ffJjIrWf-Tw^ F'^^JTKMMMM Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028214561 REVOLUTION AND REACTION IN MODERN FRANCE BY THE SAME A UTHOR Price 2s. 6d. net FROM KING TO KING The Tragedy of the Puritan Revolution REVOLUTION AND REAC- TION IN MODERN FRANCE. BY G. LOWES DICKINSON, M.A., FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE & yijs oxij^o Kawl yrjs exximum " was extended to all the necessaries of life, and it was made a capital offence to withhold them from the market: in February, 1794, the 24 MODERN FRANCE property of " suspects " was appropriated ; and it was so easy to include in this category anybody who happened to he rich, that practically all property henceforth was at the disposal of the Convention: finally it was declared by the "decrees of ventose" that the property of "enemies of the Revolution" was sequestrated; that a list should be made of " needy patriots " ; and that a report should be drawn up as to the means of "indemnifying the latter with the goods of the former." Such is the history, under the Revolution, of the " sacred and inviolable right " of property. 4. " No one may be interfered with on account of his opinions, even on the subject of religion, so long as their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by the law." (D. R., Art. 10.) The " Civil Constitution of the Clergy " set up by the Constituent Assembly, was an immediate challenge to this principle : a schism was created in the Church ; some priests refused and others accepted the oath to the new constitution ; and though an effort was made to deal gently with the non-jurors, they were eventu- ally ordered to leave the country, sentenced, if they refused, to transportation, and in case of persistent contumacy, to death. The imposition of the oath was an interference with religious opinion, for the Pope had condemned the constitution ; it might, however, be justified on the ground that the opinions attacked were prejudicial to pubUc order : but as the Revolution proceeded a persecution was instituted, not THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 25 only against non-jurors but against all Christian priests : they were made liable to transportation at the pleasure of the administrative authorities ; they were forbidden to wear the ecclesiastical costume, or to celebrate worship in public ; they were urged to give up their orders, and marry, and were punished with imprisonment if they refused; the churches were closed or converted into public assembly halls ; steeples were demolished, images smashed, relics desecrated, and an opera dancer enthroned in Notre Dame in the character of the goddess of Reason : a new fanaticism and a new persecution succeeded to the old ; and this tyranny of the grotesque was exercised in the name of.toleration and reason. § 9. The Immediate Results of The Revolution. It is thus abundantly proved that the Revolution issued in self-contradiction ; it was so far from establish- ing its own principles that it directly reversed them in practice. And, even so, it had not succeeded in cre- ating a permanent government ; the temporary unity and force which the Reign of Terror had secured was ended by the Revolution of Thermidor ; a series of insurrections destroyed the prestige of the Convention and of the Directory ; and it was not till the coup d'etat of Brumaire that political order was restored. Meantime, and through the whole revolutionary period, social and economic anarchy had prevailed : confusion, ignorance, and corruption were the rule 26 MODERN FRANCE in administration and finance; hospitals had de- generated into nurseries of disease ; pubUc build- ings were everywhere in decay ; the roads were be- coming impassable, and were infested by brigands ; in certain districts a third of the population lived by begging and stealing ; the law of the maximum, the requisitions, the war, the insecurity, the difficulties of communication, had ruined commerce ; elementary education was becoming extinct, and where it existed was little better than a farce ; everything, in every department, had been destroyed, and, in spite of innumerable positive decrees, nothing as yet had been re-created : every writing and record had been obliter- ated from the chart of France; and the only new inscription was a note of interrogation. The old order was abolished ; the principles of a new one had been affirmed;- butHArerfirst-attempt t u estafaHsfa— tfaem in practice had issued in a'caEastrophfe. Would a second attempt l)e' ma3e7Tr"sopwith— what- -interpretation ? with what precautions ? with what success ? These are the questions that it fell to the lot of Napoleon to CHAPTER ir THE FIRST EMPIRE H. Tainb. " Le Eegime Moderne." E. Hambl. "Histoire de France." A. Edmond-Blanc. " Napoleon I. et ses Institutions." J. Baeni. " Napoleon I." ROBDBEBE. "CEuvres." Pblet db la LozftEE. " Opinions de Napoleon ' Mmb. de EfiMUSAT. "Memoires." CHAPTER II THE FIRST EMPIRE § I. Napoleon and the Philosophy of the Revolution. " If the present project of a Republic should fail, all securities to a moderated freedom fail along with it ; all the indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed ; insomuch that if Monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ascendency in France, under this or under any other dynasty, it will probably be, if not voluntarily tempered, at setting out, by the wise and virtuous counsels of the prince, the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on earth." This prophecy of Burke's was fulfilled by Napoleon I. The way had been already prepared by the Committee of Public Safety ; on anarchy they bad superimposed a despotism ; they had eliminated the possible elements of resistance; and when they fell the only power that remained standing was the army. Napoleon succeeded to the heritage of Osesar and of Cromwell ; his opportunity is clear and his success intelligible; and it will be convenient here, omitting the steps by 30 MODERN FRANCE which he rose to power, to pass at once to the con- sideration of his work and of the spirit in which it was conceived. Napoleon had passed through the Revolution with- out sympathy with its ideal ; the doctrine of equality he welcomed because it opened to him a career ; that of liberty he never accepted or understood : he mis- trusted popular movements and popular sentiments : the philosophy of the eighteenth century he put aside with contempt ; he neither believed in it himself nor believed that the nation believed in it; "your Rous- seau was a madman," he said ; " it is he who has brought us to this pass ! " he judged the Revolution by what it had done, not by what it had meant to do ; it had promised the millennium and achieved an inferno ; it had started with Rousseau and ended in Fouquier-Tinville ; and the conclusion damned the prelude. Idealism having thus been tested and failed, it was time to return to facts ; what did the nation really desire ? what capacities did it really possess ? that was the point to ascertain, and that the basis to choose for the new creation. Let the end, henceforth, be the attainable, and the means the practicable : " we have finished the romance of the Revolution, it is time to begin its history ; to note only what is real and possible in the application of its principles and to ignore all that is merely speculative and hypo thetical." The application to politics of a priori principles had hurried the Revolution to a catastrophe the restorer and creator of society must directly THE FIRST EMPIRE reverse the method : — " It is to ideology that we must attribute all the misfortunes experienced by Prance ; to that obscure metaphysic which inquires minutely into first causes, and endeavours to make them the basis of legislation, instead of adapting laws to our knowledge of the human heart and to the lessons of history. Such errors were bound to lead, as they did, to the reign of the men of blood. In fact, who was it that proclaimed as a duty the prin- ciple of insurrection ? who was it that flattered the people by attributing to them a sovereignty which they were incapable of exercising ? who was it that destroyed the sanctity and authority of the laws by making them dependent not on the sacred principles of justice, on the nature of things, and on law, but merely on the will of an assembly whose members had no acquaintance with the civil, criminal, adminis- trative, political, and military institutions ? When one is called to regenerate a State it is the directly opposite principles that one must take as one's guide ; it is in history that the advantages and inconveniences of the various systems of laws are to be sought." § 2. Napoleon and Equality. While he was thus opposed to the spirit of the Revolution, Napoleon readily accepted the position it had made : he had no desire to restore the Bourbons and feudalism ; on the contrary, the destruction of the anden regime was the presupposition of all his 32 MODERN FRANCE work: it was that which he conceived to be the essential work of the Eevolution ; and it was his acceptance of thxit which led him to declare " I am the Revolution : " all that was feasible and fruitful in the movement he beUeved to be summed up in him- self ; and he expressed it all in the motto " La carriere ouverte aux talens : " privilege, once for all, was abolished, and free competition had taken its place : classes were no longer divided by arbitrary barriers ; talent, aided by luck, might pass from the lowest to the highest ; natural and social inequaUty remained, but legal inequality was abolished. Such was the basis and axiom of Napoleon's construc- tive work ; the Revolution had affirmed the principle, it was his to embody it in positive and enduring institu- tions : in this sense he was, as he boasted himself, the champion of equality ; he first realised in fact, what the Revolution had proclaimed in theory, that public burdens should fall upon all, and public offices be open to all : he took no account of birth or poUtical antecedents ; talent and loyalty to himself were his sole criterion of merit : of his marshals Massena was the son of a wine-merchant, Ney of a cooper, Lefebvre of a miller, Murat of a publican, Lannes of an ostler, Augereau of a mason ; among his prefects were representatives of the ancien regime, of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, of both Girondins and Jacobins of the Convention, and of the Directory ; on the council of his university sat together Ouvier, the Protestant man of science, and THE FIRST EMPIRE 33 Bonald, the champion of the Catholic reaction; he recalled the emigrants of every class and every shade of opinion ; side by side with the " constitutional " priests he established those who had refused the oath, and opened to members of the old noblesse the ranks of his new aristocracy : for every talent he had a use, for every merit a reward — subject, however, to the one condition of absolute submission to his will. But the equality of the revolutionary ideal had meant something more than this ; it had meant, to the more zealous of its devotees, the merging of every distinction in the title of "citizen:" St. Just had conceived a Republic of which every member should be a French Camillus, subsisting on his measured plot of ground, and ready to turn from the plough to the sword at the call of public danger; these were extreme views ; but they indicate the vague and comprehensive significance attached to the word equality : all this Napoleon brushed aside, with his characteristic contempt for the ideal ; the distinction of rich and poor he regarded as an ultimate fact, which it was the duty of the State to turn to profit, and of religion to turn to edification : property he held to be the basis of society, and it was his constant aim to establish and confirm it : not less appropriate to human nature were the distinctions of title and rank ; everybody really desired them whatever his philosophy might pretend to the contrary ; "I do not believe," said Napoleon, " that the French love liberty and equality. The French have not been 34 MODERN FRANCE changed by ten years of revolution ; they have but one sentiment — honour. That sentiment, then, must be nourished ; they must have distinctions." In accordance with this view he founded his " Legion of Honour,'' whose members received at once a decora- tion and a pension ; he instituted a hierarchy of titles, from Prince to Chevalier ; and re-introduced, for their transmission, the principle of heredity : an hereditary title was a contradiction to his own conception of equality, and he recognised the danger ; " decorated and rich," he said, " they will endeavour to escape me ; " but he consoled himself with the reflection " however fast they run, I shall know how to catch them." Napoleon's interpretation, then, of the principle of " equality " was both more precise and less compre- hensive than that of the Revolution ; it was based, like all that he thought and did, on his conception of the average man : self-interest and vanity he held to be the only springs of action; "there is only one thing to be done in this world, and that is to be always acquiring more money and more power ; everything else is chimasra : " these passions must be stimulated by prizes, hence the -pensions and titles; they must be tested by conflict, hence access for all to the running : the new regime, unlike the old, measured the reward by the work done ; and this was the fundamental distinction between the old nobility and the new. THE FIRST EMPIRE 35 § 3. Napoleon and Liberty. It was thus that Napoleon realised equality ; liberty he did not attempt to realise at all : when he said "I am the Revolution" he meant it; and it followed that the Revolution was not liberty. It was he who had delivered France from anarchy, and it was he who must found the new order : the people did not really want liberty, any more than they wanted equality; even if they wanted it they were not fit for it ; even if they were fit for it, they should not have it : " to all your complaints," he said to his wife, " I have the right to reply with an eternal 'I'"; he might have said the same to France : " power is my mistress," " I love it as a musician loves his vioUn, I love it as an artist : " the artist dare not lend his violin, and least of all to an incompetent player ; Napoleon dare not delegate his power, and least of all to revolutionary France : his passion and his conviction, his private and his public ends, pointed in the same direction, and urged the same supremacy : he was the fated man ; he had the brain and the will; France was at once his country and his property ; and duty conspired with interest to support his absolute control : he had taken over the estate from the Revolution, dilapidated but unencumbered; the old claims were abolished, the old ofiicials expelled ; it remained for him to introduce, -with the force and precision of a single will, the new 36 MODERN FRANCE metliods and the new tenants appropriate to a new era. Such, in brief, was the relation of Napoleon to the Revolution ; it will be further illustrated and defined by the actual work he accomplished. That work we shall now proceed to pass in review, examining first the political constitution which was the expression , of Napoleon's supremacy, and then the administrative and other institutions which he utilised his position to establish. § 4. The Political Constitution of the Empiee. By the constitution proposed by Sieyte, after the eighteenth of Brumaire, Napoleon would have been simply an irresponsible and irremovable head of the State ; he would have had nothing to do with the prac- tical government of the country : this position oipoivr- ceau a I'engrais he not unnaturally rejected, and trans- formed the constitution in such a way that he exercised, as " First Consul," a practically absolute authority ; his colleagues in the Consulate, Cambacerfes and Lebrun, were, as he put it himself, " nothing but councillors, whom I am obliged to consult, but wh»se advice I need not listen to : " he was head of the army and navy and appointed all their officers; he nominated the members of the Council of State, the Ministers, the ambassadors, and most of the judges ; and he selected, from hsts supplied by the electors, the officials of the local administration : — " In all other THE FIRST EMPIRE 37 acts of the Government the second and third consuls have a consultative voice ; they sign the register of these acts to prove that they are present, and if they like they record their own opinion ; after which, the decision of the first consul is sufficient." Thus in administration and public poUcy the first consul was supreme ; he was assisted and supported by a Council of State, who had the further function of formulating laws, and interpreting them whenever a doubtful case might arise. The actual legislative power resided in an Assembly of 300, which, however, could only accept or reject, without amendment or discussion, the laws submitted to it by the Council of State. The dis- cussion of these laws was entrusted to a " Tribunate," an Assembly of 100, which deputed three of its members to support its opinion before the Legislative Assembly ; three members of the Council represented, before the same body, the views of the Government. In addition to the Tribunate and the Legislative Assembly there was a Senate of 80 members, whose fvinction was to " maintain or annul all acts which are reported to it as unconstitutional by the Tribunate or the government : " the members of the Senate were selected, originally, by the consvils ; afterwards they filled up vacancies themselves by co-optation, selecting from three candidates presented for each place, one by the First Consul, one by the Tribunate, and one by the Legislative Assembly; they also selected, from lists presented by the electors, the members of the Tri- bunate and of the Legislative Assembly; so that MODERN FRANCE through the Senate, which was originally its own creation, the Government really appointed the members of the two other Assemblies. Practically, therefore, legislation, as well as administration, was in the hands of the First Consul, subject only to the necessity of deferring to the lists presented by the electors: these lists were three; ist, the communal list, being a tenth of the whole voting population, elected by manhood suffrage ; 2nd, the departmental list, elected by the members of the communal list and being a tenth of their nvimber ; 3rd, the national list, elected by members of the departmental Ust, and being a tenth of their number : from the first list were selected the public officers of the communes ; from the second the pubUc officers of the departments; from the third the members of the Tribunate and the Legislative Assembly. This was the system established by the Constitution; but in 1802 it was re-organised as follows : — the ba.sis, as before, was manhood suffrage, represented by the cantonal assemblies : These assemblies elected (a) from a list of the inost highly taxed members of the canton two candidates for each place vacant in the municipal councils. The final selection was made from this list by the First Consul ; (b) the electoral college of the " arrondissement " ; (c) the electoral college of the department (from a list of its most highly taxed inhabitants). These electoral colleges were permanent. THE FIRST EMPIRE 39 The electoral college of the " arrondissement '' elected {a) up to May 1806, two candidates for each -place vacant in the administrative council of the " arrondissement," the final selection being made by the First Consul ; (6) two names towards the formation of each of the lists from which the members of the Tribunate and of the Legislative Assembly, respectively, were chosen. The electoral college of the department elected (a) up to May 1806, two candidates for each place vacant in the council of the department, the final selection being made by the First Consul ; (6) two names towards the formation of each of the lists from which the members of the Senate and of the Legislative Assembly, respectively, were chosen. The final selection of members of the Legislative Assembly and of the Tribunate was made, from the lists so furnished, by the Senate; the Senate also selected its own members from candidates chosen by the First Consul from the list furnished by the elec- toral colleges of the department. The presidents of the cantonal assembUes were appointed by the First Consul, who, through them, found it easy to control the more or less illiterate electors: thus popular election never was, and never was meant to be anything but a form; but even the mere form was unacceptable to Napoleon ; 40 MODERN FRANCE in i'8o6 he suppressed the presentation of candidates for the municipal and departmental councils, and made the selection henceforth directly, and without restriction, himself. It might be supposed that a Tribunate and Legisla- tive Assembly, so carefully composed according to the method that has been described, would have given little offence to the most exacting Government ; they did, however, on certain occasions, venture upon opposition : having no power of amendment, they could only reject what they might otherwise have preferred to modify; and in 1801 they actually did throw out one of the chapters of the new Civil Code : such a step was regai-ded as factious, and measures were taken at once to " purge " the offending councils : it was the law that one-fifth of their membei's were renewed every year ; hitherto the names of those who were to retire had been selected by lot ; but on this occasion the Consul decided that they should be selected by the Senate, that is to say by himself; and in this way he secured the removal of all the prominent members of the opposition : even so he was not satisfied; in 1802 he further diminished the importance of the Tribunate by reducing its numbers to 50, and in 1807 he suppressed it altogether. It was in 1802 that Napoleon assumed the Con- sulate for life ; at the same time he attributed new power to his instrument, the Senate ; it had now the right to dissolve the Tribunate and the Legislative Assembly, to suspend trial by jury, to place the THE FIRST EMPIRE 41 departments out of the Constitution, and to annul the sentences of the courts : it is plain, after all this, that in 1804, when the First Consul assumed the title of Emperor, he was merely adopting the symbol of a position which he had already established in fact. The absolute power which he had thus secured Napoleon employed with indefatigable energy in the work of reorganisation : the revolutionary experi- ment in democracy had issued in anarchy ; the system was now to be reversed, and order to be secured at the cost of liberty. The institutions of the Consulate and the Empire are those of modern France ; and it is therefore necessary, briefly, to pass them in review. § 5. The Administrative System. The system of local self-government established in 1790 had failed : the communes had proved insub- ordinate to the central authorities, and the indivi- dual citizens to their communal officials; the latter were frequently ignorant, incompetent, and corrupt ; and the result of their government had been admin- istrative and financial chaos. "Since 1790," said Napoleon, "the 36,000 communes represent 36,000 orphan girls, neglected or pillaged for ten years by the municipal guardians of the Convention and the Directory. A change of mayors, adjuncts, and com- munal counsellors has meant, as a rule, nothing but a change in the method of robbery ; there has been 42 MODERN FRANCE robbery of the roads, robbery of the paths, robbery of the trees, robbery of the Church, robbery of the per- sonal effects of the commune." This state of things Napoleon set himself to remedy by a system of central- ised administration : the departments were divided into " arrondissements " ; over each department was set a prefect, over each " arrondissement " a sub-prefect, over each commune a mayor : these officers were ap- pointed by the Government, and were assisted by ad- ministrative councils, elected by the method already de- scribed : the councils, however, had no real authority ; their functions were to assess the taxes, to vote the special budget of their district, and to give their opinion and advice on local conditions and needs. Such a system was, in fact, a return to that of the ancient monarchy : the prefect took the place of the former " intendant," the department of the former " intendency," and the result was practical efficiency at the cost of local initiative. Centralisation returned the stronger for its temporary expulsion ; and no succeeding Government has been able to do more than mitigate its supremacy. § 6. The System op Taxation. The Revolution, as has been already noticed, re- formed the system of taxation on the basis of a fair contribution from all classes ; but here, as in other departments, its decrees were practically inoperative : both the assessors and the collectors of the taxes had been elected by popular vote ; and this arrangement THE FIRST EMPIRE 43 had resulted in every kind of vexation, abuse and delay ; individuals were assessed at more or less according to their political principles ; contributions were remitted, forgotten, misappropriated ; arrears increased indefinitely ; in February 1793, 176 millions (frs.) were due on the year 1791, and 296 millions on the year 1792 ; in the autumn of the year 1800 there were still 4 millions owing. But Napoleon was now in authority, and in finance, as everywhere else, he made his energy felt : he appointed himself the collectors and receivers; instituted a court for the verification of their accounts ; bound them by cau- tion money ; and was inexorable to all corruption. Henceforth there are no arrears and no malversation; the reformed system is at work at last, and its results may be measured . in money : five or six thousand officials are employed, where under the Monarchy were 200,000 ; and double the amount comes in : nor is it only the Government that profits ; the tax-payer is sensibly relieved : a farmer under the anden regime paid 81 per cent, of his income in taxes and feudal dues; 21 per cent, is now his contribution, levied with the minimum of inconvenience and vexation : for the first time he understands the meaning of the Revolution^ and willingly dispenses with his liberty in return for this practical equality. 44 MODERN FRANCE § 7. The Judicial System. The Constituent Assembly had established trial by jury and the election of judges by popular vote : such a system, suddenly introduced in a nation accustomed to despotic government, could hardly have proved satisfactory even in the quietest times ; to the Revo- lution it succumbed at once : -witnesses were afraid to give evidence, juries to convict, judges to pass sentence, except in accordance with the passions and desires of the dominant faction : attempts to enforce the common law were regarded as anti-revolutionary ; the authorities, it was complained, " are always talking about the, law, as if they did not understand that it is the will of the people that makes the law, and that we are the people ; " if a judgment delivered was not approved it was quashed by some popular authority ; lastly, the ordinary course of justice was replaced by revolutionary tribunals. Napoleon, accord- ing to his constant plan, reorganised the system of the Revolution in dependence on the Central Govern- ment : he found justices of the peace established in every canton ; these he retained, but after 1802 appointed them himself, from candidates named by the electors; he nominated also the other judges, except those of the highest court of appeal, which were appointed by the Senate from candidates presented by himself : in every arrondissement he established a ." Court of First Instance," and above these, for civil cases, permanent courts of appeal, and for criminal THE FIRST EMPIRE 45 cases, travelling assize courts; the ultimate court of appeal was the " Oour de Cassation." Trial by jury was retained in criminal cases ; but the jurors were care- fully selected from lists drawn up by the prefects, and comprising only the more educated and compe- tent citizens ; and at any moment the working of the system could be suspended by a decree of the Senate. This organisation of justice has been retained to the present day ; but Napoleon was obliged to supple- ment it during his reign by special tribunals ; these were composed of three judges, two citizens, and three military officers, and took cognisance of se- ditious assemblies, plots to assassinate the heads of the Government, robbery under arms, threats and intimidation of the purchasers of national property, attempts to corrupt the army, and all crimes com- mitted by vagabonds and convicts. State prisons were also established to which were consigned, by an order of the Council of State, " all who could neither be brought to trial nor set at liberty without endan- gering the security of the State." These prisons contained at Napoleon's fall 250 inmates. In a country just emerging from anarchy, infested by brigands, and torn by faction, some kind of special jurisdiction was necessary; neither the Restoration nor the Monarchy of July was able to dispense with it, and it is therefore puerile to make it a special charge against Napoleon ; it is part of his general system of absolutism, and that system was the con- dition of the restoration of order. 46 MODERN FRANCE § 8. The Codes. In addition to the organisation of justice Napoleon undertook the codification of the law. This work had been commenced by the Revolution, and projects had been prepared both for the Convention and for the Directory : Napoleon succeeded to their labours ; he had in his service distinguished lawyers, and he took himself a personal and intelligent part in the work. The Code Civil is still in force, or has formed the basis of legislation, not only in France, but in many other countries; it was promulgated in 1805. The other Codes drawn up under Napoleon's influence are that of Civil Procedure, promulgated in 1806, that of Commerce, in 1807, that of Criminal Instruction, in 1808, and the Penal Code in 1810. § 9. The Press. Thus to administration, justice, and finance Napoleon had given the form which they have since substantially retained ; he had reconstructed the body of the State ; it remained to discipHne and adapt the soul. He was not content with controlling acts ; he must also control opinion : every institution and every activity must work in subordination to the State ; even the arts must be utilised to support and adorn the Government ; the tragedian must exhibit on the stage the heroic prototypes of the Emperor, THE FIRST EMPIRE 4^ the painter choose for his theme the victories of the imperial arms, the orator train his tongue to eulogy. These, however, were sources of influence that could only he indirectly controlled ; there were others, more important, and capable of severer discipline. These were the Press, Education, and the Church ; and over them too Napoleon extended the net of his inexorable system. The liberty of the press had been one of the principles of the Revolution ; how little it had been realised in practice may be illustrated by the following decree of the Convention : — " Whoever shall be con- victed of having composed or printed works or writings which urge the dissolution of the national represen- tation, the re-establishment of the Monarchy or of any other power incompatible with the sovereignty of the people, shall be brought before the special tribunal and punished with death." The principle thus insulted by the Revolution Napoleon did not even profess to accept : — " If I were to re-establish the liberty of the press, I should immediately have thirty Royalist journals and as many Jacobin, and I should have to govern again with a minority." As he silenced opposition in the Tribune so he silenced it in the press ; he subjected journals and books to the censure ; limited the number of political journals; prohibited printing and publishing except under licence ; and revoked the licence if any- thing was produced " contrary to the duties of subjects towards the Sovereign and the security of the State." 48 MODERN FRANCE The censure was exercised strictly ; for example, a passage of Mme. de Stael was suppressed because it placed the Iphigeneia of Goethe above that of Racine ; journals were forbidden to speak of religion, or to mention the word Jesuit ; their news was confined to what was furnished by the bulletins of the police ; " every piece of news," wrote the Emperor, " that is disagreeable and disadvantageous to France they ought to put in quarantine, since they ought to suspect that it is dictated by the English." Nor was it enough for journalists to abstain from criticising the Government ; they were expected actively to support it ; " tell them," wrote Napoleon, " that I shaU not" judge them by the evil things that they have said, but by the good things that they have not said : " if they could not conform to these conditions their journals were suppressed or appropriated. Such restriction of the press was an inevitable corollary of a despotism, and none of the freer Governments that succeeded were able altogether to dispense with it ; it was moreover a negative rather than a positive measure, and far less radical in its effects than the system we are next to examine. § lo. Education. Napoleon's conception of education was purely political ; he regarded it as a machinery for the pro- duction of efficient subjects : — " In the establishment of a teaching body," he said, " my piiucipal aim is THE FIRST EMPIRE 49 to have a means of directing political and moral opinions ;" for " so long as people are not taught from their childhood whether they are to be republicans or monarchists, catholics or freethinkers, the State will not form a nation ; it will rest on vague and uncertain bases, and be constantly subject to change and dis- order." In accordance with this principle he drew up his scheme of education ; he established a single university, with a corporate existence and independent property ; its officers were a Grand Master, a Chan- cellor, and a Treasurer, all appointed by the Emperor ; they were assisted by a Council, composed of ten permanent members, nominated by the Emperor, and twenty annual members, nominated by the Grand Master. To this body was entrusted the absolute control of higher as well as elementary education ; every teacher and official in the public colleges and schools was nominated by the Grand Master ; every regulation of studies and discipline issued from him and his Council. Private schools already existing were swept into the system ; they were compelled to hold a licence from the Government, of which they might be deprived for misconduct ; they were only allowed to give instruction up to a certain standard ; in towns where there was a public school they were only allowed to teach what was not taught there, and for all other subjects were compelled to send their pupils to its classes ; they were forbidden to take in boarders unless the public school was full. The Catholic seminaries were subjected to even severer D 50 MODERN FRANCE restrictions ; only one was allowed to exist in each department, and for these the 'university drew up the regulations and supplied the teachers. Such a system could not be imposed without re- sistance ; it was not easy at first to secure pupils and satisfactory teachers ; the first difficulty was met by the discouragement of all competing institutions ; the second by the creation of normal schools, whose pupils received, at last, the monopoly of every post in the teaching hierarchy. Thus, in the end, teachers and taught were made to pass through the same system, and take the same permanent stamp ; that stamp was the Emperor's head. " All the schools of the uni- versity will take as the basis of their instruction fidelity to the Emperor, to the imperial monarchy, the guardian of the happiness of the nations, and to the Napoleonic dynasty, the preserver of the unity of France and of all the liberal ideas proclaimed by the constitutions." The decree is definite and clear, and it was fulfilled to the letter ; the university became a factory of soldiers and civil servants : the Govern- ment was military ; so were the schools ; they had their uniform, their drum-calls and their drill ; " the masters were sergeants, the class rooms barracks, the games manoeuvres, the examinations reviews ; " bulletins of the latest victories were officially announced in class ; and service under the Emperor was the recognised and approved ideal : the Government was Catholic ; so were the schools ; but not too much so ; " our boys must be neither bigots nor sceptics ; they THE FIRST EMPIRE 51 ■ must conform to the state of the nation and of society." The curriculum was adjusted to this concep- tion ; mathematics were encouraged because of their practical utility ; classics, for the sake of the examples of discipline offered by Sparta and Rome ; but all speculation, all culture, all of which liberty is an essential condition, so far as regulation could suppress it, was suppressed. The end of education was not Man ; it was Napoleon and the State. § II. The Ohukch. Religion, like education, was too important an influence to be allowed independent action. The Revolution had destroyed the organisation of the Church ; Napoleon determined to restore it, and use it for his own ends. There must be an established religion, as a guarantee of order and a prophylactic against fanaticism ; but it must be established under the control of the G-overnment. " Conceive," said Napoleon, " the insolence of these priests ! in the division they make with what they are pleased to call the temporal power, they keep to themselves all authority over the mind, that is, over the nobler part of man, while they circumscribe my authority to an influence over the body. They appropriate the soul, and fling me the carcase." The idea was preposterous ; the control of religion must be vested in the Sovereign ; " it is impossible to govern without it." To effect this end. Napoleon had recourse to the Pope ; " if he 52 MODERN FRANCE had not existed," he said, " I should have had to create him for this occasion." The conception of utilising the Pope was a bold one, but it was in harmony with Napoleon's larger aims ; in the world- empire to which he aspired it was necessary that the soul as well as the body, the spiritual as well as the temporal powers, should be subject to his domination : his object, as he said himself, was "to have the control of the Pope ; and then what influence ! what a lever of opinion on the rest of the world ! " It was in this spirit that he concluded the Concordat of 1801. The Revolution had caused a schism between the clergy who refused and those who accepted the civil constitution of 1791 ; this schism it was necessary to heal ; it was accordingly agreed that the Pope should demand the resignation of all existing bishops, and deprive those who refused ; the new appoint- ments were then to be conferred impartially upon both jurors and non-jurors ; but they were to be made by the Government : the Pope retained the right of institution ; but, in return, he confii-med the sales of church property, and accepted the position of the clergy as salaried officials of the State. By the " organic articles 'published in 1802 the powers of the Government were still further extended ; without its consent no papal brief might be admitted and no council held in France ; it appointed the teachers in the Catholic seminaries and imposed upon them the Galilean declaration of 1682 ; its approval was a condition of the validity of every ordination, THE FIRST EMPIRE 53 Thus retaining in his own hands the education, appointment, and payment of the Catholic clergy, Napoleon might naturally expect to find in them a disciplined and serviceable army ; there remained, however, the smaller sects of the Protestants and the Jews. The Revolution had professed the prin- ciple of toleration ; Napoleon accepted and realised it in the service of his own interests : side by side with the Catholic Church he established that of the Jews and of the two chief Protestant sects ; here too he assigned to himself the nomination of the clergy, and, in the case of the Protestants, made them pen- sioners of the State ; he thus both formally admitted the right of dissent to exist, and made its existence subserve the purposes of his own system ; henceforth there was no authorised priest whose office did not depend on the Government, and consequently no con- gregation that was not instructed in political ortho- doxy : " My Lord Bishop," said Fouche, Minister of Police, " between your functions and mine there is more than one point of similarity." Even the Emperor was satisfied ; from every pulpit in France his greatness and glory were extolled ; his victories were praised, his policy defended, his enemies anathematised ; and service in his regiments publicly commended not only as a privilege but as a sacred duty. " Have you seen," said Napoleon to Eoederer, " the charge of the Archbishop of Tours ? You couldn't have done it better yourself. He says that the actual government is the legitimate 54 MODERN FRANCE government ; that God scatters thrones and kings according to His good pleasure, and adopts the chiefs that the people prefer. You couldn't have put it better yourself." But the consummation was reached when the official catechism was published, and the following passages became part of the educational system of the country : — " Question : — What are the duties of Christians with regard to the princes who govern them, and what, in particular, are our duties towards Napoleon I. our Emperor ? " Answer :— Christians owe to the princes who govern them, and we, in particular, owe to Napoleon I., our Emperor, love, respect, obedience, fidelity, military service, and the tributes ordained for the defence of the empire and of his throne. To honour and serve the Emperor is therefore to honour and serve God Himself. " Q. : — Are there not special motives which ought to attach us more strongly to Napoleon I. our Emperor ? " A. : — Yes ; for it is he that God has raised up, in difficult circumstances, to re-establish the public ob- servances of the holy religion of our fathers, and to be its protector. ■ He has restored and presented public order by his profound and active wisdom ; he defends the State by his powerful arm ; he has become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration he has received from the sovereign pontiff, head of the uni- versal Church. THE FIRST EMPIRE 55 " Q. : — What ought to be thought of those who should fail in their duties towards our Emperor ? "A.: — According to the Apostle St. Paul, they would be resisting the order of God Himself and would render themselves worthy of eternal damnation." Napoleon once regretted that he could not pose, like Alexander, as the son of God ; it will be admitted that he did his best to approximate to his ideal. In spite, however, of this success, the subjugation of the Church was rather apparent than real. The clergy, it is true, had ceased to be an independent corporation ; but for that very reason they were driven to rely upon Rome ; they had lost their former interest and their' former status in France ; and their direct dependence on a Government which might or might not be devout, and might or might not be legitimate, was a constant challenge to disaffection. Even the Emperor, at the height of his power, found it hard to reckon with them when he had come into collision with the Pope ; and later and less despotic Govern- ments, in spite of the fact that they nominate the bishops, have found the opposition of the Church to be one of the most formidable of their political problems. Napoleon had hoped, when he framed the Concordat, to secularise the Church ; " it is the vaccination of rehgion," he said ; " in fifty years there will be none in France." The effect was exactly the contrary; the Church was stronger than ever: but it was no longer Gallicau ; it was Ultramontane. S6 MODERN FRANCE § 12. Conclusion. The institutions we have thus surveyed, with the exception of the political system, have in the main continued to the present day; the administrative, judicial and financial organisation of the Empire is maintained by the present Republic ; the Codes are still in force ; the University still subsists ; the Con- cordat is still applied. Napoleon's work was done, and done thoroughly ; it remains for us to record the criticism suggested by the course of events. In the first place, the work was that of a despot ; I'etat c'est moi was the maxim of Napoleon as absolutely as it was that of Louis XIV. ; it is almost irrelevant even to inquire whether he regarded the State as the end, or himself ; for he never seems to have conceived the possibility of a separation of the two interests : — "I swear," he said, and he probably meant it, " that I do nothing except for France ; I have nothing in view- but her advantage : " her advantage, however, was what the Emperor might determine to be so ; there could be no two opinions on the matter ; " the French Government represents the Sovereign people ; and against the Sovereign there can be no opposition : " this theoretical identification of prince and people is admirably expressed by Roederer ; — " The monarch is, in a monarchy, the sensitive and animated object in which the country lives ; it is in his interest that the public interest is revealed ; the prince is the country THE FIRST EMPIRE 57 personified ; the country has assumed a body, a soul, a spirit, a visage, that it may be better understood, and be more certain of inspiring affection." Napoleon, then, was the brain, the conscience and the will of France ; if there were opposition it could not be other than factious ; it represented ignorance or individual selQshness : was a tax unpopular? "my wish is to secure the good of my people, and I shall not allow myself to be checked in that course by the murmurs of the taxpayers " : was opposition expected to a decree ? "a very bad spirit pervades the French commercial world : " did the Tribunate criticise a j^roject of law ? it was a " disorganising institution." Theoretically, the people were still svipreme; theo- retically the Empire was their creation; but there was one official interpreter of their will, and against his interpretation there was no appeal. There can be little doubt, it is true, that when first Napoleon assumed the government the opinion of the country was with him; he was the representative of order, and order was the crying need : neither can it be said that he destroyed liberty, for there was no liberty to destroy ; all that he did was to substitute despotism for anarchy : but despotism was the condition of re- organisation, and as such it was welcomed by a people distracted by a decade of revolution : it brought with it, nevertheless, its inevitable Nemesis ; as the power of Napoleon extended so did his ambition, and his real support in the nation diminished in equal pro- portion ; he tempted with his honours and titles, he 58 MODERN FRANCE dazzled by his brilliant achievements, but the fact remained that his interest had ceased to be the interest of France ; he drained her wealth and life in pursuit of the empire of the world, and the con- ception of a world-empire was nothing but an historical anachronism ; to this conception he had sacriiiced the lives of some two millions of his subjects, only at last to hand over his country, shorn of the conquests of the Revolution, of Belgium, Savoy, and the left bank of the Rhine, to the domination of that Bourbon house which was identified with all the abuses it had cost ten years of anguish to expel. The despotism of Napoleon vanished with himself, leaving behind a tradition ; but his centralisation remained as the form and expression of modern France. He had inherited from the ancient monarchy, and, for that matter, from the Revolution, the con- ception of the State as the end and the individual as the means ; like Robespierre and St. Just, he recurred to the ideal of the ancient world ; the individual citizen was to be merely a cog in the vast machine of the State; the well-being of the whole was to be sought, at the cost of the well-being of every part ; in the civil service, as in the army, in the school and in the Church, military discipline must prevail ; no initiative and no responsibility except what was delegated from above; no activity without superior direction, no unauthorised experiments, no deviation to bye-paths, no private and self-suificient ends; religion must not be embraced as the mistress and THE FIRST EMPIRE 59 interpreter of life, it is nothing but a handmaid to the State, a guarantor of social order ; education must not be conceived as the nurse of independent thought, it is nothing but a mechanical prompter of the hypo- theses on which the government rests; the end of life is not life, but conformity to an arbitrary order ; there is no future, no development, no ideal ; a society is a congeries of individuals, moved by the spring of self-interest; these interests must be flattered or coerced into a superficial appearance of harmony; and I, Napoleon, I, am the man appointed to do it. This conception of the State is at the bottom of all Napoleon's work; everything proceeds from the centre, nothing from the extremities ; no place is left for individual or local activity. The system thus established was a weapon in the hands of every succeeding Government; it could be used with as ruthless severity by a republic as by a despot ; and though it might be employed in the interest of a liberal and progressive policy, it was and remained, in itself, a perpetual contradiction to liberty. If, there- fore, there were any vitality in the ideal of the ■Revolution, if it represented a genuine heed and a genuine tendency, and one that was not satisfied and exhausted by the mere abolition of feudalism, an opposition would be created and maintained not only against any temporary phase of political despotism, but against the despotism, more permanent and pervasive, of the system of centralisation ; such oppo- sition, in fact, did arise, and found its most em- 6o MODERN FRANCE phafcic exponent in the Communist insurrection of 1871. Surveying, then, the work of Napoleon in its i-elation to the principles of the Revolution, we come to the following conclusions : — equality he so far established that he substituted, as the basis of society, service for privilege, and distributive justice for favour; and this part of his achievement was so effective and final, that it was impossible, even for the Bourbon monarchs when they returned, to restore to the nobles and clergy their former rights and exemptions. Liberty, on the other hand, he made no attempt to realise, though the word was always in his mouth ; not only did he govern despotically himself, but he stamped the form of despotism on the State : his personal supremacy was killed at Leipzig and buried at Waterloo, though its ghost survived and haunted Prance till it re-embodied itself in Napoleon III. ; the supremacy of the State remained and remains to this day, the substance to which changes of political form are so many irrelevant accidents. Meantime, the Revolution had still its problem before it; it bad escaped from a decade of anarchy to fall into despotism ; it escaped from political despotism, no longer fluid and mobile, but fixed, as it seemed, for ever, in the mould of centralisation; and it escaped to faU once more into the hands of the Bourbon kings. Its further efforts and progress towards its still remote ideal will be traced in the chapters that follow. CHAPTER III THE RESTORATION E. Hambl. " Histoire de France. " F. R. Daebstb de la Chavannb. "Histoire de la Restauration. " E. Daudbt. "Histoire de la Restauration." P. Thuebau - Dangin. "Le Parti Liberal sons la Restauration." P. Thubbatj-Dangin. " Royalistes et Republicains. " GUIZOT. " Memoires." Bkoglib. " Souvenirs." H. Tainb. " Les philosophes Frangais du xix« sieole." Works of Maistbb, Bonald, and Lambnnais. CHAPTER III THE RESTORATION § I. The Intellectual Eevival. The issue of the idealism of the Revolution in a despotism confessedly based upon material interests, had tended to discourage or extinguish all creeds but that of force. Not only was thought constrained from without by the pressure of the Government, it had lost, or appeared to have lost, its own internal spring : " What at that time was the direction of thought ? " wrote Charles de Remusat, "To whom did it even occur to think ? What great idea did not pass for a chimera? There was a general disenchantment, in which glory and liberty were involved with the rest. Principles were excluded from politics. The Revo- lution had ceased to inspire enthusiasm ; but, since its material results were not disputed, it did not complain. Morality was gradually reducing itself to the practice of the useful virtues ; it was valued as a condition of order, not as a source of dignity. Religion, though it was accepted as a political necessity, was excluded from discussion, enthusiasm, 64 MODERN FRANCE proselytism ; it appeared to be as useless to dispute as it was out of place to defend it. A literature devoid of inspiration testified to the prevalent in- tellectual frigidity ; and, above all, a need of repose, explicable enough under the circumstances of the time, but none the less blind and pusillanimous, sub- dued and enervated the noblest hearts. Deceived in all its hopes, weary of its hazardous experiments, the reason appeared at length to acquiesce in its humilia- tion." From this torpor of acquiescence France was aroused by the Restoration ; with the King returned the RoyaKst ideal, and it was confronted with that of the Revolution : a larger measure of liberty than had ever been enjoyed before opened an arena for the conflict ; genius evoked strife, and strife kindled genius ; theory clashed with theory, thought en- gendered thought, and ideas began to move upon a troubled sea of parties : not only did the press and the tribune become a power in the State, but philo- sophy, history, poetry, sprang ipto new life and dis- covered a new direction : Chateaubriand and Lamartine infused into literature the spirit of romance ; Guizot applied philosophy to the appreciation of the past ; Maistre and Lamennais developed the theory of ultramontanism ; Cousin endeavoured to plumb the profound metaphysics of Germany ; Beranger sang his popular politics; the Constitutionnel, the Olohe, the Censeur, the Quoiidienne, echoed contemporary opinion; and Royer-Oollard, Serre, Bonald, Labour- donnaye resumed in the Chambers the broken THE RESTORATION 65 tradition of parliamentary eloquence : thought had awakened from its enchanted sleep ; it had become again a political force ; and it is necessary for the understanding of the period to take some account of its progress. § 2. The Philosophy op the Keaction. The political philosophy of the Revolution had been refuted by the Revolution itself : an attempt had been made to put its principles into action ; the attempt had issued in disaster, and its opponents were not likely to neglect to enforce the moral : they did more : not content with denying what Rousseau and Voltaire had affirmed, they went so far as to re- affirm all that they had denied : among the French authors of the beginning of the century there are three prominent names — Maistre, Bonald, Lamen-" nais — all of whom represent not only a negativerv^ reaction against the principles of 1789, but a positive return to those of the Middle Ages : they dispute the assumptions of the eighteenth century, show that they logically lead to scepticism, and invoke, against that desolating void, the dogma of Divine Revelation. The argument, developed at length, and with many variations, in their works, may be grasped in its general form and summarised as follows. It had been stated or implied by the followers of Rousseau that man was naturally good, and that his corruption was due to society: to this Maistre replied, that man, in fact, was bad, and that hisv^ E 66 MODERN FRANCE corruption was due to himself : original sin was the ultimate fact, without which nothing could be ex- plained, and original sin carried with it its correlative, original evil : evil, therefore, could not be cured by /re-arranging society ; it was the ultimate fact, the nature and law of the world ; brute preys on brute, and man on man, death is the condition of life, and war its character and essence; " do you not hear the earth crying and asking for blood ? " " without interruption, in this place or that, human blood is bound to flow : " it is not true that " all is good," as Oondorcet and his friends had maintained ; on the contrary, " all is evil," since everything is out of place : this evil is not injustice, it is Divine /retribution, for "there is no such thing in all the earth as an innocent man : " the fact is attested and symbolised by the public executioner; "take away from the world that incomprehensible agent, and in a moment order gives place tp chaos, thrones are en- gulphed, and society dispersed : " the scaffold and the block are the type of the world ; they are as old as it and as deathless : is illustration wanted of the permanent truth of this doctrine ? Let the Revolu- tion attest it ! It started with the federation feasis and culminated in the Reign of Terror ! Idealism has refuted itself ; let us return and rest upon facts ! The followers of Rousseau had maintained that society was founded on a contract ; that men had come together and agreed, for their own advantage, to submit their individual wills to the general will of the THE RESTORATION 67 whole : but, says Bonald, a contract presupposes a society; the theory of Rousseau assumes the very thing it pretends to account for, and the mystery remains unsolved till we seek its explanation in God. Moreover, continues Maistre, a contract inipKes deli- beration, and never was any society deliberately pro-*- duced : association is the inevitable result of the nature of men and things ; its bond is the mystery of life, not the lucidity of mechanism : to attempt, as the Revolution had attempted, to build a constitution in the air, on the basis of abstract propositions, is to attempt the impossible ; every constitution that has ■ had real validity existed before it was written, and in its explicit form was merely the expression of rights already guaranteed in fact : the constitution of 1791 was abortive because it was the work of reason ; and here again the Revolution supplies the refutation of its own philosophy. The followers of Rousseau had maintained that authority is derived from the people ; but what, asks Maistre, is the people ? — a collection of heterogeneous individuals ! there is no such thing as Man in the abstract, and no such thing as a " general will ; " where is the unity in this plurality, the whole among these isolated parts? Self-interest, it is replied, is the principle of cohesion : but all interests conflict, and all, ex-hypothesi, have equal claims; why should I submit mine to yours, and you yours to mine ? The " will of aU " is resolved at once into a conflict of all individual wills, and the only ultimate arbiter is the 68 MODERN FRANCE force of the luckiest and strongest. Once more, the Eevolution is its own damnation ; it founded its authority on the people, and maintained it by the Committee of Public Safety. The followers of Rousseau had maintained that as there is a " natural man," so there is a " natural mora- lity," and a " natural religion : " if that be so, asks Lamennais, where is its criterion to be found ? Is it your opinion, or mine, or his ? The prophets disagree among themselves ; Herbert, Bolingbroke, Chubb, Rousseau, each has his own doctrine ; who is to judge between them ? and by what law or stan- dard ? Rousseau accepts the existence of God and the immortality of the soul ; but why ? and how can he maintain his assertions ? " Natural religion is nothing but a gulf to swallow up every dogma ; " and natural morality fares no better : " Be just, that is enough," said Voltaire, " all the rest is arbitrary ; " " The duties of morality," said Rousseau, " are the only ones essential;" but what is justice? what are the duties of morality ? is Voltaire to define them ? or is Rous- seau ? or are you ? or am I ? the principle of the sovereignty of the conscience is as futile as that of the sovereignty of the people ; both refer the ^problem to the individual judgment; both invoke confusion, only to take refuge in despotism : the Revolution began with universal toleration ; it culmi- nated in the tyranny of atheism. The hypotheses, then, of the revolutionary phi- losophy were as false ip theory as they had been THE RESTORATION 69 disastrous in practice ; they were not principles at all, they were merely scepticism in disguise : where, then, was truth to be found ? for in scepticism it was impos- sible to rest : " There is in man," says Lamennaisf " a something which offers an invincible resistance to destruction, a certain vital faith ; whether he wish it or not he must believe, because he must act and must maintain himself:" there must, then, be a truth; but it could not be a truth of reason, for reason led ' to scepticism ; it must therefore .be a truth of autho-\ rity, and of authority beyond dispute : such an authority, our authors assert, can only be found iuv^ God : his existence they endeavour to prove by the facts of language and thought, and having established that, proceed with security in their work of construc- tion : God, in the beginning, revealed to man with his primary words his primary ideas ; these are fixed once for all, so many, neither more nor less, definite, final, without appeal : " There exist necessarily, for all intelligences, an order of truths primitively revealed — that is to say, received originally from God, as the conditions of life, or rather as hfe itself ; and these truths of faith are the immovable foundation of all spirits, the bond of their society and the law of theii existence : " these " truths of faith " are accepted in all societies, and expressed in all languages; they reveal the existence of God, His relations to man, and the relations of men to one another ; and are found to involve, curiously enough, the whole constitution of the a7icien regime : sovereignty is derived from 70 MODERN FRANCE God ; as He rules the world, so does the Pope the Church, the King the State, the father the family ; as these lesser sovereigns are ministers of God, so they in turn have ministers of their own, the Pope his priests, and the King his nobles ; and as God is eter- nal, so do they imitate eternity by hereditary titles and functions, and by the permanence of territorial status : this apparently complex society is merely a maturer form of that primitive organisation of the family which is as old as the world itself ; it is the complete expression of the one original revelation, and cannot, therefore, be developed, though it may be, and has been, corrupted : " king, nobles, and people," " pope, priests, and laymen," are the formulae that solve society, as " God, Christ, mankind," is the for- mula that solves the universe : the .world is con- structed in tr inities, fitted, likeTThnxeH. one wjthin another; a.nri avpry Trierr^ ber of every triad h as its peculiar functions and powers, preordained at TB ^ constitution of the world , attested by the rudiments of language, and implied in the rudiments of thought : either, then, there is no society, or society assumes the mediseval form ; so only can it endure, so only, properly speaking, can it exist. THE RESTORATION 71 § 3. The Party of the Reaction and the Constitution. A theory so absolute as this could never make terms > with the Revolution : the Revolution had tried to found a State on the diametrically opposite hypotheses ; such a State was n ot only immoral, it was impossible ;^ unfortunately, however, it existed, and the Government of the Restoration accepted it : all of the Revolution that Napoleon had adopted, and all which he had built upon it, it was practically impossible for Louis XVIII. to destroy : he made no attempt to do so ; he confirmed the confiscation of the property of the emigres; he admitted the toleration of non-Catholic sects; he retained the administrative, judicial and fiscal system of the Empire ; he retained even the Concordat — in a word, he definitely accepted the aboUtion of the privileges and powers of the nobility and the Church : he went even further than this ; " voluntarily," to use his own words, " and by the free exercise of his royal authority, in his own name and in that of his successors for ever, he made to his subjects a concession and gift of a constitutional charter : " by this act he established a Chamber of Peers and a Chamber of Deputies, to exercise, in conjunction with himself, the legislative power ; that is to say, he deliberately resigned a portion of his absolute and divine authority. A State so constituted was only a compromise between the Revolution and the Ancient Monarchy : 72 MODERN FRANCE it was based on the divine right of kings, yet it limited their power by a written constitution ; it admitted Catholicism as the State religion, yet it tolerated other creeds ; it retained the nobility as a separate order, yet refused to restore their original status, to endow them with territorial supremacy, and with a monopoly cf public functions ; it recognised the ministry of the Church, yet withheld from it the control of thought, of education, of marriage, of the registers of birth and death : it thus was far from conforming to the demands of the absolute theory, whose supporters accordingly formed a party of extreme reaction, advocating a revolutionary return to the pre-revolu- tionary institutions. The criticism of this party on the State as it was, found its bitterest and ablest ex- /ponent in Lamennais : the law, he declares, is atheist, since it tolerates all sects ; the Church is impotent, since it is subject to the State : it has no property in the soil, no place in the representative system, there- fore no economic and no political status ; it has lost the control of the family, through the institution of civil marriage, and the deposition of the registers of birth and death with the mayors; it has lost the control of its own discipline through the suppression of its tribunals ; it has become a parody of itself, and so has the State that maintains it, for the monarchy inevitably decays with the decay of the religious principle : the nobles are no longer a ruling caste, they are merely a section of a democratic parliament ; the Ministers are no longer servants of the King, they THE RESTORATION 73 are the responsible agents of the Chambers ; the King himself is nothing but a "venerable memory of the past," the inscription on an ancient temple transferred to the front of a jerry-built tabernacle. It is because it gave support to this practical oppo- sition that the theory we have been examining has a certain importance : it was a theory of extremes — ultramontanism or atheism, absolutism or demo- cracy; and thei'efore it was specially adapted to become the exponent of a party of passion, and to give expression iu terms of thought to the instinctive tendencies of the counter-revolution : it was said of the Bourbons when they returned, and it was literally true of many of their adherents, that they had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing : emigres returned from abroad, country gentlemen emerged from the'' provinces; deprived of their privileges and estates, aflHicted and outraged by the brutality, the robbery, the proscriptions of the Eeign of Terror, they saw in the Revolution nothing but its crimes, and in the society it had inaugurated nothing but its injustice ; they were the ghost of the ancien regime, crying for vengeance on its murderers ; all compromise was treason, all opposition rebelHon ; a Moderate was a Jacobin in disguise ; the King himself was little better : statesmen of their own party are aghast at their exaltation ; VUlele describes them as enrages ; the King dubs them fous ; " you can't imagine," writes Corbiere, " the trouble it costs to drive into their heads a piece of common-sense;" " the violence of this party," 74 MODERN FRANCE says Broglie, " both in the Chamber and out of it, at the tribune and in the galleries, in trousers or petticoats, recalled, feature for feature, the worst days of the National Convention : " they had accepted the a Charter with regret on the eve of its promulgation ; and they were not able to conceal how repugnant it was to them : their instincts pushed in the same direction as the convictions of men like Bonald ; they claimed for the nobles the supremacy of territorial and official influence, and for the Church the control of thought and social life ; the " equality " established by Napoleon, the " liberty " granted by the King, appeared to them not the foundation of the future, but a purposeless encumbrance on the past ; there was one order, and only one, that of the ancien regime, and the actual state of France was nothing but an immoral transaction with anarchy. § 4. The Ebvolutionary Left. The party thus fornSed received the name of " Ultras"; and the complement to this extreme " Right " was a ri'evolutionary ) " Left " : this included all who were actively oppdsed to the Bourbon dynasty, and was less a party than an agglomeration of elements, united rather negatively by opposition to the Government than positively by any common ideal ; its chief material strength was among the adherents of the Empire, and ^especially among the soldiers who had been retired on half-pay, to these the return of the Emperor was merely THE RESTORATION 75 a matter of time ; they were moved by the wildest rum.ours ; now he had escaped from St. Helena by an " immense subterranean passage," now he had collected an army of Persians, Turks and Moors, now he was " making astonishing progress " in America ; they refused to believe in his death ; sooner or later he would land in France and lead them to " revenge for Waterloo : " this cieSHs of the armies of the Emperor wa3 a material ready made for insurrection ; it was organised by secret societies with which even members of the Chamber were connected ; among the deputies of the Left, for example, Lafayette, Manuel, and d'Argenson, were directly concerned yith plots against the Bourbons, and Constant, Lafitte, and others were well aware of their existence ; and in the years 1820- 1822 there was actually produced, with the con- nivance of these men, a series of abortive insurrec- tions. § 5. Liberal Thought. It was not, however, this party of revolution that really developed the revolutionary ideal ; they were too negative in their attitude to be anything but an instru--, ment of destruction ; they might have overthrown a dynasty but they could not have founded a constitution, and it is to a different section of the Liberals that we - must look for the rational evolution of liberal ideas. For evolution there must be : it was not only in the judgment of its opponents that the philosophy of the Revolution was discredited ; it was discredited in 76 MODERN FRANCE the judgment of all tkinking men : some surer basis must be found for the facts of the new society, some profounder interpretation be ofiered of the formula "liberty, equality, sovereignty of the people" than any that could be elicited from the works of Rousseau, or the speeches and acts of his disciples : the problem was not merely political, it was metaphysical ; if the m'ediseval theory of society were false, what was to take its place ? if the authority of the Church were denied, what could be set up as a substitute ? if appeal were made to the human reason, what were its laws and what its axioms ? There was no mean, Lamennais had argued, between irrational dogma and scepticism ; what was the escape from the dilemma, or, at least, in what direction should escape be sought ? The problem which faced the Liberals of the Res- toration is still the problem of modern thought ; it involves two elements ; first, the deduction, from d, ^priori grounds, of a motive and ideal of life, secondly the application of this general theory to the particular conditions of existing society; the first is the work of- metaphysics, and was, at the beginning of the century, the main pre -occupation of German thought, the second is the workj in part, of a philosophical study of history ; and the Liberal thought of the Restoration i^ active in both these fields : Royer-OoUard had already begun a reaction against the materia lism of Locke: his work was continued by a later genera- ytion, and especially by Victor Cousin : Cousin had travelled in Germany; he had made the personal THE RESTORATION 77 acquaintance of Schelling and of Hegel ; he had even made some kind of acquaintance with their ideas ; and he returned to dazzle his class at the Sorbonne at once by the charm of his eloquence and by the libera- ting vigour of his doctrine : if he had not the pro- fundity to create a school, he had at least the genius to stimulate thought ; and the interest he provoked was all in the direction of ^a synthetic idealism : meta- physics had escaped from the prison in which the eighteenth century had confined it; it began to expand in the sunshine, to vivify every problem, to colour every interest, and to dazzle the new generation with the vision of a positive doctrine, based upon absolute reason, independent of unproved and unprovable tradition, accepting, interpreting, and organising the chaos of modern facts and modern ideas. While Cousin was thus introducing to France the metaphysical idealism of Germany, others were inau- gurating a serious and critical study of history ; Thiers and Mignet were writing their works on the Eevolu- tion, Augustine Thierry his book on the Norman Con- quest, Guizot his Lectures on Civilisation ; different as were the immediate aims and the methods of these writers, they have yet this common character, that they approach history with a view to the light it throws upon politics ; here, as in philosophy, the pre-^ occupation was with the present ; it was the object of Thiers and Mignet to justify the Eevolution against the " Ultras " ; it was the object of Guizot, in describing the ancien regime, " to sift the ideas of our own time. 78 MODERN FRANCE and separate the ferment and visions of the Revolu- tion from that progress of justice and liberty which is accordant with the eternal laws of social order." But it was not only in lectures and books that the Liberals carried on their campaign ; like their oppo- nents, Bonald, Chateaubriand, and the rest, they, too, made use of the press ; Guizot started the Revue jFrancflise as the organ of the "Doctrinaires" ; Thiers and Mignet wrote in the Constitutionnel ; and in 1824 appeared the first number of th e Globe j this journal is, in some respects, the most interesting of the period, for it expresses most clearly the need and the hope of a now and positive theory of society ; it was equally opposed to the scepticism of Voltaire and to the dogmatism of the " Ultras " ; its contributors had formed the conception of a " new faith," and " to this ravishing perspective they attached them- selves with enthusiasm, with conviction, with resolu- tion " ; morals, religion, politics, Uterature, all were crying for regeneration; the doctrines of the past were exhausted and sterile ; and it was the part of the new generation to discover and preach a new gospel. The problem which the writers of the Globe an- nounced they were not in a position to solve ; they never agreed on a definite system, nor advocated a definite policy ; but at the time that they were pro- claiming the need of a new synthesis, there were ("already being pubhshed the attempt of St. Simon and fhis followers to supply it ; the organ of their doc- ( trine was the Producteiir, published in 1825-6; the THE RESTORATION 79 doctrine itself we shall take anotlier opportunity to 'examine; it is mentioned here as the completest expression of the effort of speculation at this period to pass through scepticism to a new and comprehen- N sive theory, founded at once on experience and reason, I and expressing the general form which the society of ) the future will tend to assume. Meantime, however, the more characteristic atti- tude of liberal thought was one less of systematic construction than of passionate and hopeful inquiry ; — it perceived the inadequacy of the philosophy of the Revolution to found a new society, it refused to recur to the ideas and institutions of the Middle Ages, and in default of the synthesis it sought, was^^ content to wait, to search and to resist ; if the alternative — anarchy or the Pope — were to be faced, as Lamennais had faced it, it was anarchy rather than the Pope that the Liberals would choose to accept ; to the formula of the Catholic revival — no Pope, no Church ; no Church, no Christianity ; no Christianity, no Religion ; no ReKgion, no Society — the Globe replied as follows, with an audacity as much, or as little, sublime : " Truth has ceased to be universal. Traversed by every kind of doubt, face to face with a thousand different religions, a thousand contradictory systems, seeking without tutor or priest the solution of the great problem of God, of Nature and of man, individual minds have proclaimed them- selves sovereign, each on its own account ; whether this anarchy of intelligence be conducive to happiness So MODERN FRANCE or the reverse, makes no difference to the issue; it is an anarchy that is now our chief desire, our chief good, our life ; and that is why the law has established and consecrated anarchy." § 6. The Cbntees. As there was a section of liberal thinkers who, instead of idly repeating the formulae of 1789, endea- voured to supplement, to correct, and to interpret them anew, so there was a section of liberal politi- cians who, instead of aiming at the subversion of the j6rOvernment, sought to develop and apply their ideas under the conditions of constitutional opposition : France was enjoying for the first time, since 1 789, some real measure of free and representative government ; so long as the Charter was maintained, so long as the opinion even of so restricted an electorate was a real power in the country, so long it was possible for the defenders of the new society to work upon parliamentary lines ; and that was the course adopted by what was known as the " Left Centre," - and especially by the group of the " Doctrinaires " : the leaders of this group were Eoyer-CoUard in the Deputies and Broglie in the Peers, and their policy was summed up in the motto of the Revue Frangaise, " Et quod nunc ratio est impetus ante fuit " ; they endeavoured to reconcile the antipathies of the old and new order, and to merge both extremes ,in a party of gradual and rational progress ; "we THE RESTORATION 8i were at once with and against thti Government," says Guizot, " Eoyalists and Liberals, Ministerialists and Independents ; " they approved the Bourbon monarchy^^ as a guarantee of order, but only because, through the Charter, it also guaranteed liberty ; under it, they imagined, it would be possible, though only by slow degrees, to educate' the country in the practice of representative institutions, and to establish, at least, some measure of that self-government which the Revolution had brought to a premature and abortive birth ; the " Doctrinaires " were thus a constitutional party of progress, as opposed to that section of the Liberals which was actively opposed to the Bourbon dynasty ; they were more positive than negative, more anxious to realise a little than to aim at and miss everything, more concerned - with the practice than with the abstract dogma of liberty; they were at once the opponents and the perpetuators of the Revolution, opponents of its philosophy and methods, perpetuators of that vital and positive impulse which underlay its expression in facts. To this section of the Left corresponded, on the other side, a " Eight Centre," attached by tradition and ^ sentiment, as well as by connection, to the Monarchy, but accepting, without reservation, the conditions imposed by the " Charter ; " as the Doctrinaires were the constitutional party of the Left, so were these the constitutional party of the Right, distinguishing them- s selves from the " Ultras " by their opposition to 82 MODERN FRANCE measures of reaction, and by their frank adherence to >t.he compromise which the King himself had adopted ; they were the real supporters of the Monarchy as it was actually constituted at the Restoration, and found their best exponent in the Due de Richelieu. § 7. Party Passion. From this examination of the state of parties it will be seen that the condition of a stable government was the union of the Right and the Left Centres in a body agreed to support the Constitution, though divided, within the limits of that agreement, into a Liberal and a Conservative section ; this would have been the parliamentaiy system as we understand it in England ; but by the circumstances of the time its application was practically impossible in France : representative government was a new experiment, and it was being made on the top of a revolution ; revolution was the policy of the Extreme Left, and counter-revolution of the Extreme Right j the new society stood like a sepa- rate nation against the old ; an opposition which arose from incompatibihty of interests had become, during years of conflict, a passionate and irrational instinct ; Napoleon had suppressed it by force, the Restoration undertook to reconcile it in liberty ; but this was a harder task t^ liberty of debate meant liberty of passion, and passion was always on the verge of revolution ; a journal might act as a centre of disaffection, a speech or a pamphlet as a call to arms ; in the press and in THE RESTORATION - 83 the Chamber were opposed not merely two parties but two traditions, two creeds, two armies in battle array : "Our age," said Serre in 1820, "has presented a new phenomenon ; disorder has been made into a system ; anarchy, openly professed, has its maxims, its gospel, its apostles; .... every journal is a centre for the party of inveterate revolutionists, of adventurers, of young men led astray ; every journal founds a club ; these clubs are affiliated ; the whole kingdom is en- tangled in a net ; it is traversed by an organisation co-extensive with the public administration and ready in a moment to overthrow it : " the insurrections of 1820-1822 were the justification of this charge. But violence was not confined to the Liberal Press ; a journal of the Eight, for example, describes the Ministry of VUl^le (who was himself considered by Liberals as the champion of reaction) as " violent, sterile, incapable, subversive, reeling like a drunken man in the midst of a prudent and intelligent people ; and apparently making it an aim to trouble all interests, irritate all consciences, and treat as enemies glory, genius, liberty and virtue." And if the war of the press was fierce, not less so was that of the Chambers ; there were met in the same room men who had joined the camp of the emigrants at Coblentz, and men who had sat in the Convention and approved the execution of the King ; reproach and counter-reproach, taunt and indignant rejoinder, were inevitable and common; "between 1790 and 1814," the Right had maintained on one occasion, " there were nothing but 84 MODERN FRANCE rebels in France ; " " so," cried Manuel, " up to March 31, 1814, all that happened in France was crime and revolt ? " " Yes," from the Extreme Eight. " So the purchasers of the national property were nothing but robbers, up to the moment when the Charter declared their possession legitimate ? " " Yes ! " " Well, gentle- men, since that is your opinion, you should have the courage to declare it frankly to the nation ; it remains to be seen whether France is disposed to endure this humiliation ; it remains to be seen whether those who had the happiness to remain on the soil of their country, and have shed their blood for the conquest of its liberties, for the defence of its laws and its independence, will consent to accept at your- hands this insult and this disgrace." On another occasion Serre apostrophised Lafayette as follows : " When civil war breaks out, the blood is on the head of those who provoked it; the honourable member knows it better than any one else ; more than once he has learnt, with death in his soul and a blush on his cheek, that he who excites a furious rabble is obliged in the end to follow, if not to lead them." The point and the force of such invective can only be understood by those who are familiar with the history of the Revolu- tion ; who remember the part that had been played in it by Gregoire, Manuel, and Lafayette, all of whom tsat as deputies in the Chamber of the Restoration ; who realise that not only the political but the social structure of France had been reversed ; that the property of hundreds of families had been conjSscated THE RESTORATION 85 and their lives endangered or forfeited; and that representatives of the numerous sections into which the nation had been rent were summoned now for the first time to sit upon the same benches and to pro- nounce with real authority upon measures afiecting their diverse and conflicting interests : under such circumstances it is not surprising that it was difficult to pursue a policy of reconciliation ; the Centres were compromised by the Extremes ; each was kept apart from the other by fear of the more violent section of its opponents ; and each was driven, from the same cause, in the direction of its own revolutionary wing : it was the Extremes that determined the length of the pendulum's swing, till the increasing violence of its oscUlations led to the catastrophe of 1830 : revolution was already implicit in the condition of parties and passions ; and if it cannot be said that it could not have been avoided, it may at least be maintained that it does not need explanation. § 8. The King. Such, then, were the characteristics and relations of the various political parties ; it remains to consider the position of the King. The King was, in fact, as well as in theory, the head of the State ; he controlled the administrative system, by the appointment of the prefects, sub-prefects, and mayors ; the constitution was his own creation and gift, and in it he had reserved for himself the initiation of laws and the 86 MdDERN FRANCE right of veto ; the Deputies and the Peers were merely his advisers, not powers in the State co-ordi- nate with himself, and in accordance with this view, the qualifications for the franchise were determined - upon grounds of expediency, not upon grounds of principle ; the only condition imposed by the Charter was that electors must possess a certain minimum property and have attained a certain minimum age (30 years) ; the rest was left to be determined by law ; and in the debates on the electoral laws the discussion really turned, not upon who had a right to vote, but upon what would be the practical eflFect upon the stability of the existing regime of such and such a method of election and such and such a class of votes : the Government existed by its own right, it did not depend upon the suffrages of the people ; the latter must therefore be so arranged that they did not endanger the security of the throne ; as a result of this policy, the number of electors was restricted to something like 100,000, and over them the G-overn- ment exercised a considerable control ; it could com- mand the votes of its own officials, from the prefect downwards; and it could influence those of other electors, through the presidents of the electoral colleges ; in addition to this it might expect the support in the Chamber of public servants who sat as deputies : how vigorously it made use of these various means of influence may be conjectured from the following circular of the Minister Peyrennet, issued at the election of 1824 : " Any one who accepts THE RESTORATION S7 a Government post contracts at the same time the obligation to consecrate to the service of the Govern- ment his efforts, his talents, his influence ; it is a contract which binds to reciprocity ; if the official refuses to the Government the services it expects from him he breaks his faith and voluntarily infringes the pact of which the office he holds was the object and condition ; that is the most undoubted and irrevocable of abdications ; the Government has no obligation to one who does not perform his obligations to it." From the position of the King it might appear to follow that representative government would be as much a farce under the Restoration as it had been under Napoleon ; but this was not the case ; in spite of the restricted electorate, in spite of the pressure the Government could put upon the voters, in spite of the modification of the electoral law in 1820, it was never found possible to secure a stable and per- manent majority under the control of the King ; the Chamber tended constantly to be either more liberal or more reactionary than he ; and it was the obstinate and repeated return of a majority hostile to the policy of the Crown that led to the coup <£etaf, and the revolution of 1830. Representative government was thus a reality, in spite of the restrictions to which it was subject ; but the power and policy of the King was an important element in its operation : the period of the Restoration embraces two reigns, that of Louis XVIII., and that of Charles X.; and each has its own peculiar character and aims : the policy of MODERN FRANCE Louis XVIII. was reconciliation ; " the system which I have adopted," he wrote in 1818, " and that which my Ministers are perseveringly pursuing, is based upon the maxim that it will never do to be the king of two peoples ; and to the ultimate fusion of these — for their distinction is only too real — all the efforts of my Government are directed ; " the two peoples are of course the adherents of the ancien regime and of the Revolution, and in his attempts to unite them the King was continuing the policy of Napoleon ; but the conditions were different : Napoleon had stood alone, and above both parties ; he had won his posi- tion by the sword and it was by the sword that he maintained it ; he had no ties, no obligations, no dependency : Louis, on the other hand, had been restored by foreign armies ; his strength was not in himself, but in the past that he represented ; and his natural allies were all who had opposed and suffered in the Revolution ; from the very first, and by the mere fact of his position, he had, even were it in spite of himself, a mechanical bias towards the Eight : this bias he endeavoured to resist ; but his successor gave way to it : Charles X., as Comte d'Artois, had been the leader of the emigres of the Revo- lution ; he represented uncompromisingly the claims and regrets of the a'licien regime ; he was a devout son of the Church ; during the reign of Louis XVIII. he had been the recognised head of the " Ultras," and his accession to the throne was regarded as their triumph ; he threw the weight of his influence on THE RESTORATION the side of the counter-revolution, and yielding thus to the natural inclination of a Bourbon monarch, destroyed, with the possibility of compromise, the possibility of his own throne. § 9. The Situation. Such, then, were the conditions that prevailed under the Restoration ; dogmatism and free thought at war in the schools and in the press ; the micien - regime and the Revolution standing face to face ; conspiracy and armed rebellion against the reigning dynasty; irreconcileable Extremes, distracting and holding at variance the moderate statesmen of the Centres ; lastly, at the head of this chaos, a King who retained a substantial power only to employ it, at the end of the period, in an attempt at counter- revolution. Of these conditions the history of the period is an illustration ; it is they, not the events themselves, that are our present object of interest ; and it is in order to throw further light upon them, that we pro- ceed to the following summary of the facts. § 10.' Summary of the Period. The Restoration opened with a promise of modera- tion and wisdom ; in 1814 the King issued the Charter, accompanied by a preamble which indicates his attitude to the Revolution: "it was our duty," he 90 MODERN FRANCE says, " according to the example of the Kings our pre- decessors, to appreciate the results of the constantly increasing progress of enlightenment, the new rela- tions that this progress has introduced into society, the direction impressed upon opinion for half a cen- tury, and the grave alterations which have ensued ; we have recognised that the wish of our subjects for a constitutional charter was the expression of a real need." The King thus frankly admitted the conditions imposed by the events of the Revolution ; the Consti- tution he published was liberal, when compared with the despotism of Napoleon ; it main provisions were as follows : — The King was assisted in legislation by a Chamber of Peers, and a Chamber of Deputies. The King proposed and sanctioned laws; the Cham- bers discussed, amended, and voted them. Among the Peers were included the Napoleonic, as well as the old nobility. The' King had power to create titles, hereditary or not, at his pleasure. The Deputies were elected by the departments J they must be 40 years old, and pay at least 1000 frs. in direct taxation ; they were renewed by a fifth every year. The electors must be 30 years old and pay at least 300 frs. in direct taxation. All other electoral conditions were left to be deter- mined by law. In 181 5 the Goverment was interrupted by Napo- leon's return from Elba, and the episode of the THE RESTORATION 91 " hundred days." This was followed by an outbreak of royalist fanaticism known as the " White Terror ; " all the south broke out in tumult ; armed bands tra- versed the country, hunting down the adherents of the Emperor ; garrisons suspected of attachment to his cause were attacked and expelled by the populace; Marshal Brune was assassinated at Avignon, General Eamel at Toulouse : these were acts of insurrection for which the Government was not responsible ; but they indicate a passion of indignation which extended to the Chamber of Deputies: the Assembly of 1815 was an assembly of "Ultras;" it conceived that it had a mission to punish the " crime " of the 100 days, and it threw itself with zest into the work of repri- sals ; personal liberty was suspended ; special courts were established tinder military "provosts" to try, without jury and without appeal, cases of rebellion and sedition ; informations, arrests, and condemna- tions multiplied indefinitely ; and an act of amnesty, introduced by the Government, was only saved, by a majority of seven, from conversion into an act of proscription. But it was not enough to punish the past, it was necessary also to secure the future ; a public opinion must be formed, devoted to "the altar and the throne," for according to the theory of the " Ultras" the two were mutually dependent; to secure the supremacy of the Church was to secure the supre- macy of the Crown, and to that object the Chamber proceeded to address itself : it was proposed to recon- stitute the property of the clergy in the soil, and 92 MODERN FRANCE restore them to the economic independence they had possessed before the Revolution ; this proposition was too radical to be adopted, but others were mo?e suc- cessful; divorce, which had been admitted in the Code Napol6on, was abolished, and all married priests were deprived of their pensions. These measures were important less in themselves than for the current of opinion of which they were the sign, and the prejudices they were calculated to shock ; they were the first indications of a policy, which, if it could have been carried out, would have re-established the control of the Church over education, thought and social life ; they were the challenge flung to the Revolution by militant and victorious medisevalism. But the Chamber was going too far ; it had abused its right of amendment, to reverse the policy of the Crown ; its zeal for the institutions of the past was being pushed to the verge of revolution ; and the King, in self-defence, determined on a dissolution. This extreme measure he adopted in the September of 1816 ; it astonished the country almost as a coup d'etat; it was, in fact, a formal rupture of the crown with the "Ultras," a formal declaration and proof of the policy the King was determined to pursue ; and it was completely successful : the new elections returned a Ministerial majority, and for the next three years, under Richelieu and then under Decazes, the moderate views of the Centre were in ascendency in the Chambers and the Ministry. One of the first acts of the new Chamber was to THE RESTORATION 93 determine the method of election ; it was decided that all who were qualified by the Charter should vote directly, and by departments, for their representatives in the Chamber; this was regarded as a liberal measure, and proved to be so in its working ; at the first renewal of a fifth, in 181 7, twenty -five "independents" of the Left were returned; the elections of i8i8 produced similar results, and, especially, returned to the Chamber Lafayette and Manuel, both of whom had been notable figures in the Revolution ; this growing strength of the Left was a serious danger to the Government, for it represented, or might at any moment represent, an opposition not merely to the Ministry but to the Monarchy itself ; Richelieu became anxious and discouraged, he made advances to the Right, endeavoured to reconstitute his Ministry, failed, and eventually resigned, at the end of 1818. Decazes took his place, and continued a moderate policy ; in particular, he carried through the Chamber a law on the liberty of the press, which was admittedly a pattern for all subsequent legisla- tion ; it was a Kberal measure, and the last for many years: the elections of 1819 returned Gregoire as a deputy ; Gregoire was one of the most notorious of the revolutionists ; he had been a principal advocate of the civil constitution of the clergy, and he had formally- recorded his approval of the execution of the King ; his election was regarded as a declaration of war ; the indignation of the Right was boundless ; Gregoire was not allowed to take his seat; and 94 MODERN FRANCE Decazes recognised the necessity of a change in the electoral law. But before he could present his project, an event had occurred which put an end to his supremacy, and led to the triumph of the Right ; in February 1820 the Due de Berry, son of the Comte d'Artois and heir presumptive to the throne, was assassinated : the act was that of a single man, unsupported by any association, but its effects extended to the whole Liberal party ; it was regarded a& the outcome of a policy of compromise and an index of what might be expected from its pro- longed continuance ; the Ministry was destroying the Monarchy ; " either Decazes must retire," said Laine, " before the reigning dynasty, or the race of our kings must retreat before him " ; "I saw," said another, "the dagger that pierced the Due de Berry;- it was a liberal idea." The King was unable to resist the clamour; he dismissed his favourite Decazes, and summoned Richelieu in his place : new laws were passed restricting the press and personal liberty, and i the electoral law was radically modified ; the number of deputies was increased to 400, and of these 172 were to be chosen by that quarter of the electors in each district which paid the highest taxes : the next partial renewal of the Chamber gave a large preponderance to the Right, and the demands of the party increased with their power; Richelieu was too moderate to satisfy them ; he fell at the end of 1821, by a combination of the two Extremes, and was suc- ceeded by Vill^le. THE RESTORATION 95 The Ministry of Villele lasted from tlie December of 1821 to the January of 1828; it was a period of ascendency for the Ultras; not that the Minister belonged, except in name, to their party, but that he was unable to resist the pressure they brought to bear : their position was strengthened by the accession of Charles X. in 1824, and by the general election of that year, which reduced the Liberals in the Chamber to something tuider twenty ; to secure the duration of this majority, they substituted for the system of annual renewal by a fifth that of the renewal of the whole Chamber at the end of seven years. The spirit in which the Ultras exploited their victory may be gathered from the measures they passed : one of their earliest acts was the expulsion of Manuel from the Chamber; in a speech against French intervention in Spain, he had made use of the following phrase : — " The moment in which the dangers of the royal family in France became most serious, was when France, the France of the Revolution, felt that it was necessary for her to defend herself by a new method, by a new energy : " the sentence was regarded as an apology for the execution of LouisXVI. ; Manuel was not allowed to conclude it ; he was not allowed to explain himself ; he was deprived of his seat ; and, as he denied the legality of the judgment, was removed from the Chamber by force. This episode is significant of the violence of the victorious party, a violence which served to compro- mise what were otherwise statesmanlike measures : 96 MODERN FRANCE thus in 1823 a proposition was introduced to compen- sate those who had suffered by the confiscations of the Revolution ; the act may be easily defended as just and politic in itself ; but it gave opportunity to the Right to advance the most extravagant claims, to assert that the original owners had still a right to their property, that it ought to be restored to them, and the indemnity paid to the actual possessors ; and this in spite of a clause in the Charter guaranteeing the status quo. Extravagance in the Right provoked extravagance in the Left; and General Foy could count on the support of liberal feeling when he asserted that the law was a " declaration of war, an instrument of hatred ^nd vengeance." If this measure of compensation, equitable enough in itself, appeared to be, under the circumstances, an insult to modern France, much more was this the case with a proposal tending to re-establish the entail of property on the eldest son ; the object was to perpetuate a permanent aristocracy of wealth, with an interest in and a tradition of adherence to order and the throne ; but no achievement of the Revolution was more uni- versally popular than that which secured an equal division of the inheritance among all the heirs ; this " equality " was more than a matter of interest, it was a matter of sentiment ; to attack it was a scandal, almost an impiety ; tentative as was the measure of the Government, it was so seriously modified in dis- cussion as to be practically ineffectual in the form in which it was passed ; the only purpose it had served THE RESTORATION 97 was to outrage the strongest prejudice of revolutionary France, and to emphasise its opposition to the devotees of the ancien regime. The policy indicated by the measures referred to tended to the consolidation of a wealthy and per- manent aristocracy, devoted to the interests of the Crown ; this was one part of the programme of the Ultras ; the other was the reconstitution of the supremacy of the Church over education, thought, and family life. The period we are considering is a period of clerical domination ; in spite of the pro- hibition of the laws, the Jesuits had re-established colleges where the sons of the wealthy and noble were educated in considerable numbers. Already, in 1816, the schools of the University had been sub- mitted to the diocesan bishop, who appointed the principals, and had the power to dismiss professors whose opinions were reported as dangerovis ; the lectures of Villemain, of Cousin, of Gviizot were sup- pressed in Paris ; the country was traversed by " missions," involving sensational sermons, proces- sions, the sale of relics and crucifixes, and solemn acts of " reparation " for the crimes of the Revolution ; in 1826 Lamennais published his theory of uncom- promising Ultramontanism ; the same year appeared a pamphlet by Montlosiei', giving an account of the aims and methods of the " Congregation " : the Con- gregation was a religious society whose object was the restoration of the Church to its former position of authority; its head was a Jesuit priest;' of tlic G gS MODERN FRANCE central branch at Paris the King himself was a member, and through the deputies of the Right it exercised a considerable political influence ; it had its ramifications and affiliated societies throughout the country ; it disposed of offices and favours, and in a hundred ways, directly or indirectly, influenced private and public life in all classes and professions : this, at least, is what was said, and what may very well have been true ; at any rate — and that is the point — it is what was believed to be true : passions gathered in fury about the words " Jesuit " and "Congregation"; the missions were met by counter- demonstrations, their sermons answered by "Tar- tuffe "; modern France rose against the spectre of the Church, as it had risen against the spectre of the aristocracy ; and into the midst of this ferment of opinion the Ministry flung their law of Sacrilege (April 1825): it was proposed to punish by the galleys the theft of church vessels; by death, the violent burglary of a church ; and by mutilation, followed by death, the profanation of the Host : the latter clause involved the legal recognition of the doc- trine of Transubstantiation, and was a clear index of the tendency of the party in power ; for if sacrilege was to be punished by law, why not blasphemy and heresy? The project was vigorously opposed, and, though passed in a modified form, was never in fact applied. The ecclesiastical policy of the Government was further indicated by a proposal to allow the King to authorise, on his own responsibility, religious THE RESTORATION 99 commuuities of women ; it would logically follow that the permission should be extended to all communities, which would thus escape in time from the supervision of the laws, and cover France, as before the Revolution, with independent lauded corporations. The direction in which all this was tending is plain ; the extreme section of the Right was pushing the more moderate royalists towards the application of that theory of the Monarchy and the Church which we examined at the beginning of the chapter ; but they were pushing them against their will, and the persistence of the pressure was breaking up the majority : the Centre reacted against the Extreme, the anti-clerical against the clerical faction ; the liberals, though weak in numbers, were strong enough in talent to embarrass the Government ; the Peers had favoured throughout a policy of moderation : Villele was losing his hold on the Chambers, and at the end of 1827 he had recourse to a dissolution. The new elections condemned the policy of the Government, and justified the boast of General Foy that the Liberals, though they were only twenty in the Chamber, had the country behind them; the Ministerialists were a minority in the new Chamber, and Villele sent in his resignation. He was replaced by Martignac, who, like Richelieu in 1816, represented the moderates of the Centre ; he dissolved the colleges of the Jesuits, and introduced a law in the direction of local self-government ; but he was unable to com- mand a stable majority ; the Left Centre refused him MODERN FRANCE their support, as they had refused it to Kichelieu in i8i8; and in August 1829, he was replaced by PoHgnac. The choice of PoHgnac was the inevitable prelude to a coup d'etat; he was an ultra of ultras, and a prominent member of the Congregation ; it was certain that he could not command a majority in the existing Chamber, and a new election resulted only in a large increase of the Opposition. The King had to choose between dismissing his Minister, and annulling . the elections; to do the first was to hand over the Government to a party whose extreme was hostile to the dynasty, and whose more moderate members had proved themselves unable to support even a Ministry of compromise ; to do the second, was to violate the Charter and to invite insurrection. It was the latter course that the King adopted; in the July of 1830 he pubhshed the famous ordinances, which suspended the freedom of the press, annulled the recent elections, and modified the electoral law in the interest of the great land-owners. This was the signal of revolution 5 the Liberals were already prepared ; ever since the appointment of PoHgnac, they had been warning the country of the imminence of a coup d'elat ; associa- tions had been formed with the view of resisting taxation unconstitutionally imposed ; the history of the English Revolution of 1 688 had been brought to the front; on the first of January 1830, had appeared the first number of the Xational edited by Thiers ; • in its pages the idea of a change of dynasty was THE RESTORATION constantly, though indirectly, presented ; the Charter was to be maintained, but to maintain the Charter it might be necessary to change the King. The attitude of the Opposition was thus constitutional ; it invoked revolution only in answer to revolution, and urged resistance to the monarch only in defence of the monarchy; it was the King who was the aggressor by the ordinances of July, while the Liberals were the defenders of the legal status quo. They acted accordingly; the day after the publication of the ordinances Thiers and other journalists drew up a protestation declaring them illegal, and the Temps and the National appeared as usual. The same day barricades were formed, and the mob was fired upon by the troops ; the insurrection spread rapidly, and by the 28th, old soldiers of the Empire, students, workmen out of employment, and the innumerable vagrant elements that collect in a great city, had combined in an army of revolt ; the resistance of the troops was ineffectual, and in the course of the 29th Paris was lost to the Government. At this point the King agreed to withdraw the ordinances, and form a new Ministry ; but now it was too late ; Thiei's and Mignet had agreed with Laffitte and the deputies of Paris to offer the crown to the Due d'Orleans, head of the younger branch of the Bourbons. On the 31st the King retired to Rambouillet, and there signed his abdication in favour of the Duke ; and the latter accepted the crown, under the title of Louis Philippe. MODERN FRANCE The verdict of Paris was ratified without resistance by the country, and a new epoch began in the liistory of modern France. Such, in brief, was the character and history of the Restoration. From the point of view of the ideal of the Revolution, it was a period of reaction ; the domi- nant philosophy and the dominant tendency of the time reverted to the Middle Ages ; the Monarchy and the Church were the two sides of an absolutism based on revelation, and in the strictness of logic political liberty was as incompatible with the one as liberty of thought with the other ; by a judicious in- consistency it is true, the extreme application of the theory was avoided ; but there was a constant pressure in the direction of its application, and under that pressure, in the end, the Government collapsed. The attitude of Liberals, meantime, could only be that of resistance, either to the dynasty itself, which was the attitude of overt or secret revolution, or to its re- actionary tendencies, which was the attitude of the Doctrinaires. The latter were training themselves in the methods and tactics of representative government, and it is among them that the positive development of Liberalism is to be sought. For it is they who were in the ascendant during the reign of Louis Philippe, and it was their interpretation of the ideas of 1789 that was, on the whole, to prevail during the next eighteen years; what that interpretation was win be examined in the next chapter ; meantime it is sufficient to note that the revolution of 1830 was a THE RESTORATION victory at once against the ancien regime and in favour of the Left Centre ; against the ancien regime, for the monarchy of Louis Philippe rested upon expediency, not on right divine ; it had no roots in the past, no dependence on the Church and the old noblesse; it represented the triumph of 1789 over the Middle Ages, a triumph for the second time, and one that was definite and final :^in favour of the Left Centre, for the policy of Louis Philippe was the policy of Guizot, while the extremer sections of the Liberals, its more democratic Monarchists, as well as its already vigorous Republicans, were thrown into an opposition which was to produce, in its time, the revolution of 1848. The main achievement then of the revolution, during the period we have been considering, has been the subversion of the recrudescent ideal of the Middle Ages ; delivered from this, its most pressing foe, it proceeds to work its way out of the constitutional monarchy into its logical term, a republic ; by what means and with what result, we are to examine in the following chapters. CHAPTER IV THE MONARCHY OF JULY p. Thueeau-Dangin. "Histoire de la Monarchie de Juillet." L. GrhGOIBB. " Histoire de France." L. Blanc. " Histoire de Dix Ans." GuizOT. "Memoires." Odilon Baeeot. "Memoires." E. Levassbue. " Histoire des Classes Ouvrieres en France." A. F. Nettbmint. " Histoire de la Litterature Fran^aise sous le Gouvernement de Juillet." A. SuDEB. " Histoire de Communisme." L. Rbybaud. "Etudes sur les Reformateurs Modernes." P. Janet. "Saint-Simon et le Saint-Simonisme." „ " Les Orlgines du Socialisme Contemporain ." Saintb-Beuvb. " Proudhon." Saint-Simon. "Nouveau Christianisme." "Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition." Lambnnais. "Paroles d'un Croyant," &c. MiCHELET. " Le Peuple." L. Vivien. "Etudes Administratives." Odilon Baeeot. "De la Centralisation." A. BeugiEeb de Baeante. "De la Decentralisation." C. Dupont-White. " La Centralisation." CHAPTER IV THE MONARCHY OF JULY § I. The Bourgeois King. The Government of July was a government of com- promise ; it was continuous with the Restoration by its form, and divided from it by its origin. What issued from the Revolution of 1830 was not a change in the Constitution, but a change in the person of the monarch ; that change however involved a new theory of the moharchy : Louis XVIII. and Charles X. had rested upon their legitimacy ; they represented the tradition of centuries, of which the Revolution was an impertinent interruption : this tradition was the source of their strength and also of their weakness ; it gave them an impregnable position in theory and a slippery one in practice, for the same connection that established their title compromised their policy : their tendency was inevitably towards reaction, and to this tendency they succumbed; July 1830 was the defeat of the absolute monarchy, and the triumph of the Consti- tution, The policy which had ruined Charles X. could not roS MODERN FRANCE be that of Louis Philippe ; he had no hereditary title to the throne and no support in the pre-revolutionary past ; on the contrary, it was the Revolution itself, at least in its earlier stages, to which he was attached by tradition ; he was the son of Philijijae Egalite, had been connected with the Jacobin club, and had fought at Valmy and Jemappes ; later, he had fled to Smtzerland where he earned his living as an usher ; at the Restoration he had returned to France and had lived thenceforth as a private citizen, a courteous and unpretending gentleman of means, patronising art, attached to his family, careful of his investments, and walking the streets at his ease with an umbrella under his arm. He had no illusions, no theories, and no enthusiasms ; he had seen the catastrophe of the Revolution, and foreseen that of the Restoration, and he had no belief in republican or royalist formuke ; what he did believe in was his own experience and .judgment, and it was in reliance upon this that ho accepted the throne of France. Such a king, by his antecedents, his position and his character, was a real guarantee against a resump- tion of the pohcy of the " ultras " ; for he neithei' shared their beliefs nor depended upon their support. He was the "bourgeois king," the creation of the middle classes ; he received the Crown at the Hotel de Ville, under the sponsorship of Lafayette, and was confirmed in his dignity, and approved, by popular demonstrations : an anecdote current at the time in Paris may serve to suggest the kind of THE MONARCHY OF JULY 109 sentiment with which he inspired the public : — An Englishman arrives at Paris a few clays after the Revolution of July. His first idea is to betake himself to the interior court of the Palais Royal, where the king was receiving the deputations which kept arriving from all parts of the kingdom, townsmen or villagers, with mayor and drum at their head, bringing their congratulations, their prayers, and theii' ideas on the conduct of the Government. The Englishman asks if Louis Philippe has appeared. " Certainly," was the reply, " but he has just retired." " Ah, I am very sorry. I came to Paris to see him." " Oh, if that's all," said a bystander, " I'll soon show him to you." And he shouted at the top of his voice : " Long live Louis "Philippe ! Long live the Charter ! " the crowd joining in. A window opens on a balcony ; the king appears. He salutes humbly and retires. " Delight- ful ! " said the Englishman, " delightful, but I was told one could see him with the tricolour flag, surrounded by his family." "That's easily managed " said his neigh- bour, " give me five francs and he'll come." " Done," said the Englishman. Immediately a voice chants the couplet of " la Parisienne," " Soldat du drapeau tricolour, D'Orl^ans, toi qui I'as porte," &c. and the song continues without intermission until the king, surrounded by his children and holding the tri- colour flag, has appeared to thank the crowd . Thereupon the noise diminishes ; but the complacent bystander MODERN FRANCE whispers to the EngHshman : " Now, would you like me to make him sing ? It is a little more difficult ; you will give me ten francs." " Very good," said the English- man. Immediately a cry is raised : " Long live the king ! Long live the Charter ! The Marseillaise ! " So persistent is the shouting that at the end of twenty minutes Louis Philippe appears again. The crowd breaks into the Marseillaise ; the king was about to retii'e from the balcony ; he stops, amid shouts of applause, and sings with the people, beating time with his foot. The tale goes on that the officious showman of the king turned to the Englishman again with the proposal: "Now will you give me loo francs ? he will dance ! " But the Englishman had had enough. The story, no doubt, is apocryphal, but it indicates a truth ; with it may be compared the account by Saint- Simon of the levee of the ancient kings : — " At 8 o'clock the chief valet de chambre on duty . . . awoke the king. The chief physician, the chief surgeon, and the nurse . . entered at the same time. The latter kissed the king ; the others rubbed and often changed his shirt. At the quarter, the grand chamberlain was called . . and those who had what was called the grandes entrees. The chamberlain . . drew back the curtains, which had been closed again, and presented the holy water from the vase, at the head of the bed . . . He who had opened the curtains and presented the holy water, presented also a prayer-book. Then all passed into the cabinet of the Council. A very short religious THE MONARCHY OF JULY sei'vice being over, the king called, they re-entered. The same officer gave him his dressing-gown ; imme- diately after, other privileged courtiers entered, and then everybody, in time to find the king putting on his shoes and stockings . . . Every other day we saw him shave himself. As soon as he was dressed, he prayed to God, at the side of his bed, when all the clergy present knelt, the cardinals without cushions and all the laity remaining standing ; and the captain of the guards came to the balustrade during the prayer after which the king passed into his cabinet." Ichabod, ichabod ! The veil of the monarchy was rent, its holy of holies exposed ; the people had peeped and seen, instead of a mystery, a gentleman in plain clothes, with an umbrella under his arm, and a head shaped like a pear ! §2, The Two Theories of the Monarchy. There was no fear, then, that Louis Philippe would claim divine right, or venture, on that hypothesis, to abrogate the Constitution. Whatever his title may have been, at least it was not legitimacy ; that chain was broken, and with it all that bound the king to mediaeval institutions ; he no longer rested on the past ; what then was his basis and what his guarantee? The circumstances which had raised him to the throne were, briefly, as follows : — A group of deputies had appointed him the lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and this appointment had been confirmed by Lafayette MODERN FRANCE and the people at the Hotel de Ville ; after the abdication of Charles, the Chambers which he had summoned, and which were sitting at the time in only half their numerical strength, had converted the lieutenant-general into the new king, and had defined, in the Charter as revised, the conditions which he swore to observe. What interpretation, now, was to be put upon this appointment ? There were two answers to this question corresponding to two parties. Ac- cording to the one view, the basis of the new system was a kind of tacit contract between the king and the nation ; in this contract each of the parties represented an element of the sovereignty, neither therefore could dispense with the sanction and support of the other; they were equipollent parts of an indivisible whole, and the prerogatives of each were limited and guaranteed by those of the other ; neither the sovereignty of the people was admitted, nor the divine right of kings; there were two distinct titles, and each was bounded by each ; and the total and unquestionable result was the constitutional monarchy. According to the other view the king was the elected of the people ; the people, therefore, were sovereign ; the chief they had once appointed they might as readily dismiss, and make of the monarchy no more than a transitional stage to the Republic. This, at least, is the conclusion which was implied in the theory of election ; and Hugo, at a later date, gave it vigorous expression in " Les Miserables." "1830," he says, "is a revolution stopped half-way. THE MONARCHY OF JULY 113 Half-progress, quasi right. Now logic ignores the ' almost,' as the sun ignores a candle." The monarchy is " a halt, a reparation of forces," and " a halt implies the battle of yesterday and the battle of to-morrow." § 3. The Policy op the Eeign. To these two views correspond two policies : the first may be called the policy of the reign ; its object was to minimise the importance of the events of 1830, declaring that there had been no Revolution, but only a change in the head of the State, a change which had dissociated the monarchy from the reaction, but not otherwise modified the Government : this policy was opposed to democratic extension, and was named for that reason the " policy of resistance; " its chief repre- sentative and defender, in theory and practice, was Guizot, and it is from him that we extract the follow- ing account of it : — " This policy/ he says, " was really both liberal and anti-revolutionary. Anti- revolutionary, abroad and at home, for it aimed, abroad, at the maintenance of European peace, within at that of the constitutional monarchy ; liberal, for it accepted and respected fully the essential conditions of free government, the decisive intervention of the country in its own affairs, the constant and vital dis- cussion, by the public as well as in the Chambers, of the ideas and acts of those in authority." Two con- victions are indicated here which are closely connected with one another ; that of the danger of revolution, H 114 MODERN FRANCE and that of the suiEciency of the existing liberties. The monarchy in its earlier years was at constant war with conspiracy and revolt, and it was in the midst of these conditions that the policy of resistance defined itself ; " the spirit of revolution," said Guizot, " is not an acci- dental and passing guest .... it is a malady jorolonged and tedious, to a certain extent even permanent, and against it the Government is bound to wage a perpetual war." To those who held this conviction, every extension of liberty appeared to be a concession to anarchy ; to lower the qualifications for the franchise, to diminish the political influence of officials, was to en- danger the unity and force, if not the existence of the Government ; reform, as an ultimate possibility, Guizot did not reject, on the contrary he regarded it as a necessary development of the representative system ; but any immediate step he conceived to be inopportune and dangerous, and the more so that every essential of liberty was already secured ; the censure of the press was abolished, and its offences submitted to trial by jury; by the law of 183 1 the number of electors had been increased from 100,000 to 200,000; and these provisions were sufficient guarantee of the realitj' of popular control : the intelligent opinion of the country could make itself heard and felt;" and the need for immediate measures of I'eform was as imaginary as their danger was real. THE MONARCHY OF JULY 115 § 4. The Party op Motbment. Such was the policy of resistance, as defined by its ablest exponent ; its ideal was order in the interest of liberty, stability in the interest of progress, and government by a class in the interest of the people : this ideal has only to be stated to suggest the opposi- tion it was bound to encounter : against the party of resistance was set a party of movement, including various sections and various shades of opinion from constitutional Liberals to Republicans and Socialists. Of those who had gathered about Lafayette at the Hotel de VUle, many had only reluctantly agreed to the appointment of the Due d'Orleans ; all had given a wider sense than the king was prepared to admit to the catch-word of the moment "a throne surrounded by republican institutions : " it followed that even among those who were sincerely attached to the throne there were many who were bitterly opposed to what became its accepted policy; while a yet extremer section rejected the monarchy itself, and openly, by their words and acts, proclaimed themselves Republicans. The constitutional opposition assumed various forms ; but there were three main points upon which they directed their attack — the personal predominance ■ of the king, the political influence of officials, and the limitation of the franchise. ii6 MODERN FRANCE § 5. The Position of the King. During the Restoration, as has been already noticed, the king had reserved to himself considerable powers ; it was he who had granted the Constitution ; it was he who initiated legislation ; it was he who, in the opinion even of Liberals was the real head of the State ; the Chamber of Deputies did not represent the right of the people to take part in the government, it represented the will of the king to consult the opinion of his subjects ; the Ministers were not regarded as delegates of the majority, in theory, at least, they were oflB.cers of the king, charged with the execution of his personal policy : " on that day," said Royer- CoUard, " when it shall be established that in fact the Chamber can reject the Ministers of the king and impose on him others, who shall be its ministers and not those of the king, on that day all is over, not only with the Charter, but with all monarchy : " " it is the king who wills and acts," wrote Guizot, "the Ministers are charged with the execution of his will." This theory had been applied by Charles X., when he appointed Polignac in the face of a hostile majority • and the result had been a Revolution : it is therefore not surprising that supporters of the new regime should endeavour to impose on the king the opposite principle, that the Ministers are the creation of the majority, and the Crown a passive symbol of the continuity and force of the State, irresponsible, without THE MONARCHY OF JULY 117 a policy, and therefore at once too high and too unimportant to attack. " The iing reigns but does not govern," was the maxim of a considerable party ; but it was a maxim that the king himself refused to adopt : he had been deprived by the amended Charter of the monopoly of initiating legislation ; but he clung only the more closely to the power which he still possessed : like Napoleon, he did not choose to be a " pouroeato a Petigrais;" he was determined to be head of the State not only in name, but in fact, and in spite of opposition was able, on the whole, to carry his point : " they may do what they like," he said, "they shall not prevent me from driving my own carriage. A Ministry is a posting relay. Sometimes I have good horses and the journey is easy ; then I come to a station where I am obliged to take frisky and restive animals ; one must get along somehow, and after all it is only a relay." He thus made him- self responsible for the policy of the reign: that policy, as we have seen, was resistance at home, and non-intervention abroad ; on both sides it provoked a furious opposition, and the opposition glanced from the Ministers to the king ; the fiction of the Constitu- tion was shattered, and the monarchy itself exposed ; the condition of reform began to appear to be no longer a change of Ministry, but a change in the form of government, and instead of a constitutional crisis there loomed on the horizon of possibilities a Revolu- tion : the danger was felt most keenly by those who were most devoted to the Monarchy; and in 1838 and Ii8 MODERN FRANCE 1839 even Guizot and the doctrinaires joined with the Left in a campaign against the personal predominance of the king. § 6. Paeliamentary Reform. But whatever part the king may have played in the maintenance of the policy of the reign, it is plain that the support of a majority in the Chamber was essential to his success : the means whereby that majority was maintained was another grievance of the opposition : an extract from " La Presse " of March 1 840, may serve to illustrate the point ; the writer is indicating the means by which Thiers was supposed to be securing his majority : — "Every evening account is taken of the acquisitions of the day. — Shall we have so and so ? — I answer for him, if you will give his son-in-law such and such a post. — And so and so, if one gave him this, that or the other ? — It's not worth the trouble, we shall have him for nothing ; I have seen his mother-in-law. — Ah ! if we could have ! — It's not so difficult as you think ; he has just lost 50,000 ; his afiairs are much embarrassed. — But our most magnificent conquest is the excellent . What did you do to secure him ? — I caught him by his feelings. — I don't understand. — Ah ! you have no children. The good man has two marriageable daughters. I am pretty well up in my parliamentary statistics. I know those who have daughters to establish, those who have sons to place, THE MONA RCHY OF JULY 119 those who have incapable brothers on their hands, those who have affairs of the heart in the royal theatres, those who have secrets to hide, those who have manufactures to support, those who have iron- works, those who have sugar, those who have money in the funds, and lastly, those who have debts ! " This is a review, if not of the facts, of a section of opinion on the facts ; but apart from vague accusa- tions the Government possessed, as we have seen, in the centralised system of administration, a powerful means of influence in the country and the Chamber : the number of officials who were also deputies was constantly increasing ; in 1830, it was 142, of whom 72 belonged to the majority; in 1847 it was 193, of whom 160 belonged to the majority ; while the total number of deputies was only 450. There was clearly a tendency for the officials to make advancement a condition of their vote, and for the Government to make the vote a condition of advancement : but this was not all ; under the existing system every local interest depended on the central authorities, and it was local interests that determined the votes of electors ; a commune wanted a grant for the repair of its church or school, an individual wanted a scholarship for his son, or a decoration for himself, and these advantages could only be obtained directly through the Government ; it was on condition of demanding them, therefore, that a deputy was re- turned to the Chamber, and on condition of obtaining them that he gave his vote to the Ministry; there MODERN FRANCE was thus a tendency to subcirdinate general to local interests, and to secure a fictitious majority by appeals to the cupidity of electors and deputies. According to the Opposition the evil was real and serious : — "with a few exceptions," said Lamennais in 1841, " where is the deputy who thinks of anything but making and repairing his fortune, and selling the electors who, in turn, have sold the country to him ? What is the Chamber ? A great bazaar, where every one barters his conscience, or what passes for his conscience, in exchange for a place or an oflS.ce ? " To the Government such an accusation was merely the rhetoric of party enthusiasm ; and they rejected aU proposals to neutralise the influence of officials. Parliamentary reform took its place by the side of electoral reform in the programme of the Opposition ; and it was the constant refusal of the Government to consider either proposition that was a proximate cause of the Revolution of 1848. § 7. The Decentralisation. The question of parliamentary reform was connected as we have seen, with the whole administrative system. It had already become clear, under the Restoration, that the centralisation established by a despotic government was diflScult to harmonise with repre- sentative liberty ; the system had been established on the hypothesis that the nation was incapable of self-govemiiieiit, and was incompatible with a THE MONARCHY OF JULY theory that asserted or implied the contrary : already in i8J8, under the ministry of Martignac, a project had been introduced to subject to election the muni- cipal and departmental councils; the project failed to satisfy either the Left or the Right, and was with- drawn in the face of their combined opposition ; but the object at which it had aimed was attained by the laws of 1831 and 1835. Henceforth, the members of the administrative councils were appointed by a special body of electors, composed of the richer inhabitants ' and others who "offered guarantees of aptitude"; but the powers of the councils so elected were as limited as the franchise on which they depended : as defined by the laws of 1837 and 1838 they fell into three classes, (i) decisions that were finally valid unless vetoed by the prefect within a given time, (2) decisions that were valid only when confirmed by the prefect or the Minister of the Interior, (3) advices and re- commendations which might or might not be adopted by the prefect : there was thus a constant super- vision or "tutelage" of the lower by the higher authorities ; and so minute and effective was this control as to stultify in practice the local powers theoretically possessed by the councils. A. single example will help to explain the working of the system : a certain commune wanted to build a muni- cipal slaughter-house ; to this end it was necessary to raise a loan, to create a tariff, and to secure a site by expropriation in a forest belonging to the Crown : in 1846 a project was submitted to the Minister of the MODERN FRANCE Interior; in 1848 it was returned, not approved, on the ground that the conditions of the proposed loan were too onerous to be accepted; in 1850, after the Revolution, the same project was submitted again; this time it was approved by the Minister on condition that the tariif proposed be reduced, but it had still to be sent before the Council of State, who objected both to the rate of the tariff and to the size of the building; and it was not till 1858 that the authorisation was finally granted : meantime, the Commune had been in treaty with the "administration of the civil list" as to the terms of the expropriation, the position of the site, the direction of the road that was to approach it, and the right of inspection by the forest authorities ; and it was not till 1859, thirteen years after the first application, that the building was actually erected. This is an exceptional case, but it may serve to illus- trate at once the drawbacks and the benefits of centralisation ; against the waste and delay of the long ofl5.cial procedure must be set the advantage of a higher control over a body resemb%Qg, it may be supposed, our " parish councils " of /the future^ and deliberating about the site of an unsanitary building aiJifl the rate of a public tax. Over the departmental councils, composed of men of education and experience, there was less need of supervision, and by the law of 187 1 they have been, to a great extent, relieved of it; but under the monarchy of July they too were severely subject to control, and though an extension of their powers was THE MONARCHY OF JULY 123 not actually part of the Liberal programme, it was part of the tendency to which Liberals were attached. The argumentative campaign on the subject had already been opened under the Restoration ; the advo- cates of reform had opposed to a possible loss of administrative efficiency what they regarded as the certain gain of a more general experience in public business ; the conduct of local affairs, they maintained, would prepare for the conduct of those of the nation, and vague aspirations after liberty find vent in appli- cation to tangible details ; ignorant and factious criti- cism would be checked by a pr'actical acquaintance with the difficulties of administration, and the Government itself be made more secure by a process of decentral- isation, which would divert to responsible local bodies the opposition which was concentrated at present on the centre. These arguments bore their fruit after the Revolution of 1848; the reorganisation of the administrative councils was taken in hand by the Republican Assembly, but before any measure had been passed, intervened the coup d'etat, and it was not till 1871 that a radical reform was effected. § 8. Electoral Refoem. The question of centralisation came up in connec- tion with the votes of officials, and the demand for parliamentary reform was associated with that for the extension of the franchise. Republicans, Socialists and Legitimists combined in the cry for 124 MODERN FRANCE universal suflfrage ; but the practical proposal actually made by the Constitutional Left did not go beyond what was called the " adjunction of the capacities," that is to say, the extension of the vote to certain categories of citizens, selected with a view to their presumed education and intelligence. Even this proposal, however, was constantly rejected by the Government ; Guizot regarded it as premature, the king as dangerous ; once started on the slope, he felt, there was no possibility of stopping ; and to admit the smallest extension was to admit, in principle, the Republic. Against this fixed resolve the Opposition beat in vain ; till even the Liberals who adhered to the Monarchy were driven to appeal from the Chamber to the country, and to inaugurate, against their will, the Revolution of 1848. § g. The Supremacy op the Middle Class. Such, then, were the points at issue between the Government and the Constitutional. Opposition ; but underlying them all was a difference not only of policy but of sentiment. The government of July was essen- tially undramatic ; it had no brilliance, no dash, no pose : the nation was enamoured of victories, surprises, appeals to the heart, millennial vistas ; but all this found no place in the policy of the reign : instead of liberty it offered order, instead of glory, prosperity ; the passion of loyalty was dead, the tumult of demo- cracy suppressed ; nations in rebellion called in vain THE MONARCHY OF JULY 125 to the ancient champion of freedom ; Italy succumbed, Warsaw fell, and France did not stir a hand : what then, was the Government doing ? what did it repre- sent? neither nobles nor people, neither honour nor liberty, but only, as it seemed, the financial interests of the upper middle class. " Who does not recall," wrote Duvergier de Hauranne, "the tempests un- chained by sesame on the most pacific benches of the Chamber, and the agitated, tumultuous, almost revo- lutionary appearance of the ' salle des pas-perdus ' on the day that saw the great fight of beetroots and colonial sugar ? Who can have forgotten the burst of patriotic enthusiasm evoked from the galleries by the branch-line to F . . . .? These are the triumphs and defeats, the joys and griefs of our time ; these are the causes that have taken the place of those for which our fathers shed their blood on the scafibld, or the field of battle ! " Such an attitudi; was repugnant to the French imagination ; vulgar commercialism, contempt for ideas, indifiierence to national and universal ends, that is what was under- stood by the reign of the bourgeoisie : the " great nation " was tied and bound by a plutocratic class : differences of opinion, of policy, of principle, were embittered by the sensb of humiliation and contempt, and once more it is a friend of the monarchy, who sounds to his ancient allies a solemn note of warning : — " if the dominant class should employ their power merely as a means to their own prosperity, if the taste for material pleasure should absorb them 126 MODERN FRANCE exclusively, and render them insensible to national greatness, to the progress of liberty, to the needs of the classes who have no political rights ; if, in a word, it could be said of them, with some appearance of reason, that they imitate those they have overthrown, and that there exist in France on the one hand 200,000 families who command and enjoy, and on the other eight million families who obey and suffer : if this be so, is it credible that such a system is solidly based ; and is it possible that it should be long maintained ? " § 10. The Eepublican Opposition. Hitherto we have considered only the Constitutional Opposition ; but there existed also from the first the elements of a Kepublican party. The extreme section of the adherents of Lafayette at the Hotel de Yille accepted the monarchy for the moment only to inter- pret it as a democracy ; they demanded the abolition of the hereditary peerage and the assimilation of the Upper to the Lower Chamber, a franchise all but uni- versal, populai" election of the whole administrative and judicial staff, and complete liberty of worship, education and the press ; and these demands were to be submitted to the nation as the ultimate constituent authority. The policy thus laid down was monarchic only in name ; it must have led, if adopted, straight to the Republic, and, in fact, its rejection by the Government gave rise to a Republican Opposition. THE MONARCHY OF JULY 127 Tlie uevv party, insignificant at first, increased in strength and numbers as tlie policy of tlie reign de- fined itself ; it had its representatives in the Chamber and the Press, and its propaganda by secret societies : the republican Societe des amis clu peuple organised the insurrection of 1832 ; the Societe des droits de I'homme was responsible for that of 1834; and the abortive attempt of 1839 was inspired by the Societe des Saisoiis : more than once the king's life was at- tempted by irresponsible members of the party, and the attitude of the would-be regicides may be gauged from their own lips : — " Your name ? — Conspirator ! — Your profession ? — Exterminator of tyrants !^Do you repent ? — I repent only that I did not succeed ! " § II. Revolutionaet Idealism. This Republican opposition was inspired not only by the causes we have already discussed, and which suggested to more ardent and active spirits a recourse to revolution in default of reform, but also by a recrudescence of the democratic idealism of 1793. The rehabilitation of the First Republic had been already prepared by Thiers and Mignet, and now Lamartine, Michelet and Blanc, took up and completed the work ; the atrocities of the Terror, while they were not ap- proved, were attributed to fate, rather than to crime ; the Revolution was credited with all its virtues, while its vices were accounted to its opponents ; it was conceived as a modern Hercules Furens, whose 128 MODERN FRANCE Nessus shirt was woven of aristocrats and kings, and whose apotheosis awaited consummation in the heart of a regenerate humanity : " we are proud," said Lamartine, at the close of his History, " to belong to a race which has been permitted by Providence to conceive such thoughts, and to be the offspring of an age which has impressed such a movement of ideas on the human mind. Glory to Trance for her intelli- gence, her destiny, her soul, her blood ! " manj' were the victims of the struggle ; but " a nation need not regret her blood when it has flowed for the blossom- ing of eternal truths. God has set a price on the budding and unfolding of His designs for miinkind. Ideas spring from human blood. Revolutions descend from the scaffold. The divinity of every religion i.s attested by its martyrs," and over each martyr may be written " dead for the cause of the future, and labourer in the field of humanity." § 12. The People as Humanity. "Humanity" was the creed of the Republicans; it is thus defined by Leroux : " humanity is an ideal being composed of a multitude of real beings, who are themselves humanity in the germ, humanity in the virtual condition." To this metaphysical formula corresponds a movement of sentiment ; it was the ten- dency of the time to insist on the unity underlying the distinctions of society, and on the bond of affection by which that unity was, or should be, expressed, THE MONARCHY OF JULY 129 Such a conception of the general brotherhood of man does not necessarily involve a Eepublican theory of the State, for there is no A priori reason why, fraternity should not flourish under a King ; but there was a natural tendency to forget, in the unity of mankind, the diversity of men, and to suppose that because we are " virtually " brothers weare therefore actually " equal ": this is in fact the conclusion of Pierre Leroux and of other thinkers of the time : — " every man, every woman," he says, " is equivalent to every other ; there is no reason for any distinction between them : " " equality is a principle, a dogma .... it is the criterion of justice .... society has no other bond. But equahty involves, to begin with, equal political rights ; and so the transition is made from fraternity to the republic. " Humanity," then, may be further defined as a fraternal association of equal individuals : from such an association privilege is ex hypothesi excluded ; and from this it may be made to follow, with a certain appearance of plausibility, that the " classes " are ex- cluded from humanity, which is thus identified with the " people : " by this identification, the " people " in the sense of the " masses " (that is to say, of a class), are credited with all the virtues of the ideal association of mankind ; and a " Republic " comes to mean at once the realisation of universal fraternity, and the political predominance of the heterogeneous class at the moment excluded from the franchise : this confusion of ' populus " with " plebs," and of the ideal of the future I I30 MODERN FRANCE with the actual present, is curiously illustrated by the following passage from Michelet's " History of the Revolution;" he is speaking, ostensibly, of tout le monde, that is to say, of every one in general and no one in particular ; but it is plain from his words that he has in his mind the mass of men as opposed to a minority of genius or culture : — " Ignorant no doubt of natural phenomena, he {tout le monde) is none the less a just judge in all that concerns mankind. He is sovereign master by right. When he sits in his natural prsetorium and judgment seat, in the square of a great city, or on the bench at the church-door, or else on a stone at the cross-roads, under the judgment-elm, he judges there without appeal ; there is no gainsaying his sentence. Kings, queens and tribunes, Mirabeaus, Robespierres, appear humbly at his bar. The great Napoleon him- self holds his hat in his hand, as Luther had done before him He judges, all is over ; for you, historians, philosophers, critics, cavillers, to seek and find the ' why.' Seek ; he is always just ; and the injustice you discover, feeble and subtle that you are, is the defect of your own intelligence." It is plain that the " people " are here conceived at once as a class and as humanity ; and it is this con- ception that lies at the root of the Republican idealism of the time : as a class, they are the poor opposed to the rich, the simple opposed to the sophistical, the intuitions of instinct opposed to the inductions of a spurious culture : as humanity, they are society itself ; there is nothing but they, and they are all brothers ; THE MONARCHY OF JULY 131 their passions are divinely inspired, their judgments infallible ; and bound by a bond of spontaneous love they are waiting only their arrival to power to realise at once upon earth the heaven of the communion of saints. It is thus that the " enthusiasm of humanity " was brought to the support of the Republican party, and a particular policy in the present deduced from the re- mote conception of an ideal society. There is no better illustration of this attitude than the later writings of Lamennais : we have already come across him as the champion of Pope and King ; we find him now as the champion of the sovereignty of the people : the foundation of his later preaching is the brotherhood of man : — " You are sons of the same father, and the same mother has given you milk ; why then do you not love one another as brothers, and why do you rather treat one another as enemies ? " " Say not of such and such an one, he is of one people, and I of another people. For all people have had on earth the same father, who is Adam, and have in heaven the same father, who is God." From this humanitarian idealism he deduces poUtical conclusions ; the authority he had formerly derived from God he bases now on the people, and turns his kings by right divine into usurpers of the popular sovereignty : — " it is the people who make kings, and kings are made for their peoples, and peoples are not made for their kings : " " they tell you of the soyereign, of the prince, of the public powers ; they do but abuse you with words. T 132 MODERN FRANCE have told you already, the sovereign is yourselves, is the people essentially free. It is from the people that the Government is derived, be it a Government by one or by many. The Government is a simple executor of the law, or of the will of the people, and has no other functions. It is chosen and delegated for that sole object, not to command but to obey ; and if it ceases to obey the people, the people deposes it as an unfaithful delegacy. That is all." A theory of democracy so absolute as this is im- plicitly an attack on the existing regime ; and Lam- ennais does not shrink from making the consequence explicit : — " wherever," he says," by a reversion of the natural basis of equality, certain privileged classes are invested with the monopoly of legislative authority, there is disorder and tyranny ; " and he proceeds to adopt the complete Republican programme, universal suffrage, right of association and public meeting, liberty of education, and the enfranchisement of the administrative councils : the gospel of fraternity assumes the garb of poUtical propaganda, and its apostle appears as a socialist pamphleteer: — "You say : I am cold ; and to warm your wasted limbs they bind them with triple chains of iron. You say : I hunger ; and they reply : eat the crumbs that fall from the tables where we feast. You say : I thirst ; and they reply : Drink your tears. The bee has its hive for a resting-place, but you have no shelter for your head ; the mite has its raiment of silk to pro- tect it against the cold, but your limbs are bare ; the THE MONARCHY OF JULY 133 meanest worm finds shelter and food on the plant where it was born; but you are in want of both.", § 13. The People as They Were. The appeals of the Republican idealists were ad- dressed to the people as " humanity " ; what they actually reached was the people as a class : they passed through various gradations, and arrived in a profoundly modified form; the "fraternity" was decomposed into fanaticism and hate, and the faith in the universal association of mankind precipitated as rage against society as it was ; what began as an enthusiasm of humanity ended in conspiracy and revolt ; and the deification of the mass of men by a Michelet or a Leroux found its efiective applica- tion in such appeals as the following : " when the people strikes it is neither timid nor generous, for it does not strike for its own ends but for those of eternal truth, and it knows well that there is no one who has the right to pardon in its name." " Immo- late all the foes of equaUty and liberty ! it is but bare justice to strike the oppressors of humanity ; when that is done you will rest in your greatness and your force Meantime, no pity ! Bare your arms and plunge them to the shoulders in the entrails of your butchers." These extracts are characteristic ; they give us a ghmpse of the " people " as it actually was, a sufier- ing and indignant class, subject to the uncertainty 134 MODERN FRANCE and privation of an imperfect economic system, with- out education, without a plan of practical and positive reform, but looking to insurrection as the remedy for a distress whose causes were not political but economic. It is this class view of the people that is emphasised by Louis Blanc ; his " History of Ten Years" (1830-1840) is an indictment of the bour- geoisie ; raised to power by the Revolution of July they had exploited the Government in their own interest ; monopolists {A capital and land, as well as of political power, they held at their disposal the labour and the life of the proletariat; while the latter, " too ignorant even to desire their part in the Government, groaned under the yoke of a social order where for them is nothing but oppression — where children of seven years old work twelve hours a day for their living, girls of sixteen are driven to prostitution, vagabonds seek a bed on the steps of palaces, poverty produces infanticide, artisans are thrown on the streets to starve by the invention of a machine, and thousands of labourers rise at dawn, pale in face and bitter at heart, and march to battle with the cry on their Hps, ' Let us live working or die fighting'!" This passage opens the whole question of the economic organisation of society ; and it is to this, and to the various proposals of reform, that we must now address our attention. THE MONARCHY OF JULY 135 § 14. Free Competition. One of the acts of the Revolution of 1789 had been to abolish the trade corporations : these bodies represented an economic organisation which had prevailed throughout Europe for many centuries ; it was their function to limit the number of labourers or of masters in a trade, to secure good and uniform work, and to value it at a fair price. In France, the Government, following out its constant tendency to centralisation, had superimposed regulations of its own upon those of the old guilds ; and so numerous and minute did these restrictions become that it is said that by the middle of the eighteenth century " the smallest manufacturer would have needed to be a consummate lawyer not to lose himself in the multiplicity of rules to which he was subject." The Revolution, in accordance with its policy of destructive liberty, abolished these restrictions and with them the trade guilds ; any one henceforth might engage in any occupation, and sell his products or his labour at any price he chose or could: but ?his was not enough; not only were the old corporations destroyed, but the formation of new ones was forbidden ; by a law of June 1791 all combinations of masters or men were prohibited, and this law was afterwards embodied in the Code Civil. The revolution thus effected in the organisation of trade was contemporaneous with the transition from the old to the new industry; 136 MODERN FRANCE macliiiie work in factories was superseding manual work at home; by the removal of legal restrictions the number of apprentices increased indefinitely, and the rate of wages was lowered in proportion ; women and children were employed and men thrown out of work j commercial crises became severe 'and frequent ; strikes, accompanied by violence, were common, in spite of the law : in commerce, as in government, liberty had led to anarchy : — " strife of producers among themselves for the conquest of the market, of labourers among themselves for the conquest of employment, of the manufacturer against the work- man to determine the rate of wages, of the poor man against the machine that is destined to destroy him by starvation, such," says Louis Blanc, " under the name of competition, were the characteristics of the situation." An occurrence at Lyons in 1831 was a striking commentary on this text ; the chief product of the city was silk, and its price had been so reduced by foreign competition that wages had sunk to starvation point, 18 sous for a day of 18 hours; the men demanded sf fixed tarifi"; one was proposed by the Conseil de Prud'hommes, and pubHcly approved by the Prefect; but the Government disavowed the action of their subordinate : the labourers then decided on a monster demonstration, came into contact with the National Guard and the troops, and after two days fighting found themselves masters of the town : the victory, of course, was temporary ; but THE MONARCHY OF JULY 137 the significance of the situation lay in the fact that a question of wages had led to civil war, and that a body of militant workmen had adopted the desperate device ' vivre en travaillant, ou mourir en com- battant.' " This single example may serve as an extreme illustration of the general position; production had been set free, but at the cost of the producers ; the new forces were immense, but they were beyond the control of their creators : the problem therefore remained, to organise industry and trade in the interests of the whole society ; and it was the attempt to meet this problem that gave birth to Socialism. § 15. Babceuf. Socialism was a product of the first Eevolution, though the word was not invented till later : the various measures adopted by the Convention to transfer the property of the rich to the poor have been already referred to; these, however, were not properly socialistic, for they admitted private property, proposing only to transfer it from one individual to another ; Socialism proper was first intro- duced into practical politics by Babceuf (1764-1796). Babceuf proposed to transfer to the State the possession and administration of all property, and to regulate by public officials, in accordance with the state of the market, the particular kind of production which each individual was to undertake ; to simplify 138 MODERN FRANCE the problem, he would have prohibited foreign trade ; the country was to produce its own necessities in exactly such proportion as they were required, and what that proportion was, was to be determined by the State, which was also to regulate the lodging, dress, and meals of all its citizens : this ingenious system was to be introduced by a revolution (1795) ; the first step was the massacre of the Directors, of the Ministers, of the General of the Interior and his Staif, and the expulsion of the Legislative Chambers ; this was to be followed by the repudiation of public and private debts, and the abolition of the right of testament : thus remodelled and purged the State would commence its beneficent career ; it would find itself at once in possession of the existing national property, of that of " the enemies of the Revolution," which was already forfeited to the poor, and of all estates which might prove to have been " usurped " or "neglected ; " private citizens would be invited to add their possessions to this store; those who refused would be subjected to a double and progressive taxation; and any one who might be convicted of " idleness, luxury, or want of patriotism " would forfeit his goods to the community : in this way it would not be long before the State had become the universal proprietor. Such is the outline of the scheme of Baboeuf; it was communism introduced by confiscation and maintained by despotism ; it contained no real solu- tion, for it had not even analysed the problem ; all THE MONARCHY OF JVLY 139 that it did was to prepare a political revolution, in order to create a State to which the problem might be referred. The conspiracy was detected, and Baboeuf condemned and executed. Both he and his scheme were exceptional phenomena, the product of an exceptional time, and the later developments of socialistic thought had an independent origin and^ growth : two of the most important of these belong to the period of the Monarchy of July ; they are those of St. Simon and Fourier. § 16. St. Simon. St. Simon was bom in 1760 and died in 1825 ; he enjoyed from an early age the conviction of his own greatness, for his valet had orders to wake him with the words " souvenez-vous, M. le Comte, que vous avez de grandes choses ^ f aire ; " in 1779 he was a volunteer in the American war ; after the peace he developed an enthusiasm for public works, and we find him recommending to the viceroy of Mexico the junction of the two oceans, and, later, concerned with the project of a canal to connect Madrid with the sea ; in the Revolution he played no public part, but engaged in financial speculations, in which he ruined himself, and for which he was sent to prison ; he was released at the fall of Robespierre, married in 1 80 1, and was divorced within the year. He had a definite theory of life, which he expressed in the following rules : — 140 MODERN FRANCE (i) To lead during ^ the prime of life an existence as original and active as possible. (2) To make a careful study of every theory and every practice. (3) To traverse every class of society, to place one- self in the most diverse social positions, and even to create relations which have never yet existed. (4) Finally, to employ the close of life in summing up the conclusions attained. In accordance with these rules, he threw himself into life ; he made trial of everything, books, conver- sation, play, wine and women ; and reappeared in 1808, a copyist at the Mont de Piet6 on ;^40 a year ; there he was discovered and relieved by his quondam valet, till in 18 14 he secured a pension from his family; in 1823 he made an attempt at suicide, and in 1825 he died. He had written numerous books, of which the most important was the "Nouveau Christianisme," and he left behind him disciples to carry on his work. One of these, Olindes-Rodrigues, recruited Bazard and Enfantin, the future leaders of the sect, and at the moment of the master's death, began the propaganda of his ideas : it was carried on through the press and by means of public lectures, and from 1830 to 1832 was the most promi- nent intellectual movement in France. The system was based on a broad generalisation from history: society, it was maintained, proceeds from organic to critical, and from critical to organic epochs ; the critical epoch destroys the organic, and THE MONARCHY OF JULY 141 the organic concludes the critical : in the history of the world there have been two organic and two critical epochs ; the former are the pre-Socratic age and the age of mediaeval Christianity, the latter, the period between Socrates and Christ, and the period from the Reformation onwards : the Revolution of 1789 was the crisis of the last critical epoch, and heralded an age of reconstruction ; of that new age the prophet and founder was St. Simon. This law of human progress was regarded as a mattter of faith ; it was not merely a hypothesis, arrived at by induc- tion from data, it was an intuition of genius, suggested and confirmed by facts, but not dependent upon them for its validity ; this is stated by Bazard in the most emphatic language : — " ah ! do not fear to confess it, this faith ! say boldly that you believe in your love for your kind, and in their love for you ; say that you believe in the progressive will of humanity ; say that you believe that the world in which this will is exer- cised is favourable, by its nature, to its developments ; say that you believe that a bond of love unites in a close and indissoluble tie man and that which is not man, and that these two parts of a single whole, advancing together towards a common destiny, mutually assist one another with their love, their wisdom, and their endeavours. This laio then that you have learnt to express, this law that the philo- sopher did not create and cannot even justify except by his faith in it, this hypothesis of order which genius conceives, and which serves as a basis to science; 142 MODERN FRANCE this invisible law which governs man and the world ; this powerful will which impels them unceasingly towards a better future, name it without fear : it is the will of God." This passage is characteristic ; it illustrates the claim of the St. Simonians to be not only philosophers but prophets; their appeal is to the heart as much as to the head, and is based on a faith in love and in God : God is defined as "all that is ; all is in him, all is by him ; " and his expression is the tendency of the world to its consummation in a perfect society : of that society, or at least of the next stage towards it, the general formula would be the balance of body and soul : Paganism had given the preponderance to the one, Christianity to the other ; the epoch introduced by St. Simon was to reconcile and harmonise the two ; as in the individual, so in society, matter and spirit were complements each to each ; and the new organisation must embrace and co-ordinate both elements : that organisation was sketched by the St. Simonians as follows. Men were divided into three classes, Priests (or Artists), " Savants " and " Industriels : " the function of the first was to appeal to the imagination in the interest of religion, or, more precisely, in the interest of those general ideas which were the basis and the bond of the whole society ; all their words and works were to be a symbol or exposition of the accepted social ideal : "we designate by the name of priest the man who, by his thoughts and acts, by the morality of his whole life, inspires generous sentiments and awakens THE MONARCHY OF JULY 143 sympathies. He is the organiser of others and the bond of union between them ; he is essentially the religious man, for it is on him that they rely ; he is priest according to the order of St. Simon." Those whom the Priest is to harmonise and inspire, are the two subordinate classes, the "Savants" and " Indus- triels : " science, henceforth, is to work in the interest of industry, and industry to develop under the direction of science; action is incomplete without thought and thought without action, and it is the function of the Priest to consolidate their union : the Savants, then, must be defined not merely as men of science, but as men of science in touch with practical tendencies and needs ; their organisation, like that of the whole society, will be threefold ; on the one hand wiU be the men of research — the " Perfectionnants," on the other the teaching staif — the " Enseignants; " and above these two groups, to co-ordinate and inspire their labours, will be placed a group of philosophers impressed with the conception of society as a whole, intent on the general direction and aim of aU know- ledge, and synthesising to a common end the diversity of its special branches : thus the student and the teacher would be kept in touch with one another, and both of them with the general movement of the whole society ; and to the anarchy of science and education, and the isolation of their departments, would succeed an organic creation, harmonised within itself, and nicely adjusted to the environment upon which it was to direct its action. 144 MODERN FRANCE The complement of science was industry, and the " Industriels " like the "Savants" must be brought under the direction of the Priests : even more patent than the anarchy of science was the anarchy of trade ; the results were more disastrous, and the need of a remedy more pressing : it was, in fact, the primary aim of the St. Simonians to " ameliorate as quickly and completely as possible the moral and physical existence of the most numerous class " ; this they re- garded as the modern reading of the precept, " love thy neighbour as thyself : " their remedy was a form of Socialism : the State was ta own the means of p ro- [duction, and organise industr y, on the principle indi- \ catgd by'the motto, " to each accord ^rig tn bis capacity^ and to- papVi papgpjfy qp cording to its works": the " Industriels " were to be divided into communities, "3-^b '^i^'p^tpfl by a mayo r, and all fyToupefTTf^et^lift r under _a central authority ; the production of each 3ommunity, and of ea ch department of industry, wou ld ~" bB ^eguiate d by statistical information as to the pro- ^ bable need s ot consumersTaJoTthe dl^ribution woul d be regulated by the services of each producer ; there wotiTd be progigtl'on "t or ^Sgfit" and p"ensiaS~for old aggptrrrrrtETs, it was t hought, would be snffiQJeAt to pro yi3e a motive to work. Such,'~Tn genefaT^outliae, was the St. Simonian system : a single abortive attempt was made to put it into practice ; Enfantin established a " family " on an estate at Menilmontant ; there were some forty members who engaged in manual work in the garden. \l THE MONARCHY OF JULY 14S cheered by the singing of hymns and readings from the lives of the saints ; they wore a special dress, whose significance is thus described : " the waistcoat is the symbol of fraternity ; we cannot put it on without the help of one of our brethren. If it is attended, on the one hand, by thei nconvenience of making assist- ance indispensable, on the other it has the great advantage of bringing forcibly before our minds, on each occasion, the sentiment of association." In August 1832 the society was brought to trial as illegal and immoral ; the result was its dissolution and the imprisonment of Enf antin for a year ; and after this event the movement languished and died. The scheme of the St. Simonians, like that of BabcEuf, contributed not so much a solution of the problem as a direction to the State to solve it ; but it was more fruitful in the suggestion of possible and pacific measures of transition : of these the chief was the gradual absorption of inheritance by the State, first by a limitation of collateral succession, secondly by a progressive increase of death duties : in these and in other ways it was hoped that the conversion of private to public property might be effected without disturbance ; but as the St. Simonians never formed a compact political party they were never able to press their proposals upon the country ; their scheme remained a suggestion, but a faithful and interesting one, and one that has influenced, indirectly, the tendency of modern thought. 146 MODERN FRANCE § 17. EOUEIER. From St. Simon and his followers we pass to Fourier. His system is based on a fantastic and elaborate cosmology : the law of the world is universal attraction, which manifests itself in five forms, material, organic, intellectiial, animal, and social, corresponding to the five classes of phenomena, in- organic matter, life, mind, magnetism, and society : attraction, in general, is good ; therefore, in particular, every desire and passion of man is good ; if then, as appears to be the case, there is such a thing as evil, this must be ascribed not to the indulgence of the passions, but to the circumstances under which they are indulged : thus the distinction between right and wrong is merely the result of artificial conditions ; expansion, not repression, love, not duty, is the law of a natural society ; and the problem of the reformer is so to arrange the various relations of men, that every passion may find a vent and contribute its force to the common good. From this position Fourier is led to an analysis of the passions : he divides them into three classes ; those that are concerned with the satisfaction of the senses, those that are concerned with association in groups, and- those that are concerned with the associa- tion of the groups in a unity : on this classification is based the arrangement of the perfect society; in- dividuals will organise themselves in groups, the THE MONARCHY OF JULY 147 groups in series, and the series in phalansteries ; all the associations will be voluntary ; the members of a group will be attracted by some one or other of the passions that tend to that particular form of union — ambition, friendship, family affection, or love ; simi- larly, the groups will be connected by the passions that urge to larger combinations ; and the result will be a harmonious organisation comprehending, in the end, the whole of mankind. In the new society all will be workers, for work will be congenial to all; each will be directed by his dominant passion to some particular task, and it is from the conjunction of several individuals having the same natural bent that the association in groups will arise ; any member of one group may become a member of another, and thus avoid the monotony attending a single task ; while interest in the work will be further enhanced by a friendly competition between the various groups, and by then- constant party- combinations and intrigues : a single example will illustrate the way in which the system was supposed to work : — "Imagine," says Eourier, "a mass of about 600 people, half men and half women, all inspired with a passion for the same branch of industry. Let us take the series for the cultivation of pears ; these 600 people wiU be divided into groups which will devote themselves to the production of one or two kinds of pears. Thus there will be a group of the sectaries of the butter pear, another of the sectaries of the russet pear, &c. And when every one has been 148 MODERN FRANCE enrolled in the groups attached to his favourite pears (for he may belong to several), there will be perhaps thirty groups, distinguished by their banners and ornaments, and forming three, five, or seven divisions ; for example ; "SERIES FOR THE CULTIVATION OF PEARS COMPOSED OF THIRTY-TWO GROUPS. Division. ^^""" cnc progres Groups, "°°- Kind Cultivated. I. Van-guard 2 Quinces, and hard bastard kinds. 2. Ascending extremity- • 4 • Hard cooking-pears 3- Ascending wing . 6 . ' Breaking ' pears, 4- Centre of the series . 8 . ' Melting ' pears. S- Descending wing . . 6 . ' Compact ' pears. 6. Descending extremity • 4 • ' Mealy ' pears. 7- Rear-guard 2 Medlars and soft bastard kinds. " It is immaterial whether the series is composed of men, women, or children, or in part of all, the ar- rangement is always the same If the series is formed regularly, as in the example given, alliances will arise between the corresponding divisions. Thus the ascending and descending wings will unite against the centre of the series, and agree to push their pro- ducts at the expense of those of the centre ; the two extremities will be leagued together and join the centre in its conflict with the wings. The result, of this mechanism will be that each group will produce the most magnificent fruit conceivable. Similar com- petitions and similar alliances arise among the various THE MONARCHY OF JVLY 149 groups of a division Then come the intrigues of series with series, and canton with canton, organ- ised on the same plan. It may be imagined that the pear-series will be a vigorous rival of the apple-series, whUe, on the other hand, it will enter into alliance with the cherry- series, since the pear and the cherry are not sufficiently akin to excite to jealousy their respective cultivators." This passage is not only an illustration but a criticism of the whole system ; everything depends on the assumption that people will be bom into the world who have a consuming passion for the cultivation, say, of " melting " pears ; and by analogy, others, who are driven by their natural bent to the scavenging of streets or the flushing of main sewers : this assumption admitted, the difficulty is solved at once ; society will organise itself, as soon as the idea is grasped, and phalansteries spring up and flourish with the inevitableness of Nature. The scheme, in fact, may be described as one of spontaneous co-opera- tion ; instead of solving the problem, it assumes that it will solve itself : this, however, has not yet occurred ; and the phalansteries of Fourier are remembered only as a curious and suggestive speculation. § 18. Miscellaneous Socialism. St. Simon and Fourier are the most interesting of the social theorists of the time ; but they were only the most striking figures in a general movement of 150 MODERN FRANCE ideas: every one was bent on reforming society; now it is Pierre Leroux with his text, "to each according to his needs," now Proudhon with his battle-cry, "property is theft"; here it is Cabet describing the Laws of Tcaria, there Louis Blanc expounding his " organisation of labour." The " organisation of labour " calls for special notice, for Louis Blanc was to be a member of the Provisional Government in 1848 ; the scheme which he proposed was, briefly, as follows : — the State was to advance capital to co-operative productive societies ; these societies were to be organised among themselves, and by their united competition to eliminate the indivi- dual producer; equal wages were to be paid, and all ofiicers elected. The scheme was more definite and practical than most of the proposals of the time, and we shall come across it again in 1848. §19. The Socialism of the People. To meet the recognised social distress there was thus no lack of social theories : these, it is true, were various in their bases and their conclusions ; but all agree in this, that they repudiate the mediseval belief that poverty is a necessary evil, and virtue is self- denial : they assert, on the contrary, that poverty can be cured, and that virtue is self -development ; and then, with the genial optimism that underlies their faith, conclude that the millennium they as- same is already within their reach. This position. THE MONARCHY OF yULY iji interpreted by coarser minds than theirs, emerges at the bottom of society in the crudest forms of revolu- tionary materialism ; the propaganda which began with St. Simon ended with Eugene Sue ; and such works as the " Mysteries of Paris," published in the halfpenny journals, were the source from which the people began to derive their social ideal. The literature of th f actories is thus described bv Heine : — " I found there m an j y new editions of thf °poo''>'°° "f "Rnhocpiorro and the pamphlets of Marat, published in penny 'p art,a t.hp ' mst,nvy r.f t.Tio T?Qi7n]ntinn ' hj '~'l1""1- '^'l" ' ' Doctrine of the Oon.spiracv of Eaboeuf ' by Buona - rotti ; writings which l^ f^f], «« it. wprp an ndnnr of blood ; . ■ . . and I heard fg^^pp^g snnpr which seemed to have bee n composed in hell, and whose refrains bo re jyitness to a fury and ari pvaapftrahinTi wV^inVi mai me shudder." This testimony is confirmed from other sources ; material distress, Utopian enthusiasm, and the revived traditions of the first revolution combined to form a temper at once of exaltation and despair, indifierent to every disaster and credulous of all success ; the sentence of Pierre Leroux " every human being has a right to shelter, food and clothing," found its effective response in the device of the Lyons strikers " vivre en travaillant ou mourir en com- battant : " if there were no positive remedy, there was at least the negation of despair ; if it was impossible to create, at least it was possible to destroy. 152 MODERN FRANCE § 20. The General Situation. From what has been said it will be seen that the situation under the Monarchy of J uly was, broadly speaking, as follows : — for eighteen years in succession a Conservative Uovernment was in power ; it was Con- fronted by the opposTtlon not only ot ci!>Hljtitu tioiKd Liberals, but ot revolutionary RegubUcans and Social- ists i ^ and fTwas notoriously supportedaJoSTdifected'hy the Sovereign him^elfj^^ieisjKiiSSaSSSiSIE^efSre, jgven_tor ihe consStuSonal Oppositio^^^ pass from att g,cking the Ministers to attack the Moiiarc hv itself, and to this course Republicans and Socialists were pledged by t he very"na ture of th eir opmipns :"thus ^ot only the policy b ut the,f£am-S Lthe Gov ernment was exposed to attack, while for its defence it could onl y rely oh that upper section of the middle cl ass w hich was represented in the Chamber : — " eve?^ s.ucceeci mg montn,'^ says .Lord JN ormanby , " Kas tended to c^Sian. the Jesuit- -of-Biy obseraa.