the delicate 
 scorn of such pens as Prevost Paradol's into 
 the sweetness of flattery. But it was not to 
 be. Play as he might at being Augustus, he 
 could not find his Horace, and from time to 
 time such books as " Les Chatiments " warned 
 him, in Chateaubriand's phrase, that Tacitus was 
 already bom into the empire. " Si vous arretez 
 Victor' Hugo," Morny is reported to have written, 
 during the reign of the coup d'etat, " faites en 
 ce que vous voulez." But in giving that order 
 Morny made a mistake. At all hazards, he 
 ought to have got rid of the man who could, 
 and who clearly would, weave round Morny's 
 handiwork a legend that would live as long as 
 France. 
 
 Napoleon III. had to bear a slight of stiU 
 more moment to the head of a new empire 
 than the disdain of patrician families and men 
 of letters, and that was the refusal of the most 
 eminent statesmen to become his ministers. He 
 was keenly anxious to secure their services, even 
 
254 PEANOE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 on the morrow of tlie coup d'etat. But through- 
 out his reign Thiers, Guizot, the De Broglies, 
 and all the old parliamentary chiefs scornfully- 
 made known that they would not become the 
 associates of M. de Morny and M. de Persigny. 
 They declined to support a system which had 
 been built on perjury, and which was kilHng 
 the better qualities of the nation. So long as 
 Morny lived, the Empire coiild count on the 
 guidance of unflinching shrewdness, and occasion- 
 ally it enlisted a very able man of business like 
 M. Rouher ; but usually it had to give office to men 
 who could be little more than clerks. They might 
 have done passably well if watched by a free 
 parliament, and spurred on by a high sense of duty; 
 but, as the Corps Legislatif and the Senate were 
 filled by creatures of the Empire, the flatteries 
 of those bodies were usually more dangerous 
 than open assaults. They hid the thinness of 
 the crust which separated the Empire from the 
 nether fires. Still more perilous was the tone of 
 the court itself. Since it had been reared by 
 
BONAPAHTISTS. 255 
 
 crime for tte most vulgar of personal ends, and 
 since it was cut off from all the nobler public 
 spirits, it could be guided by no higher motive 
 than that of self-preservation. The courtiers 
 assumed that power and splendour were things 
 to be enjoyed while they lasted. It is said that 
 the more thoughtful of the revellers did not 
 expect to have a long lease of the Tuileries. 
 But they were not the first sybarites who had 
 said: "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to- 
 morrow we die." The wild gaieties of the court 
 throw some light on the amazing decline of 
 poHtical morality among the servants of the 
 Empire. The instincts of self-preservation will 
 not work out the way of safety for dynasties 
 whose officials are athirst for pleasure, and have 
 ceased to believe in any higher duty than obe- 
 dience to the word of command. In time, many 
 of them will not take the trouble to give that 
 word, and many more will not obey it. They 
 will amuse themselves and pay themselves. They 
 will not take care of a dynasty which has 
 
256 FKANCB SINCE THE FIRST BMPIEB. 
 
 ceased to take care of itself. Public honour 
 has a better right than chivalry to be called 
 the cheap defence of nations^ as the Empire was 
 to find when the first impulses had spent their 
 force^ and its more intrepid spirits had passed 
 away. The moral laxity of the court had spread 
 even to a service on which a despotism is ex- 
 pected to pour out the riches of its skill. There 
 could be no more bitter satire on the fancied 
 excellence of despotism than the state of that 
 army which Napoleon III. had pampered. The 
 carelessness and incompetence of the commanders, 
 the peculation, the laxity of drill, the ignorance 
 of the officers, and the general negligence of 
 duty, were such that he organised failure for 
 twenty years. The result was written out at 
 Sedan. 
 
 Louis Napoleon's chief aim was to be the 
 earthly providence of his subjects ; to be the 
 Csesar of the modern Rome ; to give the patricians 
 honours, wealth, glittering gewgaws ; to please 
 the plebeians with shows, largesses, the glory 
 
BONAPARTISTS. 257 
 
 of conquestj and the vanity of triumpli. All 
 these devices were borrowed from the vulgarest 
 tricks of the Roman emperors, and of their 
 imitator, the first Napoleon. The immediate 
 reward was the praise of the large and varied 
 class which sought for a millennium of material 
 prosperity. Nowhere is that class larger than in 
 the country which, at the summit, is the most 
 brilliantly intellectual in Europe. No literature 
 contains more allusions to the pleasures of money- 
 making than the literature of modern Prance. 
 The novels of Balzac, which are steeped in the 
 atmosphere of the Bourse, and add thrift to the 
 list of the Beatitudes, merely exaggerate a pro- 
 found instinct of French existence. The first 
 Napoleon might have styled his own countrymen, 
 much more truly than ours, a nation of shop- 
 keepers. No country at least has so strongly 
 developed the talent for saving, or so nearly 
 erected it into a moral law. The Empire, as I 
 have already said, delighted the peasants, who 
 were too ignorant to care for anything beyond 
 
258 FRANCE SINCE THE PIEST EMPIEB. 
 
 tlieir fields, and wlio fancied tliat it possessed 
 the secret of disarming the terrible Socialists 
 of Paris. It gave more positive because more 
 comprehensible delight to the gamblers in the 
 Bourse ; they shrewdly saw that a Napoleon could 
 not afford to govern like a humdrum Louis 
 Phihppe, but that he must sti-ike the imagination 
 of his subjects by brilliant surprises, which could 
 not be found in peace. The speculators of Europe 
 would vote for war every year to increase the stakes, 
 and they would clamour for any Barabbas, who 
 would help to keep Europe in a ferment. The 
 Empire found other allies among the shopkeepers, 
 to whom the making of money is the end of life, 
 and whose sordid ideas are softened neither 
 by such political enthusiasm as that of Parisian 
 working-men, nor by such religious instincts 
 as those of our own lower middle class. It 
 delighted the rich, vulgar, pushing, soulless 
 people, who scarcely know what is meant by 
 nobleness, to whom religion means something 
 to be said out of a book, and who look upon the 
 
BONAPAKTISTS. 259 
 
 ''lower orders" as a species of beings who must 
 be put under the care of the Minister of War. 
 It seemed almost an ideal government to the 
 idle frivolous men and women, to whom life 
 without a gay court and an infinite round of 
 frivolity is not life at all. They were promised 
 stillness in the revolutionary faubourgs, and 
 endless gaieties, subsidised by the Minister of 
 Finance. But the Empire was welcomed most 
 heartily by those soldiers who assume that the 
 nation lives for the sake of the army, and who 
 are as eager to gain distinction by the slaughter 
 of their fellow - beings as astronomers are to 
 discover a new planet, or philanthropists to 
 reclaim a fever - den. The barrack - room is 
 seldom a good school of politics. A military 
 training tends to hide the wondrous play of 
 those moral forces which keep society in equipoise. 
 In Prance they have been more obscured than 
 in any civilised country. The army was pleased 
 therefore to know that the nation should hence- 
 forth be ruled by the word of command. It 
 
 s 2 
 
260 PEANCE SIKCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 felt sure that the potent syllables of the drill- 
 ground could bring quiet^ and it did not see 
 the difference between quiet and peace. An 
 overheated steam-engine is never more quiet 
 than when the safety-valve is screwed down. 
 The device of the military statesmen^ when 
 they heard any noise, was to give another turn 
 to the screw. They were also delighted by the 
 military airs of the Empire. It was pleasant 
 to think that the army was no longer to b& 
 governed by talking barristers, but by its own 
 chiefs and in its own way. The emperor loved 
 to pose as a soldier, and the youngest of th& 
 sous-lieutenants sometimes felt themselves to be 
 of more account at the Tuileries than great 
 civilians. The army instinctively felt that, as 
 it had raised the government to power, the 
 government must flatter it, and pamper it, and 
 cut out work for it, to prevent it from going 
 over to the Orleanists or to the Eepublicans. 
 It dimly knew in advance that there would 
 be Crimean wars, and wars for an idea, and 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 261 
 
 wars for the payment of Jecker bonds. A 
 Pretorian Guard is the same in all ages of 
 the world. Let the throne of the Csesars be 
 put up to sale, and the auctions will be frequent 
 and the prices high. 
 
 The Empire was very much admired in England, 
 and Napoleon III. himself was heartily welcomed 
 when he came to visit the queen for the purpose 
 of getting into the good society of his fellow- 
 sovereigns. Partly, the homage was paid to 
 the ally of the Crimean War ; partly it was the 
 result of the good-will which he was supposed to 
 feel for England, and of the admiration with 
 which he was believed to regard some of her 
 institutions. It was also a tribute to the success 
 with which he was thought to be governing what 
 was held to be the most intractable race in Europe. 
 If free Englishmen were reminded that he was 
 a despot, they were ready with an answer, that 
 s, despotism was good enough for the French. 
 There remained a large share of genuine admira- 
 tion for the firm hand with which the Empire 
 
262 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 kept down all Mgli-flown aspirations towards pro- 
 gress. Vulgarity, social prejudice^ and the passion 
 for dominion were in favour of imperialism in 
 England as well as in France. All parties wMcIl 
 fancied political enthusiasm to be dangerous, and 
 which felt that high ideals were troublesome to 
 the arrangements of an old society, saw a friend 
 in Louis Napoleon. Could the success haye been 
 final, it would have cast a blight over the Liberal 
 instincts of half Europe ; it would have been 
 hke the iceberg which chills the temperature of 
 the encompassing sea. 
 
 Still, the Empire could not have lasted for 
 nineteen years, without the aid of some higher 
 quahties than frivolity, force, and greed; and in 
 truth it had some positive merits of considerable 
 value. Most of them sprang from the character 
 of the emperor himself. He was not only an 
 amiable man when he had no personal enemy to 
 crush or sinister object to gain, but he had room 
 in his mind for some large plans of statesmanship. 
 Long study in prison and exile, and long brooding 
 
BONAPAETISTS. 263 
 
 over the grandiose conceptions of the first 
 Napoleonj had given him ideas which might be 
 called "viewey," but which were certainly not 
 commonplace. He displayed a good deal of moral 
 com-age as well as mental clearness in driving 
 the reluctant French towards the ways of free 
 trade, by means of the Commercial Treaty with 
 England. If it be said, that it would have been 
 better to have left the fiscal tariif full of wasteful 
 absurdities than to have brought it more nearly 
 into agreement with good sense by means of 
 sheer force, I have nothing to reply. StiU, 
 despotic authority could not have been employed 
 in a better way. The wish to be the Cobden and 
 the Peel of France may have been an imitation 
 of the first Napoleon's ambition, to go down to 
 posterity with the Code in his hand ; but, in any 
 case, it was a more worthy desire than to play 
 at being the hero of Marengo, and to this day 
 it gives some measure of respectability and strength 
 to the imperialist party. Nor could any merely 
 commonplace mind have seen how inevitable and 
 
264 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 overmastering had become the tendency of like 
 nationalities to group themselves under the same 
 government. That tendency springs partly from 
 the spread of knowledge, which has shown those 
 scattered parts of a possible unity that they have 
 a common history, common likings, and ideals, 
 and interests — all the subtle and mysterious stock 
 of kindred quahties which are the basis of family 
 life. It springs, too, from the vast change 
 which our time has seen in the art of war. The 
 destructive force of its weapons has been multiplied 
 tenfold, and the cost of them has grown in pro- 
 portion. Thus the change has added to the 
 power of the greater and richer states, because 
 they can most easily bear the expense of the new 
 system. At the same time a network of railways 
 and telegraphs has enabled a fatal blow to be 
 struck at any government, with a swiftness which 
 would have seemed incredible half a century ago. 
 
 The campaign of 1870 has shown that a few 
 days may decide the fate of a great country. 
 But the condition of success is that gigantic 
 
BONAPARTISTS. 265 
 
 armies shall be held in leash, and thus all the 
 chief powers have engaged in a ruinous attempt 
 to outstrip each other in military equipments. 
 Hence, the smaller states were never so over- 
 shadowed and menaced as they are to-day. 
 They all seem fated to disappear, unless general 
 exhaustion or some other change in the art of 
 war should stop the present rivalry. Masses of 
 people have always an instinctive sense of coming 
 danger, and such divided nationalities as Italy 
 and Germany felt that they must group them- 
 selves under one head to escape from lasting 
 subjection to some ahen power, or from a weak- 
 ness which is a first step to decline and fall. 
 The rise and tide of nationalities has already 
 swept away the sandbanks which were raised 
 by the Congress of Vienna, and it will continue 
 the work of destruction until the peoples of 
 Europe shall be grouped according to those 
 natural divisions which are dictated by mutual 
 sympathy and community of interest. It is, 
 perhaps, no credit to the heir of Napoleon that 
 
266 FSANCB SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 he should have been quick to see the force of a, 
 tendency which was to destroy the artificial fabric 
 built by diplomacy on the ruins of the Empire. 
 He had noticed that, in modern Europe as in 
 old Rome, the mob might be made the best 
 ally of despotism, and hence that plebiscites might 
 do more for him than campaigns. Perhaps his 
 fatalistic ideas helped to show him that if the 
 growing determination of nationalities to group 
 themselves together was the master current of the 
 time, he would shatter his power by trying to 
 stem the stream. There is a philosophical fatalism 
 which outs clean through the devices of diplomacy. 
 Such may have been the reason which made him 
 look on listlessly and helplessly while the German 
 people were making gigantic steps towards unity, 
 and while many of the ablest Frenchmen were 
 saying that he must strike in or perish. Nor is 
 it difficult to understand why he should have 
 helped to make Italy into a nation. In that 
 country he had spent the happiest years of his 
 youth, and he seems to have had something like 
 
EONAPAETISTS. 267 
 
 a generous sympathy for its people. Among his 
 early dreams had been the vision of a liberated 
 Italy, and he had taken part in plots against 
 the. foreign power to which it was then subjected. 
 He had been a member of the Carbonari in 
 those mooning days, and he had fought against 
 the Austrians. It is quite true that he would 
 not give a thought to Italy when he had to 
 choose between her weKare and his own power. 
 That fact had been made clear by the compact 
 with the Clerical party, and the expedition to Rome. 
 But when Piedmont began to take steps for the 
 deliverance of Italy; when Orsini tried to shoot 
 the emperor, in the behef that the emperor 
 stood in the way of her freedom; when Orsini^'s 
 last letters gave the imperial Carbonari clear 
 warning that his life would never be safe until 
 he should have kept his early oath by striking 
 a blow for Italy; and when Pietri, the Prefect 
 of Police, warned him that the threat was 
 not empty — then Louis Napoleon launched his 
 army against Austria. He allowed himself to 
 
268 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 be stopped halfway by tlie menaces of Prussia 
 and the fears of troubles at home. It is true 
 that he shabbily paid himself for the blood of 
 Magenta and Solferino with the fee of Savoy 
 and Nice. It is true that he would never allow 
 the nation to occupy Rome. Still, we may admit 
 that he would have done more for Italy if he 
 had been less afraid of the Clerical party, and 
 that the campaign of Piedmont is the best act 
 of his reign. It is the only one of his acts 
 which has stirred the praises of generous souls ; 
 and it is no light thing to have won the plaudits 
 ■of Mrs. Barrett Browning. 
 
 Less might have been said in praise of 
 the campaign in Italy if it had not been 
 assailed by the chiefs of the constitutional party. 
 But it is a melancholy fact that they, the old 
 Parliamentarians, who ought to have given France 
 lessons in Liberalism, were on this occasion less 
 Liberal than their enemy. Practically, they were 
 on the side of the smaller Italian governments, 
 and therefore on the side of tyranny. Nothing 
 
BONAPAHTISTS. 269 
 
 did SO mucli to make the Empire seem respectable 
 as the aid which it gave to the rising nationahty 
 of Italy at a time when M. Guizot, M. Thiers, 
 and such of their younger followers as M. PreTOst- 
 Paradol, were helping the attempt of all the 
 reactionaries of Europe, and those of England 
 among others, to stop the great popular move- 
 ment. " Such," it was sneeringly said, " is French 
 Liberalism ! " In truth the real Liberals of 
 Prance, who were mostly Republicans, were 
 more heartily in favour of a united Italy than 
 the emperor himself. The old constitutionalists 
 were misled, partly by their fatal alliance with 
 political Catholicism, and partly by their inveterate 
 belief in the power of " managenaent." Some 
 of them wanted to support the Papacy for 
 reasons bound up with the very existence of 
 the Clerical faction; and all of them fancied 
 that, if the smaller States of Italy were to be 
 destroyed, the whole of Europe would slip away 
 from the control of statesmen. The foundation 
 of European order was, they said, the great 
 
270 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 international treaties, and especially tte con- 
 tracts framed by tlie Congress of Vienna. Those 
 arrangements were the constitution of Europe, 
 and the devices through which its affairs could be 
 " managed " by a small family party of able men. 
 Take away those treaties, and Europe, they 
 declared, would be at the mercy of military 
 and popular forces, just as Prance was when a 
 reckless mob pulled down the monarchy of 
 Louis Philippe. The Italian States rested, it 
 was said, on treaties which formed part of 
 what was grandly called the pubhc law of Europe. 
 It might be true enough that the King of 
 Naples, the Duke of Modena, and even the 
 Pope himself ruled badly ; but after all they 
 were independent sovereigns, and hence they 
 had as much right to be left alone as any 
 King of Prance. Make good the principle that 
 one State might invade another, in defiance 
 of treaties, and on the plea that he intended 
 to stop misrule, and Russia, it was said, might 
 claim a right to invade Turkey; for surely the 
 
BONAPAHTISTS. 271 
 
 Pope, and even the King of Naples, did not 
 govern their small States so badly as tlie Sultan 
 governed his huge empire. That reasoning was 
 urged with great ability by the present Duo de 
 Broglie in a book which was prophetic. The 
 very plea on which Piedmont and Prance over- 
 threw the old system of Italy was employed 
 by Kussia when she went to help the Bulgarians. 
 The campaign in Italy gave the inheritors and 
 the patrons of misrule throughout the world 
 notice to quit. It was a precedent of incalculable 
 importance. But the constitutional statesmen who 
 put their trust in the " public law " of fleeting, 
 fragile, preposterous treaties were living ia the 
 fools' paradise of their own pedantry ; and 
 Napoleon III. helped to bring Europe back to 
 the rude reahties of fact when he asserted 
 that the living wishes of a nation were of more 
 account than the dead parchments of Congresses, 
 which may be as far distant- from possibility as if 
 they had been held in the moon. " Public law " 
 win become somewhat more than a fine phrase 
 
2V2 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 when tlie forecasts of diplomacy are more modestly 
 brief, and wlien nations are intelligent enougli 
 to dictate at first-hand their own foreign policy. 
 On the other hand, the very aid which the 
 Empire gave to the movement of nationalities 
 hastened the inevitable day of its own ruin, 
 for the Nemesis came with a united Germany. 
 And the way in which the Empire slipped 
 down to ruin was terribly instructive. Not very 
 long before its downfall it might have seemed 
 to a superficial glance firmer than ever; but 
 that appearance was deceptive. In spite of gaudy 
 public shows, foreign alliances, and boisterous 
 foreign policy, diplomatic triumphs, victorious 
 campaigns, and appeals to the spirit of Chauvinism 
 by the master of demagogic phraseology at the 
 head of the State, the clouds of popular discontent 
 grew and gathered. The peasantry were becoming 
 less frightened by Socialistic nightmares, and less 
 pliable ; the higher classes and the men of culture 
 held aloof as disdainfully as ever from the ad- 
 venturers of the Tuileries ; and the Opposition 
 
BONAPAKTISTS. 273 
 
 — that Opposition wMdi could once "hsLve all 
 gone home in a cab " — grew every year more 
 threatening. It had ah-eady a master spirit in 
 M. Gambetta. The Empire found that it could 
 neither suppress nor cajole that Republican and 
 Democratic party which was capable of carrying 
 into politics a religious enthusiasm ; which had 
 never forgotten, and never would forget, the 
 traditions and glories of the Revolution j and 
 which hated military rule, because the pohtical 
 methods of the barrack-room are insulting to the 
 sense of personal dignity. That was the party 
 which held Paris and the other great towns in 
 its grasp. That was the party which kept 
 ]S[apoleon III. in chronic insecurity. It ridiculed 
 and worried him. Its very " chaff ■" was a serious 
 annoyance to a government largely dependent on 
 vanity. " On siffle ; voila I'empereur ! " Its 
 diatribes, its lampoons, its agitation, and, more 
 than all, its silent hate, so weakened his govern- 
 ment that, throughout his reign^ he had to 
 give spurts of nervous vigour to its enfeebled 
 
 T 
 
274 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 frame by the stimulants of plebiscites and 
 ■wars. 
 
 Wars were a necessity. They could not all 
 be successful when the whole of Europe was 
 arming to the teeth^ and e'Verj nation was casting 
 about for allies. But the tenure of the imperial 
 power depended upon unbroken success. The 
 first great defeat would bring it to ruin; and if 
 it had not been engulfed at Sedan^ it would 
 have found a grave elsewhere. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE BONAPAETISTS. 
 
 In the latter days of Ms power, Napoleon 
 made a desperate effort to regain his lost 
 authority by trying to convert himself into a 
 Corsican edition of Louis Philippe. The edifice 
 of liberty was at last to be crowned; France was 
 to be free; the heir of the great conqueror and 
 the hero of the coii-p d'etat was to become a kind 
 of constitutional king. Prince Napoleon — a real 
 Bonaparte in mental faculty as in blood, but 
 also a Jacobin in political and religious ideas — 
 had been steadily saying that the government 
 of his cousin must thus transform itself or perish. 
 Some of the Royalists and of the younger consti- 
 
 T 2 
 
276 rEANCB SINCE THE FIRST EMPIBB. 
 
 tutionalists were so far satisfied witli tlie change as 
 to accept office. M. Emile Ollivier^ the son of a 
 Eepublican, wlio had been proscribed after the 
 coiq} d'etat, and himself a leader of the Oppo- 
 sition^ became Prime Minister ; Count Dam and 
 M. Buffet joined the Cabinet; and to the aston- 
 ishment of everybody, M. Prevost-Paradol laid 
 down the pen with which he had chastised the 
 Empire, in order to put on its diplomatic livery, 
 and go as its minister to the United States. A 
 flutter of excitement passed over the more 
 credulous parts of Europe, and the Whigs of 
 England sent their compliments to their new 
 brother. But the emperor felt that, before 
 sinking into the position of a Louis Philippe, he 
 must fortify himself with another plebiscite. So 
 he submitted the constitutional changes and the 
 merits of the dynasty to the judgment of the 
 populace. M. Buffet and Count Daru would not 
 remain in the Cabinet of a sovereign who thus 
 showed an unalterable attachment to one of the 
 first devices of the Empire. M. OUivier was 
 
THE BONAPAETISTS. 277 
 
 more complacent. Meanwliile;, the peasants were 
 solemnly told that they must give this last mark 
 of their confidence in the emperor, in order that 
 he might maintain peace at home and abroad. 
 The plebiscite was peace. The secret reports 
 of the prefects, which were pubhshed after the 
 fall of the Napoleonic dynasty, show that the 
 peasantry were deeply anxious to be saved from 
 the stimulants and the cost of what is called 
 ''glory." But the emperor was familiarising 
 his brooding, hesitating mind with the idea that 
 he must fight the great military power which 
 was rising beyond the Ehine. He might have 
 longer resisted the temptation if he had been 
 the man he once was, for seeing that the chief 
 political force was the unifying current of 
 nationalities, he must have known that to attack 
 Prussia, the head of a unified Germany, was to 
 venture on by far the most perilous enterprise 
 of his reign. He had missed the chance of 
 striking Prussia in 1866, when she was fighting 
 Austria. Not merely Bonapartists, but Orleanists 
 
278 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 and EepublicanSj I fear, got into tte habit of 
 saying that the glory of France would be effaced 
 if Prussia were allowed to remain the first military 
 power of the Continent. But his health was 
 sadly shattered, and his power of will had been 
 impaired by the disease of which he ultimately 
 died. 
 
 Meanwhile the Empire had lost the gUding 
 of its better days and its reputation for luck. 
 It had never recovered from the disasters of 
 the amazingly foolish expedition which the 
 army made to Mexico, at the prompting of 
 M. de Morny's avarice and the Clerical passion 
 for power, to gather the bad debts of M. Jecker 
 and to found a Catholic empire by the side 
 of the great Protestant republic. When the 
 Mexicans not only baffled the army of France 
 by setting up their old republic, but shot that 
 Emperor Maximilian who had crossed the sea 
 under the flag of France; when his poor wife, 
 after frantically beseeching his protector to 
 send him help, was driven raving mad by the 
 
THE BONAPARTISTS. 279 
 
 consequences of the refusal; when it was 
 whispered about that the French troops had been 
 turned homewards partly by the fear of Prussia, 
 and partly by the threats of the great republic 
 which had crushed the slave-holding confederacy; 
 it was impossible to put a blind of lies between 
 the eyes of the nation and the loss of imperial 
 renown. It began to be said that Mexico was 
 the Moscow of the Third Empire. Still greater 
 was the mischief done to the dynasty by the 
 results of the war between Prussia and Austria 
 in 1866. The emperor, it was said, had been 
 culpably neutral when the German Confederation, 
 by attacking Denmark, had begun the military 
 greatness of Prussia ; and had he not been 
 infatuated, it was added, he would have poured 
 an army into the Rhine provinces when Prussia 
 began the campaign which ended in Sadowa. 
 Thus he might have won back the provinces 
 which were added to Prance by the first 
 Napoleon, and torn from her after Waterloo. 
 Nay, Prince Bismarck, in the course of his 
 
280 FEANCE SINCE THE PIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 frank talks with Ms Boswell, Dr. Busck, has 
 admitted that Prussia could not have hindered 
 France from thus advancing her frontiers. Calm 
 students of the national history may be allowed 
 to doubt whether such an invasion would have 
 done any good to the Empire in the long run ; 
 but it is only fair to say that, in the opinion 
 of so able a witness as M. Prevost Paradol^ 
 such a triumph would have established the 
 Napoleonic dynasty. But the emperor had 
 not the same decision as the statesman who 
 was welding Germany together with blood and 
 iron. He hesitated until the opportunity was 
 lost. Sadowa had been fought and won before 
 the French envoy^ M. de Benedetti, could 
 reach Prince Bismarck ; and then France was 
 mocked with assurances that she might take 
 Belgium if she liked, but warned that every 
 foot of German territory would be defended 
 with all the strength of the new nation. 
 Napoleon III. was too late. He was Louis the 
 Unready. Let it be said to his credit, however, 
 
THE BONAPAETISTS. 281 
 
 that liis hesitation partly came from Ms fitful 
 respect for the rights of nationalities. So much 
 is made clear by his dealings with the Prussian 
 ambassador at Paris, Von Goltz. M. Thiers 
 ■would have taken the side of Austria at the 
 outset from a cynical disdain for all other rights 
 than those of France. The emperor himself 
 quickly put aside his religion of nationalities 
 when he saw how formidable Prussia had become. 
 Indeed his refusal to let the Italians get Rome 
 for their capital — the fatal "jamais" of M. Eouher 
 — showed how lightly he held the tenets of his 
 political rehgion when they came into conflict 
 with the interests of his dynasty. There can 
 be no doubt that he began to familiarise his 
 dreamy brooding mind with the idea that a war 
 'with the new military power was inevitable. It 
 was believed to be inevitable even by men who 
 did not wish to bring it about — by such men 
 as M. Prevost Paradol, who said that the two 
 nations were like two trains which, placed on 
 the same line of rails, and propelled from 
 
282 FRANCE SINCE THE FIEST EMPIEE. 
 
 opposite ends of tlie line^ must come into col- 
 lision midway. A war of revenge was demanded 
 by the ChauyinistSj whose passion for conquest had 
 been stimulated by M. Thiers^ himself, in his glori- 
 fication of the First Empire. What Prance had 
 to revenge, the Chauvinists would have been 
 puzzled to say. They were content to sum up 
 their creed in the axiom that Prance must be 
 the iirst of military nations. Prussia had no 
 right to come in the way of her divine right to 
 bully her neighbours. More thoughtful politicians 
 urged that a powerful Prussia would be as 
 aggressive as Prance herseK had been; that 
 she would lay her hand on Holland and become 
 a great maritime power; that she would give a 
 protecting hand to Italy, and cancel the "jamais" 
 of M. Rouher with an edict of militant 
 Protestantism. 
 
 The speculators on the Bourse, if we may trust 
 M. Thiers, spoke in favour of war when the 
 opportunity came with the cynicism of pecuniary 
 gain. Thinking that the war of 1866 had now 
 
THE BONAPAETISTS. 283 
 
 lessened the trust in the continuance of peace, 
 and that trade was consequently suffering, they 
 urged that the Empire should make a short and 
 sharp war to regain its supremacy and increase 
 the dividends of Prance. Dealers in the funds 
 are among the worst judges of political events in 
 the world, because they look mostly to the 
 chances of the morrow^ and they would lose 
 their capacity for their work if they were to 
 cultivate philosophical breadth of view. So they 
 thought that a campaign of six weeks would 
 suffice to rectify the accounts of Prussia and 
 Prance. It is said that some of the very 
 highest of them were so ignorant of the capa- 
 cities of the two nations, as to hold that opinion. 
 "■ C'est un mauvais moment a passer, quelque 
 cinquante mille liommes a sacrifier, ap-hs quoi 
 I'horizon sera eclairci, et les affaires reprendront." 
 Such is the reading of their judgment given by 
 M. Thiers. 
 
 It is not improbable, however, that the emperor 
 might have withstood such promptings. He must 
 
284 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 have guessed^ even if lie did not exactly know, 
 that his army was weaker than his ministers dared 
 to confess. He must have known that the war 
 with Mexico had terribly drained its strength. 
 Perhaps, also, he suspected that the army had 
 suffered from the system of virements, or the 
 practice of secretly taking money which the 
 Chamber had voted for one purpose and devoting 
 it to another, which the ministers dared not avow, 
 but which the peculiarities of the emperor none 
 the less made a necessity for the moment. Perhaps 
 he suspected that the strength of regiments had 
 been cut down, and the supply of artillery pinched, 
 in order to provide funds for uses more closely 
 akin to the daily life of the court. Although the 
 most indolent of despots— although his dislike 
 to hard work formed a fatal contrast to the habits 
 of men like Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, 
 his own uncle, and the other men who had guided 
 military States — he may, perhaps, have glanced 
 at the despatches in which Colonel Stoffel, the 
 military attache at the court of Berlin, and 
 
THE BONAPARTISTS. 285 
 
 M. de Benedetti, his ambassador at the same 
 courtj had explained the real strength of the 
 Prussian army. His own soldiers had certainly 
 not taken so much trouble ; they were the most 
 dangerous set of luxurious and ignorant triflers 
 that ever thronged the antechambers of a military 
 prince. The emperor must also have been held 
 back by his real perception of the strongest 
 political currents of our time. 
 
 But far stronger than the prompting either 
 of the Bourse, or the Chauvinists, or the ignorant 
 soldiery, was that of the two parties to whom he 
 owed his throne. 
 
 Firmer, because more besotted, minds than 
 his own were urging that the dynasty could not 
 be founded without the aid of another victorious 
 war, and that this time the foe must be Prussia. 
 If he could win back the Ehenish provinces, 
 which were conquered by his uncle, and wrested 
 from France by the Congress of Vienna, the 
 glory of the achievement would be such, that he 
 might laugh at the criticism of M. Thiers, the 
 
286 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 sarcasms of the salons^, and the lampoons of 
 M. Eochefort. Sooner or later, it was urged. 
 Prance must fight Prussia; one or other must 
 he supreme. Prussia, it was said, knew the 
 necessity so well, that she was arming to the 
 teeth; and the only question for a practical 
 Frenchman was whether she or Prance should 
 strike first. In reality, a practical Prenchman, 
 even if he had listened to that profoundly de- 
 ceptive argument, would have waited until he 
 should be certain that his country was ready 
 for battle. No doubt, that is what the emperor 
 would have done if he had followed his own 
 opinions, for his habitual shrinking from any 
 great decision would have been fortified by some 
 knowledge of the real military strength pos- 
 sessed by Prussia — a knowledge of which the 
 military and ecclesiastical butterflies of his court 
 were absolutely ignorant. But he was flung into ' 
 the abyss of war by the two forces to which 
 he owed his throne — the dynastic and the 
 Clerical parties. Vengeance had come at last in 
 
THE BONAPAETISTS. 287 
 
 the shape which had at first clothed victory. 
 The plebiscite brought to light the alarming 
 fact, not merely that a large minority of the 
 people would not have the Empire on any terms, 
 but that it had been denounced by more than 
 fifty thousand voices in the army and the navy. 
 When Ceesar learns that about one in six of his 
 legionaries is sullenly looking out for his suc- 
 cessor, he naturally feels that it is time to 
 offer the distraction of distant war. A faction 
 ■of sincere bigots and sceptical traders were 
 equally of that opinion. They had a strong 
 garrison in the Tuileries, and the leader of it 
 was the Empress. They instinctively and justly 
 felt that their fine schemes of papal and sacer- 
 dotal power would be shattered if they did 
 not stop the growth of the great Protestant 
 State, which had reared itself in the centre of 
 Europe. There remained those friends of the 
 dynasty, those families of the Tuileries, those 
 members of the family itself to whom the 
 existence of the Empire was the first of neces- 
 
288 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 sities. A pretext for combat was readily found 
 in the candidature of the Prince of Hohenzollern 
 for the throne of Spain ; and it must be con- 
 fessed that Count Bismarck took no pains to 
 avert the struggle. He rather did everything in 
 his power to push France into the abyss. He 
 probably thought^ that as the challenge would 
 come sooner or later, it was better to pick up 
 the glove at a time when Germany was ready 
 and France was not. But the Chauvinists of the 
 sacristy and the barrack-room seemed to be 
 foiled for a moment by the prudence of the 
 King of Prussia, who allowed the candidature 
 of his kinsman to be withdrawn. One day 
 M. Ollivier confidently said in the lobbies that 
 peace had been assured, and on the same day 
 the Due de Grammont, the Minister of Foreign 
 Affairs, had written a short address which was 
 intended to tell the Corps Legislatif that the 
 honour of France had been satisfied. But in 
 the evening, at St. Cloud, the manuscript of 
 this little bit of imperialist self - glorification 
 
THE BONAPAHTISTS. 289 
 
 was discussed at a council, representing the 
 family as well as tlie Ministry, and it was 
 altered to a form of fatal menace. The half- 
 Clerical, half -military dynastic party thought that 
 it could not afford to throw away the chance 
 of a war with Prussia. Now or never could a 
 deadly blow be struck at the rising Protestant 
 power. Now or never was the opportunity of 
 making the reversion of the throne to the 
 young Prince Imperial secure. So the minis- 
 terial address was altered into an insolent state- 
 ment that the King of Prussia must pledge 
 himself not to allow his cousin to renew his 
 candidature, and that France would exact the 
 fulfilment of her demand. Such a claim, when 
 made with such insolence, was intended, of 
 course, to make war inevitable. Everybody knew 
 what it meant. The Eepublicans and the old 
 constitutionalists saw in it the most wanton of 
 provocations. 
 
 M. Gambetta and M. Jules Pavre desperately 
 strove to stop the fatal course of the Ministry; 
 
290 TRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 and M. Thiers uttered a prophetic warning. 
 " L'Jvistoire, la France, le monde," he said, " vous 
 regardent. De la decision que vous allez prendre 
 dependent la vie de milliers d'hommes et, peut-etre, 
 les destinees de notre piays." But the creatures 
 of the Empire drowned the protests of the best 
 men of France ; a hired mob in the streets shouted 
 " A Berlin ! " the boudoirs of St. Cloud and the 
 sacristies of the capital were in a flutter of triumph;. 
 M. Ollivier accepted the responsibility of the war 
 with " un cmur leger ; " and, in short, religion, 
 the Empire, and the dynasty were saved. Some 
 people took credit to themselves for having given 
 France the last little push down the inclined plane 
 of salvation. " Getie guerre, c'est ma guerre a moi; 
 il me la faut." Such are the words put into 
 the mouth of the empress, and her flatterers do 
 not seem to have been instructed to give them 
 a denial. The emperor himself was less cheerful, 
 and he complained to an Englishman of congenial 
 temper that France had slipped out of his hand. 
 That falsehood was dictated by a prophetic sense 
 
THE BONAPARTISTS. 291 
 
 of the terrible indictment wiiich lay in the near 
 future. Nor was he kept long in suspense. A 
 coming crowd of tremendous disasters told of the 
 ruin which nineteen years of imperialism had 
 brought to the splendid army of an older France. 
 The valour of the common soldiers might have 
 probably retrieved even the blunders of the 
 commanders but for the dynastic necessity of the 
 Empire. After the loss of Worth and Gravelotte 
 the emperor himself telegraphed to Paris : " Tout 
 pent encore se riparer." There was one last chance, 
 and that was to withdraw the remaining army 
 towards Paris, so as to prevent the investment 
 of the capital. When Mont Valerien and its 
 companions were crowned with guns it had been 
 intended that, in case of a siege, a great force 
 shoidd operate within the circle of the forts. 
 Such had been the purpose of M. Thiers. Had 
 that been done the result of the war might still, 
 no doubt, have been adverse, but Paris could 
 not have been easily besieged, and Prance would 
 have been able to exact far better terms. And 
 
292 FRANCE SINCE THE TIEST EMPIRE. 
 
 tie step whioli prudence urged might have been 
 taken so late as the September of 1870. A large 
 and unbroken army lay encamped at Chalons, 
 between Germany and Paris. Its commander, 
 Marshal MacMahon, knew that he ought to fall 
 back upon the capital ; Prince Napoleon passion- 
 ately urged his cousin, the emperor, who was with 
 the troops, to obey that plain dictate of safety ; 
 and that counsel was supported even by M. 
 Rouher, who had come to the camp. But the 
 empress and Palikao frantically telegraphed that 
 the return of a defeated emperor would give 
 the signal for a revolution, in which the dynasty 
 might be overthrown and his own hfe sacriiiced. 
 The Pretorian Guards were ready to abandon 
 CEesar. The emperor listened to that counsel 
 instead of resolving that his dynasty should 
 perish rather than his country, and Marshal 
 MacMahon was weak enough to let his own 
 judgment be overborne by the dictates of 
 the imperial family. Hence it was determined 
 that he should proceed towards the northern 
 
THE BONAPARTISTS. 293 
 
 frontier, with tlie view of doubling the German 
 army and joiaing Bazaine. The march, it is 
 said, was made in the face of a despatch from 
 Bazaine, which rendered it in the highest degree 
 improbable that the two forces could meet. It 
 was made towards a point of the Belgian 
 frontier at which less than the genius of Moltke 
 and a smaller army than his would have sufficed 
 to hem them within a semicircular band of 
 artillery, and leave them only the alternative 
 of surrender or a march into Belgian territory 
 and a capitulation. For dynastic reasons, Napoleon 
 marched straight towards the trap of Sedan. 
 Nemesis had come at last ; and modern history 
 contains no such other instance of tremendous 
 chastisement. 
 
 Nor is it possible to spare much pity for 
 the fallen greatness of the man who had been 
 the dictator of Europe. His case was very 
 <iifferent from that of Charles X. or Louis 
 Philippe. Charles X. was led astray by an 
 inherited fanaticism which did not lack a touch 
 
294 FEANCB SINCE THE EIBST EMPIRE. 
 
 of dignity^ and which, liad no taint of criminality. 
 Lonis Philippe^ if not free from tlie stain of 
 meanness, had on the whole been a good king. 
 But Napoleon III., ia spite of much personal 
 amiability, of some statesmanlike aims, and of 
 considerable ability, had debauched the mind of 
 France for twenty years by perjury, disdain 
 for the sanctity of the law, massacre, despotism, 
 a frivolous court, reliance on a "besotted bigotry, 
 wars made at the dictate of national vanity, 
 and finally by a war intended to give strength 
 to his dynasty. No government of recent 
 generations so systematically poisoned the wells 
 of the national life. However terrible may have 
 been the losses of Gravelotte, the capitulation 
 of Sedan, the blood which dyed the battle-fields 
 of the Loire, the capture of Metz, the siege and 
 fall of Paris, the greatest pecuniary fine ever 
 exacted, and the surrender of two provinces, still, 
 even at such a price. Prance was cheaply rid of 
 the Empire. Unless we keep these facts in view, 
 we cannot do justice to the passionate hatred 
 
THE REPUBLIC. 295 
 
 witli whicli Louis Napoleon and his dynasty are 
 regarded by the best class of Frenchmen. 
 Thus alone can we explain the cause of the 
 Eepublic. 
 
 My friend intended to have expanded these 
 notes — for, brilliant as many of them are, they are 
 only notes — into a bird's-eye history of France since 
 1816, and especially to have added a sketch of the 
 Republicans and their fortunes since 1870. This, 
 as I judge from long and frequent conversatioas 
 with him, would have been the most important and 
 the most effective portion of his work. Probably 
 no man not a Frenchman watched France so 
 closely. Thoroughly familiar with her modern 
 history, and acquainted with most of her eminent 
 men, Mr. Macdonell had a sympathy with French 
 Republicans, a comprehension of their motives. 
 
296 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 their objects^ and their foibles, which gave him 
 often an insight into their fortunes that looked to 
 less instructed men like prevision. During th& 
 whole of the long struggle, which began with 
 M. Thiers's appointment at Bordeaux, and ended 
 Tvith M. Grevy's election in February, 1878, he 
 never doubted that if Prance were consulted, the 
 people would decide as a body for the Eepublic. 
 In advance of almost all Englishmen he discerned 
 that the French peasantry, hating Legitimacy, 
 which they still associated with feudal oppression, 
 and disenchanted with Bonapartism, were willing, 
 if only property were made secure, to trust the 
 Eepublic ; and that with the severe suppression o£ 
 the Commune their fears for their property had 
 disappeared. He never, therefore, through the 
 whole of the contest lost heart, or dreaded anything 
 for the Eepublic, except an appeal to force, which 
 at the same time he felt confident the condition of 
 opinion in the army would not allow to be made. 
 When in 1873 the resignation of M. Thiers was 
 accepted, and Marshal MacMahon was elected to 
 
THE BEPUBLIC. 297 
 
 prepare the way for monarcliy, Mr. Macdonell 
 asked which monarchy the Monarchists intended 
 their agent to select. When, in June, 1871, the 
 Assembly, on the motion of M. Casimir Perier, 
 formally recognised the Republic, he said that 
 henceforward the conservative feeling of the 
 peasantry, or rather their reverence for legality, 
 would be on that side; and when, in 1878, the 
 Marshal President, convinced that Prance was with 
 him, appealed to the people against the Eepublic, 
 he maintained steadily that the reactionaries had 
 blundered, and that the only chance of suspending 
 the Republic, even for a time, lay in a coup d'etat. 
 Only once was his confidence momentarily shaken. 
 Thoroughly as he understood Prance, he never quite 
 understood the restraints which bind the leaders 
 of her army, the reluctance to risk a civil war 
 ''in the barracks;" and when the decision of the 
 electors was known, he for a few hours expected 
 a resort to force and a military coup d'etat. The 
 opportunity passed. Marshal MacMahon resigned, 
 M. Grevy, the most determined of Republican 
 
298 FEANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIEB. 
 
 statesmen, was elected President, and Mr. Macdonell 
 declared the Eepublic finally established. There 
 might, he said repeatedly, be any number of 
 dictatorships during special crises, but for centuries 
 no throne would be set up again in France. The 
 conflicts of the future would not be between the 
 Eepublicans and Monarchists, but between the 
 Church and the Voltaireans ; the one conflict in- 
 which he thought the Liberals, being false to their 
 principles, and fighting persecutors with persecu- 
 tion, might be repeatedly, though for short periods, 
 defeated. 
 
 The conflict between the Republicans and the 
 Anarchists he did not dread at all, and iu fact 
 did not believe in. It was, he constantly asserted, 
 a British and not a French idea of the facts. " The 
 French are essentially the most conservative people 
 in Europe, the people most keen for acquisition, 
 and the people among whom property is most 
 widely diffused. Taking the landholders, the 
 rentiers, and the people with hoards together, 
 eight Frenchmen in every ten hold property, and 
 
THE REPUBLIC. 299 
 
 they are perfectly certain not to give it up. They 
 are not generous, they never subscribe, and they 
 always push all claims to money to their precise 
 legal limit. They will never consent to any system 
 of division, or to any annexation of inheritances 
 by the State ; and the Communists of the cities, 
 if they rise a hundred times over, will be put 
 down a hundred times. Society in France is 
 founded on a rock. It is the one country in 
 Europe in which social revolution, that is suc- 
 cessful revolution, not a mere emeute, is impossible. 
 The Church is the one Republican danger, or 
 rather the Republican inabihty to leave the Church 
 alone." This was in fact the central idea of his 
 total judgment of France. Let her but be 
 Republican, be organised in accordance with the 
 instincts of her people, and civilisation has nothing 
 to fear from France. The social revolution may 
 come, but it will not come thence. The Republic 
 therefore, he believed, would succeed, and ought, 
 as the form of government likely to endure, to enjoy 
 the sympathies of all Englishmen who wish Prance 
 
300 FRANCE SINCE THE FIRST EMPIRE. 
 
 to be contented and at rest. It was from this 
 standpoint that these notes were written^ a stand- 
 point from which argument the most pertinacious 
 or most brilliant never moved James Macdonell. 
 
 M. TOWNSEND. 
 
 THB END. 
 
 CHAELES DICKENS AND ETAJfS, CETSTiL PALACE PEESS.