na
 
 FRANCE
 
 FRANCE 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN EDWARD COURTENAY BODLEY 
 
 t--- 
 
 VOLUME I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 BOOK I -THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE 
 BOOK II THE CONSTITUTION AND THE CHIEF OF THE STATE 
 
 Nefo fforfc 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 
 
 1898 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1898, 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Nortaooli 
 J. 8. Cuihlng & Co. Berwick & Smith 
 Norwood Mut. U.S.A.
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 RONALD VICTOR COURTENAY BODLEY 
 
 AND 
 
 JOSSELIN REGINALD COURTENAY BODLEY 
 
 <n tfjetr iffiotijer's iSi 
 
 SKPTEMBBR 26, 1897
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE xiii 
 
 INTRODUCTION 1 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF THE REVOLUTION ... 67 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 LIBERTY 127 
 
 CHAPTER IH 
 EQUALITY 167 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 FRATERNITY AND PATRIOTISM 213 
 
 vii
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK II 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION AND THE CHIEF OF 
 THE STATE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAOK 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION . 261 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE 271 
 
 INDEX TO VOLUME I . 333
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I TAKE this opportunity of rendering my thanks to the 
 many French people of all classes and of all shades of opin- 
 ion who for more than seven years have in manifold ways 
 helped me in my work. Some of them are mentioned 
 incidentally in the Introductory Chapter, but it would be 
 impossible to name all those to whom I am indebted for 
 ideas, for facilities in pursuing my studies, and for innu- 
 merable kind offices. I have to offer my special gratitude 
 to three distinguished Frenchmen who, between them, 
 have found time to read nearly all the proofs of these 
 volumes : M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, the eminent Econo- 
 mist and Member of the Institute ; M. Richard Wad- 
 dington, Senator of the Seine Inferieure, the accomplished 
 historian of the Seven Years' War, whom we can partly 
 claim, as not only was he educated at Rugby like his 
 lamented brother, whom we all knew at Albert Gate, but 
 he was also an officer of our Royal Horse Artillery ; and 
 M. Camille Barere, French Ambassador at Berne, who is 
 equally familiar with our language. It is needless to 
 say that those high authorities are not responsible for 
 any of the opinions expressed in this book, as on impor- 
 tant matters of public policy they differ from one another. 
 Their verification of facts and their general criticisms 
 have, however, been of the highest value.
 
 x PREFACE 
 
 The capital subject of these volumes is Political France 
 after a Century of Revolution. The plan of the work 
 needs little explanation. The Introductory Chapter is 
 not an essential part of it, but it may be of utility, as it 
 contains a description of the influences encountered by 
 a student of public questions in France. The relations 
 of the great Revolution with modern France are then 
 examined, and this gives an opportunity of a view of 
 certain phases of French life which would otherwise be 
 neglected in a political treatise. The Executive and 
 Legislative Powers are the special matters which form 
 the basis of the remainder of the work. Their operation 
 under the regime which has subsisted in France during 
 the last quarter of the nineteenth century leads to the 
 study of various conceptions which the French have had, 
 during a hundred years of political experiment, of the 
 functions of a Chief of the State and of Parliamentary 
 Institutions. I do not think that I need apologise for 
 having treated those important subjects in minute detail. 
 
 In this swift age of handbooks two volumes may seem 
 a slender result of seven years' uninterrupted labour ; 
 but those who have seriously studied problems of govern- 
 ment will recognise that the time which has been devoted 
 to the questions dealt with here is not excessive. More- 
 over, I may say that with half the labour expended on 
 these pages I could have produced three or four years 
 ago, three or four volumes examining much less thoroughly 
 the same subjects. During the final stages of my work 
 I have often realised the profound wisdom of Pascal's 
 famous ending of his sixteenth Lettre Provinciate : "Je 
 n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas en 
 le loisir de la faire plus courte."
 
 PREFACE 
 
 To properly understand the relations of modern France 
 with the Revolution, and the working of its political insti- 
 tutions, it has been necessary to study with attentive care 
 a number of subjects referred to only incidentally in these 
 volumes. It, however, seemed better to confine the actual 
 scope of this work to the two themes mentioned above 
 than to add a third volume on the jurisdictions of the great 
 interior departments of the State, which in France sur- 
 vive revolutions and changes of regime. It would needs 
 have been a fragmentary and inexhaustive supplement to 
 a work which I have striven to make as complete as 
 possible ; but I have planned another to deal with the 
 Centralised Administration, the Church and Education, 
 the Judicial and Fiscal Systems, as well as with questions 
 relating to Capital and Labour, to the Colonies and to 
 the Army. 
 
 " Diligence and accuracy," said a great master of our 
 language, " are the only merits which an historical writer 
 can ascribe to himself." My experience is that an author 
 may with greater confidence vouch for his diligence than 
 for his accuracy, even though he treat not of the dim ages 
 of which Gibbon wrote, but of events in the lifetime of 
 men he has seen or of contemporary laws and practices. 
 The most scrupulous care does not assure perfect immu- 
 nity from error, as I found out in the attentive revision 
 to which these volumes have been submitted. There was 
 a point of electoral jurisprudence on which the text-books 
 were obscure, and though not of international importance, 
 it is interesting to students of comparative procedure ; so 
 I wrote to a Deputy who is a parliamentary authority to 
 clear it up, and incorporated his answer in my text. 
 Later, being invited by the experienced and intelligent
 
 xii PREFACE 
 
 Mayor of a village to be present at a poll over which he 
 presided, I repeated the question to him, and he gave a 
 completely different reply. Finally, I referred it to a 
 Senator, and he demonstrated so clearly that both the 
 Deputy and the Mayor were wrong, that I adopted his 
 version. The incident shows that neither familiarity 
 with a country nor assiduous care, nor the kindly help 
 of its best-informed inhabitants, can insure infallibility. 
 I hope, however, that errors of fact are not frequent in 
 this work ; and should any have survived its vigilant 
 emendation I shall be extremely grateful if readers or 
 critics will point them out to me.
 
 A TABLE OF SOME OF THE MOKE IMPORTANT DATES 
 IN THE HISTORY OF FRANCE SINCE THE FRENCH 
 REVOLUTION 
 
 1789 Opening of the States-General at Versailles, May 5. 
 
 The Third Estate resolves itself into a NATIONAL ASSEMBLY, 
 
 June 17. 
 
 Fall of the BastiUe, July 14. 
 Declaration of the Rights of Man, August 20. 
 
 1790 Division of France into Departments, January 15. 
 Suppression of titles of nobility and all honorary distinctions, 
 
 June 19. 
 Federation on the Champ de Mars, July 14. 
 
 1791 Death of Mirabeau, April 4. 
 
 The flight to Varennes of Louis XVI. and his family, June 20. 
 The King accepts the Constitution of 1791, September 13. 
 First meeting of LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY, October 1. 
 
 1792 Sack of the Tuileries, August 10. 
 
 Massacres in the prisons of Paris, September 2 and 3. 
 First meeting of CONVENTION : Battle of Valmy, September 20. 
 ABOLITION OF THE MONARCHY : Commencement of Republican 
 Era, September 21. 
 
 1793 Execution of Louis XVI., January 21. 
 Beginning of Vendean War. 
 
 Fall of the Girondins, May 31. 
 
 Revolutionary Calendar came into use September 22. 
 Execution of Marie Antoinette, October 16. 
 Bonaparte at the Siege of Toulon, December 19. 
 
 1794 The Reign of Terror may be considered to have lasted from the 
 
 arrest of the Girondins in October, 1793, to the fall of Robes- 
 pierre (9 Thermidor, An II.), July 27, 1794. 
 
 1795 Suppression of the Revolutionary Tribunal. 
 Death of Louis XVII. at the Temple, June 12. 
 Constitution of An III. adopted, August 22. 
 
 xiii
 
 xiv TABLE OF DATES 
 
 1795 13 Venddmiaire, An IV. : Bonaparte suppresses the anti-Revolu- 
 
 tionary insurrection in Paris, October 5. 
 Nomination of the DIRECTORY, November 1. 
 
 1796 Bonaparte Chief of the Army of Italy. 
 
 Battles of Castiglione, August 5, and of Arcola, November 15. 
 
 1797 Battle of Rivoli, January 14. 
 
 18 Fructidor, An V. : Coup d'etat of Augereau against the 
 
 counter-revolution, September 4. 
 Treaty of Campo Formio (France and Austria), October 17 : 
 
 Bonaparte returns to Paris, December 5. 
 
 1798 Egyptian Expedition : Battle of the Pyramids, July 21. 
 
 1799 Invasion of Syria by Bonaparte : Battles of Mouut Thabor, April 
 
 16, and of St. Jean d'Acre, May 16. 
 Bonaparte returns to France : Coup d'etat du 18 Brumaire, 
 
 November 9. 
 BONAPARTE FIRST CONSUL, December 13 : Constitution of An 
 
 VIII. 
 
 1800 Administrative reorganisation by Bonaparte. 
 Battle of Marengo (Austrians), June 14. 
 Battle of Hohenlinden (Austrians), December 3. 
 
 1801 Retirement of French from Egypt. 
 
 1802 Peace of Amiens (England, France, and Spain), March 25. 
 Ratification of Concordat, and organisation of Public Education. 
 Bonaparte Consul for 10 years, May 8; and for life, August 2. 
 
 1803 Rupture of the peace with England. 
 
 1804 Assassination of the Due d'Eughien, March 21. 
 Proclamation of EMPIRE, May 18. 
 Publication of Civil Code. 
 
 Preparations to invade England. 
 
 Coronation of Napoleon at Notre Dame, December 2. 
 
 1805 Napoleon King of Italy, March 18. 
 Battle of Trafalgar, October 21. 
 
 Battle of Austerlitz (Austrians and Russians), December 2 : 
 Treaty of Presburg, December 26. 
 
 1806 Battle of Jena (Prussians), October 14: The continental 
 
 blockade. 
 
 1807 Battle of Eylau (Russians), February 8. 
 
 Battle of Friedland (Russians), June 14: Peace of Tilsitt, 
 July 8. 
 
 1808 Invasion of Spain. 
 
 1809 Battle of Wagram (Austrians), July 6.
 
 TABLE OF DATES 
 
 1810 Divorce of Josephine: Marriage of Napoleon and the Arch- 
 
 duchess Marie Louise, April 1. 
 
 1811 Birth of the King of Rome, March 20. 
 
 1812 French reverses in the Peninsula. 
 
 Invasion of Russia : Retreat from Moscow began, October 19. 
 
 1813 Campaign of Germany: Battle of Leipsic (coalition), October 
 
 18, 19. 
 
 1814 Campaign of France : First Entry of the Allies in Paris, March 
 
 31 : Abdication of Napoleon, April 11. 
 FIRST RESTORATION : Louis XVIII. enters Paris, May 3. 
 Opening of Congress of Vienna, November 3. 
 
 1815 Napoleon lands from Elba at Golfe Juan, March 1. 
 
 Flight of Louis XVIII. : Arrival of Napoleon in Paris, March 20 : 
 HUNDRED DAYS. 
 
 Battle of Waterloo, June 18. 
 
 Second Entry of the Allies in Paris, July 6 : SECOND RESTORA- 
 TION. 
 
 The White Terror. 
 
 Arrival of Napoleon at St. Helena, October 13: Execution of 
 Marshal Ney, December 7. 
 
 1820 Assassination of the Due de Berry, February 13. 
 
 Birth of his son the Due de Bordeaux (Comte de Chambord), 
 September 29. 
 
 1821 Death of Napoleon at St. Helena, May 5. 
 
 1823 Action of France with Holy Alliance : Occupation of Spain : 
 
 Siege of Trocadero, August 31. 
 
 1824 Death of Louis XVIII., September 16 : Succession of Comte 
 
 d'Artois as CHARLES X. 
 
 1825 Coronation of Charles X. at Reims. 
 
 1827 Battle of Navarino, September 20. 
 
 Fall of the " Ultra ".ministry of M. de Villele. 
 
 1828 Moderate ministry of M. de Martignac. 
 
 1829 The " Ultras " return to office under M. de Polignac. 
 
 1830 Invasion of Algiers. 
 
 Revolution of July : Abdication of Charles X. : Due d'0rle"ans 
 
 becomes King of the French. 
 MONARCHY OF JULY: Louis PHILIPPE. 
 
 1831 Casimir-Perier Ministry. 
 
 1832 Death of the Due de Reichstadt (King of Rome). 
 Ministry of llth of October (Broglie, Thiers, Guizot). 
 A rrest of the Duchesse de Berry.
 
 xvi TABLE OF DATES 
 
 1836 Mol Ministry : Arrest of Louis Napoleon at Strasbourg, October 
 
 30. 
 1840 Louis Napoleon lands at Boulogne and is imprisoned at Ham. 
 
 Soult-Guizot Ministry. 
 
 Second Funeral of Napoleon. 
 
 1842 Death of the Due d'Orle*ans, heir to the throne, July 13. 
 
 1843 The entente cordiale between France and England. 
 
 1844 The Pritchard affair. 
 1846 The Spanish marriages. 
 
 1848 Revolution of 24th February: Abdication of Louis Philippe. 
 The SECOND REPUBLIC : The Constituent Assembly. 
 Insurrection in Paris : The Days of June. 
 
 Louis Napoleon Bonaparte elected President of the Republic, 
 December 10. 
 
 1849 The Legislative Assembly. 
 
 1851 The Coup d'etat: The Presidency conferred by plebiscite on 
 
 Louis Napoleon for ten years, December 2-28. 
 
 1852 The SECOND EMPIRE : Louis Napoleon after a second plebiscite 
 
 proclaimed Emperor as Napoleon III., December 2. 
 
 1853 Marriage of Napoleon III. with Eugenie de Guzman (de Mon- 
 
 tijo), January 30. 
 
 1854 Crimean War. 
 
 1856 Birth of the Prince Imperial : Treaty of Paris. 
 
 1859 Italian War : Battles of Magenta and Solferino : Peace of Villa- 
 
 franca, April-July. 
 
 1860 Treaty of Turin : Cession of Savoy and Nice to France, March 24. 
 Commercial treaty between England and France. 
 
 1862 Mexican Expedition. 
 
 1867-69 Gradual transformation of Government into "Liberal Em- 
 pire." 
 
 1870 Plebiscite on the Revised Constitution. 
 
 War with Prussia : Battle of Sedan, September 2 : Fall of the 
 
 Empire. 
 
 THIRD REPUBLIC : Revolution of 4th of September. 
 Investiture of Paris : Campaign of the Loire. 
 Surrender of Metz, October 27. 
 
 1871 Capitulation of Paris, January 28. 
 
 Election of National Assembly, which met at Bordeaux Feb- 
 ruary 12. 
 
 Signature at Versailles of preliminaries of peace, including 
 cession of Alsace-Lorraine, February 26.
 
 TABLE OF DATES 
 
 1871 Entry of Germans in Paris, March 1. 
 
 Insurrection of the Commune, March 18. 
 
 Treaty of Frankfort, May 10. 
 
 Defeat of Commune and occupation of Paris by Versailles troops, 
 
 May 26, 
 M. THIERS proclaimed "President of the French Republic," 
 
 August 31. 
 1873 Death of Louis Napoleon, January 9. 
 
 Resignation of M. Thiers : MARSHAL MACMAHON President of 
 
 the Republic, May 24. 
 
 1875 Dissolution of the National Assembly after it had voted the 
 
 CONSTITUTION OF 1875. 
 
 1876 First Elections of Senate and Chamber of Deputies under new 
 
 Constitution. 
 
 1877 The Seize Mai. 
 
 1879 Resignation of Marshal MacMahon : M. GRVY President of 
 
 the Republic. 
 
 Death of the Prince Imperial in Zululand, June 1. 
 The Legislature returns to Paris from Versailles. 
 
 1880 The Ferry decrees issued relating to religious Orders. 
 
 1881 Gambetta Prime Minister, November 14 to January 26, 1882 
 
 (Le Grand Ministere). 
 
 1882 Death of Gambetta, December 31. 
 
 1883 The Second Ferry Ministry, the most durable of all the Ministries 
 
 of the Republic, held office from February 21, 1883, to March 
 30, 1885. 
 Death of the Cornte de Chambord, August 24. 
 
 1884 Partial Revision of the Constitution. 
 
 1885 Disaster of Lang-Son, March 28. 
 
 Re-election of M. Grevy as President of the Republic, Decem- 
 ber 28. 
 
 1886 General Boulanger Minister of War, January, 1886, to May, 1887. 
 Expulsion of the Princes of families which had reigned over 
 
 France. 
 
 1887 Resignation of M. Gre'vy ; M. CARNOT President of the Republic, 
 
 December 3. 
 
 1888 Progress of Boulangist movement. 
 
 1889 Election of General Boulanger as Member for Paris, January 27 : 
 
 His flight from France, April 1. 
 
 1890 M. de Freycinet Prime Minister for the fourth time. 
 1892 Exposure of the Panama affair.
 
 xviii TABLE OF DATES 
 
 1893 Visit of the officers of the Russian squadron to Paris. 
 
 1894 Assassination of M. Carnot : M. CASIMIK-I'KKIKK President of 
 
 the Republic, June 27. 
 Death of the Cointe de Paris, September 8. 
 
 1895 Resignation of M. Casimir-Pe'rier : M. FELIX FAURE President 
 
 of the Republic, January 17. 
 Madagascar attached to the French Colonies, December 12. 
 
 1896 M. Meline formed the 34th Cabinet which had taken office iu 
 
 France since the resignation of M. Thiers in 1873.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 A WRITER who undertakes the study of the institu- 
 tions and tendencies of a nation not his own, and espe- 
 cially an Englishman who thus turns his attention to 
 France, has before him two great masterpieces, the 
 methods of which it behooves him to observe. The one is 
 the journal of an English traveller in France : the other 
 is the treatise of a French philosopher on an English- 
 speaking community. Though a century has passed since 
 Arthur Young published the record of his rides through 
 France on the eve of the Revolution, it retains all its 
 freshness: and if he is now only read with curiosity by 
 his countrymen, the French regard him as a classic 
 authority on the outward aspect of their land in the last 
 days of the old regime. Tocqueville's work on the new 
 Democracy of America which sixty years ago attracted 
 the notice of thinkers of all nations has little in common 
 with that of the Suffolk squire, who had no pretension 
 to abstract science. Arthur Young notes incidentally 
 day by day his impressions on the condition of the people 
 and the political movement imminent among them in 
 a minute inquiry into the state of French agriculture, 
 while Tocqueville sets himself the deliberate task of 
 remarking the phenomena arising out of the democratic
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 expansion of the Anglo-Saxon stock. Each undertook 
 his inquest at a momentous stage of the progress of 
 civilisation. The Travels in France were completed 
 under a regime eight hundred years old, just before the 
 great upheaval, which, in destroying it, convulsed the 
 world. Tocqueville crossed the Atlantic also on the eve 
 of a revolution, less resounding, but of more permanent 
 and wide-spread effect than that of 1789. Many of the 
 actors in that stupendous drama survived in France, and 
 in America he saw men who had taken part in the War 
 of Independence. It was the roseate morning of the 
 Orleanist dispensation. The French bourgeoisie which 
 had led the revolt against the ancient bondage, had, after 
 forty years' wandering in a series of wildernesses, entered 
 the promised land of statutory monarchy and of middle- 
 class domination: while to complete its complacent joy, 
 England, its constitutional pattern, in whose history it 
 had found far-fetched revolutionary antitypes, now fol- 
 lowed the lead of France, and 1832, which endowed the 
 British middle-classes with political power, was the echo 
 of the glorious Days of July. But though it was the 
 period of the century when the tradition of the French 
 Revolution was most in favour, its results had produced 
 disillusion in the minds of philosophers who had the 
 power of detaching themselves from superstitious rever- 
 ence for theories and for doctrines. The nightmare of 
 the Terror was the starting-point of the memories of all 
 the elders of that generation, and those who were born 
 after the reign of the Jacobins had seen with their young 
 eyes the other tangible results of the Revolution: the 
 reconstruction of France by the agency of military des- 
 potism; the delivery of the autocratic fabric by foreign
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 conquerors to the heir of divine right, reinstated to deck 
 it as a constitutional figure-head of the English model; 
 the clerical reaction which called forth the parliamentary 
 Monarchy of the middle-classes. Hence observers like 
 Tocqueville, sceptical of the finality of any successive 
 phase of the Revolution, turned with hope to the Western 
 Continent and its new civilisation untrammelled by a 
 past. 
 
 Just as the English squire riding through France 
 could not in his forecast of the coming storm anticipate 
 that its lasting result would be a solid construction of 
 centralised government raised by a too victorious soldier, 
 so the French philosopher returned from America con- 
 vinced that he had seen the land where the social revolu- 
 tion was so simple and uncomplicated that it had nearly 
 attained its limits. A few years later the application of 
 steam-power and electricity was so to transform the con- 
 ditions of life on that continent, that rapid means of 
 communication and consequent commercial development 
 produced a social revolution greater than that which in 
 the Old World followed the fall of the Bastille and the 
 abolition of privilege. We who stand at the close of the 
 century which has seen the reconstruction of France by 
 Napoleon, and the more momentous changes wrought 
 all over the globe by scientific inventions, which have 
 deprived Europe of its uncontested supremacy as the 
 centre of civilisation, and which in communities, old and 
 young, have raised new social questions and altered the 
 aspect of the eternal struggle between rich and poor: we 
 whose calendars will soon mark the last stage of the 
 second millenary period of the Christian era may prob- 
 ably witness unexpected phenomena which will even
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 more completely upset the calculations of philosophic 
 observers. 
 
 Such considerations ought not to discourage the 
 student of human institutions from minutely analysing 
 the systems of government or the political and social 
 tendencies of his time ; but they should deter him from 
 the facile pastime of prophecy which has allured the 
 most cautious of philosophers. No modern publicist is 
 more lucid than Tocqueville, or more suggestive in ideas 
 regarding the development of mankind: yet when he 
 descends from the vantage ground whence he made -his 
 accurate and sagacious observations he goes as far astray 
 in his predictions as any empiric watching the human 
 movement from an arm-chair. Indeed he recognises the 
 futility of forecast: "Dans le tableau de 1'avenir le 
 hasard forme tou jours comme le point obscur ou Toeil 
 de 1'intelligence ne saurait pe'ne'trer. " x 
 
 The pages of Tocqueville display the attractiveness of 
 generalisation, a method which was perhaps inevitable 
 in treating of a young democracy without a past. But 
 there would be no excuse for a writer who used it in a 
 treatise on France, the last country in the world about 
 which it is possible to generalise. The ignoring of this 
 truth by the men of the Revolution was a leading cause 
 of the anarchy and horror after 1789. None were ever 
 more eloquent in generalities than the Jacobins of the 
 revolutionary assemblies. Superficially equipped with 
 the theories of Rousseau, they evolved from them general 
 principles which unhappily they were in a position to 
 apply to the government of France. We all know what 
 the result was, and how the ruin thus consummated had 
 1 Democratic en Amirique, vol. ii. c. 10.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 to be repaired by the hands of the greatest master of 
 detail the world has ever seen. Napoleon had the impar- 
 tial eye of an alien to discern the nature of the evil ; but 
 Voltaire, who knew his countrymen as well as their 
 Corsican protector came to know them, had said that in 
 every section of the nation, in all the relations of life, 
 were found side by side all the contradictions and incom- 
 patibilities possible to imagine. 1 
 
 The treatise of Tocqueville, moreover, would be more 
 instructive if his illustrations were less fragmentary, and 
 if he dissimulated less the particulars whereon he bases 
 his conclusions, which sometimes have the air of the 
 dogmatisms of a moralist instead of being the reflections 
 of a diligent traveller. The completely contrary method 
 of Arthur Young has great merits. He, however, had 
 the happy chance of keeping his roving diary at one of 
 the most interesting crises of human history, and a cen- 
 tury later a daily record of life in France could, at its 
 best, only furnish a collection of unarranged material for 
 future students. An admirable example of work of this 
 class is a posthumous volume of M. Taine, his Carnets 
 de Voyage, consisting of notes made in the French prov- 
 inces, when under the Second Empire he was an itinerant 
 examiner of candidates for St. Cyr. His more finished 
 Notes sur VAngleterre, and his Voyage en Italic, show 
 what excellent literature can thus be produced by a 
 master-hand; but this was mere holiday diversion com- 
 pared to the great work of his life, of which the chief 
 feature is the methodical classification of the results of 
 his research and experience. 
 
 These worthy examples of diligence and observation 
 1 Candide, c. xxii.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 aid in projecting his plans the writer who has undertaken 
 the examination of the problems of government and other 
 cognate questions in a nation which is the most complex 
 product of civilisation on the face of the globe. While 
 discarding the method adopted by Arthur Young, the 
 drawbacks of which he modestly sets forth in the first 
 pages of his journal, as I have been led to give exclu- 
 sively to this work a number of years, which few, even 
 of those who could spare them, would care to devote to 
 the consideration of a foreign country, I venture briefly 
 to relate how they have been occupied. 
 
 II 
 
 I came to France in May, 1890, and wrote the last 
 lines of these volumes more than seven years later, hav- 
 ing in the interval not spent seven weeks away from 
 French soil, as I had soon perceived that uninterrupted 
 residence in the land was the only means of accomplish- 
 ing my self-imposed task. In bygone days the French 
 provinces had often attracted my steps, not only haunts 
 of tourists, such as Normandy, Touraine, and Provence, 
 but less familiar ground, from the industrial region of 
 the North-East, where the factory smoke of Sedan has 
 not yet obscured the traces of the fumes of battle, to 
 Poitiers and Angouleme in the West, where in the 
 vineyards far from the frontier the phylloxera is more 
 dreaded than the ravages of human invaders. Thus 
 when the idea of -writing a work on France brought me 
 to live in Paris, I went there not quite as a stranger. 
 In the first months I made or renewed acquaintance with 
 many Parisians of various types and schools of thought,
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 including M. Renan, M. Taine, Comte Albert de Mun, 
 Mgr. Freppel, and M. Clemenceau. A sad thought over- 
 shadows the memory of that pleasant summer. Three of 
 the five names I have just written are no longer those of 
 living men ; and in the ranks of all whom I have known 
 during my sojourn in France death has made ruthless 
 havoc. Cardinal Manning, without whose affectionate 
 interest my knowledge of certain phases of French life 
 would have been less intimate, said of the projected 
 work, "It is like writing the history of a kaleidoscope," 
 and the words have had a meaning not intended by the 
 venerable Cardinal, who himself has submitted to the 
 kaleidoscopic power which changes the aspect of human 
 society without reference to the vicissitudes of govern- 
 ment or the mobility of national temperament. 
 
 One who has thus disappeared of those whom I saw 
 in my early days in France was the British Ambassador 
 to the Republic. Lord Lytton had, in that capacity, 
 some injustice done to his remarkable talents, coming 
 as he did to the Embassy in Paris between two of the 
 most distinguished envoys ever lodged in the h6tel of 
 Pauline Borghese. His predecessor, Lord Lyons, was 
 the ablest professional diplomatist of his time in the 
 English service, and his successor, Lord Dufferin, a 
 politician by training, has taken into retirement the 
 fame of the most brilliant representative the Queen 
 has had beyond the seas during her long reign. Lord 
 Lytton had, however, a quality precious in an ambas- 
 sador to France, possessed by neither of those eminent 
 men, and rarely found in any countryman of ours. 
 In the course of my life I have known the four or 
 five Englishmen reputed to have had the completest
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 acquaintance with France and its people, but the faculty 
 possessed by each of them was akin to the knowledge 
 which an attentive doctor has of a patient. With skill, 
 often painstaking and accurate, they diagnosed the 
 French; but not one of them had that sympathy, in the 
 sense in which the Latin races use the term, cherished 
 by Lord Lytton for the men and women of France. 
 During his mission in Paris it happened that the French 
 Ambassador in London was M. Waddington, who, for 
 different reasons, had an analogous gift of understand- 
 ing the springs of English action. Both diplomatists 
 were of undeviating loyalty to the lands of their alle- 
 giance, but each had the inestimable capacity of dis- 
 cerning the point of view of the people with whom he 
 had to treat. If modern ambassadors held in their hands 
 the issues of peace and war, it might promote the calm 
 of Europe could we always install in the Faubourg St. 
 Honore* a Parisian-minded Briton, while Albert Gate 
 was tenanted by an English public-schoolman who had 
 rowed in a University race. 
 
 My first provincial voyage cT Etudes I will describe with 
 some detail to show how I made it my aim from the first 
 to see people of every calling and of every class of the 
 community, without distinction of party. It was a 
 happy experience. When wayfaring in France as a 
 tourist the towers of a chateau seen among the woods 
 from the roadside, or a prefecture standing in its park 
 in a country town, or the modest home of a rural priest 
 beneath the shadow of a church, had always filled me 
 with wondering desire to know what manner of people 
 dwelt within those walls ; so having read and imagined 
 much about the lives they led, it would not have been
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 surprising if some disillusion had followed my first entry 
 into this novel society. Nothing of the sort occurred, 
 and the memory of my opening journey as a resident in 
 France is a series of pleasing pictures. During several 
 previous years I had travelled in distant English-speak- 
 ing lands, studying various phases of the expansion of 
 our race in our own admirable Colonies, and in the 
 United States; but the strenuous impressions brought 
 home from these edifying voyages had not unfitted me 
 to appreciate more restful adventures amid an older 
 civilisation. Even now, when I know the French prov- 
 inces as few foreigners can know them, the familiar 
 scenes of daily life which meet the casual view give me 
 pleasurable sensations as keen as when I was a passing 
 stranger. A bishop blessing little children in the aisles 
 of his cathedral, a group of white-coifed peasant women 
 in a market-place, or a red-legged regiment swinging 
 through a village to the strains of a bugle-march has 
 now for me not merely the sentimental or picturesque 
 interest of former days. I know, indeed, that the lives 
 of many of these people are neither ideal nor idyllic, 
 but I recognise now in these provincials, with all their 
 failings, the true force of France which keeps her in 
 the front rank of nations, in spite of the follies, gov- 
 ernmental and otherwise, committed in her beautiful 
 capital. 
 
 The first prolonged halt on my journey of 1890 was 
 made at Autun. I went there on the invitation of 
 Mgr. Perraud, the learned Academician, who, being in 
 intellect and in character an ecclesiastic superior to 
 those whom the Republic is wont to honour under the 
 provisions of the Concordat, was made to wait inordi-
 
 10 INTRODUCTION 
 
 nately for his Cardinal's hat. The hours I spent in the 
 old palace of the Dukes of Burgundy, of which Talley- 
 rand was once the episcopal occupant, were more memo- 
 rable because of the presence of the Bishop's brother, the 
 late Abbe* Charles Perraud, the intimate friend of Henri 
 Perreyve, who, the hope of the Church in France, did 
 not attain even the early age at which Pascal died. 
 My copy of his correspondence with Charles Perraud 
 belonged to another very dissimilar companion of those 
 days at Autun. Mr. Hamerton was then living in the 
 Morvan, in the rural homestead of which English readers 
 well know the charm, and it was an advantage to have 
 his judicious counsel at the outset of my work. Certain 
 phases of life in France he knew better than any natives 
 of the soil, though he retained his English characteristics 
 most remarkably amid domestic surroundings peculiarly 
 French. He was a perfectly unprejudiced observer of 
 the ways of the nation in the midst of which he lived, 
 as befitted a philosopher of original gifts and elevated 
 view. 
 
 From Autun I went to Le Creuzot to stay with 
 M. Schneider, the owner of the great iron-works and 
 ordnance factory, whose father was president of the 
 Corps Le'gislatif under Napoleon III. There I carefully 
 studied the conditions of existence in a mining and 
 industrial centre in which the relations of capital and 
 labour are generally harmonious, examining the work- 
 men's dwellings, the schools, and the organisations for 
 the encouragement of thrift. My next visit was a pleas- 
 ant experience of a very different order. In the hill- 
 country of the Forez, near the upper Loire, I went to see 
 the Vicomte de Meaux, a cultivated historian who was
 
 INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 twice a minister under Marshal MacMahon, and it was a 
 happy hazard for an Englishman that in the first rural 
 chateau to which he was invited the chatelaine was a 
 daughter of M. de Montalembert, whose admiration for 
 England was such that the judges of the Second Empire 
 sentenced him to imprisonment for his suggestive praises 
 of British rule. 
 
 My next stage was Lyons. M. Jules Cambon, since 
 Governor-General of Algeria and now Ambassador at 
 Washington, was then Pre*fet of the Rh6ne, and by his 
 obliging kindness I was enabled not only to study the 
 administrative system as organised in the second prefec- 
 ture of France, but I was put into relations with many 
 of the notables of the great provincial capital who direct 
 the self-governing institutions of which the Lyonnais 
 are proud. The civic hospitals, the savings-banks, the 
 enterprises for housing and for feeding the poor, to say 
 nothing of the religious establishments, some of which 
 the late Cardinal Foulon permitted me to visit, make 
 Lyons one of the most interesting places in Europe, the 
 practical arts being perfected by a population which con- 
 tains contending elements of mystical fervour and of 
 revolutionary turbulence. From Lyons I visited two 
 other important towns. At Grenoble, the old metropolis 
 of Dauphiny, which has grown into a modern industrial 
 city, I attended the sittings of the Conseil-Ge'ne'ral and 
 was aided in my inquiries by M. Robert, the Pr^fet of 
 the Isere; and at St. Etienne, where the surroundings 
 of toil are less picturesque, I first made acquaintance 
 with French trade-unionists and socialists. 
 
 On my way to the eastern frontier I stopped at Bourg- 
 en-Bresse, a typical agricultural centre, going thence to
 
 12 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Besangon, Vesoul, and Epinal, chief towns of depart- 
 ments which are important both for strategic reasons and 
 because of their industrial development due to the immi- 
 gration from the annexed provinces. Thence I crossed 
 the Vosges into the lost territory, and made an excursion 
 of pathetic interest, the Alsacians whom I met at Stras- 
 bourg, Mulhouse, and elsewhere being nearly all of the 
 class passionately devoted to France. After a visit to 
 Belfort, the heroic fragment of the Haut Rhin saved 
 from Germany, I went to Nancy, which, unlike most 
 disenthroned capitals, has preserved a sumptuous air of 
 grandeur. At all the places within the French boundary 
 I had ample opportunity of studying the sentiments of 
 every section of the frontier population, in visits to 
 republican prefectures and to royalist chateaux, and in 
 frequent intercourse with soldiers and functionaries as 
 well as with permanent denizens of the borderland. 
 Before returning to Paris by Domre'my and Reims I saw 
 two former Prime Ministers who had little in common 
 except their Vosgean origin and their thankless experi- 
 ence of a statesman's calling in France. M. Jules 
 Ferry lived hard by the frontier at St. Die*, his birth- 
 place, and the electors of his native city had just ejected 
 him from Parliament in return for his services ever since 
 the creation of the Chamber. M. Buffet, spared from 
 such vicissitude by being an irremovable senator, dis- 
 played the advantage of the now abrogated system of 
 nomination. Though much older than his republican 
 antagonist, though his official career ended when that of 
 M. Ferry began, and though unlike him he had not the 
 solace of knowing that since his fall France was ruled 
 by his political friends, M. Buffet seemed to take a more
 
 INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 buoyant view of life than did his neighbour. The vener- 
 able leader of the Reactionaries knew his party too well 
 to have any illusions about its future; but for a student 
 of French institutions it was a privilege to listen to one 
 whose long public career began as a Minister in 1848, 
 and I took away some historical lessons of value from 
 the chateau of Ravenel. 
 
 My subsequent journeyings shall be more briefly sum- 
 marised. After passing some months in Paris I started 
 again in 1891, returning to Lyons, which contains mate- 
 rial for frequent study worthy of the second city of 
 France. Thence I went to Marseilles, and stayed long 
 enough to get a certain insight into the life of the com- 
 posite population. Crossing to Algeria, during a long 
 visit I was able to examine the peculiar system of 
 administration followed in this quasi-colonial possession, 
 and also the more practical methods of Cardinal Lavi- 
 gerie's Pdres Blancs. I travelled as far as the frontier 
 of Tunis, and returned to France by way of Corsica, 
 exploring a large portion of the island which, after Great 
 Britain, has had more influence on the destinies of 
 modern Europe than any other insular fragment of that 
 continent. 
 
 After a brief summer season in Paris we set out for 
 the West, visiting the cities of Le Mans, Angers, and 
 Vannes. There in the Morbihan the Comte de Mun 
 met us, and under his amiable guidance we had many 
 glimpses of Breton life rarely accorded to strangers. 
 In hospitable chateaux and in village presbyteries, at 
 pardons and at horse-fairs, in fishing hamlets and in 
 moorland towns, our surroundings made it hard to realise 
 that we were living among the subjects of a Republic,
 
 14 INTRODUCTION 
 
 for the Encyclical referring to that state of things, which 
 the next year dismayed Catholic and Royalist Brittany, 
 was not yet delivered to the printer of the Vatican. 
 
 We travelled slowly by Nantes and La Rochelle to 
 Bordeaux, an attractive city where- a genial commerce 
 promotes proficiency in the art of living, and from the 
 vine-country passed to the Landes, a sequestered region, 
 of which the kindly inhabitants display marked local 
 characteristic. Then several Pyrenean towns were vis- 
 ited, including Lourdes, which for a student is one of 
 the most interesting places in Europe a century after the 
 installation of the cult of Reason on the altar of Notre 
 Dame. We advanced into Languedoc as far as Carcas- 
 sonne, taking away pleasant memories of home life in 
 remote chateaux, of which the inmates disdain the dis- 
 tant joys of Paris, and go for their winter season to 
 Toulouse. We had already halted in that exuberant 
 city, so turning north we came to Limoges, an example 
 of how in France the prosperity of a smoky trade does 
 not deface the landscape. Then we drove through 
 George Sand's country, lingering in many a forgotten 
 town and village in the Creuse and the Indre which were 
 household words fifty years ago, and so we came to the 
 capital of the Berry. Apart from its ecclesiastical and 
 industrial features, Bourges presented a phenomenon 
 which, outside Paris and away from the Alpes Maritimes 
 and from certain summer resorts, I have rarely encoun- 
 tered on my travels in France : we met an Englishman. 
 It is true he had for his singular enterprise the excuse 
 of a special mission, the explorer being Sir Frederick 
 Leighton, who was studying cathedral architecture in 
 the preparation of an academical address.
 
 INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 The circumstances of my life now made prolonged 
 journeys somewhat difficult, so, with the exception of 
 visits to Chartres and other places near the capital, I 
 remained in Paris till the summer of 1892, when it 
 seemed more advantageous to choose a provincial neigh- 
 bourhood for a residence of some months than to be per- 
 petually roving. Travelling, indeed, is most essential 
 to gain a general view of a country, and to compare the 
 tendencies and sentiments of the populations; but it is 
 also necessary to live quietly among the people in order 
 to observe at leisure their daily life. Moreover, for 
 studying the uniform institutions of France one locality 
 serves just as well as another. The centralised adminis- 
 tration and the educational system, the clergy and the 
 magistracy, are organised on identical lines in Touraine 
 and in Provence. The chief town of a department, of 
 an arrondissement or of a canton, or a simple commune 
 provides precisely the same material for study in Gascony 
 as in Champagne, or indeed in Algeria, a fact which I 
 realised during my first visit to that dependency when 
 attending a meeting of a rural municipal council: the 
 formalities of the proceedings, the nature of the business, 
 to say nothing of the physiognomy and the diction of the 
 councillors, gave the illusion that the village was in the 
 vicinity of Marseilles or of Cette rather than of a colonial 
 city in Africa. 
 
 By good fortune I mentioned my idea to M. Taine, 
 and with his aid I found a house near his home on the 
 Lake of Annecy. Before another summer came the great 
 critic and philosopher was laid to rest by the waterside, 
 and already declining health had limited his attractive 
 powers of intercourse; but the form of my work was
 
 16 INTRODUCTION 
 
 considerably influenced by his conversations, while an 
 agreeable intimacy with his family gave me a valuable 
 insight into his method of study. After this memorable 
 sojourn of three months in the Haute Savoie I visited 
 Lyons for the third time, and thence descended the RhSne 
 by boat, halting at Vienne, Valence, and Avignon. We 
 stayed for some time at Montpellier, which, with its 
 learned Faculties, has the air of a University town. 
 During this southern tour of exceptional interest we 
 called at Rodez and Montauban, and had some varied 
 experience of country-house life in the Aveyron and the 
 Landes, while I followed my usual plan of seeing people 
 of every description, from reactionary bishops to anti- 
 clerical professors. Returning to Paris we paid some 
 visits in the chateaux near the capital, thus ending the 
 year in Seine-et-Oise with the late Due de Rohan. If I 
 name that lamented gentleman of the old school, it is not 
 merely as a tribute of friendship, but because he was in 
 my experience the last survivor of his class who had 
 retained a savour of the ancient regime. He had been 
 brought up among the men and women of the Emigration 
 who had taken part in the diversions of the Court of 
 Louis XVI., and who imparted to the children of the 
 Restoration a lingering trace of that charm of manner 
 whereof the eighteenth century had the secret. 
 
 Of the places visited in the next two years a bare 
 enumeration must suffice, which can give no idea of the 
 ever-varying charm of travel on French soil. The spring 
 of 1893 we spent on the Mediterranean, quitting the 
 tourist track and seeing many unfamiliar places. We 
 went inland by way of Aix, and from Aries traversed 
 the Camargue, exploring the Dead Cities of the Gulf of
 
 INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 Lyons, in one of which, Aigues Mortes, modern social 
 questions are discussed with lively emphasism. At 
 Nimes I saw something of the Protestants who have their 
 chief seat here: thence we went through the Cevennes 
 to Le Puy, and through Auvergne to Clermont Ferrand. 
 That summer we passed on the shores of the Gironde, 
 described by Michelet in La Mer, where another French 
 Protestant population survives in the Huguenot settle- 
 ments of Saintonge, and here I witnessed the general 
 elections. Early in 1894 we revisited Algeria, and on 
 our return made a tour in Burgundy before going to the 
 Chablais for the summer. The shores of Ldman are not 
 far from Annecy, so we went to stay in the home of M. 
 Taiue at Menthon; and there in his library, untouched 
 since he left it, among his annotated books, I was able 
 better than ever to realise the industry and research with 
 which he had pursued the study of the origins of modern 
 France. I paid a fourth visit to Lyons, and then spent a 
 month in country houses in the Charollais, in an interest- 
 ing district on the borders of a great mining basin and of 
 an agricultural country. I thus visited Paray-le-Monial, 
 where the devout inhabitants accept with joy the decision 
 of the Holy See that it is not an article of faith to believe 
 in the prodigies of Lourdes, which have eclipsed the 
 more venerable shrine of Marie Alacocque. Thence I 
 went to Dijon to inspect the military quarters in that 
 city of valiant renown during the Prussian invasion. 
 We remained in Paris till the spring of 1895, when we 
 made a new series of tours in the Nivernais, in Touraine, 
 and in Picardy. 
 
 Paris had now been my home for five years and I had 
 steadily pursued my task to the exclusion of all other 
 
 VOL. I C
 
 18 INTRODUCTION 
 
 occupation, but I was not quite satisfied with its pro- 
 gress. From each provincial journey I had brought 
 back a mass of information, and in Paris I was never 
 idle, but the writing accomplished there displayed an 
 inharmonious contrast in tone to the studies made in the 
 tranquil air of the provinces. A foreigner who lives in 
 Paris, and who frequents the dissimilar circles of its 
 society, cannot escape the agitating influence of conflict- 
 ing coteries. Paris still contains the material for the 
 most attractive society in the world, but unhappily so 
 disorganised, so split up into sections, and so modified 
 by the pleasure-seeking cosmopolitan element that so- 
 cially the brilliant city is losing its character of a great 
 metropolis. The fashionable class has no relations with 
 the governing class, and the men of genius, wit, and 
 intellect have little dealings with either. Here and 
 there the borderland between the various groups is 
 indistinct, but generally speaking, fashion, politics, and 
 culture rarely meet on common ground. If a stranger 
 express his regret at this state of things he is told that 
 it is inevitable : the triflers reprobate the morals of poli- 
 ticians: the politicians disparage the mental faculties of 
 the fashionable : the workers and thinkers who, in spite 
 of the others, maintain the prestige of France, more 
 quietly disdain both categories which between them 
 have destroyed the great glory of French society, the 
 salon. Moreover, in Paris one sees too many news- 
 papers, and as publicists of the boulevards are wont to 
 revile in rude language their fellow-countrymen who do 
 not agree with them, the enjoyment of an unlicensed 
 press is apt to distort a stranger's ideas of the people 
 of the land.
 
 INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 Paris, again, though one never looks at a newspaper or 
 sets foot in society, is a distracting and seductive city, 
 even in these days when the march of civilisation is 
 trampling down much of its old characteristic. There 
 is no place on the globe where it is so easy to imagine 
 that a day of sauntering has been fruitful in good work. 
 A morning spent on the Quays in search of a serious 
 book, an afternoon passed in a studio listening to theo- 
 ries, may familiarise a stranger with the ways of the land 
 of his sojourn, but they do not speed him in the progress 
 of un travail de longue haleine to use an expressive 
 phrase which shows that the French understand the 
 conditions of successful effort. For it is to be noted 
 that Paris has not this laxative effect on the Parisian 
 inured to its atmosphere. A felicitous discourse of M. 
 Kenan's had for its text the query, "Peut-on travailler 
 en province ? " but though he took eloquent pains to 
 prove to his audience at the Sorbonne that inability to 
 perform intellectual work in the provinces was a fallacy 
 born of the centralising heritage of the Revolution, he 
 never availed himself, save at holiday times, of the pro- 
 vincial advantages which he extolled, and I do not think 
 that it was his Hebrew Chair at the College de France 
 which bound him to the capital. Among his surviving 
 colleagues at the Institute, the variety of French genius 
 has never been more signally displayed than by M. 
 Ludovic Halevy and M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, and both 
 of those eminent authors have assured me that it is in 
 Paris that their powers of production are most active. 
 It is among the smiling lawns which skirt the Bois de 
 Boulogne that the grave economist proves his worthi- 
 ness to be the compatriot of Bastiat and the kinsman
 
 20 INTRODUCTION 
 
 of Michel Chevalier, while the sombre heights of Mont- 
 martre have inspired the creator of Madame Cardinal to 
 add to the gaiety of nations ; but the atmosphere of Paris 
 equally pervades those dissimilar quarters. 
 
 Though M. Halevy once courted his muse in the sub- 
 urban groves of St. Germain, I can testify that amid 
 rural scenes he ceased to be a writer, for he was my 
 neighbour for two pleasant summers. Not being a Pari- 
 sian I was beset by the conviction that to accomplish my 
 work I must find a place removed from influences which 
 disturbed its unremitting pursuit, and we found it in the 
 Brie hard by the domain of the amiable Academician. It 
 was a chateau built in the last days of Louis XIII., with 
 all the architectural grace of that stately epoch ; and in 
 the next century it acquired some literary associations, as 
 its woods adjoined those of Grandval, so the guests of 
 Baron d'Holbach sometimes came that way, as Diderot 
 recorded in his letters to Mile. Voland. It was thus 
 almost within sight of the capital, so uninterrupted work 
 was possible without the isolation of enforced solitude. 
 The provincial excursions were not wholly abandoned : 
 once we went to Poitou driving through the Vendee and 
 the Deux Sevres, and another time we visited Normandy ; 
 but for the greater part of two years I rarely left my 
 writing. 
 
 These volumes were not, however, finished there, for, 
 compelled to winter in the south, I went to Nice, being 
 the first foreigner in the cognisance of the Prefet of the 
 Alpes Maritimes, who, since the annexation, had chosen 
 that garish cosmopolis for a sojourn, because of its ad- 
 ministrative attractions as a Chef-lieu de Departement. 
 I had my reward in witnessing some interesting phases
 
 INTRODUCTION 21 
 
 of French local government, notably when that accom- 
 plished agent of the Republic, M. Henry, who has since 
 been promoted to be its Minister at Bukharest, issued a 
 proclamation, in which, citing Napoleon's Decree of 
 Messidor, he forbade all public officials, from the clergy 
 to the magistracy, to attend the New Year's reception of 
 the Mayor, as the elect of popular suffrage had affronted 
 the representative of centralised authority. It was a 
 striking corroboration of what I have suggested more 
 than once in the following pages, that under every 
 regime, Republican or Monarchical, autocratic or parlia- 
 mentary, the civic life of the nation is regulated by the 
 durable machinery of the Napoleonic settlement. Since 
 then I have sought other practical means of verifying 
 the contents of these volumes in the course of a long 
 driving tour through the Basses Alpes, the Hautes Alpes, 
 and the Isere, finally completing them near Chambery, a 
 city of exceptional amenity, almost within sight of Les 
 Charmettes, where Rousseau first studied philosophy with 
 consequences which changed the destinies of France. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It was M. Taine who first represented to me the mag- 
 nitude of my task, relating his own experiences with his 
 Origines de la France Contemporaine, which, conceived 
 in his early manhood, were still unfinished forty years 
 later. Before I realised the nature of the enterprise my 
 idea was to live in Paris for a year or so in the intervals 
 of provincial tours, and to finish the work in England, 
 a plan so unpractical for the study of a complex society 
 with its deluding surface of symmetrical institutions that
 
 22 INTRODUCTION 
 
 one short summer excursion would have better qualified 
 me for it. Mr. Hamerton, from his experience, gave me 
 some sound advice on this point. "There are two mo- 
 ments," he said, " for writing : one when the writer 
 knows nothing about his subject (which is the time 
 often chosen by travellers for composing their descrip- 
 tive works), and the other when he knows a great deal ; 
 in the intermediate stage, if he is acquiring knowledge, 
 its acquisition destroys the confidence which he had 
 before learning, and which he can only retrieve after 
 having learned." Not that a stranger's first ideas of a 
 country are to be despised, if only he will not parade 
 them as a definite and weighty judgment. A new-comer 
 is often struck with characteristics which, apparent to his 
 superficial view, soon evade the notice of the most observ- 
 ant student as the land and its people become familiar to 
 him. A writer is wise, therefore, to note early impres- 
 sions as they indicate the points on which his countrymen 
 need information. 
 
 There is another objection to studying in a limited 
 period a nation like France, with its conflicting institu- 
 tions and its profound internal divisions. A non-resident 
 traveller who examines a strange country must needs be 
 dependent on the polite inhabitants who display to him 
 its features. He cannot help being affected by the opin- 
 ion of his guides ; or if he takes an independent view 
 he feels bound to modify it so as not to rudely oppose 
 that of his hosts, who on their part communicate, with- 
 out intentional insincerity, a conventional or highly 
 coloured impression not quite in accordance with their 
 own belief. The impartial wayfarer who frequents antag- 
 onistic circles of society, especially in a land where the
 
 INTRODUCTION 23 
 
 breaches between them are impassable, is not in much 
 better case, for with two sets of friends whose prejudices 
 he wishes to respect, he sums up the cases of rival advo- 
 cates with judicial inconclusiveness. English authors 
 who write treatises on English-speaking communities are 
 not subject to this disadvantage, as a Briton who goes 
 to the British colonies or to the United States possesses 
 on landing, in instinct, education, and language, the 
 equivalent of a long residence in a foreign country. 
 There are, however, certain monographs published on 
 the continent on English institutions, which though 
 painstaking and interesting are too clearly the reflec- 
 tion of the opinions of the authors' English friends 
 to be valuable as works of reference or as essays in 
 philosophy. 
 
 A writer who sets himself to examine a foreign country 
 may compare himself with one commissioned to investi- 
 gate the working of a great railway company. Such an 
 one, if he wished his report to be of value, would not be 
 satisfied with a few picturesque journeys over the smooth- 
 est portions of the line in the comfortable saloon of the 
 directors, who with personal attention further facilitated 
 the inquiry. Still less would he content himself with 
 the opinions of discharged officers of the company, expo- 
 nents of a contrary system of management, or of malcon- 
 tent shareholders who wished to change the directorate. 
 He would assiduously utilise all those means of informa- 
 tion, but he would supplement them with a searching 
 independent inquiry. He would explore the line in all 
 directions, not disdaining the humblest class of convey- 
 ance or the slowest trains : he would elicit from his 
 fellow-passengers their travelling experiences and inter-
 
 24 INTRODUCTION 
 
 rogate the servants of the company ; he would ascertain 
 the frequency and the gravity of accidents, the standard 
 of punctuality observed, the tariff of fares and of freights, 
 the condition of the rolling-stock and of the permanent- 
 way, the wages paid to workpeople, taking care to com- 
 pare all his private information with official documents. 
 Such an inquest would require time, patience, and dili- 
 gence, yet it would be a mere holiday task by the side 
 of an investigation into the functions and working of the 
 institutions of a great nation. 
 
 If I had confined myself to a few instructive tours, 
 alternating sojourns in anti-republican chateaux with 
 visits to provincial towns to see the authorities, I should 
 have got some vivid impressions of contradictory phases 
 of French life, auxiliary to my sedentary studies, with- 
 out acquiring a competent knowledge of France. An 
 itinerant in a strange land, whether lodged in an inn or 
 beneath a hospitable roof, has no real experience of the 
 working of its institutions. The government of the 
 country, the administrative, judicial, and fiscal systems, 
 although he has glimpses of their machinery and hears 
 much of their advantages or inconveniences, have no 
 practical purport for him. They only become realities 
 to the student who submits himself to the conditions of 
 existence of the people he is studying. Then as a house- 
 holder, a tax-payer, or if needs be, as a litigant, in unre- 
 stricted and unfavoured commerce with all classes of the 
 population, he can turn to profit the daily incidents of 
 life, or even its vexations. As for the latter, the wheels 
 of civic existence turn smoothly in France for the law- 
 abiding and the unagitated. All nations have their 
 self-imposed crosses to bear. The French complain,
 
 INTRODUCTION 25 
 
 with some reason as we shall see, that they are eaten 
 up by functionaries, but the scourge is not so devastat- 
 ing or so palpably useless as that of the lawyers who 
 eat us up in England. The incidence of taxation 
 oppresses French citizens, but, save for the limited class 
 which has direct dealings with the municipal octroi, its 
 payment is a joy compared with the harassing process 
 which tax-payers, imperial and local, have to endure in 
 the United Kingdom. 
 
 IV 
 
 While the business of everyday life thus tends to give 
 the foreign settler a favourable impression of the country, 
 there is a contrary influence abroad in France to which a 
 resident is more exposed than a passer-by. The esprit 
 critique which made the French Revolution has never 
 ceased to be active, but under the Third Republic it has 
 taken the form of pessimism, acute and contagious, affect- 
 ing every portion of the nation, excepting that which 
 goes resolutely about its daily work without troubling 
 to think whether France is ill or well governed, or what 
 is the precise nature of her prestige among the powers 
 of Europe. The phenomenon is so striking that it is 
 necessary to consider its causes, as those adduced do 
 not adequately explain the affliction of a large propor- 
 tion of the sanguine French nation with a malady resem- 
 bling that which their wits used to impute to the splenetic 
 denizens of our fog-bound island. 
 
 France is not the only country stricken with pessimism 
 at the end of the nineteenth century. The disease now 
 follows in the trail of civilisation, ravaging communities
 
 26 INTRODUCTION 
 
 irrespective of their racial origin or system of govern- 
 ment. It has infected individuals ever since the world 
 began, but the epidemic form in which we know it is so 
 recent that its name was not recognised as a French 
 word till forty years after the Revolution. To judge 
 from what has occurred since .that neologism was moulded, 
 increased rapidity of communication and other scientific 
 improvements, excepting those connected with the heal- 
 ing art, will not increase the sum of human happiness. 
 Their primary effect is to destroy repose and to agitate, 
 thus inducing nervous tension, which is the physical cause 
 of most phases of hypochondria. France has not had to 
 submit to such neurotic influences more than other lands, 
 so there the advantages of civilisation are not the special 
 cause of the inordinate growth of pessimism. Moreover, 
 in other respects, civilised progress has had less depressing 
 results in France than elsewhere. We do not find there, 
 for instance, any counterpart of the hopeless misery of the 
 poor of our English cities, which has been aggravated to a 
 degree unknown in other communities by the congestion 
 of population owing to locomotive facilities, as well as by 
 the substitution of machinery for manual labour. The 
 social question is serious in France, but it does not present 
 any such sombre pictures of extreme suffering calculated 
 to deject the view of those disposed to gloom. Thus 
 French pessimism cannot be regarded as merely a symptom 
 of the universal malady of the age, and there are peculiar 
 causes which give to the nation its predisposition, unnatu- 
 ral to its temperament, to contract inordinately the dolo- 
 rous contagion. 
 
 The special cause of pessimism in France in the last 
 generation of the century is usually said to be the disas-
 
 INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 trous issue of the war with Prussia. Witnesses who are 
 old enough to have known France before 1870, natives as 
 well as foreigners, declare that the immediate effect of the 
 German victory was the disappearance of certain charming 
 qualities which till then had characterised the French 
 nation. The gaiety, the genial sociability, the politeness 
 of the people, which made their capital the most attractive 
 collection of human beings in Europe, were all crushed in 
 the fatal nine months between the Battle of Worth and 
 the Treaty of Frankfort. France, they say, came out of 
 that struggle like a man who blithe, expansive, and pros- 
 perous is smitten with an illness which leaves him prema- 
 turely old, peevish, and suspicious, as well as damaged in 
 fortune and bereaved in his affections. Those who had 
 not reached manhood when that transformation took place 
 can judge of its extent only from oral or written tradition ; 
 but while it seems certain that France was a land of 
 greater amenity under the Second Empire than under 
 the Third Republic, and while no one can doubt the dis- 
 tressing moral effect on the nation of defeat and loss of 
 territory, a close study of the people and their history 
 convinces that the contrast thus depicted is too indiscrimi- 
 nate. As for the simile of the man broken with sickness, 
 nations are happier than mortals in being able perpetually 
 to renew their forces. This is emphatically true of a race 
 as buoyant as the French, and on the morrow of their 
 reverses they left on record manifestations of their swift 
 recuperative power. 
 
 The literature of the period contains little trace of being 
 the production of a people in mourning, and it is notably 
 free from the ill-conditioned pessimism which blemishes, 
 as the French recognise with regret, much of their work
 
 28 INTRODUCTION 
 
 in the third decade after the war. The drama in France 
 is the reflection of the feelings and tendencies in the nation, 
 and if we examine the pieces written at this epoch by 
 Dumas fils, whom the highest authorities regard as an 
 unerring guide in this respect, 1 we find his Frenchmen 
 and Frenchwomen who discussed subtle problems on the 
 boards of the Theatre Frangais after the loss of Alsace- 
 Lorraine, not more solemn than those whom he put on the 
 stage of the Gymnase in the light-hearted days of the 
 Second Empire. His most brilliant successor, M. Pailleron, 
 made his fame with a play written in the early years of the 
 Republic, and the life-like creatures who people Le Monde 
 oil Von s'ennuie, whatever their vanities or their charms, 
 are not a band of morose cynics like the miscreants, politi- 
 cal and fashionable, who monopolise the scenes of French 
 comedy at the end of the century. In fiction, Octave 
 Feuillet's heroes and heroines were as romantic after 
 Sedan as in the days when he spent the intervals of com- 
 posing in the gay circle at Compie'gne and at Fontaine- 
 bleau; but, though in losing his Imperial protectors he 
 had more personal reason for gloom than perhaps any 
 other writer, his creations after the war evinced none of 
 the dyspeptic despondency of the unwholesome characters 
 of the analytical school, who have now taken possession 
 of French romance. 
 
 If imaginative literature reflects the particular temper- 
 ament of the writer as well as the spirit of the age, there 
 is another source of evidence free from that confusion. 
 The debates of the National Assembly from 1871 to 1875 
 are entirely dissimilar in tone to those of the Chamber of 
 Deputies in the third decade of the Republic. Under the 
 1 See vol. ii. p. 291.
 
 INTRODUCTION 29 
 
 presidencies of M. Carnot and M. Faure scepticism and 
 violence have been the dominant notes of parliamentary 
 eloquence : under M. Thiers and Marshal MacMahon, 
 though party strife was bitter, the language of the depu- 
 ties showed that while there was keen dissension as to 
 who should be entrusted with the government of France 
 all men were inspired with a dignified hope for the desti- 
 nies of their country. This tone is apparent even in the 
 inquiry, conducted by the Assembly, into the tragic story 
 of the National Defence. Personal recrimination was 
 sometimes heard, for a dire heritage of the great Revolu- 
 tion is the inability of the French to sink internecine dis- 
 cord in the face of public tribulation ; but the men of all 
 professions and parties who deposed to the causes of dis- 
 aster were hopeful rather than downcast, and as we read 
 their testimony we say, these are the sons of a great 
 nation who know how to profit from the lessons of adver- 
 sity. Yet the Prussian was still encamped within their 
 borders, the ravage of siege and of battle was unrepaired, 
 the streets were black with mourners for those who had 
 fallen in defeat, and France, without even a settled gov- 
 ernment, was not only mutilated but isolated. After a 
 quarter of a century of prosperous peace, with a form of 
 government so undisputed that it is the most stable of 
 those enjoyed by France for over a hundred years, in the 
 period which has brought her into close amity with 
 another great power, we must avoid perusing the utter- 
 ances of her public men in Parliament and in the press, if 
 we would retain unimpaired our belief in the grandeur of 
 the French. 
 
 We may be told that the pessimism of the century's end 
 is due to the fact that the generation maturing in it got
 
 30 INTRODUCTION 
 
 its first impressions in the dark days of defeat, so that all 
 those born or adolescent at that epoch had their fancy 
 tainted with images of gloom. The theory might be 
 plausible if an intemperate cult of the serious were a 
 feature of modern French pessimism, or if 1870 were the 
 first year in which France had suffered disaster. There 
 never was a season when the spirit of the nation was mer- 
 rier than under the Restoration after the invasions which 
 deprived it of its Revolutionary spoils. The removal of 
 the nightmare of war and carnage with which Napoleon 
 had oppressed France was enough to cause a reaction of 
 gaiety in the first years of relief; but as time went on 
 without any renewal of national glories, depression did 
 not fall upon the people. Twenty-seven years, which lie 
 between us and the battle of Sedan, form a large span 
 in the life of a nation, and especially of modern France. 
 Only twenty-seven years divide 1788 from 1815. In the 
 former year Bonaparte was a needy subaltern at Auxonne 
 in the service of Louis XVI., anxious for his mother 
 struggling to support her children at Ajaccio ; in the 
 latter he landed at St. Helena, having in the interval 
 made an Emperor of himself and kings of the Corsican 
 orphans, having changed all the frontiers of Europe, and, 
 with more durable effect, having reconstructed France. 
 The like space of time which followed his disappearance 
 was less crowded : instead of nine or ten changes of con- 
 stitution or regime there was only one, the Revolution of 
 July, so France had leisure to brood over the ills of 1815; 
 but the middle period of Louis Philippe's reign was 
 never excelled for the healthy and gladdening tone both 
 of literature and of opinion. The national thirst for 
 glory was not extinct, as the Orleanists found out in the
 
 INTRODUCTION 31 
 
 ominous enthusiasm evoked by the second burial of 
 Napoleon. Moreover, despondency and discontent ex- 
 isted then as they always do ; but when Alfred de Musset 
 bemoaned his conception between two battles, and sug- 
 gested that the melancholy of his age bore the stamp of 
 the agitating events which had surrounded a childhood 
 whereof Waterloo was the earliest tradition, his contem- 
 poraries, not so afflicted, ascribed his distemper to the 
 influence, moral and literary, of Byron, rather than to the 
 political visions which haunted his cradle. 
 
 The loss of Alsace-Lorraine, an integral part of the old 
 realm, no doubt weighed more heavily on French hearts 
 than the retrocession of the spoils of war after the fall of 
 Napoleon, but it is not the cause of the pessimism of 
 to-day. M. Jules Claretie, when visiting the conquerors 
 of the lost territory, wrote, " Twenty-seven years have 
 passed, and our domestic brawls, insults, and animosities 
 have thrust out of sight our simple and patriotic hopes of 
 regeneration and revenge." The observant Academician 
 is an ardent Republican who tries to make the best of the 
 regime, so his reflections which the sight of Berlin in- 
 spired are valuable. The rancorous discord in French 
 public life is a persistent source of the malady which has 
 a more depressing effect than the distant memory of a 
 sharp grief ; and the steady growth of pessimism is a sure 
 sign that there is something essentially wrong in the 
 government of the country. The root of the ill is to be 
 found not in its Republican form, though the democratic 
 basis of that regime extends the area of the evil, but in 
 the parliamentary system. 
 
 While it is an uncongenial task for an Englishman to 
 condemn the parliamentary institutions of any cornmu-
 
 32 INTRODUCTION 
 
 nity, the day is past when an inability to appreciate them 
 would be imputed to a people as a reproach. Even in 
 the heyday of superstitious belief in the oecumenical util- 
 ity of British institutions, the political educator, who 
 later was adopted in that capacity by the nation which 
 invented parliaments, sounded an audacious note of 
 scepticism. "' I go to a land,' said Tancred, ' that has 
 never been blessed by that fatal drollery called a repre- 
 sentative government, though Omniscience once deigned 
 to trace out the polity which should rule it." Mr. 
 Disraeli, when he thus delivered himself in the Asiatic 
 romance which he studded with his personal opinions, 
 was a member of the House of Commons, and as he had a 
 profound faith in his future domination over that body, 
 he was by anticipation ungrateful for the fame he found 
 there. His peculiar genius would not have reached so 
 lofty an eminence in any other sphere. He was not an 
 administrator, never once as a minister undertaking the 
 drudgery of a departmental headship ; nor is it easy to 
 fancy him in holy orders, competing for the chair of St. 
 Augustine. As an ambassador he might have shone, 
 but at an earlier epoch, when effulgence was encouraged 
 in embassies. As a novelist he was incomparable, yet he 
 failed to touch popular fancy. The House of Commons 
 was his destined arena, and the estimate of this great 
 Member of Parliament, who was moreover endowed with 
 the cosmopolitan instinct of his race, is useful to recall, 
 when France, having made unexampled trial of parlia- 
 mentary government, has found it to be in the words of 
 its consummate master "a fatal drollery." 
 
 Previous French experiments in representative institu- 
 tions were always too short-lived, being abbreviated by
 
 INTRODUCTION 33 
 
 revolution, and were founded on too artificial a basis to 
 afford material for judgment. But under the Third Re- 
 public they have been tried during a period of perfect 
 peace and domestic tranquillity on a democratic founda- 
 tion, under the most durable regime of the century, which 
 has never had a serious rival ; and out of these favouring 
 circumstances the parliamentary system has emerged 
 irretrievably discredited. The temperament of the French 
 people is not the sole cause of its failure. A fundamental 
 obstacle to thwart its working is its combination with a 
 centralised administration constructed to be manipulated 
 by one strong hand, and instead of modifying the defects 
 of centralisation, parliamentary government aggravates 
 them. The fatal incompatibility has been carefully 
 studied in these volumes, and one only of its results need 
 be mentioned here. An essential feature of a centralised 
 bureaucracy is the profusion of offices held directly from 
 the State ; and the French have found out that whatever 
 the evil of vesting their patronage in a strong central 
 power, it is more harmful to the commonwealth to trans- 
 fer it to the elected representatives of the nation. For, 
 as we shall see, each member of Parliament, not hostile to 
 the Government, thus becomes a wholesale dispenser of 
 places, controlling the administrative and fiscal services 
 in his constituency, and supervising the promotion of the 
 judges. Moreover, to augment his popularity, a legislator 
 likes to have as many posts as possible to bestow ; so the 
 tendency of representative government is to effect not 
 economy but the multiplication of state-paid offices, ruin- 
 ing the finances of the country, and turning the industri- 
 ous French people into a nation of needy place-hunters. 
 Under previous parliamentary regimes this evil was not
 
 34 INTRODUCTION 
 
 patent, as the electorate was extremely limited, and if 
 every voter in France had been given a post under Louis 
 Philippe the bureaucracy would not have been unduly 
 swollen ; whereas with ten million constituents encour- 
 aged to regard their members in this light, the rich 
 resources of the land are strained, and citizens are taken 
 away from callings which increase the national riches, are 
 deterred from colonial enterprise, and are generally di- 
 verted from ambitious pursuits which elevate the standard 
 of a nation. 
 
 An Englishman who observes this sad state of things, 
 and the depressing effect it has on some of the most 
 enlightened thinkers in France, exclaims : " But why not 
 do away with your centralised system, and give parlia- 
 mentary government a chance ? " The reply is, that if 
 the Napoleonic fabric of centralisation, which has survived 
 all the vicissitudes of the century, were demolished, it 
 would bring down with it every institution in France 
 with havoc more ruinous than that of 1789, and to build 
 another structure, another Napoleon would be needed. 
 It may be that he planned his reconstruction on wrong 
 lines, as M. Taine objects, and instead of strengthening 
 the centralising features of the old regime he would have 
 done better to strew the land with autonomic institutions. 
 But on his return from Egypt in 1799, ten years of revo- 
 lution had made anarchy and chaos so complete that his 
 genius alone could have saved the integral existence of 
 France ; and when mortals are endowed with superhuman 
 power on rare occasions in the world's history they are 
 not mild doctrinaires, nor would they be able to cope with 
 the crises which produce them were their qualities those 
 which befit benign constitutional organisers. It is, how-
 
 INTRODUCTION 35 
 
 ever, futile to dream of what Napoleon might have done, 
 especially as subsequent events indicate that autonomic 
 institutions would not have suited the French, while it is 
 certain that the centralised system does conform to their 
 wants and ideas. Proofs of this fact abound. 
 
 In the first place, while several times in the century the 
 French have overturned dynasties and. engaged in civil 
 war, when the fray was over and the new regime set up, 
 though the Government of the country was manned 
 entirely with opponents of the previous dispensation, a 
 material change was never essayed in the essential fabric 
 of the Napoleonic construction. Secondly, though trea- 
 tises on decentralisation abound in France, they show that 
 the boldest practical conceptions of reform leave the cen- 
 tralised system untouched from our English point of view. 
 They call to mind those radical schemes for re-organising 
 our public offices at Whitehall, which new ministers with 
 ingenuous zeal sometimes promote : three superfluous 
 clerks are made to retire on full pay; three other clerks 
 have their salaries raised to reward their labours thus 
 increased, and the next year three new clerks are intro- 
 duced to complete the old establishment. On a gigantic 
 scale, such are the lines on which daring decentralisers in 
 France would remodel the bureaucracy. 
 
 In the third place, the scant interest taken by French 
 citizens in the important local governing bodies which 
 they possess, shows that the majority like to depend on 
 the central power for their administration. Here and 
 there a population, as at Bordeaux, is inspired with an 
 independent municipal sentiment, and in other localities, 
 as at Marseilles, the presence of Socialists or other politi- 
 cians of vivacious manners at a council board attracts
 
 36 INTRODUCTION 
 
 attention to its superficial proceedings : but the undertak- 
 ing of projects which may possibly add to the weal of the 
 community and will certainly augment its taxation is 
 regarded with indifference. While writing these intro- 
 ductory pages I attended the opening session of the 
 Conseil-General in a provincial capital. Its public 
 spirit had been roused the previous week by a state- visit 
 of the President of the Republic, who had decorated with 
 the national Order two of the members of the Council ; 
 so the inaugural addresses of the Chairman and of the Pre- 
 fet, recording the honour paid to the departmental assem- 
 bly, contained matter of more special interest than the 
 usual financial exposition. But tax-payer and admiring 
 fellow-citizen alike remained unstirred. Five unofficial 
 spectators alone were attracted to the prefecture: two of 
 them were reporters, two were experts employed in a tech- 
 nical matter, and the uncompelled audience consisted of 
 one member of the public who was a stranger to the 
 department and to France. 
 
 A fourth sign of the suitability of the centralised sys- 
 tem to the French temperament is that not only it pro- 
 vokes no popular opposition, but its existence is approved 
 by almost every Frenchman of eminence of the great class 
 which takes no part in politics, and which brings the 
 highest credit on the nation. Philosophers and artists, 
 men of science and men of business, of various views on 
 social and ecclesiastical questions, are generally unani- 
 mous in holding that the centralised fabric is necessary to 
 the existence of France as a tranquil country in which 
 art, letters, research or riches may be pursued. Before 
 coming to France, my native prejudices against the prin- 
 ciple of centralisation had been modified by experience at
 
 INTRODUCTION 37 
 
 the Local Government Board, where I had seen how salu- 
 tary was the effect of a centralised control over elective 
 authorities when exercised by impartial officials of high 
 character. But that is a gentle form of centralisation, 
 not incompatible with representative government, and an 
 Englishman has an ingrained difficulty in conceiving a 
 free community unblessed by parliamentary institutions ; 
 so when my observation persuaded me of their incompati- 
 bility with the French administrative system, I was per- 
 petually pondering if it were possible for the latter to be 
 decentralised so as to work healthily under Parliament. 
 
 It sometimes happens, in all branches of inquiry, that 
 a casual conversation has more influence on the final 
 judgment of an investigator than his most assiduous 
 studies and reflections. Constantly revolving this prob- 
 lem in my mind, one summer evening I strolled up 
 from the Seine to Meudon to see M. Janssen and his 
 famous observatory. Astronomers are no longer con- 
 sulted, as in days of old, on questions of government, 
 though, if it be true that certain political sciences have 
 been relegated to the planets, we shall have recourse 
 again to their open vision : but there was a special 
 reason why our talk turned to the terrestrial subject 
 of centralised institutions. I had first met M. Janssen 
 at Lyons, within sight of the summit of Mont Blanc, on 
 which he has placed his intrepid post of observation, 
 and he had come to aid a movement, favoured in that 
 city, towards "University Decentralisation." The idea, 
 the practical progress of which I hope to deal with one 
 day, is not revolutionary, its aim being the creation in 
 the provinces of establishments of Superior Education 
 which will check the migration of the youth of France
 
 38 INTRODUCTION 
 
 to Paris ; and the foundation of Universities independent 
 of the Ministry of Public Instruction is not contemplated. 
 The retention of this jurisdiction led us to speak of the 
 general principle of centralisation, and the venerable 
 savant, himself a decentraliser, declared with strong 
 emphasis that the system of supervision exercised by 
 the capital on the local government of the country was 
 the essential power which kept France together. I 
 recalled that on the occasion when he came to Lyons, 
 I had said to M. Jules Cambon, then Prefet of the 
 Rhone, and now an Ambassador of the Republic, that 
 amid my admiration for the organisation over which he 
 presided, the thought surged up that if a British civil- 
 servant of his eminence were sent to administer Man- 
 chester as the political agent of the Government of the 
 Queen, that loyal city would be in insurrection in a 
 week. But I also remembered to have seen the Prefet 
 surrounded by the leading citizens of Lyons, distin- 
 guished men who devote their lives to the local insti- 
 tutions of the second town of France, the independent 
 spirit of which is their pride. If therefore a great 
 civic population, composed of conflicting elements, accept 
 complacently the governance of an imposed authority, 
 it is clear that the system is in accordance with the 
 sentiments of the community. As we descended from 
 Meudon the reflection of the setting sun on the pano- 
 rama of Paris gave the illusion that its monuments were 
 in flame, and called to mind the summer night of 1871, 
 when the terrified dwellers on these heights looked down 
 upon the incendiary work of apostles of local autonomy, 
 which was not calculated to encourage in France essays 
 in decentralised government,
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The combination of parliamentary government with 
 centralisation is a potent cause of the pessimism of 
 French political writers. They see that the general 
 result is unsatisfactory, and that some of the chief 
 elements of the governmental system are immovable, 
 manhood suffrage being as permanently established in 
 France as the centralised administration. Thus the only 
 hope of an improved state of things lies in the prospect 
 of the voice of the nation delegating its powers to an 
 authoritative hand instead of to parliamentary repre- 
 sentatives. But apart from the retrograde character of 
 such a change, which would sadden doctrinaires, no 
 leader capable of touching popular sympathies has shown 
 the faintest sign of existence. When he arises he may 
 be the bon tyran of M. Kenan's optimist dreams; but, 
 on the other hand, there is always the fear of a shallow 
 military adventurer being disastrously hailed to rescue 
 the land from parliamentary anarchy. Moreover, the 
 most definite prospect of ending the present state of 
 things rests in the vague future which lies beyond the 
 issues of the next European conflict; and war is so 
 dreaded by the French, in spite of their martial tem- 
 perament, that rather than contemplate its horrors they 
 would submit to an infinitely worse regime than the 
 present, to the defects of which the great mass of the 
 population is absolutely indifferent. 
 
 Thus the pessimism which is now prevalent is for a 
 paradoxical reason more wide-spread than that of previous 
 periods. For the first time in France since the Encyclo- 
 pedists began to undermine the old Monarchy, no one 
 has a substitute to propose for the existing regime ; 
 under every other its opponents solaced themselves with
 
 40 INTRODUCTION 
 
 the thought that one day it could be dispensed with ; 
 and though this idea detracted from the stability of 
 dynasties, it also checked the demoralising belief that 
 however bad things were, no remedy was possible. Un- 
 der the Restoration, M. Guizot's letters show that he 
 was utterly discouraged at the convergence of the Royal 
 Government towards the principles of the Holy Alliance : 
 but the Liberals, with the precedents of 1688 always be- 
 fore them, were never destitute of hope that they would 
 one day enjoy a statutory monarchy of the English pat- 
 tern. So under the Second Empire Prevost-Paradol, 
 long before he ever contemplated service under Napo- 
 leon III. or its tragic sequel, criticised the situation 
 with such bitter raillery that his friends compared his 
 talent to that of Swift ; but the men of that time who 
 thought themselves oppressed by Imperial rule were not 
 hopeless. Republics in France had hitherto been inter- 
 vals of turmoil and anarchy between a revolution and 
 an autocracy, so knowing nothing of Republican govern- 
 ment as a state of existence in time of peace, they 
 invented an ideal which they hoped would take tangible 
 form after the Empire had passed away. 
 
 The survivors of the Opposition of that day attest 
 that the youth of France, under the so-called tyranny of 
 Louis Napoleon, was as happy and as sanguine as it is 
 now cynical or dejected. M. Lavisse, the Academician, 
 who has all his life studied the rising generation, de- 
 scribes the gaiety with which youthful aspirants after 
 liberty used to hiss Sainte-Beuve at the College de 
 France, and Edmond About at the Odeon, because they 
 frequented the Court, and their joy when they received 
 from Belgium a contraband copy of Les Chdtiments,
 
 INTRODUCTION 41 
 
 enclosed in a plaster bust of the Emperor, whose head 
 they broke to the music of Victor Hugo's fierce stanzas. 1 
 The young men of the Empire retained their hopefulness 
 beyond the misfortunes which produced the Republic, 
 and it is only in its third decade that their disillusion 
 has become complete. M. Sarcey, who has escaped the 
 malady of the age by renouncing politics, except as a 
 subject for reminiscence, writing of an old class-mate, 
 Dionys Ordinaire, who was one of Gambetta's allies in 
 the heroic days of the Second Empire, said, "Republic 
 was for him a word of magic sound, capable of ele- 
 vating the moral sense and of healing all the ills of 
 humanity." 
 
 Short of such Utopian ideals the Third Republic had 
 every chance of bringing credit on Republican institu- 
 tions and on France which adopted them. The prestige 
 of the Third Republic would have been the great justifi- 
 cation of the French Revolution, but the era in which its 
 tradition has lost its glamour is that in which France has 
 been in undisputed enjoyment of the form of government 
 representing the principles of 1792. The most notable 
 propagandist of pessimism in France has been M. Taine, 
 and the chief moral result of his last great work is the 
 irretrievable damage inflicted by it on the legend of the 
 Revolution. If, however, the Republic had been strik- 
 ingly successful, if it had employed in its service the 
 worthiest sons of France, and encouraged politicians of 
 decorous example, if the records of its legislature had 
 been free from scandal, and if economical finance and use- 
 ful legislation had been the product of the parliamentary 
 
 1 Jeunesse cTautrcfois et jeunesse tfaujourcThui, par Ernest Lavisse de 
 l'Acadmie Frangaise.
 
 42 INTRODUCTION 
 
 system, the illustrious name of Taine would not have 
 availed to discredit the great Revolution which the Third 
 Republic claimed peculiarly to personify. It is, however, 
 doubtful if in that case he would have denounced it so 
 mercilessly. His criticisms of the old Monarchy and of 
 the Napoleonic reconstruction show that it was not as a 
 partisan of any regime that he attacked the Revolution. 
 But he lived, the attentive observer of the unfolding 
 history of his country, for twenty-two years after the 
 foundation of the Republic, and instead of being the vin- 
 dication of the Revolution, it justified in its annals the 
 anti-Revolutionary judgment of the philosopher. 
 
 At the other end of the moral and intellectual scale 
 there is a most dissimilar pessimist influence ever at work 
 in France. The violent press ought to have no effect on 
 the mind of the impartial student of French institutions, 
 but he has to take into consideration its wide-spread 
 power for evil. Every day throughout France are dis- 
 tributed tens of thousands of cheap journals, which, ex- 
 pressing every shade of opinion from the doctrine of the 
 Commune to reactionary clericalism, have one feature in 
 common, the scurrilous aspersion of public men. Some- 
 times the objects of their fury are not worthy of the high 
 position to which the hazards of an ill-contrived political 
 system have raised them : but as a rule the defamatory 
 clamour has little relation with the real actions or char- 
 acter of the persons denounced. At all events, it is 
 demoralising for the nation that those who read the news- 
 papers in town and country should daily be told that all 
 Frenchmen in authority, whether politicians, diploma- 
 tists, judges, or ecclesiastics, are tainted with vice or even 
 branded with crime. The evil is spreading, as there are
 
 INTRODUCTION 43 
 
 provincial journals which outdo the most abusive prints 
 of the boulevards in traducing the gallant chiefs of the 
 army. 
 
 By eschewing the loud-toned organs which instruct the 
 multitude, and perusing nothing in the press which is not 
 signed by names of high authority, the newspaper reader 
 in France does not escape pessimistic influence. One of 
 the ablest of French political writers is M. Jules Roche, 
 a former minister of the Republic. Summing up a series 
 of elaborate studies on the parliamentary system after 
 twenty years of undiluted Republican rule, he declares, 
 " We are the worst governed country in the world ; or I 
 will say, so as to hurt no one's feelings, one of the very 
 worst." This Member of Parliament may have personal 
 reasons for not admiring the work of his colleagues ; but 
 M. Jules Lemaitre is not a disillusionised politician : he 
 has attained the highest honour which can crown a 
 Frenchman's career, and an early election to the Academy 
 ought to induce a cheerful view of the national life, at all 
 events for a few years. But he asserts that France is in 
 full decadence, and is going to its doom with its eyes 
 open, for "never was a wretched nation more conscious 
 of the ills which afflict it." He also says that "for 
 twenty-seven years it has been a doubtful pleasure to be 
 a Frenchman," so, as he was a boy at the time of the war, 
 he has never known since he came to man's estate the 
 pride of nationality. Both these writers diffuse their 
 pessimism in a widely read journal, 1 attached to no party, 
 before delivering it to the limited public which buys 
 volumes of essays ; and both of them, I venture to say, 
 formulate their discontent in exaggerated terms, which 
 1 Figaro : April 13, May 22, June 11, 1897.
 
 44 INTRODUCTION 
 
 represent the prevalent malady, rather than an accurate 
 statement of facts. 
 
 Although in this work I have freely criticised certain 
 features in the government of France, far from thinking 
 with the Republican politician that his country is " the 
 worst governed in the world," I should be perplexed to 
 mention three nations which on the whole are better 
 governed than France. Nothing which strikes the eye 
 of the itinerant stranger suggests that the country is ill- 
 governed, and he often takes home an idea, which we in 
 England have put into aphoristic form, that things are 
 managed better in France than elsewhere. Moreover, on 
 the condition of never looking at a newspaper or men- 
 tioning a political subject, one might reside for years in 
 the land without knowing that any one thought it was 
 badly governed. No doubt in the daily routine of life 
 incidents grievous to citizens arise, similar to those which 
 provoke the plaints of Englishmen offended by the ca- 
 prices of income-tax assessors or the whims of postal 
 authorities : but petty dolours such as these do not 
 depress the spirit of a nation, and we must take care to 
 discern what the ex-minister means by ill-government. 
 His strictures refer to the parliamentary system, which 
 has been regulated exclusively by his political friends for 
 twenty years ; while the well-organised daily life of the 
 nation, which is but little affected, is a striking sign of 
 the excellence of Napoleon's administrative structure. 
 
 There can be no doubt about the pessimistic effect of 
 a system of government which animates not only violent 
 malcontents, but also moderate and authoritative writers 
 to disseminate the depressing epidemic. For all that, the 
 complaints of M. Lemaitre, like those of the ex-minister,
 
 INTRODUCTION 45 
 
 are much too sweeping; for no Frenchman ought to 
 despair, when he contemplates the orderliness, the dili- 
 gence, and the thrift of the majority of the nation. The 
 solid qualities of the people, first tested by the payment 
 to the Germans of the colossal war indemnity, have reor- 
 ganised the army and produced the wealth without which 
 an alliance with another military power in need of loans 
 would have been vainly sought by the politicians. Their 
 own most tangible production has been unsound finance, 
 with the consequent increase of the burden of taxation ; 
 and the indifference of a provident democracy to the 
 prodigal proceedings of its chosen representatives is a 
 sign of the unsuitability of the regime under which it 
 lives and works, rather than of the decadence of the 
 nation. The curious phenomenon has been fully dealt 
 with in these volumes, and since they were written it 
 has inspired another member of the French Academy 
 with some of his most incisive observations on the ways 
 of his countrymen. In one of his masterly studies of 
 provincial life, M. Anatole France, describing how the 
 laborious population of a department received the news 
 of the arrest of one of its members of Parliament with 
 the same impassibility as it would have heard of his 
 nomination to an embassy, remarks : " Public opinion, 
 which was a reality under the Monarchy and the Empire, 
 has no existence in our time, and the people once ardent 
 and generous are now incapable either of love or of 
 hatred, of admiration or of contempt." 1 
 
 None of the foregoing appreciations, it is to be noted, 
 were uttered in the days of international isolation. They 
 were all made after the visit of the Tsar to Paris, when a 
 1 UOnne du Mail, par Anatole France de I'Acad&uie Franjaise.
 
 46 INTRODUCTION 
 
 monarch, for the first time since France ceased to have one 
 of her own, entered the capital in state, thus, it was said, 
 conferring lustre on the Republic, and restoring with its 
 European prestige the ancient blitheness of the nation. 
 I saw the Russian sovereigns pass through the streets 
 from the house where Talleyrand lodged another Tsar in 
 1814, and it was a suggestive spectacle to watch the 
 elected chief of the parliamentary Republic pointing out 
 the historical site to his august guests, the great-great- 
 grandchildren of Alexander I. and of George III. : for it 
 was within these walls that the Autocrat of Russia, being 
 master of the situation, decreed that France should have 
 a constitution on the model of that presided over by his 
 ally the King of England, 1 who was not able to take an 
 active part in the transactions which followed the fall of 
 Napoleon. Representative government might have been 
 tried in France without the intervention of the enlight- 
 ened despot who had a taste for political experiments: but 
 as it was actually first set up by the instrumentality of a 
 Russian Emperor, it would be an act of justice if the 
 friendship of his descendant could lead to a remedy for 
 some of the ills which its later developments have 
 brought on the French nation. 
 
 That the relations of France with Russia have not 
 brightened the view of some of the most thoughtful 
 critics is not a bad sign ; for, while in my opinion there is 
 no ground for their extreme pessimism, it is more salutary 
 for the country that its sober thinkers should have escaped 
 the strange doctrine propagated by politicians that the 
 friendship of Russia has given France a higher rank 
 among nations. A more humiliating theme was never 
 1 The circumstances are related in vol. ii. p. 254.
 
 INTRODUCTION 47 
 
 uttered in the name of patriotism. France has never 
 ceased to be a great nation, by virtue of the genius of its 
 people, irrespective of international vicissitude : but if 
 that people ever adopt the demoralising idea that their 
 national prestige depends on alien protection, it will take 
 a long step down from its high eminence. But no alli- 
 ance, however gratifying to proper patriotic pride, and no 
 military success ensuing from it, not even though it 
 restore Alsace and Lorraine to France, will bring lasting 
 satisfaction, unless a form of government be established 
 capable of working well with the permanent institutions 
 of the country. These are the Centralised Administra- 
 tion and Manhood Suffrage, and even though the master 
 whom France is always looking for arrive, he will not 
 enjoy a long reign unless he be apt to combine those 
 elements. 
 
 Amateurs of the diversified French coinage of this 
 century are familiar with a series of gold pieces of great 
 beauty, struck when it was young, the oldest bearing the 
 revolutionary date An XII, and the most modern that 
 of three years later, 1807. They are still in circulation, 
 and their unworn outlines tell of ninety years' hoarding, 
 and betoken the national virtue of thrift, to which 
 France largely owes its stability, while several genera- 
 tions of limners of the Mint have invented new effigies 
 to distinguish passing dynasties. On these coins the 
 image and superscription are worthy of note, not merely 
 for their fresh preservation of Ciesar's finely cut profile, 
 but because on their face is engraved "Napoleon Em- 
 pereur," and on the reverse " Republique Frangaise." 
 Even before the term Empire was made official, the Re- 
 public was overlaid with Imperial trappings, and we all
 
 48 INTRODUCTION 
 
 know whither the pride of empire, which they symbol- 
 ised, took the great reconstructor of France. Neverthe- 
 less the legend on these coins, with all its inconsistency, 
 seems to indicate the form of government which France 
 needs. Frenchmen who look with admiring eyes to the 
 British monarchy, the subjects of which enjoy more 
 liberty than do the citizens of their Republic, sometimes 
 define our regime as an ideal Republican government 
 with a sovereign at its head. The description is not 
 inapt; but France, instead of trying to imitate our insti- 
 tutions, unsuited to the genius or tradition of her race, 
 should organise her own, under an appropriate headship; 
 and thus an Emperor, as the chief of a Republic, far 
 from being an anomaly, might under favouring circum- 
 stances solve the unravelled problem of the century. 
 
 The word Emperor has no longer the unpopular sound 
 in French ears of the years succeeding Sedan, when for 
 a season the memory of the first Napoleon was involved 
 in the second downfall of his dynasty. No one now 
 regards Louis Napoleon as a Tiberius or a Nero; he is 
 recognised as a well-meaning and ambiguous dreamer 
 who drifted into destruction, carrying with him the 
 nation which he had previously brought to great pros- 
 perity. One pernicious heritage left by him has abun- 
 dantly developed under the Republic. After he had 
 let Prussia, uninterfered with, clear the way at Sadowa 
 for the conquest of France, and while he was devising 
 the empirical remedy of a Liberal Empire for the danger 
 thus assured, his Court became the centre of influence to 
 turn Paris into a cosmopolitan city of boisterous luxury, 
 which, encouraged within the palace, demoralised even 
 the army of France. That evil no longer exists : what-
 
 INTRODUCTION 49 
 
 ever is open to criticism now in the nation, the army, 
 in spite of isolated scandals, is exempt from the ills 
 which deface political or fashionable society. But other- 
 wise the social mischief thus sown in the capital has 
 so spread that critics of the Empire are fain to confess 
 that even its frivolous Court had restraining qualities 
 which would be salutary for Parisian license under the 
 Republic. 
 
 Never had a society such an opportunity for doing 
 service to their country as had the higher circles of 
 Paris after the war. Even after the politicians of their 
 preference had thrown away their chance of governing 
 the country, when the Republic was founded a self- 
 respecting upper-class, well organised and vigilant, might 
 have been a serious factor in French politics. If the 
 Republic had been governed by men of genius or in- 
 tegrity, no force of aristocratic pretension could have 
 impeded its popular career : but the ephemeral minis- 
 tries of the Republic have not been so composed, and 
 it might have had its days shortened if Paris had con- 
 tained a society similar to that frequented by the Lib- 
 eral Opposition under the Restoration, when the salon 
 of the Duchesse de Broglie had perhaps more influence on 
 the destinies of France than the writings of her mother, 
 Mme. de Stael. If the circumstances are not analogous, 
 the bearers of names once famous at Court or on battle- 
 field and once associated with wit and intellect, together 
 with other possessors of wealth, might at all events have 
 so shaped the corporate existence of the leisured class of 
 a great capital as to be an element in the political destiny 
 of France, and to gain the respect of Europe. 
 
 Unhappily, the well-born and the wealthy class in
 
 60 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Paris has since the war pursued a line of conduct 
 which has grieved all who love France, or who recog- 
 nise the social danger of unseemly example in high 
 places. In the course of this work I have been led 
 to mention some of the features of that curious society, 
 but in doing so I have followed the rule, which has 
 guided me in dealing with every phase of French life, 
 of never making a harsh criticism unless my own im- 
 pression were corroborated by the published opinion of 
 a respected and impartial French authority. For ex- 
 ample, in treating of this subject I have not ventured 
 to express myself as strongly as has M. Anatole Leroy- 
 Beaulieu in the following passage, which, as it contains 
 some significant English terms, would lose its force in 
 translation : " Les hautes classes sont inconsciemment les 
 grands fauteurs du socialisme. Leur vie est une predi- 
 cation contre la societe. La frivolite impertinente de la 
 jeunesse de nos salons, l'oisivet ridiculement affairee de 
 nos sportsmen et de nos clubmen, 1'etalage outrageant 
 de la de*bauche elegante, quelles lemons pour le peuple 
 de la rue ! " l This is the calm judgment of a distin- 
 guished member of the wealthy class, who has no love 
 for the parliamentary Republic, and whose philosophic 
 writings, which have given him a high place in Euro- 
 pean letters, are free from all exaggeration. 
 
 M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu deprecates the ways of 
 Parisian society because of its dangerous example : but 
 equally eminent Frenchmen, less interested in the social 
 question, deplore the saddening spectacle on other 
 grounds, and it is one of the causes of the pessimism 
 
 1 La papaute, le socialisme et la democratic, par Anatole Leroy-Beau- 
 lieu : Menibre de 1'Institut.
 
 INTRODUCTION 61 
 
 of writers like the gifted Academicians whom I have 
 quoted. It is indeed mortifying to a patriotic French- 
 man, who by his talent maintains the renown of his 
 nation, to see his beloved Paris, with all its past tradi- 
 tion and present capacity, assuming the aspect of a 
 cosmopolitan city of pleasure, and becoming, in the eyes 
 of strangers, a place like Nice or such like resort of 
 idlers, where the foreign element leads the fashion, and 
 where the affairs of the country interest no one. For 
 the most conspicuous Parisians, whose exploits are most 
 widely advertised, proclaim that, apart from their lighter 
 relaxations, their gravest ambition is to vie with exotic 
 foreigners in diversions imported from England. Thus 
 accomplished Frenchmen, who would have shone in 
 salons, lament that Paris is becoming an international 
 casino : a sad fate for the brilliant city, in which, save in 
 the darkest hours of the Revolution, for over two hundred 
 years, from the time of the H6tel Rambouillet to the death 
 of M. Thiers, the intelligent commerce of refined men 
 and women had a distinct influence on the history of 
 France and on its place in the world. 
 
 It must not be thought that all French people of high 
 social rank are given up to frivolity. Remote country 
 chateaux are often the scenes of blameless and simple 
 lives, while in Parisian society there are many excellent 
 women who, not shunning worldly pastime, are devoted 
 to good works. Moreover, even among the men there 
 are a few fine patterns of conduct. As M. de Mun's life 
 is passed in public, he may without impropriety be men- 
 tioned as an example of what a Frenchman of the upper 
 classes can do who is set on maintaining the tradition of 
 his race. I do not speak of the particular subjects which
 
 62 INTRODUCTION 
 
 he has studied, as their pursuit needs a special vocation. 
 I merely refer to him as an instance of a well-born French- 
 man of attractive social as well as mental gifts, who, 
 instead of squandering them on the idle plea that the 
 Republic gives no scope to a man of good family, has so 
 cultivated all his powers that they have borne him to a 
 seat in the French Academy. Another member of that 
 company, whose origin exalted him above his countrymen, 
 though it likewise brought exile and disability upon him, 
 was a splendid example to the gentlemen of France. The 
 Due d'Aumale had no sympathy with the lives of that 
 monarchical class which has hopelessly prejudiced the 
 dynastic fortunes of his kinsmen ; but neither the folly 
 of Royalists, nor the outrage and injury inflicted on him 
 by Republican rulers, diverted him from his nobly ap- 
 pointed mission to illustrate to his countrymen the duties 
 devolving, even under unfavourable circumstances, on the 
 possession of a great name and of great wealth. 
 
 One unfortunate result of the practices of "la haute 
 societe Parisienne " is to extend the pessimism, which we 
 have been considering, to certain foreign observers, who 
 have nothing in common with the pleasure-seeking im- 
 migrants from the East and the West, but who, at the 
 same time, have no opportunity of seeing the more admi- 
 rable phases of the national life. The most pessimist ap- 
 preciations of France and its people which I ever heard 
 from lips not French were those of a distinguished Am- 
 bassador to the Republic, a man of the world of cosmo- 
 politan tastes, and blessed with a happy disposition for 
 looking at the bright side of existence. The reason was 
 that his ideas of France were taken from the society of 
 aristocratic pretension, from the politicians of democratic
 
 INTRODUCTION 63 
 
 profession, and from the press. His experiences in many 
 lands had taught him that an intelligent familiarity with 
 those three elements in a nation usually afford some clue 
 to its characteristics, its ethical standard, and its possible 
 destiny. To draw conclusions from such objects of study 
 in France seems the more reasonable because of their 
 mutual dissidence, fashion and politics being completely 
 antagonistic to one another, while in the newspapers the 
 exponents of both are often treated with contumely. But 
 general principles cannot be followed in appraising the 
 French, and the elements which preserve them from the 
 fate predicted by the experienced diplomatic censor are 
 not palpably manifest to the view of even the most favored 
 official visitors to France. 
 
 Apart from the mass of the people, with their excel- 
 lent qualities of stability and diligence, there are three 
 great but dissimilar bodies in the nation, the virtues of 
 which counterbalance the ill done by the conspicuous 
 classes whose words and deeds fill the newspapers. 
 These are the Army, the University, and the Clergy. 
 The virtues fostered by them, which are not practised 
 by the political and fashionable classes, nor inculcated 
 by the popular press, are a high sense of duty and a 
 respect for authority, combined with unobtrusive hard 
 work and vigorous abnegation. The entire manhood of 
 the nation passes through the ranks of the army, and 
 grave as is the economical aspect of compulsory service 
 which takes from their training at a critical period the 
 apprentices in every art, craft, and science, since Europe 
 has to be a military camp, the army of France may be 
 regarded as a national institution of beneficial influence. 
 The officers usually set an example of devotion to their
 
 54 INTRODUCTION 
 
 duties, avoiding luxurious pretension even in the rare 
 cases where they are rich, and a close study of garrison 
 life has helped me to understand the general affection 
 in which the French soldier is held whatever his grade. 
 The respect for the uniform, no doubt, is greatly due 
 to the martial instinct of which few Frenchmen are des- 
 titute ; but for the practical enjoyment of that sentiment 
 every French family pays in kind, and as, moreover, 
 the peasant and the tradesman have a fervid horror of 
 war, the universal popularity of the army speaks well 
 for the general effect of military discipline on the nation. 
 The University is the technical term for the great 
 teaching corporation engaged in the secondary and supe- 
 rior education of the country under the Ministry of 
 Public Instruction. The educational system has become 
 the object of severe criticism in France at the end of 
 the century, when every Frenchman wishes to incite his 
 neighbour or his neighbour's son to go to the colonies, 
 as it is deemed to discourage initiative and to turn out 
 youths who are fit for nothing but a life of routine. 
 Pending the controversy on the need of educational re- 
 form, which I hope before long to deal with, the teach- 
 ers engaged in secondary and superior education, who 
 are classed together in France as Professors, form a body 
 which is an admirable force within the nation. The 
 devoted men who compose it have not the unattractive 
 social habits of the professorial class in some continental 
 countries, being often as refined as they are learned. 
 Yet unlike our prosperous educators they are slenderly 
 paid, and there are no pecuniary prizes whatever in 
 their calling for even those who attain its highest posts. 
 Their sole stimulant is thus the sense of duty which
 
 INTRODUCTION 55 
 
 guides them in their modest but momentous functions, 
 and they pursue them conscientiously, rarely seeking for 
 commendation outside their academic circle. 
 
 The third beneficial category in the nation is the 
 Clergy. The old Conflict between the Church and the 
 University, which raged throughout the Monarchy of 
 July and the Second Empire, reached its bitterest pitch 
 when a professor, M. Paul Bert, was chosen as the ruth- 
 less anti-clerical instrument of the Republic ; but while 
 the discord between free inquiry and dogmatic belief re- 
 mains irreconcilable, circumstances have led the priest- 
 hood and the professoriate to regard one another less 
 pugnaciously. In one of the life-like provincial sketches 
 by an accomplished Academician 1 already quoted, a 
 learned member of the Faculty of Letters in a country 
 town and the Principal of the Diocesan Seminary culti- 
 vate a curious mutual friendship, in the course of which, 
 while renewing their eternal controversies, they find that, 
 seeing things from a higher plane than their fellow- 
 citizens of the Republic, they have a bond of sympathy. 
 Rare though such intimacies may be in France the 
 apologue shows how the clergy may be coupled with 
 their old antagonists, the lay professors of higher educa- 
 tion, as a salutary national influence under the Third 
 Republic, to counteract the ill example and debased ideal 
 of those whose lives ought to be a pattern of conduct. 
 The author of the Vie de JSsus, who had none of the 
 injustice of an apostate, said of the order which he had 
 quitted, "I have never known any but good priests"; 2 
 and seven years of constant association with French 
 
 1 V Orme du Mail, par Anatole France. 
 
 2 Souvenirs d'Enfance, " Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet."
 
 60 INTRODUCTION 
 
 ecclesiastics of every rank have impressed the full value 
 of this testimony upon me, who also regard the Catholic 
 Church objectively, though not from the point of view of 
 M. Renan. My studies on the Church in France, in the 
 work which will follow these volumes, will fully deal with 
 the condition and character of the clergy, and all that 
 need be said of them here is, that by their lives and 
 example they show how a celibate sacerdotal caste may be 
 an advantage in a modern state. One of the objections 
 to the celibacy of a priesthood is that it withdraws from 
 the nation a generative force; but at the present hour, 
 when the frugal caution of the peasantry is depopulating 
 France, the regions where a normal birth-rate is main- 
 tained are those where the teaching of the Church is most 
 heeded. The clergy represent all the best features of the 
 French peasantry who form the robust backbone of the 
 nation ; for it is to be noted that they are recruited ex- 
 clusively from that class and from the minor bourgeoisie. 
 The descendants of the nobility which monopolised the 
 rich benefices of the old regime, who, in the intervals of 
 their modern diversions, profess loud devotion to the 
 Church, successfully discourage their sons from entering 
 the orders of the secular clergy, now that it is ill-paid, 
 laborious, and virtuous. The parish priests of France, 
 than whom there is not a more exemplary body of men in 
 any land, illustrate the better qualities, refined by dis- 
 cipline, of those great categories of the people which con- 
 stitute the real force of the nation. 
 
 In these volumes we shall not see much of the more 
 excellent elements in the community, nor of the great 
 mass of the people of France whose silent, sober energy 
 makes up for the errors of its conspicuous classes. It is
 
 INTRODUCTION 67 
 
 particularly with the politicians we shall have to do ; and 
 while writing this work amid the calm which is the gen- 
 eral characteristic of life in France, I have often recalled 
 the words of one of those old Republicans whose eloquence 
 and moderation raised the level of debate in the National 
 Assembly, and helped to found the Third Republic which 
 their respectable school was not permitted to govern. M. 
 Laboulaye said, " We present the spectacle of a tranquil 
 people with agitated legislators." 1 This was the experi- 
 ence of a veteran, who had seen men of the Revolu- 
 tion, and who had himself witnessed most of the political 
 vicissitudes of the century, even before the creation of the 
 Parliamentary Constitution of 1875, which was to enhance 
 the truth of his aphorism. 
 
 The place of which I was the tenant in the Brie was an 
 old ecclesiastical fief; so by a usage which suggests that 
 France was not entirely renovated at the Revolution, we 
 had, when Holy Cross Day came round, to give up to the 
 village fete our rights over a green at the gates of the 
 chateau. Thus my neighbour for several weeks each 
 year was a philosopher who was the owner of a set of 
 swings for the use of infants. He was a Parisian glove- 
 maker, and as his trade was slack in the summer, he took 
 his vacation in making the rounds of the rural fairs of 
 the lie de France. Born under Louis Philippe he had 
 seen a few revolutions and regimes, but had never taken 
 any part in politics, though he had lived all his life on 
 the turbulent northern heights of Paris, where the insur- 
 rection of the Commune broke out in 1871. He had 
 never been Orleanist, Imperialist, or Republican, so he 
 assured me ; and the only indirect way in which he had 
 1 Assemble Nationale : Stance du 28 Janvier, 1875.
 
 58 INTRODUCTION 
 
 ever been connected with any political movement was 
 after the Commune, when, as a fireman, he helped to 
 quench the flame of the buildings set alight by the politi- 
 cians. The experience of this sage is that of the great 
 bulk of the inhabitants of France; they toil at their call- 
 ing so long as work is to be done; they take their holi- 
 days happily, yet thriftily; and their sole participation in 
 the politics of the nation is that their energy supplies the 
 remedy for the damage done to France by political incen- 
 diaries of various denominations. 
 
 In a treatise dealing with questions of government the 
 existence of worthy citizens like this journeyman of 
 Montmartre can only incidentally be noticed ; but in 
 studying the political institutions of France it must 
 always be remembered that, however unsatisfactory a 
 spectacle the conduct of public affairs may present, the 
 land contains several millions of worthy people of various 
 classes engaged in the tillage of the soil, in crafts of skill 
 and in commerce, as well as in intellectual pursuits, who 
 are working, most of them unconsciously, for the benefit 
 of the community; and, moreover, such lives abound not 
 merely in the silence of the fields and vineyards, or amid 
 the placid murmur of country towns, for Paris, the nursery 
 of revolution, the playground of frivolity, the theatre of 
 political adventure, is also a brilliant centre of intellect 
 and one of the great workshops of the world. 
 
 V 
 
 The study of problems and systems of government is, 
 even when inconclusive or perplexing, so interesting to 
 mankind that a work which treats of those of a nation
 
 INTRODUCTION 69 
 
 whose political experiments have convulsed the world 
 need not profess to have any other object beyond their 
 historical and philosophical consideration. This would 
 seem to be obvious did not certain writers on the institu- 
 tions of lands not their own conceive themselves, as the 
 result of their brief voyages of discovery, accredited with 
 an international mission. "If," say in substance these 
 modest optimists, "in revealing the inhabitants of one 
 great country to another we have helped to clear away 
 misunderstandings which result from ignorance, and if 
 we have thus lessened the danger of hostilities between 
 two enlightened peoples, we shall be sufficiently re- 
 warded." The ingenuous idea of two nations learning 
 to love one another out of a manual would not need 
 attention were it nurtured only by sanguine authors ; but 
 for the purpose of cultivating a similar theory, societies 
 have actually been formed. One of them tells the public 
 that a more intimate knowledge of each other's language, 
 social customs, and political institutions would lessen 
 the danger of conflict between England and France. If 
 there were any fear of this amiable delusion becoming 
 current it might be dangerous, as it belongs to the same 
 category as that cherished by the estimable Quakers who 
 surprised Nicholas I. with a visit on the eve of the 
 Crimean War. It may, however, be useful to point out 
 that there is no justification in history for the propaga- 
 tion of this idea, and that there is no modern instance 
 of a war between two countries being delayed for a day 
 because their inhabitants were familiar with each other's 
 way of life or of government. 
 
 On the contrary, since the Crimean expedition, which 
 prophets said was to be the last "guerre de chancellerie,"
 
 60 INTRODUCTION 
 
 the last conflict in which civilised peoples were to be 
 engaged without mutual animosity, simply at the bidding 
 of their rulers, most of the wars in which Christian 
 nations have contended, have been between combatants 
 who had an intimate acquaintance with one another's 
 language, institutions, and social customs. The most 
 deadly and prolonged conflict of the second half of the 
 century was that between the Northern and Southern 
 States of America, the inhabitants of which were mutu- 
 ally possessed of all the knowledge which in the future 
 is to make wars cease. If, however, civil war may not 
 be reckoned, while it was going on, Prussia, aided by 
 Austria, attacked Denmark for the very reason that part 
 of the Danish population was so familiar with German 
 institutions that it was deemed fit to make it enter the 
 German Confederacy. Two years later, the victors in 
 that fray having quarrelled over the spoil, the peoples of 
 North and South Germany, whose common language was 
 the basis of their intimacy with the social and public 
 conditions of one another's states, fell to blows, and 
 ended their struggle on the field of Sadowa, the most 
 decisive battle of the century since Waterloo. 
 
 If we regard the relations of powers which have not 
 broken the peace, we observe similar phenomena. Since 
 the month of June, 1815, the period of the century in 
 which England and France came most perilously near an 
 appeal to arms was not when the colonels of the Second 
 Empire their martial appetites whetted by the Italian 
 campaign threatened us with invasion, nor when Re- 
 publican love for Russian autocracy has induced attacks 
 of Anglophobia. It was under the Monarchy modelled 
 on the English pattern, when the foreign affairs of
 
 INTRODUCTION 61 
 
 France were directed by the most enthusiastic and well- 
 informed admirer of English institutions the world ever 
 saw. M. Guizot, the idolater of the British Constitu- 
 tion, the profound expositor of our national history, the 
 intimate correspondent of British statesmen, was during 
 his powerful ministry again and again on the verge of a 
 rupture of diplomatic intercourse with Great Britain. 
 His friendship with Lord Aberdeen may possibly have 
 helped to ward off war in connection with the Pritchard 
 Affair in 1844; but when Lord Palmerston came to the 
 Foreign Office, it was M. Guizot with his policy in the 
 Spanish Marriages who so embittered our mutual rela- 
 tions that Europe witnessed the unseemly spectacle of 
 the British Ambassador in Paris publicly bandying insults 
 with the Minister of France : while it was M. Thiers, with 
 no knowledge of our people and their institutions, except- 
 ing such as was included in his legendary omniscience, 
 who aimed at conciliating England. 
 
 At the end of the nineteenth century the same phe- 
 nomenon is apparent; and on the face of the globe there 
 is not a single instance of two nations which have a 
 cordial feeling for one another due to their intimate ac- 
 quaintance. The citizens of the United States are more 
 conversant with our language, institutions, and social life 
 than any other foreign people, yet we must fain recognise 
 that their collective love for us is less evident than that 
 of the Italians, whose knowledge of us is shadowy and 
 traditional. Moreover, the real strength of the basis of 
 the Franco-Russian alliance is the complete ignorance 
 which the two contracting nations have of one another, 
 excepting the fraction of the Russian upper-class which 
 cultivates the lighter products of the French language.
 
 02 INTRODUCTION 
 
 While forced to recognise this deplorable truth, I con- 
 sider that a war between England and France would be 
 the greatest misfortune which could afflict the human 
 race, and that scarcely any sacrifice, consistent with 
 national honour, would be too great to effect the union 
 of our two nations in the field, if we are fated to take 
 part in the next European conflict. We have arrived at 
 a stage in the history of the two countries which differs 
 from any other which England and France have reached 
 since they became nations. For the first time since the 
 Norman Conquest three generations have gone by with- 
 out the armies of England and of France meeting in 
 battle array. The last of the veterans of Toulouse and 
 of Waterloo have passed away, and it seems certain that, 
 for the first time since the invention of gunpowder, there 
 is no man living who has fired a shot in warfare between 
 the French and English nations. 
 
 There were bowmen of Poitiers who lived to hear of 
 their sons wielding the firelock at Agincourt, when 
 already Joan of Arc was listening at Domre'my to legends 
 of English aggression. After she had fulfilled her des- 
 tiny in withstanding the power of England, rarely a 
 decade passed without renewal of Anglo-French hostili- 
 ties, till the comparative peace maintained by the first 
 Tudor monarchs. Yet even in that amicable period there 
 were three English invasions of France in half a century. 
 Then followed the loss of Calais, Elizabeth's armed inter- 
 ventions on behalf of the Huguenots, and the expedition 
 to La Rochelle, all within seventy years. When England 
 ceased to be ruled by a king, and France was governed 
 by a foreign priest, Cromwell and Mazarin agreed to 
 keep the peace for a short season ; but all the love of
 
 INTRODUCTION 63 
 
 Charles II. for Louis XIV. could not prevent their two 
 nations coming to blows, and in 1666 we were actually at 
 war with France. The military inaction forced on the 
 English by the last of the Stuart line ceased, after the 
 flight of James II., with the French invasion of Ireland, 
 followed forthwith by the sea-fight of La Hogue. Thence 
 Blenheim was only a dozen years distant, and there were 
 young soldiers of Marlborough and of Villars at Mal- 
 plaquet who fought as veterans at Fontenoy. Only 
 seventy years then remained to Waterloo, a blood-stained 
 period as crowded with French and British encounters 
 as that of the Hundred Years' War with which this 
 recapitulation began. 
 
 During all the ages that the English tongue has 
 existed, and during the long evolution of the language 
 of France, from the Langue d'O'il, in which Froissart 
 told the tale of Cre^y, to the modern French in which 
 Victor Hugo described the struggle at Mont Saint Jean, 
 the generation of writers now growing gray is the first 
 which has had no opportunity to supply contemporary 
 chroniclers of French and English mutual slaughter. In 
 the lapse of all those centuries there was never an epoch 
 till the present in which old campaigners of both nations 
 could not show their scars, made by French and English 
 steel, to inspire their sons to renew the perennial feud ; 
 and for the first time the manhood of the two peoples 
 have never seen mourning garb worn by their women as a 
 sign that there were precious lives to be avenged in the 
 next encounter. 
 
 The close of a century of the common era has come to 
 be regarded as an important stage in the history of the 
 human race, although it is such an artificial division of
 
 64 INTRODUCTION 
 
 time that many people are uncertain in which year it 
 ends, and when its successor begins. Whether we quit 
 the nineteenth century on the last day of 1899, or begin 
 the twentieth only with 1901, it is devoutly to be hoped 
 that for the relations of England and France the epoch 
 may have no other importance than that of a date to mark 
 the completion of an unexampled span of peace which 
 gives promise of attaining unbroken its hundredth anni- 
 versary. But to aid that happy consummation is not 
 within the power of any writer, however sincere his 
 pacific ardour ; for the issues which divide or unite 
 nations are regulated by unexpected hazards which defy 
 even the calculations of statesmen and divert the patriotic 
 passions of peoples. The only advantage in this respect 
 possessed by an assiduous student of two great countries 
 is that his intimate knowledge of their inhabitants puts 
 him in the position of a favoured spectator of their 
 national life and of their international relations; so, 
 calling to mind that the deity who protected the traffic 
 of the book-stalls had his shrine hard by the gates which, 
 . opening or shut, indicated the imminence of war or the 
 establishment of peace, he may say to his book on send- 
 ing it forth : 
 
 Vertumnum Jauumque, liber, spectare videris.
 
 BOOK I 
 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 AT the end of the nineteenth century there are two 
 families of the human species of which the institutions 
 and experiments, political and social, are of surpassing 
 interest to students, statesmen, and philosophers. That 
 the Anglo-Saxon race, in its marvellous expansion, should 
 command their attention is not surprising, seeing how 
 it has carried all over the globe the English language, 
 imposing it, as well as versions of the mother constitu- 
 tion, on new communities of diverse origin, the largest 
 and most mixed of which is not subject to the sceptre of 
 England. But besides the societies peopling the British 
 Empire and the American Commonwealth, there is a 
 nation in the Old World which, though it has not 
 expanded either in Europe or beyond the seas, is equally 
 attractive to study. The frontiers of France are not 
 wider than they were when the United States were British 
 dependencies ; its population has scarcely increased since 
 our Australian colonies were constituted; its emigrants 
 who go forth to distant lands with fixed intent to remain 
 and to stock them with a French-speaking population 
 are fewer than in the reign of Louis XV. Yet the 
 people inhabiting this tract of the continent, their social 
 economy, their ideas on government and the development 
 
 67
 
 68 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 of their institutions, are as full of living and philosophi- 
 cal interest as those of any community on the face of the 
 earth. 
 
 If this could be said of other nations of modern 
 Europe the importance of France as a subject of social 
 and political study would not be remarkable, for its high 
 place is unchallenged among the great powers. But the 
 interest inspired by each of the others is limited or 
 special. Austro-Hungary is a collection of peoples 
 heterogeneous in language and race; United Italy lives 
 on the renown of the ages when Italy was a geographi- 
 cal expression; Russia is a quarter of the globe, of 
 which the European fringe administers a score of races, 
 mostly Asiatic, under the autocracy of an imported 
 dynasty. 
 
 There is, however, one nation of Europe which can be 
 mentioned side by side with England and France; yet 
 Germany, which stands with them conspicuous in the 
 front rank of civilisation, does not attract the attention 
 of the outside world as do France, the United Kingdom, 
 and Greater Britain. This anomaly is so curious that it 
 deserves a short consideration. The Germans, having 
 beaten the French on the battle-field, proceeded to new 
 victories in the struggle for commercial priority, and 
 having surpassed their neighbours in this contest, they 
 are threatening the industrial supremacy of Great Britain. 
 Scientific and systematic, they pursue the practical arts 
 of peace with the same serious spirit with which they 
 perfected the art of war. Nor is their energy entirely 
 material in its aims. Learning and research are still 
 cultivated for their own sake in Germany, and critical 
 philosophy still has its home there. Again, the popula-
 
 CH. I THE NATURE OF GEKMANIC PROMINENCE 69 
 
 tions of both hemispheres are affected by the develop- 
 ments of the social problem in the German Empire, which 
 is the chief centre of socialistic agitation in the world; 
 while at the other end of the political scale there is a 
 monarch whose unflagging youth has kept the eyes of all 
 mankind fixed on his Imperial domain. But the Emperor 
 is not the only German sovereign who commands atten- 
 tion. There is scarcely a throne in Christendom which 
 is not filled by one of his race. In most of the reigning 
 families of Europe, like those of England and of Russia, 
 the strain is wholly Germanised; in others, like the 
 House of Savoy, it is less so; but the general result is 
 that allegiance to the institution of royalty in all civil- 
 ised countries involves loyalty to a personage of German 
 descent. Even in the line of Bernadotte, the last living 
 and effective relic of the Napoleonic legend, since the son 
 of the Gascon lawyer made a queen of the daughter of 
 Clary, the merchant of Marseilles, German intermarriages 
 have un-Gallicised the Swedish dynasty. Moreover if 
 France had to take as ruler either of the pretenders who 
 advance hereditary claims, the choice would have to 
 be made between an Orleans whose father was half a 
 German, and who himself has married a Teutonic prin- 
 cess, and a Bonaparte who has no French blood in his 
 veins, but who had two German grandmothers. 1 
 
 1 The son of Bernadotte, who succeeded his father on the throne of 
 Sweden as Oscar I. , married the daughter of Eugene Beauharnais by a 
 princess of Bavaria. His son, the present king, married a princess of 
 Nassau, and the Prince Royal is married to a princess of Baden. The 
 mother of the Comte de Paris was a princess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 
 and the wife of the Due d'Orle'ans is a Hapsburg. The two grandmothers 
 of Prince Victor Bonaparte were a princess of Wurtemberg, wife of 
 Jerome, sometime king of "Westphalia, and a Hapsburg, wife of Victor 
 Emmanuel, whose mother likewise was a Hapsburg.
 
 70 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 Thus the prominence of the Germans in arms and com- 
 merce, in learning and sociology, to say nothing of their 
 monopoly of the crowns of Europe, would suggest that 
 the institutions of their fatherland, and the life and 
 customs of its inhabitants, would have a claim on the 
 interest of other civilised peoples as great as that inspired 
 by the political and social features of France. This is 
 not the place to demonstrate that it is not so, or to dis- 
 cover the reasons of the anomaly, but we may glance at 
 one superficial sign of the truth of the proposition. The 
 English are a Teutonic race, and the relations of England 
 and Germany are intimate and manifold ; but in the 
 more cultivated circles of London it is probable that for 
 every twenty persons who, questioned abruptly, could 
 give the names of half-a-dozen French writers of the 
 present decade, not one could mention three contempo- 
 rary German authors; and if one so well-informed were 
 encountered, he would be either an abstruse specialist, 
 or a youth filled for a competitive examination with 
 knowledge encyclopaedic and momentary. The reasons, 
 historical and actual, why members of other civilised 
 communities take so little spontaneous interest in the 
 life of the people of Germany cannot be enumerated here. 
 The chief, perhaps, is that the Germans are burdened 
 with a language difficult to master, which they them- 
 selves willingly relinquish for tongues more practical. 
 By this faculty of repudiating what is indigenous the 
 Germans seem to warn the world that nothing but their 
 exports are worthy of attention. The flood of German 
 immigrants who renounce their nationality to settle per- 
 manently in English-speaking lands, under Anglo-Saxon 
 institutions, eschewing their own colonies, is an eloquent
 
 CH. i THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF FRANCE 71 
 
 testimony of the failure of Germany to inspire a durable 
 interest even in native hearts. 
 
 It is not my intention to essay any comparison between 
 the French and the German character. Here we have 
 only to do with France, and there is no need to demon- 
 strate that the French nation has that quality in which 
 the Germans are lacking. All other civilised peoples 
 look to France and to the human movement within its 
 borders ; and though its relative importance in the world 
 may be less than formerly, with improved means of com- 
 munication, which have developed its rivals, France has 
 become an object of interest to a greater number of 
 denizens of other lands than at any time since it became 
 a nation. No doubt that interest is for the most part 
 superficial. Still it indicates superiority in a race that 
 strangers all over the globe should study, not as a pass- 
 ing fashion but with steady eagerness, descriptions of its 
 life and manners as portrayed in romances and comedies. 
 It is true that most of these works of fancy give an 
 erroneous impression of French domestic ethics; true, 
 also, is it that in spite of the vast numbers of aliens who 
 sojourn or travel in France, attracted by its amenity, few 
 foreigners have any acquaintance with the real elements 
 of the French nation. Nevertheless it commands atten- 
 tion, not only in its lighter aspects of existence, but as 
 a people which, in making experiments in the art of 
 government, has caused more commotion and greater 
 sacrifice of life and treasure than all the modern com- 
 munities of the human race put together in essaying 
 similar problems. It is in its quality as the land of the 
 Revolution that we have now to consider the position 
 of France.
 
 72 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 II 
 
 During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury the tradition of the great Revolution was so sacred 
 in France that Frenchmen, in spite of the national pride 
 which they cherish, seemed willing to ascribe their high 
 position as a people in the ranks of humanity less to 
 the prodigious genius of their race than to the political 
 convulsion amid which the ancient monarchy and its 
 institutions disappeared. The various regimes which 
 subsequently succeeded one another were severally de- 
 fended as phases of it. Thus Napoleon was the soldier 
 of the Revolution, and the Empire its apotheosis. The 
 Restoration with its Charter was the constitutional 
 monarchy to have been set up by the National Assembly 
 but for the king's flight to Varennes and the European 
 coalition. It fell into anti-Revolutionary hands, so the 
 Monarchy of July was put in its place under the son 
 of Philippe Egalite", who was presented to the people 
 by La Fayette, the inventor in 1789 of the tricolour, 1 
 now unfurled again. The Republic of 1848, of which 
 Lamartine was the transitory hero, owed its unstable 
 foundation to his eulogy of the Convention. The Second 
 Empire, which suppressed it, was advertised as the asser- 
 tion of the principle of the Revolution; and when the 
 last Constitution of the century had to be devised the 
 delegates of the nation, who hesitated about its form, 
 agreed with overwhelming voice in their adhesion to the 
 doctrine of 1789. 
 
 1 La Fayette was not persistently loyal to the tricolour. In March, 
 1815, on the news of Napoleon's escape from Elba, he came up from 
 La Grange to offer his services to Louis XVIII., and appeared at the Tui- 
 leries with the white cockade in his hat. Memoir es de La Fayette, v. 5.
 
 en. i UNIQUE QUALITY OF THE REVOLUTION 73 
 
 To the great book of the Revolution the friends and 
 foes of each form of government set up in France turned, 
 just as in our country rival religious sects cited the 
 authority of holy Scripture : 
 
 Liber hie est in quo quaerit sua dogmata quisque, 
 Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua. 
 
 In English history there has been no one era compar- 
 able to the French Revolution. There have been epochs 
 of the highest importance, such as the Reformation, the 
 Elizabethan Age, the Great Rebellion, and the Revolu- 
 tion of 1688, but there is no one cardinal period to which 
 men have referred everything in the modern State. The 
 most remarkable feature of the French Revolution was 
 perhaps the immediate impression which it gave of its 
 historical importance. As a rule the impressional reac- 
 tion after a political convulsion is swift. A man felled 
 to the ground by a fragment of his house, blown off by 
 a passing gust, may suffer the same sensation as the 
 victim of a tornado which has devastated a continent; 
 but he soon recovers and recognises, in spite of his per- 
 sonal emotion, that the disturbance was only local. 
 This, however, was not the experience of the witnesses 
 of the Revolution and of at least two generations of their 
 progeny. M. Taine himself, whose appreciations we 
 shall have to take account of, having grown up among 
 survivors of the period, could say that he had been able 
 to write on it as though his theme had been the Revolu- 
 tions of Florence or of Athens, 1 and this was not entirely 
 due to his own peculiar objectivity. The French Revo- 
 
 1 La Revolution, vol. i. Preface.
 
 74 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 lution had raised itself before the eyes even of those who 
 had involuntarily grown up in it as a barrier between 
 modern times and the past. M. de Barante, the ambas- 
 sador of Louis Philippe, who all his life recorded his 
 impressions, noted that when, an observant youth, he 
 entered the Ecole Polytechnique under the Directory, 
 only nine years after the fall of the Bastille people spoke 
 of the Ancient Regime as of something belonging to 
 antiquity or to a distant land. 1 
 
 We who now stand on the verge of the twentieth 
 century look back on the epoch preceding the French 
 Revolution as belonging to the distant past, yet even 
 our generation is not remote from it. A Parisian whose 
 life was cut short before its natural term in the Presi- 
 dency of M. Faure had as witnesses to her marriage three 
 contemporaries of Robespierre and Danton, born when 
 the mother of the Bonapartes was a little child. 2 Four 
 years older than Charlotte Corday was the father of the 
 Due de La Tre'mo'ille, who was born in the reign of 
 Queen Victoria. An old priest in the Sarthe still says 
 his mass in the parish church, of which the previous cure* 
 was instituted in 1785, 3 when the clergy held a fifth of 
 the soil of France, and their prelates were semi-sovereign 
 princes. The span of life of some of our own country- 
 
 1 Souvenirs du Baron de Barante, vol. i. 
 
 2 The Baronne de Valley, murdered in 1896, was married at St. Ger- 
 main 1'Auxerrois in the early days of the Monarchy of July, and her mar- 
 riage certificate, which established her identity, showed that her witnesses 
 were contemporaries of Danton and Robespierre, who were both born in 
 1759. Letitia Ramolino, the mother of Napoleon, was born in 1750, and 
 Charlotte Corday in 1768. 
 
 8 The Abbe 1 Paris, who became cure" of Vallon-sur-Ges, diocese of Le 
 Mans, in 1842, as the immediate successor of the Abbe" Frangois Pineau 
 who was instituted in 1785.
 
 CH. i THE LEGEND OF THE REVOLUTION 75 
 
 men makes us realise more vividly how near we are to 
 that great era. Mr. Gladstone in his last Ministry had 
 colleagues between whose age and his there was a longer 
 space of years than between the date of his birth and that 
 of St. Just the Conventional, whom Thermidor brought 
 to the scaffold; and the aged statesman left in the House 
 of Commons an older veteran, who was learning to read 
 when the Revolutionary Calendar was still used in 
 France. 1 
 
 We shall presently consider the causes which induced 
 the survivors of the Revolution to look back upon it as a 
 most imposing epoch, raising to heroic rank those whom 
 it had produced. They in turn handed on the tradition 
 to their sons, who inherited their reflected lustre. Hence 
 the belief of the old men whom this generation has seen, 
 such as M. Jules Simon, that the French Revolution was 
 the greatest event, ancient or modern, in the history of 
 the world. The venerable philosopher who, though a 
 Republican, in the days when the creed was a disability, 
 was treated as a Reactionary under the Third Republic, 
 had opposed the Second Empire as the contradiction of 
 his view of the Revolution. Yet there were supporters 
 of the Imperial regime who were eulogists of the Revolu- 
 tion as eloquent as the Republicans of 1848. There was 
 Sainte-Beuve, born ten years nearer to it than Jules 
 Simon, whose devotion to the Second Empire did not 
 prevent his writing: "If you would admire the French 
 Revolution, study it: it came, like the Law from Sinai, 
 
 1 Mr. Gladstone was born in 1809, forty years after St. Just, who was 
 the same age as Napoleon. Some authorities make St. Just two years 
 older, but books and prints published at the time of the Revolution give 
 the date of 1769. Mr. Villiers was born in 1802, and was in his fourth 
 year when the Revolutionary Calendar was abolished.
 
 76 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 amid thunder and lightning ; Fox spoke up for it, for the 
 foreigner loved it as much as we did ; Goethe blessed it : 
 Schiller defended it; Byron celebrated it all when it 
 was only fifteen years old. In a hundred years it will be 
 acclaimed as far as the land of the Samoyedes." 1 
 
 That remote region is on the European frontier of 
 Siberia, and Sainte-Beuve's rhapsody sounds like a 
 prophecy, precociously fulfilled, of the Franco-Russian 
 alliance, when the Tsar's Arctic subjects no doubt ap- 
 plauded their master's obeisance to the Marseillaise, and 
 his amity for the Republic. But prophecy is an easier 
 science than history, and the great critic in his enthusi- 
 asm ventured on the general statement that the foreigner 
 loved the Revolution as much as did the French. If he 
 had appended that remark to his citation of the three 
 poets, it would have been less controvertible, as in all 
 nations the poetical faculty is bestowed on man in the 
 inverse ratio of his abstract love of law and order. But 
 to couple the general proposition with the name of a 
 foreign statesman, however sympathetic, was misleading, 
 for the distinctive feature of the French Revolution, 
 and indeed the partial justification of its excesses, was 
 the hostile interference of the alien ; and when Fox 
 raised his voice in the House of Commons on the occa- 
 sions cherished by his French admirers, Sheridan was 
 almost alone to echo it. The talent of Sainte-Beuve 
 reached its prolonged maturity when the Revolution was 
 fifty years old, and had attained a wider esteem than it 
 had previously enjoyed. In the early part of the cen- 
 tury the career of Napoleon had made the Revolution an 
 object of alarm outside France, rather than of admira- 
 1 Nouvelle Correspondance.
 
 CH. i THE WHIGS AND THE FKENCH REVOLUTION 77 
 
 tion. The Restoration was a period of recuperation 
 which was not of a nature to attract much sympathy 
 for France ; but when the Monarchy of July came, 
 with its sham air of 1688, then the Liberals abroad 
 vied with the sons of the Revolution at home in their 
 recognition of the grandeur of the palingenesis of 
 France. 
 
 It was at this period that Macaulay wrote his famous 
 essay on Barere, and belaboured that despicable member 
 of the Convention with invective well-merited, but of 
 a violence unworthy of the pen of a master of refined 
 and noble language. 1 Yet amid the foaming torrent of 
 his rage the great apostle of the Whigs becomes calm and 
 judicial when he approaches the subject of the deposition 
 and the death of the king. He complacently approves of 
 the vote of the Convention abolishing the royal office ; 
 and when he comes to the regicide, though he mildly 
 chides the timidity and vacillation of the Girondins who 
 voted for it, in palliation he calls attention to the becom- 
 ing emotion and broken voice of their leader, Vergniaud, 
 when he announced the sentence. All that calls forth his 
 fury in that grim scene is that Barere made a " lying " 
 quotation from an ancient author unknown to Macaulay. 
 
 1 " Macaulay a la main rude ; quand il frappe il assomme " (Taine, 
 Litterature Anglaise, liv. 5, c. iii.). This appreciation refers to Macau- 
 lay's harsh epithets applied to Southey. Taine, in his highly eulogistic 
 criticism of Macaulay's fine qualities, ascribes his vehemence to the pas- 
 sion of the orator which called forth " la fureur de 1'invective, 1'exces de 
 rancune." The essay on Barere is not mentioned by Taine, who, how- 
 ever, contrasts Guizot's dispassionate attitude towards the history of 
 England in the seventeenth century and that of Macaulay, who lived 
 again every day of the period as a contemporary partisan. But Macau- 
 lay did not become dispassionate in treating of the affairs of another 
 country, and Barere provoked his wrath just as violently as did Arch- 
 bishop Laud or Mr. Montgomery.
 
 78 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 Now, apart from the estimate of the personal character of 
 individual Girondins and Jacobins, this attitude of apol- 
 ogy for revolutionaries, who confined themselves to regi- 
 cide, and of reprobation of less moderate reformers, who 
 sent also their colleagues to the scaffold, is consistent 
 with Whiggism. The confiscation of church property, 
 the execution or the deposition of kings were beneficent 
 events which in England had put riches and government 
 in the hands of a Liberal oligarchy ; but that moderate 
 revolutionaries should incur revolutionary penalties whole- 
 sale was unreasonable. Had not Hampden bled on the 
 field and Sidney on the scaffold, and did not those 
 vicarious sacrifices suffice to justify the enjoyment of 
 power and place by their prosperous disciples from gen- 
 eration to generation ? 
 
 The services of the Whigs to the English nation were 
 large, and largely were they recompensed ; but the 
 French Revolution was a movement too rapid for them 
 to understand, surveying it from the depths of their arm- 
 chairs. The idea that the flood could have been stayed 
 after the execution of Louis XVI. was as chimerical as 
 all others founded on false and strained analogies between 
 the precipitate French Revolution and the slowly succes- 
 sive political convulsions and reorganisations in England. 
 Later we shall observe some of the ills which have ac- 
 crued to France in consequence of the superficial resem- 
 blance of certain historical events in the two countries. 
 One of them was pleasing the fancy of Macaulay when he 
 wrote his essay in 1844, the similarity of the position 
 of Louis Philippe on the throne of Charles X. to that of 
 William III. wearing the abdicated crown of James II., 
 and he seemed to think that notwithstanding the
 
 LAMARTINE 79 
 
 savage blunders of the Terror, and the interludes of the 
 Consulate and the Empire, France had arrived safely in 
 the haven of limited monarchy, never to venture again on 
 stormy seas of revolution. 1 The Monarchy of July was 
 in many respects an admirable regime, but it had one 
 grave defect, that of being wholly unsuited to the politi- 
 cal temperament of the people of France. So while 
 Macaulay was complacently patronising those portions of 
 the great Revolution which reminded him of passages in 
 the growth of the British constitution, native glorifiers 
 of heroes of the epoch which had touched the fancy of the 
 Whig essayist were undermining his cherished fabric of 
 limited monarchy. 
 
 An event had just taken place fated gravely to affect 
 the relations of the Revolution and modern France. In 
 1843 M. de Lamartine joined the Radical opposition in 
 the Chamber where he had sat for ten years. He had 
 not, like Macaulay, been brought up in a school of apol- 
 ogy for revolution and regicide. Born in 1790, he was 
 not one of those who imbibed in infancy the principles 
 associated with that period, for, an aristocrat by instinct 
 and training, he attained his fame as the bard of the 
 throne and the altar, poetising the reactionary ideas which 
 proved fatal to the Monarchy of the Restoration. After 
 its overthrow he travelled in the East, bringing thence a 
 stock of visionary ideas which finally turned him into a 
 sentimental revolutionist. When double the age of some 
 of his new favourites of the Convention, he announced 
 that the French Revolution was merely an emanation of 
 
 1 Twelve years earlier (1832) this idea predominates in his essay on 
 Mirabeau, in which he describes the French Revolution as "a great 
 blessing to mankind," the Orleans Monarchy having just been founded.
 
 80 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 the idea of Christianity applied to politics. 1 In 1847 he 
 published the literary result of his conversion, and in the 
 history of letters no book ever produced consequences 
 so formidable, so wide-spread, and so immediate as the 
 Girondins. The mind of the public no doubt was ready 
 for revolt. The government of M. Guizot was not popu- 
 lar ; a wider franchise was demanded ; and before a year 
 had revolved the people, further irritated against the 
 upper and political classes by the revelation of parlia- 
 mentary scandal and the murder of the Duchesse de Pras- 
 lin by her husband, being thrilled with the poet's romantic 
 idealising of the tragic anarchy of the Revolution, made 
 an end of the limited Monarchy. 
 
 At no moment was the French Revolution ever so uni- 
 versally acclaimed as in 1848, and no Frenchman born 
 since the taking of the Bastille has enjoyed idolatry so 
 complete as did Lamartine during his brief hour of popular- 
 ity. The one element in the nation which had stood hostile 
 to the Revolution now rallied to the movement led by the 
 mystical singer of the sanctuary, and the clergy blessed 
 the Trees of Liberty planted to solemnise the new era. 
 But in vain did Lamartine refuse to accept the red flag 
 which, with grim and ironical logic, the mob wished to 
 impose on the government of the Second Republic sprung 
 from his lyrics. His eloquence prevailed only for a short 
 season over the disorder he had inspired, and before the 
 year ended the people of France used their new franchise 
 to call to the supreme power Louis Bonaparte, simply 
 because he bore the name of the soldier of the Revolution 
 who had turned its anarchy into order. Neglect fell upon 
 
 1 "La France parleinentaire," vol. iii. (!crits et discours politiques de 
 Lamartine, 1843).
 
 CH. i THE REVOLUTION OF 1848 81 
 
 the chief maker of the Republic long before it had turned 
 into the Second Empire, and the pathetic vicissitudes of 
 his declining years are a warning to poets not to descend 
 from their dim heights to sport with the prose of modern 
 history and of politics. 
 
 Lamartine did not initiate the revival of the revolu- 
 tionary legend in the middle of the century. It was 
 cherished in some form by all the moderate men of the 
 day, like Sainte-Beuve, who has been quoted, and who 
 scoffed at the profile of Jocelyn with which the creator 
 of that romantic hero invested all the orators of the 
 Convention. Among men of less sober opinion Louis 
 Blanc and Michelet had, before the appearance of the 
 Grirondins, published their Histories of the Revolution 
 which, in glorifying in cruder tones its excesses, were 
 calculated to fire the fanaticism of Jacobins. It was a 
 different audience to which Lamartine appealed ; clothing 
 the revolutionary idea in the music of poetry, he touched 
 a chord in the human heart which the middle-class gov- 
 ernment had neglected, and attracted to the Revolution 
 those who had regarded it with fear before he turned it 
 into popular epic. His flowery profuseness, unlike the 
 simple style of the great masters of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury or of some of his contemporaries, has lost its charm. 
 Yet even now those who have no illusions left about the 
 heroes of the Convention, who agree with Lally-Tollendal 
 when he said of the Girondins that " their existence and 
 their death had been equally baleful to their country," 
 can be infected with the emotion of the poet when they 
 read his romance of Guadet, at the secret interview with 
 the King and Queen in the Tnileries, kissing the sleeping 
 Dauphin by the light of a taper held by the royal mother ; 
 
 VOL. I O
 
 82 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 or the description of Vergniaud as the youth who with a 
 gesture had overturned a throne. 
 
 The peculiarity of the Revolution of 1848, wherein it 
 differed from the great Revolution, was that it gave the 
 supreme power in the State to the democracy, which, 
 though it had played a strenuous part all over France 
 in the violent events of the last decade of the eighteenth 
 century, had had nothing to do with the direction of the 
 central government. The Convention of 1792 contained 
 no men of the people, and the heroes celebrated by Lamar- 
 tine, in the battles between Girondins and Mountain, 
 were members of the middle-class whose domination he 
 helped to destroy in the Revolution of February, 1848. 
 The Days of June, in the same year, again differed from 
 every previous revolutionary movement in France, as the 
 aim of the insurgents was not to change the form of 
 government, the Republic then having existed for four 
 months, but to alter the order of society. It was this 
 peril which alarmed the newly enfranchised population 
 of France, so out of the Parisian barricades arose first 
 the Presidency of Louis Bonaparte, and then, its natural 
 consequence, the Second Empire. 
 
 M. de Tocqueville, because he had opposed the govern- 
 ment of M. Guizot and was already celebrated as the dis- 
 criminating eulogist of the new order of democracy, has 
 had his name unduly associated with the democratic 
 Revolution of 1848. He was, however, a close witness 
 of its events, being a member of the National Assembly 
 and for a brief season Minister for Foreign Affairs under 
 the Prince-President. Never was there greater contrast 
 than between the rhapsodic inexactness of Lamartine 
 and the calm discernment of Tocqueville, who, when he
 
 CH. i THE REVOLUTION OF 1848 83 
 
 died in 1859, leaving studies in political philosophy 
 more valuable than any others produced in the middle 
 of the century, had not attained the age at which the 
 poet had embroiled Europe with his youthful phantasies. 
 The public careers of both were brought to an end by 
 the reaction which ensued from the excesses of 1848 ; 
 but Tocqueville, while he was still holding office under 
 Louis Bonaparte, foresaw that the first durable result 
 of universal suffrage would inevitably be an arbitrary 
 monarchical government. The tendency of the popular 
 voice was to invest the executive with the widest powers 
 in order to be able to repress the dangers menacing 
 public prosperity; and a powerful executive, combined 
 with the centralised system perfected by the other Bona- 
 parte, could not but lead to Napoleonic dictatorship in 
 the hands of one who bore the Imperial names. Louis 
 Napoleon took care not to let his triumph over the in- 
 surrectionaries of 1848 be considered as a victory over 
 the Revolution. While he assailed the new Republic 
 and destroyed its symbols, he persistently declared that 
 the principle which he represented was the Revolution. 
 When acclaimed on his progress through France in 1852 
 in the interval between the Coup d'Etat and the procla- 
 mation of the Empire, he accepted the cries of "Vive 
 1'Empereur," he said, because his uncle, though he 
 checked the excesses of the revolutionary spirit, had 
 been the chief instrument to cause the benefits of the 
 Revolution to prevail. 1 And so till the final scene in the 
 drama of his dynasty, when, from the Imperial head- 
 quarters at Metz, Napoleon III. announced that " the glo- 
 rious flag just unfurled before the enemies of France 
 1 Discours de Lyon, 19 Septembre, 1862.
 
 84 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 was the same which had borne across Europe the civil- 
 ising ideas of the great Revolution." l 
 
 The reproduction of the Empire as the first result of 
 popular suffrage in France was a great disillusion to 
 the theorists who regarded sovereignty of the people as 
 an emanation of the Revolution, and the Revolution as 
 the source of liberty. Henceforth there was a tendency 
 among philosophers to defend civil and individual liberty 
 rather than political liberty, and to combat the principle 
 of sovereignty of the people, which had given birth to 
 democratic despotism. The abstract discussions of the 
 Liberal school under the Second Empire had not much 
 effect either in aiding the opposition to the Government 
 or in altering the tradition of the Revolution. 2 On the 
 other hand Tocqueville's writings on the Ancient Regime 
 and the Revolution had a certain influence in suggesting 
 the idea that the normal evolution of civilisation might 
 have remedied the evils of the old Monarchy without 
 the violence of the last period of the eighteenth century. 
 The work which, however, was destined to affect the 
 general estimation of the French Revolution more seri- 
 ously than any previous philosophical study or political 
 vicissitude, did not see the light until the Second Empire 
 had gone the way of all the preceding doctrinaire, liberal, 
 or democratic forms of government of which the exist- 
 ence in France had been justified by reference to prin- 
 ciples laid down in 1789. 
 
 1 Proclamation du 28 Juillet, 1870. 
 
 a E.g. the works of Jules Simon, who was the tutor, and of PreVost- 
 Paradol, who was the friend of Taine at the Ecole Normale.
 
 M. TAINE 85 
 
 III 
 
 In 1854 M. Taine, fatigued by his philosophical re- 
 searches, which had already given him the repute of 
 an original thinker, sought recreation in reading the 
 Histoire Parlementaire of Roux and Bouchez, an au- 
 thority on the Revolutionary period. He was struck 
 with the intellectual mediocrity of the most famous men 
 of that epoch of grandiose renown, and decided that it 
 would be an historical phenomenon interesting to exam- 
 ine. This was the inception of the capital task of his 
 life, his inquiry into the Origins of Contemporary France. 
 Although the work was first conceived in the early days 
 of the Second Empire, at a moment when he was suffer- 
 ing from its arbitrary vexations, there is little trace in 
 it that he had any particular disfavour for that regime. 
 M. Taine had such a power of detaching himself from 
 surrounding circumstances that he was able to bring to 
 bear on modern events in his own country the same 
 powers of independent analysis as are seen in his 
 erudite Essay on Livy, or in his History of English 
 Literature. 
 
 The first volume of the Origines de la France Gon- 
 temporaine did not appear until twenty years after his 
 inspiration to examine the genesis and nature of the 
 Revolution, and a quarter of a century after the need 
 for such an inquiry had beset him, when, coming of age 
 in 1849, he found himself invested, by the new system 
 of manhood suffrage, with a vote, in order that he might 
 not only make his choice of men, but show his preference 
 for theories. As he was neither Royalist nor Republican,
 
 86 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 Democrat nor Conservative, Socialist nor Bonapartist, he 
 envied his neighbours endowed with political convictions, 
 and began to ponder on the foundations of their faith. 
 The war with Prussia, the Commune, and the harsh 
 conditions of the peace of 1871 had afflicted him before 
 the first pages of the great work appeared, and the 
 minute analysis and classification of the persons com- 
 posing the society under the old Monarchy, together with 
 the rigorous conclusions derived therefrom, portended 
 that his appreciations on the Revolution would not be in 
 harmony with received tradition. 
 
 It is said that M. Thiers, in his last days, hearing of 
 the coming work, exclaimed: "He must take care not 
 to touch my Revolution"; and by the expression "my 
 Revolution " the aged statesman did not refer to his own 
 history of the change of things with which, as a youth, 
 he won a front place in the brilliant literary group of 
 the Restoration. He was giving expression to the sen- 
 timent cherished to the period of his death by most 
 Frenchmen, excepting the fanatics of Legitimism, that 
 the Revolution was a sacred manifestation which might 
 be diversely interpreted, but never profanely assailed. 
 M. Taine did, however, lay desecrating hands on it ; he 
 followed the injunction of Sainte-Beuve and studied it 
 as it had never been studied, with a result contrary to 
 that predicted by the older critic. His last work re- 
 mains one of the greatest monuments of research and 
 diligence ever reared in France, where literary labour is 
 inexhaustible. Its peculiar feature was that it applied 
 to the French Revolution the spirit of criticism which 
 in the eighteenth century was one of the factors in pro- 
 ducing the great upheaval. The esprit critique, which
 
 CH. i THE INFLUENCE OF M. TAINE'S WOEK 87 
 
 helped to destroy the Old Regime, lingered in France, 
 and had aided to make government unstable, while it 
 discouraged faith and fostered pessimism ; but never 
 before had it been turned upon its own chief work. 
 
 The adverse judgments on the work of Taine were to 
 the effect that the minute investigator of the dissecting- 
 room was incapable of discerning through his lens the 
 great organisms and their movements, of which he per- 
 ceived only a microscopic fragment. It was said that 
 while in his exposure of the excesses of the Old Regime 
 he dwelt on the waste of wax candles at Versailles, he 
 was silent as to the grandeur of France in Europe under 
 the last kings of the ancient Monarchy ; that while in 
 revealing the anarchy of the Revolution he gave details 
 of the outrages of village incendiaries, the imposing 
 figure of Mirabeau is unnoticed on his pages ; that while 
 he emphasised the private defects of Napoleon, describ- 
 ing how he kicked a Senator and seized a Marshal by 
 the throat in the council-chamber, he had never a word 
 to say how he won the battles of Austerlitz and of Jena. 
 All this may be true, but Taine did not conceive that 
 his mission was to repeat the well known. He said of 
 his work, that before he began it he was inclined to 
 think as most Frenchmen did, only his opinions were 
 an impression more or less vague rather than a faith, 
 while his later iconoclasm was due to the conscientious 
 and exhaustive study of documents. The Revolution 
 was in his view the first application of moral science 
 to human affairs, which were in a lamentable state in 
 France in the reign of Louis XVI., and needed a more 
 practical remedy than the crude philosophy of Rousseau, 
 with its bad method and its false and precipitate solu-
 
 88 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 tions. Hence the catastrophe of 1789 with its sequence, 
 the imperfect reorganisation effected under the Con- 
 sulate and the Empire, which has lasted all the century 
 and, in his judgment, has been the cause of the political 
 ills which have afflicted France and kept it down from 
 the high place whereon the genius of its people would 
 have set it. 1 
 
 The working of the Napoleonic machine of centralisa- 
 tion in combination with parliamentary institutions im- 
 ported from England, amid a people whose political ideas 
 were formulated in the period of confusion in which the 
 Ancient Regime disappeared, will be a prominent subject 
 of this work. Neither the method nor the conclusions of 
 M. Taine will be followed ; but no writer who essayed to 
 deal with the problems of government in France at the 
 close of the nineteenth century could be indifferent to the 
 philosopher who, more than any one person, has modified 
 the aspect of the French Revolution. M. Taine's influ- 
 ence has been of a peculiar character. The movement and 
 the resulting phenomena which he criticised were hastened 
 by the critical spirit of the philosophers of the eighteenth 
 century. But their works, considering the smallness of 
 the educated class at that period and the dearness of 
 books, were very widely read. The minor but more 
 democratic Revolution of 1848 was, as we have seen, 
 influenced by the publication of Lamartine's Cttrondins, 
 of which the circulation was prodigious, edition after 
 edition being read with greater avidity than was ever 
 excited by any romance, though that was the happy 
 epoch when novels were interesting. 
 
 The lot of M. Taine's great work has not been the 
 1 Lettre a M. Havet du 24 Mare, 1878.
 
 CH. i THE INFLUENCE OF M. TAINE'S WOKK 89 
 
 same. It stands on the shelf of every library, yet it is 
 possible that in twenty years not more than two or three 
 thousand Frenchmen have read the six volumes from 
 beginning to end. For the author was forced by the 
 nature of his investigation to depart from the graceful 
 style which had charmed into insensibly studying some 
 of the most profound problems of philosophy the idlest 
 readers of his early works. Almost any of them one can 
 read under a tree on a sunny day with as much ease as 
 a volume of Voltaire or of Diderot, or, if in romantic 
 mood, as Lamartine's legendary history, and with less 
 cerebral fatigue than a modern novel, psychological or 
 naturalist. But the Origines de la France Contempo- 
 raine is a treatise which demands attentive perusal such 
 as only the student can bestow ; though no modern work 
 so richly rewards the explorer who finds in it the record 
 of the period, drawn from contemporary chronicles and 
 forgotten archives, 1 describing the life and agitation in 
 village, market-town, and city, with the ideas and pas- 
 sions which moved to action peasant and artisan, bour- 
 geois and functionary, all arranged with that classification 
 and analysis of which Taine was the master. Thus the 
 production of this work had no resounding effect in the 
 streets or in Parliament. No election was ever affected 
 by it, no act of the legislature can be referred to it, and 
 it has rarely influenced the political action of a citizen of 
 France. Yet it deserves the epithet epoch-marking more 
 
 1 M. Taine lias been censured by his critics for making use of obscure 
 contemporary authorities whose testimony is of doubtful value, but as he 
 once said to me, when talking about the best method of studying history, 
 "II n'y a pas de mauvais documents." The value of a contemporary 
 record in the hands of a historian depends less on the character or position 
 of the writer than on the use made of it by its discoverer.
 
 90 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 than any book which this generation has seen, for the 
 most striking tendency in French opinion during the last 
 quarter of the century is the change of mental attitude 
 towards the Revolution ; and if the thunderings and 
 lightnings and noise of the trumpet have lost their 
 Sinaitic prestige, so that the great convulsion is now 
 regarded merely as a historical phenomenon like the 
 Wars of Religion under the last of the Valois, or the 
 reorganisation of France by the Kings who came next, 
 that result is chiefly due to the intellectual effort of one 
 sedentary philosopher. 
 
 IV 
 
 Though M. Taine did not anticipate that his work 
 would influence the government or administration of 
 France in his lifetime, one immediate effect of his criti- 
 cism was the vehement defence of the Revolution by 
 some of its more extreme champions. The centenary of 
 the events succeeding the fall of the Bastille had arrived, 
 and M. Sardou in 1891, prematurely celebrating the close 
 of the Terror, produced at the Theatre Frangais a play 
 entitled Thermidor, representing the downfall of Robes- 
 pierre in the month of 1794 which bore that name in the 
 Revolutionary Calendar. The House of Moliere belongs 
 to the State, and the Terrorists were not amiably depicted 
 by the Academician, so the Radicals pressed the Govern- 
 ment of the Republic not to allow scenes of the Revolu- 
 tion to be held up to scorn on the national stage. In the 
 Chamber M. Clemenceau demanded the interdiction of 
 the piece in one of those improvised harangues in which 
 he used to display the keen edge of his trenchant talent,
 
 CH. I THE REVOLUTIONARY "BLOCK" 91 
 
 declaring that the Monarchists who applauded the drama 
 had become Dantonists in their desire to have Robespierre 
 held up to reprobation, and adding, " the Revolution is a 
 block from which nothing can be taken away." 1 
 
 Apart from the question of representing scenes of 
 recent history at a national theatre, there was much to 
 be said for M. Clemenceau's theory of the "block." The 
 difficulty of applying it to a proper appreciation of the 
 French Revolution is that no two admirers of that move- 
 ment are agreed as to the composition of the "block." 
 Where did the Revolution end? or where ought it to 
 have ended to merit the praises of right-thinking men? 
 Are we to reprobate Robespierre and approve the acts of 
 Danton, or are our tears to be reserved for the untimely 
 end of the Girondins ? Macaulay, as we have seen, seemed 
 to think that if the Convention had stopped at the deposi- 
 tion of the king it would have carried out a praiseworthy 
 revolution on a wholesome English model. Mme. de 
 Stael, whose writings had a great influence on the Lib- 
 erals under the Restoration in their interpretation of the 
 Revolution, conceived that its proper term was 1791, 
 when, but for the Emigration, a constitutional monarchy 
 might have been possible ; so, as the Restoration pro- 
 duced that admirable British institution, 1814 was the 
 direct sequence of 1791, and all that occurred in the 
 interval were illegitimate additions to the great Revo- 
 lution. 2 The Radicals who applauded M. Clemenceau's 
 theory of the "block" intimated their approval of the 
 Terror, and in defending the memory of Robespierre 
 showed their adherence to the popular idea that he was 
 
 1 Chambre des repute's, 29 Janvier, 1891. 
 
 2 Considerations sur la Revolution Franqaise (1818).
 
 92 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 a democrat with a thirst for blood. But the more light 
 there is thrown on his grim figure the more clear it 
 seems that he aimed at being a politician of the type 
 known under the Third Republic as "a man of govern- 
 ment," and therefore opposed to the views generally held 
 by his modern partisans of the Extreme Left. Napoleon 
 believed that his intention was to re-establish order after 
 destroying all the revolutionary factions ; but while he 
 thus appreciated the character of Robespierre, to whom 
 he owed his early opportunities, the career of General 
 Bonaparte might have been restricted had the Terrorist 
 chief survived, for, if he were not playing for his own 
 hand, he probably contemplated the restoration of the 
 Comte de Provence. Some day, perhaps, the correspond- 
 ence between Robespierre and the future king will reveal 
 the real reason for Louis XVIII.'s favourable opinion of 
 him. Meanwhile, we know that it was he who began the 
 reaction ; and though Royalist heads fell wholesale in the 
 Terror, the most conspicuous victims were the leaders of 
 the revolutionary groups, Feuillants, Girondins, Corde- 
 liers, H^bertists, and Dantonists being in turn sent to the 
 scaffold by Robespierre. 1 
 
 1 The testimony is chiefly circumstantial which supports the theory 
 that Robespierre was not the victim of Reaction, but was destroyed as a 
 Reactionary by the surviving Revolutionaries, who saw that their turn 
 was coming. Napoleon's strong view on the subject is found in the 
 Memorial de Sainte-Helene and in the Relation du Docteur G'Meara. 
 It seems probable that most of the documentary evidence was destroyed. 
 Couitois, a regicide member of the Convention, was charged with the 
 examination of the papers of Robespierre after his fall, but the report he 
 drew up in 1794 was considered by Robespierre's sister to be a mendacious 
 compilation. Courtois had, however, all his correspondence, and seems to 
 have given up to the First Consul the letters he, when General Bonaparte, 
 had written to Robespierre. Courtois was exiled after the Restoration, 
 but M. Decazes, the favourite and minister of Louis XVIII., was sent
 
 CH. i THE DOCTRINE OF LATENT REGIMES 93 
 
 The Republicans who survived did not make a signal 
 success of the Directory, which led up to the most 
 momentous of all the phases of the Revolution. The 
 Coup d'Etat of Brumaire, when Bonaparte, returning 
 from Egypt at the end of 1799, seized the supreme 
 power, was so far the most important portion of the 
 revolutionary "block" that it cannot be dealt with 
 in passing mention. But, before observing its effect, 
 we will pass for a moment to later events in the history 
 of France which have been deemed to form part of the 
 Revolution. The Restoration was hailed by Mme. de 
 Stael as the consummation of the upheaval of 1789. 
 But 1830 supervened, when with the definite triumph 
 of the middle-class, as Tocqueville said, " The first period 
 of the Revolution ended, for there has been only one 
 Revolution, the beginning of which our fathers saw, 
 and of which we are not likely to see the end." 1 The 
 downfall of the Monarchy of July produced the demo- 
 cratic phase of the Revolution, the tangible result of 
 which was the Second Empire, created by the first exer- 
 
 after him, just before his death in 1816, and got from him twenty letters 
 written by the future King to Robespierre. Mile. Robespierre had a 
 pension granted to her by Bonaparte when First Consul, which was con- 
 tinued by Louis XVIII. till 1823, when it was stopped for some reason 
 connected with the Courtois papers. 
 
 1 Souvenirs tf Alexis de Tocqueville, partie 1. This idea is constantly 
 found in his writings. In the second part of his Souvenirs he returns to 
 it in his reflections on the Revolution of 1848. After each change of 
 government up till then, he writes, " It was said that the French Revolu- 
 tion, having accomplished its work, was finished, . . . and here it is 
 beginning afresh. Shall we ever arrive at a social transformation more 
 complete than that which our fathers wanted, or are we merely on the 
 road to that intermittent anarchy, the well-known and incurable malady 
 of old peoples ? I often ask if this land, which we have been seeking for 
 so long, exists, or if our destiny is not to plough the sea eternally?" 
 (I860.)
 
 94 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 else of manhood suffrage. That regime gave way to 
 the Republic, not from the movement of opinion in the 
 direction of Republicanism, though there were signs 
 of such a tendency before the War, but in consequence 
 of military disaster, and the subsequent inability of the 
 monarchical parties to concert any other form of gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 The more emphatic admirers of the violent portions 
 of the first Revolution, including most of those who 
 specially resent the conclusions of M. Taine, have a 
 theory that the Republic is the sole legitimate offspring 
 of the Revolution. It was ingeniously expounded by an 
 eloquent successor of the Jacobins, M. Challemel-Lacour, 
 whose character much more resembled that of Robespierre 
 than did that of the Radicals, who disliked his authorita- 
 tive temperament. At the centenary of the First Republic 
 he asserted that " the Republic, since September 22, 1792, 
 had not ceased for a single moment to live its latent 
 life as a government in reserve for the salvation of the 
 country." 1 No doubt it was pleasing for Republicans 
 to feel that the regime of their preference had never 
 ceased to exist since it was set up three weeks after 
 the Massacres of September ; but the doctrine of latent 
 existence had often been applied by their adherents to 
 other intermittent forms of government in France. It 
 was originally borrowed from England, where the public 
 acts of Cromwell officially belong to the first decade 
 of the reign of Charles II., and there the permanent 
 re-establishment of the monarchy justified the fiction. 
 In France it has been used since the Revolution with 
 less success. It was the basis of Mme. de Stael's idea 
 1 Discours au Pantheon, 22 Septembre, 1892.
 
 CH. i THE DOCTRINE OF LATENT REGIMES 95 
 
 that the governments between the abolition of royalty 
 and the Restoration were of no account, and it was 
 adopted by the Comte de Provence, who accordingly was 
 deemed to have inherited the crown on the death of his 
 nephew in the Temple, five months before the Directory 
 came into being : so General Bonaparte won the battle of 
 Rivoli, and the Emperor Napoleon that of Jena, in the 
 second and twelfth years, respectively, of Louis XVIII. 's 
 reign. 1 Louis Napoleon, when in 1852 the Senators 
 and Deputies brought the news to him that the plebis- 
 cite had made him Emperor, recognised the prevalence 
 of the doctrine, and felt constrained modestly to say to 
 them, " My reign does not date from 1815, but only 
 from this moment of your announcement of the will of 
 the nation." 2 Nevertheless in styling himself, by acci- 
 dent or design, Napoleon III., he signified that the 
 Empire had continued in the person of the Due de 
 Reichstadt, who until his death at Schoenbrunn in 1832 
 was the second Napoleon of the dynasty. The idea of 
 the Republic, ever latent under all other forms of gov- 
 ernment, is indicated by certain journals of the Extreme 
 Left, which are still dated according to the Revolu- 
 tionary Calendar, whereof the Year One began on the 
 day commemorated by M. Challemel-Lacour ; but the 
 principle underlying it is dangerous to apply to an 
 existing regime in France, as it suggests the possibility 
 
 1 Louis XVII. died June, 1795 : Rivoli was fought in January, 1797, and 
 Jena in October, 1806. 
 
 3 St. Cloud, December 1, 1862. The same week in the House of Lords, 
 Lord Malmesbury, who was a personal friend of Louis Napoleon as well 
 as Foreign Secretary, took pains to explain that the title " Napoleon III." 
 implied no pretension to Imperial heredity contrary to the Declaration of 
 the Congress of Vienna.
 
 9(i THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 of its resuming its state of latency, while another under- 
 ground stream bubbles up for a visible course. 
 
 Thus there is no harmony of opinion either as to the 
 limits of the French Revolution, or as to the form of gov- 
 ernment which was peculiarly its offspring. If the ex- 
 treme view of Tocqueville be taken, we may consider the 
 Revolution still in full operation more than a century 
 after its start. But a century after the assembly of the 
 States-General it is not easy to distinguish which social 
 phenomena are the result of the national upheaval, and 
 which the result of the general progress of civilisation in 
 the human race. Our English fathers considered the 
 revolutionary period to have ended with the second 
 entry of the Allies into Paris in 1815, 1 and the inclusion 
 in it of the First Empire is adopted by modern admirers 
 of the Napoleonic legend who regard its events from a 
 very different point of view. It is impossible to take 
 a date or a crisis, and to say that this was the boundary 
 of the Revolution proper. The twenty years from the 
 fall of the Bastille to the battle of Wagram perhaps con- 
 stitute a term convenient to be regarded as the revolution- 
 ary period, as they include both the epoch of disintegra- 
 tion, which alone did not constitute the Revolution, and 
 the succeeding season of reorganisation. From 1809 there 
 
 1 A copious work in two large volumes was published at the end of the 
 reign of George III., by " Hewson Clarke, Esq.," which, though without 
 literary value, is a storehouse of curious contemporary information on 
 the events in France, the British Isles, and Europe during the previous 
 thirty years. FRENCH REVOLUTION is the most conspicuous line of the 
 title-page, which sets forth that it is "An impartial History of the naval, 
 military, and political events in Europe from the commencement of the 
 French Revolution to the entrance of the Allies into Paris, including 
 biographical memoirs of Buonaparte and a narrative of the progress of 
 that Revolution to the conclusion of a general peace."
 
 CH. i THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 97 
 
 was no more constructive policy accomplished by the re- 
 constructor of France. The glories of the Empire for a 
 moment continued to expand, but the wars and alliances 
 had now departed from their revolutionary basis, and had 
 become the tools of a conqueror's ambition. 
 
 If the day be past of sentimental enthusiasm for the 
 French Revolution, its close study, while revealing the 
 unheroic horrors of the period, convinces the impartial 
 student that it was inevitable. The pitiless narrative 
 of Taine displays how swift was anarchy to follow the 
 first movement, and how its violent expansion through- 
 out the land was turned to the profit of the disorderly 
 and marauding classes. But the material did not exist 
 in France to stem the flood of anarchy, once it had begun 
 to overflow. In no other revolution did ideas or abstrac- 
 tions play so large a part, and this was why its early 
 stages appeared grandiose to the imagination ; but man 
 is not an abstract being, and theoretical ideas alone could 
 not cause a revolution, even in a community imbued with 
 the philosophy of the eighteenth century. The Revolu- 
 tion was intensified by the preaching and application of 
 crude doctrine, but its cause was the financial disorder of 
 the State and the oppressive incidence of taxation. It 
 was inevitable because of the immense misery and discon- 
 tent caused, first, by the mismanagement of the public 
 finances together with the extravagance of the Govern- 
 ment and the Court, and, secondly, by the ever increasing 
 multitude of privileged persons whose exemption from 
 
 VOL. I H
 
 98 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 taxation threw the burden more grievously on the poorest 
 portion of the population. 
 
 The suppression of that system of privilege was the 
 chief object of the Revolution. It destroyed at the same 
 time the last vestiges of feudalism ; but, as was remarked 
 by a witness of 1789, Chancellor Pasquier, so little re- 
 mained of feudality that it had become an almost mean- 
 ingless word, the one question in dispute between the 
 nobility and other citizens being that of pecuniary privi- 
 lege. 1 Moreover the persons enjoying it were not all 
 members of an exclusive, high-born, or territorial caste, 
 or merely the absentee courtiers of Versailles devouring 
 the substance of their dependents in the luxurious royal 
 circle. Every year, in all parts of France, persons of 
 obscure origin were invested with dignities, sometimes 
 in virtue of judicial or municipal office, sometimes by 
 purchase, which gave them noble rank, exempted them 
 from taxation, and even accorded them the right to exact 
 dues from the most heavily burdened section of the Third 
 Estate. This wholesale multiplication of petty nobility 
 accounts for the great number of families still surviving 
 in France which claim a noble origin of date anterior to 
 the lavish creations of unprivileged titles under the Em- 
 pire. Moreover, without being ennobled, a large propor- 
 tion of the bourgeoisie most capable of paying, including 
 public functionaries and lawyers, as well a,s the inhabi- 
 tants of certain towns, enjoyed greater or less exemption. 
 Thus the heaviest imposts fell on the labourers, who had 
 no possession save their tools and their hands, on the in- 
 habitants of the miserable villages of the Old Regime, and 
 on the small proprietors who cultivated their own plots 
 1 Mbmoirea du Chancelier Pasquier, vol. i.
 
 CH. i THE SWIFT DIFFUSION OF THE REVOLUTION 99 
 
 of ground. For it was not the Revolution which made 
 the peasant a land-owner ; during the whole of the eigh- 
 teenth century he had acquired the soil, with a passionate 
 craving, clad in rags and concealing his hoard from the 
 tax-collector till the occasion offered when he could buy 
 cheaply a scrap of land. 
 
 The question of the right to levy taxes and of their 
 incidence has in various forms had great effect on the 
 history of revolutions in both hemispheres, and here it 
 touched the population in every corner of the realm. 
 The grievance was so wide-spread that it produced a gen- 
 eral popular movement, a phenomenon so rare in France 
 that it has never since been repeated, though revolutions 
 have changed its forms of government, and plebiscites 
 have recorded temporary phases of opinion. The univer- 
 sal diffusion of the wrong accounts for the swiftness with 
 which the Revolution spread at an epoch when news trav- 
 elled slowly. Even a generation later, when M. Jules 
 Simon first came to Paris from Brittany under the Resto- 
 ration, it took as long to travel from Brest to the capital 
 as is now taken in going from that port to America, in so 
 primitive a state had the great Revolution left provincial 
 France. Of the slow circulation of news while it was in 
 operation we have a witness from England. When the 
 Bastille fell, Arthur Young was travelling in Alsace- 
 Lorraine, and a fortnight later came to Besangon. " From 
 Strasbourg hither," he writes on July 27, 1789, " I have 
 not been able to see a newspaper. For what the country 
 knows to the contrary their deputies are in the Bastille 
 instead of the Bastille being razed, so the mob plunder, 
 burn, and destroy in complete ignorance." Thence he 
 crossed Burgundy, hearing of chateaux being fired or
 
 100 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 sacked, and inquiring whether it were the work of peas- 
 ants or of brigands, yet when he reached Moulins, at the 
 best house-of-call he " might as well have demanded an 
 elephant as a newspaper. In the capital of a great prov- 
 vince, with a National Assembly voting a revolution, not 
 a newspaper to inform the people whether Fayette, Mira- 
 beau, or Louis XVI. is on the throne." 
 
 All the doctrines of Rousseau and of the philosophers 
 would not have carried the insurrection beyond the walls 
 of Paris and the great towns, but for the universal unhap- 
 piness throughout the length and breadth of France caused 
 by the fiscal system. Its oppressiveness made the people 
 welcome anarchy and join with the marauding class in 
 their work of rapine, while the representatives of the nation 
 in the capital were making the anarchy irremediable by 
 their work of demolition. Here and there in the annals of 
 the Constituent and Legislative assemblies some construc- 
 tive act is recorded, sometimes of permanent value, but the 
 words which perpetually meet the eye in them are " sup- 
 pression," "abolition," and "suspension." Many of the 
 men of 1789 began their work inspired with noble motives, 
 but they neglected the precaution which the most elemen- 
 tary architects even among primitive peoples observe, not 
 to destroy the foundations of a fabric which it is intended 
 to remodel if it has to be inhabited during the reconstruc- 
 tion. To the ruin of the edifice of central government 
 was added the confusion of a people in insurrection ; and 
 while rhetoricians frothed at the top of the seething soci- 
 ety, its dregs were an active element in the angry fermen- 
 tation which stirred up the whole intermediate mass. 
 France, with all its splendid tradition and civilisation, 
 could not have escaped extinction in this overwhelming
 
 CH. i THE PATRIOTIC PHASE OF THE REVOLUTION 101 
 
 and inexorable cataclysm, but for an influence which at 
 first aggravated its horrors. 
 
 VI 
 
 On the llth of July, 1792, the country was declared in 
 danger, and to intimidate the foreign invader was made 
 the excuse for every species of blood-stained excess. 
 But though soon, in the words of its apologist, "the 
 guillotine was the only institution in France and the 
 government was the scaffold," 1 the king being followed 
 to it by his judges as well as by droves of innocent 
 victims, and though humanitarian philosophy had led to 
 such depths of inhuman ferocity that to see unfortunates 
 sent to execution was a spectacle to which the mothers 
 of Paris brought their children, 2 another current of 
 sentiment was running, which though fierce was not 
 debased. The battalion of Marseillais, which passing 
 through Paris on the way to the frontier was utilised by 
 Danton and Marat in the carnage of the Tuileries on the 
 day of the downfall of the Monarchy, brought with it 
 the song which, though composed in Alsace by a native 
 of Franche-Comte', 3 has for ever associated the name of 
 Marseilles with the most thrilling battle-cry of patriotism 
 ever called forth by national peril. Here we see the 
 
 1 Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins, livre 62. 
 
 2 The famous tricoteuses who used to attend the sittings of the Revolu- 
 tionary Tribunal did so by virtue of the Decree of "6 Nivdse An II." 
 (December 26, 1793), passed in the middle of the Terror, which provided 
 that "les femmes pourraient assister aux stances avec leurs maris et leurs 
 enfants et y tricoter." 
 
 8 Rouget de Lisle, who was born in the Jura, composed the " Marseil- 
 laise" at Strasbourg in April, 1792, and it was brought to Paris by the 
 Marseillais who took part in the sack of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792. 
 
 UBHARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA BARBARA
 
 102 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 double phase of the Revolution. The volunteers who 
 massacred the nobles and the Swiss Guard and sacked 
 the palace were mere murderous insurgents ; but march- 
 ing to meet the Prussians at Valmy and Jemmapes they 
 were ennobled into saviours of their country. To have 
 taken part in those two victories of the Revolution was 
 the greatest pride of Louis Philippe, whose valour on 
 those fields as the youthful Due de Chartres, distin- 
 guished his revolutionary renown from the sinister record 
 of his father, Philippe Egalite', 1 chiefly associated with 
 the deeds of Convention, though he too had taken part 
 in military operations on the frontier. 
 
 The grandeur of the Revolution in the eyes of those 
 who had witnessed it, or had received its tradition from 
 actors in it, would not have been apparent without its 
 patriotic aspect and its military glory. The disciples 
 of the men of 1789, who deplored the violence of the 
 subsequent period, might say that in addition to abolish- 
 ing the Old Regime with its iniquitous fiscal system 
 (which was a high claim to the gratitude of mankind), 
 they enunciated principles so exalted that the issue of 
 the Declaration of the Rights of Man sufficed to glorify 
 the movement as the era of a perfect gospel. But beauty 
 of sentiment flourished equally in conjunction with the 
 most violent and cruel phases of the Revolution. As 
 Lamartine said of the Constitution drawn up by Robes- 
 pierre as a prelude to the Terror, " it recalled the pastoral 
 
 1 The Due d'Aumale, who, unlike some of his less distinguished rela- 
 tives, did not disclaim the revolutionary tradition of his family, was fond 
 of relating the story of his father's visit to Danton, when Dumouriez sent 
 him to Paris to bear the news of Valmy to the Convention. " Jeune 
 honime," said Danton to the young Louis Philippe, "ne vous mlez pas 
 de politique. Laissez nous faire cette besogne et retournez a 1'arme'e."
 
 CH. I THE UN WARLIKE PHASE OF THE REVOLUTION 103 
 
 republics of Plato or of Telemachus ; God and the people, 
 justice and humanity, inspiring every page of it." 1 In 
 nobility of principle the moderate men of '89 have no 
 advantage over the Jacobins of '93, and it was the 
 improvident destructiveness of the former and their 
 incapacity to govern which delivered the destinies of 
 France into the hands of the Terrorists ; for the anarchy 
 which reigned for ten years was the immediate effect of 
 the precipitate overthrow of the ancient authorities, and 
 the insufficiency and the discord of the new rulers. 
 
 If France had not been delivered from that anarchy by 
 the indirect means of exterior military conquest, and 
 reorganised by the same instrument, little would have 
 been heard of the grandeur of the French Revolution, 
 though some of the most ecstatic in its praise are those 
 who most deplore the means which made it glorious and 
 fashioned out of its chaos a new France. From the life 
 of Barere and its laudatory treatment by Hippolyte 
 Carnot, some idea may be gathered of what the Revolu- 
 tion would have been like without its military aspect. 
 It is clear that a servile, cruel, and cowardly profligate 
 was accounted one of its heroes by the son of one of the 
 few who had brought lustre on the Revolution. But 
 military glory was the sole title to eminence of the name 
 bequeathed to Hippolyte Carnot. As a regicide, as a 
 member of the Committee of Public Safety, and as a 
 Director, Lazare Carnot would have been less remem- 
 bered than his colleague Barras, not having had the 
 conspicuous vices of that other worthy of the un warlike 
 phases of the Revolution. But as "the Organiser of 
 Victory" he handed down a legend which marked out 
 1 Histoire des Girondins, livre 39.
 
 104 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 his estimable grandson to represent France before Europe, 
 when the Third Republic was bringing discredit on 
 democratic institutions, and to save it, it was necessary 
 to show that there were revolutionary traditions neither 
 sordid nor disorderly. 
 
 Not long after M. Sadi Carnot's election to the Presi- 
 dency an appreciation of the Revolution was made in its 
 centenary year, remarkable for the circumstances under 
 which it was uttered by one of the most authoritative 
 voices of France. A talented man of letters, in his 
 political capacity an ardent Republican, M. Claretie, the 
 Director of the The'dtre Frangais, was received at the 
 French Academy by M. Renan. They had first met at 
 the house of Michelet, whose exclusion from that eminent 
 company is regretted by many who have not for the elo- 
 quent historian's revolutionary enthusiasm the sympathy 
 of M. Claretie. M. Renan, whose iconoclasm was usu- 
 ally applied to legends of origin earlier than 1789, might 
 have been expected to treat the Revolution with the 
 mellifluous optimism, or gentle irony, which he usually 
 extended to modern subjects, but departing from his 
 wonted style he thus addressed the new Academician: 
 "If we turn away from the grandiose fatality of the 
 Revolution, all that is left is odious and horrible : a 
 nameless orgie, a monstrous fray into which madmen, 
 incapables, and miscreants rush, told by their instinct 
 that their opportunity is come, and that victory is for 
 the most repulsive of mankind. Every crime and every 
 insanity seem to have united to produce the success of 
 the Days of the Revolution." This was the language not 
 of an improvised polemic in the lips of a Reactionary, but 
 of an academical discourse pronounced by a sage whose
 
 CH. i THE EFFECT OF WAR ON THE REVOLUTION 105 
 
 career and opinions made him appear to be a sou of the 
 Revolution. It was the centenary of the one year in that 
 epoch which unites nearly all Frenchmen, yet M. Renan 
 having deliberately to choose his phrases and to submit 
 them to his colleagues before uttering them, deemed it 
 right to thus express himself in welcoming to the Insti- 
 tute the friend of Michelet and the eulogist of Camille 
 Desmoulins. 1 
 
 If after the death of Louis XVI. the European coali- 
 tion had left France to work out its destiny without 
 interference, the Revolution would have had no other 
 aspect in the eyes of posterity than that which pro- 
 voked M. Renan's unwontedly sombre epithets. Every- 
 thing indicates that the Jacobins, after devouring the 
 Girondins, would have proceeded to prey on one another, 
 just as they did when the enemy was on the frontier. 
 Nor was the anarchy which desolated the land aggravated 
 by the exterior troubles, excepting in certain limited 
 regions. Robespierre might have restored order had he 
 been given a free hand, but that is an impossible hy- 
 
 1 R4ponse au Discours de Reception a 1' Academic Frar^aise de M. 
 Jules Claretie, 21 Fe"vrier, 1889. The submission of the addresses made 
 on these occasions to a committee of Academicians chosen by lot is not 
 always a mere formality, it being competent for the committee to insist 
 on the alteration or omission of passages which might offend the political 
 susceptibilities of members of the Company. Thus M. Emile Ollivier, 
 who was elected in 1870, never pronounced his discourse on Lamartine, 
 whom he succeeded, as he refused to alter in it certain allusions to the 
 Second Empire, which were not considered opportune, the war having 
 intervened between his election and reception, the formal ceremony of 
 the latter being indefinitely postponed. The same fate befell his pro- 
 jected speech when he was designated to receive M. Henri Martin the 
 historian in 1878. M. Challemel-Lacour, who succeeded to Renan's 
 chair, evidently did not forget his predecessor's attack on the Revolution, 
 and he bitterly criticised him in his Discours de Reception in January, 
 1894.
 
 106 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 pothesis ; with no other weapon than his civilian blade of 
 the guillotine he could not have set up any authoritative 
 form of government capable of working usefully, or of 
 surviving the horror inspired by its origin. Events 
 would probably have followed the course that they 
 actually took up to a certain point, for the Directory, 
 which came out of the reaction after the Reign of Terror, 
 was not created by the foreign situation, and to the 
 interior Revolution must be wholly ascribed the chaotic 
 administration, the mismanagement of the finances, the 
 dissoluteness and corruption which permeated society. 
 But the enmity of Europe was the salvation of France in 
 the dark hours of the closing century ; and the army with 
 its valiant achievements alone maintained a standard of 
 conduct and duty in the disorganised nation, which 
 instead of sinking inextricably into the demoralisation 
 of the Directory, was raised to life again by the vicissi- 
 tudes of war. 
 
 VII 
 
 The discipline of warfare with all its ills, and the 
 exhilaration of conquest, would not have sufficed to 
 renew the life of France ; but the battle-field produced a 
 hero and a captain who was also a master of the science 
 of government, of genius never surpassed. The French 
 threw themselves into the arms of Bonaparte, not be- 
 cause they discerned in him the reorganiser of France, 
 but simply as the glorious young conqueror whose mar- 
 tial prestige was the only force sufficient to save the 
 country from the anarchy of the Directory and from civil 
 war. Thus, on landing at Fre*jus from the East in the
 
 CH. i THE RISE OF BONAPARTE 107 
 
 last autumn of the century, his progress to the capital 
 was a triumph, the victor of Arcola and Rivoli, the 
 pacificator of Campo Formio who had given Belgium and 
 the Rhine to France, being hailed as liberator. 
 
 Arrived in Paris he shuts himself up beneath his 
 domestic roof, having to cultivate acquaintance with his 
 wife, of whom he has not seen much since Barras handed 
 her over to him in 1795, with the command of the Army 
 of Italy as a wedding-present. Josephine is still amiably 
 grateful to the protector who saved her from the guil- 
 lotine, but the career of the Director, in gallantry as in 
 government, is nearly done, and henceforth Madame 
 Bonaparte will be a relatively respectable wife : like 
 another handsome adventuress who, under dissimilar cir- 
 cumstances, attained a crown, she had to accomplish the 
 days of her purification. The General keeps quiet and 
 calculates: when he puts on a uniform it is not that 
 which the soldiers of France have followed from the 
 Adige to the Nile, but the coat with the green palm- 
 leaves of the Institute, for his colleagues in which 
 learned company he has opened up the mysteries of 
 Egypt. But though he does not obtrude his military 
 prestige, it is recognised as likely to be a useful instru- 
 ment in the hands of some talented Revolutionary, who, 
 as civil dictator, would restore order. Talleyrand was 
 intriguing; so was his rival Fouche'; so was Sie'ye's, a 
 regicide like the latter, an apostate priest like the former, 
 whose career was not destined to be as lucrative as that 
 of the ex-bishop of Autun. Meanwhile he was a Director 
 at the head of affairs, and is reported to have said that 
 "To save France a sword and a head were necessary." 
 Sie'ye's was willing that the sword should be that of
 
 108 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 Bonaparte, but the events which succeeded the Coup 
 d'Etat of Brumaire were a revelation to the contempo- 
 raries of the young general, the nature of whose work is 
 not universally appreciated even by posterity. 
 
 Some years ago I was travelling towards the land 
 where the last hope of the Bonapartes fell in savage war- 
 fare while wearing the uniform of the army which crushed 
 the founder of his dynasty. At the early close of a 
 tropical day the dark rock of St. Helena rose before us 
 in the sea. At sundown the ship lay at anchor in the 
 roadstead, and night fell on the island with sudden 
 swiftness. In the muffled moonlight of a cloudy evening 
 I rode across the hills which lie between Jamestown and 
 Longwood, where in the mean house upon the heights 
 overlooking the wastes of ocean, across which he used 
 to gaze, I saw by dim candle-light the bare chamber in 
 which Napoleon died. A few hours later, when the ship 
 was leaving behind the grim cliffs in their solitude, my 
 impressions of the lonely ride, which was weird enough 
 to move the least imaginative, were disturbed by the 
 question of an unsentimental traveller, a Scottish legis- 
 lator, who in the voice of common sense asked who was 
 this Bonaparte, and what title had he to the style of 
 Napoleon the Great? had any of his works survived him 
 save a record of suffering, and had he left anything 
 behind him but a name as barren as the rock vanishing 
 in our wake ? 
 
 M. Taine, the sternest modern critic of the Emperor, 
 had already answered that inquiry. The work of Napo- 
 leon which has survived him is modern France. 1 The 
 sword which the Abb Sieves deemed might clear the 
 1 Le Regime Moderne, liv. i. c. i.
 
 CH. i THE SAVIOUR OF THE REVOLUTION 109 
 
 way for a civil dictator had performed only a preliminary 
 parade in Italy and in the Orient of the feats it was 
 about to accomplish on more famous fields, from Marengo 
 to Wagram. But the soldier whose wielding of it had 
 only just begun to astonish Europe, in the interval 
 between two expeditions, which any other commander 
 would have found too brief for repose or for technical 
 study, displayed the most colossal gifts of government 
 and organisation ever possessed by a human being. A 
 young general of thirty, of alien race, who had learned as 
 a foreign tongue the language of the people he was to 
 rule, who man and boy had lived only for fourteen years 
 in France, 1 suddenly appeared and being called in to 
 intimidate misrule, instead of returning to his troops 
 when he had restored order, revealed himself by his 
 genius as the master and the chief of the nation. The 
 soldier of fortune, a stranger unversed in civil life, suc- 
 ceeded where philosophers, lawyers, and politicians had 
 failed, and saved the great movement, which had swept 
 away the old Monarchy and the Ancient Regime, from 
 dissolving the French nation in anarchy. 
 
 While residing in the Brie there were two spots I 
 sometimes passed, in that beautiful region on the south 
 of Paris, which seemed to mark the beginning and the 
 end of the astounding epoch wherein modern France was 
 made, though their historical interest is forgotten. They 
 
 1 Between Bonaparte's first arrival in France in December, 1778, at 
 the age of nine years and four months (when he went to Autun to learn 
 French before entering at Brienne), and November, 1799, when he made 
 the Coup d'Etat of Brumaire at the age of thirty years and three months, 
 he seems to have spent fourteen years and two months in France. Be- 
 tween his twentieth and his thirtieth year he made only one long sojourn 
 in France, the two and a half years before he was appointed to the Army 
 of Italy.
 
 110 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 are only roadside points on the royal highways issuing 
 from the capital, their pavements now deserted by traffic, 
 the one leading to Bale, the other to Antibes and Italy. 
 On the former stands the village of Boissy St. Le"ger, 
 where Mme. de Stael, arriving from Switzerland on 
 November 9, 1799, made her last change of horses before 
 entering Paris, just as Barras passed on his way to Gros 
 Bois hard by, the ch&teau then occupied by him, but soon 
 to be given to another son of the Revolution, Berthier, 
 afterwards Prince de Wagram, whose descendant still 
 lives there. It was the "18 Brumaire," and the gen- 
 darmes escorting the fallen Director told the postilions 
 of Mme. de Stael of what had occurred at the Tuileries ; 
 and she recounts how for the first time since the Revolu- 
 tion she heard a popular name on the lips of men and 
 women. Until then everything had been done by the 
 Constituent Assembly, by the Convention, or by the 
 People; but to-day the human race was no longer anony- 
 mous in France, where in every mouth was the name of 
 Bonaparte. 
 
 A few miles distant, where the highroad to the south 
 approaches the Seine, fourteen years later a scene took 
 place less dramatic than the better known farewell of 
 Fontainebleau soon to come, but for that reason more 
 pathetic. It was midnight, on March 30, 1814. The 
 campaign of France was over: Napoleon in the supreme 
 struggle had risen to the height of his genius, and in a 
 month had won twelve battles to defend the approaches 
 of his capital against the armies of three nations. But 
 Paris was invested, and in the hope of striking a last 
 blow, he speeds thither as fast as a post-chaise will carry 
 him, leaving his troops at Troyes. While changing
 
 CH. i THE BREVITY OF THE NAPOLEONIC EPOCH 111 
 
 horses at the Cour de France, a wayside inn near Juvisy, 
 he hails a squadron of cavalry riding away from Paris. 
 The officer, recognising in the dark the well-known voice, 
 halts and gives him the news of the day: the Empress 
 and Joseph Bonaparte in flight, the capitulation signed, 
 and the Allies to enter Paris in the morning. All 
 through the night he paced the bleak road, refusing to 
 believe that it was too late to press on to his capital, 
 where his presence alone would undo Marmont's defeat 
 and Talleyrand's treachery. The chilly dawn broke 
 before he could be forced into the cabriolet which bore 
 him to Fontainebleau, while the Tsar Alexander was 
 consenting to be Talleyrand's guest in the rue St. 
 Florentin, where he decided that the French should 
 enjoy a copy of the British Constitution, and ordered his 
 Cossacks to aid the Parisians in displacing for the first 
 time the statue in the Place VendQme. Two obelisks 
 mark the spot where the Emperor heard that the Empire 
 was ended, but the weather-worn inscriptions, though 
 older than this roadside tragedy, are significant. One 
 sets forth how "Ludovicus XV., rex Christianissimus, 
 viam hanc antea difficilem, arduam et pene inviam fieri 
 curavit," and the other in French says that the monu- 
 ments were restored "in the reign of Napoleon the 
 Great." 
 
 "Napoleon the Great" was again spoken of as "Bona- 
 parte " in the fickle capital the night that he trod his 
 Calvary on the steep which he climbed by the road made 
 by the king whose subject he was born only forty-four 
 years before. His career was done, save for the epilogue 
 of the Hundred Days, at an age when men, excepting the 
 heroes of the French Revolution, are on the threshold of
 
 112 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 public life. It is a coincidence which has not been 
 noticed, that at the moment when the great Emperor 
 became Bonaparte again, he was day for day the same 
 age as was his nephew, Louis Napoleon, when he 
 dropped the family name to become an Emperor. 1 He 
 was younger when he had completed the work which 
 gives him his title of greatness. Twenty years after the 
 Revolution, ten years after his return from Egypt, it was 
 all finished: and if in 1809 he had fallen at Wagram 
 when he was thirty-nine, his renown would have been 
 almost unimpaired, though even then, having accom- 
 plished the reorganisation of France and become the 
 master of Continental Europe, his ambition had impelled 
 him to his first fatal step, the invasion of Spain. 
 
 But, before the ambitious conqueror had got the better 
 of the ruler and the organiser, he had accomplished work 
 which at the end of the century, after revolutions and 
 invasions, after changes of dynasty and misgovernment 
 of every form, lasts as the solid foundation and frame- 
 work of French society. The whole centralised adminis- 
 tration of France, which in its stability has survived 
 every political crisis, was the creation of Napoleon and 
 the keystone of his fabric. It was he who organised the 
 existing administrative divisions of the departments, 
 with the officials supervising them and the local assem- 
 blies attached to them. The relations of Church and 
 State are still regulated by his Concordat. The Uni- 
 
 1 Napoleon, born August 15, 1769, on March 30, 1814 (the last day of 
 the Empire, a provisional Government being set up the next day), was 
 aged 44 years and 227 days. Louis Xapoleon, born April 20, 1808, on 
 December 1, 1S-V2 (the last day on which he used the name of Bonaparte, 
 being proclaimed Kmperor on December 2), was also age- 1 44 years and 
 227 days.
 
 CH. I THE RECONSTRUCTION OF FRANCE 113 
 
 versity, which remains the basis of public education, was 
 his foundation. The Civil Code, the Penal Code, the 
 Conseil d'Etat, the Judicial System, the Fiscal System, 
 in fine every institution which a law-abiding Frenchman 
 respects, from the Legion of Honour to the Bank of 
 France and the Come"die Franchise, was either formed or 
 reorganised by Napeolon. No doubt the revolutionary 
 assemblies sometimes paused in their work of demoli- 
 tion to essay a constructive project. The Constituent 
 Assembly created the departments, the Directory remod- 
 elled the Institute; and Condorcet might have carried 
 out his schemes of education had not his colleagues of 
 the Convention driven him into suicide to escape the 
 guillotine. But when Bonaparte arrived in France in 
 1799 from the camp and the battle-field, he found that 
 the result of the Revolution, for ten years in the hands 
 of jurists, rhetoricians, and theorists, was chaos. It was 
 illumined with a few streaks of light which displayed 
 the fragmentary beginnings of well-conceived designs; 
 but it was none the less a chaos, needing the inspiration 
 of a creator to evolve order from it, and the authority of 
 a master of men to utilise the misapplied intellects of 
 that erratic epoch. 
 
 The institutions of the Napoleonic establishment sur- 
 vive, not as historical monuments, but as the working 
 machinery which regulates the existence of a great people 
 at the end of the nineteenth century, and their minute 
 examination shows that they operate satisfactorily. M. 
 Taine and other critics of the Napoleonic reorganisation 
 say it was imperfect, and ascribe to it many of the ills 
 from which France has suffered. It was not perfect: no 
 human work is ; but admirably suited to the French tern-
 
 114 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 perament is the organisation which, created in less than 
 a decade amid the alarms of war, has not only performed 
 its functions for three generations, but stands erect as 
 the framework to keep French society together amid the 
 fever of insurrection or the more lingering disorder of 
 parliamentary anarchy, just as though it owed its stability 
 to the growth of ages. 
 
 It is hard to see what other form the reorganisation of 
 France could have taken. Had constitutional govern- 
 ment been essayed to cope with the anarchy, the social 
 edifice demolished at the Revolution could never have 
 been reconstituted. Napoleon seemed to be called into 
 being, a miraculous or at all events an abnormal figure, 
 to save the existence of France; and that his work has 
 lasted without any serious effort to upset it shows how 
 good it was. The conjunction with it of a parliamentary 
 monarchy was anomalous, but Napoleon himself made 
 that unnatural combination inevitable. At first his 
 peaceful work of construction advanced with the devel- 
 opment of his military genius. Marengo was followed 
 by the organisation of the Church and of education; and 
 from the council-chamber where he set his own impress 
 on the Code to bear his name, he sped across Europe to 
 win the fields of Austerlitz and Jena. But when the 
 marvellous combination had brought France in a few 
 years from the brink of disruption to an unequalled 
 height of splendour and prosperity, then his character 
 degenerates. The lawgiver, the organiser, the statesman, 
 disappear; he is only the conqueror, conscious of his skill 
 in the terrible game of war which distorts his imagina- 
 tion and drags him in a furious wanton course to Madrid, 
 to Moscow, and to Leipsic, till we find him, by a strange
 
 CH. i MADAME DE STAfiL AND NAPOLEON 116 
 
 irony, after his most consummate exhibition of strategy, 
 wandering on a March night on the road-side near Paris, 
 deserted by his wife, his kindred, his marshals, his coun- 
 sellors, who owed to him their place and name in the 
 world. 
 
 Mme. de Stael, writing soon after his final downfall, 
 said: "Many people hold that if Bonaparte had under- 
 taken the invasion neither of Spain nor of Russia he 
 would still be Emperor; but he had need of war both to 
 establish and to preserve absolutism. A great nation 
 would not have endured the monotonous and degrading 
 weight of despotism, if military glory had not continually 
 roused and animated public sentiment." 1 The accom- 
 plished daughter of Necker had two strong passions a 
 hatred of Napoleon who had persecuted her, and an 
 affection for the liberties of the British Constitution. 
 But the least prejudiced spectator, writing when France 
 was worn out, weary of useless slaughter, subjugated to 
 the foreigner, and mutilated, had the right to think that 
 the monster of ambition who caused these calamities 
 could never have taken his place as the peaceful ruler of 
 the nation which he had led first to triumph and then to 
 disaster. If the discussion of hypothetical contingen- 
 cies, so tempting in tracing the political history of 
 modern France, were not futile, much might be said on 
 the other side. It seems as though Napoleon, after he 
 had done his great work of organisation, and had given 
 to the army eleven years of legitimate glory from Cas- 
 tiglione to Friedland, had an unexampled opportunity of 
 ruling peacefull}' a contented people. Save for the 
 Royalist plots there was then no symptom of discontent 
 1 Considerations sur la devolution Franqaise, partie iv. c. 19.
 
 110 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 with the authoritative regime which Mme. de Stael 
 called despotism, but under which there was more liberty 
 than in the despotism of the Convention or in the 
 despotism of the subsequent anarchy. Had her life not 
 ended two years after Waterloo, she would have soon seen 
 that the limited monarchy of her desire was capable of 
 oppression, 1 without even the excuse of public disorder 
 as at the time of the White Terror. She might have also 
 realised the vanity of her theory, that the Restoration 
 took up the tale of the Revolution where it was inter- 
 rupted by violence in 1791, and that the intervening 
 events formed a deplorable interlude outside the pro- 
 gressive history of France. 
 
 Looking back from the end of the century to its first 
 three decades, we perceive a phenomenon which precisely 
 contradicts the idea running through the treatise of 
 Mme. de Stael. The period wherein the rightful kings 
 of France reigned over the realm restored to them seems, 
 in spite of the brilliant literary renaissance which dawned 
 in it, politically obscure after the years which had gone 
 before. Louis XVIII. and Charles X. had grown into 
 manhood in the ancient Court, taking part in its pleas- 
 ures, its intrigues, and its politics. Yet these princes, 
 who had been foremost figures in a society never equalled 
 for stateliness and grace, when they recovered their 
 inheritance made but a mean appearance on the throne 
 
 1 Mme. de Stael, after the 1st Restoration, began to protest against the 
 increasing oppression by the clergy and the e'migre's, and would have 
 agitated opinion against the restored monarchy but for the return of 
 Napoleon. Correspondence de Talleyrand et de Louis XVIII. (1814). 
 In 1822 her daughter, the Duchesse de Broglie, thanked God that she had 
 not survived to see all her hopes set at nought. Souvenirs du Baron de 
 Sarante, vol. iii.
 
 CH. i THE NEW CHARLEMAGNE 117 
 
 and in the palaces of their fathers ; though the elder of 
 them was a statesman of high ability, and was a good 
 king, who reigned with sagacity during the first years 
 of repose necessary for the renewal of the forces of 
 France. Had they come back recalled to France to 
 restore order after anarchy, they might each have pre- 
 sented a more imposing figure to history. But it was 
 not to revolutionary disorder that these monarchs suc- 
 ceeded; it was the great son and organiser of the Revo- 
 lution whom they came after, dwarfed by him who had 
 filled Europe with his presence, and whose constructive 
 work has remained when the traces of his mad havoc have 
 disappeared. 
 
 After the prudent reign of Louis XVIII. had ended in 
 1824, Charles X. decided to be crowned in the cathedral 
 of Reims with all the pomp with which the Church had 
 honoured the royal guardians of her eldest daughter, on 
 the spot associated for ages with the assumption of the 
 purple of France. To this altar Joan of Arc had brought 
 Charles VII. to be anointed with the holy chrism. Here 
 the Grand Monarque, a child of sixteen, had received 
 the crown in the presence of his mother, Anne of 
 Austria, and of the Italian cardinal who had usurped his 
 father's place ; and here Charles X. himself, when Comte 
 d'Artois, had assisted fifty years before at the coronation 
 of his fated brother Louis XVI. and of Marie Antoinette. 
 Louis XVIII. had dispensed with the sacred ceremony; 
 when he succeeded de jure the cathedral of Reims was 
 not accessible to the family of Bourbon, and in France 
 the heads of kings were then associated with instruments 
 other than crowns. But the aged monarch who came 
 next decreed that the holy phial brought down from
 
 118 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 heaven for the baptism of Clovis should be broached once 
 more for him ; and though its virtues could not preserve 
 his kingship even for the few years left of his span of 
 life, perhaps the event was worthier of resounding cele- 
 bration than it seemed to spectators, for now we know 
 that it was to be the only occasion for a century and a 
 quarter on which a ruler of France succeeded his prede- 
 cessor by hereditary right. 
 
 Between the two ceremonies in which Charles of 
 Bourbon had played a part there had been another corona- 
 tion in France. Not in the royal shrine of Champagne, 
 but at Notre Dame de Paris, a dozen years after the 
 anointed head of Louis XVI. had fallen within sight of 
 its towers, while the Comte d'Artois was reposing in 
 safety at Holyrood, took place the most imposing conse- 
 cration of a monarch that Christendom had ever seen, for 
 the Vicar of Jesus Christ came from Rome to assist at it. 
 It was not in the English but in the French sense of the 
 word that Pius VII. assisted at the coronation of Napo- 
 leon, for the captive Pope sat a spectator while the 
 amazing conqueror placed with his own hands the crown 
 on his head. The last witnesses both of that scene and 
 of the coronation of Charles X. twenty years later have 
 gone, but we have some idea why the audacious splen- 
 dour of the upstart pageant paled and made unreal the 
 legitimate revival of the regal sacrament. Two painters 
 who were present, David and his pupil Gdrard, have left 
 us their respective impressions on the walls of two noble 
 galleries once the antechambers of kings of France. 
 Regard the sumptuously attired personages of the Impe- 
 rial retinue reproduced in the rich colouring of the 
 revolutionary painter. Kneeling before her husband,
 
 CH. i APOTHEOSIS OF THE REVOLUTION 119 
 
 and unheeding the gesture of benediction of the Pontiff, 
 is Josephine, ex-mistress of Barras, to-day Empress of 
 the French, and, unlike her heir-desiring master, des- 
 tined to have a descendant to rule over France. Soon 
 she will pay the penalty for the ill-timed term of her 
 fruitfulness, and when the Creole's place is taken by a 
 daughter of the Emperors of the West, the Church, 
 whose chief on earth is here to-day, will show its flexibil- 
 ity by blessing the new union while she lingers neglected 
 at Malmaison. The minister of the Church who will unite 
 his nephew, the successor of Louis XVI., to the niece of 
 Marie Antoinette is here too. Csesar's uncle eight years 
 ago had lost his holy vocation, and instead of a village 
 priest in Corsica was a commissary in the Army of Italy ; 
 but the Consulate revived the ancient faith in many 
 breasts and Cardinal Fesch had been Primate of the 
 Gauls already three years when, a Prince of the Church, 
 he escorted the Pope to France. Here is another who 
 had worn the violet of prelates in the previous reign 
 when it was rarely accessible to sons of the people like 
 Joseph Fesch, but, apostate and unmitred, Talleyrand 
 does not shun pious ceremonies, nor even the presence 
 of the keeper of the Fisher's Seal. 
 
 Now if we pause to examine David's picture at the 
 Louvre, it is not because it represents with skill an 
 isolated scene of historic interest, but because it reveals 
 the making of modern France and even of modern Europe. 
 It is the apotheosis of the French Revolution ; it is the con- 
 secration of its organisation by armed force. Napoleon 
 incarnates first the triumph of the populace over the 
 Ancient Regime and then the organisation of the people 
 into omnipotent military despotism. The Papacy has, in
 
 120 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 its eternal wisdom, frequently shown indulgent com- 
 placency for the disorders and delicts of great rulers who 
 have represented mighty dynasties and long traditions; 
 but there is not one among this brilliant throng blessed 
 by the Pope who represents any tradition. Without the 
 revolutionary victories of Castiglione, of Rivoli and 
 Marengo, they would be a band of nameless adventurers 
 and adventuresses headed by an unfrocked priest: but 
 they are the satellites of the risen star of military genius, 
 and the successor of St. Peter quits the apostolic thresh- 
 old to mingle with them. Presently his example will 
 be followed by the occupants of the proudest temporal 
 thrones of the Continent when Austerlitz and Jena have 
 made them the vassals of the soldier crowning himself 
 with the crown of Charlemagne. 
 
 Hence it is that whatever vulgarity there may be 
 hidden beneath the scarlet and the purple and the ermine 
 crowded on the floor of Notre Dame, the force and 
 audacity of the scene made any other manner of corona- 
 tion in France henceforth ridiculous. Before glancing 
 at the other picture we may reflect that some of the 
 materials which gave David his subject are still ready 
 to hand in France. The world will probably never see 
 another Napoleon. But a leader with the genius of one 
 of his marshals may one day in a moment of victory 
 realise that the conquering armies of Bonaparte which 
 made him Emperor were a handful of ill-equipped levies 
 compared with the disciplined legions which the French 
 democracy now maintains on a war footing, at the dis- 
 posal of a soldier of fortune who touches the popular 
 fancy. 
 
 The other picture at Versailles represents a mas-
 
 CH. i APOTHEOSIS OF THE REVOLUTION 121 
 
 querade which imposes on no one. The costumes and the 
 architecture are the same which are familiar in paintings 
 and prints of bygone coronations at Reims, but we recog- 
 nise some of these faces as having taken part in certain 
 events and movements which have altered the face of 
 Europe since the hero of to-day assisted at his brother's 
 crowning. The old King is embracing the Dauphin 
 amid the acclamations of his companions of the emigra- 
 tion, and of certain others. Had there been no Salic 
 law to prevent the consort of the heir to the throne from 
 becoming Queen of France and Navarre when she emerged 
 from the Temple, whence her father and mother had gone 
 to the guillotine, and where her brother had succumbed, 
 history might have taken a different turn ; for Napoleon 
 himself recognised in the Duchesse d'Angouleme the 
 only man of her family. But the applauding e'migre's 
 are not the only audience in the cathedral. The two 
 Cardinal-Dukes who officiate at the anointing are aided 
 in the after ceremony by two Marshal-Dukes whose 
 names and titles were unknown to the Old Regime, for 
 they bear them by the favour of the self-crowned Emperor 
 who died at St. Helena four years ago. So Mortier, Due 
 de TreVise, and Soult, Due de Dalmatie, have offered the 
 hand-of- justice and the sceptre to the King ; and the grim 
 old marshals who would have been sergeant-pensioners of 
 a royal regiment but for the Revolution, for which they 
 fought, perhaps think it better to spend a morning trip- 
 ping in silk and satin with lowly obeisance on the carpet 
 oifleurs de lys than to be taken out behind the Luxem- 
 bourg and shot like their comrade Ney. The shoes of 
 lilied velvet have been humbly put on the royal feet by 
 the ubiquitous one ever ready to bend the knee to any
 
 122 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 master. Louis XVI., Constituent Assembly, Conven- 
 tion, Directory, First Consul, Emperor, are all the same 
 to M. de Talleyrand, who is equally ready to betray them 
 in turn. The Prince de Be*nevent, alone of his prodig- 
 ious generation, personifies the Revolution in all its 
 phases, so when it takes that of a royal masque he plays 
 his part in it with consummate art. His performances 
 are not yet done ; thirteen years are yet to run before the 
 Abbe Dupanloup will be called to the rue St. Florentin 
 to hear a confession perhaps more interesting than the 
 published memoirs of Talleyrand. He has one more 
 master to serve who is here to-day. We all know that 
 the head of the Orleans family is, after the Children of 
 France, always the first Prince of the blood, since the 
 renunciation of the Spanish Bourbons ; so here is Louis 
 Philippe erect at the right of the throne just as he used 
 to mount guard at the door of the Jacobin Club in his 
 youth, when his cousin D'Artois, king to-day, had fled 
 to Coblentz, and when his father Philippe Egalite was 
 meditating how he might supplant Louis XVI. without 
 sending him to the scaffold. 
 
 The coronation of Napoleon, with all its magnificent 
 effrontery, was the apotheosis of the revolutionary settle- 
 ment. The crown which the soldier of fortune assumed 
 that day departed from his head, but the spectacle sym- 
 bolised the result of the Revolution, the civil reconstruc- 
 tion of France by a military adventurer. The phase of 
 the Revolution proclaimed that day, the Empire, did not 
 last, but its work survived it, making vain all attempts 
 to ignore the change of things. Hence the coronation of 
 Charles X. was a mere travesty, though the chief mime 
 was the lawful heir of St. Louis, and all it led to was
 
 CH. i THE CORONATION OF CHARLES X 123 
 
 the Revolution of July for the benefit of the family of the 
 regicide Orleans, while outside the royal fete the people 
 responded with a demonstration, when in ominous thou- 
 sands they bore to the grave General Foy, a hero of the 
 Grande Armee. 
 
 Not that the tradition of the Empire was generally 
 popular under the Restoration. On the contrary, the 
 removal of the scourge of war from a nation exhausted by 
 twenty years' drain of life-blood was a relief so exhilarat- 
 ing that the blitheness of the French people is one of the 
 most notable features of that curious epoch. Defeat, loss of 
 territory, and foreign invasion had none of the grievous 
 effects which our generation has seen produced on the 
 French nature by similar misfortunes comparatively 
 slight. Save to his old soldiers, the memory of Napoleon 
 was a nightmare to the French in the early days of the 
 Restoration, when Victor Cousin dared to say of Water- 
 loo that it was the triumph of liberty over despotism. 
 It is interesting to follow the fluctuations of French 
 sentiment towards Napoleon. The rock of St. Helena 
 was the first cause of the metamorphosis. Had another 
 Elba been found for him in European waters, had he 
 ended his days in a suburb of London or of Vienna, spy- 
 ing the amours of Marie Louise, composing manifestoes 
 to the people of France, or plotting to reappear in their 
 midst, his legend would have never revived, though 
 his constructive work would have remained. But the 
 Memorial of St. Helena, coming forth from the tomb on 
 the desert island, was the gospel of a miraculous apos- 
 tolate: so he who for the last portion of his career had 
 imperturbably sent men to death by myriads in the pur- 
 suit of his insensate ambition, was transfigured into " the
 
 124 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 Christ of the French Revolution, wickedly nailed to the 
 rock by the malice of kings." Without St. Helena, 
 Beranger's ballads might have pleased the veterans of the 
 Grande Arme'e and charmed future generations by their 
 literary beauty, but there would have been little need for 
 the government of the Restoration to imprison the poet, 
 who afterwards gave his aid to the Revolution of July 
 which brought back the tricolour. 
 
 Louis Philippe in turn encouraged the revival of the 
 legend by sending his son to bring home the Emperor's 
 ashes ; so that, when the Middle-class Monarchy was 
 upset, the name of the hero and martyr of the Revolu- 
 tion was so cherished in the newly enfranchised democ- 
 racy that its inheritance bore his nephew to popular 
 dictatorship. The Second Empire did not increase the 
 prestige of the Napoleonic tradition, which seemed to 
 have incurred eternal execration when the dynasty fell 
 amid the same woodlands of the Ardennes where Du- 
 mouriez had led his raw levies to the first victories of 
 the Revolution, and had associated the name of Sedan 
 with repulse of invasion before the fame of Bonaparte 
 was ever heard of in France. The years after the war 
 mark the lowest depths of misesteem attached to the 
 Napoleonic legend since Las Cases published the Memo- 
 rial. Lanfrey had already essayed to damage it when 
 the events of 1870 came as a commentary to his work ; 
 but as the memory of the Second Empire receded a 
 reaction commenced, and when Taine published his un- 
 flattering portrait of Napoleon, the controversy roused 
 by it showed that there was a renaissance of feeling in 
 favour of the soldier of the Revolution. The rifeness 
 of parliamentary anarchy and scandal, not unlike that
 
 CH. I THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEND 125 
 
 which Bonaparte suppressed, helped to turn the revived 
 sentiment into a cult and a passion, which, however, had 
 only a literary development. 
 
 But it is to be noted that whatever sentiment prevails 
 for the moment in France with regard to the character 
 and career of Napoleon his work endures unaffected. 
 Under the Restoration of the legitimate kings, under 
 the Revolutionary Monarchy of the Orleans branch, 
 under the Plebiscitary Empire, and under the Parlia- 
 mentary Republic, the Napoleonic construction forms 
 the unchanging basis of the administration and life of 
 the country, whatever forms of legislative and executive 
 powers the constitution of the moment has set up. Con- 
 sequently, whether we regard Napoleon as M. Taine's 
 mediaeval Italian condottiere, who strongly resembles the 
 Corsican ogre of our forefathers, or as the idyllic Little 
 Corporal with his gray military coat ; whether we are 
 dazzled with the audacity of the coronation scene, or 
 shocked at the murder of the Due d'Enghien, we have 
 to recognise that his constructive work remains the 
 framework of modern France and that its stability re- 
 sists time and vicissitude. Decentralisation has been 
 the subject of a thousand pamphlets ; the revision of 
 the Concordat is a venerable article of reform ; the sys- 
 tem of education has been improved and the tribunals 
 have been increased ; but the Napoleonic settlement of 
 the Revolution lasts. Moreover, nothing survives of the 
 Revolution but what was established by Napoleon. So, 
 now that a century has passed since the great change 
 of things, we see clearly that its chief tangible result 
 was the authoritative centralised government established 
 by him whom Mine, de Stael called a Robespierre on
 
 120 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 horseback, thus recognising the revolutionary character of 
 his work. But the absolutism of Napoleon was neces- 
 sary and salutary for the reconstruction of France ; and 
 that he organised the chaos of the Revolution into a 
 fabric, of which the use by three generations has dis- 
 played the suitability, is a proof of his providential 
 genius.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 LIBERTY 
 
 BBFOBE we examine the working of the institutions 
 under which France is governed at the end of the 
 nineteenth century, and their connection with the great 
 Revolution, we may first inquire what has been the fate 
 of certain principles laid down at that epoch. It is es- 
 pecially interesting to observe the attitude of the French 
 to those displayed in the device of the First Republic, 
 "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," which in 1848 was 
 reiterated in the Constitution 1 promulgated the month 
 before Louis Bonaparte was elected President of the 
 Second Republic. On the third occasion when France 
 established that form of government, it voted a Consti- 
 tution containing no declaration of principle and no 
 promise of liberty. The Republic, however, set up again 
 the motto which the Prince-President had removed from 
 public buildings when he rooted up the Trees of Liberty 
 planted by the enthusiasts of 1848. Not that it is cer- 
 tain that the inscription broadcast of the name of Lib- 
 erty, together with those of its accompanying virtues, 
 is the best means of imposing its principles on citizens. 
 
 1 Constitution du 4 Novembre, 1848. 
 127
 
 128 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 The sight of it, for instance, on the portals of the State 
 prisons is more suggestive of those metaphysical discus- 
 sions in which the French have essayed to define the 
 term, than of Liberty in the eyes of commonplace 
 man. 
 
 A visit to Oxford led M. Taine to the conclusion that 
 metaphysics did not flourish in England, 1 but the absence 
 of the science, in which he was an adept, did not attenu- 
 ate his praise of our literature ; for in it he recognised 
 that the unphilosophic terminology wherein we clothe 
 our ideas has been an advantage in the history of the 
 nation. Thus we are more practical in our treatment 
 of Liberty, which, to a Frenchman, is a dogma to define 
 or to expound rather than a factor in the every-day life 
 of a community. This conception partly accounts for 
 the durability of the fiction that the Revolution was the 
 era of Liberty, the exact contrary being the fact. The 
 emancipation of modern thought was effected by the 
 philosophers who were the products of the Ancient 
 Monarchy, which let them air their doctrines with little 
 hindrance. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot all contrib- 
 uted to the Revolution, but had they lived until the 
 Terror, they would in spite of their advanced years 
 have probably shared the fate of Lavoisier and of Male- 
 sherbes, 2 unless they had cheated the guillotine, as did 
 Condorcet in his cell. Each of those philosophers was 
 arrested under a warrant which bore first on its face 
 
 1 Litterature Anglaise, livre v. The metaphysical currents, which 
 led to the Revolution, are critically analysed by Taine with great skill 
 and lucidity in the Ancien Regime, livre iii. 
 
 2 Voltaire and Rousseau died in 1778: Diderot in 1784: Condorcet 
 committed suicide in March, 1794 : Malesherbes was guillotined in April, 
 and Lavoisier in May, 1794.
 
 CH. n REVOLUTIONARY CONCEPTION OP LIBERTY 129 
 
 the word Liberty. Malesherbes, best known as the in- 
 trepid advocate of Louis XVI., was the friend of Rous- 
 seau, and under his administration, as a royal official, had 
 appeared the Encyclopaedia. Jean-Jacques had been ex- 
 humed to pompously follow Voltaire to the Pantheon a 
 few months before his venerable friend perished, with 
 his daughter and his granddaughter, on the same scaffold 
 where some days later the illustrious Lavoisier died, who, 
 begging that his execution might be postponed till he 
 had completed his last great experiment, was told by 
 the public prosecutor that "the Republic had no need 
 of savants and chemists." 
 
 It was thus that the apostles of liberty, who had sur- 
 vived the Ancient Monarchy of their origin, were treated 
 in that stage of the Revolution which had Liberty for 
 its official device. If Rousseau and Diderot could have 
 lived through it to its next period, the Napoleonic re- 
 gime, their heads would have been in less danger than 
 at the time when the cult of Liberty was official ; but 
 they would have experienced a severer supervision of 
 their philosophy under the revolutionary dictatorship 
 than under the old Monarchy, which they helped to 
 shatter. Under Napoleon they would have had to choose 
 between putting forth their thoughts in exile, and keep- 
 ing silence in the land which had won its liberty : or 
 they might, under paternal restraint, have aided the 
 organiser of the Revolution in his reconstruction of 
 France, as did Tronchet, 1 the friend of Mirabeau, in 
 the preparation of the Code. It was only when the 
 allied anti-Revolutionary sovereigns forced back its an- 
 
 1 Tronchet, like Maleaherbes, is best known as one of the valiant advo- 
 cates of Louis XVI. 
 
 VOL. I. K
 
 130 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 cient line of kings on France that it began to enjoy a 
 taste of the liberty which the philosophers had preached, 
 and which the Revolution had checked while making 
 great parade of the principle. The First Year of Liberty 
 in the Revolutionary Calendar began on September 21, 
 1792, 1 and the previous night, after Valmy, by the biv- 
 ouac fire, Goethe had said, "On this spot and on this 
 day has commenced a new era for the history of the 
 world." The poet's observation was accurate, but the 
 new era, which dated from the defeat of the royal 
 troops of Prussia by the conscripts of the Revolution, 
 was not the epoch of liberty of which he presaged the 
 dawn. Sixteen years later at Erfurt, he had occasion 
 to recognise the nature of the era inaugurated by the 
 army of the Revolution, when he talked with Napoleon, 
 in the plenitude of his glory and absolutism, who had 
 summoned thither the autocrat of Russia to discuss with 
 him the maintenance of the Continental blockade. 2 The 
 intellectual revolution of the eighteenth century, led by 
 Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopae- 
 dists, was checked by the political revolution which it 
 helped to cause. In 1789 the friends of liberty in all 
 countries hoped that the violent movement initiated in 
 France to sweep away the oppression of the Old Regime 
 would lead to the triumph of their principles: but as 
 M. Taine demonstrates, from the first moment of the 
 uprising there was never any hope for a philosophic re- 
 settlement of society. The spontaneous anarchy, which 
 was immediate, swiftly became the prey of the Jacobin 
 
 1 It was a year later, 1 Vend&niaire, An II., that the calendar began 
 to be used. 
 
 October, 1808.
 
 CH. ii THE DEVICE OF THE REPUBLIC 131 
 
 conquest, the despotism of disorder, which needed the 
 high-handed discipline of military dictatorship to mas- 
 ter it. 
 
 The association therefore of the idea of Liberty with 
 the Revolution, or at all events with that phase of it 
 which established the Republican form of government, 
 is conventional ; and if this were generally admitted, 
 there would be no reason to advert to the severe restric- 
 tions on liberty under the regime claiming to be the 
 particular offspring of the Revolution, or to the spirit 
 hostile to liberty which is rife in France a century 
 after that era of emancipation. If the inscription on 
 coins and on public buildings, " Liberte", Egalite, Frater- 
 nite," were merely an official badge, we should take no 
 more serious notice of it than of the heraldic motto of 
 a distinguished family referring to some more or less 
 authentic adventure in its history, out of keeping with 
 the character of its present members. The chief objec- 
 tion to it would be its length, as painted in black char- 
 acters it often defaces a handsome monument, and we 
 should wish that the Third Republic had chosen a less 
 sprawling device, like the S.P.Q.R. of the municipality 
 of modern Rome, which for other reasons is equally inapt. 
 But voices of authority in the Republic tell us that the 
 official placarding of Liberty and the other words is 
 symbolical of the efflorescence of the doctrine implied 
 in them under the present regime, which inherited it 
 from the Revolution. If we take up the challenge we 
 shall perhaps find that the apparent inconsistency in 
 theory and in practice is partly due to the fact that in 
 France liberty is a mere subject of the class-room and 
 the library.
 
 132 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 The study of philosophy, of which M. Taine noted the 
 absence at our chief seat of metaphysical learning, is not 
 neglected in France. Before the age at which youths 
 enter the English Universities the toiling school-boys of 
 France are dipping into studies similar to those which 
 only a few of the most diligent pupils of Oxford cultivate 
 several years later. As an intellectual training the edu- 
 cation in the public schools of France is superior to that 
 which burdens the resources of English parents of moder- 
 ate means, while tending to turn our nation into a mus- 
 cular plutocracy. The good and evil of the French 
 system I hope to examine before long. Here we have 
 only to glance at its working with regard to the principle 
 and practice of liberty. The young Frenchmen who 
 correspond to our sixth-form boys have studied the 
 theories both in antiquity and in French philosophy ; but 
 when they get up from their books their surroundings 
 make them feel that what they have learned about liberty 
 has no more practical bearing on modern life than the 
 geography of the Odyssey, or the agriculture of the 
 Georgics. A Frenchman often likens a Lycee in its 
 interior economy to a barrack, or to a prison, and, unless 
 he were a day scholar, looks back to his school-days as a 
 period of servitude in which, sleeping and waking, he was 
 subject to perpetual espionage. There is no sadder 
 spectacle on the gay scene of Paris than that of the 
 mournful processions of bearded youths in collegiate uni- 
 forms promenading the Champs Elyse'es under the eyes of 
 their ushers. 
 
 During the rest of his career a French citizen, if of law- 
 abiding temperament, may experience no encroachments 
 on his liberty ; for the notion that a resident in France is
 
 OH. ii PERSONAL LIBERTY UNDER THE REPUBLIC 133 
 
 the prey of a constant official vexation is exaggerated, and 
 there is no country where under normal circumstances life 
 can be enjoyed more tranquilly. At the same time he is 
 exposed to accidents which remind him that the chief 
 tangible result of the French Revolution was the volun- 
 tary submission of the nation to the tyranny of absolu- 
 tism, as the following case will show. A commercial clerk, 
 after his day's work, is showing to his children, in 
 M. Armand Dayot's popular pictorial history of the 
 Revolution, the reprints illustrating the horrors of the 
 Bastille. We know now that the demolition of that for- 
 tress revealed that the rare prisoners interned in it, in 
 1789, were not friends of liberty and had not much to 
 complain of ; l but the massacre by the mob of Governor 
 de Launay had to be justified, and the prints of the 
 period represent the insurgents rescuing the captives just 
 as the rats were about to devour them on the 14th of 
 July. So the good father explains to his sons the nature 
 of a lettre de cachet, and the iniquity of a system de- 
 stroyed by the glorious Revolution, which permitted a 
 citizen to be thrown into prison without trial when a 
 knock is heard at the door. A police officer enters with 
 a warrant to arrest the man on the charge of defrauding 
 his employers : he protests his innocence and is carried 
 off. 
 
 So far the proceedings might have occurred in any free 
 country, even in the case of a man unjustly taken into 
 custody; but the next steps, which a whole generation 
 
 1 M. Gaston Deschamps, who has studied the subject, finds that only 
 six or seven men were in custody on July 14, 1789, none of whom were 
 political prisoners, four being forgers, and all were well lodged and fed. 
 The infamous Marquis de Sade was an inmate of the Bastille shortly 
 before that date.
 
 134 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 under the Third Republic has submitted to, are not sug- 
 gestive of life under a democratic parliamentary regime, 
 of which the official fete is the anniversary of the fall of 
 the Bastille. The accused person is locked up in solitary 
 confinement, cut off from communication with his family, 
 and in private audience interrogated day after day by a 
 magistrate, who strives to extort an avowal. Meanwhile 
 all the forces of the police are at work to get up evidence 
 against the untried prisoner, of the nature of which he 
 is kept ignorant, while the juge d? instruction, in his inter- 
 rogatories, uses the craft of a skilled expert to drag 
 damaging admissions from the mouth of the man, bewil- 
 dered with the isolation of captivity, sometimes browbeat- 
 ing him with threats, sometimes inventing the fiction that 
 an accomplice has proved his guilt. Until the twenty- 
 eighth year of the Republic, only when at last committed 
 for trial was the accused allowed to consult a lawyer for 
 his defence. The system of "secret instruction" flour- 
 ished intact during a generation of democratic rule, some- 
 times indeed criticised in the press when it gave rise to 
 some glaring scandal, such as the suicide of an unfortu- 
 nate, conscious of his innocence yet crushed with the 
 anxiety of his situation ; or when an eloquent advocate, 
 by picturing to the jury the hardship of the ordeal, 
 restored his client to his family broken in health and 
 fortune. But the majority of the victims belong to the 
 criminal class; so in a nation where the principle of the 
 Habeas Corpus Act is reverenced only by a few theorists 
 it is not easy to effect a fundamental change for the sake 
 of sparing from wrong an occasional honest citizen of the 
 Republic, who falls under the suspicion of the agents of 
 justice. Thus the prolonged tolerance of such a system
 
 CH. ii LIMITATIONS ON PRIVATE LIBERTY 135 
 
 in a nation where universal suffrage is supreme, and 
 where the freedom of the press in denouncing institutions 
 is of unbridled licence, has shown that its idea of liberty 
 has a peculiar and special signification. 1 
 
 A less tragic experience of the national conception of 
 liberty may befall a French citizen suspected of mere 
 irregularity. To realise the plenitude of his privilege in 
 living under a Republic, he leaves his home one day to 
 hear M. Aulard, the lecturer at the Sorbonne, demon- 
 strate that human happiness reached its greatest height 
 under the regime proclaimed in 1792. As he returns 
 past the statue of Danton he wonders how the country- 
 men of that lover of liberty could have submitted to the 
 Second Empire, when even the domicile of a citizen was 
 not exempt from violation; and thus reflecting he reaches 
 his door. A scene of disorder awaits him : the drawers 
 of his study, the cupboards of his chamber, are broken 
 open ; the house would seem to have been ransacked by 
 burglars in broad daylight. But he hears that the dis- 
 array has been caused not by enemies of the law but by 
 its emissaries. He is at a loss to account for the outrage : 
 he is not an anarchist capable of secreting dynamite, nor 
 a financier given to bribing members of Parliament and 
 keeping their receipts, nor in any category of persons 
 normally subject to domiciliary visitations of the police. 
 
 1 Criminal procedure has at last been somewhat modified in the 28th 
 year of the Republic by the efforts of M. Constans, after the exposure of 
 the evils of the "secret instruction" by an eminent public prosecutor, 
 M. Jean Cruppi. But law reformers are sceptical about the practical 
 results of the reform (which permits an accused person to employ an 
 advocate during the private preliminary inquiry), as there is no prospect 
 of the magistracy adopting, or of public opinion enforcing, the doctrine 
 which presumes the possible innocence of an untried prisoner.
 
 136 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. t 
 
 But he has been denounced as a smoker of cigars im- 
 ported without official permission, and though the charge 
 is untrue, the Government monopoly of tobacco is so 
 important that the mere suspicion of an infringement of 
 it calls for measures of a terror-striking nature. Lord 
 Eldon is said to have remarked, in the days when Eng- 
 lishmen were put to death for minor offences against 
 property, that if the capital penalty were relaxed, no 
 man's overcoat would be safe hanging up in his hall : 
 and so if Frenchmen did not know that the mere posses- 
 sion of contraband cigars subjected them to rigours 
 appropriate for coiners or for bomb-makers, they might 
 refuse to smoke the insipid state-manufactures of Pantin 
 and of Chateauroux. 
 
 The submission of the French nation, a century after 
 the Revolution, to limitations on private liberty such as 
 these, which modern democracies do not usually consider 
 necessary for orderly government, may be referred to 
 several causes. To begin with, their hardship affects 
 only a small proportion of the community. The average 
 Frenchman who accepts any existing regime, and who 
 has no illusions about the philosophical doctrine of the 
 Revolution, will say that all government rests on the 
 surrender of a certain amount of personal liberty; and 
 though in principle he may object to the way in which 
 untried prisoners are treated, and to the wide powers 
 given to the police of violating private domicile, yet 
 as these abuses in most cases incommode only persons 
 dangerous to society, he does not deem it worth while 
 to agitate for reform. As we have seen, the sole 
 occasion in French history when there was a great 
 popular movement rousing the whole nation was the
 
 CH. ii LIMITATIONS ON PRIVATE LIBERTY 137 
 
 Revolution, of which the immediate cause was the bad 
 fiscal system oppressive to every one excepting the privi- 
 leged. Then again there is no public opinion in France 
 as we understand it in England, or at all events, no 
 means of expressing it. The spirit of the press of the 
 whole country, excepting in matters of local interest, is 
 regulated by the journalists of Paris, who interpret 
 merely the sentiments, sometimes conflicting, sometimes 
 unanimous, of the Boulevards, and the newspaper is 
 not used by the public for airing its grievances by means 
 of letters to the editor. Moreover, the legislature, as 
 we shall see, though called a Parliament, is not utilised 
 as a parliamentary people would make use of it for 
 quietly redressing the grievances of the day ; questions 
 and deputations to ministers, petitions to the two Houses, 
 pledges demanded of members, and, in fine, all methods 
 of constitutional agitation are unpractised in France. 
 This is the corollary of the national tendency which 
 survives all regimes. Louis Napoleon may take down 
 the inscription of Liberty and the Third Republic may 
 put it up again, but all the time the French people like 
 to be governed : in the intervals of their revolutions 
 they prefer to be driven not with a loose rein, but feeling 
 the hand of authority directing them. In a democracy 
 which voluntarily confers on the State such arbitrary 
 powers to encroach on its personal liberty, a special sig- 
 nification must be attached to that word. 
 
 II 
 
 There is another aspect of the subject of Liberty in 
 France which calls for separate consideration. A century
 
 138 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 after the Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed 
 the free exercise of opinion, religious or otherwise, so 
 much intolerance lingers in the land that it has been 
 said that a Frenchman's conception of Liberty is liberty 
 for ideas in accordance with his own. Intolerance is a 
 vice not peculiar to France. It has disfigured the annals 
 of all civilised peoples, notabty in connection with con- 
 troversies kindled by the exercise of the Christian re- 
 ligion, the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin races having 
 practised it with unedifying rivalry. I wish, therefore, 
 in dealing with this question, to guard against the cen- 
 sorious attitude of a stranger pleading the superiority 
 of his own nation ; my design merely is to show that 
 the French Revolution, for all its boasted doctrine of 
 emancipation of the human race, has perhaps been the 
 cause of France enjoying less liberty than other countries 
 where its principle has not been enunciated as an ab- 
 stract formula at seasons of insurrection. 
 
 One way in which the great Revolution conduced to 
 the acuter phases of intolerance surviving longer in 
 France than in England, was in its destruction of sec- 
 tarian subdivision, whence the polemical forces of the 
 nation ever since have been arrayed against one another 
 in two definite and irreconcilable camps. On the eve of 
 Voltaire's birth, Calvinists were persecuted by Catholics, 
 Jesuits fought with Jansenists, and Gallicans resisted 
 Ultramontanes. At his death the conflict between the 
 pretensions of the Church and the doctrine of free 
 inquiry had grown so keen that little place was left 
 for minor controversies, and the great upheaval had be- 
 come inevitable. The Revolution came, rooting up 
 society from its foundations, and when the disturbed
 
 CH. ii LIBERTY IN OPINION 139 
 
 elements settled down again, the two conflicting influ- 
 ences came forth in clearly defined mutual oppugnancy. 
 The persecutions of the clergy in the struggle, and the 
 confiscation of their possessions, added a new article to 
 the Catholic faith, that of hostility to the principles of 
 the Revolution, which henceforth were professed by the 
 bulk of the nation, though variously interpreted. The 
 Concordat consolidated the Church without reconciling 
 it to the new order of things ; and through all the 
 regimes which have succeeded one another, indepen- 
 dently of the strife of party and of dynasty, though some- 
 times associated with their fortunes, the French nation 
 has contained two great discordant sections, representing 
 the civil and the ecclesiastical power. Their antagonism 
 for one another has not been softened or diverted by the 
 rivalries of manifold sects, for the Protestant minority 
 has existed only in scattered localities. 
 
 The political conflict between the two forces in the 
 early years of the Third Republic will be mentioned 
 later. All that need be said of it here is that the cleri- 
 cal party was the first aggressor. Not taking to heart 
 the admonition of the Founder of the Church, " omnes 
 enim qui acceperint gladium, gladio peribunt," it impetu- 
 ously drew the sword and provoked a merciless reprisal. 
 The spirit of the clergy after the War, outside the field 
 of politics, was displayed by Mgr. Dupanloup, who, 
 though he asserted his own liberty of opinion before 
 the Pope himself, did not extend the same freedom to 
 his countrymen more undisciplined than he. So when, 
 in spite of his opposition, Littre was elected to the Acad- 
 emy in 1871, the Bishop of Orleans gathered his purple 
 robes around him lest the great philologer, who was also
 
 140 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 a positivist, should touch their hem, and withdrew from 
 the learned company in which four cardinals and four 
 other prelates of the Church in its days of power had 
 sat side by side with Voltaire. 1 
 
 In contrast with the attitude of this Gallican dignitary 
 to a heterodox Frenchman of eminence may be noted the 
 cordial feeling which Cardinal Manning cherished for Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold ; and it is probable that in a secular 
 society, such as is the French Academy, he would have 
 preferred as a colleague the author of Literature and Dog- 
 ma to his episcopal opponent of the Vatican Council. 
 Manning, the unbending churchman approved at Rome, 
 could maintain friendly relations with a persuasive 
 doubter: Dupanloup, whose own creed was held insuffi- 
 cient to entitle him to a scarlet hat, wished, on theological 
 grounds, to keep a lexicographer out of a company engaged 
 in dictionary making. This seems to be an example of 
 the promotion of tolerance in England by the multiformity 
 of sects and creeds. If Cardinal Manning had been the 
 head of the one religion prominent in the realm, of which 
 the only serious rivals were irreligion or indifference, his 
 social and worldly relations would have been restricted. 
 The old Oxford man could cultivate sympathetic intimacy 
 with younger members of his University without reference 
 to their faith : but if Renan, whose opinions resemble 
 those of Arnold, and whose abjuration had not been more 
 extensive than that of Manning in the opposite direc- 
 tion, had, from love of his old college, frequented the 
 
 1 Cardinals A. G. de Rohan, de Rohan-Soubise, de Luynes, and de 
 Bernis ; Archbishop de Boisgelin ; Bishops Boyer, Surian, and de Roque- 
 laure. All these ecclesiastics were not simultaneously of the Acad&nie 
 Franchise, but Voltaire was a member from 1747 to 1778, so saw several 
 generations of Immortals.
 
 CH. ii THE CHUKCH AND FREE-THOUGHT 141 
 
 society of Sulpicians, loud would have been the scandal 
 in France. 
 
 The idea that the population of both sexes is roughly 
 divided into two great sections, consisting of those who 
 more or less implicitly bow to the authority of the Church, 
 and of those who more or less consistently hold that 
 thought is free, encourages the teachers of the first category 
 not only in exclusiveness, but also in the tradition of 
 Rome which would circumscribe the sources of human 
 knowledge available for mankind. Of all the works ever 
 proscribed by the wisdom of the Congregation of the Index 
 there are none which the French clergy more heartily ban 
 than those of Voltaire, until his name in their sermons has 
 come to represent the principle of infidelity, like the " Jews 
 and Turks" in the English liturgy. The position in 
 French estimation of Voltaire is about as much affected 
 by the declamations of the priesthood as the conversion of 
 the Hebrew community in England is quickened, or the 
 Eastern question modified, by the prayers of the Estab- 
 lished Church. The obloquy poured upon him is too 
 indiscriminate, and there are multitudes of French people, 
 especially in the rural districts, who would never hear his 
 name but for the vague sound of it from the pulpit after 
 the Gospel on Sunday mornings. An excellent Savoyard 
 priest, whom I knew, used to exhort his flock " to burn 
 the works of Voltaire and of Rousseau in their libraries." 
 Among the toil-worn rustics whom he addressed, the richest 
 in printed possessions rarely had even a cheap newspaper 
 to read ; but the simple-minded Cure, a peasant himself, 
 cherished the admonitions he had heard at the Seminary 
 across the lake at Annecy, the city of Madame de Warens 
 as well as of Sainte Chantal ; so there were local reasons
 
 142 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 for including the scandalous Jean-Jacques in the maledic- 
 tions usually reserved in other dioceses for the philosopher 
 of Ferney. 
 
 Although the spiritual declensions of these villagers 
 were not due to their literary temptations, in the next 
 parish there was a house containing a library, of which 
 the good Abbe did not know, and in it M. Taine had 
 written of Voltaire's work, " It includes the entire scope 
 of human knowledge, and I know not what idea of im- 
 portance would be wanting in a man who had for his 
 breviary the Dialogues, the Dictionary, and the Ro- 
 mances." 1 Few of his contemporaries had as vast a stock 
 of learning as Taine, so the testimonial is of value. Vol- 
 taire, in spite of his inaccuracies, his prejudices, and his 
 false canons of criticism, the more he is studied the more 
 he amazes with the force of his genius. Ideas without 
 number, which later generations regard as novel or auda- 
 cious, he has anticipated. Mr. Huxley related that he 
 had a friend who was one of the most original thinkers in 
 the world, but he never emitted an original thought, as, 
 never having read anything, he was unaware that others 
 had come to identical conclusions. The study of Voltaire 
 gives the impression that there are many of our modern 
 teachers in the same case, as far as he is concerned. If 
 we take the one small section of his work which has 
 specially brought him under the ban of the Church, that 
 in which he deals with revealed religion, we find his 
 judgments constantly reproduced in our day as novelties. 
 If an Anglican clergyman, in essaying the reconciliation of 
 science with revelation, throws overboard a Mosaic narra- 
 tive or a Messianic prophecy ; if a Presbyterian minister, 
 1 Ancien Regime, liv. iv. c. i. 4.
 
 VOLTAIRE 143 
 
 for similar recusancy, incurs pursuit for heresy, the argu- 
 ments or inferences of each have a familiar sound to those 
 who have studied Voltaire. This is no reflection on the 
 learning or the good faith of such seekers after truth, for 
 German criticism, which undermines the impregnable 
 rock of Holy Scripture by the mechanism of Oriental 
 erudition, not at the disposal of Voltaire, arrives at the 
 same results ; while at the other end of the intellectual 
 scale the questions of the Kaffir catechumen which per- 
 plexed Dr. Colenso, who was first an arithmetician and 
 then a bishop, are to be found in Voltaire's Philosophic. 
 
 The beautiful landscape amid which Taine wrote his 
 eulogy of Voltaire teems with associations exhorting 
 Frenchmen to tolerance. Savoy was in language and in 
 sentiment a part of France when politically distinct, and 
 its residents, both natives and settlers, have for centuries 
 given lustre to French literature and eloquence. Above 
 the pleasant home of M. Taine, by the Lake of Annecy, 
 stands the Chateau of Menthon, whence, in the dim 
 Middle Ages, St. Bernard went to found the Alpine 
 sanctuaries which bear his name. The family of the 
 Saint still inhabits the castle, and thither every year came 
 Mgr. Dupanloup to recruit his pious vigour in the hill- 
 country of his birth. The lattice of his chamber looks on 
 one of the fairest prospects in Europe. In the foreground 
 is the knoll by the water-side, where lies buried the phi- 
 losopher whom the Bishop would have kept out of the 
 French Academy had he lived and had his way; at the end 
 of the lake rise the old battlements of the city where repose 
 the remains of a Savoyard prelate more illustrious than 
 the eminent Gallican ; to Annecy, a century after St. 
 Francois de Sales had been laid to rest in the convent of
 
 144 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 the Visitation, came Jean-Jacques Rousseau from Geneva, 
 which lies beneath the low ridge of the Jura, visible on 
 the horizon, marking also the spot where Voltaire retired 
 for the last twenty years of his life to exercise his sway 
 over the generation about to see the French Revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 No doubt there are earnest people who for different 
 reasons would consider that the existence of each of these 
 men was a misfortune for the French race. Ardent 
 Protestants might deplore the conversion of the Chablais 
 by St. Francois from the Reformed faith. Protestants 
 might join with Catholics in deprecating Voltaire's 
 onslaughts on their common Christianity. Lovers of 
 orderly progress might regret the sentimental abstractions 
 of Rousseau which aided the anarchy of the Revolution. 
 Ultramontanes, as well as free-thinkers, might object to 
 the teachings of the masterful Bishop of Orleans ; and 
 champions of the Revolution might, equally with the 
 orthodox, lament the destruction of their idols by Taine. 
 But the greatness of France has sprung from the diver- 
 sity of intellect which has formed and illustrated the 
 French language. Perfect tolerance is an impossible 
 ideal, as it implies the disappearance of human pride and 
 passion. Yet even in France, where the course of history 
 has been unfavourable to its approximation, its beauties 
 are recognised if not practised. On the fagade of the 
 most successful of modern public schools in Paris, the 
 Lycee erected by the munificence of M. Janson de Sailly, 
 in the agreeable quarter which lies between the Champs 
 Elysees and the Bois de Boulogne, the bust of Bossuet 
 is seen side by side with that of Voltaire, while Fenelon's 
 is flanked by the effigies of Rousseau and of Moliere,
 
 CH. ii THE NEED FOR TOLERATION IN FRANCE 145 
 
 both of whom were banned by the Church of the Arch- 
 bishop of Cambrai. 
 
 Voltaire, though he rallied the British nation on the 
 number of its sects, saw that this was of greater advan- 
 tage to the cause of tolerance than the tendency, then 
 developing in France, to range the community into two 
 camps. 1 Since his time religious persuasions have mul- 
 tiplied in our midst, within as well as without the Estab- 
 lished Church ; and could he have looked into the future 
 he would have observed a phenomenon which even he 
 could not have anticipated. He would have seen that 
 the diversity of creeds in England has been much more 
 productive of tolerance than has been in France the great 
 Revolution of which he saw the approach : that while 
 the celebration by his countrymen of the centenary of 
 his death was denounced by Mgr. Dupanloup as a decla- 
 ration of war on Christianity, Cardinal Guibert ordaining 
 a ceremony at Notre Dame de Paris to expiate the 
 impious fete, the Church of England no longer the 
 Erastian institution which he had known in Bolingbroke's 
 days, but an active agency of positive doctrine ex- 
 tended its charity to conspicuous exponents of Vol- 
 tairian philosophy. Mr. Arnold's criticism of the Book 
 of Isaiah, Mr. Tyndall's suggestion for a test of the 
 efficacy of prayer, and Mr. Huxley's reflections on the 
 Gadarene swine are all pure Voltaire, in conclusion if 
 not in style or in spirit; yet instead of being refused 
 Christian burial, as their precursor was by the Cure of 
 
 1 " Je crois que depuis notre revolution 1'Angleterre est le pays ou le 
 christianisme fait le moins de mal. La raison en est que ce torrent est 
 divis6 chez nous en dix ou douze ruisseaux, soit presbyte"riens soit autres 
 dissenters." Lettre de Milord Cornsburi a Milord Bolingbroke (1736).
 
 146 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 St. Sulpice, those eminent men were in their death ac- 
 corded the same rites that the Church of England be- 
 stows on its strictest sons. 1 
 
 The posthumous treatment of Renan and of Matthew 
 Arnold in their respective countries was peculiarly strik- 
 ing. The Comment on Christmas is a piece of criticism 
 as destructive of orthodox Christian belief as anything 
 ever written by the historian of Israel, the only differ- 
 ence being that Arnold addressed a select circle of cult- 
 ured people, while Renan was a philosopher of wider 
 celebrity and influence. In England Arnold was quietly 
 laid to rest in a peaceful country graveyard, and the 
 comforting office of the national Church was read over 
 the remains of the gentle apostle of doubt, without any 
 Englishman daring or wishing to say that the sacred 
 rite was inappropriate from any point of view. But 
 Renan's funeral was a pompous anti-religious spectacle ; 
 the courtyard of the College de France was decked as 
 a Temple of Reason, from which the body was borne 
 amid red wreaths, like those which survivors of the 
 Commune place on the wall at Pere la Chaise where 
 their comrades were shot. Renari would not have 
 minded the maledictions with which the clerical press 
 saluted his death; but that he, a fastidious aristocrat 
 by instinct, should have had his funeral car decked 
 with revolutionary garlands, and acclaimed by the 
 
 1 Of course it may be urged that the Church of England is so broad 
 that not only may every English layman claim its membership irrespec- 
 tive of dogmatic belief, but even in its day of Catholic revival exponents 
 of free-thought are found among the most esteemed of its clergy. I have 
 the best reason for knowing that M. Renan brought away from his per- 
 sonal intercourse with Mr. Jowett the impression that their attitude to 
 revealed religion was practically identical.
 
 CH. ii RENAN AND MATTHEW ARNOLD 147 
 
 rabble, would have sorely vexed his soul. It was a 
 retribution for an attitude which he sometimes assumed 
 in his lifetime. As his old friend Jules Simon said, " I 
 forgave him for being a doubter, but I could not for- 
 give him for rejoicing in his doubts." Far different 
 was the demeanour of Taine, whose scepticism was not 
 exuberant, and who, scandalised at the unseemly scene 
 at the obsequies of Renan, directed that he should be 
 buried according to the Protestant rite : for civil inter- 
 ment in France is used as 'a political demonstration. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It is a notable contrast that in England, amid bitter 
 feud on the subject of funeral rites, universal sentiment 
 is so opposed to burial without prayers that it is con- 
 sidered an indignity, reducing man to the level of the 
 lower animals, which even a suicide should be spared : 
 whereas in France, though civil obsequies are equally 
 repugnant to mourners, and rare outside the great towns, 
 they are sometimes, in the case of Ministers of the Repub- 
 lic and of other prominent persons, flaunted before the 
 public, as though to deprive weeping women and chil- 
 dren of hope and consolation were an act of civic virtue. 1 
 On such occasions is displayed the sectarian spirit ani- 
 
 1 In the provinces the feeling against civil interment is strong, and 
 even in the case of anti-clerical leaders it is rare that their families permit 
 their political colleagues to deprive them of sacred rites ; though the 
 mother or the widow is sometimes abused in the anti-clerical journals for 
 insisting on a religious service. On the other hand, when the clericals 
 for a short season got the upper hand, under the government of the 
 Seize Mai, they tried coercive measures agaiast civil funerals, the Pre"fet 
 at Lyons decreeing that they should only be tolerated before eight o'clock 
 in the morning.
 
 148 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 mating the exponents of free-thought. The French term 
 libre penste more plainly indicates its presumed connec- 
 tion with Liberty, yet in France its cult has produced 
 the most curious phase of intolerance manifested under 
 the Third Republic. Anti-clericalism may be a useful 
 remedy to moderate the pretensions of the sacerdotal 
 caste in a nation where, since the decline of Gallican- 
 ism, ecclesiastics regard themselves sometimes as the 
 mandatories of a foreign potentate ; but free-thinkers 
 contravene the basis of their own profession in erecting 
 anti-clericalism into a dogma, not only to be paraded on 
 occasions like that of a public civil funeral, but even to 
 be imposed on others as a test of citizenship. In the 
 unhappy period when the name of Ferry was associated 
 with outrages offered to religious communities or to 
 sacred emblems, they were the incidents of a war of 
 religion, of which the tradition has always been more 
 cruel than that of merely secular strife. But while it 
 was the clerical faction which began the conflict, in their 
 merciless retaliation M. Paul Bert and the anti-clericals 
 revealed that their conception of liberty did not include 
 the enjoyment of freedom by their adversaries. Every- 
 day life in France at normal times unfortunately abounds 
 in instances of the application of their doctrine. 
 
 The efforts of the exponents of free-thought to penalise 
 religious observance afford a peculiar example. In Eng- 
 land Dissenters and Catholics used to be punished for 
 attending divine worship after their own rites ; and in 
 France, from 1685 to the Revolution, Protestants were 
 subject to similar treatment. But in neither case was 
 Liberty invoked to palliate the coercive policy : in both 
 countries it was frankly applied to enforce conformity to
 
 CH. n A CURIOUS PHASE OF INTOLERANCE 149 
 
 the creed of the State. The intolerant system under the 
 Third Republic differs from all persecutions known to 
 history, in that it is not only practised in the name of 
 Liberty, but it aims at laying official disability on an 
 established religion. Not that there is any vexatious 
 legal restraint on the cult of the Roman Catholic faith 
 analogous to the English Penal Laws or to the Revocation 
 of the Edict of Nantes. The clergy are free to provide 
 public offices in the churches for every hour of the day 
 and the night. Nevertheless a French citizen who is de- 
 pendent on the State for his livelihood is not always at 
 liberty to accompany his wife and his children to mass on 
 Sunday morning, without risking his future prospects and 
 their means of sustenance. 
 
 " No one has any idea what a noxious and insupportable 
 creature is the anti-clerical in the provinces. Always 
 eager to accuse others of fanaticism, he is the bitterest 
 and most oppressive of fanatics himself. Under the mask 
 of free-thought he would like to prevent his neighbours 
 from thinking differently from himself, being violently 
 and despotically narrow, for all his boasts of liberal- 
 mindedness. If he were only a harmless fanatic it would 
 not matter ; but he is an aggressive persecutor, malig- 
 nantly meddling in affairs which do not concern him, at- 
 tacking or denouncing honest folks, public functionaries 
 and others, with whose conscience he has nothing to do, 
 threatening them on account of their opinions, which he 
 calls ' subversive ' because they do not agree with his. 
 If he be a town-councillor, or in any similar position, he 
 uses all his influence to set up irreligion as a standard of 
 citizenship." 1 
 
 1 Journal des Debats, November 17, 1893. The Debats and the Temps
 
 150 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 The foregoing quotation is not from an organ of the 
 sacristy. It is from the Journal des Dtbats, to which 
 Renan and Taine were contributors as long as they lived ; 
 and under the Third Republic it has had to recognise 
 that the sectarian intolerance of the later Jacobins is a 
 greater peril to liberty in France than the pretensions 
 of the Church. 
 
 That picture was drawn in an Eastern department. 
 In the West the following incident came under my own 
 notice. The postmaster of a town in the Vendee, who, 
 as is usual in that region, observed his religious duties, 
 was sent for by the sous-Pre'fet, who said to him : " It is 
 reported that you are a constant attendant at church 
 on Sunday; more than that, you always take a book 
 with you ; and a man who follows the service with a 
 book must not be surprised if he is put down as a clerical. 
 Besides, there are your daughters : the eldest, who is 
 being educated at the convent, sings in the chapel choir, 
 and her sister makes the collection at the parish church. 
 Now all these facts are noted against you here in your 
 dossier, and I think it fair to warn you that you are get- 
 ting the reputation of being a Clerical." l The post- 
 
 ( which, if it has any religious bias, is disposed to favour liberal Protes- 
 tantism) are the only two journals which I have consulted to supplement 
 my personal observations of anti-clerical intolerance, as their impartiality 
 is unimpeachable. The testimony of Clerical and Reactionary organs 
 should not be accepted uncorroborated on this subject, any more than 
 that of the Radical and anti-Clerical press on the misdeeds of the clergy ; 
 but the journals of the Extreme Left, especially in the provinces, often 
 reveal with great candour the proceedings of their party in their strife 
 with the Church. 
 
 1 Dossier is the name given to the confidential collection of documents 
 relating to every functionary of the State, which his chiefs consult when 
 there is question of his promotion or dismissal. Each bishop has his 
 dossier carefully annotated at the Ministry of Public Worship, each mag-
 
 CH. n THE BIGOTRY OF FREE-THINKERS 151 
 
 master consulted the Cure, who is a rare example among 
 the French parochial clergy of an accomplished man of 
 the world, and he said, " You have your wife and children 
 to think about, so you ought not to sacrifice your chances 
 of promotion for trifles not essential. Leave your prayer- 
 book at home if it offends the anti-clericals, tell the 
 good Sisters not to let your daughter sing in the con- 
 vent choir, and I will find another of our young friends 
 to take the place of your second girl in making the col- 
 lection here on Sunday." The venerable rector's advice 
 was sagacious : nevertheless in a land where such sagac- 
 ity is needful it is clear that the term Liberty has a 
 peculiar and special meaning. The sous-Prefet in this 
 case was an official of mild and considerate demeanour, 
 who seemed incapable of tyranny. His warning of the 
 postmaster was probably an act of kindness; for in the 
 Vendee, a Royalist as well as a Catholic stronghold, an 
 agent of the Government would have strict orders from 
 the Ministry of the Interior to flatter the zeal of the 
 anti-clerical party. 
 
 The form which persecution takes in different coun- 
 tries, like that of all other human action, is necessarily 
 affected by the interior economy and the institutions of 
 each community. In England instances of tyranny may 
 be found practised on the one hand by members of the 
 rural clergy, and on the other by trade-unions in indus- 
 trial districts ; the reason being that the ancient organi- 
 sation of the parish and the modern organisation of the 
 trade-guild have put facilities for oppression at the 
 
 istrate at the Ministry of Justice ; while the reports relating to the great 
 army of minor officials in the provinces are kept and revised at the pre"- 
 fectures and sous-prefectures of the departments. See vol. ii. p. 113.
 
 162 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 disposal of men of domineering temper, who are found 
 in all nations and in all classes of life. But the fore- 
 going incident could have no counterpart among us, 
 because pressure of the kind described can only in a 
 highly centralised state be brought to bear upon public 
 functionaries. In France they form a numerous body, 
 ready to be organised for political purposes apart from 
 their official duties. The system was constructed to 
 work as an essential portion of the machinery of auto- 
 cratic government : but under parliamentary institutions 
 and unstable ministries the direction of the centralised 
 machine has, as we shall see, passed out of the hands of 
 ephemeral ministers into those of local committees, self- 
 constituted and irresponsible, which often exercise a 
 sinister despotism in provincial neighbourhoods. Thus 
 the functionaries who under illiberal regimes have been 
 coldly looked upon for neglecting religious observances 
 are, under the liberal dispensation of the Republic, de- 
 nounced as enemies of the Government if they go to 
 church. 
 
 The liberty which the anti-clerical sectaries withhold 
 from public officials they do not willingly extend to 
 private individuals who wish to stand well with the party 
 in power. In a part of Touraine associated less with the 
 religious strife of the Renaissance in that region than 
 with the earlier tradition of Joan of Arc, whom clericals 
 and anti-clericals equally extol, near the road between 
 Azay-le-Rideau and Chinon, is the small village of Vil- 
 laines. The smiling landscape through which the Maid 
 passed on her miraculous mission to Charles VII. does 
 not seem to have retained her mystical spirit, for " A 
 Group of Republicans " there felt moved to denounce in a
 
 CH. ii THE ANTI-CLERICAL IDEA OF LIBERTY 153 
 
 journal of Tours the following scandal : " In our com- 
 mune," they said, " the cure", wishing to make his services 
 more attractive, has been looking out for singers. With 
 our good pastor's efforts to increase his income we have 
 nothing to do, but what does astonish us is to see in the 
 choir two sons of an old democrat hitherto a staunch lib- 
 eral and anti-clerical. Is it possible that a soldier of the 
 Republican army has failed to bring up his children in 
 sound principles, or has he let them be perverted by the 
 cure* to abandon ' Marianne ' for the Blessed Virgin ? In 
 either case he would do well to give us a plain answer, 
 in order to allay the malevolent suspicions which he has 
 aroused in the hearts of his friends." 1 
 
 Similar instances might be quoted from every depart- 
 ment, and unhappily it is often too true that the tyranny 
 of free-thought is retaliation for acts of clerical intoler- 
 ance in the past. But the free-thinking sectarians are 
 not content with attacking the pretensions of Rome, or 
 even of Christianity. The public expression of any 
 religious belief excites their arrogant wrath. Thus at 
 Dole in the Jura it is the custom each winter to commem- 
 orate the inhabitants who died in 1870 defending their 
 homes against the Prussians. One year the mayor issued 
 a placard inviting the population to take part in the usual 
 ceremony, in which he said, " Our pious souvenirs will go 
 beyond the tomb to show our fellow-townsmen that we do 
 not forget them." In the land of the Sequani once ruled 
 by Marcus Aurelius, there are cinerary relics of the 
 
 1 Utfclaireur : organe de la democratie socialiste de V Quest, 5 Jfoi, 
 1895. With this may bo compared the proceedings of the "Possibiliste- 
 Broussiste ' ' group of the socialists in a quarter of Paris who rejected the can- 
 didature of one of their number for the Municipal Council because it was 
 ascertained he had been married in a church (Temps, 23 Decembre, 1802).
 
 154 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 Roman occupation before the introduction of Christian- 
 ity, on which is inscribed a more definite evocation of the 
 dead : but the freemasons of the town-council saw in the 
 language of the mayor a clerical manoeuvre to make offi- 
 cial "the deplorable superstition of a life beyond the 
 tomb," and an expurgated placard was pasted over the 
 other. 
 
 As there are few of the French who do not practise the 
 pathetic cult of the dead, an incident like this displays 
 a peculiar feature of the tyranny of free-thought. In 
 every other religious persecution in France, from the 
 martyrdoms of Lyons and Vienne in the second century 
 to the dragonnades of the Protestants under Louis XIV., 
 the oppressed have been a feeble minority ; but under the 
 Third Republic it is the minority which imposes its nar- 
 row policy on the majority. In the whole population 
 there is not one person in a hundred who is an anti- 
 religious bigot, and even among the men of France who 
 form the electorate, the sectaries of free-thought are a 
 small minority, smaller than the clerical party of the other 
 extreme. The great majority of Frenchmen are tolerant 
 or indifferent ; they resent ecclesiastical interference, but 
 they have no active sympathy with the zealots of anti- 
 clericalism. But the latter in their masonic lodges, which 
 in France are not mere convivial or charitable sodalities, 
 and their local committees, are effectively organised and 
 are thus a potent influence in the government of the coun- 
 try. When we examine the Parliamentary System, we 
 shall see that one sign of its unsuitability to the French 
 temperament is that it invests with undue power a minor- 
 ity composed of the least worthy elements of the nation, 
 this being a worse evil and more subversive of liberty than
 
 CH. ii THE TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY 155 
 
 the regular delegation of authority to an autocratic gov- 
 ernment. Here we have to observe the constraint laid by 
 the minority on the representatives of the whole nation. 
 
 About the tradition imposed on the President of the 
 Republic never to pronounce the name of God in any 
 public utterance, for fear of offending the free-thinkers, I 
 will say nothing, as the subject is somewhat delicate. 
 The contrary practice of all other civilised rulers, from 
 the Emperor of Russia to the President of the United 
 States, is not permitted in France, where the sacred name 
 is regarded by the anti-clericals as such a symbol of super- 
 stition that a school edition of La Fontaine, who passed 
 for a Liberal in his day, was by them expurgated of all 
 reference to the Deity, in order not to mislead the young 
 with ideas too fabulous even to be tolerated in fable. 1 
 M. Felix Faure would be the last to give his voluntary 
 approval to such sectarian vagaries, for he seems to be a 
 large-minded representative of the tolerant majority of 
 the French nation. Yet like every other functionary of 
 the Republic, he submits to the terrorism of the anti-cler- 
 icals. Otherwise it would not be explicable why the 
 
 1 Among the emendations made in the edition of La Fontaine for the 
 use of schools, drawn up by the direction of the Municipal Council of 
 Paris, was in the opening of the well-known fable which begins : 
 
 Petit poisson deviendra grand 
 Pourvu quo Dieu lui prete vie. 
 
 For which the second line was made to read "Pourvu que 1'on lui pre"te 
 vie." The story was revived by the Temps in calling attention to a simi- 
 lar proceeding of the Conseil-Ge'ne'ral of the Sarthe, at its meeting in 
 August, 1896, when on the motion of M. Leporche", a Radical senator, a 
 vote of censure was passed on the inspector of primary schools at Le Mans 
 for setting questions in an examination "which implied the existence of 
 a God." It should be said that the population of the Sarthe is decidedly 
 Catholic, a large minority being actively clerical in tendency.
 
 156 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 Chief of the State, who under the Concordat has to pre- 
 side at semi-ecclesiastical ceremonies, such as the inves- 
 titure of French cardinals with the scarlet hat, should 
 avoid official appearance in churches, as though they were 
 places of ill repute. 1 He goes to Reims to inaugurate a 
 statue of Joan of Arc, but though the only association of 
 the Maid with that city is in the cathedral where she 
 brought Charles VII. to be crowned, the President dares 
 not set foot in it, and delays his arrival till the festal ser- 
 vice is over within the glorious walls. He makes an offi- 
 cial tour in Brittany where, Republican or Royalist, every 
 man is an ardent Catholic, yet though spending a Sunday 
 in the cathedral town of Quimper and welcomed at the 
 Prefecture by the Bishop, he may not gratify the pious 
 population of Cornouailles by attending service in the 
 shrine of St. Corentin for fear of the criticisms of the 
 anti-clerical press in Paris. 
 
 President Faure did on one occasion make an official 
 visit to a church. When the Tsar of Russia came to 
 Paris, the young autocrat profited from the curious defer- 
 ence paid him by the French nation to read the Republi- 
 can Government a lesson in religious decorum. Though 
 not a member of the Roman communion, he expressed his 
 desire to pay his respects to the religion professed by the 
 majority of the people whose guest he was, and thus the 
 President of the Republic went officially to the metropoli- 
 tan Cathedral of Notre Dame, not as the chosen chief of 
 many millions of Catholics, but as the polite attendant of 
 
 1 The anti-clericals in the Chamber having blamed M. Faure's presence 
 at Notre Dame at the obsequies of victims of the fire in the rue Jean- 
 Goujon, to which all the powers of Europe sent their envoys, the Min- 
 istry declared that the ceremony was not official. Ch. des De'pute's : 
 Se"ance du, 25 Juin, 1897.
 
 CH. n THE INFLUENCE OF HOLY RUSSIA 157 
 
 a foreign potentate. The Tsar plainly intimated to the 
 French Government that only as a Christian prince did 
 he accept its homage, and his first public act in France 
 was to proceed with pomp to a solemn service in the Rus- 
 sian Church ; though he had not found that ceremony 
 necessary when visiting Great Britain or Germany. One 
 of the most singular results of the Franco-Russian alli- 
 ance was that, in its desire to please its august ally, the 
 Republican Government, which officially ignored religious 
 solemnities celebrated by Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, 
 displayed a sudden cult for the offices of the Orthodox 
 rite. On every birthday or other festival of the Imperial 
 family of Romanoff, the high officials of the French Re- 
 public with such assiduity trooped to prayers to the Rus- 
 sian Church in the rue Daru, that an ingenuous stranger 
 might have thought that it was not Christianity which 
 the French anti-clericals disliked, but only the filioque 
 clause of the Western creed. 
 
 The view adopted in these pages of this peculiar phase 
 of liberty which widely prevails under the Third Republic 
 is that of the majority of the French nation. In its expo- 
 sition no effort has been made to disguise the intolerant 
 tendencies of the clericals : but the restraints which they 
 would lay on human action are not imposed in the name 
 of liberty, as are the restrictions enforced by the zealots 
 of free-thought, so they are less to be dreaded in the 
 modern democratic State. Moreover, if tyranny has to 
 be endured by a citizen at the end of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, the domination of the Church would seem a less evil 
 than that of the anti-clericals. Both are highly undesir- 
 able, but if the choice of ills had to be made, it might be 
 better to submit to those who profess a lofty ideal and a
 
 158 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 severe moral code, than to undisciplined masters who 
 have neither the one nor the other. But the municipal 
 councillor who drives the sisters-of -mercy from the hospi- 
 tals and deprives the village of the processions which 
 used to delight his own children at the Fete Dieu or the 
 Assumption, will reply with magniloquent gesture that 
 the choice lies between him, the son of Voltaire, and the 
 successors of those denounced by Voltaire for their share 
 in the torturing and slaying of Jean Galas and of the 
 Chevalier de la Barre in the name of religion. 1 Now next 
 to a well-beneficed abbe of the Old Regime it is hard to 
 conceive a type less pleasing to Voltaire, authoritative 
 and fastidous, fresh from the court of Potsdam or holding 
 his own levees of princes at Ferney, than a Radical poli- 
 tician of the Third Republic. Yet, even if the hatred of 
 such an one for religion should justify his title of Voltair- 
 ian, the circumstances are not quite the same as when the 
 civil judges and officials of the French Monarchy pro- 
 nounced and carried out iniquitous sentences on persons 
 deemed to be hostile to the Catholic Church. 
 
 We are all familiar with the theme of the unchanging 
 inclemency of the yoke of Rome, or with a wider version 
 which associates the whole history of Christianity with 
 the oppression of man by man. We may recognise that 
 in all lands theological profession, or even opinion, has 
 no necessary relation with moral conduct, and that in 
 
 1 Jean Calas was a Protestant of Toulouse, broken on the wheel in 
 1763 on the false charge of having murdered his son for becoming a 
 Catholic, the youth having in reality committed suicide. The Chevalier 
 de la Barre was a boy of nineteen, executed at Abbeville in 1766, after 
 having his tongue cut out, on the charge of having mutilated a wooden 
 cross on the highway. Voltaire's pamphlets on these judicial crimes are 
 included in his volumes of " Politique et Legislation."
 
 CH. n PROVINCIAL ANTAGONISMS 159 
 
 France the section of society most conspicuous in the 
 ranks of Catholic laity is not pre-eminent in the nation 
 for its ethical qualities. But when we descend from 
 general proposition to particular instance, ij: we go to a 
 French provincial centre under the Third Republic we 
 find there that the extreme exponents of Christianity 
 are worthier specimens of humanity and less inimical to 
 liberty than are the extreme representatives of free- 
 thought. In the society of a small provincial town, at 
 one end is the Cure, usually a peasant by origin, with 
 no other experience of the world than that gained in 
 the limited horizons of his native village, of the diocesan 
 seminary and of his parish. But though his intellectual 
 development be imperfect, he has compensating qualities : 
 his morals are pure ; his rectitude is as notable as his 
 homely shrewdness and good sense ; simple-minded, un- 
 ambitious, and self-denying, he often shares his meagre 
 pittance with his poorer neighbours. Some, indeed, there 
 are whose defects of character far outweigh their virtues, 
 while others in nobility of life approach the level of 
 human perfection ;' but the average parish priest gener- 
 ally corresponds to the foregoing description. At the 
 other extremity are the leaders of free-thought : the 
 doctor who dreams that the town-council may perhaps 
 be his stepping-stone to the Chamber of Deputies ; the 
 journalist who hopes that the violence of his pen may 
 take him to the provincial capital, or even to Paris. 
 Their virtues are theoretical. In the name of liberty 
 they would emancipate the human spirit from supersti- 
 tion. The local application of the principle involves 
 the removal of the crucifix from the cemetery or the 
 school-room, and the prohibition of religious processions 
 in the streets.
 
 160 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 The cafe is the meeting-place of these guardians of 
 liberty, and it is there that the denunciation is concerted 
 of the petty official who has been seen at church, or who 
 has let his children take part in a service. Formerly the 
 charge of church-going was equivalent to one of hostility 
 to the Republic, though even when clericalism was really 
 its enemy the population in some of the most Republican 
 provinces of France was most assiduous in religious ob- 
 servance. 1 But since the Pope enjoined an active adhe- 
 rence to the existing regime on the clergy, who, for the 
 most part, are democratic by instinct as well as by origin, 
 the insinuation that a man who attends public worship is 
 disloyal to the Government has to be more subtly sug- 
 gested. The Church is the negation of the Revolution ; 
 the Republic is the only legitimate offspring of the Revo- 
 lution ; therefore adherence to the Catholic religion, even 
 in most perfunctory form, in spite of nominal loyalty to 
 the Republic, marks an unsound citizen who ought to 
 receive no favour from the Government. 
 
 Sometimes it is seriously suggested that the tyrannical 
 ideas which are thus made irregularly to regulate the 
 lives of many French people shall be erected into laws. 
 Such was the plan of M. Pochon, deputy for the Ain, 
 who proposed that no Frenchman should be eligible for 
 any public employment unless he had been educated in 
 a Government school ; 2 a project with nothing but its 
 
 1 At the elections of 1881, which to a great extent were fought on 
 Gambetta's party cry of "clericalism the enemy," among the departments 
 in which not a single vote was given to the adversaries of the Republic 
 was the Haute Savoie, where nearly all the male population goes to mass. 
 
 2 Ministers of the Republic have essayed to carry out this intolerant 
 policy. In the Chamber, on November 6, 1892, the question was raised 
 of four youths in the department of the Fas de Calais, who had been
 
 CH. ii DOMESTIC LIBERTIES 161 
 
 tyranny to recommend it, even in the interest of the 
 party of irreligion, as, possibly because Frenchmen look 
 back without pleasure to their school-days, many politi- 
 cians hostile to the Church have been educated by the 
 priests, while well-known clericals were pupils of the 
 Lycees. Even in the Senate, where respect for liberty 
 more generally prevails, a former Minister of Education, 1 
 utilising private reports procured during his term of 
 office, proposed to force all persons in Government em- 
 ployment, under pain of dismissal, to send their children 
 to Government schools. In many of the large towns of 
 France the best secondary education is imparted in the 
 Lycees ; in certain other localities the schools conducted 
 by religious Orders are better; but in either case it is 
 an outrageous theory that a General or a Judge, by 
 reason of his services to the State, should be deprived 
 of his domestic liberties. It is not surprising, when 
 voices of authority are heard enunciating such doctrine 
 in the calm air of the Senate, that petty local tyrants 
 should venture to apply their version of it to the cases 
 of the minor functionaries under their influence. 
 
 When from the benches of the Extreme Left in the 
 Legislature coercive measures, such as these, are proposed, 
 their supporters cite the similar policy of the Second 
 
 disqualified from an open competition for clerkships in the "Fonts et 
 Chausse'es " on the ground that they had been educated by the Christian 
 Brothers instead of at the Communal School. The Minister of Public 
 Works (M. Viette) recognised the truth of the story, but said that the 
 real reason why the boys had not been allowed to compete was because 
 their fathers were active members of the clerical party. The Temps the 
 following day, in the name of Liberalism, took the Ministry severely to 
 task for its action in the matter. 
 
 1 M. Combes, Senator of the Charente Infe'rieur and a Doctor of Medi- 
 cine, Minister of Public Instruction from November, 1895, to April, 1896. 
 
 VOL. I M
 
 102 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 Empire to justify their demands. A Radical will retort 
 to a Moderate Republican who advocates perfect liberty, 
 " Do you think the Second Empire would have allowed 
 its officers or its magistrates to send their children to 
 schools where anti-Imperial ideas were taught ? " The 
 Second Empire would probably have acted as the Radi- 
 cals would wish the Third Republic to act, but with less 
 inconsistency. The Imperial autocracy had no abstract 
 dispositions in favour of clericalism or of anti-clericalism. 
 When it was thought expedient to conciliate the clergy, 
 a promising young professor like Taine was sacrificed at 
 the outset of his career, or Renan in his maturity was 
 treated with rigour; but when the pretensions of the 
 Church became excessive they were resisted on behalf 
 of the Imperial Government by Victor Duruy, the most 
 enlightened Minister of Education that France has had 
 in the last half of the century, with the exception, per- 
 haps, of Jules Simon. The tortuous ecclesiastical policy 
 of the Second Empire is not a model to be followed ; but 
 whatever its faults, it was not in the name of Liberty 
 that it ordained oppression. 
 
 Archbishop Ireland once, after hearing some of the 
 grievances of his brethren of the French clergy, told 
 them that he recognised the justice of their complaints, 
 but that looking at past history, he believed that if 
 they had the upper-hand they would be as intolerant 
 as their irreligious oppressors. That prelate of the New 
 World whose Christian charity is so strong that high 
 ecclesiastical rank has failed to impair his love of liberty, 
 knew France well, having been educated at the Seminary 
 of Belley. He seemed to indicate that the French, irre- 
 spective of party or creed, were generally incapable of
 
 CH. ii THE FORCES OF TOLERATION IN FRANCE 163 
 
 understanding liberty and toleration in the highest sense ; 
 but that opinion needs some qualification. France con- 
 tains a certain number of citizens who are patterns of 
 philosophic tolerance such as no other land produces; but 
 they are now too few even to form a group in the legis- 
 lative assemblies. Some of them, indeed, survive on the 
 benches of the Senate, and in the classes of the Institute 
 they are relatively numerous. They retain the liveliest 
 illusions on the perfection of the British Constitution, 
 and since the State has bought the portrait by Ingres 
 of Bertin, the creator of the Journal des Debats, the 
 Louvre ought to be their place of pious pilgrimage, 
 for that masterpiece is the type in portraiture of the 
 Liberal bourgeoisie which might have governed France 
 for a century instead of for one short intermediate epoch, 
 if 1789 had not been followed by 1793, and the Empire 
 had not come forth from the Terror. This select band 
 is far from containing all the tolerance and love of 
 liberty to be found in France ; but the attachment to 
 the principles of liberty and toleration 'of the vast 
 majority of the population is of such" a nature that they 
 decline to interfere actively in any matters not of per- 
 sonal concern. 
 
 In these pages we shall see how important a factor in 
 the life of the nation is the political indifference which 
 prevails. The electors who refrain from recording their 
 votes at the polls are numerous, but they do not include 
 all the indifferent. If the industrious mass of the popu- 
 lation seems supine in matters of public interest, whether 
 national or local, except when they appeal to the indi- 
 vidual, it must be borne in mind that the experience of 
 a century is of a nature to make the peaceable citizens
 
 164 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 of France sceptical as to the utility of interference in 
 politics. Moreover, the excessive restrictions laid on 
 liberty in France, whether enforced by Government or 
 by irresponsible hands, do not lessen the happiness of a 
 large proportion of the inhabitants. The hard-working 
 tradesman or peasant, either in his laborious days or in 
 his occasional hours of diversion, is, save in rare cases, 
 not often harassed either by the rigours of the admin- 
 istration or by the tyranny of politicians who exercise 
 undue influence under the Parliamentary System. 
 
 Thus as the old Liberal party is unhappily ineffective, 
 and the toiling tranquil population is indifferent, two 
 intolerant factions are exclusively conspicuous to the 
 superficial view. There is the party of reaction, of 
 which the most durable and the best organised element 
 is the clerical section : and there is the Jacobin party. 
 It is likely enough that the former, if ever it became 
 predominant, would, as the discerning American prelate 
 said, lay grievous restraints on liberty : but as its efforts 
 in that direction since the reign of Charles X. had no 
 signal success when powerful lay influence was exerted 
 on its behalf, either under the Second Empire or during 
 the Presidency of Marshal MacMahon, there is no fear 
 of it constituting a danger to a people long habituated 
 to freedom from priestly domination. Indeed the Church 
 and the centralised administration, both of which operate 
 in France by means of the machinery devised by Napo- 
 leon, tend much less to interfere with personal liberty 
 than does the action of that section of the population, 
 which, hostile to those organisations, would in the name 
 of Liberty subject the entire nation to its narrow doc- 
 trine. The Church with its mystical and moral author-
 
 CH. n INTOLEEANCE AND ANARCHY 165 
 
 ity, and the administrative system with its ramified and 
 deep-rooted stability, are two of the chief defences of a 
 sober and industrious people against anarchy, which is 
 incompatible with all liberty. 
 
 The extreme politicians who tyrannise in the provinces 
 are generally associated with the party of disorder in 
 Paris and in the populous centres, which has excessive 
 weight with ministries and urges them to intolerant 
 policy. Anti-clericalism is indeed often professed by 
 authoritative opponents of anarchy. That, however, is 
 not the usual tendency of the sectaries, who terrorise 
 public servants of every degree, from the humble func- 
 tionary, deprived by them of his liberty to regulate the 
 most sacred details of his domestic life, to the President 
 of the Republic, who for fear of them must not be 
 seen in a church. They are the descendants of the 
 Jacobins who diverted the course of the Revolution to 
 their own purposes. Though their aims and doctrines 
 differ in some particulars, they have one point of re- 
 semblance : they are only a handful of the population. 
 M. Taine has elaborately proved that the Jacobin con- 
 quest of France, after 1789, was accomplished by a party 
 which did not include in its ranks one-twentieth of the 
 male adults left in France. 1 So a century later, after 
 a generation of tranquillity, just as in the period suc- 
 ceeding the great upheaval, the majority of the French 
 people have the same dread of anarchy which then drove 
 them into surrendering some of the liberties recently won 
 in order to escape the worst form of oppression. Hence 
 it is not impossible that the curious conception which 
 
 1 Revolution, vol. ii. liv. i. c. ii.
 
 166 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 the revolutionary minority has of liberty, coupled with 
 the inability of parliamentary government to check its 
 pretensions, might become a contributing force to impel 
 the French nation to try a new experiment in govern- 
 ment to inaugurate the new century.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 EQUALITY 
 
 THERE are without doubt many French people who 
 would willingly see the principle of Liberty more liberally 
 applied ; but this can hardly be said of the second great 
 theory of the Revolution. It is, however, no reproach to 
 the French that Equality is neither found nor cultivated 
 among them, for the contrary could only be the case if 
 they ceased to belong to the human family. What is 
 open to criticism is their official pretension that their 
 nation is endowed with a quality which has never existed in 
 any community of mankind ; so, as at the end of the nine- 
 teenth century they repeat the legend adopted at the Rev- 
 olution, the student is bound in courtesy to inquire into 
 its signification, and to see if its perpetuation has a good 
 or an evil effect in the land. 
 
 The first stage of the Revolution did appear to produce 
 relative equality in the French nation. The abolition of 
 privilege and the equalisation of all classes before the tax- 
 gatherer and the tribunals was such a change from the 
 oppression which had provoked the upheaval, that men 
 excusably believed that an era of equality had arrived. 
 But soon human passion asserted itself, and the accredited 
 
 167
 
 168 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 leaders of the movement, members of the long suppressed 
 middle-class, revealed that their idea of Equality was 
 equality with people who pretended to be of superior 
 rank to them. As was said sixty years later by Tocque- 
 ville, than whom none knew better the true results of the 
 Revolution, the word Equality in the lips of a French 
 politician signifies, "No one shall be in a better position 
 than mine." 1 This was the sentiment of the Jacobins of 
 the Terror. Camille Desmoulins, the same summer that 
 he, a briefless barrister deeply in debt, had become a 
 popular hero by his inflammatory harangues in the Palais 
 Royal on the eve of the fall of the Bastille, wrote pri- 
 vately of his improved position : " An additional pleasure 
 is to put myself in my proper place, to display my power 
 to those who despised me, to bring down to my level 
 those whom fortune had set above me. My motto is that 
 of all honest folks, 'no superior.'" 2 For four years he 
 pursued his upward career, displaying his power by de- 
 manding the heads of his colleagues of the Convention, 
 till at last the chief accuser of the Girondins found that 
 he had to recognise a superior in Robespierre, who sent 
 him vociferating to the scaffold, a few months before the 
 autocrat of the Revolution himself became a victim to the 
 device of the Republic, as it was sometimes written in 
 1794 : "Liberty, Equality, or Death." 
 
 The season in which the guillotine did its levelling 
 work is looked back upon with satisfaction by only a 
 select few of the sons of the Revolution. The revolu- 
 
 1 Alexis de Tocqueville et la democratic liberate : Etude suivie de 
 fragments des entretiens de Tocqueville avec N. W. Senior (1848-58), 
 par E. d'Eichthal. 
 
 a September 20, 1789.
 
 CH. in EQUALITY AT THE REVOLUTION 169 
 
 tionary period which has been extolled by Frenchmen of 
 every party, excepting extreme Legitimists, is that of the 
 Constituent Assembly. Yet before it was a year old its 
 acts took so little account of human nature that they 
 were condemned from their inception. When at the 
 famous night sitting of August 4, 1789, the deputies of 
 the clergy and of the nobility abandoned all their privi- 
 leges, fiscal, feudal, and judicial, the only criticism which 
 can be made of that great rectification of inequality is 
 that it was too sudden. The baneful institutions were 
 abolished without anything being ready to take their 
 place, so anarchy and chaos were the result. But the 
 reform was both well-conceived and essential, qualities 
 which were soon lacking in the acts of the Assembly. 
 Just a year after it had, in the Tennis Court at Ver- 
 sailles, 1 solemnly sworn not to separate before giving a 
 constitution to France, it paused on the way to suppress all 
 nobiliary titles and honorific distinctions, declaring that 
 henceforth, under pain of fine and deprivation of civic 
 rights, no Frenchman should take or keep the title of 
 duke, prince, marquis, count, baron, or similar style, or 
 use under any circumstances any appellation but that of 
 his family name. 
 
 A hundred years later, a generation grown up under 
 a Republic, in which nobility has no place and which 
 claims to have inherited the complete doctrine of 1789 
 and 1790, reads in the newspapers any morning a list of 
 names of the frequenters of a Parisian place of amuse- 
 ment, including more French subjects styled count or 
 marquis than are to be found in a volume of St. Simon ; 
 
 1 " Serment du Jeu de Paume," June 20, 1789. " Suppression de tous 
 les litres et distinctions honorifiques," June 19, 1790.
 
 170 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 while the Republic itself allows the members of its legis- 
 lature, and even its salaried functionaries, to deck them- 
 selves with whatever title seems good to them. Moreover, 
 though the First Empire and the Restoration lavishly dis- 
 regarded the prohibition of the Constituent Assembly, 
 Louis Philippe and Napoleon III. conferred only a limited 
 number of hereditary titles. So, nearly seventy years 
 after their creation practically ceased, the result of the 
 law of 1790, under a Republican regime which professes 
 to respect its principle, is that nobiliary titles have multi- 
 plied in France to an extent which would have scanda- 
 lised a king of the Ancient Monarchy who was the sole 
 fountain of honour. 
 
 No doubt the abolition of titles was the logical corollary 
 of the abolition of privilege, and to the theorists of 1790 
 it seemed unreasonable that men should be distinguished 
 among their fellows by meaningless rank which only kept 
 alive the memory of discarded abuses ; but their conclu- 
 sion proved their ignorance of human nature. The 
 enthusiasm of some of the revolutionaries was as single- 
 minded as it was chimerical ; but the sentiment expressed 
 by Camille Desmoulins inspired much of the action of 
 that period, and had he kept his head on his shoulders 
 another four months, till Robespierre's had fallen, he 
 might have attained the exalted rank enjoyed by guillo- 
 tining levellers as ferocious as himself, like Fouche, 
 whose dukedom of the Empire was confirmed by Louis 
 XVIII., the brother of his most illustrious victim. The 
 impotence of the revolutionaries, after redressing grievous 
 abuses, to establish the theory of the equality of mankind 
 is revealed on every page of French history for a century. 
 Here we may observe some of its contemporary mani-
 
 CH. in THE ABOLITION OF TITLES 171 
 
 festations, and they will incidentally allow us to glance 
 at a section of the population which otherwise might be 
 neglected in a work primarily concerned with the politi- 
 cal forces of France. 
 
 The most superficial traveller may remark the curious 
 fact that in England, which is an unmilitary monarchy, 
 the importunates who infest the exits of London theatres 
 deem that the surest way of winning custom is by ad- 
 dressing a person whose carriage they offer to call as 
 "Captain"; whereas under the Republic, in warlike 
 but egalitarian France, a member of that disinherited 
 class addresses his possible client as " Monsieur le Comte," 
 or, if unduly avaricious, as "Mon Prince." And just as 
 the peaceful attorney rolls home to Bayswater in a han- 
 som not dissatisfied with the recognition of his martial 
 air, so does the Republican deputy descend the Boulevard 
 satisfied that his features bear a stamp of noble distinc- 
 tion superior to that of his colleagues in the Chamber. 
 The conclusion is that an Englishman, though he depre- 
 cates conscription, and though his country has only once 
 in living memory been at war with a civilised power, has 
 a human weakness for fighting ; and that a Frenchman, 
 however sincere his official creed that titular honours 
 have no place in the democratic State, has an equally 
 human disbelief in the equality of rank. 
 
 Before glancing at the nobiliary titles used by an ever- 
 increasing number of French citizens under the Republic, 
 we ought to notice the legalised mode whereby the Gov- 
 ernment counteracts the principle of Equality advertised 
 in its revolutionary device. The Legion of Honour 
 founded by Napoleon during the Consulate, and reorgan- 
 ised at various epochs, is the object of much criticism in
 
 172 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 France ; but it is an excellent institution of its kind. As 
 all the powers of Europe, excepting Switzerland, have 
 found that government is facilitated by the faculty of dis- 
 tributing among their subjects honorary distinctions, 
 titular or decorative, the French system of one great 
 national Order seems to offer all the advantages of 
 symmetry, which is a feature of the creations of the 
 Napoleonic settlement. It is composed of five classes, 
 and it cannot be compared with any method existing 
 in our country for rewarding merit. The divisions of 
 Grand Crosses and of Grand Officers are so essentially 
 military in composition that for French civilians they 
 are more exclusive in point of number than any cate- 
 gory of honours at the disposal of an English minister. 1 
 The intermediate Legionaries styled Commanders and 
 Officers correspond in some degree to the British subjects 
 who in expanding crowds receive baronetcies, knight- 
 hoods, or companionships. They include diplomatists, 
 functionaries, men of letters and of science, judges, pro- 
 vincial mayors, railway officials, journalists, politicians, 
 and tradesmen, in addition to the multitude of soldiers 
 
 1 In a recent roll of the Legion of Honour, out of 48 Grand Crosses 
 held by French subjects, 7 only were held by civilians. Of 227 Grand 
 Officers 49 were civilians ; thus making a total of 56 civilians invested 
 with the two highest distinctions at the disposal of the French Govern- 
 ment. There are 63 ribbons of the Garter, the Thistle and St. Patrick 
 available for British subjects (though they are not bestowed on the 
 ground of merit), to say nothing of the much more numerous Grand 
 Crosses of our other five orders, which have more resemblance to the 
 high ranks of the Legion of Honour. Moreover, nowadays there are 
 always at least sixty peers of the first creation surviving in our country. 
 But although the high promotions in the Legion of Honour are often 
 conferred on men whose position would in England give them a claim to 
 peerages, such as ambassadors, colonial governors, and men eminent in 
 science, art, and letters, there is no sort of analogy between the distinctions.
 
 CH. in THE LEGION OF HONOUR 173 
 
 and sailors whose predominance in all ranks of the Order 
 preserves its originally military character. All, however, 
 must have passed a period of probation in the fifth class 
 of Knights of the Legion of Honour, which is unlimited 
 in numbers, and never has fewer than several thousand 
 members, so it does not resemble any institution in our 
 country. 
 
 If it be for the public good that a portion of a human 
 community should be singled out for distinction by the 
 Government under which it exists, the broad basis of 
 the Legion of Honour seems to present certain advan- 
 tages. It puts a wide-spread premium on good behaviour. 
 Every citizen of France, in town and country, without 
 overweening ambition, which often ruins the happiness 
 of well-meaning persons, may regard the coveted red- 
 ribbon as a distinction not beyond his reach. Honours 
 of all categories are in all countries often conferred on 
 the undeserving and the impudent ; and a grave objec- 
 tion made by French critics to the miscellaneous be- 
 stowal of the Order is that it is a military decoration, 
 giving all its wearers the right to be saluted by soldiers, 
 and to be buried with martial escorts, so that its occa- 
 sional possession by blackmailing journalists and other 
 miscreants brings indirect stigma on the gallant army 
 of France. That is a domestic question which does not 
 concern this inquiry. From the egalitarian point of 
 view the disadvantage of the system is that it tends 
 to make the French a nation of supplicants, each man 
 soliciting to have confirmed his superiority over his 
 neighbour. Twice annually, at the New Year, and on 
 the day of the fall of the Bastille, supreme festival of 
 Equality, the new nominations and promotions are pub-
 
 174 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 lished, being the result of many months' importuning of 
 ministers. So vast is the host of applicants that two 
 other species of decorations have had to be developed 
 or invented outside the national Order ; the Academic 
 Palms, a distinction divided into two classes, and dis- 
 pensed by the departments of Education, Fine Arts, and 
 Public Worship, and the ribbon of " Merite Agricole " 
 conferred by the Minister of Agriculture. Thus, when- 
 ever the President of the Republic visits officially a 
 provincial town, he goes with the definite mission of dis- 
 playing that equality is discountenanced by the State ; 
 for it is his practice to seize the occasion to distinguish 
 local notables with invidious disparity. The worthiest in 
 the eyes of the Government he invests with the Legion 
 of Honour ; while other inhabitants of mark he practi- 
 cally tells that they are of inferior condition, not good 
 enough for the red-ribbon, and only entitled to the 
 modest violet of the Academy, or the rustic green of 
 Agriculture. 
 
 But though the conferring of the national Order and 
 of the departmental decorations is an official contradiction 
 of the principle of equality, yet in one outward aspect 
 the recipients of these distinctions remain on a level. 
 From M. Pasteur, who wore the Grand Cross of the 
 Legion of Honour, to the humble farmer who, for skil- 
 fully using his discoveries, has won the Merite Agricole, 
 none of the decorated have any style or title affixed to 
 their names. Moreover the consorts of citizens so hon- 
 oured are of rank as naked as the wife of an English 
 archbishop. In our country it is said that if the corre- 
 spondence of party whips and of ministers' secretaries 
 were made public, it would reveal that the most ardent
 
 CH. in "QUIA AUDISTI VOCEM UXOKIS TUAE " 175 
 
 solicitations of titles are attributed to feminine ambition. 
 An unpretending manufacturer will write that since a 
 rival tradesman was knighted by the preceding ministry, 
 his wife has vowed that a baronetcy conferred on her 
 husband will alone give her the precedence proper to her 
 merits ; or a reluctant millionaire will demand a peerage 
 on similar grounds, while declaring that personally he has 
 a clinging love for the lowly rank in which he was born ; 
 and the adviser of the Crown, though aware of the dis- 
 ingenuousness of the petition, will sometimes, in defiance 
 of the most venerable tradition of antiquity, reward his 
 unblushing supporter who pleads that he has hearkened 
 unto the voice of his wife. That, generally speaking, the 
 vanity of the male is more aggressive in these matters, is 
 perhaps shown by the fact that in official France women 
 are content with the spectacular joy of their masters' be- 
 ribboned button-holes. Nevertheless, the pleasure derived 
 by both sexes from being addressed by their fellow-creat- 
 ures with titles implying superiority, accounts for the 
 curious phenomenon we are about to notice. 
 
 n 
 
 While the Legion of Honour, though opposed to the 
 principle of equality, is bestowed on the ground of desert, 
 achievement, or service, nobiliary titles are every year 
 assumed wholesale by French subjects without pretence 
 of meritorious or useful actions, and are in most cases 
 conferred by their wearers. Apart from the theory that, 
 none being recognised by the Republic, all titles of nobil- 
 ity borne by French citizens are irregular, there are a 
 certain number in use in France as authentic, as regu-
 
 176 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 larly inherited and as interesting in origin as any in 
 Europe. But so multitudinous are the persons who 
 assume noble affixes according to their fancy, that out- 
 side those of the chiefs of ducal houses, no Frenchman 
 but a learned expert can judge whether a title held by 
 one of his countrymen, whatever his social position, be 
 his due heritage or an unwarranted assumption. 
 
 The confusion would be less if it were not that thou- 
 sands of the transgressors are connected with noble 
 families. The French nobility before the Revolution 
 was based on an entirely different principle from ours. 
 Nobility in England was a political institution composed 
 of a limited number of persons, each of whom on his 
 death handed on to his heir in line of primogeniture the 
 legislative and other powers he had exercised, together 
 with his titles. In France it was a numerous privileged 
 caste enjoying no political power, but transmitting its 
 fiscal and other privileges to all its male progeny, though 
 its titles were usually settled to descend from eldest son 
 to eldest son. 
 
 A striking difference between the nobility in the two 
 countries was, that in England its progeny in the junior 
 branches, to adopt a French expression, redescended into 
 the bourgeoisie. In the most exclusive days of the British 
 peerage, before Mr. Pitt began the democratising of the 
 House of Lords, of which our generation has seen some 
 startling developments, a great nobleman's grandsons, 
 who in the eyes of the heralds of the Continental courts 
 were by their quarterings of unimpeachably gentle quality, 
 were in their own country simple members of the Third 
 Estate without rank ; while a successful lawyer of lowliest 
 parentage would, if elevated to the peerage, be the social
 
 CH. in ENGLISH NOBILITY AND FRENCH NOBLESSE 177 
 
 superior of such scions of illustrious stock. Thus in 
 England the expression " noble birth " has always been 
 inaccurate, as no one could be nobly born in our country 
 excepting the sole posthumous son of a peer ; in other 
 cases of succession the ennobling of the blood taking 
 place only on the cessation of the breath of the previous 
 holder of the peerage. At the present day it is a matter 
 of no interest to anybody that all the sons of a duke, in- 
 cluding even the eldest in his father's lifetime, should in 
 legal and official documents be described as untitled com- 
 moners ; but in the past that tradition has had a most 
 important bearing on our national history. Without it 
 an aristocratic caste would have been formed, causing the 
 division of English society into horizontal layers, and 
 preventing the development of the party system, which 
 has been in the past the bulwark of our nation against the 
 abuses of privilege, and a safeguard against revolutions 
 resembling that of 1789. 
 
 In France, before the Revolution, all titled persons 
 were noble, but only a portion of the nobility were titled. 
 In some provinces few of the privileged nobles had titles ; 
 and all over the land the marquisates, baronies, and other 
 similar distinctions were usually settled strictly according 
 to primogeniture, the younger sons transmitting the noble 
 name and the fiscal privileges to their progeny, but usually 
 without any nobiliary affix, excepting the preposition de 
 known as the particule. There were exceptions to this 
 rule, and there were even then instances of persons who 
 unduly assumed titles, amid the crowd of noble families 
 ever increased by nomination to various offices in the 
 realm, and also by purchase. This is, of course, only a 
 very general view of a complicated subject which abounds 
 
 VOL. I N
 
 178 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 in countless details and exceptions ; it is a superficial 
 sketch which may help to explain certain social phenom- 
 ena conspicuous in France more than a century after the 
 Revolution abolished not only privilege but also titles. 
 
 Napoleon, while he maintained the first principle of the 
 Revolution hostile to privilege, understanding human 
 nature and recognising that men liked to be called by 
 names which put them on a higher level than their fellow- 
 creatures, even though they did not invest them with 
 privileges, scattered titles broadcast, making his Marshals 
 and Ministers, Princes and Dukes, and including in the 
 distribution of minor honours numerous members of the 
 old nobility who rallied to the Empire. He had not time 
 to see the hereditary effect of his creations, but when the 
 legitimate kings of France returned, they recognised 
 many of the Imperial dignities and conferred others ; 
 some of them being attached to membership of the new 
 Chamber of Peers, others being purely decorative, like our 
 baronetcies, but all being unconnected with privilege, 
 which was the basis of the nobility of the Old Regime. 
 
 The patents conferring titles under the Restoration 
 limit them in line of primogeniture, but the old dynasty 
 did not remain long enough on its recovered throne to 
 enforce regularity or to see its ordinances carried out; 
 and since the abdication of Charles X. in 1830 there has 
 not been a ruler in France to whom French subjects of 
 aristocratic pretensions have paid regard. The Faubourg 
 St. Germain had equal scorn for Louis Philippe and for 
 Napoleon III., and the efforts of the latter to introduce 
 regularity in the bearing of titles had no effect. 1 The 
 
 1 The "Loi centre 1' usurpation des litres" passed in 1858 was not an 
 honest attempt to settle this question, but rather an effort of the Imperial
 
 CH. in THE USE OF TITLES IN MODERN FRANCE 179 
 
 Government of the Republic having acted on the fiction 
 that under a regime of which Equality is the official prin- 
 ciple no titles can exist, the widest scope has been given 
 to private enterprise. 
 
 The system which the more plausible of the assumers 
 of titles have followed is as follows. A descendant in the 
 male line of a family noble before the Revolution is quite 
 aware that, being the younger son of younger sons, under 
 the Old Regime he would have borne no title without a 
 new creation. But, if he be overscrupulous, he reasons, 
 " Under the Ancient Monarchy I should have been noble ; 
 I should have enjoyed certain privileges ; and the only 
 modern compensation for their disappearance being a title 
 I have the right to use one." Not one in twenty of the 
 persons so situated takes the trouble to argue thus. A 
 man adopts a title, which perhaps his father used irregu- 
 larly before him, because his friends do likewise. The 
 offshoots of ducal houses set an example in the democratic 
 use of these adornments, and in some of them there are 
 dozens of multiplying younger branches, each member of 
 which styles himself "Comte," and transmits the same 
 designation to all his male posterity in perpetuity. The 
 head of one of these families, whose dukedom dated from 
 the early days of Louis XIV.,*told me that his own kins- 
 men, in thus styling themselves, defied tradition and 
 profited from the disorder caused by the Revolution. In 
 
 Government to obtain the favour of its Legitimist opponents who bore 
 titles by giving them official consecration ; but the law remained a dead 
 letter, as the Royalists declined to register their titles while continuing 
 to use them at their own discretion. The chief opponent of the measure 
 in the Corps Le"gislatif was M. Emile Ollivier, who afterwards rallied to 
 the Empire, and he argued that the recognition of an hereditary nobility 
 is contrary to the principles of the Revolution (Stance du 7 Mai, 1858).
 
 180 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 his province, moreover, where few of the local noblesse 
 under the old Monarchy bore titles, its authentic repre- 
 sentatives, perceiving that others with less claim than they 
 to nobiliary attributes assumed them, called themselves 
 under the Third Republic counts or barons for the first 
 time in their immemorial annals. If the ancient gentry 
 and the cadets of once great houses are willing to take 
 such liberties with the usages of their order, the scions 
 of the Revolutionary nobility of the Empire naturally do 
 likewise ; while multitudes of others follow suit who can 
 trace no connection either with the courtiers of Versailles 
 or the magistrates of the Ancient Regime, with Napoleon's 
 soldiers of fortune and functionaries, or with any one who 
 has ever been granted a title by a ruler of France. It is 
 obvious that a man who has some renown in literature or 
 art, or even in industry, could not suddenly announce to 
 the world that he had made himself a marquis or a baron ; 
 but, considering that any French citizen may assume a 
 title with perfect impunity, and that its assumption in 
 time may increase his own consideration, as well as aug- 
 ment the dowries he may demand for his sons when he 
 arranges their marriages, it is surprising that any obscure 
 people of independent means remain in France who have 
 the self-restraint not to endow themselves with these 
 ornamental advantages. 
 
 It is more surprising that the Government of the 
 Republic has taken no step to curb the irregularity 
 which it connives at by a paradoxical application of the 
 doctrine of Equality. The fiction is that titles borne by 
 French subjects have no existence, so to recognise them 
 even for the purpose of limiting their use would bring 
 them into being and infringe the principle of equality.
 
 CH. in REPUBLICAN SANCTION OF TITLES 181 
 
 The Government of the Republic does, however, recog- 
 nise titles. In the official lists of the Legislative Cham- 
 bers a member is invested with any nobiliary rank he 
 likes to give himself. There are also many of the diplo- 
 matic servants of the Republic who bear titles which 
 are formally confirmed by their Government in the 
 documents accrediting them to foreign courts. More- 
 over, when the President visits the provinces in state 
 he is accompanied by functionaries of the Protocole, the 
 power which regulates the ceremonial etiquette of the 
 Republic, some of whom in the official account of 
 the solemnities are formally described as noblemen. 
 Therefore the Republic cannot repudiate its responsibil- 
 ity, which is grave for a reason not often recognised. 
 The objection to the unlimited multiplication of titles at 
 the will of the wearers is not merely a sentimental regret 
 that a large section of the nation should bring ridicule 
 on dignified or picturesque traditions by following the 
 example of Italy or Spain or other countries which, 
 even though they have sovereigns to regulate such mat- 
 ters, ought not to be looked to by France for social 
 guidance. The system is objectionable on economical as 
 well as on social grounds. 
 
 Each year it increases a section of the community 
 which adds nothing to the resources of the country, 
 while it debases the national standard of intelligence. 
 This will be shown by the mention of a remarkable 
 fact. In the very numerous class claiming nobility, 
 whether authentic or doubtful, ancient or modern, it 
 would be difficult to cite, at the end of the nineteenth 
 century, the names of six men born in the latter half of 
 it who are known to fame or are believed to show
 
 182 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 promise. 1 The fact is the more lamentable as attractive 
 youths of this class on leaving school, before they sink 
 into a pitiful existence of futility, from which the pro- 
 fession of arms seems to be the only way of escape, often 
 display intelligent qualities which ought to foretoken 
 a bright and honourable future. Mgr. d'Hulst, shortly 
 before his death, gave me his opinion on this point, 
 on which he had exceptional knowledge, he being him- 
 self the chief of a noble Breton family, the intimate 
 friend of the Comte de Paris, a Royalist deputy, and 
 the head of the Catholic Institute of France. He was 
 lamenting with some severity the position in the country 
 of the men of good family ; and being asked if it were 
 an exaggeration to say that there were not six of them 
 born in the last half of the century who even gave prom- 
 ise of brilliant achievement, the learned prelate, who was 
 a pessimist, replied with emphasis, "You will not find 
 three." All the young men of distinction belonging to 
 that class are now older than Napoleon was when his 
 career was ended. M. de Mun and his colleagues of 
 the Academy, M. d'Haussonville and M. de Vogue, as 
 
 1 In the army there are young officers belonging to noble families who 
 are said to give remarkable promise, but in time of peace such military 
 reputation is unknown to the public. It should be said that no officer in 
 the French service, until he has passed the rank of Colonel, is permitted 
 to use any nobiliary title, authentic or otherwise. But superior officers 
 of distinction rarely avail themselves of the faculty, such affixes being 
 regarded in France as of less prestige than high combatant titles. Mar- 
 shal MacMahon was scarcely ever called Due de Magenta, though he 
 won that title on the battle-field. General Davout, in whose favour Napo- 
 leon III. revived the title conferred on his uncle by Napoleon after Jena, 
 sometimes called himself Due d'Auerstaedt when a General of Division 
 under the Third Republic, and there was every reason for maintaining on 
 the army list its glorious tradition. On the other hand, General de Gal- 
 liffet let his more ancient title of Marquis fall into disuse.
 
 CH. HI DECADENCE OF THE TITLED CLASS 183 
 
 well as Mgr. d'Hulst himself, were all born before the 
 middle of the century, in the last years of the Monarchy 
 of July, and their successors are not apparent. 
 
 It should be noted that each of these descendants of 
 noble houses has attained his distinction under the Repub- 
 lic, so it is not the influence of the regime which has hin- 
 dered others of the same class from doing likewise. The 
 policy of the Republic in keeping out of the public 
 service those suspected of noble lineage is an excuse 
 pleaded for the useless lives of persons so disqualified ; 
 but though young men of gentle birth or pretensions may, 
 for their reactionary opinions, have thus been prevented 
 from earning a pittance in the huge army of functionaries, 
 they have not been debarred from paths of renown in the 
 liberal professions, in letters, or in science, or indeed in 
 the career of politics. Since the death in 1882 of Gam- 
 betta, himself an example of fame made in opposition, not 
 a single Republican office-holder has made a parliamentary 
 reputation greater than that of M. de Mun. Of the 
 scores of successive ministers several have adequately 
 filled the places they have held, but not one has won politi- 
 cal fame unattainable by an active opponent of ministries. 
 Since the Republic was governed by Republicans, the only 
 department of the State in which distinction has been 
 gained is that of Foreign Affairs, wherein the employ- 
 ment of men of good social position has not, for obvious 
 reasons, been discouraged. It is not true that the Repub- 
 lic has entirely precluded bearers of noble names from 
 illustrating honourable pursuits. The oratory of M. de 
 Mun is not a gift to be obtained by taking thought ; but 
 parliamentary skill and political prominence are within 
 the reach of the resolute, while diligence is the chief and
 
 184 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 indispensable element of literary success such as is enjoyed 
 by the other Academicians whose names have been cited. 
 
 A republic has its home in France greater than that 
 which rests on the Constitution of 1875. In the com- 
 monwealth of letters, distinction does not depend on the 
 hazards of a writer's birth or on his political sentiments ; 
 and since the fall of the First Empire the literature of 
 the century, fabricated by men of most diverse origin, has 
 been the greatest glory of the French nation, irrespective 
 of change of regime. The Revolution, far from being 
 repressive in its after effects on the talents of the class 
 which it had deposed, seemed after the reconstruction of 
 France to encourage its sons to excel in the paths which 
 their fathers had less often trodden in the old days of 
 privilege. Under the Monarchy of July, when the bour- 
 geoisie was paramount, half the brilliant names foremost 
 in every branch of literature were claimed to be of noble 
 origin. Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Lamennais, Rerausat, 
 Segur, Barante, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Tocque- 
 ville, Alfred de Vigny, Balzac, and Montalembert all 
 were, or professed to be, members of noble families. 
 They represent the whole range of French style and 
 opinion in history, poetry, drama, romance, theology, and 
 political philosophy, and each of them had made a name 
 before attaining the age of forty. 
 
 No doubt the Monarchy of July was a period of excep- 
 tional literary splendour to which every class of society 
 contributed, while the Third Republic is by comparison 
 commonplace. But France continues to produce a num- 
 ber of admirable writers, and while the so-called noble 
 class has increased enormously in proportion to the popu- 
 lation, it is most rare for a writer of the first rank to claim
 
 CH. in RESULT OF UNREGULATED USE OF TITLES 18o 
 
 connection with it, no matter what his opinions or his 
 subject. Now, if the portion of the community which 
 displays this and many another outward sign of decadence 
 were a small and exclusive caste, living and intermarrying 
 apart from the world, composed of fossilised patricians 
 isolated in the pride of their parchments, such as are some- 
 times found in the provinces, its condition would have no 
 national importance. But the exponents of sterile aristo- 
 cratic pretension are an expanding multitude, not suffer- 
 ing from stagnation of the blood which has destroyed 
 many a genuine aristocracy. Even when they bear right- 
 fully noble family names, they are often the offspring of 
 several generations of alliances with the shrewd French 
 middle-class, or with opulent foreigners of equal intelli- 
 gence, notably of Jewish or American origin. Thus the 
 peril to society lies in the fact that every year a great sec- 
 tion of the population, increasing by the operation of the 
 laws of nature and of human vanity, is diverted from prof- 
 itable and praiseworthy pursuits, to form an idle class, 
 without tradition, ideal, or prospects. 
 
 In the interest of the whole community the Government 
 of the Republic ought to have interfered. Some of its 
 partisans avow with cynicism that as the wearers of titles, 
 whatever their origin, are Reactionaries, it has been in the 
 interest of the Republic not to check them in courses which 
 bring ridicule on the enemies of the established regime. 
 This is the reasoning of opportunism rather than of 
 statesmanship, which would not have permitted this wan- 
 ton drain on the resources and intellect of France. The 
 craving for titular distinction is a curious phase of mod- 
 ern democracies, and, as we have seen, the presumably 
 meritorious, such as are invested with titles in our coun-
 
 186 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 try, have in France to be satisfied with a ribbon, which, 
 however, is not less an infringement of the principle of 
 equality. But the wearing of a decoration does not per- 
 niciously influence a Frenchman in the performance of his 
 duties to society, and indeed the hope of obtaining a 
 higher grade may inspire him to effort : whereas the self- 
 assumed or invented nobiliary title inspires its holder with 
 no worthier resolve than to turn it indolently to material 
 profit. 
 
 Only the Government of the Republic could have under- 
 taken the serious task of regulating the assumption of 
 titles, for it alone could with impunity offend the wearers 
 of them, they being an anti-Republican force. If a mon- 
 archy were re-established, the sovereign, whether absolute 
 or constitutional, would have to take every precaution to 
 conciliate all classes of his new subjects, and he would 
 hasten his return into private life if he began to meddle 
 with the fancies of his most devoted adherents. An im- 
 portant supporter of the Comte de Paris told me that he 
 knew several holders of palpably home-made titles, who, 
 having offered their fealty to the pretender and their 
 purses to his cause, had received gracious letters from 
 Sheen or from Stowe, commencing " Mon cher Comte " or 
 "Mon cher Marquis," and signed "Philippe." These the 
 recipients treated as patents of nobility not less authentic 
 than those whereby Charles IX. and Henry IV. respec- 
 tively conferred the dukedoms of Thouars and of La Tre- 
 moille on the ancestor of the present titulary of those 
 ancient fiefs. 
 
 If strength or statesmanship had been found in the gov- 
 ernments of the Republic, it would have been easy to 
 remedy the abuse, as in France the State exercises arbi-
 
 CH. in STATE SUPERVISION OF NOMENCLATURE 187 
 
 trary powers in regulating the nomenclature of its citi- 
 zens. A Frenchman is perpetually called upon to produce 
 his " papers," relating to the registration of his birth, to 
 verify his identity, and the strictest restraint is put upon 
 the alteration of his family or baptismal names. It is a 
 curious contrast between the habits of the two countries 
 that while in England a man with unmusical or grotesque 
 appellations may with faintest formality exchange them 
 for a stately combination suggesting illustrious kinship ; 
 yet if he unduly describe himself a lord he is suspected of 
 defrauding tradesmen or of being an escaped lunatic : 
 whereas in France any citizen may with success make 
 himself into a marquis or a count ; though if he take upon 
 himself to alter his civil names inscribed on his birth cer- 
 tificate he is subject to the sternest penalties. More than 
 that, a French father is restricted in the choice of the 
 names he may give his child : he may not call him by a 
 surname, either for legitimate family reasons, or because 
 of romantic sound, or in honour of a favourite author or 
 politician. He may not spur his infant to ambition by 
 naming him Voltaire or Bossuet or Robespierre or Bona- 
 parte or Gambetta or Zola. If he wishes to endow him 
 with a perpetual stimulus to valour or patriotism or virtue 
 or piety, he can call him Achille or Marius or Aristide or 
 Xavier : for the great reconstructor of France decreed 
 that no names could be accorded to a French subject but 
 those found in the calendars of the saints or in the history 
 of antiquity, 1 thus also precluding fantastic parents from 
 
 1 Loi du 11 Germinal An XI. (April, 1803). The most elaborate for- 
 malities are required for any modification in the names attributed to a 
 French subject when his birth was registered. If he desire a change in 
 consequence of some error then committed, the tribunals can authorise 
 the alteration after due proof ; but any other change of nomenclature can
 
 188 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 naming their offspring after savage potentates or abstract 
 virtues. 
 
 No one but a barbarian would wish to abolish titles, 
 ancient or modern, which have been handed on from 
 father to son with historic continuity, whether they took 
 their origin in the Court of Versailles or on the battle- 
 fields of the Empire, though the regulation of their use 
 is of urgent expediency. Nothing of historical interest 
 in architecture or in personal attribute should ever be 
 destroyed in a civilised nation unless its preservation 
 causes actual injury to human beings. At the Revolu- 
 tion it was as necessary to deal with the wealth of the 
 Church as it was to take away the privileges of the 
 nobles, both having conduced to the misery of the people; 
 but the mutilation of noble buildings was as indefensible 
 as the burning of parchments. The official care taken by 
 the Republic of the Invalides at Paris, of the Cathedral 
 at Reims, or of the Maison Carree at Nines, does not com- 
 mit the Government of France to the cult of the religion 
 of the Antonines or of Clovis, or to the revival of the 
 splendours of Louis XIV. ; and the legal recognition of 
 the ducal titles of Uzds, created the year of the massacre 
 of St. Bartholomew, or of the princely title of Moskowa, 
 conferred on Marshal Ney, would not make the Republic 
 suspected of producing a Catherine de Medicis or a Napo- 
 
 only be effected by the Government after solemn petition. Not only in 
 legal documents but in official lists a man's family name has to be inscribed 
 as it was borne by his ancestors, even though his father before him used 
 the modified form. Thus on the roll of the Institute M. Jules Simon was 
 inscribed as "Jules Francois Simon-Suisse dit Jules Simon," and in the 
 list of the Chamber of Deputies M. Lockroy, the kinsman of Victor Hugo, 
 is entered as " Edouard Simon dit Lockroy, fils de Joseph Simon dit Lock- 
 roy."
 
 CH. in OFFICIAL RECOGNITION OF NOBILITY 189 
 
 leon. They are historical monuments which ought to be 
 preserved as such. 
 
 Certain incidents inspired by an inheritor of the 
 former title threw light on the attitude of the Repub- 
 lic to such relics of past regimes. The Due d'Uzes was 
 an amiable young man descended paternally from the line 
 of dukes created in 1572, and from the Veuve Clicquot of 
 genial commercial tradition by his mother, who was the 
 most serious enemy the Republic ever had outside its own 
 ranks, as she gave 120,000 to General Boulanger when 
 he seemed to need nothing but funds to destroy it. The 
 Duke in travelling to the Congo did what would have 
 passed unnoticed in England, whence every year men of 
 good position go to spend their holidays on adventurous 
 journeys. When in 1893 he died by fever on the expedi- 
 tion, officials of the Republic outdid reactionary journal- 
 ists in giving importance to the untimely ending of an 
 unknown young nobleman, which in our country would 
 have been dismissed with a sympathetic paragraph in the 
 newspapers. But the event was doubly noteworthy in 
 France, because it behooves the Government to encourage 
 every class of its citizens when they show symptoms of a 
 taste for voyaging, the lack of which in the nation checks 
 the effective establishment of a colonial empire ; and the 
 case of a rich and well-born youth quitting the facile joys 
 of the boulevards for the arduous pleasures of travel was 
 phenomenal. At all events his death received more offi- 
 cial notice than if he had been the son of a Republican 
 politician. The Minister himself bore the news to the 
 family, and at the funeral at the ancestral chateau in the 
 Cevennes, a Republican officer, deputed by the Ministry 
 to represent it, said he was " sent by the Government of
 
 190 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 the Republic to express the unanimous sorrow of the 
 nation for the Due d'Uzes, who had displayed exceeding 
 strength of character in foregoing the life of a favourite 
 of fortune, his wealth and the splendour of his great 
 name having already realised for him the dreams of 
 human ambition." 1 
 
 In these words publicly pronounced by the repre- 
 sentative of the Government there was first the formal 
 recognition of an ancient title, disposing of the pretended 
 inability of the Republic to admit the existence of such 
 an anomaly. There was then the splendour and great- 
 ness attributed to the name, not by an advocate of the 
 privileges of the ancient court, who might justifiably 
 use those terms in a special sense, but by the official 
 mouthpiece of the Republic, which theoretically refuses 
 to ascribe greatness to any contemporary name, except 
 for the personal achievement of its bearer. But there 
 was a still graver repudiation of the principle of equal- 
 ity. There was the suggestion of the idea prevalent 
 in France, expressed sometimes in contemptuous, some- 
 times in respectfully envious form, to the effect that 
 there is a class of favoured beings called, in defiance of 
 etymology and of history, the " aristocracy," which has 
 no other vocation or duty than the pursuit of pleasure 
 at Paris and in the resorts of Parisians ; and that should 
 one of its members weary of a life, of which the foremost 
 
 1 " Le Gouvernement de la Re"publique m'a charge" de vous exprimer, 
 Madame la Duchesse, en son nom et au nom de tous les Francois de cceur, 
 les regrets unanimes de ses concitoyens de la mort de celui qui fut le Due 
 Jacques d'Uzes. II fallut au de"funt une grande force d'ame pour renoncer 
 a la vie des heureux de ce monde ; jouissance de la fortune, e"clat d'un 
 grand nom, tel que le rfivent les ambitieux de ce monde." Discours du 
 Deleyue du Gouvernement aux obseques du Due d' Uzes : 27 Septembre, 1893.
 
 CH. in MODERN PARISIAN SOCIETY AND OLD REGIME 191 
 
 exponents are often the prodigal heirs of tradesmen, he 
 deserves to be lauded as a hero of renunciation. That 
 demoralising idea is fostered by the perpetual increase 
 of titled persons in France. But there are also other 
 influences, less special in character, which have affected 
 the upper-classes, to use that conventional expression, 
 the currency of the synonyms of which in the French 
 language is another contradiction of the principle of 
 Equality after a century of Revolution. 
 
 Ill 
 
 If the society which calls itself aristocratic 1 had no 
 other faults than an exaggerated distaste for republics 
 and for the principle of equality, it would be easy to 
 pardon its abstention from public affairs. If its con- 
 spicuous members formed a community preserving the 
 tradition of the Ancient Regime with prejudices softened 
 by a perfume of old-world mellowness, one might com- 
 mend them for shrinking from the mire of politics with- 
 out reminding them of the Revolutionary origin of some 
 of their fortunes, or of the unauthenticity of their titles. 
 They might then be compared to a sacerdotal caste which 
 guarded the disestablished temples of a once powerful 
 cult, and preserved with such fidelity the rites of a 
 bygone age that the onlooker did not ask for proofs of 
 the priestly succession of all the ministers, or for the 
 history of the trappings decking some of the altars reared 
 again. 
 
 1 These pages describe only one phase of existence in the French upper- 
 classes, and in many secluded chateaux lives are led of dignified and blame- 
 less simplicity (see vol. ii. p. 354).
 
 192 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 The more thoroughly the eighteenth century is studied, 
 and the more closely modern French society is observed, 
 the more clearly is it seen that the failings of the latter 
 have no relation with the peculiar shortcomings of the 
 Old Regime. Parisians of fashion will sometimes bewail 
 that they are the victims of hereditary frivolity, and that 
 if they are incapable of leading useful lives, it is because 
 their ancestors supped at the Palais Royal or masqueraded 
 at Trianon. Many who make this lament have in their 
 veins little of the blood of the courtiers ; but apart from 
 the contrary fiction currently assumed, it is to be 
 remarked that the failings of French society to-day all 
 fall into categories not exclusively French. They are 
 either those which have been practised in all ages and 
 in all lands by the idle and the self-indulgent, or they 
 are the special outcome of the civilisation of our epoch. 
 
 If we study French society in the eighteenth century 
 from its dawn, described by St. Simon, to the Revolu- 
 tion, which sent Mme. de Genlis on her wanderings, 
 each new mode and each new exponent of it can be fol- 
 lowed month by month and year by year. The age of 
 Memoirs is past. Like the salon, they survived the 
 Revolution for half a hundred years, but like it they 
 could not survive the era of railways and of plutocracy. 
 Yet the genius of the French to catch fleeting follies, 
 and to describe them in vivid language, is not extinct. 
 The real personages of to-day are too insignificant to 
 have their names recorded, excepting in the cheap press, 
 the society they compose is too uninteresting: but they 
 afford types for the modern penciller to seize ; and when 
 we are weary of the bright throngs which flitted through 
 the chamber of the Duchesse du Maine, or were f6ted by
 
 cu. in THE DIVERSIONS OF THE OLD KEGIME 193 
 
 the Prince de Conti, we can turn to the sprightly page 
 of Gyp, and see what right the idlers of the present hour 
 have to call themselves the successors of the Old Kegime. 
 The vivacious authoress who has adopted that name 
 belongs to the class which she portrays, and she some- 
 times lays herself open to the charge of malice and of 
 caricature. But the cruel truth of photography is the 
 chief offence of that censorious literature, in which she 
 has some talented rivals of the other sex. Indeed its 
 subjects are hardly appropriate for the higher forms of 
 art. A sketch by such a censor of the boulevards may 
 be compared to an instantaneous photograph of one of 
 those strangely packed coach-loads of fashionable Paris- 
 ians, sometimes seen in the Champs Elyse'es on the way 
 to the race-course at Auteuil, boisterously heralding to 
 passers-by that the imagination of the successors of the 
 wittiest and most brilliant society of the past can invent 
 no happier employment for their wealth and leisure than 
 a parody of an English pastime. 
 
 We turn from this spectacle, worthy only of the 
 itinerant camera, to the galleries of the Louvre, where 
 the sumptuous canvas of Van Loo displays the grace and 
 refinement of French diversion in the past. The stately 
 picture entitled Une halte de ckasse represents also men 
 and women on out-door pleasure bent; but in the 
 eighteenth century, though there was an interchange of 
 modes between the two nations, French wit and opulence 
 did not parade inept imitations of British sport ; and the 
 gallant company reposing after the morning's chase 
 would have disdained to be mere copyists of the costume 
 or to travesty the language of our rubicund fox-hunters 
 of the days of Walpole. The faults of French society at
 
 194 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 that epoch were doubtless grievous, and grievously were 
 they expiated, but it invested even its follies with a cult- 
 ured ease, and with its inimitable stamp richly embla- 
 zoned a page of the history of civilisation. We know 
 now that the light-hearted hunting-parties of Marly and 
 Rambouillet were a generation later to end on the scaffold 
 or in exile, but on their way thither the blithe followers 
 of the chase compelled the envy of Europe, and in the 
 grace of their existence and deportment offered to art 
 and to literature material which, wrought with the skill 
 of the age, still adds to the joy of the world. No tragedy 
 specially awaits the modern leaders of Parisian society: 
 for social divisions have been invented undreamed of at 
 the Revolution, and the would-be exponents of the 
 nobility, whose last corporate act was to decline to be 
 fused with the Third Estate, are now by strange irony 
 ranked as "bourgeois" by the new Revolutionaries. It 
 is, however, a pity that the claimants of the tradition of 
 the Old Regime should in their trivial domain of pleasure- 
 seeking thus justify the new social classification by 
 taking as their model the imitative plutocracies of the 
 New World. 
 
 But the superiority of French society of the Old 
 Regime over its degenerate successors was not merely 
 in its faculty of inventing a style, and of impregnating 
 the century with its savour. It did not content itself 
 with creating a distinct school of art by offering to 
 painters models of gracious elegance, and with furnish- 
 ing to memoir-writers the sparkling conversation of a 
 polished court, in which, no doubt, it was aided by the 
 prestige of the royal circle from which it depended. It 
 also displayed a quality which is attainable by the upper-
 
 CH. in FASHION AND INTELLECT 195 
 
 class of any society, under any regime: it took delight 
 in the companionship of the most brilliant intellects of 
 the time. It was the age destined to change the history 
 of humanity; but the women and the men who dictated 
 the fashion to Europe little recked that the social fabric 
 which protected them was being subverted by the philoso- 
 phers whom they cultivated. Thus it was in salons that 
 the new doctrine was first rehearsed, and in chateaux one 
 day to be sacked by its forcible application. 
 
 It was among the groves of Grandval that Diderot 
 discussed with the Encyclopaedists : it was in that 
 famous chateau of M. d'Holbach that he planned his 
 most audacious theses. It was for Mme. d'Epinay that 
 Rousseau composed JSmile; and in her salon, as in that 
 of the Due de Luxembourg, the uncouth presence of 
 Jean-Jacques, redolent of his rustic days of privation in 
 Savoy, was the most welcome: while Voltaire, who had 
 passed his life in an atmosphere royal and aristocratic, 
 was ending it at Ferney, where he held a court, and 
 whither the noblest and most refined exponents of French 
 society went in pilgrimage. At the moment when the 
 Court of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette had reached 
 its zenith of brilliancy, Arthur Young, in spite of an 
 agriculturist's sympathy for the farmer-like qualities of 
 his own sovereign, was not able to compare favourably 
 the influence of the blameless George III. with that 
 of the French king. Among his vaticinations of the 
 approaching Revolution he observes: "Persons of the 
 highest rank pay all attention to science and literature. 
 I should pity the man who expected, without other 
 advantages of a very different nature, to be well received 
 in a brilliant circle at London because he was a fellow
 
 190 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 of the Royal Society; but a member of the Academy of 
 Sciences at Paris is sure of a good reception every- 
 where." 1 
 
 It may be retorted that the society of the eighteenth 
 century would have done better not to have encouraged 
 the philosophers; and if the modern upper-class were 
 overwhelmed by a cataclysm, it might truthfully protest 
 that it had not provoked it by commerce with men of 
 intellect. But it may be observed that the greatest 
 French intelligences of our age have been anti-Revolu- 
 tionary in tendency. Renan was the very type most 
 sought after in the salons of the Old Regime, a Vol- 
 tairian of aristocratic instinct; but the trifling descend- 
 ants of pilgrims to Ferney, whose modern clericalism 
 does not restrain them from paying court to Jewish 
 financiers, disdained to cultivate the historian of the 
 House of Israel. Pasteur, on the other hand, was a sin- 
 cere Catholic, who brought more credit on his religion 
 than all his compatriots of rank : Taine was the destroyer 
 of the legend of the Revolution. Men so illustrious 
 require a society more attractive than that which fashion- 
 able France can now show : but there are brilliant writers, 
 thinkers, and artists surviving them and best represent- 
 ing modern French civilisation, who regret the separation 
 of fashion from intelligence in repudiation of the tradi- 
 tion of the Old Regime. 
 
 The composition of the so-called aristocratic society 
 may account for this. The majority, which has more 
 pretension than tradition, imposes its tone. The grow- 
 ing crowds which bear titles of phantasy naturally seek 
 to consecrate them by frequenting exclusively the less 
 1 Travels in France, October, 1787.
 
 CH. in THE COSMOPOLITAN PLUTOCRACY 197 
 
 irregular nobility. Again, the wealthy society of Paris 
 becomes every year more cosmopolitan, and children of 
 the Republics of the two Western continents do not 
 colonise Europe primarily for the sake of the intellectual 
 attractions of its capitals. Thus the increasing number 
 of marriages with rich foreigners does not elevate the 
 tone of Parisian society. Dowerless wedlock is not 
 favoured in France in any class of life; and as testa- 
 mentary liberty is restricted, the heads of once great 
 families have been able to maintain a relatively high 
 position only by wealthy marriages. But alliances with 
 the sole heiresses of rich French families, whether noble 
 or industrial, have usually had no demoralising effect, as 
 they have been contracted according to the ideas of social 
 economy cherished in the nation, and as the fortunes they 
 have united have not been so inordinately large as to 
 induce luxury alien to the tradition of the parent stock. 
 It may be here remarked that the lives of Frenchwomen 
 of the unoccupied upper-class are often in admirable 
 contrast to those of the men. Their virtues are of the 
 type usually attributed to the women of the bourgeoisie. 
 They are devoted mothers, excellent housewives, and 
 patterns of piety. The orderliness of their existence 
 and their virile qualities counteract the undisciplined 
 or aimless example of their husbands; and in many a 
 household in the decorative section of society the woman 
 is the superior, morally and mentally, of her lord. But 
 brides from beyond the Ocean or beyond the Rhine, 
 whether Aryan or Semitic, are apt to regard Paris as a 
 playground, and the endowment of an indigent title as a 
 means of entering into its pastimes. Thus the daughters 
 of native capitalists acquire the imported idea that the
 
 198 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 chief use of riches is to make a conspicuous figure in 
 the world of triflers. 
 
 These observations lead us to an important point in 
 our inquiry into the relation of modern France with the 
 Revolution. Its latest phase, the Third Republic, has 
 doubtless greatly modified the condition of society, as 
 under it the separation between politics and social 
 amenity has been complete; the failure of the Govern- 
 ment to regulate the increasing assumption of nobiliary 
 titles being moreover one of the outward signs of the 
 resulting disarray. But mere negative influences such 
 as these would not alone have so transformed the society 
 of the capital. The change in its tone is chiefly due, 
 not to the Revolution, but to the increased influence of 
 wealth: to the rise of the plutocracy, and not to the fall 
 of the Bastille. The salon survived that event for two 
 generations; and in the second quarter of this century 
 the social commerce of men and women in the highest 
 circles of Paris was as brilliant, perhaps, as in the days 
 of Mine. Geoffrin and of the Marquise du Defiant. 
 
 The keenest observers from England at that period 
 noted the superiority of Paris over London in this respect. 
 The chapters in Coningsby describing the French capital 
 are simply passages from Mr. Disraeli's journal of 1842. l 
 They refer, therefore, to the epoch fifty years after 
 the Emigration, and during that chequered half-century 
 society had undergone many transformations, culminat- 
 ing in the foundation of the anti-aristocratic Monarchy 
 of July, then in its full prosperity. "Nothing strikes 
 me more in this brilliant city," said Coningsby, "than 
 the tone of its society, so much higher than our own. 
 
 1 Coningsby, bk. v. c. 8 : bk. vi. c. 1. Lord BeaconsfielcTs Letters, 1842.
 
 CH. in THE EXTINCTION OF THE SALON 199 
 
 How much conversation and how little gossip ! Here all 
 women are as agreeable as is the remarkable privilege 
 in London of half-a-dozen. Men too, and great men, 
 develop their minds. A great man in England, on the 
 contrary, is generally the dullest dog in company." 
 Lord Beaconsfield's sphinx-like silence in society in his 
 later days may have proceeded from a desire to adopt the 
 usages of the people he governed. At this period, how- 
 ever, he was often denounced, by Tories as well as by 
 Whigs, as "un-English," and to that quality was 
 ascribed his sympathy with things French. But if Mr. 
 Disraeli had little of the Briton in his nature, he was 
 still more unlike a Frenchman. In his occidental capac- 
 ity he was purely English. In Paris he sat down each 
 morning to a British breakfast-table with G-alignani 
 before him, and an aggressively British wife by his 
 side. No doubt it was his cosmopolitan genius which 
 aided him to appreciate the merits of French social inter- 
 course ; but there is unimpeachably English testimony as 
 to the vitality of the aristocratic salon at that epoch. 
 Henry Bulwer, in his studies on the Monarchy of the 
 Middle-Classes, speaks of the exclusion of the nobility 
 from politics, diplomacy, and other careers under Louis 
 Philippe, which is complained of under the Third Repub- 
 lic, and adds that, "defeated in the market-place and the 
 forum, it has entrenched itself in the salon." 1 Con- 
 temporary French memoirs, comedies, and romances, as 
 well as the souvenirs of survivors of the period, all show 
 that neither the Terror nor the Emigration, neither the 
 battles of the First Empire nor the middle-class domina- 
 
 1 The Monarchy of the Middle- Classes, by Henry Lytton Bulwer, Esq., 
 M.P. (afterwards Lord Dalling), 1836.
 
 200 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 tion of " July " had divorced the cultured class from the 
 nobility. 
 
 Thus the salon, which survived the Revolution and 
 the reconstruction of society, has now become extinct in 
 an epoch of which the political and social upheavals have 
 been relatively mild. The reason was suggested uncon- 
 sciously by Disraeli in a letter to his sister describing 
 his life in Paris. With perhaps the contempt of his race 
 for persons with moderate incomes (which he attributed 
 to his hero Lord Monmouth), after reciting a list of the 
 noble persons he had met in salons containing elements 
 most pleasing and intelligent, he exclaims: "What 
 names, but where are the territories? There are only 
 one hundred men in France who have 10,000 a year. 
 Henry Hope and Rothschild could buy them all ! " 
 
 The chapters of the Esprit des Loix on Equality 1 have 
 had considerable influence on the social history of France, 
 as in them Montesquieu defended the principle of equal 
 testamentary division of property among children, which, . 
 not anticipating the Napoleonic regime, he declared 
 could not be established in a despotic State. In that 
 connection he says that the complement of equality is 
 frugality; and though his speculations on the advantages 
 of the Republican over other forms of government have 
 been falsified in the later history of France, his remarks 
 on that subject may be taken to heart in our generation, 
 when the rule of wealth is upsetting most of the theories 
 of political philosophers, and becoming so omnipotent that 
 the social composition of the communities under its sway 
 is more affected by it than by the regime of the State, 
 republican or monarchical, constitutional or arbitrary. 
 1 De V Esprit des Loix, liv. v. c. 4, 5, 6, etc.
 
 en. in EQUALITY AT SCHOOLS 201 
 
 IV 
 
 Though the growing power of wealth is the chief 
 destroyer of the qualities which once peculiarly distin- 
 guished Parisian society, and though it has introduced 
 into France new social distinctions, class-feeling indepen- 
 dently of the possession of riches has survived both the 
 Revolution, and the subsequent working of institutions 
 of which the tendency might be expected to promote 
 equality. The educational system might be thought to 
 discourage the ancient class-feeling, and to counteract its 
 new forms in a plutocratic age, but it seems to have the 
 contrary effect. In England, the boys of the section of 
 society known as the upper and upper-middle classes are 
 for the most part educated in a score or so of ancient and 
 modern foundations, the cheapest of which is expensive 
 from the French point of view. In France such schools 
 are unknown. The secondary education of the country is 
 imparted either in the Lycees of the State, or in Colleges 
 conducted by religious Orders. 1 In neither category are 
 there institutions set apart for the wealthy and well-born 
 classes. Of public schools, the College Stanislas at Paris 
 is the one most favoured by them. Of the 1500 boys 200 
 have names prefixed with the particule, signifying that 
 they claim to be of gentle birth. Among the remain- 
 ing 1300 boarders and day-boys are to be found the sons, 
 not merely of rich business men, of judicial and political 
 personages and of leaders of the liberal professions, but 
 also of small tradesmen, and of other persons in relatively 
 
 1 There are also mixed organisations like Stanislas, and municipal col- 
 leges like Chaptal, both in Paris,
 
 202 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANC E UK. i 
 
 humble walks of life. All the boys are treated on terms 
 of equality, the titles of those who would seem to have 
 right to bear them not being recognised. 1 In the schools 
 conducted exclusively by ecclesiastics it is the same. In 
 Brittany, where caste feeling is strong, the sons of the 
 old Breton nobility are brought up at the Jesuit College 
 at Vannes with the sons of the shopkeepers and peasant 
 farmers of the Morbihan. 
 
 All this might be supposed to tend to the oblitera- 
 tion of class-feeling. The hourly contact and comrade- 
 ship, at an age when other considerations appeal to the 
 imagination more strongly than those of social rank ; 
 the absolute equality inculcated in the monotonous dis- 
 cipline ; the identical mean-looking costume and the 
 limited wardrobe prescribed for all the boys alike ; the 
 dormitory system and the absence of private quarters 
 admitting of decoration according to a school-boy's idea 
 of luxury; the small temptation to spend pocket-money; 
 the promenades taken in common ; and the restrictions 
 on the free choice of friendships in fine the whole 
 working of the machine is calculated to turn out indi- 
 viduals stripped of all superstitions regarding class in- 
 equality. It probably is this very uniformity which 
 destroys its own egalitarian object. The accident of 
 contact is not sufficient to generate lasting sympathy. 
 The friendships of youth, which, in spite of the vicissi- 
 tudes of life, leave a durable trace on the memory and 
 imagination of men, need to have been begun amid agree- 
 
 1 E.g. in the school-lists of Stanislas the Prince de Le"on (a title held 
 by the eldest sons of the Dues de Rohan ever since the creation of the 
 dukedom in 1652, than which it is more ancient) is entered as J. de Rohan- 
 Chabot, with no more distinguishing mark attached to his name than to 
 that of the son of a notary on another page which has the particule.
 
 CH. in SUPEKFICIAL PHASE OF EQUALITY 203 
 
 able associations, and to have been nurtured by the sen- 
 timent called esprit de corps. Now though our tongue 
 has no equivalent for that French expression, it connotes 
 a sentiment less known in France than in England. It 
 can scarcely be said to exist in French school-life, the 
 feeling being so jejune that a man's most intimate friends 
 neither know nor care where he was educated, and even 
 the official biographies of legislators or academicians 
 rarely give that information. 1 As for agreeable asso- 
 ciations, a French collegian, whether he goes home to a 
 sumptuous hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain or to an 
 attic in the Batignolles, whether his holidays are spent 
 in a historic chateau, or in a humble farm-house, regards 
 his Lycee as a penitentiary in which young creatures are 
 immured to give them a greater zest for the liberty or 
 licence of manhood. Usually the only youths who de- 
 light in their school-days are those precocious students 
 whose sole love is learning, or the unfortunates, rare in 
 France, whose harsh childhood has been spent in unhappy 
 homes. The English idea of sending a boy to school to 
 make advantageous acquaintances, which has sadly trans- 
 formed the tone of our most famous foundations, never 
 enters the head of a French parent; and a tradesman 
 ambitious for his son does not imagine that his future 
 social position will be improved because he has for class- 
 fellows the heirs to high-sounding titles, or the children 
 
 1 In the volume of Biographies of the Deputies returned to the Cham- 
 ber of 1893-98, most of them written in great detail, in the first seventy 
 the schools or colleges of only two members are mentioned. The pupils 
 of certain establishments of superior education, notably the Ecole Xonnale 
 and the Ecole Poly technique, are not wanting in esprit de corps; but 
 among secondary schools the only Lyc4e which seems to inspire that sen- 
 timent is Condorcet, a day-school in Paris where there are no boarders.
 
 204 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 of millionaire bankers. 1 It is not surprising, therefore, 
 that universal military service, which puts on a level, 
 during a later period of discipline, those who have been 
 brought up in elementary schools with those who have 
 had the advantages of secondary education, should have 
 no effect in propagating the sentiment of social equality. 
 Even among French officers, who are drawn from more 
 diverse classes of the community than those of the British 
 army, there is, in time of peace at all events, not much 
 intimate comradeship, in the same regiment, between 
 those who belong to different social ranks. 
 
 The uniformity of education of all classes higher than 
 those brought up in elementary schools has one result 
 bearing the superficial aspect of equality. While there 
 are members of certain professions who unmistakably 
 bear the stamp of them, it is often difficult in France 
 even for Frenchmen to recognise, by means of a brief 
 conversation on different topics, to which social category 
 a man, met casually, belongs. An agreeable companion 
 of a railway journey, who in admirable language dis- 
 courses on the European situation or on art and lit- 
 erature, may turn out to be a person of such social 
 surroundings that an Englishman of corresponding situ- 
 ation would express himself crudely on those subjects, 
 and with unrefined pronunciation or accent. Such an 
 experience is an example of the truth that civilisation 
 
 1 In one very honourable way boys are sometimes sent to a Lyce"e to 
 make influential acquaintances. If a parent intends his son for the " Uni- 
 versity," that is to say the profession of schoolmaster, he sends him to a 
 Lyce"e having a distinguished professorial staff, in order that he may early 
 attract the notice, if he show promise, of those who will later be his chiefs 
 and colleagues. But that motive has nothing to do with the question of 
 social gradation. Girls of the bourgeoisie are, however, sometimes sent 
 to fashionable convents for the sake of social advantages.
 
 CH. in THE CIVILISATION OF THE POOR 205 
 
 descends lower in the French nation than in ours. On 
 the other hand, Frenchmen of highest social rank take 
 pains to assert that they stand lower in the scale of 
 civilised humanity than Englishmen of the corresponding 
 class, by insisting that the more nearly they approach in 
 exterior attributes the British model the more nearly do 
 they attain perfection imitation being a sign of infe- 
 riority. This is not the place to study the philosophy 
 of Anglomania, which, as practised in the upper circles 
 of Paris, is in my opinion much to be deplored. Here 
 we are treating of class distinction ; so all that need be 
 said on the subject is, that since the disappearance of 
 the last members of the noblesse brought up under the 
 Restoration with the survivors of the Emigration, who 
 retained the irretrievable savour of the Old Regime, 
 a French gentleman of fashionable pretension usually 
 assumes no other perceptible attributes to distinguish 
 him from his less favoured countrymen than the use 
 of English clothes and English phrases in the pursuit 
 of English pastimes. 
 
 The permeation of civilisation to a level in France 
 lower than in other communities, is a gratifying feature 
 of the national life. The country tradesman or the vil- 
 lage postmaster often reveals in his unstudied speech 
 the urbanity of good breeding, and cottagers sometimes 
 astonish strangers with their charm of manner. No 
 doubt there are regions of France where the peasants 
 are boorish, and their personal habits unattractive ; but, 
 on the whole, their civilisation is remarkable. Their 
 stores of household linen, their excellent cooking, the 
 propriety of their attire, though not universal, exist as 
 signs of the force of the French race which resists the
 
 206 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 disorderliness of its governors. At nightfall the trav- 
 eller who passes through remote villages sometimes sees 
 through the open cottage door the evening meal neatly 
 laid with a comfort unknown in middle-class houses in 
 other civilised lands. If he visits a rural mining dis- 
 trict, which, from the language of the deputies who 
 represent it at Paris, and of their journals, he might 
 believe was peopled by anarchical savages, he will not 
 find a population given to brutal diversion or to in- 
 temperance ; but if he enters the humble abode of a 
 collier or of an ironworker, he may perhaps see him, 
 surrounded by his family, taking his dinner served with 
 accessories only found at the tables of the rich in other 
 countries. 
 
 No doubt there is another side to the picture, and the 
 daily life of the French nation abounds in scenes as un- 
 pleasing as any to be found in other modern communities. 
 If a writer sets to work, like M. Zola, to prove that 
 labourers or miners or shopmen are sometimes revolting 
 in their lives, it is easy to gather testimony in support. 
 But his inductive method is as unscientific and as mis- 
 leading as that of less eminent French writers, who, by 
 collating reports of English tribunals, seek to show that 
 the English are a nation of profligate hypocrites. Some 
 of the work of M. Zola deserves a high rank in the con- 
 temporary literature of Europe ; but even though he has 
 never set down a single incident without documentary 
 evidence, he has none the less slandered his countrymen 
 in his compilations. More than that, the humble French 
 people whom he holds up to horror in Germinal and La 
 Terre are, considering their arduous disadvantages, rela- 
 tively much more civilised than the class to which M.
 
 CH. in CIVILISATION AND EQUALITY 207 
 
 Zola belongs. For the points on which the civilisation of 
 the French provokes most criticism are those displayed 
 not by the poor alone, but by the whole nation. For 
 example, in appliances of sanitation, now much improved 
 in France, the dwellings of the rich were until late years 
 as defective as those of the humble. On another point of 
 civilisation there has been decided deterioration under the 
 Third Republic. Public decency is less respected in 
 France than at any time since the Directory ; but for the 
 coarse indecorum of the music-halls, and the impropriety 
 of a portion of the press, the peasants and working people 
 are not responsible ; and until a government arises strong 
 enough to suppress licence, the profession of which M. 
 Zola is a hierophant might, if it pleased, execute the 
 civilising task. 
 
 In spite of the naturalist school, the traveller in France 
 may believe his own eyes and ears when the modest shop- 
 keeper in the Vendee, or the villager in the Berry, gives 
 him unstudied display of the descent of civilisation to low 
 social strata in France. There are French theorists who 
 pretend that its permeation among the humble is the 
 result of the Revolution ; but that suggestion is both un- 
 complimentary to the French race, and untrue. When, 
 one may ask, did the Revolution work on the lowly its 
 civilising mission ? Was it when the tricoteuses took their 
 infants to see men and women hurried to the guillotine ? 
 Was it when Napoleon was making of France a nation of 
 widows and orphans? Under the Restoration and the 
 succeeding regimes, no doubt, increased well-being did 
 elevate the condition of the working classes, but the 
 Revolution had only indirectly to do with those periods ; 
 and if the Third Republic be accounted the immediate
 
 208 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 inheritor of its tradition, it is to be feared that under it, 
 in spite of the spread of education and of other advan- 
 tages, the old urbanity and refinement of the race have 
 suffered detriment. 
 
 The civilisation of France, of which traces are found 
 in all classes of society, is an heritage of the ages, and its 
 possession accounts for the good use to which Frenchmen 
 of modest origin can pul the advantages of a diffused 
 education. The Republic has not been a regime to em- 
 ploy, in places of prominence, the worthiest specimens of 
 the nation ; but Ministers and other conspicuous repre- 
 sentatives of the Government, though not endowed with 
 the genius which outweighs defects of training, have 
 often filled the high posts conferred on them without the 
 awkwardness which in other countries sometimes charac- 
 terises men who have risen. Some of those who thus 
 ascend from humble ranks are political apostles of Equal- 
 ity, but in practice they define it according to the con- 
 ception of it noted at the outset of our inquiry. It is a 
 virtue which prevents a right-minded Republican from 
 acknowledging a superior, while not diminishing his right 
 to exact due deference from his inferiors. It is not only 
 the public servants of the democracy who enjoy the 
 obeisance of their subordinates. A Parisian tradesman 
 who talks to his customers, whatever their rank, with 
 gracious and familiar ease, would, on returning to his 
 fireside, be scandalised if his domestics addressed him in 
 the second person, as a servant would speak to his master 
 in England, where equality is not an official doctrine. 
 Flaubert, who was a keen observer of the foibles of his 
 nation, noted the pleasure which thrilled his socially 
 ambitious heroine of the lower middle-class when she
 
 CH. in A CHIVALROUS SYMBOL OF EQUALITY 209 
 
 thus heard herself addressed in the third person ; and 
 under the Republic the practice has not been interfered 
 with. 
 
 There is one institution which, in its actual form, may 
 be said to have been handed down from the Revolution 
 as a symbol of the great principle that men should con- 
 sider themselves equal with persons of higher social rank 
 than they. The ridiculous aspect of the modern duel is 
 a fertile theme for French wits, but little heed has been 
 taken of its egalitarian character, though that has hin- 
 dered ridicule from putting an end to it. Before the 
 Revolution the duel in France, as in other countries, was 
 a method of settling quarrels usually confined to gentle- 
 men having the right to bear arms ; and a bitter griev- 
 ance of the roturier was that in no case could he call out 
 a noble. One of the fiercest regicides of the Convention 
 was Lacroix, the champion of Marat, who finally went to 
 the guillotine in the same cart with Camille Desmoulins, 
 whose doctrine of Equality we know. An incident of his 
 youth ever rankled in his heart. One night, before the 
 Bastille fell, when coming out of a theatre he was hustled 
 by a gentleman, who, on his expostulating, replied, " Who 
 are you ? " The young provincial recited his name and 
 qualities, when the other interrupted, " I am glad to hear 
 you are all that : I am the Comte de Chabannes, and in 
 a great hurry." The most sceptical as to the benefits of 
 the French Revolution cannot deny that it put an end 
 to this particular hardship ; for at the present day in 
 France a country lawyer, insulted by an ill-bred person, 
 no matter what his rank, has the right to be killed by 
 him the next day without the slightest penalty being 
 inflicted on his slayer.
 
 210 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 Yet though the lawyer and the politician may, thanks 
 to the Revolution, demand satisfaction of men of high- 
 est social pretension, they will not accord it to persons 
 of rank which they consider humbler than theirs. A 
 journalist who has a casual altercation in the street with 
 a man whose birth and fortune are far superior to his, 
 claims the right to challenge such a one to combat ; but 
 if he in turn insulted a cabman in the same place, he 
 would scorn the driver's threat to send his seconds, even 
 though he were the owner of the vehicle and so not 
 under menial disability ; moreover, though both were 
 of precisely the same social origin, both sons of peasants, 
 the penman would to the coachman adopt the tone with 
 which M. de Chabannes turned the young Lacroix into 
 a malign apostle of the doctrine of equality. Now I 
 would not venture to criticise this code of honour. To 
 cross swords or exchange bullets with a politician or 
 a journalist, whatever his antecedents or repute, may be 
 a chivalrous survival of the ages of romance; while to 
 meet in combat a person of similar origin who gains an 
 honest livelihood by manual toil may be undignified. 
 But while recognising the delicate distinction, one may 
 submit that, as an application of the principle of Equal- 
 ity, it is conventional and inconsistent. 
 
 A senator of the Third Republic, M. Victor Schoel- 
 cher, to the end of his long life, which began under the 
 Consulate, was, according to current anecdote, the type 
 of the Republican regarding himself as the equal of the 
 highest in the land, but disdainful to his inferiors. In 
 his young days he applied somewhat inconveniently the 
 duelling privilege of equality won by the Revolution, 
 for, serving in his father's shop in the rue Drouot, he
 
 CH. in EQUALITY AND SOCIALISM 211 
 
 used to challenge customers who perversely carped at 
 the price of the wares. The spirit which moved this 
 son of the Revolution, whom Napoleon III. exiled for 
 his republicanism, is said sometimes to animate the whole 
 body of Republican senators and deputies, who are not 
 always eager to extend to humbler citizens advantages 
 which they secure for themselves. In some respects the 
 interests of the democracy are better looked after by 
 our Imperial Parliament than under the French regime 
 of Equality. The contrast between the favour shown 
 to third-class passengers on railways in monarchical Eng- 
 land, and the penalty of miserable travel inflicted upon 
 them in republican France, is most significant, as there 
 the Government has infinitely greater powers of pressure 
 on the companies than has ours. But the poor traveller 
 in the land of equality has to loiter with the discomfort 
 of fifty years ago, while the privileged rich enjoy the 
 luxury of swiftness. One reason may be that all legis- 
 lators have first-class passes to travel on all the railways 
 of France. 1 The theory that a Member of Parliament 
 ought not to incur expense in travelling the 30 or the 
 300 miles between his constituency and the capital, does 
 not seem to justify his right to journey gratuitously on 
 the 30,000 miles of the French railway system. Hence 
 
 1 Ten francs a month are deducted from the salary of each senator and 
 deputy to pay for the passes. The dependence of the railways on the 
 Government, partly owing to the state guarantee of interest, is such that 
 the President of the Republic on his journeys through France travels at 
 the expense, not of the State (a practice which would be intelligible), but 
 of the Companies of the lines over which his fancy leads him ; and on his 
 official tours his gratuitously carried suite includes forty or fifty journalists 
 to record his words, deeds, and diet. It is needless to say that the Queen 
 of England travelling on the railways of her realm pays for her journeys 
 like any of her subjects.
 
 212 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 less favoured advocates of equality enviously point to 
 the spectacle of Socialist deputies, after the fatigue of 
 promoting a strike in the foggy North, speeding to the 
 Mediterranean in costless ease to recruit their forces. 
 
 The mention of the Socialists may suggest the remark 
 that nothing has been said here of the one party in the 
 State which has equality of condition for its cardinal 
 principle. French Socialism at the end of the nineteenth 
 century is a phenomenon of high importance, which will 
 be examined in later portions of this work. But it has 
 little to do with this section, treating of the relations of 
 modern France with the Revolution, for its theories are 
 utterly at variance with the doctrine of 1789. No doubt 
 there are passages of Rousseau which argue that private 
 property cannot exist, and that its possessors are only de- 
 positaries of public wealth. It is also true that the first 
 practical result of the Revolution was anarchy, which took 
 the form of an insurrection against property. But the 
 recognition of individual proprietorship was one of the 
 fundamental bases of the Declaration of the Rights of 
 Man, and throughout the Revolution, in its philosophic 
 stage, in its moments of greatest horror, as well as in its 
 reactionary and reconstructive phases, the principle was 
 respected. Indeed, one reason why the tenets of collec- 
 tivism and of State Socialism, with their egalitarian 
 tendency, make less progress in France than in England 
 among the prosperous classes is that the French bour- 
 geoisie is deeply imbued with the individualism of the 
 great Revolution.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 FRATERNITY AND PATRIOTISM 
 
 FROM documents of the Revolutionary period it would 
 seem that the word Fraternity was not made an integral 
 part of the device of the First Republic until the year of 
 the Terror. Previous to that phase of the brotherhood 
 of mankind the new reformers sometimes enunciated 
 Liberty and Equality without their complementary 
 virtue. 1 Although the practice of the two former has 
 been, as we have seen, peculiar in France since the Revo- 
 lution, they have not been affected by it to the same 
 extent as has been the principle of Fraternity. Prince 
 Metternich, who was reaching manhood when the French 
 Republic erected the guillotine as the symbol of brotherly 
 love, said in later life, after his varied visits to Paris, 
 " Fraternity as it is practised in France has led me to the 
 conclusion that if I had a brother I would call him my 
 cousin." 
 
 1 The device of " Liberty and Equality " seems to be originally due to 
 Montesquieu, who wrote from England in 1729, sixty years before the 
 Revolution, A Londres Liberte et galite. The coat-of-arnis of the 
 museum at Bordeaux, engraved in 1783, bears the motto Liberte-Egalite, 
 no doubt in honour of Montesquieu the great glory of the Bordelais. Thus 
 Fraternite alone of the three national virtues owes its legend entirely to 
 the Revolution. 
 
 213
 
 214 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 The sarcasm of the Austrian diplomatist, like every 
 generalisation applied to the French, requires careful 
 qualification. In their private and domestic capacity 
 there are no people in the world so devoted and consider- 
 ate to one another. In all the relations of the human 
 race which concern the home and the family they set an 
 example to us. The love for a mother is not the life-long 
 religion of an Englishman as it is of a Frenchman : the 
 affection is mutual, and the tenderness of the French of all 
 classes for their offspring is perhaps so excessive as to be 
 injurious to the robustness of the race. But one result is 
 that the local tribunals have rarely in France to try an 
 offence corresponding to that which in England is known 
 as leaving parents chargeable to the parish. Nor has the 
 French language a technical equivalent for the term " wife- 
 beating," and if Frenchmen sometimes widow themselves 
 by swifter means, they are as a rule the most humane of 
 husbands. 
 
 The French, again, are capable of making sentimental 
 sacrifices for the benefit of oppressed nationalities. Under 
 the Monarchy of July and the Second Empire they would 
 have gladly taken up arms to succour Poland. The ills 
 they suffered in the war with Prussia have had a too 
 overwhelming effect to allow them to think much of the 
 grievances of other peoples. Nevertheless we have seen 
 the Foreign Minister who has done most credit to the 
 Republic narrowly escape rejection at the Academic Fran- 
 gaise, because he was deemed to have neglected the plaint 
 of Greece at the bidding of Russia. With the exception 
 of the curious relations between the Muscovite Autocracy 
 and the Republic, the attitude of the French towards 
 great powers has at the end of the century presented no
 
 CH. iv FRATERNITY 215 
 
 abnormal features. The rivalries of war and of peace 
 have naturally affected the French in their feelings 
 towards several of their neighbours in Europe ; and at 
 an epoch when the fraternal effusions of peoples are 
 trammelled by their bristling coats of armour it is per- 
 tinent to ask which is the nationality whose members 
 Frenchmen regard with most asperity. 
 
 Are they the Germans across the Rhine ? The memory 
 of the invader marching in triumph through Paris, after 
 making himself Emperor in the palace of Louis XIV. by 
 right of victory over France, galls those who saw those 
 days of sorrow. But a generation has arisen to which 
 Alsace-Lorraine is a sad tradition only by reason of the 
 black patch on the school-maps blurring the Eastern fron- 
 tier ; so in the fancy of young France the Prussian may 
 perhaps one day be transformed, as has been the Cossack 
 of the previous invasion. Are they the Italians, who, un- 
 mindful of Solferino, have inspired their Gallic kindred 
 with resentment which, in regions whither the Piedmon- 
 tese troop over the Alps to compete with French wage- 
 earners, is keener against these industrial rivals of Latin 
 race than against the more distant Teutons? Are they 
 the English, whom politicians of the boulevards hold up 
 to enmity as bitter as that provoked by Italians in Prov- 
 ence and by Germans in the Vosges? There is a nation 
 to the members of which Frenchmen are more revengeful 
 than to Germans, more irascible than to Italians, more 
 unjust than to English. It is to the French that French- 
 men display animosity more savage, more incessant, and 
 more inequitable than to people of any other race. 
 
 An Englishman reads in a Parisian journal an insinua- 
 tion against his nation so virulent that he fumes with
 
 216 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 indignation at the currency of such a libel in the press of 
 a friendly country. He may calm his ruffled feelings, 
 for the next page is full of slanders more outrageous, 
 aimed at Frenchmen who differ from the writers on a 
 point of politics. Or he sees exposed for sale in Paris a 
 caricature lampooning the British race ; but close by are 
 a dozen others more coarsely defaming French public men, 
 not sparing even the Chief of the State. Or a Prince of 
 the House of France, turned journalist, to win applause 
 maligns the English, who reflect that though Frenchmen 
 in general are under no obligation to England there is one 
 French family not in that case. But there is no need to 
 be sore at Prince Henri's forgetfulness that when France 
 bid the Orleans begone we lodged them in our palaces, 
 or when again their chiefs were exiled we let them use our 
 country for their plots against a government at peace 
 with us. For, to prove that a Frenchman ungracious to 
 foreigners is doubly malevolent to compatriots, when in 
 the wilds of Africa he fell out with a long-tried travelling 
 companion, the enterprising prince took care to advertise 
 to Europe the domestic spectacle which French explorers 
 were giving to the natives. 
 
 The peculiar harshness of Frenchmen to Frenchmen 
 in their political capacity dates from the Revolution. 
 Before that epoch the intolerance of the Church, the 
 despotism of the Crown, and the oppressive privileges of 
 the nobility were merely forms of evils found in various 
 degrees in all countries. But while other nations have 
 gradually softened their internal rigours, France has 
 substituted new asperities for those of the Old Regime. 
 This may be traced to the Jacobin conquest of the Revo- 
 lution. The lawyers and rhetoricians who then held
 
 CH. iv HARSHNESS OF FRENCHMEN TO FRENCHMEN 217 
 
 France in their blood-stained hands were, some of them, 
 in committing enormities, of perfectly good faith. But 
 they had steeped themselves in the theories of the Con- 
 trat Social, the sophisms of a Swiss sentimentalist, native 
 of a community which never enjoyed unity of language 
 or of race, nor indeed any qualifications of a nation, 
 save those which are artificial and fortuitous. So hence- 
 forth their fellow-countrymen were to merit consideration 
 only in so far as they accepted doctrines applicable to 
 all mankind. Frenchmen were not to be regarded as 
 the natives of French towns and villages, peopling the 
 streets and tilling the fields of France : they were mem- 
 bers of the human race, who must, however, be put out- 
 side the pale of humanity unless they accepted the social 
 doctrines crudely believed by these superficial theorists. 
 The genesis of the cruelty of modern Frenchmen to 
 Frenchmen is curious to study, as it belongs to the sanie 
 period as the growth of the modern conception of pa- 
 triotism in France, which is based on an entirely con- 
 trary idea. As has been maintained in these pages, it 
 was the discipline of war which saved the Revolution 
 from degenerating into an orgy of primitive barbarism. 
 " We will make a cemetery of France," said the atrocious 
 Carrier, "rather than not regenerate it after our own 
 fashion." While, however, he was drowning at Nantes 
 French people men, women, and children with ob- 
 scene tortures, which he boasted to the Convention were 
 inflicted in the name of humanity, Bonaparte was point- 
 ing his cannon against the foreign invader, and opening 
 the way for his transformation of the character of the 
 Revolution. It was then that Marie-Joseph Che"nier 
 celebrated in song the " Reprise de Toulon," and a few
 
 218 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 months later composed the famous " Ghaut du Depart," 
 a poem interesting to peruse, as its spirited stanzas are 
 animated by the conflicting sentiments which inspired 
 the movements of the Revolution animosity against 
 certain categories of Frenchmen, and opposition to the 
 alien foe. 
 
 Whenever Frenchmen at the end of the nineteenth 
 century are moved to belabour one another in the dis- 
 cussion of public questions, their mutual malevolence 
 cannot of course be ascribed to the direct influence of 
 the humanitarian philosophy which preceded, or to the 
 violence which accompanied, the Revolution. When, for 
 example, in the quarrel just mentioned between French 
 explorers, the elder declared that his high-born compa- 
 triot was a creature not superior to his Abyssinian negro, 
 this was only by accident an exposition of the doctrine 
 of Rousseau. 1 So when a Republican journalist, wishing 
 to disparage a minister of the Republic, charges him with 
 once having followed a degrading trade, or with having 
 committed offences which, if brought to justice, would be 
 tried with closed doors, the resemblance in sound of his 
 language to the scurrility of Marat in the Ami du Peuple 
 is unstudied. But in these and similar cases the bitter- 
 ness of Frenchmen for Frenchmen may be traced to the 
 period when the principle of Fraternity was officially 
 enunciated, and when French people acquired the habit, 
 never since lost, of regarding all political controversy as 
 a desperate struggle between irreconcilable elements, in 
 which every lethal weapon was lawful to use, and all ties 
 of racial kinship were to be ignored. 
 
 We need only refer to the cruel annals of the Revolu- 
 1 Figaro, March 29, 1897,
 
 THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION 219 
 
 tion when they illustrate a phenomenon of the present 
 day ; for ever since Napoleon ceased to direct French 
 ardour against the foreign foe, the century has presented 
 a series of blood-stained pictures, of which the subject is 
 the slaying of Frenchmen by Frenchmen as an incident of 
 political divergency. M. Emmanuel Arago, who lived to 
 be an Ambassador of the Republic in the last decade of the 
 century, was the son of the great astronomer, and passed 
 his childhood at the Observatory near the garden of the 
 Luxembourg. There his earliest emotion was hearing the 
 sound of musketry on a winter's morning, when Marshal 
 Ney was shot by French soldiers, after leading to victory 
 the armies of France with sublime courage for twenty- 
 five years before his forlorn heroism at Waterloo. The 
 aged diplomatist had many a similar reminiscence of the 
 history of his countrymen. The White Terror in the 
 provinces exceeded in ruthless destruction of French lives 
 the executions in the capital of warriors of the Empire. 
 The government of the Restoration, under which French 
 people were thus put to death, itself came to a violent end 
 in the Three Glorious Days of July ; and a lofty column, 
 where the Bastille once stood, now commemorates how 
 Frenchmen died wholesale by French hands on that felici- 
 tous occasion. When the nation wearied of Louis Phi- 
 lippe, who derived the chief profit from the Revolution of 
 1830, it got rid of him with less bloodshed than attended 
 his accession, only a score or two of French corpses strew- 
 ing the streets to mark the end of his dynasty. Four 
 months later new proof was shown that for the mutual 
 slaughter of the people of France no regime was more 
 favourable than a Republic, when in the Days of June, 
 1848, five thousand Parisians were despatched by their
 
 220 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 compatriots. After that the cannon and the rifles with 
 which Louis Napoleon cleared the boulevards of his 
 unsympathetic fellow-citizens in December, 1851, may be 
 deemed to have merely fired the customary salute where- 
 with new methods of government are announced in 
 France. 
 
 Warfare, even in its civilised guise, brings out all the 
 evil passions of human nature. Homo homini lupus is as 
 true in our day as when the nations of Europe were semi- 
 barbarous tribes. But most modern peoples reserve the 
 latent savagery within them for the chastisement of their 
 enemies abroad ; whereas the French show themselves 
 most inhuman in fratricidal strife, as though to substitute 
 for the old aphorism a new version, G-allus G-allo lupus. 
 In time of war the French show generosity to foreign foes, 
 but when Gaul meets Gaul, quarter is neither given nor 
 expected. Thus the conflict between France and Prussia 
 in 1870, desperate as it was, was not stained by deeds of 
 truculence. But when the Germans were resting after 
 their victory on the heights around Paris, Parisians, to 
 show them that a triumphant invader did not stand deep- 
 est in their hate, made a bonfire of the noblest monuments 
 of their capital as a spectacle for the conqueror, and amid 
 its fumes massacred venerable and peaceful citizens of 
 France. The insurrection of the Commune was one of 
 the blackest crimes known to history, and merited the 
 sternest retribution ; but its wickedness would have been 
 a more salutary lesson for future generations had it been 
 punished with less retaliatory ferocity. The dire occa- 
 sion did not admit of judicial calmness ; the infamy of the 
 provocation offered by the insurgents was unparalleled ; 
 nevertheless the soberest narrative of the suppression of
 
 CH. iv GALLUS GALLO LUPUS 221 
 
 the rebellion convinces that Frenchmen ineted out to 
 Frenchmen penalty so ruthless, so exuberant, and so indis- 
 criminate that other Europeans in modern warfare only 
 inflict the like on barbaric races. The cruelty of the 
 Communards to their fellow-citizens was as dastardly as 
 that of the Sepoys to the British at Cawnpore : the pun- 
 ishment inflicted by the Versailles troops on the Parisians 
 during the Semaine de Mai was as merciless as that with 
 which the English in India had to stamp out the Mutiny. 
 It might be urged that Civil War, being fratricidal, 
 calls forth inhuman passions, only that a few years earlier 
 the War of Secession in America had shown that there 
 are modern peoples which can engage in bitter internecine 
 conflict unaggravated by cruelty. As the French do not 
 thus conduct their civil conflicts, the events of May, 1871, 
 ought to have taught them to forget, save as a warning, 
 every occasion on which French blood has been shed by 
 French hands. That, however, was not the tradition 
 inculcated on the children born amid the carnage ex- 
 hibited to the complacent Germans, who had not left so 
 many French corpses at Gravelotte, or even at Sedan, as 
 fell by French hands during the epilogue to their victo- 
 ries. That generation grew up to keep as the national 
 holiday the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, which, 
 if a triumph for liberty, was also the occasion of the 
 slaughter of Frenchmen by Frenchmen. There were 
 great days in 1789, unstained with French blood, which 
 the nation might have joined to celebrate. The Oath 
 in the Tennis Court at Versailles on the 20th of June, 
 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the 20th of 
 August, are dates as fitting for popular festival as the 
 14th of July, and are unsullied with the death of a single
 
 222 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 French citizen. But when the centenary of the Revolu- 
 tion arrived, it was clear that its apostles were imbued 
 with its relentless spirit, for they clamoured for commemo- 
 ration of more days on which French had slain French. 
 Pressure was put upon the Government, on August 10, 
 1892, to fete the Sack of the Tuileries ; and a few weeks 
 later, when the Municipal Council of Paris celebrated the 
 centenary of the formal abolition of Royalty, little dis- 
 guise was made that the rejoicings were in honour of the 
 Massacres of September, 1792. A statue was decreed for 
 Danton. It stands between the site of the Abbaye, 
 where the carnage began, and the Ecole de Medecine, 
 where the science of saving life is now taught. The 
 irony of the locality was unnoticed amid the debate 
 aroused as to Danton's responsibility for the Massacres 
 in the Prisons. It clearly showed that whatever his real 
 share in them, his admirers would not have wished to 
 honour him in bronze had they not firmly believed that he 
 abetted the butchery of the thousand French men, women, 
 and children who died with the Princesse de Lamballe. 
 Any doubt about it was dissipated five years later when 
 the same municipality proposed a statue for Marat, who 
 represented no principles in the Revolution but those of 
 delation and of murder of French people. 
 
 A curious fact, which perhaps proves the superior hap- 
 piness of our domestic history rather than the superiority 
 of the British temperament, is, that while the French 
 perpetuate their internal strife by celebrating the days on 
 which they shed the blood of their compatriots, the his- 
 torical anniversaries which we have kept as holidays com- 
 memorated the saving of English lives, and not their 
 extinction. There was Royal Oak Day, in honor of the
 
 CH. iv THE CULT OF FRATRICIDE 223 
 
 preservation of the not very valuable life of Charles II. at 
 Boscobel, and there was the Fifth of November, which 
 solemnised the escape from Gunpowder Plot of the 
 Houses of Parliament. With regard to the latter fes- 
 tival, however, it may be open to doubt if in any modern 
 community the deliverance from destruction of its legisla- 
 tive bodies would now be deemed a benefit sufficiently 
 precious to justify its inscription in a ferial calendar. 
 
 The unbrotherly tradition of the Revolution has entered 
 into the domain of art, which ought not needlessly to be 
 disfigured with images of fratricide. The French have 
 reason to be proud of the gallery of the Luxembourg, 
 where, in an age barren of art in many lands, France is 
 seen to be still the nursery of artistic instinct, an element 
 which keeps it, in spite of its politicians, in the front rank 
 of nations. Many of the canvases there of contempo- 
 rary painters inspire patriotism as well as admiration : 
 Detaille's stirring war scenes; Bonnat's glowing effigy 
 of Cardinal Lavigerie, the foremost of French colonists ; 
 Jules Breton's peasants, the solid basis of French pros- 
 perity. But there is one conspicuous picture of which 
 the casual visitor, whether native or alien, can perceive 
 only the horror. It represents an agonised little boy in 
 cavalry uniform, unhorsed and stabbed to death by men 
 armed with bayonets and pikes. It bears no explanatory 
 inscription, and all that is manifest from the costumes is 
 that three stalwart Frenchmen are slaughtering a defence- 
 less French child. That, indeed, is the subject chosen 
 by the artist to hand down to future ages. The painting 
 delineates the legendary death in the Vendean War of 
 the young Barra, whose name occurs in the Chant du 
 DSpart, as he was said to have been killed by the Royal-
 
 224 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 ists for crying "Vive la Republique." The legend is as 
 impossible to substantiate as the more heroic tale of the 
 son of Lucien Casa-Bianca, deputy for Corsica in the Con- 
 vention, who perished five years later at Aboukir ; but if 
 it were as edifying as that of the victim of the explosion 
 on the Orient, there would be no harm in perpetuating it. 
 It is, however, a story, the currency of which falsifies 
 history, for the presumable purpose of proclaiming that 
 the murder of children by Frenchmen is a normal inci- 
 dent of French civil disturbance. 
 
 The calumny in this case is so unjust that a stranger 
 may be allowed to challenge it. In all the blood-stained 
 record of the Revolution even Revolutionary authorities 
 recognise the humane conduct of the Vendeans in defend- 
 ing their hearths and altars, till the diabolical cruelty of 
 Westermann's Infernal Column, and of other Republican 
 forces, provoked reprisals. 1 If, therefore, it could be au- 
 thentically proved that young Barra's death took place 
 as described in Revolutionary poetry, it would still be an 
 
 1 E.g. Mme. de Stael, Considerations sur la Revolution Franqaise, 
 partie 3, c. xvii. As to the cruelty of the Republicans to the Vendeans, 
 there is no lack of Republican evidence. In an Adresse du comite de sur- 
 veillance revolutionnaire de Fontenay-le-Peuple a la Convention, the fol- 
 lowing report was made on the conduct of a Republican chief in that 
 picturesque town, which has since regained its pre-Revolutionary name 
 of Fontenay-le-Comte : " We see him every day catching any children 
 he happens to meet, whether their parents are Republicans or Brigands. 
 [It was thus that the Republicans called the Royalists of the West.] He 
 seizes them by one leg and slices them in two, just like a butcher splitting 
 up a sheep." Marceau himself, after helping to win the battle of Le 
 Mans in 1793 over the Vendeans, wrote to his sister, declining her con- 
 gratulations on the victory, because, he said, his laurels were stained with 
 the blood of his countrymen. The outrages on the vanquished in that 
 battle were extended pitilessly to women, as related by a less dispassionate 
 authority, Ame'de'e de Bejarry, son of the Vendean leader, in his Souve- 
 nirs, published at Nantes in 1800.
 
 CH. iv FKENCH SELF-DETRACTION 225 
 
 exceptional incident not characteristic of the Vendean 
 war. Thus, a picture like this is a wanton presentment 
 of French cruelty to the French. The authorities who 
 exposed it seem to have reasoned that the public which 
 came there consisted largely of foreigners who had an 
 idea that the atrocities which stain the domestic history 
 of France, from the Terror to the Commune, were chiefly 
 the work of Revolutionaries ; that they had vaguely heard 
 of the young and the aged being done to death in the 
 name of Fraternity, from the boys and girls butchered at 
 Bic6tre in the massacres of September, 1792, to Arch- 
 bishop Darboy shot in 1871 ; it was therefore necessary 
 to advertise the fact that savagery of this kind was not 
 confined to one party in the State, but that G-allus Crallo 
 lupus was a general proposition applicable to the whole 
 race. Otherwise, why should a noble gallery be defaced 
 with the delineation of a cowardly crime of Frenchmen 
 based on a mere legend ? It is not as though the Revolu- 
 tionary period were not abundant in incidents worthy to 
 inspire the patriotic genius of artists, as testify a hundred 
 famous canvases, such as " Rouget de Lisle singing the 
 Marseillaise at Strasbourg," by Pils, at the Louvre ; the 
 "Enrolment of the Volunteers of 1792," by Couder, at Ver- 
 sailles ; to say nothing of the series of military scenes by 
 Gros, who was with Bonaparte in the Army of Italy, and 
 by Carle Vernet, who handed on the graphic gifts of his 
 family to his son Horace, born the year of the Revolution. 
 Or if modern Republican art sought a praiseworthy sub- 
 ject from the pitiful annals of the Vendean campaign, it 
 might depict the humanity of Marceau, who, when he 
 died at twenty-seven a General of five years' standing, 
 unlike his colleagues in the war against the Royalists of
 
 '228 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 the West, left a memory unsullied by cruelty to his 
 fellow-countrymen. 
 
 The perpetuation of such legends in pictorial art is 
 only a symptom of the unfraternal tradition which the 
 Revolution rooted in France, and is not a powerful 
 influence to diffuse it. The tone of the press, however, 
 shows how wide-spread is the evil of which it is a dis- 
 seminating agency. The Journal des Dtbats and the 
 Temps, which both support the principles of 1789, are 
 unsurpassed in Europe for the propriety and moderation 
 of their domestic polemics. In certain other organs 
 political articles sometimes appear signed by pens as 
 refined as they are eloquent. But in the cheap journals 
 of widest circulation, controversy is usually conducted 
 in gross language, laden with base allusions to oppo- 
 nents. A stranger travelling in France, who, setting 
 out from Paris, buys at the station an armful of morn- 
 ing papers, might gather from their perusal, before the 
 express train has made its first halt, that the popula- 
 tion of the land through which he is speeding is wholly 
 composed of the ignoble and the fatuous, who spend their 
 lives in rancorous strife, for which the cure is known only 
 to the sole saviours of society, the raging prophets of 
 the press and the tribune. The traveller, confused with 
 crude epithets not found in the dictionary of the French 
 Academy, would do well to raise his eyes from the enven- 
 omed sheet. Superficial though the view of the country 
 be from the window of a railway carriage, he will discern 
 things belying the infuriate print before he reaches the 
 noble spires of Chartres, or Orleans with its memories of 
 Frenchmen united against a foe from the days of Joan 
 of Arc to the campaign of the Loire in 1870, or Rouen,
 
 CH. iv THE POPULAR PRESS 227 
 
 where two sublime minsters tower above the busy factory 
 smoke ; cities whose associations of patriotic defence, of 
 worship, and of industry take the imagination away from 
 the sordid brawl of politics. He will see the peasant at 
 work in the cornfields of the Beauce or in the pastures of 
 Normandy ; or if it be a Sunday, he will catch a glimpse 
 of villagers making holiday, blithe, sociable, and sober. 
 No doubt the lives of all these people at work or at play 
 are not of ideal amenity, and human passion is troublous 
 in the provinces as well as in the agitated capital. At 
 the same time, they are for the most part indifferent to 
 political contention, and at the end of the century, of 
 which one of the boasted triumphs is a cheap press, it 
 has to be avowed that a most salutary feature of national 
 life in France is that a large proportion of the people of 
 all classes never read the newspapers. 
 
 It is not my intention to quote any of the appalling 
 terms which, applied by politicians to one another, meet 
 the eye perusing a journal in search of news, or to give 
 examples of the infamous charges brought against oppo- 
 nents as a daily incident of political controversy. All 
 that shall be noted here is one lamentable effect of the 
 discussion of public topics, a heartless callousness before 
 personal affliction, or even mortal bereavement. Sick- 
 ness and death in France usually bring forth the ten- 
 derest of human sentiments, and move mere spectators 
 of sorrow to express compassion. The popular political 
 press is above such sentimentality, and it is not only 
 Republicans who are thus cruel to Monarchists, or Reac- 
 tionaries to Radicals ; so inherent has cruelty grown in 
 all French polemics that a temporary divergency will 
 bring down upon a former friend rancour which would 
 be excessive to pour upon a lifelong enemy.
 
 228 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 The Libre Parole, primarily an anti-Semitic organ, 
 professes devotion to the Church, and is one of the few 
 Parisian journals read by the country clergy. Its editor, 
 M. Drumont, whose writings on uncontroversial subjects 
 show that a literary talent of great charm has been sacri- 
 ficed to the furies of polemical journalism, attacks indis- 
 criminately all who differ from him. No Frenchman has 
 more claim on the respect of Catholics than M. de Mun, 
 but he supported the Government of the Republic in cer- 
 tain legislation, provoked by the outrages of anarchists, 
 which was not agreeable to M. Drumont ; and soon after- 
 wards, being stricken with illness which seemed beyond 
 cure, this is what the rural priests read of their most 
 devoted defender from a Catholic pen : " God has heard 
 our complaints and has sternly smitten De Mun ; He has 
 said to him, 'I gave thee eloquence, and thou hast kept 
 silence when men were waiting to salute thee as the cham- 
 pion of justice. Thou shalt never speak again.' " l M. de 
 Mun's lips happily recovered their eloquence, which was 
 crowned with the highest honour France has to confer on 
 a Frenchman. Just two years 2 after the utterance of this 
 savage blast of fanaticism he was elected to the Academy 
 in succession to M. Jules Simon, who in good taste, toler- 
 ance and amenity had illustrated the craft of journalism. 
 
 In the latter days of that veteran, who had fought in 
 many a political field, it was a pleasure to turn to his 
 genial contributions to the press. They demonstrated a 
 fact which modern French journalists and politicians 
 should take to heart, that their flexible native language 
 as a weapon of attack is more formidable when manipu- 
 lated with grace and irony than when it is used as an 
 1 Libre Parole, 6 Avril, 1895. April 1, 1897.
 
 CH. iv THE FURIES OF JOURNALISM 229 
 
 instrument of barbarous warfare to bludgeon or to rip up 
 an adversary. To exult or to gibe over an open grave is 
 assuredly worthier of a savage tribe than of the French 
 nation, which in its domestic life has an exemplary cult 
 for the quiet dead. The death of M. Carnot, doing his 
 duty as a dignified Chief of the State, moved Europe to 
 tears, yet on the day of his burial M. de Cassagnac hailed 
 the funeral procession with sneers, and, with audacity ill- 
 placed in a Bonapartist, said that the Church of Notre 
 Dame, where Napoleon had publicly flouted the Vicar of 
 Christ, was desecrated by the solemn obsequies sung over 
 the remains of the murdered President. 1 If Catholics are 
 unfeeling in the presence of death, more reverent charity 
 need not be expected from professors of irreligion ; so 
 when a pious priest of the diocese of Paris was slain by a 
 mad woman the organ of the Socialists suggested a base 
 reason for the crime, though the victim was an example 
 of self-denial and ascetic devotion, being a rare instance 
 of a Frenchman of high birth in the orders of the secular 
 clergy. 2 But while the humblest workman in France 
 salutes the lifeless body of a stranger borne past him to 
 the tomb, this is not the practice of politicians before the 
 remains of those whose opinions they dislike, and even in 
 the bosom of the Republican family like unseemliness is 
 displayed. When M. Jules Ferry died, on the morrow of 
 his election to a post which requited his long exclusion 
 from office, it was not the priests and nuns, persecuted by 
 him in the days of his power, who made signs of joy. It 
 
 1 Autorite, 1-2 Juillet, 1894. 
 
 2 Petite Bepublique, 13 Mai, 1896, on the murder of the Abbs' Prince 
 Paul de Broglie, brother of the Due de Broglie, and grandson of Mme. de 
 Stael.
 
 230 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK- i 
 
 was the anti-clerical Radicals who most loudly exulted, 
 and one of them, M. Clovis Hugues, a poet in his hours, 
 thus celebrated the event in crudest prose : " Yesterday 
 all-powerful, to-day Jules Ferry is but a corpse which 
 the people have the right to execrate, and to-morrow the 
 worms will eat him just as he had us eaten up by the 
 Versailles troops in 1871. " J 
 
 It was thus that the Carmagnole was joyfully danced 
 and sung in Paris during the Massacres of September, 
 1792. The song and the dance went on all through the 
 Terror, and the chief effect of the Revolution on the 
 national temperament would have been to make French- 
 men rejoice at the woes of Frenchmen, had not the for- 
 eign invader imposed on them the wholesome discipline 
 of war. Consequently out of the same violent movement 
 which has left a heritage of hate and strife to the nation 
 came the modern idea of patriotism in France, which is a 
 sentiment both generous and sincere. Its existence side 
 by side with internecine dissension, which after a century 
 shows little sign of abating, is one of the many paradoxes 
 encountered in the study of French character, and is a 
 result of the abnormal nature of the great upheaval. 
 
 II 
 
 The French form of the word patriot is not in its 
 familiar sense of ancient usage. St. Simon thus applied 
 it to Vauban, but previously it was a synonym of com- 
 
 1 Twenty-second anniversary of the Commune, celebrated at the Maison 
 du Peuple, Paris, March 18, 1893, the day after the death of M. Ferry, 
 which occurred just after his election to the Presidency of the Senate, 
 eight years after his dismissal from office in 1885.
 
 PATRIOTISM 231 
 
 patriot, in which sense Rousseau continued to use it, 
 though by his time the Encyclopaedists had out of it 
 constructed the word patriotisme to connote amour de la 
 patrie. Until the Revolution, however, that sentiment 
 was associated with the idea of loyalty to the crown, or 
 even to the person of the sovereign. The kings had 
 made France. For eight centuries, by marriage, con- 
 quest, or heritage, the fabric of France was built up by 
 its monarchs, who were the liberators of the territory 
 from the English, the Spaniards, and the Pope, turn by 
 turn, and had consolidated the kingdom by absorbing 
 the independent domains of Brittany, Burgundy, and 
 Provence. Thus the first Emigration (unlike the second, 
 which was a more justifiable flight from death after the 
 throne was upset in 1792) has been judged perhaps more 
 harshly than it merited. The feeling that patriotism 
 signified the cause of the King was so strong among the 
 nobles that, in crossing the frontier and in joining the 
 Prussian or the Austrian to fight the Revolutionary levies 
 of France, they believed that they were doing their duty 
 as good Frenchmen; though they gave the impression 
 that they were leaving in the lurch their sovereigns, 
 whose fate was aggravated by their action. Moreover 
 the troops which they and their fathers had commanded 
 in battles won or lost for France were often foreign mer- 
 cenaries, and this system kept up the idea that it was 
 as a personal service to the king that they offered their 
 lives. No officers were more intrepid in the field than 
 they, but it was as valiant domestics of the royal house- 
 hold that they went to fight, paid by privileges, but not 
 allowed to take any part in the affairs of their country. 
 Thus servitude became the badge of the nobility, which
 
 232 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 was not an aristocracy, as it represented no interests in 
 the nation outside the institution of royalty. It was this 
 curious conception of their position which prompted large 
 numbers of the nobles to rally to Napoleon when he 
 opened the gates of France to them. Mme. de Stael 
 relates that when the bearer of one of the noblest names 
 of the ancient court was reproached for accepting the 
 office of chamberlain to the usurper of the throne of his 
 king by divine right, he replied : " What would you have 
 me do? One must serve somebody." 1 
 
 The Emigration, which aggravated the feeling of the 
 Revolutionaries against the invaders of France, was no 
 doubt one of the strongest factors in the evolution of the 
 patriotic sentiment which came into being at that period. 
 The deputies of the States-General formed the first 
 Assembly which in France had been animated with a 
 national sentiment to the exclusion of all provincial 
 distinction. When the ceremony of the Federation took 
 place a year after the fall of the Bastille, when Talley- 
 rand for the last time publicly pontificated as a bishop, 
 the fact that the King's brother, with a crowd of the 
 nobility, was plotting with the foreigner across the fron- 
 tier, inspired most of those who took part in the cere- 
 mony with a feeling entirely new to French hearts. 
 Thus was the patrie founded and consecrated. Then the 
 first battalions which marched against the invasion were 
 specially invested with the name of "patriot," and we 
 have noticed the beneficent effect which that movement 
 had on the spirit of the Revolution. At the same time 
 the idea of Patriotism did not become clearly defined as 
 a sentiment to be directed against the foreigner. The 
 1 Considerations sur la Revolution Franqaise, partie iv. c. 11.
 
 CH. IT ENGLISH AND FRENCH PATRIOTISM 233 
 
 Vendean insurrection, though the uprising of the West 
 was abetted from outside, was a civil war, and the name 
 of "patriot" assumed in it by the Republicans became 
 merely the title of one of the contending factions. 
 
 The end of it all was that the idea of patriotism, which 
 took its rise under circumstances abnormal and unprece- 
 dented, amid the conflicting turmoil of foreign invasion, 
 revolution, anarchy, and civil war, became a territorial 
 rather than a racial sentiment. The opposite phenome- 
 non is found in our country. A Briton, while he has 
 an abstract reverence for the island of his origin, has 
 rarely the clinging attachment to its soil which a French- 
 man has to the land of France ; but he is less harsh to the 
 men of his own race, in the destiny of which, established 
 in no matter what quarter of the globe, he has a profound 
 belief. 
 
 It is worthy of notice, in this inquiry into the relations 
 of the Revolution with modern France, that the French 
 idea of patriotism, developed in the last decade of the 
 eighteenth century, is that which subsists still in France ; 
 whereas the British conception of patriotism has under- 
 gone a complete change in the intervening hundred years, 
 having been modified by the expansion of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race, and by the general march of civilisation. 
 The instances quoted in these pages show that at the 
 present day Frenchmen, when divided on political ques- 
 tions, are as cruel to one another as ever; while it is 
 probable that their affection for the soil of France is 
 deeper than at any previous period. The mourning for 
 the loss of Alsace and Lorraine has not been merely the 
 wail of wounded national vanity; nor did it chiefly 
 spring from regret for the lost populations, for as for
 
 234 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 the Alsacians, France took little pains to ungermanise 
 them in language and in education when they were 
 French subjects. The sorrow of the French is that two 
 fair provinces, with their mountains and vineyards and 
 towns, and above all with the left bank of the Rhine, 
 should no longer form part of the soil of France. To 
 live on the tract of Europe bearing that name is in a 
 Frenchman's eyes the greatest of human privileges so 
 great that he shrinks from practical ideas of colonial 
 aggrandisement which can only be purchased at the 
 price of exile from France. At industrial exhibitions in 
 French cities charts of the world are exposed to illustrate 
 the produce of the colonies. On them the possessions of 
 France are marked with vivid colour, so bountifully 
 spread that an usher from the local Lycee conducting his 
 ingenuous troop to be impressed with the enterprise of 
 France might, with the untravelled aptness of a map- 
 making school-master, exclaim : 
 
 Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? 
 
 But if the draughtsman had added to each painted area 
 the number of French settlers inhabiting it, the statistics 
 would show that for the purpose of the expansion of the 
 Gallic race, France might as well claim dominion over 
 the Polar Regions as over some of its nominal posses- 
 sions. Even in Algeria, at the gates of France, less 
 distant from Provence than is Normandy, a sparse French 
 population discontentedly neglects the riches of a splen- 
 did heritage, ever gazing over the Mediterranean in the 
 hope of regaining its native shores. 
 
 No doubt the longing which expatriated Frenchmen 
 have for their country is less due to any theory of patri-
 
 en. iv PATRIOTISM AND COLONISATION 235 
 
 otism evolved at the Revolution than to the amenity of 
 France as a land to live in. There is indeed no portion 
 of the earth's surface so favoured by nature. Its climates 
 are genial, the products of its picturesque soil are as rich 
 as they are varied, and its offspring are endowed not only 
 with the instinct of making the best use of them, but 
 with the means of enjoying them, which a wide disper- 
 sion of wealth permits. The comparative inclemency of 
 the British sky is not the sole reason why Britons have 
 a less affection for the home of their race than have the 
 French for theirs; but we have all known Australians 
 and other colonists, of exemplary loyalty to the Crown 
 of England, who after a brief sojourn within their re- 
 visited native shores, spent in carpings at the fogs which 
 enshroud them, depart again ill-content to end their 
 days elsewhere than in their unforced exile. Our Indian 
 story, however, shows that Englishmen have not built up 
 the Empire merely as epicures of climate. Moreover, 
 when we were laying its foundations both in the East 
 and in the West the French were our active rivals from 
 the Hoogley, where they retain an outpost, to the St. 
 Lawrence, where their language still is spoken, though 
 at that time more self-denial and courage were demanded 
 of colonists than now. 
 
 The evaporation in France of the colonising spirit, and 
 the increase of that unimperial form of patriotism mani- 
 fested in a clinging to the cradle of the race, may be 
 ascribed to the material results of the Revolution and of 
 the subsequent resettlement. It not only made France 
 a pleasanter abode for the multitude by the abolition of 
 the fiscal burdens which ground the joy of life out of the 
 humble; but by going beyond the suppression of primo-
 
 236 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 geniture, in denying testamentary liberty to citizens, it 
 secured competence to the great majority to enjoy the 
 bountiful products of the land. Similar restrictions on 
 the power of testators would not have the same effect in 
 our country. Laws which regulate the making of wills 
 affect only those members of the community who have 
 property to bequeath, and not a large proportion of the 
 inhabitants of the United Kingdom would be better off 
 if parents were prevented by law from disinheriting any 
 of their progeny. But in France the national virtue of 
 thrift tends to make every one a capitalist, and the fact 
 that down to a low social level few marriages are con- 
 tracted without dowry, shows how widely diffused are 
 riches among all classes. Even before the Revolution 
 the people were thrifty, and their devices to hide from 
 the rapacious tax-gatherer the hoards, which they devoted 
 to the purchase of land sharpened the quality. Its com- 
 bination with the system of forced testamentary division 
 of property has for its result the possession of indepen- 
 dent fortune by a large proportion of the population. 
 Hence the men of various categories who in the nine- 
 teenth century have gone forth from the British Isles to 
 build up an Empire beyond the seas have in France had 
 new motives for staying at home, from the cadets of 
 our rich families who, dissatisfied with straitened ex- 
 istence on the pittance of younger sons, were the first 
 pioneers of some of our most thriving settlements, to the 
 superfluous offspring of our villages and towns who 
 emigrated to escape pauperism in the mother-country. 
 Thus the popular advantages which France offers as a 
 land of residence restrain its colonising forces, and tend 
 to restrict the genius of the French race to a tract of
 
 CH. iv CHECKS ON COLONIAL ENTERPRISE 237 
 
 European ground no larger than that which it filled two 
 centuries ago. 
 
 This diffusion of unambitious comfort has another 
 drawback. As the revenue from the modest heritage 
 which falls to most Frenchmen needs only a small sup- 
 plement to suffice for the support of a family, an ever- 
 increasing number of the male population wish to be in 
 the salaried service of the State. Thus the army of 
 functionaries, necessarily great under a centralised gov- 
 ernment, is further swollen by the place-seeking demands 
 of the population, and is a wasteful drain on the re- 
 sources of the country, slenderly remunerated but need- 
 less posts being created wholesale at the expense of the 
 tax-pay ei-s. Another disadvantage of the testamentary 
 law is that its operation after several generations has 
 caused such an excessive subdivision of landed property 
 that peasant proprietors meet the inevitable difficulty 
 by limiting the number of their children. Whence the 
 shrinking birth-rate of France, which is a further check 
 on colonial enterprise, and in the days of universal con- 
 scription on the Continent is a menace to French se- 
 curity in the face of the steady growth of the armed 
 nation beyond the Vosges. 
 
 If an era of peace had arrived, and if to inhabit in 
 material comfort a genial and abundant tract of Europe 
 secured greatness for a nation, the situation of the 
 French would be more enviable than it is. But in the 
 century which has diffused well-being in France, Europe 
 lias ceased to be the uncontested centre of gravity of the 
 human race, and the French have profited less than other 
 civilised and intelligent peoples from the improved means 
 of communication which have effected the change. They
 
 238 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 use the ocean-going steamers for the transport of their 
 merchandise; they multiply their custom-houses in Asia 
 and in Africa to mark their so-called colonies; but for 
 the conveyance of men and women over the surface of the 
 globe the passenger ships, even those which float the 
 French flag, would be lightly freighted were it not for 
 Americans who cross the Atlantic and English who sail 
 the Eastern seas, as there are few sea-going travellers 
 from France, save reluctant functionaries and more eager 
 soldiers, the chief agents of French colonisation. 
 
 It is not merely to extend the British Empire that our 
 countrymen utilise modern means of locomotion. We 
 have the temperament of migratory travel, and our par- 
 ticular sentiment of patriotism, inspired by race rather 
 than by locality, makes us facile settlers in foreign lands, 
 whither we carry some of our native habits and all our 
 native allegiance. An Englishman whose occupation 
 forces him to live abroad is never an object of com- 
 miseration to his friends at home if the climate of his 
 domicile be agreeable, as is a Frenchman under similar 
 circumstances. Indeed, an increasing number of our 
 wealthy class voluntarily spend half of the year on the 
 Continent, often establishing luxurious homes on alien 
 territory favoured by the sun. There are distinguished 
 servants of the British crown who, having been employed 
 for years beyond the seas, do not hasten back to the 
 scenes of their youth when their work is done, but prefer 
 to grow old in tasting the joys of a novel foreign resi- 
 dence. This is incomprehensible to the French; for 
 though in France a person who has served his country 
 with distinction as ambassador or in other high post 
 enjoys lamentably little social consideration at home, yet
 
 CH. iv RACIAL AND LOCAL PATRIOTISM 239 
 
 such is the longing of every Frenchman to feel under his 
 feet the soil of France, that brilliant careers have been 
 prematurely exchanged for obscurity to satisfy that fancy. 
 Time will show whether this sentimental growth of a 
 hundred years will be for the eventual glory of France. 
 The idea is admirable and worthy of all sympathy, but it 
 seems to have been developed rather too late in the his- 
 tory of civilisation. Rapid communication is more stimu- 
 lating to racial than to local patriotism, and the love of 
 Frenchmen for their mother soil has reached its intensity 
 in the century which has put Acadia and other lost over- 
 sea possessions of France within nearer reach of Paris 
 than was Albi when the explorer La Perouse was born 
 there under Louis XV. or Marseilles and Brest when 
 Barras sailed from those ports to India to see France 
 losing its last chances 1 of founding an Oriental empire, 
 before he finally settled in his native land, and helped 
 endow it with the Revolution and its sedentary after- 
 consequences. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Patriotism of the soil would also seem to need as its 
 complement, to make it more effective for the elevation 
 of France, a greater harmony among Frenchmen at 
 moments of national misfortune. Patriotism ought then 
 to display itself as a virtue rising high above party strife, 
 
 1 Barras' two voyages to India were commenced in 1776 and in 1781. 
 On the latter occasion he sailed from Brest with the famous Bailli de 
 Suffren on the expedition which French authorities say would have ended 
 in the destruction of British domination in India but for the peace of 1783. 
 Talleyrand relates that in 1766 he took seventeen days to go from near 
 Angoulme to Paris in the fast Bordeaux inail-coach, the time now of a 
 voyage from France to India.
 
 240 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 and French critics have flattered us by comparing the 
 calm of the English people with the passionate emotion 
 of their own fellow-countrymen on such occasions. 1 The 
 fall of Khartoum was humiliating for British pride, but 
 the news of it, though bitterly deplored, caused no par- 
 oxysm of frenzy in England as did in France, a few 
 weeks later, the tidings of the French reverse at Lang- 
 Son, when, amid a scene of wild fury in the Chamber, 
 M. Jules Ferry was chased eternally from office, while 
 the raging mob outside clamoured to throw him into the 
 Seine. Although ministers held responsible, justly or 
 unjustly, for disasters are not thus treated in our coun- 
 try, the envying contrast which French publicists draw 
 should not fill us with a complacent sense of superiority, 
 but rather with a feeling of thankfulness that our domes- 
 tic history has been of a nature to enable us to cultivate 
 an imperturbable spirit during many generations. It 
 was not always so. 
 
 The tendency to make scapegoats of public men is 
 incidental to a state of unsettled government. The most 
 celebrated victim of that type in modern times was an 
 Englishman, whose fate was made immortal by a French 
 epigram. When Candide crossed the Channel to com- 
 pare English insanity with that of other nations, the 
 first sight which met his eyes was a British officer being 
 
 1 In the Ann.ee, Politique for 1886, edited by Andre" Daniel (M. Andre" 
 Lebon, since Minister of Commerce and of the Colonies), the following 
 occurs : " L'attitude du Parlement franc,ais devant Pincident de Lang-Son 
 fut d'autant plus attristante qu'au mme moment le Parlement anglais 
 avait sonne" un admirable exeinple de sang-froid en presence de difficult^ 
 de tous points comparables a celles du Tonkin." M. Gaston Deschamps 
 and M. Sarcey, among other eminent French writers, have paid similar 
 compliments to the attitude of England at such crises.
 
 CH. iv THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCAPEGOATS 241 
 
 shot with solemnity by British soldiers on the quarter- 
 deck of a man-of-war, and he was informed that in Eng- 
 land it was thought a good thing from time to time to 
 put to death an admiral to encourage the others. 1 Yet 
 Voltaire, who thus stigmatised the sacrifice of the ill- 
 starred Byng, was in his strictures usually more merciful 
 to England than to France. In the half-century before 
 the French Revolution, for which he was preparing the 
 way, amid all the admiration excited by the comparative 
 liberty enjoyed under the British Constitution, continen- 
 tal observers did not regard our kingdom as a pattern of 
 settled government. No doubt when, in 1756, to obtain 
 the death of Admiral Byng for an error of judgment, the 
 people were inflamed to madness, the city of London call- 
 ing for vengeance, and the cry being echoed from every 
 corner of the realm, 2 the Hanoverian succession was prac- 
 tically established. But only a few years previously, 
 before the '45 scattered the hopes of the Jacobites, 
 another intelligent Frenchman, younger than Voltaire, 
 thus discussed the chances of the Old Pretender, whom 
 he saw at Rome, though he did not impress him favour- 
 ably. "It is not possible for him," wrote Charles de 
 Brosses in 1740, " to give up all hopes of recovering the 
 crown of a country so given to revolutions. . . . The 
 spirit of the English nation is to hate the ruling mon- 
 
 1 Candide, c. xxiii. 
 
 2 Macaulay in his essay on Thackeray's History of the Earl of Chat- 
 ham, says of the year in which Byng was shot : " At this time appeared 
 Brown's Estimate, a book universally read, admired, and believed. The 
 author convinced his readers that they were a race of cowards and scoun- 
 drels : that nothing could save them." This is quite the tone of French 
 pessimists of the end of the nineteenth century, when the sentiment which 
 sacrificed Byng is rife in France.
 
 242 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. I 
 
 arch, be he whom he may." 1 To France in the nine- 
 teenth century might be applied the judgment which the 
 president of the Parlement de Dijon passed upon Eng- 
 land at the moment when the House of Brunswick had 
 occupied the throne the same space of time which the 
 Third Republic had survived in the sixtieth year of 
 Queen Victoria. 
 
 The Third Republic will not be as durable as the 
 Hanoverian dynasty, but if any settled regime could 
 only last in France the span of one of the sexagenarian 
 reigns of monarchs of that line it would be an unbounded 
 blessing to the country. Long reigns are not of auspi- 
 cious tradition in France, for when that of Louis XV. 
 ended a hundred and thirty-one years after the accession 
 of his immediate predecessor, the administration of the 
 land was so evil that all the glories of the Age, won by 
 the French in art, letters, and arms, could not counter- 
 vail the menacing discontent, which indeed was encour- 
 aged by the literary prodigies of the later period. It was 
 not the length of the reigns of Louis XIV. and of his 
 great-grandson which produced the splendour of the 
 Grand Si&cle ; it was the stability of the Ancient Mon- 
 archy which gave the genius of the people its opportunity 
 to fructify. The prolonged sway of a strong and re- 
 spected ruler would no doubt be beneficent for France, 
 but such benefits are not at the beck of human societies. 
 Modern democracies have, however, the choice of the 
 regime under which they will be governed, and it is 
 within the power of the people of France to disembarrass 
 
 1 Letters of De Brosses, translated by Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, 
 xxi. (Lettres familieres ecrites d'ltalie en 1739 et 1740, par Charles de 
 Brosse : Lettre xl. 6"d. de 1869.)
 
 CH. iv THE ORDERLY INSTINCT OP THE FRENCH 243 
 
 themselves of one untoward heritage of the Revolution 
 unstable government. 
 
 The forms which it has taken under the Third Repub- 
 lic will be carefully examined in the following pages. 
 Here the general observation may be made that the spirit 
 of the nation is opposed to the idea expressed in the word 
 "improvisation," which, now a political term in daily 
 use, till this century had no place in the French lan- 
 guage, excepting to describe the Italian facility of 
 making unprepared a poem or a speech. In spite of 
 the ebullient element in the French nature, which in 
 troublous times bursts out with ferocity, and in diver- 
 sion takes the form of excessive blitheness, in spite of 
 the qualities which induced M. Taine in a misanthropic 
 passage to liken the vagaries of his countrymen to the 
 antics of monkeys, 1 there are no creatures of the human 
 species so orderly and so methodical as the French. In 
 the private life of the people, their thrift, their care in 
 keeping accounts, their skill in organising simple pleas- 
 ures in the intervals of toil, the neat attire of the women, 
 the formality and good service of the meals even in 
 humble homes, all testify to a provident and systematic 
 temperament inconsistent with improvisation. The habit 
 of thought of the French is equally opposed to it. They 
 are wont instinctively to classify and to formulate their 
 ideas, and the educational training of all grades fosters 
 this tendency. An English priest, once attached to the 
 diocese of Paris, told me how impressed he was with the 
 
 1 " L'horame est un animal tres voisin du singe. . . . De 1& en lui un 
 fonds persistant de brutalite", de fe'rocite', d'instincts violents et destrue- 
 teurs, auxquels s'ajoutent, s'il cst Fran<jais, la gaiete", le rire et le plus 
 6trange besoin de gambader, de polissonner au milieu dea de"gats qu'il 
 fait." Ancien Regime, liv. iii. c. iv. '3.
 
 244 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 contrast of the confessions in the two countries of young 
 girls before the age when the sacrament is a psycho- 
 logical revelation or a perfunctory routine. The youth- 
 ful English penitent told a tale which had neither 
 beginning nor end, tangled and unreflecting. The 
 French child unfolded a calmly prepared theme, a model 
 of lucid symmetry, in which all that had to be said was 
 arranged under precise categories. 
 
 The same systematic disposition the French like to see 
 and to feel in their government. Their propensity is not 
 to improvise, but to hierarchise ; and so, side by side 
 with the Parliamentary Republic, of which every Presi- 
 dent has abdicated save one who was murdered, and 
 under which a minister who retains his portfolio for a 
 year is a curiosity, subsists a series of stable official 
 hierarchies, administrative, ecclesiastical, military, and 
 judicial, which incarnate the spirit of the nation. The 
 secret of the completeness of Napoleon's domination over 
 the French, and of his ability to reconstruct France, in 
 evolving order out of the chaos of the Revolution, was 
 that he recognised the needs and the qualities of the 
 nation. His warlike genius gave him authority and 
 opportunity, but his civil edifice would have been swept 
 away with his conquests and his dynasty had he not been 
 animated with the spirit of the nation he was called to 
 rule and to reconstitute. His severest judge of our time, 
 M. Taine, has described his mind as divided into " three 
 atlases," the first military, the second administrative, 
 and the third personal, each mental volume being sub- 
 divided into a score of sections, all under methodic 
 headings; so that Napoleon when taking a decision on 
 any question of strategy or munitions, of taxes or tribu-
 
 CH. iv FRANCE THE VICTIM OF IMPROVISATION 245 
 
 nals, or requiring the character of any individual, had 
 only to turn to the marvellous cartulary of his mind, 
 where every subject was classified and docketed. This 
 quality showed that despite his alien origin he was the 
 providential reconstructor of France; and no more con- 
 spicuous monument of the national disposition has ever 
 been erected than the work in which M. Taine criticises 
 the giant who exemplified and appreciated it. His 
 treatise on the Origins of Contemporary France is itself 
 a masterpiece of classification, proclaiming him a typical 
 example of French intellect, trained to the highest point. 
 From the philosopher among the National Archives, or 
 in his library at Menthon, analysing and marshalling the 
 elements of the fabric of modern France, to the pains- 
 taking functionaries in public offices, tabulating the 
 statistics and reports which facilitate all inquiry into 
 French institutions, the people which willingly sub- 
 mitted to Napoleon's codes and administrative hierar- 
 chies are all in different degrees prone to classify and to 
 stereotype. They like to have everything methodically 
 arranged in its place, in their government as in their 
 account-books or in their domestic cupboards; and this 
 is the nation which has continually to accept the impro- 
 vised, where outward forms of government are constantly 
 being renewed, and where unexpected adventure is 
 always imminent. Thus the energetic and passionate 
 side of the national character, which when disciplined 
 has borne France to the front on many a contested field 
 in war and in peace, is kept in a perpetual state of irri- 
 tation, with the result of internecine strife. It began at 
 the Restoration, made inevitable by the insensate ambi- 
 tion of the great organiser of the Revolution, which
 
 240 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE im. i 
 
 tempted him from his constructive work to bring upon 
 France the chastisement of Europe. So though his 
 administrative edifice survived him, fitted with its hie- 
 rarchies suitable to the wants and tastes of the nation, 
 to it was superadded the improvised simulacrum of the 
 British constitution. We shall see in these pages what 
 ills were inflicted on France by the empirical importation 
 of a flimsy copy of a structure slowly piled up by a dis- 
 similar people. 
 
 This unnatural state of improvisation is thus a result 
 of the Revolution, which may be held accountable for 
 much of the political ill-temper of the French. As each 
 generation grows up it learns, as the lesson of the cen- 
 tury, that whatever regime the country submits to is 
 provisional, and will pass away, to be held up to con- 
 tumely by those who will succeed it. In a library at 
 Lyons, when looking through an encyclopaedia of serious 
 pretensions, under the letter N there met my eye a series 
 of violent lampoons, in the guise of biographies, of the 
 various persons who had borne the name Napoleon. Not 
 only was Louis Napoleon arraigned as a political criminal, 
 but his private life was aspersed, a list of his mistresses 
 was given, and his mother, Queen Hortense, was treated 
 as a frail adventuress. The great Emperor was vilified 
 in the same tone ; so to see what this strange instructor 
 of the people had to say of early passages in his life, I 
 turned to the part containing the letter B, and in it all 
 the Bonapartes were flattered with adulation as fulsome 
 as the abuse was scurrilous of the Napoleons. Hortense 
 Beauharnais, the wanton of the later volume, was a high- 
 souled princess, as was Pauline Borghese, against whom 
 a fearful insinuation was made under the heading
 
 OH. iv FRANCE THE VICTIM OF IMPROVISATION 247 
 
 "Napoleon." The explanation was, that the first letters 
 of the alphabet had been dealt with in 1867, whereas the 
 encyclopaedists only reached N in 1874, when the Second 
 Empire had been succeeded by the Third Republic. But 
 what a lesson it taught to the youth of France who 
 sought their first ideas in political philosophy in this 
 popular source of instruction! For worse than the 
 scepticism here inculcated was the consecration, as a 
 doctrine, of servile mob-fickleness towards once adulated 
 rulers, which, ever found in all communities, is usually 
 not made a matter of boast. The treatment inflicted on 
 the twice-fallen dynasty cannot be ascribed to the special 
 wrath roused by the disastrous end of Louis Napoleon's 
 policy ; for if after Sedan his life was preserved only by 
 his being sent to Germany, in which country he had 
 made as many widows and orphans as in France, where 
 he would have been torn to pieces, he enjoyed merely 
 the discipline which other rulers of France had tasted, 
 and which was in store for men of the Republic who 
 proclaimed his downfall. The aged Louis Philippe 
 escaping disguised in a farmer's cart through Normandy 
 to the sea-shore in 1848, and Jules Ferry flying for his 
 life from the people of Paris in 1885, were equally vic- 
 tims of the principle enshrined in the popular encyclo- 
 paedia. It, in turn, is the outcome of a century of 
 Revolution wherein rulers are only temporary expedients 
 in the nation which of all others needs a strong and 
 stable executive as the complement of the orderly hierar- 
 chies of its choice. 
 
 None who take part in French public life can help 
 being infected, more or less, with either bitterness or 
 scepticism. Fortunately for the land, it is the latter
 
 248 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 quality which prevails, and it often takes a genial form. 
 Our English ballad of the Vicar of Bray seems to suggest 
 that the diocese of Oxford could have well dispensed 
 with the incumbency of that divine; but it referred to 
 the period when England was a country where the actual 
 regime was liable to be upset by a revolution, and since 
 1789 France has been lucky to produce citizens animated 
 with the spirit of the perpetual curate. Such a one was 
 for over fifty years the mayor of a village which I know 
 in the Landes. First appointed by Louis Philippe, he 
 was an Orleanist until the Revolution of February, but 
 before he had time to become a Republican the Coup 
 d'Etat of 1851 made him an Imperialist. It was only 
 a pleasure deferred, as after the war he became a devoted 
 servant of the Third Republic, and continued so to be, as 
 neither the Comte de Chambord nor General Boulanger 
 succeeded in upsetting it. Such philosophers are the 
 salvation of Revolutionary France; and that their quali- 
 ties are appreciated was shown in this case, as both when 
 the mayoralty was a government appointment and when 
 it was an elective office, whatever regime was established 
 and whatever the political tendency of the region, he was 
 always chosen to preside over the affairs of his commune. 
 Thus it is that France survives, although for more than 
 a century it has spent its intelligence and its forces in 
 trying to find out under what form of government it had 
 better live. But it is not surprising that an air of 
 pessimism should hang over a nation in which the most 
 salutary symptom is the indifference of the great majority 
 in all matters political.
 
 CH. iv FRENCH VICARS OF BRAY 249 
 
 IV 
 
 Besides the irritation induced by the instability of gov- 
 ernments, there is another cause, less directly connected 
 with the Revolution, of the ill-conditioned tone of French 
 political controversy at times of public trouble, when 
 internecine strife ought to be hushed instead of being 
 loudened. The geographical disabilities which affect all 
 Continental nations, and from which insular peoples are 
 free, are particularly galling to a high-spirited race, and 
 foreign inroads have become more discomposing since its 
 patriotism has been specially inspired by associations of 
 the soil. That sentiment, as we have seen, first took 
 tangible shape under the stress of the invasion during the 
 Revolution. In the epic interval between the first chant 
 of the Marseillaise and the desperate interjections of 
 General Cambronne at the last charge of the Old Guard, 
 the armies of France had invaded many lands between the 
 Tagus and the Jordan ; but the epoch ended as it began 
 with hostile occupation of French territory. In 1815 and 
 the preceding year the people were so weary of war that 
 the Allies, entering the capital, were hailed as beneficent 
 restorers of peace ; so the spectacle of Parisians cheering 
 English redcoats camped in the Bois de Boulogne and 
 Cossacks in the Champs Elysees, or flocking to the Opera 
 to see the Battle of Waterloo danced as a ballet, 1 gave 
 
 1 Letters of Harriet Countess Granville, 1810-46. This was on July 
 30,1815. The previous year similar scenes were witnessed. "LeSAvril 
 L. chante a l'ope"ra en presence des souverains allies les couplets suivans 
 ' Vive Guillaume, et sos jjnerriers vaillants ! De ce royaume il sauve les 
 enfans Par sa victoire,' etc." Montgaillard, Gouvernement Imperial, 
 1814.
 
 250 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 strangers the impression that in French hearts invasion 
 was not a grievous sore. But this was only the reaction 
 after the removal of a crushing burden from a people of 
 buoyant nature, and the phantom of invasion remained 
 ever before the French from the time when the youthful 
 William of Prussia first entered Paris in the triumphal 
 retinue of his father, who, by the force of his Allies, thus 
 commenced the revenge of Jena, till the day, an aged 
 man, he came back to complete it single-handed, having 
 turned his father's kingdom into an empire in the halls of 
 Versailles. 
 
 It was the vision of the son of Frederick William and 
 of the successors of Bliicher within their gates which 
 prompted the Revolutionary excesses of the Parisians 
 when the news of Sedan arrived. It has been often made 
 a reproach to them that on the 4th of September, 1870, 
 their frenzy was directed not against William and Bis- 
 marck and Moltke, but against Louis Napoleon and his 
 dynasty, thus signifying that domestic and political hate 
 is a more potent impulse in France than patriotic resist- 
 ance to a foreign foe. The prominence on that day of 
 men soon to direct the outrages of the Commune, and the 
 apparent joy of the populace at a moment when it ought 
 to have been grim with patriotic sorrow, justified that 
 reproach. But though certain Republican leaders might 
 have liked defeat to destroy the Empire better than vic- 
 tory to consolidate it, they would have been torn to pieces 
 by the same mob which clamoured for the downfall of 
 the dynasty had they evinced the same disposition with 
 Louis Napoleon on his triumphant way to Berlin. In 
 this as in every other consideration of the French char- 
 acter, composed as it is of contradictory elements, it is
 
 CH. iv THE PHANTOM OF INVASION 261 
 
 impossible to generalise ; but it may be accepted that the 
 presence of a victorious enemy within the frontier of a 
 country already acquainted with the woes of invasion is 
 calculated to drive its sensitive inhabitants into a nervous 
 attitude of recrimination towards its rulers, which island 
 dwellers can scarce understand. Since the renewal of 
 these sorrows in the war with Germany, that nervousness 
 has increased, aggravated by depression because no states- 
 man has yet arisen to restore France to its former posi- 
 tion in Europe. 
 
 From reproaching ministers with being incompetent to 
 recover Alsace and Lorraine, to believing them capable of 
 suffering another invasion, is but a step for an agitated 
 public. Thus it is that at moments of disaster, which 
 ought under normal conditions to unite a people in sup- 
 porting its government, a French Minister may, for 
 events beyond his control, be treated as the most abject 
 of traitors. When M. Jules Ferry, delivered to the mob 
 by his friends, fell never to rise again because of a mili- 
 tary reverse in Tonkin, it was not that the Parisians 
 definitely expected to see the Black Flags marching down 
 the Champs Elysees, like the Prussians in 1871 ; but to a 
 population which had witnessed that spectacle the psycho- 
 logical idea of defeat, in no matter what part of the world, 
 presented the unreasonable spectre of invasion. To the 
 same source must be ascribed the tendency of the French 
 recklessly to accuse their public men of being the agents 
 of foreign powers. One day it was M. Ferry said to be 
 in the pay of Prince Bismarck, at another time it was M. 
 Clemenceau charged with being in the employ of Eng- 
 land; and critics of the Russian alliance have muttered 
 that this or that politician was the bondsman of the Tsar :
 
 252 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. i 
 
 thus continuing the tradition of the Revolution, when 
 Republicans used to charge one another, as well as the 
 King's party, with being friends of the foreigner, when 
 Jacobins denounced Girondius for being subsidised by 
 Mr. Pitt. 
 
 " Friend of the foreigner " is an English expression, but 
 it has had no such sinister signification in our island his- 
 tory. From long before the French Revolution our im- 
 munity from invasion has been the envy of Europe, and 
 whenever our relations become strained with a continental 
 power the desire is kindled abroad to make us cede our 
 boast of centuries and submit to the lot of other lands 
 which periodically see their fields and cities ravaged by 
 alien hordes. Once when travelling on the Mozambique 
 Coast I met with a family of Hollanders to whose settle- 
 ment was wafted sometimes, from below the tropic of 
 Capricorn, an echo of the discord between their kindred 
 Boers and the British, and one of them said to me, " Con- 
 fess, now, that you English have never forgiven us for 
 burning your ships in the Medway." The patriotic 
 Dutchwoman was not quite accurate. Our South African 
 troubles have not been due to the infantile training of our 
 nomadic speculators, who at their mothers' knees vowed 
 to wipe out the outrage of Tromp and Ruyter. But it 
 would be supremely true to say that we should have 
 cause for undying resentment towards the Power which 
 ever succeeded in landing a hostile force on our shores ; 
 for, apart from the material and momentary harm, such 
 an experience would alter our national character, substi- 
 tuting a nervous temper for our phlegmatic sense of 
 security. Even at times when invasion has seemed im- 
 minent the panics which are said to have scared us did
 
 CH. iv PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECT OF INVASION 253 
 
 not greatly affect British unconcern. When Napoleon 
 was planning his descent on our coasts our Cominander-in- 
 Chief, the Duke of York, inspecting the works at Dover 
 and Folkestone, constructed to face the attack, wrote to 
 the notorious Mrs. Clarke letters, afterwards brought to 
 light, 1 in which he described the view of the French camp 
 on the opposite heights as a harmless panorama. 2 After 
 that peril had passed, contemporary chroniclers relate 
 that the disaster to our troops at Walcheren caused less 
 excitement in England than the duel it provoked between 
 Mr. Canning and Lord Castlereagh or the O.P. riots at 
 Covent Garden though Europe was in a blaze, in the 
 year of Wagram and of Talavera, 3 when no land but ours 
 was free from the ingress of devouring armies. 
 
 That invasion remains an imminent alarm to France is 
 manifest to all who have sojourned in that country since 
 the Franco-German war laid open the frontier, inviolate 
 for five-and-fifty years. That interval was less than the 
 span of life of many an inhabitant of the Eastern prov- 
 inces, as I have found on my travels. At St. Die, which 
 the Treaty of Frankfort made a frontier town, the old 
 dean of the cathedral chapter related how he had seen in 
 his native Vosges the two invasions which ended the First 
 and Second Empires. Nearer Paris there is the fortified 
 city of Soissons, where the elders, who survived a few 
 years ago, had agitated memories of their youth and old 
 age. Taken and retaken by Cossack and by Prussian in 
 1814, it was bombarded again in 1870, so that the antiq- 
 
 1 Report of Committee of House of Commons, appointed January, 
 1809, to investigate the conduct of H.R.H., the Duke of York, Comman- 
 der-in-Chief, with regard to promotions, exchanges, and appointments to 
 commissions in the army. 2 1804. 8 1809.
 
 264 THK REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 uities of the capital of Clovis have suffered ; but it con- 
 tains other relics, and in the courtyard of an inn there is 
 a pile of cannon-ball left by the Grand Duke of Mecklen- 
 burg as a reminder of a debt one day to be repaid. Here, 
 again, is the hfttel of a wealthy family at Reims : the 
 daughter, who now bears an historic name, when she en- 
 tertains her guests calls to mind that her first experience 
 as a girl of doing the honours of a house was when Prince 
 Hohenlohe took up his quarters in her home after Sedan, 
 and stipulated that she or her mother should always dine at 
 table with him. Here is a peaceful chateau in the Brie 
 which looks as though nothing had disturbed its cairn 
 since Mme. de Sevigne saw its stately walls rising, and 
 Diderot discoursed in its salons ; but the modern books in 
 the old library are mutilated, and out of Thiers' Consulate 
 and Empire are torn the pages describing the battle of Jena, 
 with a scrawl to attest that it was the work of a corporal 
 of a Prussian regiment in January, 1871. 
 
 In England only to old places are historical souvenirs 
 attached. Those which Americans like to venerate are 
 as a rule older than the emigrations under the Stuarts of 
 the first British settlers who crossed the Atlantic. In 
 France modern buildings too have their traditions, 
 and ancient edifices have associations dating, not from 
 the past centuries which saw them reared, but from the 
 lifetime of contemporaries. This is riot exclusively due 
 to the continental situation of France, for in Italy the 
 traveller does not pause to consider monuments for their 
 recent memories ; the interest of most events in France 
 in the last hundred years is connected with the Revolu- 
 tion and its sequences. When there was a question of 
 demolishing the Malmaison, a Frenchman, who had seen
 
 CH. iv THE REMINISCENCES OF TWO NATIONS 255 
 
 not a few national vicissitudes, said to me, "Our land 
 unhappily so constantly renews its places of historical 
 association, that it is impossible to preserve them all." 
 No doubt it would not be easy to find in England a 
 house the stones of which thrill the imagination because 
 of a woman who lived in it within the nineteenth century, 
 and Mrs. Hannah More's cottage in the Mendips, or the 
 home of Mrs. Hemans in the Vale of Clwyd, in spite of 
 the chaster merits of those gifted matrons, can be regarded 
 with less emotion than the chateau which the Citoyenne 
 Bonaparte bought and where she died a fallen Empress. 
 
 It is a curious thing that while we are a less literary 
 nation than the French, many of the more interesting 
 reminiscences of our elders have in this century referred 
 to the exploits of literature rather than of action. " Ah ! 
 did you once see Shelley plain?" asked Mr. Browning; 
 while Beranger, "II avait petit chapeau avec redingote 
 grise. ... II me dit : 'Bon jour, ma chere! ' ' II vous a 
 parle, grandmere ! II vous aparle ! " It is the more re- 
 markable because there is no period of English history in 
 which our men of action showed greater merit than in the 
 years succeeding the French Revolution. Yet, though 
 there was no colossal figure like that of Napoleon to 
 overshadow our warriors, we have neglected the memory 
 of heroes not less valiant than Marceau and Hoche, than 
 Kleber and Massena, of whom every Frenchman knows 
 the fame. The victors of Trafalgar and of Waterloo we 
 remember ; and Sir John Moore we know, because a poet 
 of a single song sang him an immortal dirge. But if the 
 name of Sidney Smith be spoken in a company of English- 
 men, its sound evokes the quips of the reverend jester of 
 the Whigs, and not the feats of the glorious defender
 
 250 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE UK. I 
 
 of St. Jean d'Acre, who arrested Bonaparte's gigantic 
 scheme of Eastern conquest, and who, in the Emperor's 
 opinion, was a more fatal obstacle to his ambition than 
 either Nelson or Wellington. 
 
 Thus because our wars were waged beyond the seas, 
 and because Great Britain had done with revolution 
 when Charles Edward forlornly marched to Derby and 
 back, the liveliest recollections of the most aged who 
 survived to the lifetime of men of our day were mild 
 and commonplace compared with those of their neigh- 
 bours in France. The oldest people we have ever known 
 in our childhood had perhaps seen George III. bathing 
 at Weymouth, or watched a press-gang at work ; while 
 those of the next generation remembered the talk about 
 Mr. Perceval's murder, or heard the bells for Princess 
 Charlotte's marriage. While such pale, isolated memo- 
 ries were being impressed on young English minds of 
 those days, how crowded and how vivid were the images 
 which passed before French eyes : the tragic figure of Ma- 
 rie Antoinette, the farewell embrace of a father dragged 
 to the guillotine ; the return of Napoleon from Elba 
 between two triumphal entries of the Allies in Paris. 
 For six-and-twenty years France was full of tumult, 
 men's voices outdinned by the crash of arms and the 
 sound of trumpet. At first the streets and the fields 
 were stained with French blood shed by French hands, 
 but they presently were turned against the enemies of 
 France ; and the clouds of cannon smoke, which suc- 
 ceeded those of incendiary flames, moved beyond the 
 frontiers, within which for a decade and a half all the 
 marchings and the counter-marchings were of the armies 
 of France. Sometimes in the train of their commander
 
 CH. iv THE RESULTS OF THE REVOLUTION 257 
 
 there came a brave show worth seeing, even if it did not 
 console for the tribute of manhood it cost. Sometimes 
 the roads near the capital were encumbered with the 
 spoils of the galleries of Europe : one day the Pope of 
 Rome came a captive visitor to the new Charlemagne ; 
 later a daughter of the Csesars was sent as a hymeneal 
 hostage to the soldier of the Revolution who taught the 
 last Emperor of the West that the original meaning of 
 "Imperator" was "victorious general of the republic." 
 After that the tattered relics of the retreat from Moscow 
 presaged the coming end of abnormal experience and 
 glory. But in less than a generation a new France had 
 been constructed on the wrecked foundations of the 
 old edifice, and the people had passed through such a 
 series of emotions, had suffered such vicissitudes, and 
 had witnessed such amazing scenes, that they and the 
 generation procreated by them during the years of unrest 
 formed a new nation. It retained part of its heritage of 
 old Gallic civilisation as well as many of the virtues and 
 defects of the race ; but a quarter of a century of turmoil 
 and tension had developed new qualities which made 
 them the people the least adapted in the world to be gov- 
 erned under constitutions improvised on the venerable 
 British model. 
 
 Here, then, we see the chief effects of the French Revo- 
 lution on modern France after a hundred years. There 
 is the great tangible result, the machine of administrative 
 government constructed by Napoleon ; and there is the 
 psychological or moral result of a people which has never 
 yet found a political government to soothe and weld 
 together the elements unsettled by the great upheaval. 
 For the rest, the Revolution is not responsible for half of
 
 268 THE REVOLUTION AND MODERN FRANCE BK. i 
 
 the good or of the evil attributed to it. It did not 
 hasten one moment the invention of steam power or the 
 application of electricity which have been the real revo- 
 lutionary forces of the world in the nineteenth century, 
 and the consequences of which the Ancient Regime could 
 not have withstood. While it abolished certain intoler- 
 able grievances which bore most harshly on the humble, 
 it did not redress the everlasting conflict between rich 
 and poor. There are pages of Rousseau, treating of ine- 
 quality, among the most eloquent of his writings which 
 conduced to the Revolution, and they describe the lot of 
 the poor in our time or perhaps it might be said, at any 
 period of the world's history. At all events, the French 
 Revolution has done nothing to help the solutions of the 
 problems which face humanity a century after its con- 
 summation ; and it might never have occurred, for any 
 effect it has had on the relations of capital and labour, 
 on the progress of Socialism, or on the power of Plu- 
 tocracy. The best that can be said of the French Revo- 
 lution is that just when civilisation was on the point of 
 making history colourless it burst forth and produced for 
 the student and the artist a collection of pictures and 
 documents thrilling and pathetic, grandiose and revolt- 
 ing, such as no epoch of antiquity or of modern times 
 has supplied. But to provide intellectual pleasure for 
 the cultivated it was hardly worth while that millions of 
 the human race should have lamentably perished before 
 their term.
 
 BOOK II 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION AND THE CHIEF OF 
 THE STATE
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 FRENCH jurists and historians have expressed admira- 
 tion at the conduct of the Parliamentary Convention 
 which arranged the transmission of the crown after the 
 English Revolution of 1688. The king was in flight, a 
 foreign invasion was imminent, and this was the moment 
 chosen by the Lords and the Commons to display the 
 national reverence for law and prescription by tranquilly 
 discussing precedents afforded by the deposition of 
 Richard II. and of Edward II. ; till at last the venerable 
 Maynard, who had witnessed all the vicissitudes of the 
 century, lost patience and exclaimed : " A man in a 
 revolution, resolving to do nothing which is not strictly 
 according to established form, resembles a man who has 
 lost himself in the wilderness, and who stands crying, 
 'Where is the king's highway? I will walk nowhere 
 but on the king's highway.'" l 
 
 An eminent French authority 2 finds a parallel and a 
 contrast with this incident in the proceedings of the 
 Corps Legislatif, in 1815, after Waterloo. The surround- 
 ing circumstances were graver. Bliicher was at the gates 
 
 1 Macaulay, History of England, c. xi. 
 a E. Boutmy, Etudes de Droit constitutionnel. 
 261
 
 262 THE FRENCH CONSTITUTION BK. n 
 
 of Paris ; the official Moniteur announced that the capital 
 was in the hands of the Allies ; and the representative 
 Chamber, instead of considering the dangers menacing 
 the country, discussed with animation a Declaration of 
 Rights, presented by Garat, the old Minister of the 
 Convention who announced the death-sentence to Louis 
 XVI., defining, in philosophic phrase, sovereignty of the 
 people and liberty of the individual. An unphilosophic 
 member who came to interrupt the deliberation with the 
 announcement that the English had arrived, was scorn- 
 fully silenced ; and while the Allies were concluding the 
 capitulation, the Chamber, having completed its Declara- 
 tion of Rights and of principles, proceeded to vote with 
 academic zeal fifty articles of the new Constitution, which 
 was not accepted by Louis XVIII. 
 
 The respective methods of these two bodies mark both 
 the national characteristic of the peoples they represented 
 and the attendant circumstances of the Revolutions in the 
 two countries. England had the advantage of undergoing 
 her decisive political crises, not only free from the pressure 
 of alien interference, for Ireland, which was invaded by 
 the foreigner, was more distant from the capital than 
 France or the Low Countries, but also in the century 
 before the age of Voltaire had imbued all Europe with its 
 rationalism, at a time when even in France the tendency 
 in matter of politics, as well as of science and theology, 
 was to recognise authority and to register precedents. 
 Had the English Revolutions been deferred, the Bill of 
 Rights might have been a more symmetrical document, 1 
 
 1 " II n'y a dans le Bill des Droits ni ordre ni plan d'ensemble. Les 
 13 articles qui le composent se suivent comme an hasard. Cela est tout 
 a fait contraire a l'ide"e que nous nous faisons des actes issus d'une situa- 
 tion re"volutionnaire " (Boutmy).
 
 CH. i CONSTITUTION OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC 263 
 
 more sonorously phrased, but it would not have been an 
 enduring possession. 
 
 The Constitution under which the last generation of the 
 nineteenth century has lived in France is distinguished 
 from others which preceded it in that it contains no 
 declaration of principle, no philosophic or humanitarian 
 pretension. It would be too much to say that the absence 
 of axioms similar to those found in the Declaration of the 
 Rights of Man, or in the Constitution of 1848, has given 
 it a durability not enjoyed by the regimes initiated by 
 those instruments. It is, however, certain that the cir- 
 cumstances which moved the National Assembly to confine 
 itself to the organization of the public powers without 
 theoretical dissertations on doctrine, have, in their develop- 
 ment, preserved the Constitution of 1875, which has lasted 
 to the end of the century with little modification. The 
 Constitution of the Third Republic owes its origin, as it 
 owes its duration, to the weakness of purpose and the 
 dissensions of the monarchical parties. The National 
 Assembly which established the Republic was not a 
 republican body. The majority were monarchical, but 
 the Legitimists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists composing it 
 failed to agree ; and the country being weary of an 
 avowedly provisional state of things, the necessity was 
 forced upon the unenthusiastic Assembly l of confirming 
 Marshal MacMahon as Chief of the State, with a Repub- 
 
 1 The reporter of the Commission which had examined the Bill for the 
 " Organisation des pouvoirs publics," M. de Ventavon, described the situa- 
 tion very well: "II est difficile dans la situation actuelle des esprits de 
 fonder des institutions definitives. Tous les gouveraements qui se sont 
 succe'de's en France y ont laisse" des partisans, et ces partisans sont repre"- 
 sente"s dans 1' Assembled Nationale. Comment grouper une inajoritd pour 
 e"tablir un gouvernement qui doit tre le triomphe exclusif d'un parti?" 
 (Ass. Nat. Stance du 21 Janvier, 1875.)
 
 264 THE FRENCH CONSTITUTION BK. n 
 
 lican constitution to guarantee the Septennate. Hence 
 the debates which preluded the passing of the Constitu- 
 tional Law were unique in their character ; for little as 
 they resembled discussions in the English legislature on 
 constitutional changes, with their grave references to 
 historical precedents, 1 they departed also from French 
 tradition in that they were conducted without classical 
 allusion and without didactic theorising. We are all famil- 
 iar with the pedantic extravagances of the orators of the 
 Convention, faintly echoed by those who aided Lamartine 
 in making the Constitution of 1848 ; but the National 
 Assembly reared the Third Republic without any inspira- 
 tion from Greek and Latin antiquity, without any proofs 
 from the Encyclopaedists. M. Jules Favre refrained 
 from comparing himself with Thrasybulus, and the re- 
 actionary composition of the " Commission des Trente " a 
 did not produce the obvious allusion to the Thirty 
 Tyrants. The regicide date of the 21st of January, 
 though it raised the ire of aged Royalists whose fathers 
 had served Louis XVI., failed to call forth from Repub- 
 licans the inapt but once inevitable reference to Marcus 
 Brutus ; and M. Jules Simon argued with sound philoso- 
 phy, without one specious quotation from the philoso- 
 phers of the last century. 
 
 In an enactment passed under such conflicting circum- 
 stances the commonplaces of revolutionary terminology 
 could no more find a place than declarations in favour 
 of limited monarchy or of plebiscitary dictatorship. The 
 
 1 One or two speakers, for instance M. Dufaure, referred to historical 
 precedents, but rather as warnings than as models of conduct. 
 
 4 The Commission des Trente, nominated at the end of 1873 to prepare 
 the constitutional lews, contained scarcely any Republicans among its 
 thirty members.
 
 CH. i GENESIS OF CONSTITUTION OF 1875 265 
 
 keynote to the situation is given in the concluding pro- 
 tests of the extreme Legitimists on the day the new 
 Constitution was voted by the National Assembly. 1 
 They vainly besought the Broglies and the Haussonvilles 
 to hesitate before joining with Republicans of every 
 shade, not only with Leon Say and Dufaure, but with 
 Gambetta and Jules Favre, in founding the Republic. 
 But the Orleanists justified their transaction with the 
 Left Centre by the belief that the Conservative Republic 
 would be the safest halting-place, till abdication or death 
 took the Comte de Chambord out of the way of the 
 foundation of a constitutional monarchy ; while the 
 members of the Extreme Left knew that any form of 
 Republic, once established, was likely to become their 
 possession in the face of monarchical dissensions. Thus 
 by a compromise, regarded as provisional by many of its 
 supporters, voted without phrases and without enthusi- 
 asm, was founded the regime which has proved more 
 durable than any other set up in France since the Ancient 
 Monarchy succumbed on the 10th of August, 1792. 
 
 A constitution thus brought into being presents no 
 scientific interest, such as that which the Constitution of 
 the United States offers. It is chiefly interesting as the 
 scheme of government under which a great people has 
 managed to live for a certain number of years. Even 
 decorated with a preamble of pretentious maxims like 
 that prefixed to the Constitution of 1848, it would not 
 have altered the fact that, though France is more exer- 
 cised in the practice of constitution-making than any 
 other civilised nation, it has never seriously applied itself 
 to the scientific study of constitutional law. It has no 
 1 Ass. Nat. Stance du 25 F4vrier, 1876.
 
 286 THE FRENCH CONSTITUTION UK. 11 
 
 classical literature on the subject, and since the Revolu- 
 tion its Faculties of Law have made but faint attempts to 
 give instruction in it, 1 the great jurists not being at- 
 tracted to a subject made barren in their nation by recur- 
 ring political vicissitude. The existence of a treatise like 
 Tocqueville's Democratic en AmSrique displays at once the 
 aptitude of the French genius to deal with constitutional 
 problems, and its compulsion to turn to other countries to 
 study them. 
 
 It would serve, therefore, no useful purpose to institute 
 a comparison between the French, the English, and the 
 American conceptions of a constitution. We might take, 
 for instance, the Constitution of 1848, and point out how 
 this imperative act of the nation, creating out of noth- 
 ing an organised hierarchy, differs, on the one hand, 
 from the English Constitution founded on a series of 
 treaties made during the course of ages between certain 
 ancient corporations, the immemorial depositaries of pub- 
 lic powers ; and, on the other hand, differs from the 
 Federal Constitution of the United States, with its distinct 
 and sovereign bodies politic, which unite to create and to 
 limit the State. We might recognise in all this the in- 
 fluence of national characteristic of the English love 
 for tradition and informal precedent, of the French ten- 
 dency towards abstract rationalism, with its refined classi- 
 fications and its precise formulas. We might further 
 illustrate our theme by a contrast between the origins of 
 the American and the French democracy the former, 
 without a past, never having been mixed with any 
 other element, establishing its regime without strife and 
 
 1 A chair of constitutional law was created at Paris for Rossi in 1835, 
 but was abolished in 1851, and was revived only in 1879 (Boutmy).
 
 CH. i INSTABILITY OF FRENCH CONSTITUTIONS 267 
 
 without the destruction of institutions ; the latter, the final 
 transformation of an aged and complex society effected 
 by means of a struggle, violent, yet not wholly conclusive. 
 
 But while we are engaged on these instructive parallels, 
 Louis Bonaparte comes along, with no other merit to rec- 
 ommend him than the bearing of the name of one who, 
 half a century before, had made short work of constitu- 
 tions and their makers ; so before we have time to formu- 
 late our conclusions, the Sovereignty of the People ex- 
 presses itself in a manner repugnant to philosophers, and 
 by the voice of the plebiscite ratifies the Coup d'Etat of 
 December, as it had ratified that of the 18 Brumaire, thus 
 deciding to dispense with constitutional government for 
 a season. 
 
 A regime will have had to last half a century without 
 revolution before the French will begin to believe in the 
 durability of their constitutions, and before jurists can 
 make them the subject of profitable examination. Sixty 
 years ago, when the Monarchy of July gave promise of 
 establishing a permanent form of government in France, 
 and the prospects of the Orleans dynasty seemed assured, 
 Tocqueville, in the midst of his studies of American de- 
 mocracy, could not refrain from sounding a note of 
 scepticism. He was commenting upon the somewhat 
 ironical theory of the immutability of the French Consti- 
 tution, and illustrated it by quoting the decree of Chan- 
 cellor Maupeou under Louis XV., which provided that 
 the new tribunal of judges instituted by it should be ir- 
 removable, like their predecessors, who had just been 
 swept away. 1 This tradition of immutability has been 
 maintained, so that in the intervals of revolutions con- 
 1 La Democratic en Amerique, vol. i. note L.
 
 268 THE FRENCH CONSTITUTION BK. n 
 
 stitutional changes can only be effected by the deliberate 
 setting in motion of an elaborate and special machinery. 1 
 Here French and English ideas and practice are entirely 
 opposed. We have no revolutions in our country, but 
 we possess no legal safeguards against hasty amend- 
 ments of the Constitution. We have no cognisance of 
 constituent assemblies as distinct from legislative assem- 
 blies. Each succeeding Parliament is competent to act 
 in either capacity, and the same procedure with which 
 bankruptcy or cattle-plague is regulated would suffice 
 to alter the succession to the Crown. That the working 
 of this system, even with a wide franchise, does not 
 result in either inordinate constitutional changes, or 
 collisions between the Estates of the Realm, is doubtless 
 largely due to national character ; but it is also due to 
 the wisdom of our ancestors, who have always refrained 
 
 1 Revision: The doctrine was laid down in 1884 that, while it was 
 impossible to limit the powers of a revisioual Congress by any legal sanc- 
 tion, it was practicable to place a de facto limitation on the scope of their 
 deliberations, by a moral engagement taken by the majority in each 
 Chamber not to discuss any articles of the Constitution which had not 
 been formally specified in advance. There is no doubt that Art. 8 of the 
 Constitutional Law of February 25, 1875, in making the meeting of a 
 revisional assembly depend on a double resolution passed previously by 
 each of the two Chambers, intended that both branches of the Legislature 
 should be in accord, both on the necessity of a revision, and on the nature 
 of the questions to be decided. In 1884 the Prime Minister, M. Ferry, 
 and the Minister of Justice, M. Martin Feuill6e, in making their proposals 
 for Revision, laid down the axiom, which was not seriously questioned, 
 that there could be no convocation of the National Assembly unless the 
 resolutions of the two Chambers were identical in their general scope. 
 It is clear that this position detracts from the importance of a constituent 
 Congress, but there is no escaping from the dilemma ; so long as the con- 
 sent of the two Houses is required for the meeting of the Congress, either 
 its proceedings must be previously agreed upon, the Congress becoming 
 simply a registering assembly, or the proceedings are not agreed upon 
 and no Congress can take place.
 
 CH. i ORDER OP STUDYING QUESTIONS 269 
 
 from substituting a written constitution for the scattered 
 laws and traditions which order the government of the 
 kingdom. Drawn up in the form of a statute, it would 
 present perpetual temptation to reformers, even though 
 safeguarded by precautions, with which all communities, 
 whether prone to change or not, find it necessary to 
 protect a written constitution. 
 
 These considerations on the instability of the French 
 Constitution might seem to indicate that we should not 
 at the outset examine those institutions which during 
 the last century have been repeatedly subject to change, 
 but should turn first to those which, having survived 
 revolutions, may be regarded as permanently established. 
 
 Political prediction is always unsafe, but a prophet 
 would not be considered rash who foretold that in Eng- 
 land twenty years hence the Crown, with its attributes, 
 will remain unchanged, but that local administration 
 will have undergone serious modifications. On the other 
 hand, in France no one would predict the reform or the 
 abolition of the communal system in that period ; while 
 few are confident that the supreme executive power will 
 be then vested in a President of a Parliamentary Repub- 
 lic. This being so, the question arises whether it would 
 not be better to work upwards, studying Municipal and 
 Departmental organisation before dealing with the Exec- 
 utive and the Legislature. That plan has its advantages, 
 and was employed by Tocqueville in his description of 
 the system of the United States ; but he points out 
 that, while in America the commune lends its function- 
 aries to the Government, in centralised France the Gov- 
 ernment imposes its functionaries on the commune, 1 and 
 1 La Democratic en Amerique, vol. i. c. 5.
 
 270 THE FRENCH CONSTITUTION BK. H 
 
 little progress has been made since in the direction of 
 decentralisation. It is necessary, therefore, in order to 
 understand the organisation of the commune and of the 
 department, to study the machinery of the legislature 
 and of the central Government from which it depends.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE 1 
 
 FEW subjects are more attractive to the student of 
 modern democracy than the various conceptions which 
 the French people have held in the last hundred years of 
 the attributes of a chief of the Executive. They have 
 not succeeded one another with the gradual development 
 of evolution ; nor have they followed the regular course 
 of periodic revolution and reaction. They have to be 
 referred to a number of causes. The alleged instability 
 of the national character is not sufficient to account for 
 the history of the last century in France. Account has 
 also to be taken of the premature suddenness of the great 
 emancipation ; of the personality of the master into whose 
 arms France threw herself, not knowing what to do with 
 
 1 The scientific order of examining the component parts of the French 
 Constitution would be (1) the Constituent, (2) the Legislative, and (3) the 
 Executive Powers, but it will be more convenient to depart from it, and 
 before examining the Legislative power to consider the functions and the 
 position of the chief of the Executive under the Kepublic. The Presi- 
 dent does not unite in his person all the executive attributes of the Gov- 
 ernment, which he shares with his ministers ; but they, though not all 
 Senators or Deputies, are so dependent on the changing caprice of the 
 Lower Chamber, that they are in practice a temporary committee of the 
 Legislature, so that it will be best to treat of them under Parliament. 
 
 271
 
 272 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 her new liberty, who made the succession difficult for 
 ordinary mortals ; of the peculiar influence that exterior 
 relations have constantly had on the domestic destinies of 
 the country. Only thus is it possible to understand how 
 it was the same nation which, ten years after publishing 
 its Declaration of the Rights of Man, handed them all 
 over to the soldier whom it made Emperor, whose con- 
 sistent policy was a complete negation of each article 
 of that famous document ; which, having submitted 
 with pride to the glorious tyranny of a military dicta- 
 tor, accepted as his successors from the hands of his 
 foreign conquerors the unwarlike heirs of the regime, 
 the upsetting of which had cost Europe a quarter of a 
 century of convulsion ; which, half a generation later, 
 exchanged its belated exponents of the divine right of 
 kings for a statutory monarchy after the British model ; 
 and wearying of it wandered back into the wastes of 
 doctrinaire revolution, investing itself there with uni- 
 versal suffrage, which it forthwith confided to the 
 guardianship of Louis Napoleon to form the anomalous 
 foundation of the anomalous autocracy established by 
 him. 
 
 The examination of these phenomena, of deep interest 
 to the philosophic historian, has no place in a work deal- 
 ing with the actual institutions of France. The nomina- 
 tion of Bonaparte to the Consulate, by the remnant of the 
 Anciens and the Cinq Cents, has no more connection with 
 the manner in which M. Carnot or M. Faure was chosen 
 to the Presidency of the Republic, than has the election 
 of Hugues Capet as King by the nobles and prelates of 
 the Duchy of France, save in the sense that every politi- 
 cal event of this century depends on the Revolution, and
 
 OH. n VICISSITUDES OF FRENCH EXECUTIVE 273 
 
 on the subsequent reconstruction of the country by Napo- 
 leon. 
 
 In considering the position and attributes of the Presi- 
 dent of the Republic, we have not therefore to investigate 
 an hierarchic line even of the moderate length of that 
 of the Presidents of the United States. The defeat of 
 Sedan, and the consequent overthrow of the Second 
 Empire, make 1870 a date as indicative of a new order 
 of things in France as 1792 or 1848. A new Govern- 
 ment had to be created out of nothing amid circum- 
 stances of peculiar hardship. The Government of the 
 4th of September was only a Committee of National 
 Defence; and it was not until the capitulation of Paris 
 that the armistice gave the opportunity for the election 
 of a National Assembly. The first act of that body on 
 meeting at Bordeaux was unanimously 1 to declare M. 
 Thiers " Chief of the Executive of the French Repub- 
 lic." By his investiture with that title, and by its 
 use in the preliminaries of peace, signed at Versailles 
 the following week, the Third Republic was consecrated 
 by the voice of the people. If the name given to it of 
 a " Republic without Republicans " was an exaggera- 
 tion, it is true that the National Assembly elected by 
 universal suffrage was an anti-Republican body, for no 
 French Legislature of the century had included so many 
 men of rank and fortune. A great majority of its mem- 
 bers were of the two sections of the Monarchical party, 
 the Imperialists being discredited by the war, while the 
 prolongation of the struggle by Gambetta's heroic per- 
 sistence, and the menace of Revolution in Paris, covered 
 
 1 February 17, 1871. The Assembly was so nearly unanimous that a 
 division was not called for. 
 
 VOL. I T
 
 274 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 Republicanism with unpopularity in the country, which 
 the unpatriotic excesses of the Commune were soon to 
 invigorate. 
 
 A year after Sedan the Assembly passed a law con- 
 ferring on the Chief of the Executive the title of Presi- 
 dent of the Republic. 1 M. Thiers continued to be a 
 member of the National Assembly, and sometimes took 
 part in its debates. It was not prepared to follow the 
 old Minister of Louis Philippe in his gradual but defi- 
 nite adoption of the Republican form of government. 
 Gambetta's famous speech 2 at Grenoble, in which he 
 declared that a new social stratum was about to take 
 possession of political power, alarmed Moderates as well 
 as extreme Reactionaries, and just when the German 
 army of occupation was withdrawn before the stipu- 
 lated time, owing to the speedy payment of the war 
 indemnity by the patriotic energy of M. Thiers, his 
 Government was defeated in the Assembly after a 
 speech he had made in its support. The President 
 forthwith tendered his resignation, 3 although a law had 
 been passed, 4 in consequence of his previous threat to 
 resign, substituting ministerial for presidential responsi- 
 
 1 The law was passed by a majority of 491 to 94, Gambetta and one 
 or two Radicals, who wanted an appeal to the country, voting in the 
 minority, which was generally composed of extreme Monarchists (Annales 
 de I'Ass. Nat. i. 6). 
 
 2 September 26, 1872, "Les nouvelles couches." 
 8 May 24, 1873. 
 
 * March 13, 1873. Previous to this the President had the right to take 
 part in debates. This law enacted that he could only be heard after giving 
 notice to the President of the Chamber, and that no debate could take 
 place during the sitting in which he had thus taken part. The law created 
 no precedent for M. Thiers' successors, and its only importance was in 
 laying down the principle that no parliamentary assembly could deliberate 
 freely in the presence of the Chief of the Executive.
 
 en. H M. THIERS 275 
 
 bility in the case of collisions between the Chief of the 
 State and the Assembly. But the majority did not ask 
 M. Thiers this time to reconsider his decision, and with 
 unbecoming haste elected and proclaimed on the spot 
 Marshal MacMahon President of the French Republic. 
 The aged statesman may have committed errors ; per- 
 sonal ambition may have been a motive for his adhe- 
 sion to the principle of a Republic ; the consciousness 
 of the value of his services to his country may have 
 unduly filled him with the idea that he was indispensa- 
 ble to its government ; the Reactionaries may have hon- 
 estly believed that his adoption of the Republic would 
 not save it from the hands of those whose Republican- 
 ism was that of the Commune ; 1 nevertheless, in the 
 eyes of Europe, the curt dismissal of the venerable Lib- 
 erator of the Territory was an act of wanton ingratitude, 
 prejudicial to France as seeming to be a token of national 
 inconstancy. 2 Its only justification would have been the 
 success of the majority in founding a stable government 
 of monarchical form. The sole result, however, of the 
 
 1 The rupture of the majority with the President was brought about by 
 the hostile attitude of the extreme Republicans to him in the matter of 
 the Barodet election. M. de Re"musat, M. Thiers' Minister for Foreign 
 Affairs, was candidate for Paris, and was opposed by M. Barodet, a sym- 
 pathiser with the Commune (elected Senator of the Seine twenty-three 
 years later in 1896), whom Gambetta supported, the President's candi- 
 date being beaten by 45,000 votes. 
 
 2 The Reactionaries assert that Prince Bismarck took exception to the 
 dismissal of M. Thiers, because he thought that the result would be the 
 foundation of a strong monarchy better able than the Republic to cope 
 with Germany. This theory seems to be founded on unofficial state- 
 ments made by M. de Gontaut Biron, the Royalist Ambassador of France 
 at Berlin ; but even if he represented accurately the feeling of the Ger- 
 man Chancellor, it is certain that the indignation felt in England and 
 elsewhere at the treatment of M. Thiers was disinterested.
 
 276 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. 11 
 
 24th of May, 1873, was to provide a definite date to mark 
 the opening of the era of reactionary incompetence in 
 France. During many years after the day when the 
 Monarchists sacrificed M. Thiers, because he seemed 
 to obstruct their schemes, the country intimated from 
 time to time, more or less clearly, that it was not in- 
 disposed to discard the Republic, if only a strong and 
 imposing form of government were forthcoming to take 
 its place ; and each recurring occasion only helped to 
 establish a tradition that anti-Republicanism in France 
 is synonymous with political feebleness and ineptitude. 
 
 It is from the election of Marshal MacMahon that the 
 history of the Presidency of the Third Republic com- 
 mences, though his election was compassed for the pur- 
 pose of extinguishing both the Presidency and the 
 Republic. 
 
 When the National Assembly met in November, 1873, 
 the President, in his message read by the Prime Minister, 
 the Due de Broglie, 1 after remarking that nothing had 
 occurred in the vacation to trouble the public peace, rec- 
 ommended the House to establish a form of government 
 which would attract the support of all lovers of order 
 without distinction of party. Untroubled as the autumn 
 had been, important events had occurred which produced, 
 instead of a decided declaration of policy, this vague 
 appeal for the establishment of a vague government. 
 The Comte de Paris had made his ill-starred pilgrimage 
 to Frohsdorf 2 to abandon to the grandson of Charles X. 
 
 1 At that epoch the Minister who formed and gave his name to the 
 Cabinet was officially styled "Vice-President of the Council." After 
 1876 he was called " President of the Council." 
 
 8 August 6, 1873.
 
 CH. n THE MONARCHICAL FUSION 277 
 
 the pretensions of the family of Orleans to the Crown, 
 and to accept the position of Dauphin of France, thus, 
 by implication, denouncing his grandfather Louis Phi- 
 lippe as a usurper. With the government of Moral Order 
 in command of the administration, it seemed, in spite of 
 the successes of Republican candidates at legislative bye- 
 elections, as though the moment had arrived for the res- 
 toration of the Monarchy, when its supporters were 
 thrown into disarray by the Comte de Chambord's 1 
 resumption of his original resolve only to accept the 
 Crown with the white flag, which thus became the 
 shroud of the Royalist party. Not that that party in- 
 tended to end its life at the moment when it seemed to 
 be fuller of vitality than at any period since 1815; but 
 the situation was embarrassing. A Republic without 
 Republicans is less anomalous than a Monarchy without a 
 king, and the only possibility of the advent of a king lay 
 in the abdication or the death of the Comte de Chambord, 
 whose adherence to the white flag alienated even ardent 
 anti-Republicans, the gallant soldier at the head of af- 
 fairs declaring that the rifles would go off by themselves 
 if the army were despoiled of its glorious tricolour. 
 
 The uncertainty as to what form of government the 
 country desired was such that even the Bonapartists, 
 presuming on the Emperor's death to dim the stigma of 
 Sedan, and full of hope in the stripling promise of his son, 
 boldly proposed their traditional remedy for the perplex- 
 ities of democracies, and invited the Assembly to pre- 
 scribe a plebiscite at which every adult citizen should 
 pronounce for Monarchy, Republic, or Empire. 2 Mean- 
 
 1 October 27, 1873. 
 
 2 Proposition &schas$erieux, November 5, 1873.
 
 278 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 while the reproach addressed by the Republicans to the 
 unsolid monarchical majority seemed justified. " You 
 will not inaugurate the Republic," said MM. Grevy and 
 Jules Simon, "and you cannot found the Monarchy." 1 
 Undoubtedly the idea of the majority in establishing the 
 Septennate was that it would be a halting-place where 
 the Monarchists might organise their forces and arrange 
 their differences, while the permanent exclusion of the 
 aged M. Thiers might thus be assured. No one, how- 
 ever, quite knew the part that Marshal MacMahon was 
 going to play. When the proposal was made to confer 
 the Presidency upon him for ten years, that term obvi- 
 ously suggested comparisons with the Consulate conferred 
 on Bonaparte, but it was equally obvious that no parallel 
 could be drawn with the 18 Brumaire, as no one imputed 
 to the Marshal the intention of re-establishing a throne for 
 his own occupation. Some of the Royalists described the 
 arrangement as a Protectorate ; others referred to the 
 Lieutenancy- General of the Comte d'Artois in 1814 
 between Napoleon's abdication at Fontainebleau and the 
 arrival of Louis XVIII. ; while other orators demanded, 
 as had been already asked concerning M. Thiers, whether 
 MacMahon was going to be a Washington or a Monk. 
 
 The latter of those worthies is the one hero of English 
 history whose name since the French Revolution has been 
 more familiar in France than in England. The successive 
 dethronements of various dynasties, and the subsequent 
 recall of some of them, have made Frenchmen constantly 
 regard a restoration of a former regime as the possible 
 termination of every form of government. Consequently 
 the apparition of the General who brought back Charles 
 1 Assemble Nationale : Stances du 18 et 19 Novembre, 1873.
 
 CH. n THE TRADITION OF MONK 279 
 
 Stuart to England is always being looked for, and each 
 generation asks, " Who is to be the Monk of our Restora- 
 tion ? " When Dumouriez, after his victories of Valmy 
 and Jemmapes, declared against the Convention, his de- 
 fection was ascribed to the wish to be the Monk of the 
 French Revolution. Five years later, amid the anarchy 
 of the Directory, the Royalists rashly hoped that the fame 
 of Monk might be the ambition of the young hero of 
 Arcola and of Rivoli. When, in 1814, that General of 
 the Army of Italy was relegated to an Italian island, hav- 
 ing in the meanwhile been Emperor of Western Europe, 
 would-be Monks to bring back the Bourbons swarmed 
 among the "gens de Bonaparte." It was not the moment 
 for an ambitious soldier to play the part, as Marmont 
 found out, but there was no lack of civilians among the 
 late Imperial retinue to share the credit of the Restoration 
 with the Allies. Talleyrand would not have disdained it, 
 and Fouche, Duke of the Empire, thought that his share 
 in the guillotining of one royal brother demanded his 
 instant protection of the two survivors. The escape from 
 Elba, however, put an end to retrospective claims to the 
 Monkship of the first Restoration, and when Louis XVIII. 
 was finally put back in the Tuileries no one disputed that 
 he owed his throne to alien aid, as the grateful monarch 
 testified when, like Charles II. who created his restorer 
 Duke of Albemarle, he made Wellington Due de Brunoy 
 in the kingdom of France as recompense for the victory 
 of Waterloo. 1 The nephew of the loser of that battle was 
 
 1 The formal granting of this title by Louis XVIII. to the Duke of 
 Wellington is difficult to verify. In the Illustrated News of September 
 25, 1852, a letter was published from a witness of the entry of the Allies 
 into Paris who repeated the story that Louis XVIII. made Wellington 
 "Duke of Brunoy," and also a " Knight of the Holy Ghost and a Mar-
 
 280 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 perhaps the least likely Monk ever conceived, yet there 
 were ingenuous Royalists who imagined that Louis Napo- 
 
 j 
 
 leon made his Coup d'Etat to prepare the way for the 
 elder Bourbons disinherited by his enemies the Orleans. 
 The Bishop of Chartres, Mgr. de Mentals, an aged Legiti- 
 mist, ventured thus to address the Prince President to 
 his face : " You cannot keep for yourself the supreme 
 power. The part that you have to play is that of Monk, 
 and in saving France thus you will acquire a more lasting 
 glory than that of your uncle." 1 When the Man of De- 
 cember was a fallen Emperor and a prisoner at Wilhelm- 
 shohe, it was the perverted image of Monk which impelled 
 Bazaine to treason at Metz ; and when the Comte de 
 
 shal of France," but at his funeral the Dukedom of Brunoy was not 
 included in the list of foreign titles proclaimed at the grave-side by the 
 Heralds. Louis XVIII. before the Revolution, when Comte de Provence, 
 purchased the Seigneurie of Brunoy from the heirs of Marmontel, who, 
 early in the century, had bought from the La Rochefoucauld family the 
 Marquisate, which, in 1775, was erected into a Duche"-Pairie. It was 
 thus the private appanage of the restored King, and if he conferred a title 
 on the Duke of Wellington it is likely to have been selected by him as a 
 personal gift. Living near Brunoy, I found that though the tradition 
 lingered there nothing authentic was known about it. Messrs. Hachette 
 told me that they had not been able to corroborate the version of it in 
 the 1878 edition of their Environs de Paris Elustres : it was, I imagine, 
 copied from the Itineraire de Paris a Sens par Jeannest St. Hilaire, 
 where the fact is stated without the citation of decree or letters patent. 
 The Duchess of Wellington kindly made some inquiries at my request at 
 the Heralds' College in 1895, without result. In the Bulletins des Lois of 
 the years succeeding the Restoration I can find no decree conferring this 
 title among the patents of honours conferred on Talleyrand and other 
 makers of the Restoration : but if Louis XVIII. conferred French hon- 
 ours on the victor of Waterloo, he would not have given excessive pub- 
 licity to them. A learned resident of Brunoy, M. Ch. Mottheau, who 
 does not think that the story was a mere invention of Bonapartist enemies 
 of the Bourbons, informs me that a relative of M. de Courcel is investi- 
 gating the interesting point. 
 
 1 Hist, du Cardinal Pie, liv. ii. c. 4.
 
 CH. ii THE SEPTENNATE OF MACMAHON 281 
 
 Paris, with the fatality which attended his every transac- 
 tion, accepted in an evil moment the protection of the 
 soldier of fortune who, as Minister of War, had insolently 
 dismissed his kinsman from the army of France, it was 
 because his adherents were persuaded that at last a veri- 
 table Monk had appeared in the person of General Bou- 
 langer. 
 
 Marshal MacMahon did not model his conduct on that 
 of any historical personage, either in restoring a dynasty, 
 or in establishing a commonwealth, or in seizing a dicta- 
 torship. The Septennate was conferred upon him, in spite 
 of the opposition of the Republicans, as a bridge of years 
 which might possibly lead from the Republic to a Mon- 
 archy. Some of the opposition leaders denounced the 
 arrangement as illegal. They argued that the National 
 Assembly was a constituent body whose mandate was to 
 make a constitution, and that in preluding that work by 
 attaching the Presidency to a person for a term of years 
 beyond the limits of its own existence, it was both trans- 
 gressing its powers and destroying its constituent char- 
 acter. One of the weightiest opponents of the Law of 
 November, 1873, conferring the Presidency on MacMahon 
 for seven years, was the only President of the Republic 
 who ever profited to the full from the septennial rule thus 
 established. M. Grevy had, in the National Assembly of 
 1848, acquired his first fame in opposing the creation of 
 the office of President of the Republic, and the general 
 tenor of his criticisms during the debates of 1873 and 
 1875 was to indicate the dangerous use to which that post 
 might be put. 
 
 Thus the Chambers, created under the Constitution of 
 1875, were not called upon to use their prerogative in
 
 282 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 choosing a chief of the Executive, as they found a Presi- 
 dent ready installed, who eventually was much more dif- 
 ficult to dislodge than modern rulers of France usually 
 have been, 1 and the somewhat confused debates in the 
 National Assembly throw little new light on the concep- 
 tion of the Chief of the State. The most important 
 incident of these discussions occurred after the adoption 
 of an amendment making the Senate elective by the same 
 electors as the Chamber of Deputies : whereupon the 
 President sent a message to the Assembly to the effect 
 that as that vote destroyed the special character of the 
 Second Chamber, and compromised the conservative inter- 
 ests of the country, he could not accept it. 2 The Repub- 
 licans yielded, and during all the long period in which 
 they have had the majority in the two Chambers they 
 have never used it to restore the amendment of the Con- 
 stitution disallowed by Marshal MacMahon. 
 
 II 
 
 The articles of the Constitution of 1875 relating to the 
 President of the Republic, his election and his powers, 
 
 1 The legendary " J'y suis, j'y reste," which became the device of the 
 Marshal during his conflict with the Chamber after the " Seize Mai," was 
 constantly quoted as indicative of his character long before there was any 
 certainty of the Republicans getting the upper hand. In the Assemble 
 Nationale, on the eve of the passing of the Septennate law, M. de Castel- 
 lane told the well-known story, u C'e"tait a Malakoff : le premier il entre 
 dans la citadelle ; elle est mine'e : elle va 1'ensevelir sous ses ruines ; 
 n'importe. II se jette sur le te'le'graphe et e"crit a son chef cette parole 
 sublime : ' J'y suis et j'y reste.' Que le parti conservateur imite cet 
 exemple. Lui aussi il est dans une tour mine'e," etc. (Seance du 18 
 Novembre, 1873). 
 
 2 Assembled Nationale: Stances du 11 et 12 Ffivrier, 1875 (see vol. ii. 
 p. 6).
 
 CH. n PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS 283 
 
 are as follows. He is elected by absolute majority of 
 the Senate and Chamber united, which electoral college 
 is called the National Assembly, and in the case of ex- 
 traordinary vacancy, owing to death or other cause, it is 
 forthwith summoned for the election of a new President, 1 
 the Council of Ministers being invested with the executive 
 power in the interval. He is elected for seven years and 
 can be re-elected, 2 but it is necessary to complete the entire 
 septennial term in order to be eligible for re-election, as 
 the term commences from the day of the appointment of 
 the actual President without any reference to the duration 
 of the presidency of his predecessor. 3 As M. Grevy was 
 made to relinquish the presidency early in his second 
 term, France has not yet experienced the government of 
 one President of the Republic for fourteen years. It is 
 urged that that period is far too long for an elective chief 
 of the State to be at the head of affairs, it being the length 
 of an average reign in most countries, or indeed of a 
 dynasty in modern France longer than the First Empire, 
 and almost as long as the Restoration. The unpopularity 
 of M. Grevy in his second term of office, and the compara- 
 
 1L.C. 25 FeVrier, 1875, art. 2 et 7. (The letters L.C. signify Loi 
 Constitutionnelle. ) 
 
 2 L.C. 25 Fe"vrier, 1875, art 2. 
 
 8 In the early days of Marshal MacMahon's presidency it was his 
 practice to summon informally to the Elyse'e certain prominent members 
 of the Right Centre and of the Left Centre of the National Assembly to 
 confer with him on the Constitutional Laws then about to be voted ; and 
 the moderate Conservatives thus proposed a scheme somewhat resembling 
 the Constitutional Law of the United States relating to the vacancy in the 
 office of President to the effect that if the Marshal disappeared before 
 the close of his septennate he should be replaced by another President 
 who should hold office until 1880, the date at which the seven years 
 of the Marshal expired. This plan was known as the "Septennat 
 ioipersonnel."
 
 284 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 tive ease with which he was prevailed upon to resign, 
 perhaps indicate that a prolonged sojourn at the head of 
 the State contains in itself the remedy to prevent its be- 
 coming dangerous. 
 
 The President of the Republic has the right of initiat- 
 ing laws concurrently with the members of the two 
 Chambers, 1 a power which bears more resemblance to that 
 enjoyed by the Sovereign in England and in other con- 
 stitutional monarchies than that of the President of the 
 United States, who only recommends measures to the 
 examination of Congress. 2 He promulgates the laws 
 when they have been voted by the two Chambers within 
 a month in ordinary cases, and within three days if they 
 are declared urgent by either House of Legislature. 3 He 
 has the right of pardon, 4 which is practically an absolute 
 right, subject to certain formalities. He has at his dis- 
 position the armed forces of the country, a power which 
 seems remarkable when it is considered that the President 
 to whom it was given without restriction by the Assembly 
 which established the Republic was a Marshal of France. 
 The explanation seems to be that the Republicans were so 
 glad to have the Republican regime assured by peaceable 
 means that they were willing to give large prerogatives to 
 the Chief of the State, feeling sure that in the face of the 
 hopeless division of the monarchical parties they could 
 not be used by the Marshal-President against the young 
 Republic, and that in the future the legislative represent- 
 atives, to whom was confided the choice of the Chief of 
 the Executive, would take care not to elect a person likely 
 
 1 L.C. 25 Fe'vrier, 1875, art. 3. 
 
 a Pierre, Traite de Droit Politique : " Initiative des Lois." 
 
 L.C. 16 Juillet, 1875, art. 7. L.C. 25 Fe'vrier, 1875, art. 3.
 
 CH. ii POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT 285 
 
 to misuse this prerogative. 1 It is limited by the Con- 
 stitutional Law of July, 1875, which declares that the 
 President cannot declare war without the previous con- 
 sent of the two Chambers. 2 All civil and military ap- 
 pointments are made by him, but this is only a nominal 
 prerogative, 3 the President of the French Republic having 
 no other patronage at his disposal than that of the posts 
 in his own household. The American spoils' system has 
 no counterpart in France. It is practised in the sense 
 that since the Republicans came into power the profession 
 of Reactionary opinions has been generally a bar to em- 
 ployment in the administration and the magistracy, just 
 as Republicans under the government of Moral Order 
 were excluded from public appointments. But so far 
 from the election of a new President causing an upheaval 
 in the civil service, like that associated with the advent 
 to office of a President in the United States, there are 
 fewer functionaries affected by a change of the Chief of 
 the State than by one of the frequent changes of ministry. 
 Consequently the crowd of office-seekers who throng the 
 receptions at the White House is unknown at the Elysee, 
 as on the most importunate the French President has 
 nothing to bestow. 4 
 
 1 " Nous avons consent! a vous donner le pouvoir exe"cutif le plus fort 
 qu'on ait jamais constitue" dans un pays detection et de democratic " 
 (Gambetta, Ass. Nat. Stance du 12 Fe"vrier, 1875). 
 
 2 L.C. 16 Juillet, 1875, art. 9. 
 
 3 M. Jules Simon records that when he became Prime Minister in 1876 
 Marshal MacMahon, in the most constitutional manner, never refused his 
 signature for the replacing of Reactionary functionaries by Republicans, 
 though the President made no disguise of his personal preference for 
 "enemies of the Republic." 
 
 * L.C. 25 Fe"vrier, 1875, art. 3. The Constitution, in providing that 
 every act of the President has to be countersigned by a Minister, relieves 
 him of the responsibility of private patronage.
 
 286 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. 11 
 
 The President of the Republic usually presides over 
 the meetings of the Cabinet, in which he takes some- 
 times an active part, his observations generally relating 
 to matters within the competence of the Foreign Minister 
 or the Minister of War. He presides at all the national 
 solemnities, and to him are accredited ambassadors and 
 diplomatic envoys : he has, moreover, under certain lim- 
 itations, the power to ratify and negotiate treaties. 1 
 Unlike the Ministers he is accounted personally respon- 
 sible only in the case of high treason : 2 moreover a mem- 
 ber of any family which has reigned over France is 
 ineligible for the office. 8 
 
 Some of these attributes will be noticed later ; but 
 two prerogatives conferred on the President by the Con- 
 stitution, that of dissolving the Chamber of Deputies 
 before its legal term, on the advice of the Senate, and 
 that of adjourning the sittings of Parliament for a 
 month, 4 were used by Marshal MacMahon during the 
 crisis known as the Seize Mai, from the date on which 
 it commenced, and reference to it here will fall in proper 
 chronological order. 
 
 The first Chamber elected after the voting of the Con- 
 stitutional Laws of 1875 contained a large Republican 
 majority, the famous 363, while in the Senate the Re- 
 actionaries prevailed. The clerical party, disappointed 
 at its defeat at the polls, due in part to its exterior inter- 
 ference, which was imperilling the relations of France 
 with Germany and Italy, became so aggressive that the 
 ministry, presided over by M. Jules Simon, the least 
 anti-clerical of French Liberals, had to accept a motion 
 
 1 L.C. 16 Juillet, 1875, art. 8. L.C. 13 Aofit, 1884, art. 2. 
 
 2 L.C. 25 F6vrier, 1876, art. 6. * L.C. 16 Juillet, 1875, art. 2.
 
 CH. ii THE SEIZE MAI 287 
 
 inviting it to use the same disciplinary policy towards 
 the Church which had been followed by Napoleon III. 
 and Louis Philippe. It was then that Gambetta made 
 use of his famous exclamation, "Le clericalisme, voila 
 1'ennemi." Some days later, on the morrow of a less 
 important debate, a letter appeared in the Officiel, dated 
 May 16, 1877, from President MacMahon to his Prime 
 Minister, informing him that he had no longer his con- 
 fidence, as it was clear that he had lost the influence 
 over the Chamber which a President of the Council 
 ought to exercise. 
 
 M. Jules Simon resigned and the Due de Broglie took 
 his place, the President announcing to the Chambers that 
 he intended to act on his constitutional right of choosing 
 counsellors sharing his views, and by virtue of the Law 
 of 1875 he adjourned them for a month. On resuming, 
 the Lower House, by a large majority, denounced the 
 coalition of groups hostile to the Republic, and the Sen- 
 ate, at the request of the President, authorised the disso- 
 lution of the Chamber. The administrative electoral 
 machinery was now in the hands of the Reactionaries, the 
 Broglie Ministry having followed the policy, traditional 
 in France, of replacing the functionaries hostile to it with 
 its own partisans ; but in spite of this advantage for the 
 official candidates, patronised by the Government accord- 
 ing to the methods practised under the Empire, and of a 
 fiery manifesto of the Marshal-President (which indeed 
 was eclipsed by a posthumous appeal of M. Thiers, who 
 died on the eve of the elections), a Republican majority 
 was sent back to the Chamber, and the Broglie Cabinet 
 resigned. The Marshal sent for General de Rochebouet, 
 who formed a ministry of unknown Reactionaries, but as
 
 288 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 the Chamber refused to vote supply it survived only for a 
 few days, when M. Dufaure formed a Republican Cabinet l 
 which lasted for the remainder of the MacMahon Presi- 
 dency. 
 
 The history of the Seize Mai merits attention, as it 
 indicates the difference of the English and the French 
 conception of what is constitutional, and also displays 
 how inconveniently a written constitution may work with 
 parliamentary institutions. The Constitutional Laws of 
 the Third Republic make no mention of the nomination 
 of Ministers which is deemed the prerogative of the Presi- 
 dent, in virtue of the article investing him with the ap- 
 pointment to all civil and military posts. The practice 
 now is for a member of the retiring Cabinet 2 to counter- 
 sign the presidential nomination of the new Prime Minister, 
 who in turn countersigns those of his colleagues ; but if 
 all the retiring Ministers refused to thus endorse the 
 nomination of the new President of the Council there 
 would probably be a deadlock, the law making no provi- 
 sion for the case. Here we have then what in England 
 would be called a constitutional practice growing up side 
 by side with a written Constitution. Again, the law is 
 silent on the powers of the President of the Republic to 
 dismiss a ministry, so an unwritten theory has here also 
 to be applied to the effect that the President cannot make 
 his Ministers resign so long as they retain the confidence 
 of the majority in the popular chamber. But on the Seize 
 Mai the ministry dismissed by the Marshal had a great 
 majority in the Chamber, and his arbitrary disregard for 
 it was, from the English point of view, an unconstitu- 
 
 1 December 13, 1877. 
 
 2 Usually the Keeper of the Seals, or the retiring Prime Minister.
 
 CH. ii IMPORTANCE OF THE SEIZE MAI 289 
 
 tional act. Yet contemporary records show that amid all 
 the passion roused by this coup d'Stat, it was rarely sug- 
 gested that the President had acted unconstitutionally, 
 though his action was notoriously due to the advice of 
 a small band of irresponsible counsellors unknown to the 
 Constitution. Indeed, Gambetta, the rival champion of 
 MacMahon in this crisis, said in all sincerity on the mor- 
 row of the event, " No one can deny the President's loyalty 
 to the Constitution." 1 This indicates precisely the dif- 
 ference between the English and the French conception of 
 loyalty to a Constitution. 2 The British sovereign might 
 adhere to the letter of the written law, and yet be guilty 
 of unconstitutional conduct: the chief of the French 
 Executive, so long as he adheres to the letter of the writ- 
 ten law, is not accounted disloyal to the Constitution, 
 even by his enemies. 
 
 The turbulence of the debates at Versailles when the 
 Chamber reassembled did not favour calm juridical dis- 
 cussion, and few of the speakers 3 referred to the consti- 
 tutional aspect of the crisis. Gambetta during the 
 adjournment had said, "The struggle is more profound 
 than a mere combat for the Constitution. The struggle 
 is between the old castes, with their privileges of a by- 
 gone regime, between the agents of the theocracy of 
 Rome, and the sons of 1789. " 4 This language, stripped 
 
 1 Chambre des Deputes, 17 Mai, 1877. 
 
 2 Certain Constitutional authorities of our colonies do not take quite 
 this view. They justify a governor, the representative of the British sov- 
 ereign, who would dismiss a ministry possessing a majority in the repre- 
 sentative Assembly, provided that he believed that the electorate would 
 give a majority to the new minister called to office, and this practice seems 
 to be justified, as constitutional, by Secretaries of State. 
 
 * M. Jules Ferry dealt with it : Chambre des Ddput^s, 18 Juin, 1877. 
 4 Discours a la Deputation de la Jeunesse des e"coles : 1 Juin, 1877. 
 VOL. i c
 
 290 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. 11 
 
 of rhetoric, expressed the opinion of both parties in the 
 contest. The Seize Mai was a political and not a consti- 
 tutional crisis. The question at issue was not whether 
 the President of the Republic should have the right to 
 override the majority of the popular chamber, but whether 
 the Republic should continue to exist. That the Repub- 
 licans have never, during their subsequent predominance, 
 amended the Constitution by limiting the powers of the 
 President in dismissing or choosing his Ministers, shows 
 that the Seize Mai was an attempt to change the political 
 form of government rather than to enlarge the preroga- 
 tive of the Chief of the State. The comparative experi- 
 ence of the methods of Marshal MacMahon and of Louis 
 Napoleon proved to France that a coup d'Stat, to be effec- 
 tive, requires armed force which no constitutional enact- 
 ments can guard against. 
 
 The pretension assumed by the President to dismiss a 
 Minister for carrying or accepting a resolution in the 
 popular chamber bears little analogy to the right of veto 
 on legislation exercised by certain constitutional rulers, 
 though the President has a power resembling that of 
 veto. He can, after the passing of a bill in the two 
 Chambers, by a message to them insist on a further de- 
 liberation on it. 1 This right cannot be applied to any 
 measure revising the Constitution, and therefore affecting 
 the President's own position, as the National Assembly 
 convoked for a congress of revision is dissolved the mo- 
 ment it has voted its amendments of the Constitution : 
 thus, as a message cannot be addressed to a body which has 
 ceased to exist, the President has no means of demanding 
 a second deliberation upon measures relating to himself. 
 * L.C. 16 Juillet, 1875, art. 7.
 
 CH. ii IMPORTANCE OF THE SEIZE MAI 291 
 
 The coup d'etat of the Seize Mai was condemned by 
 all Europe from its inception. Even had it produced 
 a reactionary majority it is hard to see what would have 
 been done with it, for the Comte de Chainbord had still 
 six years to live, so a Restoration was not practical, 
 and MacMahon had neither the ambition nor the un- 
 scrupulousness to institute a military dictatorship. Its 
 chief effects were to prove again to the country the in- 
 competence of the Monarchists, and, by associating in 
 the public mind the Church with this abortive attempt, 
 to provoke reprisals from the anti-clericals when they got 
 the upper hand, the bitterness of which still lingers in 
 the land. After the submission of Marshal MacMahon, 
 Gambetta sagaciously expressed the wish that he should 
 be allowed to complete his term, so that the peaceful 
 transmission of his powers to a duly elected successor 
 might display the advantage of Republican rule over the 
 other regimes of the century, under which all reigns but 
 one had come to a violent end. 1 But the old soldier 
 found himself isolated, and in January, 1879, he made a 
 difference of opinion on a military question an excuse for 
 resigning, when M. Jules Grevy, the President of the 
 Chamber, was elected to succeed him by the National 
 Assembly, which thus met for the first time under the 
 provisions of the Constitutional Law. 3 
 
 Ill 
 
 M. Grevy's first presidential term presents few points 
 of constitutional interest. Abuse of prerogative was not 
 to be feared from the grave leader of the bar, who, under 
 
 1 Discours & Romans, 18 Septembre, 1878. 
 1 L.C. 26 Ftfvrier, 1876, art, 2, 7.
 
 202 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. 11 
 
 the Empire, had been pointed out to young Republicans 
 as the author of the amendment to the Constitution of 
 1848 which, if carried, would have prevented the Coup 
 d'Etat of 1851. l After that event his abstention from 
 militant politics, and on the 4th of September, 1870, his 
 refusal to join the Government of National Defence be- 
 cause it was the offspring of revolution, showed him to 
 be a person of calm ambitions. But though, even before 
 the war, he was spoken of as a possible President of the 
 Republic, he only attained the high office by a series of 
 chances, being chosen on the refusal of M. Dufaure to be 
 nominated, and practically on the proposition of Gam- 
 betta. The latter, indisposed to hurry to the Presidency 
 of the Republic, was ready to accept the Premiership of 
 M. Grevy's first ministry, but assured by his rivals, of 
 whom the new President of the Republic was the most 
 jealous, that time was not yet ripe for him nominally to 
 direct the affairs of the country, he accepted the Presi- 
 dency of the Chamber. In that position he wielded 
 immense power without responsibility ; but it was a 
 situation of self-effacement, and M. Grevy's intrigues, 
 which kept him there, form a striking instance of the 
 influence of a President of the Republic on the destinies 
 of France. Some there are who ascribe to this initial 
 policy of M. GreVy the errors, the divisions, and the 
 scandals which have marked the history of the Republic, 
 of which, then intact and of clean record, the vigour and 
 popularity of Gambetta might have been the columns of 
 support and adornment. Such a lament implies that had 
 
 1 The amendment was to the effect that the Second Republic should 
 not have a President, the executive power being delegated by the National 
 Assembly to the President of the Council of Ministers.
 
 CH. ii PRESIDENCY OF M. GREVY 293 
 
 Gambetta been given a free hand to govern France he 
 would not have died, and thus it falls into the category 
 of regrets which attend the cutting off in their prime of 
 all lives of potential rulers in a land of revolutions, and 
 are as futile as those inspired by the untimely tombs of 
 the Due de Berry and of the Due d' Orleans, of the King 
 of Rome and of the Prince Imperial. M. Grevy's first 
 three Prime Ministers MM. Waddington, de Freycinet, 
 and Ferry were men of high ability : but by deliber- 
 ately keeping out of office, until an unfavourable mo- 
 ment, the one man capable of uniting a strong majority, 
 the President of the Republic perpetuated the vicious 
 system, no longer inevitable as it had been under the 
 confused regime of Marshal MacMahon, of short-lived 
 ministries representing groups. 
 
 In thus effacing a personality which gave promise of 
 overshadowing every other in France, M. Grevy was 
 aided by Gambetta's rivals. The astute veteran, who 
 had bided his time since 1848, thought that as the oifice, 
 the creation of which he had opposed a generation before, 
 had by the irony of chance devolved on him, it would 
 be ingratitude to fate if he did not occupy it for the rest 
 of his days. The Republic was quite willing, when 
 Gambetta was dead, that M. Grevy should be President 
 for life, the system of short-lived ministries having 
 effectually discredited in turn the reputation of every 
 prominent politician. In December, 1885, the National 
 Assembly met under the provision of the Constitution 
 that a month before the legal term of the powers of the 
 President the two Chambers shall unite to fill the office 
 for another seven years. 1 The question was raised of 
 1 L.C. 26 F^vrier, 1875, art. 2, et 16 Juillet, 1875, art. 3.
 
 294 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 the competence of members to discuss the candidates, 
 there being no statutory regulations controlling the pro- 
 cedure of the Congress. It was ruled that the sole 
 function of the National Assembly, convoked to elect a 
 President of the Republic, was to give its votes without 
 debate or discourse ; and M. Grevy was reappointed, 
 practically without opposition. 
 
 M. Grevy commenced his second term of office on 
 January 31, 1886, with every prospect of ending his 
 days as President of the Republic ; but at that very 
 moment he had about him two men of widely different 
 types, one in the Council Chamber and the other on 
 his domestic hearth, who were destined to make abor- 
 tive the experiment of a second septennate vested in 
 the same hands. He had entrusted the forming of his 
 tenth ministry to M. de Freycinet, who thus becoming 
 Prime Minister for the third time gave the portfolio 
 of War to General Boulanger. The apparition in poli- 
 tics of that phenomenal figure caused a complete revo- 
 lution in the spirit of the French population, which, 
 restless and ready for change, would have remodelled 
 the form of government and the functions of its Presi- 
 dent, had its new leader possessed qualities adequate 
 to the occasion offered to him. The acclamation of the 
 Minister of War by the people of Paris on the national 
 fete ; his popularity in the army ; the jealousies of his 
 colleagues in two ministries ; his passage from the posi- 
 tion of nominee of the Radicals to that of protector of 
 the Royalists, all contributed to agitate the public mind ; 
 so when he came into conflict with the Government, and 
 moreover declared for revision of the Constitution, the 
 growing discontent regarding the Presidency of the Re-
 
 CH. n RE-ELECTION OF M. GREVY 295 
 
 public seemed likely, with his aid, to overwhelm that 
 office. M. Grevy, in spite of his re-election, was not 
 popular. His distaste for ostentation and his thrifty 
 mode of life were ascribed to a frugal parsimony, which, 
 praiseworthy in the French peasant stock from which he 
 sprang, and a chief source of the national wealth, is 
 unbecoming when unduly practised by the official head 
 of a great and brilliant nation. While the dazzling con- 
 trast of the unofficial leader was aggravating the dis- 
 content of the critics, who declared that the President 
 was amassing a fortune out of the public income be- 
 stowed upon him to embellish his office, it was discov- 
 ered that the decoration of the Legion of Honour had 
 been made an object of traffic ; and one of the persons 
 most implicated in the scandal was the son-in-law of 
 M. GreVy, M. Wilson, an Opportunist deputy and a 
 former Under-Secretary of State, who resided at the 
 lillysee and made use of the presidential residence as 
 a bureau for his transactions. 
 
 Consequently public opinion, which was brought home 
 to M. Grevy by the refusal of successive politicians to 
 form a new ministry so long as he retained his post, 
 forced him to resign two years after his second election. 
 The date of his message to the Chambers, announcing 
 his reluctant decision, might have reminded General 
 Boulanger, philandering at that crisis in a village inn 
 in Auvergne, that the chance of a coup d'Stat does not 
 recur on every 2d of December ; l but though that 
 
 1 The advocate-general in his indictment of General Boulanger before 
 the High Court (August 9, 1889) charged him with conspiring in Paris 
 on December 2, 1887, while, as a matter of fact, he was on that date hid- 
 ing with his mistress at the H'Otel des Marronniers at Royat.
 
 296 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 incomplete hero declined to attempt the seizure of the 
 supreme power then or on subsequent favourable occa- 
 sions, the election of a new President was materially in- 
 fluenced by his disturbing presence in the land. There 
 were three prominent candidates : M. de Freycinet, 
 thrice, and M. Jules Ferry, twice Prime Minister, and 
 M. Floquet, the Radical President of the Chamber. 
 M. Ferry, in spite of his intolerant policy towards the 
 Church, had failed to retain the favour of the Extreme 
 Left, and the military reverses in Tonkin under his sec- 
 ond Ministry had made his unpopularity general. His 
 old colleague, M. de Freycinet, was a more adroit poli- 
 tician, and these two competitors were said to be united 
 by a bond stronger than that of official association 
 their former jealousy of Gambetta. Before his death 
 neither had supported him, but when his welcome 
 disappearance cleared the way for smaller men, they 
 borrowed his doctrine and became his rival successors. 
 M. Floquet had not yet been a Minister. He had been 
 Prefet of the Seine under Gambetta, and was a kins- 
 man of M. Ferry, but it was as a Radical leader that he 
 had been conspicuous ever since the day he left the 
 National Assembly in 1871 rather than support the 
 Versailles Government in suppressing the Commune. 
 
 It is important to notice the prominence of these candi- 
 dates for the Presidency at the first contested election for 
 that exalted post, as displaying how the attainment of 
 political eminence under the Third Republic invariably 
 entails the loss of public esteem and the ill-will of political 
 colleagues. M. Ferry seemed to have the strongest chances 
 for a curious reason. As he was supported by the moder- 
 ate Republicans the adherence of the Reactionaries would
 
 CH. ii PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES 297 
 
 have assured him the requisite absolute majority in the 
 Congress ; and the Reactionaries were willing to vote for 
 him in the belief that his election would produce civil war, 
 so bitter was the hatred of the Radicals for him in the 
 Chamber, at the Hotel de Ville, and in the street. Gen- 
 eral Boulanger's wish was to secure a President who would 
 recall him to the Ministry of War, where he could mature 
 his plans, and M. de Freycinet and M. Floquet were both 
 so certain of being chosen that each secretly intimated to 
 him the position he would hold after the election. M. Cle- 
 menceau, who till then had wasted his brilliant talents as a 
 destroyer and a maker of ministries, now further glorified 
 his faculty of deposition and of investiture by deciding, in 
 the language of English sport, that the great prize should 
 be won not by a favourite but by an outsider. 1 
 
 The Radicals seeing that they could not carry M. de 
 Freycinet, their candidate after the retirement of M. Flo- 
 quet, accepted the advice of M. Clemenceau. Conse- 
 quently, at the National Assembly on December 3, 1887, 
 after an indecisive first ballot, M. Carnot was elected by 
 three-fourths of the suffrages of the electoral college. A 
 legend arose that the Assembly, filled with shame for the 
 iniquity of M. Wilson, called to mind an act of probity of 
 M. Carnot when he was Minister of Finance, and wonder- 
 struck at the spectacle of virtue unsullied by the contact 
 of politicians, hailed him as the upright man to save the 
 civic honour. The story cannot be substantiated. No 
 
 1 "Tout plutdt que la guerre civile," re"pliqua M. Clemenceau, " prenons 
 done un outsider, Brisson ou Carnot." This is the version of M. Clemen- 
 ceau's words, which practically settled the destinies of France, as given in 
 the compilation entitled Les Coulisses du Boulangisme. That work is not 
 an accurate record of contemporary history, but I have heard from one of 
 the persons present that this was the expression used by M. Clemenceau.
 
 298 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE UK. n 
 
 doubt the act of integrity was quoted and utilised as a 
 proof of M. Carnot's fitness to hold high office in corrupt 
 times ; but, as a matter of history, his presidency of the 
 French Republic was conceived in a newspaper office by 
 a conclave of wire-pullers and journalists who had little 
 sympathy for his virtues. 
 
 When M. Carnot's election became inevitable, not 
 only was his high character recognised but also the emi- 
 nence of his name ; so when the choice of the Assembly 
 was announced, its members arose and saluted with 
 cheers the father of the new President, himself a senator, 
 old Hippolyte Carnot, acclaimed at Versailles as the son 
 of the Organiser of Victory, handing on a famous name 
 to adorn the chief magistracy fallen into disrepute, and 
 thus to raise the credit of France before Europe. 
 
 Not that hereditary military genius or ambition was 
 imputed to M. Sadi Carnot. The very suspicion of it 
 would have alarmed the Assembly, already perturbed at 
 the ominous popularity of a uniform. Indeed the politi- 
 cian chiefly responsible for the choice cynically declared 
 that he had furthered the nomination of M. Carnot 
 because of his "perfect insignificance." M. Clemenceau 
 merely meant that the inheritor of a name not only re- 
 nowned but appealing to democratic tradition had, when 
 called to the Council of Ministers, performed his duties 
 with self-effacing modesty, thus escaping the odium which 
 is in France the swift penalty of conspicuousness. He 
 was of the type which, happily numerous, is the salvation 
 of the country, though rarely found in political circles 
 the type of Frenchman never talked about in the news- 
 papers industrious, cultivated, scrupulous, and unobtru- 
 sive. He suddenly attained the supreme power at a
 
 CH. H M. SADI CARNOT 299 
 
 moment when, owing to the causes of M. Grevy's fall, it 
 had become the practice to publicly criticise the most 
 intimate details of the lives of the inmates of the Elysee ; 
 but under the scrutiny of would-be libellers he afforded 
 no occasion for reproach. The years that he was Presi- 
 dent of the Republic were unexampled in France, even 
 at times of revolution, for the bitterness of political pas- 
 sion and the ferocious licence of the press. The Decora- 
 tions scandal, the Boulangist movement, and the Panama 
 affair filled the entire period with scurrility and recrimi- 
 nation. If a political leader offended an opponent the 
 whole of his past existence was laid bare, and strong men 
 were driven from public life, not for errors or crimes com- 
 mitted in their public capacity or condemned by tribunals 
 of the law, but because they had incurred the fury of 
 a journalist who disinterred the secret of a youthful 
 offence. 
 
 To have occupied unscathed the most conspicuous posi- 
 tion in the land, while it was swept by tempestuous 
 seasons of disloyalty and of delation, was a striking testi- 
 mony to the blamelessness of a life which was singularly 
 consistent. "While the nephew of Bonaparte was un- 
 steadily throned at the Tuileries, the grandson of Lazare 
 Carnot, commencing his career as an engineer like his 
 ancestor, had established his first simple home on a 
 Savoyard roadside, in the region once a trophy of the 
 Organiser of Victory and now almost the sole title to 
 glory of the Second Empire. His subsequent passage 
 through ministries where office was unblushingly re- 
 garded as a source of wealth or a stepping-stone to dic- 
 tatorship 1 brought out the same qualities of diligence, 
 
 1 It was during the third Freycinet administration in 1886, in which
 
 300 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 conscientiousness, and modesty which he had displayed 
 when building bridges at Annecy. As President of the 
 Republic the worst faults his critics could find in him 
 were his precision of dress, or his ceremonious rigidity 
 of form, which were only expressions of his desire to fill 
 his office with becoming dignity and never to depart 
 from constitutional reserve. M. Carnot was not perhaps 
 a great man, but he was the worthy bearer of a great 
 name, thus showing himself the possessor of a faculty 
 rare in all countries. 
 
 In the year before his death there were two minis- 
 terial crises in which M. Carnot was accused of having 
 taken an excessive part. It was the sixth year of his 
 Presidency, and the question of his re-election being 
 already debated, the opponents of the renewal of his 
 power pointed out that one disadvantage of a long term 
 of office was that it induced the President to impose his 
 personal views in the conduct of affairs. In the spring 
 of 1893 the Ribot Cabinet fell. As the general elections 
 were to take place in August, the chances were that the 
 Cabinet chosen in April would last until then, the average 
 life of a ministry being eight months. Thus the new 
 Minister of the Interior would probably " make the elec- 
 tions," a process which, involving the manipulation of 
 'all the centralised machinery of France, is attractive to 
 politicians. The previous elections, in 1889, when Bou- 
 langism was still a force, had been adroitly supervised 
 
 M. Carnot was for the second time Minister of Finance, that the Minister 
 of Public Works (an office which M. Carnot had held in two previous 
 Cabinets) committed the acts in connection with the Panama Loans which 
 subsequently resulted in his being sent to penal servitude ; and General 
 Boulanger was in the same Government, for the first time Minister of 
 War.
 
 CH. n THE PRESIDENCY OF M. CARNOT 301 
 
 by M. Constans, and the friends of that enigmatic states- 
 man pressed his name on the notice of the President, 
 who, disregarding them, called upon M. Dupuy to form 
 a cabinet. The friends of M. Constans compared M. 
 Carnot with Louis XIV., and M. Dupuy, a school-master 
 turned politician, superintended the elections, which took 
 place amid the profound indifference of the nation. 
 
 The result of the polls threw little light upon the 
 feeling of the electorate, regarding either the President 
 or his Ministers, or the legislative needs of the country, 
 and the Dupuy Cabinet, having survived almost the 
 traditional eight months, was defeated, for no particular 
 reason, on the reassembling of the new Chamber, and 
 resigned. The crisis which ensued was prolonged owing, 
 it was said, to the attitude of M. Carnot. He was ac- 
 cused of opposing the will of the majorities in the two 
 Chambers in trying to call to power a ministry agreeable 
 to certain groups whose votes he wished to secure in the 
 National Assembly at the presidential election a year 
 later. Abroad as well as in France, the comment was 
 made that, contrary to the usage in constitutional gov- 
 ernments, the head of the French Executive seemed not 
 only to have a policy of his own, but to claim the right 
 to impose it on his ministers. That the President was 
 intriguing with a view to re-election we shall see was 
 false. That he was essaying to dictate the composition 
 of a ministry is probably true only in the sense that in 
 the formation of his ninth Cabinet in six years, he felt 
 that his experience made him the most competent per- 
 son in France to give general advice on the choice of 
 ministers likeliest to serve the interests of the nation. 
 The comments made abroad on M. Carnot's alleged un-
 
 302 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 constitutional attitude showed that outside France the 
 impression prevails that parliamentary government in 
 that country bears some resemblance to the British in- 
 stitution after which it was modelled ; so after a general 
 election it might be thought that the defeat of a Prime 
 Minister in the new Chamber signified that the electo- 
 rate was discontented with him and with his policy, and 
 desired to see another statesman at the head of affairs 
 whose name, having been re-echoed in every polling- 
 booth, was indicated to the Chief of the Executive. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the constituencies, excepting at 
 an election of quasi-plebiscitary character, such as those 
 conducted by Gambetta before and after the Seize Mai, 
 or such as that of 1889 might have been but for General 
 Boulanger's flight, never take into consideration the 
 name of any man nor the merits of any policy. Dur- 
 ing the elections of 1893 no one ever heard of the 
 Prime Minister or of his successor, M. Casimir-Pe'rier, 
 any more than of his predecessors, MM. Ribot and 
 Loubet; and when M. Dupuy was dismissed from office 
 on the assembling of the new Chamber, it did not mean 
 that he had lost the confidence of the country, for he 
 had never had it in the sense in which the word is under- 
 stood in England. The country was neither pleased nor 
 displeased either when he resigned office in November, 
 
 1893, or when he became Prime Minister again in May, 
 
 1894. Considering that each successive ministry in 
 France, under the present regime, is only a temporary 
 expedient doomed to give way in most cases to another 
 similar combination a few months later, far from it 
 being unconstitutional for a President to give the Prime 
 Minister of his choice the benefit of his wisdom in the
 
 CH. ii CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY OF A PRESIDENT 303 
 
 selection of his colleagues, it seems to be distinctly his 
 duty to act as M. Carnot did. At the same time it is 
 futile duty, for whatever quarter of the Chamber a 
 ministry is recruited from, and whatever influences are 
 used to include one group of politicians or to exclude 
 another, the result is the same ; the ministry, in nine 
 cases out of ten, lasts for less than a year, and the iden- 
 tical process has then to be repeated. Unless, therefore, 
 a President contemplates a coup cTStat, a project which 
 the most reckless of M. Carnot's critics never imputed 
 to him, he would study his own comfort better by con- 
 senting to remain a passive figure-head raised above the 
 petty strife of recurring ministerial crises. 
 
 When M. Casimir-Perier finally consented to form a 
 ministry on the sixth anniversary of M. Carnot's election, 
 another charge was brought against the latter, which is 
 worth noticing in our examination of the nature of the 
 President's attributes. We have seen that Frenchmen 
 have reason for believing that the tenure of high minis- 
 terial office is the ruin of reputation and of popularity. 
 M. Casimir-Perier, whose election to the Presidency of 
 the Chamber showed that he had favourably impressed 
 his colleagues with his hereditary abilities, was marked 
 out as a possible President of the Republic ; so when M. 
 Carnot pressed upon him the Premiership, the sagacious 
 exclaimed that this was the way that M. Gre*vy had got 
 rid of Gambetta ; but the uncharitable sages who im- 
 puted similar guile to M. Carnot, only showed how 
 valueless are precedent and analogy in French political 
 forecast. M. Casimir-Perier became Prime Minister, 
 and failed to remain in office for even half a year ; yet 
 a month after his dismissal this defeated Minister was
 
 804 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 elected to succeed the President, struck down by an 
 assassin. It remained for one of his colleagues to clear 
 the memory of M. Carnot from the imputation of an 
 ignoble wile. M. Spuller, Gambetta's Under-Secretary 
 at the Quai d'Orsay in 1881, became Minister of Educa- 
 tion in the Casimir-Perier Cabinet, after declining to 
 form a ministry himself. Thus brought into confidential 
 relations with the President, he heard from his lips that 
 he had definitely resolved to refuse a nomination for a 
 second term, on constitutional as well as on personal 
 grounds. These words, spoken privily and not for pub- 
 lic effect, were given to the world at the moment when, 
 had he been let live, M. Carnot would have resumed the 
 character of a private citizen, which he knew how to 
 illustrate as well as the highest civic rank. 1 
 
 IV 
 
 Three days after M. Carnot's murder at Lyons M. 
 Casimir-Perier became President of the Republic. Al- 
 though the sudden vacancy in June, 1894, was not an- 
 ticipated, the approaching term of the septennate was 
 preparing men's minds for a presidential election, and it 
 was thought that if M. Carnot did not stand M. Casimir- 
 Perier would be the strongest candidate. No one was 
 surprised, therefore, that he obtained an absolute major- 
 ity in the National Assembly at the first ballot. M. 
 Brisson indeed on this occasion secured nearly two hun- 
 dred votes, and the Socialists who supported that austere 
 politician afterwards denounced the new President as the 
 elect of the Reactionaries ; but if all the Reactionary votes 
 
 1 Au Ministers de V Instruction Publique, par Eugfene Spuller, 1894.
 
 CH. n M. CASIMIR-P&RIER 306 
 
 had been transferred to M. Brisson, M. Casimir-Perier 
 would still have headed the poll. He thus commenced 
 his Presidency, the nominee not of a mere coalition but 
 supported by the majority of Republicans. 
 
 Like M. Carnot the new President was the representa- 
 tive of a distinguished name. A family which in our 
 country had been eminent and wealthy as long as the 
 Periers have been in France, would have attained a high 
 rank in the peerage. When, before the Revolution, they 
 became great landowners there were English families, now 
 of ducal rank, only just emerging from the class of coun- 
 try squires. The owner of the Chateau of Vizille, where 
 the Assembly of the Etats du Dauphine in 1788 preluded 
 the meeting of the States-General at Versailles, had a 
 brother who died an archbishop under Louis XVIII. , one 
 son who was a peer of France, and another Prime Minis- 
 ter under Louis Philippe. The son of that statesman 
 was an ambassador, and was the father of the President 
 of 1894. Nevertheless, such are the peculiarities of the 
 French social scale that this family, which was of high 
 consideration when the ancestors of the nobility of the 
 First Empire and of the Restoration were in many cases 
 of humble condition, was regarded as being the type and 
 pattern of the French bourgeoisie. 
 
 The French bourgeois has fallen on evil days. After 
 having made the Revolution of 1789, and repeating it, in 
 miniature, in 1830 with ampler profit to himself, he no 
 longer enjoys public prestige at the close of the nine- 
 teenth century. The descendants of the revolutionary 
 possessors of national property, and even of the men of 
 the July Monarchy, sometimes style themselves " sons of 
 the crusaders " ; whereas their less prosperous kinsmen,
 
 306 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE UK. u 
 
 who regard politics as a swift road to fortune, court uni- 
 versal suffrage in the guise of "sons of peasants." The 
 scions of the middle-classes, ennobled by Napoleon and 
 the restored Bourbons, are as disdainful of the bourgeoisie 
 as are the representatives of the courtiers and the lawyers 
 of the Old Regime; while at the other end of the scale the 
 Radical Socialists, like the Anarchists, use " bourgeois " as 
 a term of reprobation to designate men who do not get 
 their living by manual toil or by agitation. A " labour " 
 member of the House of Commons once related to me his 
 experiences at a Trade Union Congress in Paris. He said 
 that he had gone to France entirely ignorant of the lan- 
 guage, but to his last day he should never forget one 
 word repeated in every sentence of the French delegates' 
 speeches with every intonation of hatred and contempt 
 the word " bourgeois." This estimable Englishman, though 
 representing thousands of working men, was in appearance 
 and in mode of thought a typical bourgeois, from the French 
 point of view as dissimilar to his as the Carmagnole, with 
 which his French colleagues terrified him, was to the pious 
 exercises which he was wont to conduct at his Sunday 
 School at home. 
 
 It is necessary to understand this point, which will be 
 referred to again, in order to comprehend the force of the 
 attacks upon M. Casimir-Perier from the morrow of his 
 election, when the possession of an honoured name, asso- 
 ciated with the conquest of popular liberty, was turned into 
 a reproach. It is typical of the insignificance into which 
 the French noblesse has fallen, that the old denunciation 
 of "aristocrat" was rarely used by his assailants. Occa- 
 sionally a sneer at his kinship with persons bearing titles, 
 or at his support by the Royalists in the Congress, was
 
 OH. H THE BOURGEOISIE 307 
 
 heard, or a suggestion that as the Orleanists had become 
 Legitimists, so would the grandson of Louis Philippe's 
 Minister receive the Ancient Regime ; but for the most 
 part the representative of a family proud of a century 
 and a half of high renown in the bourgeoisie was made 
 the victim of the artificial antipathy with which the 
 modern school of socialism regards that class. M. Casi- 
 inir-Perier was not, however, denounced by theoretical 
 objectors to the bourgeois principle solely because of his 
 ancestral connection with the middle-class Monarchy of 
 July. He was one of the owners of a coal-field notorious 
 for its strikes, and it was as a capitalist that day after 
 day he was made the object of attacks moulded by the 
 Socialist leaders in form to please every sect of discontent, 
 from the anti-semites and anarchists of the century's end, 
 to the inheritors of the doctrine of the Jacobins. 
 
 M. Casimir-Perier was the victim of the vain theory 
 of the impersonality of the President. His predecessor, 
 though he studied to efface himself in his office, could 
 not make it forgotten for a day that he was the grandson 
 of " Pere la Victoire," and the grandson of the Minister 
 of 1831 was marked out as a possible President long 
 before the tragedy of Lyons, because he too bore a his- 
 toric name with conspicuous force of character. It was 
 therefore by a curious inconsistency that the possession of 
 that name chiefly made his position untenable. Beneath 
 an exterior of resolute sturdiness, he had not the calm 
 temperament, free from self-consciousness, of M. Carnot, 
 essential for the chief of a democracy which is not strik- 
 ingly qualified to use the privilege of unlicenced printing. 
 His habit, therefore, of perusing the journals containing 
 gross libels on his character and incitements to violence
 
 308 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 kept constantly before his eyes the causes which might 
 render him unpopular. Thus he was driven into resign- 
 ing his office after six months' tenure of it, because it was 
 evident that, however constitutionally he discharged its 
 functions, public opinion refused to contemplate the possi- 
 bility of a President of the Republic being an impersonal 
 head of the State. Whether he committed an unpatriotic 
 blunder, or saved the country from civil war by hastily 
 descending from the summit of Republican ambition as 
 soon as he had attained it, we need not discuss. The 
 probability is that his brief experience led him to the con- 
 clusion, not rare in France, that the Presidency is a vain 
 office, and that within certain limits it does not matter 
 who occupies it ; but that in face of the national tendency 
 to invest its occupant with distinctive attributes, it is bet- 
 ter that it should be filled by a citizen of unemphatic char- 
 acter and unsensitive temperament. 
 
 Had the Chamber given him the support due to a con- 
 stitutional Chief of the State from the representatives of 
 the nation, he might have endured until his persecutors 
 were weary ; but the popular House gave him to under- 
 stand that it had no intention of protecting the President 
 from outrage. For defaming M. Casimir-Perier in a 
 Socialist print a journalist had been tried and sent to 
 prison. Forthwith a turbulent quarter of Paris sent him 
 to Parliament, and a motion was proposed in the Chamber 
 for his release, involving the reversal of a sentence duly 
 passed by a judicial tribunal. The motion, instead of 
 being opposed by all excepting the small Socialist group, 
 was defeated by only a slender majority. It was not 
 merely a disposition to encourage contempt for the Chief 
 of the State that induced the Chamber so nearly to vote
 
 CH. ii THE CHAMBER AND THE PRESIDENT 309 
 
 impunity to his defamer. It is the constant tendency of 
 the French legislature to arrogate the functions of a Con- 
 vention and to override the principle of the separation of 
 the powers a sure sign of the unsuitableness of parlia- 
 mentary institutions or the French national character. A 
 further attempt in the same direction, when the majority 
 of the Chamber voted for the revision of a judgment of 
 the Conseil d'Etat in the matter of certain State agree- 
 ments with the railway companies, caused the retirement 
 of the second Dupuy ministry, and M. Casimir-Perier 
 seized the occasion of this crisis to address to the Presi- 
 dents of the Houses of Legislature a letter resigning his 
 high office, indicating some of the reasons why he found 
 its further custody intolerable. 1 The general purport of 
 the message was that the President had too many respon- 
 sibilities and not enough powers. The Socialists' com- 
 ment upon it was that there was logically no middle course 
 between the abolition of the presidency and its conversion 
 into a dictatorship ; a dilemma which would be irresistible 
 if logic had any relation with the science of government. 
 
 Even when a presidential election is imminent, nothing 
 occurs resembling the preliminary campaign of candidates 
 for the presidency of the United States. When, there- 
 fore, a vacancy suddenly occurred six years before the 
 country anticipated a change, to fill it in forty-eight hours 
 was necessarily a matter of hazard. M. Brisson was at 
 the disposal of the nation for the fourth time, but the 
 belief that he was now favoured by the Socialists did not 
 improve his chances. The most serious competitors 
 seemed to be M. Waldeck- Rousseau and M. Godefroy 
 Cavaignac. The former, an advocate of talent, had been 
 1 January 15, 1895.
 
 310 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 called to the Ministry of the Interior at an early age by 
 Gambetta, when older men refused to serve in the Grand 
 Ministe're, and again in the second Ferry Cabinet, which 
 survived the phenomenal span of two years. Subse- 
 quently he had withdrawn from active politics, and hav- 
 ing been professionally retained in the Panama trials, it 
 was thought that he possibly possessed, for an impartial 
 Chief of the State, too intimate a knowledge of the char- 
 acter of politicians who might be designated for ministe- 
 rial rank. M. Cavaignac, had he been chosen to succeed 
 M. Carnot and M. Casimir-Perier, would have established 
 a tradition that the presidency was reserved for members 
 of dynasties which had served the commonwealth since 
 the Revolution. The grandson, like M. Carnot, of a regi- 
 cide member of the Convention, he was the son of the 
 General who had his hour of glory and popularity before 
 his defeat by Louis Bonaparte at the plebiscite for the 
 presidency in 1848 ; and as a boy he had dramatically 
 defied the Second Empire when, at a public distribution 
 of prizes, he refused to accept a laurel wreath from the 
 hands of the Prince Imperial. Had the Presidency been 
 vacant two years earlier he would have been called by 
 acclamation to fill it, for during the debates on the Pan- 
 ama scandal in 1893, when public opinion was dis- 
 comforted by the withdrawal from justice of the most 
 prominent politicians involved in it, he made a speech at 
 the Palais Bourbon expressing with such sober eloquence 
 the prevailing sentiment of outraged honesty of the bulk 
 of the French nation, that the Chamber with enthusiasm 
 ordered it to be placarded in every commune of France. 1 
 The triumph was too conspicuous. Had M. Carnot's 
 1 February 8, 1893.
 
 CH. ii THE DISABILITIES OF FAME 311 
 
 meritorious probity when Minister of Finance received 
 equal attention and applause, it would have drawn down 
 upon him the jealousy which closed the gates of the 
 Elysee upon M. Cavaignac. 
 
 The choice of the National Assembly, convoked at 
 Versailles on January 17, 1895, fell on M. Fe*lix Faure, 
 and it is probable that on the previous New Year's Day, 
 even in Paris, in the heart of political life, not one 
 person in a thousand knew him even by name, although 
 he was Minister of Marine. It does not follow in France 
 that because a public man is unknown to the public he is 
 therefore obscure. It is true that in the frequent changes 
 of Cabinets many politicians, who flit through ministerial 
 office without leaving a trace of their passage, are obscure 
 men; but aptitude and talent in Ministers are some- 
 times unrecognised, so profound is the indifference of 
 the French public for the machinery of government. 
 M. Faure belonged to a class unfortunately rare in 
 France, that of the successful and intelligent man of 
 business, who takes an active part in politics. With a 
 few well-known exceptions, the representatives in Parlia- 
 ment of the great commercial centres of France are 
 generally doctors, lawyers, professors, and journalists; 
 but the electors of Havre are wont to delegate their 
 interests to their substantial citizens, and if M. Felix 
 Faure was unknown to the French nation, he enjoyed the 
 best graces of his fellow-townsmen. Eight months 
 before his elevation to the supreme power, though twelve 
 years earlier he had been an Under-Secretary, he had
 
 312 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. 11 
 
 never attained Cabinet rank, which is not difficult of 
 access under the Third Republic; or perhaps one ought 
 rather to say that it is difficult of access for business men 
 of solid qualities who help to keep France in the van of 
 nations, and countervail the passing pranks of profes- 
 sional politicians in the ministries. 
 
 The sudden apparition of a President of this unwonted 
 type, who represented no dynastic hierarchy like his 
 immediate predecessors, no doctrinaire tradition like 
 M. Grevy, who had neither the military prestige of 
 Marshal MacMahon nor the European renown of M. 
 Thiers, took the fancy of the public. An agreeable 
 presence, gracing a blithe alertness in performing his 
 novel functions with unaffected joy, made M. Faure a 
 popular hero before the detractors of M. Casimir-Perier 
 had time to realise that he was a member of the same 
 oppressive and selfish class. The antipathies of the 
 French public are short-lived, excepting in the case of 
 persons held responsible for military disaster, like Napo- 
 leon III., and, in a smaller way, M. Jules Ferry. Had 
 M. Casimir-Perier not resigned, the violence of his per- 
 secutors would have caused a reaction in his favour, for 
 the daily baiting of the President had become wearisome, 
 and the populace of Paris was ready to beckon on the 
 nation to hail with enthusiasm any occupant of the presi- 
 dential chair ; for the yearning of the French to acclaim a 
 chief is chronic. 
 
 When the improvised popularity of the new President 
 became a national creed, the dethroners of his prede- 
 cessor felt that their position as leaders of thought was 
 imperilled by the ascendancy of another bourgeois. That 
 term, though its meaning is less definite than when,
 
 M. FELIX FAURE 313 
 
 under the Old Regime, it connoted the men of the great 
 mediate class which, without privilege or rank, had office 
 and wealth, has in modern times a signification much 
 clearer than any approximate English synonym. Now 
 that the noblesse no longer exists, and the clergy is no 
 longer an estate, while the passage of the whole nation 
 through the army has abolished the military caste, every 
 one is a bourgeois who does not gain his living by the 
 labour of his hands : though Socialist writers extend, as 
 we have seen, the non-bourgeois ranks in order to include 
 themselves, by defining the bourgeois as one who does 
 not earn his bread either by manual toil or by agitation. 
 But at whichever end of the social scale we artificially 
 limit the bourgeois class, either by counting as pro- 
 letarians politicians who utilise the blouse as a lucrative 
 symbol rather than as an article of apparel, or by adopting 
 the fiction that an order of nobles still exists in France, 
 no elimination can ever exclude from the bourgeoisie the 
 respectable section of society which M. Felix Faure has 
 illustrated. This would seem to be obvious to all the 
 world; but when it was seen that a capitalist and an 
 employer of labour was winning the good graces of all 
 grades of society, it was clear that if his success could 
 not be checked it ought to be expounded. 
 
 An authorised spokesman of the Radical party was 
 M. Pochon, the deputy for Bourg-en-Bresse, and he had 
 a further title to speak in the name of the population as 
 President of the Conseil-General of the department of 
 the A in, which stretches from Lyons to Geneva. At its 
 first meeting after the election of M. Faure he thus 
 moralised: "We have the right from past experience 
 to beware of the bourgeoisie, which has learned nothing
 
 314 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 from the lessons of this century. It was no longer 
 possible for us Republicans to allow that class to resume 
 the direction of public affairs, after our unlucky essay 
 with a president whose family was known to history. 
 That was why the democracy chose in its own ranks the 
 successor of M. Casimir-Perier, convinced that M. Felix 
 Faure would never belie his origin." 1 
 
 Now a Frenchman who denies that M. Felix Faure is 
 a member of the bourgeoisie is capable of anything. It 
 is not surprising, therefore, to learn that the stern 
 democrat, who boasted that the people in their distrust 
 of the bourgeois class had elevated one of themselves to 
 the chief magistracy, was not only a bourgeois himself 
 but had done all in his power to prevent M. Faure's 
 election. At Versailles M. Faure was opposed by 
 M. Pochon and his group as a danger to the democracy, 
 and they voted to a man for a genuine son of toil, 
 M. Brisson, whose father was an attorney at Bourges and 
 who was himself a member of the Parisian bar. The 
 malcontents unable to carry their own candidate, and 
 knowing that the country was tired of presidential 
 unpopularity, accepted with disingenuous grace the suc- 
 cess obtained by the new President as the triumph of 
 their doctrine. It is therefore necessary to examine 
 closely M. Faure's proletarian titles. 
 
 The timorous, who dread the advent to power of the 
 democracy, will be reassured at knowing that the Radical- 
 Socialists proclaim M. Faure to be by his life and origin 
 its incarnation. His parents, though not rich, had not 
 to labour with their hands, and the future President, 
 instead of being educated at a public elementary school as 
 
 1 Conseil- General de I'Ain, Seance de Vouverture, 22 Avril, 1895.
 
 CH. n THE LEGEND OF A NEW PEESIDENT 316 
 
 befitted a son of the people, was sent first to a suburban 
 college of some pretension, and later to England to learn 
 the language. On his return, being apprenticed to a 
 tanner at Amboise, he wore a workman's costume, as the 
 sons of the rich often do when learning a business prac- 
 tically. He then married the heiress of a wealthy man 
 who died a senator, and placing his capital at Havre, he 
 attained social and commercial rank in that seaport, after 
 the war taking a valiant part in the suppression of the 
 Commune with a vigour not calculated to endear him to 
 the revilers of the bourgeoisie. The theoretical objectors 
 to the bourgeois principle know very well that the strict 
 application of their theories might uncomfortably affect 
 their own position. They, therefore, arbitrarily label 
 this public man as a bourgeois and that as a proletarian, 
 without reference to his social rank or even his political 
 views. A similar process was practised a hundred years 
 before in Brittany, when the mere denunciation as a 
 Chouan or a Jacobin, according as the Blues or Whites 
 prevailed in the region, was a sentence of death; but 
 M. Casimir-Perier, its most conspicuous victim in recent 
 times, was driven to suicide rather than to execution by 
 the new philosophers with their new definition. 
 
 All this tendency to classify each individual President 
 is additional proof that it is contrary to the instincts of 
 the nation to regard the Chief of the State as an imper- 
 sonal figure representing France. 1 M. Felix Faure was 
 
 1 M. Carnot had even to rebuke his fellow-citizens, who assumed the 
 attitude of respectful subjects on his presidential journeys. At Chambe'ry 
 on September 4, 1892, the anniversary of the foundation of the Republic, 
 M. Horteur, Deputy and Chairman of the Conseil-Ge'ne'ral, having re- 
 ferred to him in laudatory terms, the President replied: "Je vous 
 remercie infiniment de 1'hommage que vous reudez a la Re"publique, mais
 
 316 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. 11 
 
 the first President of the Republic who had no tradition 
 connected with his name, but from the morrow of his 
 election the Parisian press and public began to invest him 
 with legend. The Provencal origin of his family pro- 
 voked comparisons with that of M. Thiers; spirited 
 controversies arose as to the precise site of his modest 
 birthplace in an industrial quarter of the capital; his 
 suburban school-master was made the subject of mono- 
 graphs; his practical method of learning the trade of a 
 fellmonger produced the myth that he had begun life as 
 a journeyman tanner, and portraits of a needlessly toil- 
 stained workman were rapturously circulated; while for 
 the satisfaction of the prosperous classes, and to show 
 how fitted he was to impress foreign potentates with the 
 amenity of France, anecdotes were related of his sporting 
 prowess in Hungary, where his affability had inspired an 
 innkeeper to foretell a brilliant future for him. In fact, 
 all the lore that is formed around the founder of a 
 dynasty was made ready as though this respectable mer- 
 chant of Havre were a new Bonaparte. 
 
 VI 
 
 It is not possible that a country governed for centuries 
 and grown great under the absolute sway of kings, which 
 it only dispensed with to take refuge in the absolute rule 
 of a military dictator, should realise that the Chief of 
 the State does not govern. Thus we find the President 
 
 vous me voyez un peu peine" des eloges particuliers que vous ra'avez 
 adresse"s. H n'y a pas d'homme en France, il n'y a que des institu- 
 tions." Nevertheless when five years later another President visited 
 that unemotional city the solitary cry of the calm spectators was, " Vive 
 Felix Faure."
 
 CH. ii ANOMALIES OF PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE 317 
 
 of the Republic, in the performance of the functions 
 prescribed for him by the written Constitution, in the 
 anomalous position of a Chief of the State whose name is 
 kept constantly before the public in a manner unknown 
 in constitutional monarchies; while he is subjected to 
 unwritten restrictions of a puerile character intended to 
 curb dictatorial aspirations, but only having the effect 
 of attenuating the picturesqueness of Parisian life. 
 
 For example, the Constitution makes it his duty to 
 preside at all national solemnities; 1 but if he were to 
 repair to them in a gilded coach or on horseback and 
 attired in a brilliant uniform, he. would be accused of 
 meditating a coup <T6tat, though the Constitution is 
 silent regarding his apparel and his equipage. The 
 President is thus constrained to review the troops at 
 Longchamp on the 14th of July in a costume associated 
 by Parisians, when they see it in the Bois de Boulogne, 
 with the guests at the wedding feasts of the humbler 
 classes, which are held in that pleasaunce. When, there- 
 fore, nature has endowed the Chief of the State with an 
 unimposing presence, which requires tradition or attire 
 to make it impressive, the precautions thus taken to pre- 
 vent an individual obtaining too great an influence over 
 the crowd sometimes defeat themselves. For the French 
 public delights in panache, and when the nodding plumes 
 and the gold lace are seen adorning a minor actor in the 
 spectacle, the mob, which would have had no idea of 
 acclaiming with kingly titles the President merely be- 
 cause he was strikingly arrayed, turns to the prancing 
 captain, crying, " This is the hero who should have led 
 our summer holiday." That was the origin of the 
 i L.C. 25 F^vrier, 1875, art. 3.
 
 318 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 Boulangist legend in 1886, when the democracy of the 
 capital turned its back on the notarial decorum of M. 
 Grevy to hail the glittering uniform which a showy 
 charger bore down the Champs Elysees at the head of 
 the garrison of Paris. 
 
 The prerogative of receiving the diplomatic representa- 
 tives of the powers 1 is, on the other hand, a function, the 
 importance of which the President is permitted to exag- 
 gerate. In a monarchy like England, when the sovereign 
 receives a newly accredited envoy, he is welcomed with 
 impressive dignity and sometimes with a cordiality 
 enhanced from the kinship of his august master with 
 our royal family; but the only knowledge the British 
 public has or desires to have of the event is gathered 
 from the abrupt Court Circular which records it in a 
 single line between the monarch's daily promenades and 
 the knighting of a provincial mayor. In Republican 
 France, after an ambassador has been received at the 
 
 f 
 
 Elysee, every citizen who has a sou to buy a newspaper 
 can read every detail of the ceremonial as well as the dis- 
 courses exchanged between the President of the Republic 
 and the envoy of his royal or imperial colleague: their 
 formality or warmth is discussed, and next day every 
 politician from Brest to Marseilles founds forecasts of the 
 future of Europe upon the recorded duration of the pri- 
 vate conversation of the two personages, before the chief 
 of the Protocole conveyed the new-comer back to his 
 embassy. Again, it is the practice of crowned heads to 
 notify to the rulers of the powers the births, marriages, 
 and deaths which take place in their illustrious families. 
 In our country no one outside the Court is aware of the 
 1 L.C. 25 FSvrier, 1876, art. 3.
 
 CH. ii DIPLOMATIC INSTINCT OF THE FRENCH 319 
 
 custom; but in the French Republic, each time that the 
 President receives such a notification, the journals 
 announce it together with the text of his reply of con- 
 gratulation or of condolence in a way to habituate the 
 public to the idea that the position in the European 
 hierarchy of their first citizen is similar to that of the 
 Emperor Francis Joseph or of King Leopold. 
 
 French is not the language of diplomacy for nothing, 
 and every citizen who takes an interest in affairs believes 
 himself a master of the diplomatic art. Hence we find 
 the opposite state of things to that which exists in 
 England, where even in the capital the ardent politicians 
 of the street, who criticise Home Secretaries and compare 
 Chancellors of the Exchequer, know not the names of the 
 envoys of France or of Germany within our gates, save at 
 seasons of international commotion. The Boulevards are 
 in equal ignorance regarding the personality of the 
 Ministers of the Interior and of Finance, except at epochs 
 of " parliamentary scandal, " but the British or the Rus- 
 sian ambassador is a familiar Parisian institution. 
 
 This peculiar if superficial interest assumed by the 
 French public in foreign relations is not sufficiently taken 
 into account by those who deplore the extravagances of 
 the inferior journals of the Boulevards in discussing 
 exterior affairs ; and it is the same popular instinct which 
 is flattered by all that tends to put the President of the 
 Republic on an equality with the sovereigns of other 
 European nations. By the Constitution of 1875 l he has 
 the power to negotiate and to ratify treaties ; but treaties 
 of peace and of commerce, and those which affect the 
 finances of the State, are only effective after being voted 
 
 1 L.C. 16 Juillet, 1875, art. 8.
 
 320 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 by the two Chambers. It is to be observed that treaties 
 of alliance are not included among those which require 
 the ratification of the Chambers, and during the long 
 period of "understanding" between France and Russia 
 the question was constantly discussed in the journals 
 whether President Carnot had or had not actually con- 
 cluded a treaty with the Tsar. The highest authorities 
 declare that a treaty concluded thus secretly without 
 communication to Parliament could not be very serious 
 in its scope, as there are few treaties of alliance which 
 do not in their result affect the finances of the contracting 
 states. 1 There can be no doubt that, whatever its dan- 
 ger, the idea of the President treating with a sovereign, 
 and especially with an autocratic monarch, without refer- 
 ring to the Chambers, is far from unpopular in France. 
 The French love personal rule, and amid much that was 
 unflattering to France in the Franco-Russian demonstra- 
 tions before the death of M. Carnot, a sentiment of 
 national pride was made manifest in the exaggerated 
 pictures circulated of the President grouped with the 
 Tsar, whom he never saw, which suggested that the Chief 
 of the Republic counted for as much in the union of the 
 two powers as the autocrat of Russia. This idea fol- 
 lowed M. Carnot to the tomb, and Republicans, who 
 believed that there was even then an alliance between 
 
 1 Pierre, Traite de Droit Politique : " Des traitfe diplomatiques. " The 
 leading case of a treaty concluded by the President of the French Repub- 
 lic, under the Constitution of 1876, without the ratification of Parliament, 
 is that of the Treaty of Berlin. The contracting parties were Great 
 Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, and Turkey. The 
 Treaty bears the date of July 13, 1878 ; it was ratified by President Mac- 
 Mahon after the prorogation of the Chambers and promulgated in the 
 Journal Offieiel of September 6, 1878.
 
 CH. H PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES OF PRESIDENT 321 
 
 France and Russia, and that it was advantageous for 
 France, took pains to perpetuate the legend that the 
 transactions deemed to have brought France out of her 
 isolation in Europe were the personal acts of the Chief 
 of the State, who bore a name associated with bygone 
 glories of French Republicanism carried beyond French 
 frontiers. 1 
 
 It is not the practice of the French to speak imperson- 
 ally of "the President," even on occasions when, as Chief 
 of the State, he is treated with greater ceremony and 
 deference than a constitutional sovereign. When M. 
 Carnot returned to Paris from his summer sojourns at 
 Fontainebleau, or when M. Faure has come from Havre 
 to preside at a meeting of the Cabinet, it has been the 
 practice for the President of the Council and other 
 Ministers to be in attendance at the railway terminus; 
 though the English sovereign, when paying even a State 
 visit to her capital, is, on alighting from the train, con- 
 tent with the welcome of the station-master. It is to be 
 observed in the published record of these occasions that 
 
 1 On the monument erected in memory of President Carnot at Nolay 
 (C6te d'or), the birthplace of his grandfather the Organiser of Victory, 
 eight dates and names of places are inscribed thus : "Limoges, 1837 : Le 
 Mans, 1870 : Nolay, 1871 : Versailles, 1887 : Paris, 1889 : Cronstadt, 1891 : 
 Toulon, 1893 : Lyons, 1894," and they are said to summarise his life and 
 achievements. Together with incidents in which he took the chief part, 
 such as his birth, his death, and his succession to the Presidency, comes 
 " Cronstadt, 1891 " a reference to the visit of the French fleet to a Rus- 
 sian port, which took place during the presidency of M. Carnot, while he 
 was never within a thousand miles of the spot. It was supposed to be the 
 first act of the Franco-Russian Alliance concluded by the President, and 
 the visit of a French squadron to Russian waters was thus treated as a 
 personal act of the President, as a visit by proxy. The inauguration of 
 this monument was an official ceremony presided over by a Minister in 
 September, 1896.
 
 322 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 the Minister is generally designated by his office, while 
 the President of the Republic is invariably referred to by 
 name. Moreover his physiognomy, as well as his name 
 and actions, is officially impressed on the imagination of 
 every citizen of France, by means more effective than the 
 unresembling effigies struck on coinage whereby loyal 
 peoples are deceived regarding royal lineaments. If a 
 humble subject of the Queen of England wishes to know 
 the veritable features of his sovereign, he must purchase 
 at his own cost her likeness; but in France the State 
 forces every peasant and artisan to regard that of the 
 President each time he votes at an election, or marries a 
 wife, or registers a birth. The mairie is the centre of 
 local life in rural villages and crowded towns alike, and 
 after the new President has been escorted back from 
 Versailles to Paris, the first act of the Minister of the 
 Interior is to approach his new master with a humble 
 prayer that he will cause his portrait to be taken in order 
 that it may be reproduced, distributed, and exposed in 
 the forty thousand communes of France and Algeria. 
 
 VII 
 
 It is a curious lesson in the vicissitudes of France and 
 of her governors to visit, in a provincial mairie or in a 
 prefecture where these works of art are more pretentious, 
 not the official chamber, where the actual Chief of the 
 Executive looks down from the walls on the acts of cen- 
 tralised administration performed within them, but the 
 basement or the garret where the lumber of generations 
 moulders in the dust. Here repose, undisturbed by revo- 
 lutions, the portraits of all the past rulers of France since
 
 CH. n A DISOWNED GALLERY 323 
 
 the century was young. The latest of them never was 
 exposed to view, for it only arrived the day M. Casimir- 
 Perier startled the provinces with his resignation; the 
 look of tenacity in his face belying the ease and swift- 
 ness with which his enemies made him climb down from 
 power. The last picture that was hung presents the 
 punctilious form of M. Carnot, attired in the correct 
 black broadcloth set off with the ribbon of the national 
 order, the unfailing subject for the mirth of wits, till 
 the night the crimson of the Legion of Honour hid the 
 stream of life-blood, when the President was murdered 
 in his wonted costume in which too he was laid to rest 
 in the Pantheon. The wily features of M. Grevy sug- 
 gest the frugal virtues of the peasantry rather than in- 
 tegrity in high places, exemplified by Carnot, or the 
 warlike gallantry of MacMahon. The Marshal's uniform, 
 here presented, calls forth memories not of the Seize Mai, 
 but of the return of the troops from Italy, when from the 
 field of Magenta he brought back an almost forgotten 
 title ; it revives the names of Sebastopol, and of Malakoff, 
 which, blazoned above the altar in the chapel of the Inva- 
 lides the day of his burial, gave greater joy to the Crimean 
 veterans than to the officers of Russia, whom France then 
 was feting in the vague hope of a renewal of her glories. 
 
 The next in the ghost-like series is M. Thiers, battered 
 and faded ; but the shrill visage, beneath the pugnacious 
 crest, can never be mistaken, whether found in old prints, 
 adorning early issues of his youthful history of the Revo- 
 lution, or reproduced by Bonnat's genius half a century 
 later, or here under the dust of twenty years. It is well 
 preserved compared with the mildewed effigy which is 
 behind. This is evidently copied from Hippolyte Flan-
 
 324 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 drin's NapoUon ///., for dim in the background there is 
 the outline of the bust of the great Emperor, and com- 
 paring the features or looking at the nebulous eyes of this 
 dreamer in epaulettes, who quitted France at Sedan, one 
 wonders if the songstress of the brave Dunois believed 
 her son to be by blood a Bonaparte. Louis Philippe, 
 blackened and crumbling, can just be recognised by the 
 pear-shaped head of Gavarni's sketches. But the Revo- 
 lution of July, which caused the diligence to bring his 
 portrait to this country town, is more than two genera- 
 tions away, and the rats have left nothing but a phantom 
 in the frame of his Most Christian cousin, whose portraits 
 were better taken care of in the far-off days, when his 
 kingly prospects were remote, when Drouais painted the 
 little Comte d'Artois, while Louis XV. was installing 
 Mme. du Barry at Versailles, and Marie Antoinette was 
 learning French at Vienna. Yet this musty relic of 
 Charles X. is interesting, for it was the official present- 
 ment of the only ruler of France, hereditary or republi- 
 can, constitutional or plebiscitary, who, during a hundred 
 and twenty years, has succeeded to the supreme Execu- 
 tive by the natural death or normal lapse of powers of 
 his predecessor. No doubt there is little resemblance be- 
 tween the flight of Louis Philippe to Newhaven and the 
 retirement of M. Grevy to the Avenue d'lena, but both 
 those proceedings were abdications ; and certainly it is 
 the strongest argument in favour of the Republican form 
 of government, that the abdication of the Chief of the 
 Executive, which seems inevitable in France unless an 
 assassin intervene, is effected under a Republic without 
 revolution, its invariable accompaniment when a monarch 
 is impelled to lay down his functions.
 
 CH. ii CHARACTER OF MODERN FRENCH RULERS 325 
 
 Two reflections an Englishman may make while dis- 
 turbing the dust of this disowned gallery of once ac- 
 claimed French rulers. The one is that the sovereign 
 whose subject he is at the century's close has witnessed 
 the investiture and the destitution of all these monarchs 
 and presidents within her lifetime ; and even when her 
 reign began, the first of the series, who had led the revels 
 at Trianon for years before the Bastille fell, had only just 
 ended his short exile at Goritz. 1 The other reflection is 
 that while his own country has been spared convulsion 
 during a century of revolution, and while one placid and 
 prosperous reign has covered more than half of the span 
 which lies between the Old Regime and the end of the 
 nineteenth century, the variously denominated chiefs of 
 the Executive in France, from Louis XVI. to M. Felix 
 Faure, have been distinguished for excellent qualities, 
 and if examined individually will compare favourably 
 with any series of rulers during a like space of a hundred 
 and twenty years in any government of ancient or modern 
 times. There has never been another instance of empire, 
 kingdom, or republic suffering so sorely for more than a 
 century from internal vicissitudes where some of the rulers 
 might not be classed by historians of forcible style as mon- 
 sters or idiots. As none of the rulers of France during 
 that period can impartially be thus designated, in spite 
 of Victor Hugo's florid arraignments of Louis Napoleon, 
 and the scorn of the old Orleanists for the mental facul- 
 ties of Charles X., this seems to indicate that in the new 
 era nations have to work out their own destiny. The 
 
 1 Charles X., who was born in 1757, died on October 6, 1836, when the 
 Queen was seventeen years of age, about eight months before she ascended 
 the throne. His reign had lasted from September, 1824, to July, 1830.
 
 320 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 gigantic figure of Napoleon stands apart, as a phenom- 
 enon which rises twice perhaps in a thousand years of 
 the world's history. It may be it was the strength of his 
 grip that made France unfit for the possession of men of 
 ordinary stature and of limited powers, and though he 
 was necessary for the reconstruction of the society swept 
 down with the old royality, it was equally needful that he 
 should have left a successor, the heir of his methods and 
 his prowess. However that may be, the spectacle which 
 France has repeatedly presented of misgovernment, of 
 anarchy, or of revolution cannot be ascribed to the char- 
 acter of her rulers. M. GreVy narrowly escaped ending 
 his term of office as boisterously as Charles X. ended his 
 reign ; yet there was nothing in common, either in per- 
 sonal temperament or in public policy, between the 
 brother-in-law of Marie Antoinette and the father-in-law 
 of M. Wilson. Nevertheless, but for the unreadiness of 
 General Boulanger, and the fortuitous calling of M. Car- 
 not, an insurrection would have accompanied the presi- 
 dential crisis of 1887, as though it had been the downfall 
 of a monarchy. 
 
 It is clear, therefore, that whatever the character of the 
 Chief of the Executive, and whatever regime he repre- 
 sents, he is certain to incur, sooner or later, the discon- 
 tent of a sufficient number of the French people to make 
 his position untenable. Moreover, no two revolutionary 
 movements in modern France can be ascribed to the same 
 cause, whether they take the form of dethroning a dynasty 
 or of upsetting a president. It was as the protector of 
 clericalism and of the censorship of the press that Charles 
 X. lost the crown ; it was the agitation for electoral re- 
 form which overturned Louis Philippe ; Louis Napoleon
 
 CH. ii DIVERSE CAUSES OF EEVOLUTIONS 327 
 
 might have suppressed every popular liberty with impu- 
 nity had he only returned from the frontier victorious, and 
 it was the fortune of war which destroyed the Second 
 Empire. Under the Republic the crises which have 
 stopped short of revolution, thus displaying the chief 
 benefit of that regime, have been all due to diverse causes. 
 The force which impelled Marshal MacMahon to resign 
 was the growing contempt in the country for the inepti- 
 tude of the reactionary party and the rising cult for the 
 genius of Gambetta ; M. Grevy nearly had the honour of 
 a revolution to escort him into private life, .because his 
 dingy failings were out of keeping with a periodic im- 
 pulse of the nation towards the glitter of dictatorship ; 
 the attacks before which M. Casimir-Perier capitulated 
 were based on the social question. 
 
 Is it therefore to be inferred that the French are as a 
 nation prone to revolution and ungovernable ? If each 
 successive revolutionary movement had had the same 
 direction, if it had been a violent manifestation of an 
 identical doctrine, then it would be just to assume that 
 the great upheaval of 1789 was still fermenting, and that 
 revolutions would recur so long as any article of the 
 Declaration of the Rights of Man was infringed. But 
 the periodical disturbances which convulse France have 
 nothing to do with the doctrine of 1789. No doubt the 
 habit of insurrection was then acquired, and as the Revo- 
 lution of 1830 was nominally directed against the heirs of 
 the old Monarchy, the first of the series in this century 
 took its place as the putative offspring of the great Revo- 
 lution. But subsequently the Days of June which were 
 the cause of Louis Napoleon obtaining the supreme power, 
 the uprising which proclaimed his fall, and the rebellion
 
 328 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 of the Commune had no more connection with the doctrine 
 of 1789 than the Boulangist movement or the demonstra- 
 tions of the new Socialists, which have more recently put 
 ideas of revolution into men's minds. 
 
 When it is further considered that the vast majority of 
 the French people is peaceable and industrious, it be- 
 comes clear that revolution is chiefly to be feared from 
 the fitful discontent of the turbulent of Paris and of 
 certain industrial centres. The best form of government, 
 therefore, for France is the one which can best keep in 
 hand that section of the population. Here, no doubt, the 
 advantage of the Republican form becomes most apparent, 
 not because it is the creation of 1792, but for the anatomi- 
 cal reason that its head is a removable accessory and not 
 a vital organ. Hence the Republic, with its succession of 
 Presidents, whom it can shed in turn without hurt to 
 itself, would be the ideal regime for France if her children 
 could divest themselves of their ever-smouldering desire 
 for a hero to worship and a master to submit to. This 
 latent instinct is the weakness of the Republican system ; 
 for it will not only kill it one day, but, meanwhile, it so 
 alarms its defenders that they use all the force of govern- 
 mental machinery to crush men of parts who seem apt to 
 win popular favour. It was thus that Gambetta found 
 the way to the Presidency barred for him ; yet by cut- 
 ting short his career his enemies nearly secured for France 
 a worse fate than his dictatorship ; for the people's desire 
 to be governed was not buried with him, and but for his 
 death General Boulanger would never have inspired a 
 legend. It has become a commonplace to applaud the 
 patriotism of the politicians who, aided by circumstances, 
 ridded France of that soldier of fortune ; yet no one
 
 CH. n THE OFFICIAL FEAR OF GREAT MEN 329 
 
 knows for certain that the country would have been worse 
 off had he been called to power, and the government of 
 the Republic since his day has not been so perfect as to 
 make it impossible to conceive a better. Because he was 
 a pitiful adventurer it does not of necessity follow that 
 he would have been a bad administrator. We all have 
 heard of the veteran miserably slain six months after 
 attaining the supreme power, who would have been 
 deemed to be "capax imperii nisi imperasset " ; l and 
 there may be men who have just failed to reach success 
 of whom an epigram in the converse sense might be 
 made. The narrow escape which the country then had, 
 makes the guardians of the Constitution take excessive 
 precautions in overshadowing honourable achievements 
 likely to win popularity; and the spectacle has been 
 witnessed in Republican France of a General, returning 
 home victorious after a colonial war, treated as though he 
 were afflicted with an infectious disease certain to dis- 
 seminate contagion and therefore to be kept from the 
 sight and touch of his fellow-countrymen. 2 
 
 If the Third Republic is fearful of paying excessive 
 honour to its sons during their lifetime lest it should 
 thus endow them with sufficient strength and prestige 
 to overturn it, it has an original method of proving to 
 the world that it is not barren in great men. It does 
 not stint its funereal tribute to those who, having died 
 in its service, can never become popular idols dangerous 
 to the established regime. A stranger arriving in Paris 
 and finding its monuments swathed in black, its boule- 
 vards lined with thousands of troops to salute in its 
 
 1 Tacitus : Hist. i. 49. 
 
 2 General Dodds on his return after the Dahomey expedition of 1892.
 
 380 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 passage a pompous bier borne along to the martial 
 music of an heroic march, asks why these trappings of 
 woe, why this imposing pageant, deployed with all the 
 art of which the French are masters, suggestive of a 
 nation mourning its noblest son? Obsequies stately as 
 these could only be offered to one who, in the hour of 
 vicissitude, had done the country services like those of 
 Thiers and Gambetta, or to an immortal genius like 
 Victor Hugo. It cannot be that another President of 
 the Republic has met with untimely death ; and the last 
 Marshal of France has still a short span to complete 
 before he is borne to the Invalides with the supreme 
 homage due to the distant memory of a once victorious 
 army. 
 
 The name that the stranger hears on the lips of the 
 crowd, which has the air of curiosity rather than of 
 lamentation, conveys little to his mind, even though he 
 be a student of European politics ; and if he pursue his 
 inquiries, he ascertains that this funereal parade, the like 
 of which is seen in England only once or twice in a 
 century when a Nelson or a Wellington is laid to rest, is 
 in honour of a politician who has held office for two 
 brief spaces in two ephemeral ministries, and who ended 
 his career by presiding over the Chamber of Deputies 
 for a few weeks : the total period of his office-holding 
 having amounted to about one year. But even on the 
 morrow when Parliament, despite a frugal protest, votes 
 to the bereaved family a pension double that accorded 
 to the widow of a Marshal of France, the country rests 
 unconvinced of the greatness of the dead man thus 
 glorified, only perceiving in its scepticism that under 
 the Republic the most profitable of all pursuits is that of 
 politics.
 
 CH. ii THE FRENCH NEED FOR A CHIEF 331 
 
 In spite of the efforts, both of the jealous and of the 
 disinterested, the day will come when no power will 
 prevent France from hailing a hero of her choice. 
 Whether he will bear the name of a once reigning 
 dynasty, or whether he will be a statesman to inspire 
 or a soldier to lead to victory, the next generation will 
 know. Judging from history it is unlikely that France 
 will be appreciably happier or unhappier under the new 
 regime than under past dispensations, and its duration 
 could not be predicted even if its founder were revealed. 
 It is possible that the present system under which 
 France is governed is as effective as any other for pro- 
 ducing the greatest happiness of the greatest number ; 
 but no country can remain in the first rank of European 
 nations, in the sense that French temperament regards 
 the first rank, without conspicuous leaders of men. In 
 Switzerland individual well-being attains a high standard, 
 and there the system of the impersonality of the govern- 
 ment is so well carried out that the Presidents who 
 succeed one another every year are individually as little 
 known to fame in their country as are the Lord Mayors 
 of London in our own; and it is probable that not one 
 in a million of the strangers who visit the Helvetic 
 Republic ever knows by name the President of the 
 Confederation for the time being. But this sinking of 
 personality will never suit the genius of the French 
 nation. It was essayed in the Revolution, and the 
 result was the greatest and most masterful personality 
 that ever despotised Napoleon. 
 
 That France should become a swollen Switzerland is 
 not a prospect to appeal to patriotic sentiment, but there 
 are worse fates awaiting democracies than the inglorious
 
 332 THE CHIEF OF THE STATE BK. n 
 
 prosperity of the federated cantons. The United States 
 are as prosperous as Switzerland, and have with affluence 
 become almost as barren in art and in letters, after an 
 early season of wondrous literary promise. It is true 
 that in that vast Republic the name of the President is 
 familiar to every citizen ; but his renown, while it affords 
 no danger of dictatorship, does not make his office an 
 object of ambition for the worthiest members of the com- 
 munity. The abstention from politics of the better types 
 of Frenchmen combined with the growing materialism of 
 the upper-classes of the capital, are symptoms which can- 
 not be regarded with indifference, when the example of 
 America, of too great influence in France, is contem- 
 plated. The dangers and difficulties which now beset 
 peoples are of a different order from those which were 
 apparent a hundred years ago when the calendar was 
 dated from the new era of the change of things ; but 
 signs are not wanting that the French nation may need 
 as strong a hand to guide it out of the nineteenth 
 century as that of the First Consul which brought it 
 thither.
 
 INDEX 
 
 ABBAYK, massacre of the, 222. 
 
 Aberdeen, Lord, 61. 
 
 Aboukir, battle of, 224. 
 
 About, Edmond, 40. 
 
 Academic Palms, 174. 
 
 Acadtmie Fran^aise, 43, 52, 104-105, 
 139, 143, 214. 
 
 Acadia, 239. 
 
 Administrative system (see also Cen- 
 tralisation, Napoleon) : identical all 
 over France, 15 ; excessive number 
 of Functionaries, 25, 33, 237; its 
 strength makes up for bad political 
 government, 44; founded by Na- 
 poleon, 21, 112-114; survives all 
 regimes, 36, 124-126, 257, 269; the 
 liberties of functionaries, 150-151, 
 160-161. 
 
 Africa, South, 107, 252. 
 
 Agincourt, battle of, 62. 
 
 Aigues-Mortes, 17. 
 
 Aix-en-Provence, 16. 
 
 Ajaccio, 30. 
 
 Alacocque, Marie, 17. 
 
 Albi, 239. 
 
 Alexander I. (of Russia), 46, 111. 
 
 Algeria, 13, 15, 17, 234. 
 
 Allies in Paris (1814-15), 46, 96, 111, 
 249-250, 256, 262. 
 
 Alpes Maritimes, dept. of, 14, 20. 
 
 Alsace-Lorraine, 28, 31, 47, 99, 215, 
 233, 251. 
 
 Amboise, 315. 
 
 America, United States of (see also 
 Tocqueville), 1-3, 9, 61, 67, 194, 
 332; War of Secession in, 60, 221; 
 constitution of, 265-266, 284 ; presi- 
 dential elections, 309; spoils sys- 
 tem, 285. 
 
 Ami du Penple, L\ 218. 
 
 Anciens, Conseil des, 272 
 
 Ancient Re'gime, 84, 87, 88, 98, 128, 
 158, 205; modern Parisian society 
 compared with that of, 191-196; idea 
 of patriotism under, 230-232. 
 
 Angers, 13. 
 
 Anglomania, 51, 193, 205. 
 
 Anglo-Saxon race, expansion of, 67, 
 233. 
 
 Angouleme, Due d', 121. 
 Duchesse d', 121. 
 
 Annecy, 15, 17, 141, 143, 300. 
 
 Anti-clericals and anti-clericalism, 
 147-166; civil interments, 147; the 
 Ferry Laws, 148 ; in the provinces, 
 149-155. 
 
 Arago, M. Emmanuel, 219. 
 
 Arcola, battle of, 107, 279. 
 
 Aries, 16. 
 
 Army, the French, 48, 53, 120. 
 
 Arnold, Mr. Matthew, 140, 145-146. 
 
 Artois, Comte d' (see also Charles X.) , 
 117-118, 122, 232, 278, 324. 
 
 Assembly, Legislative, of 1791, 100. 
 
 Assembly, National, of 1789, 72, 100, 
 113, 168. 
 
 Assembly, National, of 1871, 28, 57 ; 
 its composition and debates, 263, 
 264, 273; its powers and work, 265, 
 281. 
 
 Aulard, M., 135. 
 
 Aumale, Due d', 52, 102. 
 
 Austerlitz, battle of, 87, 114, 120. 
 
 Austria, Anne of, 117. 
 
 Austro-Hungary, 68. 
 
 Authoritative government, agreeable 
 to the French, 137, 244, 320, 328 ; 
 necessary complement of central- 
 ised system, 33, 247. 
 
 Autun, 9, 107, 109. 
 
 Auvergne, 17. 
 
 Auxonne, 30. 
 
 333
 
 334 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Aveyron, dept. of, 16. 
 Avignon, 16. 
 
 BALZAC, H. de, 184. 
 
 Barante, Baron de, 74, 184. 
 
 Barere, Bertrand, 77, 103. 
 
 Barodet, M., 275. 
 
 Barra, Joseph, 223. 
 
 Barras, 103, 107, 110, 119, 239. 
 
 Barre, Chevalier de la, 158. 
 
 Barrere, M. Camille, Preface. 
 
 Barry, Mme. du, 324. 
 
 Bartholomew, St., massacre of, 188. 
 
 Basses Alpes, dept. of, 21. 
 
 Bastille, fall of the, 90, 96, 99, 133- 
 134, 168, 173, 198, 209, 221, 232. 
 
 Bazaine, Marshal, 280. 
 
 Beauharnais, Eugene, 69. 
 
 Be"jarry, A. de, 224. 
 
 Belfort, 12. 
 
 BeVanger, P. J., 124, 256. 
 
 Bernadotte, 69. 
 
 Bernard, St., 143. 
 
 Bert, M. Paul, 55, 148. 
 
 Berthier, Prince de Wagram, 110. 
 
 Berlin aine, 163. 
 
 Berry, Due de, 293. 
 
 Berry, the, 14, 207. 
 
 Besan9on, 12, 99. 
 
 Bicetre, 225. 
 
 Bill of Rights, 262. 
 
 Bismarck, Prince, 250-261, 275. 
 
 Blanc, Louis, 81. 
 
 Blenheim, battle of, 63. 
 
 Bliicher, Field-Marshal, 250. 
 
 Boers, 252. 
 
 Boissy St. Leger, 110. 
 
 Bolingbroke, Lord, 146. 
 
 Bonapartists, 229; in Assembly of 
 1871, 263, 273, 277. 
 
 Bonaparte, family of (see also Napo- 
 leon), 30, 69, 74, 246. 
 
 Bonnat, M., 223, 323. 
 
 Bordeaux, 14, 35, 213, 273. 
 
 Borghese, Pauline, 7, 246. 
 
 Boscobel, 223. 
 
 Bossuet, 144. 
 
 Boulanger, General, 281, 294-297, 326, 
 328-329. 
 
 Bourg-en-Bresse, 11, 313. 
 
 Bourgeoisie, the : and the great Revo- 
 lution, 82, 167-168, 305; and the 
 Revolution of July, 2, 305; inter- 
 
 marriages with noblesse, 185 ; Radi- 
 cal and Socialist use of term, 194, 
 306, 313, 314 ; general modern defini- 
 tion, 313. 
 
 Bourges, 14, 314. 
 
 Boutmy, M. E., 261, 262, 266. 
 
 Bray, French Vicars of, 248. 
 
 Brest, 239. 
 
 Breton, M. Jules, 223. 
 
 Brie, the, 20, 57, 109, 254. 
 
 Brisson, M., 297, 305, 309, 314. 
 
 British Constitution, 46, 111, 115; 
 effects of its imitation in France, 
 46, 246, 267. 
 
 Brittany, 13, 99, 156, 202, 231, 315. 
 
 Broglie, Abbe" de, 229. 
 
 Broglie, Due (Albert) de, 276, 287. 
 Duchesse de, 49, 116. 
 
 Brosses, C. de, 241. 
 
 Brown's Estimate, 241. 
 
 Browning, Mr., 255. 
 
 Brumaire, Coup d'fitat de, 93, 108, 
 109, 267, 272, 278. 
 
 Brunoy, seigneurie of, 279. 
 
 Brunswick, House of, 242. 
 
 Buffet, M., 12. 
 
 Bulwer, Henry (Lord Dalling), 199. 
 
 Burgundy, 17, 99, 231. 
 
 Byng, Admiral, 241. 
 
 Byron, Lord, 31, 76. 
 
 CABINET COUNCIL, see Council of Min- 
 isters : Ministerial instability. 
 
 Calais, the loss of, 62. 
 
 Calas, Jean, 158. 
 
 Camargue, 16. 
 
 Cambon, M. Jules, 11, 38. 
 
 Cambronne, General, 249. 
 
 Campaign of France, 110. 
 
 Campo Formio, Peace of, 107. 
 
 Canada, 235, 239. 
 
 Candide, 240. 
 
 Canning, Mr., 253. 
 
 Capet, Hugues, 272. 
 
 Carcassonne, 14. 
 
 Carmagnole, the, 230, 306. 
 
 Carnot, Hippolyte, 103, 298. 
 
 Carnot, Lazare, 103, 297, 299, 307. 
 
 Carnot, M. Sadi, President of the 
 Republic, 29, 104, 229, 272, 307, 315, 
 320 ; his election to Presidency, 2ft" ; 
 career and character, 298 seq.; 
 death, 304, 323.
 
 INDEX 
 
 335 
 
 Carrier (of Nantes), 217. 
 
 Casa-Bianca, Lucien, 224. 
 
 Casimir-Perier, M. J., President of the 
 Republic, Prime Minister, 302-303 ; 
 election to Presidency, 304; his 
 antecedents, 305-307; his term of 
 office, 306-309, 312, 315, 323, 327. 
 
 Casimir-Pe'ner, family of, 305. 
 
 Cassagnac, M. P. de, 229. 
 
 Castellane, M. de, 282. 
 
 Castiglione, battle of, 115, 120. 
 
 Castlereagh, Lord, 253. 
 
 Cavaignac, General, 311. 
 M. Godefroy, 309-310. 
 
 Cawnpore, 221. 
 
 Centralisation (see also Administrative 
 System, Napoleon) : conforms to 
 French needs and ideas, 34 seq., 
 113, 244 ; incompatible with Parlia- 
 mentary government, 33, 83; no 
 likelihood of decentralisation in 
 France, 34seg.,270. 
 
 Cevennes, the, 17. 
 
 Chabannes, Comte de, 209-210. 
 
 Chablais, the, 17, 144. 
 
 Challemel-Lacour, M., 94, 95, 105. 
 
 Chambe'ry, 21, 315. 
 
 Chambord, Comte de, 265; and the 
 White Flag, 277. 
 
 Chantal, Sainte, 141. 
 
 Chant du Depart, 218, 223. 
 
 Chaptal, College, 201. 
 
 Charlemagne, the new, 120, 257. 
 
 Charles II. (of England), 63, 94, 223, 
 279. 
 
 Charles VII., 117, 152, 156. 
 
 Charles IX., 186. 
 
 Charles X., 78, 164, 276,324, 325, 326; 
 coronation of, 117, 118, 122. 
 
 Charlotte, Princess, 256. 
 
 Charmettes, les, 21. 
 
 Charollais, the, 17. 
 
 Charter of 1814, 46, 72. 
 
 Chartres, 15. 
 
 Chateaubriand, 184. 
 
 Chateaux, French, 8, 11, 13, 20, 51, 191. 
 
 Che'nier, M. J., 217. 
 
 Chinon, 152. 
 
 Church, the : Concordat, 9, 112, 114, 
 138, 139, 156 ; character of clergy, 
 55, 56, 151, 159, 229; clergy before 
 Revolution, 56, 74, 119, 216; and 
 Revolution of 1848, 80; attitude 
 
 to free-thought, 138-145; conflicts 
 with Republic, 138, 286, 290; and 
 Voltaire, 141, 145 ; and the Revolu- 
 tion, 160; the Seize Mai, 286; asso- 
 ciation with Monarchists, 291. 
 
 Church of England, 141, 142, 145-146, 
 151. 
 
 Cinq Cents, Conseil des, 272. 
 
 Civil burial, 147. 
 
 Civilisation: the progress of, causes 
 greater changes than did French 
 Revolution, 3, 192, 198, 257; per- 
 meation of, to humble classes, 205- 
 207 ; old civilisation of France, 208, 
 257. 
 
 Claretie, M. Jules, 31, 104. 
 
 Clarke, Mrs., 253. 
 
 Clary, 69. 
 
 Class feeling, 201 seq. 
 
 Classification and formula, French 
 tendency towards, 243, 245, 266. 
 
 Clemenceau, M., 7, 90, 91, 251, 297. 
 
 Clerical party, the Seize Mai, 286; 
 alliance with Monarchists, 291. 
 
 CUricalisme, Le, voila I'ennemi, 160, 
 287. 
 
 Clermont-Ferrand, 17. 
 
 Clovis, 118, 188, 254. 
 
 Codes, the (Civil, Penal, etc.), 113, 
 129. 
 
 Colenso, Bishop, 143. 
 
 College de France, 19, 40, 146. 
 
 Colonies, British, 9, 67, 70, 235-236. 
 
 Colonisation, French, 232-239; re- 
 straints on, 234-235 seq.; effect of 
 testamentary law, 236. 
 
 Comment on Christmas, 146. 
 
 Commission des Trente, 264. 
 
 Committee of Public Safety, 103. 
 
 Commune : insurrection of, 38, 57, 86, 
 146, 220, 225, 230, 250, 274, 275. 
 
 Condorcet, Lycee, 203. 
 
 Condorcet, Marquis de, 113, 128. 
 
 Congress for election of President of 
 the Republic, 282-283, 294. 
 
 Coningsby, 198. 
 
 Constitution of 1848, 127, 263-264, 
 266. 
 
 Constitution of 1875, 127, 263-270; 
 unlike all which preceded it, 264; 
 without scientific interest, 265; 
 articles relating to chief of execu- 
 tive, 282 seq.
 
 336 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Constitutional precedents, practice 
 and law, 261 seq., 272, 288, 300-302 ; 
 no scientific study of, in France, 
 265 ; in England, 266 ; conception of 
 unconstitutional conduct, 288-289. 
 
 Constitutional revision, 267, 290; in 
 England, 268. 
 
 Consulate, the, 79, 88, 119, 272. 
 
 Conti, Prince de, 193. 
 
 Continental blockade, 130. 
 
 Contrat Social, 217. 
 
 Convention of 1792, 72, 77, 79-81, 91- 
 92, 102, 110, 113, 168, 217, 264, 279, 
 310. 
 
 Convention, English Parliamentary, 
 of 1688, 261. 
 
 Corday, Charlotte, 74. 
 
 Cordeliers, 92. 
 
 Corps Ltgislatif of 1815, 261. 
 
 Corsica, 13, 30, 119. 
 
 Council of ministers (see also Minis- 
 terial instability), 283, 285, 288. 
 
 Coup d'fitat of 1851, 83, 220, 248, 267, 
 280,292. 
 
 Cour de France, 111. 
 
 Cousin, Victor, 123. 
 
 Cre'cy, battle of, 63. 
 
 Creuse, dept. of, 14. 
 
 Crimean War, 59, 323. 
 
 Criminal procedure in France, 133- 
 134. 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 62, 94. 
 
 Cruppi, M. Jean, 135. 
 
 Cult of the dead, 154, 228, 229. 
 
 DANISH War, 60. 
 
 Danton, 74, 91-92, 135, 222. 
 
 Darboy, Archbishop, 225. 
 
 David, Sacre de Napoleon, 118-120. 
 
 Davout, Due d'Auerstaedt, 182. 
 
 Dayot, M. A., La Revolution Fran- 
 
 qaise, 133. 
 "Days of June" (see Revolution of 
 
 1848), 82, 219, 327. 
 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 
 
 102, 138, 212, 221, 263, 272, 327. 
 Deffant, Mme. du, 198. 
 Deity, the name of the, 155. 
 Deschamps, M. Gaston, 133, 240. 
 Desmoulins, Camille, 105, 168, 170, 
 
 209 
 
 Detaille, M., 223. 
 Deux Sevres, dept. of, 20. 
 
 Dictatorship (see Authoritative gov- 
 ernment) : the French latent liking 
 for, 312, 318, 320, 328 ; official pre- 
 cautions against, 317, 329. 
 
 Diderot, 20, 89, 128, 195, 254. 
 
 Dijon, 17. 
 
 Directory, the, 74, 93, 95, 103, 106, 
 279. 
 
 Disraeli, Mr., 32, 198-199. 
 
 Dodds, General, 329. 
 
 Dole, 153. 
 
 Domicile, violability of, 135. 
 
 Domremy, 12, 62. 
 
 Dossiers, 150. 
 
 Dowry, custom of, 197, 236. 
 
 Dragonnades, 154. 
 
 Drama, the French, 28. 
 
 Drouais, 324. 
 
 Drumont, M., 228. 
 
 Duelling, 209. 
 
 Dufaure, M., 265, 292. 
 
 Dufferin, Lord, 7. 
 
 Dumas fils, Alexandre, 28. 
 
 Dumouriez, 102, 124, 279. 
 
 Dupanloup, Mgr., 122, 139, 143, 145. 
 
 Dupuy, M., 301. 
 
 Duruy, Victor, 162. 
 
 Dutch in the Medway, the, 252. 
 
 Normale, 203. 
 
 J^cole Polytechnique, 203. 
 
 Education (see also University) : the 
 Professoriate, 54 ; in the Lyce'es, 132, 
 161, 201, 203 ; in Catholic schools, 
 161, 202; inculcation of equality, 
 202 ; schoolboy life in France, 132, 
 203. 
 
 Edward II., 261. 
 
 Egypt, Campagne of, 93, 107. 
 
 Eighteenth century (see also Ancient 
 Regime) : intellectual revolution of, 
 130 ; society of, 191-195 ; intellectual 
 charm of, 195; idea of patriotism 
 in, 230. 
 
 Elba, 123, 256, 279. 
 
 Eldon, Lord, 136. 
 
 ElyseX Palace of the, 295, 318. 
 
 Emigration, the, 16, 91, 121, 198, 205, 
 231. 
 
 Empire, Second, 95; effect of, on 
 Napoleonic legend, 48, 124, 247; 
 national character under, 27, 40, 48 ; 
 its revolutionary tradition, 72, 75,
 
 INDEX 
 
 337 
 
 82-84, 93 ; Opposition under, 40, 84 ; 
 and M. Taine, 85, 162 ; its disastrous 
 fall, 48, 124, 250, 273 ; relations with 
 the Church, 162, 164; and titles of 
 nobility, 170, 179; and oppressed 
 nationalities, 214. 
 Encyclical, Papal, of 1892, 14, 160. 
 Encyclopaedists, the, 39, 129, 130, 195, 
 
 231. 
 
 Eughien, Due d', 125. 
 England and France: relations of, 
 59-64, 215 ; titles of nobility in, 171, 
 175-177 ; orders and distinctions in, 
 173 ; nomenclature in, 187 ; histor- 
 ical anniversaries in, 222 ; ideas of 
 patriotism in, 233, 238; colonising 
 spirit in, 235 seq.; effect of unset- 
 tled government in, 240-241 ; effect 
 of geographical position on national 
 temper, 249-253 ; modern historical 
 associations in, 254-256 ; revolutions 
 of, compared, 262; constitutional 
 revision in, 267-268. 
 England, Queen of (see also Victoria, 
 
 Queen), 318, 321-322, 325. 
 English revolutions : comparisons 
 with, drawn by French Liberals, 40, 
 77, 78, 91 ; compared with French 
 Revolution, 73, 262. 
 Ephial, 12. 
 
 !Epinay, Mme. de, 195. 
 Equality, 167-212: under the Revolu- 
 tion, 167-170 ; French ideas of, 168, 
 208; titles of nobility, 169; orders 
 and decorations, 171 seq. ; Montes- 
 quieu upon, 200; in the schools, 
 201 seq. ; superficial phase of, 204 ; 
 the duel a symbol of, 209-210; 
 railway travelling, 211. 
 Erfurt, 130. 
 Esprit critique, 25, 86. 
 Esprit de corps, 203. 
 Espnt des Lois, 200. 
 Executive power, the, 271 seq. (see 
 also President of the Republic) ; 
 attributes of chief of, 271, 282; 
 character of chiefs of, since Revo- 
 lution, 325. 
 
 FAUBOURG ST. GERMAIN, 178, 203: 
 
 see also Noblesse, etc. 
 Faure, M. Felix, President of the 
 
 Republic, 29, 155-156, 272, 325; 
 
 his election to Presidency, 311; 
 origin and career, 311-316. 
 
 Favre, M. Jules, 264-265. 
 
 Federation of 1790, 232. 
 
 Fe'nelon, 144. 
 
 Ferney, 142, 158, 195. 
 
 Ferry, M. Jules, 12, 148, 229, 240, 
 247, 251, 268, 289, 296. 
 
 Fesch, Cardinal, 119. 
 
 Feuillants, 92. 
 
 Feuillee, M. Martin, 268. 
 
 Feuillet, Octave, 28. 
 
 Filioque clause of the creed, 167. 
 
 Financial causes of the Revolution, 
 97-99, 167, 235. 
 
 Flandrin, Hippolyte, 323. 
 
 Flaubert, G., 208. 
 
 Floquet, M., 296, 297. 
 
 Fontainebleau, abdication of, 110, 
 278. 
 
 Fontenoy, battle of, 63. 
 
 Foreign relations (see England and 
 France, Russian Alliance), 215; 
 French popular interest in, 319. 
 
 Forez, 10. 
 
 Fouche', Due d'Otranto, 107, 170, 279. 
 
 Foulon, Cardinal, 11. 
 
 Fox, C. J., 76. 
 
 Foy, General, 123. 
 
 France: the pleasantness of life in, 
 24, 4, 71, 235; the tranquillity of 
 the people, 57, 328; their industry 
 and thrift, 44, 58, 236 ; their orderly 
 instincts, 243 seq.; its importance in 
 the world, 67-77 ; cult of domestic 
 affections in, 214 ; art in, 223 ; soil 
 of, love of French for, 233, 239; 
 treatment of fallen rulers of, 247 ; 
 its modern historical associations, 
 254-257 ; reconstruction of (see Na- 
 poleon), 257. 
 
 France, M. Anatole, 45, 56. 
 
 Franche-Comte', 101. 
 
 Francis I., Emperor of Austria (pre- 
 viously Francis II., Emperor of 
 Germany) , 257. 
 
 Francis-Joseph II. (Emperor of Aus- 
 tria), 319. 
 
 Franco-German War, 45, 86, 153, 215, 
 220, 247, 250, 253, 273; its effect on 
 French character, 27 seq., 251, 
 253. 
 
 Franfois de Sales, St., 143.
 
 338 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Frankfort, Treaty of, 27, 263. 
 
 Fraternity, 213-230; at the Revolu- 
 tion, 213, 216-219; harshness of 
 French to French, 215 seq.; the 
 cult of fratricide, 221 seq. 
 
 Freemasons, 154-165. 
 
 Freethought and freethinkers: atti- 
 tude of Church to, 139, 141, 143, 
 145-146 ; influence of Voltaire, 142- 
 143; intolerance towards religion, 
 148-166; in French provinces, 149 
 seq . 
 
 Fre'jus, 106. 
 
 Freppel, Mgr., 7. 
 
 Freycinet, M. de, 294, 296, 297. 
 
 Friedland, battle of, 116. 
 
 " Friend of the foreigner," 252. 
 
 Frohsdorf , 276. 
 
 Froissart, 63. 
 
 Functionaries, see Administrative 
 system. 
 
 Funeral honours paid to politicians, 
 329-330. 
 
 GALLICANS and Gallicanism, 138, 140, 
 143, 148. 
 
 Galliffet, General de, 182. 
 
 Oallus Gallo Lupus, 215-220, 225, see 
 Fraternity. 
 
 Gambetta, 41, 160, 183, 265, 273, 275, 
 284, 289, 310, 327, 330 ; his share in 
 founding the Republic, 275, 289; 
 the jealousy he excited, 292, 296, 
 303, 328 ; his occult power, 292. 
 
 Garat, 262. 
 
 Gavarni, 324. 
 
 Generalisation: inappropriate in a 
 treatise on France, 4. 
 
 Genlis, Mine, de, 192. 
 
 Geoff rin, Mme., 198. 
 
 George III., 46, 195, 256. 
 
 Gerard, Sacre de Charles X., 118. 
 
 Germany (see also Franco-German 
 War), 12, 60, 247; prominence of, 
 in the world, 68-71 ; German criti- 
 cism and philosophy, 68, 143 ; French 
 feeling towards, 214-215. 
 
 Girondins, the, 77, 81, 91, 92, 105, 168, 
 252 ; Lamartine's History of, 80, 81, 
 88,89. 
 
 Gladstone, Mr., 75. 
 
 Goethe, 76, 130. 
 
 Gontaut Biron, M. de, 275. 
 
 Goritz, 325. 
 
 Grande Armte, 123. 
 
 Grandval, 20, 195. 
 
 Granville, Harriet, Conntess, 249. 
 
 Gravelotte, battle of, 221. 
 
 Greece, 214. 
 
 Grenoble, 11, 274. 
 
 Gre'vy, M. Jules : President of the Re- 
 public, 278, 280, 291, 293, 312; elec- 
 tion to Presidency, 2!)1 ; his double 
 term of office, 283, 2<J4; his jeal- 
 ousy of Gambetta, 292, 303; his 
 character, 295, 318, 323, 326-327; 
 his fall, 295, 299, 324. 
 
 Gros Bois, Chateau de, 110. 
 
 Guadet, 81. 
 
 Guibert, Cardinal, 145. 
 
 Guizot, M., 40, 60, 80, 82. 
 
 Gunpowder Plot, 223. 
 
 "Gyp, "193. 
 
 HALEVT, M. Ludovic, 19. 
 
 Hamerton, Mr. P. G., 10, 22. 
 
 Hampden, 78. 
 
 Ha no t;u ix, M., 214. 
 
 Hanover, House of, 242. 
 
 Haussonville. Comte d', 182. 
 
 Hautes Alpes, dept. of, 21. 
 
 Havre, 311, 315. 
 
 Hemans, Mrs., 255. 
 
 Henri IV., 186. 
 
 Henry, M. Arsene, 21. 
 
 Hero-worship: the form it takes in 
 France, 312, 317, 328; the means 
 used to suppress it, 329. 
 
 High office in France the ruin of popu- 
 larity, 296, 303. 
 
 Hoche, General, 255. 
 
 Hohenlohe, Prince, 264. 
 
 Holbach, Baron d', 20, 195. 
 
 Holy Alliance, 40. 
 
 Hortense, Queen, 246. 
 
 Hotel Rambouillet, 51. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 41, 63, 184, 325. 
 
 Huguenots, 17, 62. 
 
 Hugues, M. Clovis, 230. 
 
 Hulst, Mgr. d', 182-183. 
 
 Hundred Days, 111. 
 
 Hundred Years' War, 63. 
 
 Huxley, Mr., 142, 146. 
 
 IMPERIAL, Prince (Louis Napoleon) , 
 108, 278, 293, 310.
 
 INDEX 
 
 339 
 
 Improvisation, 243 seq. 
 
 India, French in, 235, 239. 
 
 Indian Mutiny, 221. 
 
 Indifference of French to public 
 
 affairs, 36, 40, 58, 136, 154, 163, 247, 
 
 311. 
 
 Indre, dept. of, 14. 
 Ingres, 1(53. 
 Institute of France (see also Acade- 
 
 mie Fran9aise), 107, 113, 163, 195. 
 Intolerance, 138-166; ecclesiastical, 
 
 139-145; anti-clerical, 147-166; in 
 
 England and in France, 137, 151; 
 
 in provinces, 149-153; peculiarities 
 
 of French, 152, 153, 157; official, 
 
 150, 154-155 ; and anarchy, 165. 
 Invalides, Hotel des, 188, 323, 330. 
 Invasion, the phantom of, 250-253. 
 Invasions of 1814-1815, 110, 215, 
 
 249. 
 
 Ireland, Archbishop, 162, 164. 
 Ireland, invasion of, 262. 
 Isere, dept. of, 11, 21. 
 Italian nation, 61, 68 ; French feeling 
 
 for, 215. 
 
 Italian War of 1859, 60. 
 Italy, Army of, 119, 225. 
 
 JACOBINS, the, 78, 81, 94, 103, 105, 
 164, 165, 168, 216, 252. 
 
 Jacobites, 241. 
 
 James II., 63, 78, 249. 
 
 Jansenists, 138. 
 
 Janson de Sailly, Lyce'e, 144. 
 
 Janssen, M., 37. 
 
 Jemmapes, battle of, 102, 279. 
 
 Jena, battle of, 87, 95, 114, 120, 250, 
 254. 
 
 J'y suisj'y reste, 282. 
 
 Jesuits, 138, 202. 
 
 Joan of Arc, 62, 117, 152, 156. 
 
 Jocelyn, 81. 
 
 Jordan, the, 249. 
 
 Joseph Bonaparte, 111. 
 
 Josephine, Empress, 107, 119, 255. 
 
 Journal des De'bats, 149, 163, 226. 
 
 Journalism, characteristics of French, 
 18, 29, 42, 135, 137, 150, 215, 218, 
 226-230, 298, 307, 316; at Revolu- 
 tion, 100, 218. 
 
 Juvisy, 117. 
 
 KHAKTOUM, 240. 
 
 Kleber, Marshal, 255. 
 
 LABOULAYE, M., 57. 
 
 Lacroix, 209. 
 
 La Fayette, 72, 100. 
 
 La Fontaine, 155. 
 
 La Hogue, battle of, 63. 
 
 Lally Tollendal, 81. 
 
 Lamartine, 72, 78-82, 101, 184. 
 
 Lamballe, Princesse de, 222. 
 
 Lamennais, Abbe" de, 184. 
 
 Landes, dept. of, 14, 16. 
 
 Lanfrey, P., 124. 
 
 Lang-Son, disaster of, 240. 
 
 Langue d'O'il, 63. 
 
 La Pe'rouse, 239. 
 
 La Rochelle, 14, 62. 
 
 Las Casas, 124. 
 
 La Tre"moille, Due de, 74, 186. 
 
 Launay, Governor de, 133. 
 
 Lavigerie, Cardinal, 13, 223. 
 
 Lavisse, M., 40. 
 
 Lavoisier, 128, 129. 
 
 Lebon, M. Andre, 240. 
 
 Le Creuzot, 10. 
 
 Legion of Honour, 113, 171-174, 295. 
 
 Legitimists, 169 ; in assembly of 1871, 
 2ti3, 265. 
 
 Leighton, Sir F., 14. 
 
 Leipsic, battle of, 114. 
 
 Lemaitre, M. Jules, 43-44. 
 
 Leman, Lac, 17. 
 
 Le Mans, 13. 
 
 Leopold II. (King of the Belgians), 
 319 
 
 Leo XIII., 160. 
 
 Leporche', M., 155. 
 
 Le Puy, 17. 
 
 Leroy-Beaulieu, M. Anatole, 50. 
 
 Leroy-Beaulieu, M. Paul, Preface, 19. 
 
 Lettres de cachet, 133. 
 
 Liberals, the old, 164. 
 
 "Liberator of the Territory," 274- 
 275, see Thiers. 
 
 Liberty, 127-166 : French and English 
 conceptions of, 128 ; connection with 
 Revolution, 128 seq. ; its theoretical 
 study in France, 128, 131-132 ; per- 
 sonal liberty untried prisoners, 
 132-135; violability of domicile, 
 135; liberty of opinion, 138 seq. ; 
 effect of sectarian subdivision on, 
 138 seq.; limitations of religious
 
 340 
 
 INDEX 
 
 liberty, 148-152 ; restraints imposed 
 in name of, 157 ; restraints on, do 
 not interfere with general happi- 
 ness. 136, 164. 
 
 " Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," 
 127, 131, 213. 
 
 Limoges, 14. 
 
 Literature and Dogma, 140. 
 
 Literature: and French Society, 18, 
 50, 184 ; under July Monarchy, 184 ; 
 in Grand Siecle, 242. 
 
 Littre', E., 139. 
 
 Local Government Board, 37. 
 
 Local Government, see Administra- 
 tive system. 
 
 Lockroy, M., 188. 
 
 Loubet, M., 302. 
 
 Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (see also 
 Napoleon HI.), 80-83, 95, 112, 127, 
 137, 267, 272, 280, 290, 310, 324, 327. 
 
 Louis Philippe, 30, 34, 72, 78, 102, 122, 
 170, 247-248, 277, 324. 
 
 Louis XIV., 63, 154, 188, 215, 242. 
 
 Louis XV., 67, 239, 242, 267, 324. 
 
 Louis XVI., 78, 87, 100, 105, 117, 113, 
 122, 129, 195, 262, 264. 
 
 Louis XVII., 95. 
 
 Louis XVm., 92, 95, 116, 170, 278, 305. 
 
 Lourdes, 14, 17. 
 
 Louvre, pictures in the, 118, 163, 193, 
 225, 324. 
 
 Luxembourg, Palais du, 121, 219; gal- 
 lery of, 223. 
 
 Lyce"es, see Education. 
 
 Lyons, 11, 13, 16, 17, 38, 147, 154. 
 
 Lytton, Lord, 7. 
 
 MACAULAY, Lord, 77-79, 91, 241, 261. 
 
 MacMahon, Marshal, President of the 
 Republic, 29, 164, 182, 312, 320, 323, 
 327 ; elected to the Presidency, 275 ; 
 his Septennate, 264, 278, 281,282; 
 the Seize Mai, 286-291. 
 
 Maine, Duchesse du, 192. 
 
 Malakoff , battle of, 282, 323. 
 
 Malesherbes, 128. 
 
 Malmaison, the, 119, 254. 
 
 Malmesbury, Lord, 95. 
 
 Malplaquet, 63. 
 
 Manhood Suffrage, see Universal Suf- 
 frage. 
 
 Manning, Cardinal, 7, 140. 
 
 Marat, 101, 209, 218, 222. 
 
 Marceau, General, 224-225, 255. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, 153. 
 
 Marengo, battle of, 109, 120. 
 
 Marie Antoinette, Queen, 81, 117, 195, 
 256,324. 
 
 Marie-Louise, Empress, 111, 123. 
 
 Marlborough, Duke of, 63. 
 
 Marly, 194. 
 
 Marmont, Marshal, 111, 279. 
 
 Marmontel, Marquis de Brunoy, 279. 
 
 Marseillaise, the, 76, 101, 225, 249. 
 
 Marseilles, 13, 35, 101. 
 
 Marshals of France, posthumous 
 honours to, 330. 
 
 Martin, M. Henri, 105. 
 
 Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, 154. 
 
 Massacres of September, 94, 222, 225, 
 230. 
 
 Massena, Marshal, Due de Rivoli, 255. 
 
 Maupeou, Chancellor, 267. 
 
 Mazarin, Cardinal, 63, 117. 
 
 Meauz, Vicomte de, 10. 
 
 Mecklenburg, Grand Duke of, 254. 
 
 Me"dicis, Catherine de, 188. 
 
 Memorial of St. Helena, 92, 124. 
 
 Menthon St. Bernard, 17, 143. 
 
 Me'rite Agricole, 174. 
 
 Messidor, Decree of, 21. 
 
 Methodical spirit of the French, 243- 
 245. 
 
 Methods of studying a foreign coun- 
 try, 1-6, 21-25. 
 
 Metternich, Prince Clement, 213. 
 
 Metz, 83, 280. 
 
 Meudon, 37. 
 
 Michelet, Jules, 17, 81, 104. 
 
 Middle-classes, see Bourgeoisie. 
 
 Ministerial instability under the Re- 
 public, 49, 292, 293, 302-303. 
 
 Ministries, see Council of Ministers. 
 
 Mirabeau, 87, 100, 129. 
 
 Moltke, Field-Marshal, 250. 
 
 Monarchists, their dissensions in As- 
 sembly of 1871, 263, 278; their 
 political ineptitude, 276, 291; alli- 
 ance with the clericals, 286, 291. 
 
 Monarchy of July (see also Louis 
 Philippe, Orleanists), 2, 30, 34, 72, 
 77, 79, 93, 183, 184, 198, 267. 
 
 Monde ou Von s'ennuie, le, 28. 
 
 Moniteur, the, 262. 
 
 Monk, the tradition of, in France, 
 279-281.
 
 INDEX 
 
 341 
 
 Monopoly, Government, of tobacco, 
 
 136. 
 
 Mont St. Jean, see Waterloo. 
 Montalembert, Comte de, 11, 184. 
 Mentals, Mgr. de, 280. 
 Montatiban, 16. 
 Montesquieu, 130, 200, 213. 
 Montmartre, 20, 58. 
 Montpellier, 16. 
 Moore, Sir John, 255. 
 "Moral order," government of, 277 
 
 seq. 
 
 Morbihan, dept. of, 13, 202. 
 More, Mrs. Hannah, 255. 
 Mortier, Marshal, Due de Tre'vise, 
 
 121. 
 
 Morvan, 10. 
 Moscow, 114, 257. 
 Moulins, 100. 
 Mulhouse, 12. 
 Mun, Comte Albert de, 7, 13, 51, 182, 
 
 183,228. 
 Musset, A. de, 31, 184. 
 
 NANCY, 12. 
 
 Nantes, 14, 217. 
 
 Nantes, Revocation of Edict of, 149. 
 
 Napoleon: his attention to detail, 5, 
 244, 245; his fabric of centralized 
 administration, 21, 34 seq., 44, 83, 
 87, 112-114, 125, 152, 164, 257; his 
 career, work, and character, 30, 95, 
 106-115, 256, 272, 325, 326 ; his coin- 
 age, 47 ; the son of the Ke volution, 
 72, 92, 106, 117, 331 ; criticised by 
 Taine, 34, 87, 113, 124-125 ; opinion 
 on Robespierre, 92; on Duchesse 
 d'Angouleme, 121 ; Napoleonic le- 
 gend, 96, 123, 124, 246 ; reconstructor 
 of France, 109, 122 ; organised the 
 Revolution, 112 seq., 117, 217, 245; 
 coronation of, 118-120, 229 ; second 
 burial of, 31; Imperial nobility, 
 169, 178, 180; Legion of Honour, 
 171 ; nomenclature of French citi- 
 zens, 187; testamentary law, 199; 
 bis plan to invade England, 253; 
 his magnitude a disadvantage for 
 France, 271,325, 326. 
 
 Napoleon III., 40, 83, 95, 170, 246, 250, 
 312, 324. 
 
 National defence, Government of, 
 273, 292 ; inquiry into acts of, 29. 
 
 Nelson, Lord, 256, 330. 
 
 Ney, Marshal, Prince de Moskowa, 
 121, 188, 219. 
 
 Nice, 20. 
 
 Nicholas I. (of Russia), 59. 
 
 Nicholas II. (of Russia), 46, 156, 157. 
 
 Nimes, 17 ; the Maison Carrie, 188. 
 
 Nineteenth century, close of, 63, 67, 
 74, 332. 
 
 Nivernais, the, 17. 
 
 " Noble birth," 177. 
 
 Noblesse, French, before the Revolu- 
 tion, 99, 177 ; abolition of privilege 
 and titles, 169; reconstituted by 
 Napoleon, 170, 178 ; under Restora- 
 tion, 178; under Second Empire, 
 178 ; under Republic, 169, 175 ; de- 
 cadence of noble class, 49, 51, 182, 
 196-200, 306 ; its Anglomania, 193, 
 205. 
 
 Nomenclature, State supervision of, 
 187. 
 
 Normandy, 6, 20. 
 
 Notre Dame de Paris, 118, 156, 229. 
 
 Nouvelles Couches, Les, 274. 
 
 OLLIVIBR, M. Emile, 105, 179. 
 
 Opinion, public, in France, 136. 
 
 O. P. riots, 253. 
 
 Ordinaire, Dionys, 41. 
 
 Origines de la France Contemporaine, 
 
 see Taine. 
 Orleanists (see also Royalists, Louis 
 
 Philippe), 30; in assembly of 1871, 
 
 263. 
 Orleans, Ducd' (Philippe Egalite), 72, 
 
 102, 122. 
 Orleans, Due d' (son of Comte de 
 
 Paris), 69. 
 Orleans, Due d' (son of Louis 
 
 Philippe), 293. 
 
 Orle'ans family, 69, 122, 216, 277. 
 Orle'ans, Prince Henri d', 216. 
 Oxford, 128, 132, 140. 
 
 PAILLEKON, M., 28. 
 
 Palais Royal, the, 192. 
 
 Palmerston, Lord, 61. 
 
 Panama affair, 310. 
 
 Paray-Le-Monial, 17. 
 
 Paris, Comte de, 182, 186; his sub- 
 mission to Comte de Chambord, 277 ; 
 and Boulangism, 281.
 
 342 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Paris: society of, 18, 48-52, 190, 
 191 seq.; intellectual work in, 19; 
 its cosmopolitan aspect, 51, 193, 
 194, 197 ; opinion of the Boulevards, 
 137, 215 ; Municipal Council of, 222 ; 
 the theatre of revolutions, 57, 327. 
 
 Parliament, English, 261 ; a labour- 
 member of, in France, 306. 
 
 Parliamentary system : its effect on 
 the spirit of the nation, 31, 39, 330 ; 
 incompatible with centralised ad- 
 ministration, 33 seq. ; Parliament 
 not used for quiet redress of griev- 
 ances, 137; the power of the mi- 
 nority, 154; no real resemblance 
 with its English model, 302; no 
 names before constituencies at 
 elections, 302 ; not suited to French 
 temperament, 31, 308; rarity of 
 business men in political life, 311. 
 
 Particule, the, 177, 201. 
 
 Pascal, 10. 
 
 Pasquier, Chancellor, 98. 
 
 Pasteur, M., 174, 196. 
 
 Patriotism, French: its connection 
 with Revolution, 101, 230 seq.; 
 before Revolution, 230; territorial 
 rather than racial, 233, 238; and 
 colonisation, 234 seq. ; effect on, of 
 unsettled government, 240 seq. ; 
 effect on, of fear of invasion, 250- 
 253. 
 
 Peasantry, 9, 45, 56, 223, 227, 236; 
 their love of the soil, 99 ; their civ- 
 ilisation, 205-206. 
 
 Peerage, English and French nobility, 
 176-177. 
 
 Perceval, Spencer, 256. 
 
 Perraud, Abbe C., 10. 
 
 Perraud, Cardinal, Bishop of Autun, 
 9. 
 
 Perreyve, Henri, 10. 
 
 Pessimism : its growth and phases in 
 France, 25-52 ; its connection with 
 civilisation, 26; with the Franco- 
 Prussian War, 27, 29 ; with the sys- 
 tem of French government, 32 seq., 
 39 seq. ; pessimist influences in 
 France, 41-15, 50-52, 247-249. 
 
 Peut-on travailler en province, 19. 
 
 Picardy, 17. 
 
 Pitt, Mr., 176, 252. 
 
 Pius VII., 118-120, 257. 
 
 Plutocracy: its influence in French 
 society, 192, 194, 197, 198-201, 258. 
 
 Pochon, M., 160, 313. 
 
 Poitou, 20. 
 
 Poland, 214. 
 
 Political eminence, jealousy of, in 
 France, 292, 296, 303, 311. 
 
 Politics, French: and society, no 
 relations between, 18, 52, 198 ; bit- 
 terness of, 29, 31, 218, 226, 22U; 
 unsoftened by national misfortune, 
 29, 239, 250 ; causes of political ill- 
 temper, 240, 245, 249: abstention 
 of the best class of men from, 36, 
 332. 
 
 Population, not increasing in France, 
 56, 67, 237. 
 
 Portraits of rulers of France, 322-324. 
 
 Praslin, Duchesse de, 80. 
 
 President of the Republic (see 
 Executive, Thiers, MacMahon, 
 GreVy, Carnot, Casimir-Pe'rier, 
 Faure), 271, 332; and the Church, 
 156-157 ; creation of office in 1871, 
 273; M. Grevy's early opinion on 
 the office, 281, 292; mode of elec- 
 tion under Constitution of 1875, 
 282 ; powers and prerogatives, 283- 
 286 ; term of office and re-election, 
 283; his patronage, 285; right of 
 dissolving and adjourning Parlia- 
 ment, 286 ; the nomination of min- 
 isters, 288; elections of, 282, 291, 
 293, 296-297, 304, 311 ; his action in 
 Ministerial crises, 298 seq. ; theory 
 of his impersonality, 307, 315, 320- 
 322, 331 ; anomalies of his position, 
 317 ; his relations with foreign gov- 
 ernments, 318-321 ; ceremonious 
 treatment of, 321-322; circulation 
 of his portraits, 322. 
 
 Pretender, the Young, 256. 
 the Old, 241. 
 
 Pre'vost-Paradol, M., 40. 
 
 Prime Ministers of the Third Repub- 
 lic, 276, 302. 
 
 Broglie, Due de, 276, 287. 
 Casimir-Pe'rier, M., 302. 
 Dufaure, M., 288. 
 Dupuy, M., 301. 
 Ferry, M. Jules, 293, 296, 310. 
 Freycinet, M. de, 293, 294, 296. 
 Gambetta, M., 303, 310.
 
 INDEX 
 
 343 
 
 Loubet, M., 300, 302. 
 Ribot, M., 300, 302. 
 Rochebouet, General de, 287. 
 Simon, M. Jules, 285-287. 
 Waddington, M., 293. 
 Pritchard Affair, 61. 
 Privilege, before the Revolution, 98, 
 
 167, 170, 176, 188, 216. 
 Processions, religious, 158-159. 
 Protestants, French, 17, 139, 144, 147- 
 
 148, 154. 
 
 Provence, 15, 215, 231. 
 Provence, Comte de, 280: see Louis 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Provincial France, 6-21 ; the charm of 
 travel in, 8, 16; rarity of English 
 travellers in, 14; intellectual work 
 in, 19-20; intolerance in, 149-159; 
 the clergy, 159 ; civilisation of 
 humble classes, 205-206. 
 Public decency, 207. 
 
 QUAKERS, visit of, to Tsar Nicholas, 
 
 59. 
 Quimper, 156. 
 
 RADICAL party, 90-91, 96, 297. 
 
 Railway companies and the govern- 
 ment, 211. 
 
 Rambouillet, 194. 
 
 Rambouillet, Hotel, 51. 
 
 Reactionaries, see Monarchists, Le- 
 gitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists. 
 
 Reichstadt, Due de (King of Rome), 
 95,293. 
 
 Reims, 12, 117, 121, 156, 188, 254. 
 
 Re'musat, C. de, 184, 275. 
 
 Renan, M., 7, 19, 39, 196; his testi- 
 mony to the clergy, 56; on the 
 French Revolution, 104-105; and 
 Matthew Arnold, 140, 146. 
 
 Representative government, see Par- 
 liamentary system. 
 
 Reprise de Toulon, La, 217. 
 
 Republic, First, 93-95, 101, 134. 
 
 Republic, Second, 13, 72, 76, 80, 83, 
 127, 263-265, 281, 292, 310. 
 
 Republic, Third, growth of Pessimism 
 under, 27-31; its durability, 33; 
 and the Revolution, 41, 93-94; 
 strengthened by conduct of Reac- 
 tionaries, 278; its origin, 94, 262, 
 273, 290; due to monarchical dis- 
 
 sensions, 265, 278; personal liberty 
 under, 135, 136; religions contro- 
 versy under, 138; intolerance un- 
 der, 149-161; tyranny of the 
 minority, 154-155, 165 ; the church, 
 160; recognition of titles of nobil- 
 ity, 169, 181, 183, 188; literature 
 and society under, 184, 198 ; public 
 decency under, 207 ; its statesmen, 
 208; ministerial instability under, 
 292; posthumous honours to its 
 great men, 329-330. 
 
 Republican form of government, ad- 
 vantage of, 324, 328, 331. 
 
 Restoration period, 86, 99, 116 seq., 
 129, 219, 245, 279; its blitheness, 
 29, 123; the Liberals under, 40, 49, 
 91, 116, 123; its connection with 
 Revolution, 72, 272 ; nobility under, 
 16, 169, 205. 
 
 Revision of Constitution, 268, 290. 
 
 Revolutionary Calendar, 75, 90, 95, 
 130. 
 
 Revolutionary movements in France, 
 diverse causes of, 326-327. 
 
 Revolution of 1848, 80, 88, 219, 272. 
 
 Revolution of July, 2, 30, 93, 122, 219, 
 324, 326, 327. 
 
 Revolution of September 4, 1870, 250, 
 273, 291. 
 
 Revolution, the French, 2, 4; its chief 
 result the centralised administra- 
 tion, 3, 19, 125, 257 ; and the Third 
 Republic, 41, 94 ; and Modern 
 France, 67-258; tradition of the, 
 41, 72 seq., 85-90, 102; nature of 
 its importance, 73, 257 ; our genera- 
 tion not remote from it, 75 ; attitude 
 of English Whigs to, 78-79 ; Lamar- 
 tine's glorification of, 80-82 ; Taine's 
 criticisms of, 42, 85-90, 165; the 
 " Block " theory, 91 seq. ; period of 
 the, 91-96, 116; its inevitableness, 
 97; suppression of privilege, 98, 
 167, 169, 188 ; swift spread of move- 
 ment, 99 ; influence in, of abstract 
 doctrine, 88, 97, 102, 103, 144, 216; 
 destructive policy and anarchy of, 
 100, 105, 130 ; Jacobin conquest of, 
 165, 216 ; warlike and patriotic as- 
 pect of, 101, 106, 217-218, 230 seq., 
 256-257; umvarlike aspect of, 103, 
 105; organised by Napoleon, 112;
 
 844 
 
 INDEX 
 
 his work alone survives of it, 126, 
 267 ; liberty under it, and inherited 
 from it, 128, 132 ; its effect on relig- 
 ious intolerance, 139 seq.; and equal- 
 ity, 167-171, 209 ; abolition of titles, 
 169; and the society of the eight- 
 eenth century, 193-196; civilising 
 consequences of, 207; and Social- 
 ism, 212; its doctrine of fraternity, 
 213, 218, 221 seq. ; humanitarian 
 doctrine of, 216-220 ; its heritage of 
 unsettled government, 242-247 ; in- 
 fluence of, on colonisation, 235; 
 pseudo-classicism of, 264; its con- 
 nection with subsequent revolu- 
 tions, 327. 
 
 Rihot, M., 300, 302. 
 
 Richard II., 261. 
 
 Rivoli, battle of, 95, 120. 
 
 Robespierre, 74, 92, 93, 102, 105, 168, 
 170. 
 
 Roche, M. Jules, 43. 
 
 Rochebouet, General de, 287. 
 
 Rohan, Due de, 16 ; titles of, 202. 
 
 Rouget de Lisle, 101, 225. 
 
 Rousseau, J. J., 4, 21, 87, 100, 128-130, 
 141, 144, 195, 218. 
 
 Roux and Bouchez, Histoire Parle- 
 mentaire, 85. 
 
 Royal families of Europe : their Ger- 
 man origin, 69. 
 
 Royal Oak Day, 222. 
 
 Russia, 68. 
 
 Russia, Napoleonic wars with, 111, 
 114, 257. 
 
 Russia, relations of France with, 45 
 seq., 60-62, 75, 166, 214, 251, 320- 
 321, 323. 
 
 SADE, Marquis de, 133. 
 
 Sadowa, battle of, 48, 60. 
 
 St. Die", 12, 253. 
 
 St. Ifctienne, 11. 
 
 St. Helena, 30, 108, 121 ; Memorial of, 
 
 92. 123. 
 St. Just, 75. 
 
 St. Simon, 169, 192, 230. 
 St. Sulpice, 146. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, M., 41, 76, 81, 86. 
 Saintonge, 17. 
 Salon, the extinction of, 51, 192, 198, 
 
 199. 
 Samoyedes, the, 76. 
 
 Sand, George, 14. 
 
 Sanitary improvements, 207. 
 
 Sarcey, M. F., 41, 240. 
 
 Sardou, M., 90. 
 
 Sarthe, dept. of, 156. 
 
 Savoy, 16, 141, 143, 195, 299. 
 
 Savoy, House of, 69. 
 
 Say, M. Leon, 264. 
 
 Scepticism, political (see Pessimism), 
 163, 247, 330. 
 
 Schiller, 76. 
 
 Schneider, M. Henri, 10. 
 
 Schoelcher, M., 210. 
 
 Sebastopol, 323. 
 
 Sedan, battle of, 28-29, 48, 124, 221, 
 247, 254, 273, 277, 324. 
 
 Segur, P. de, 184. 
 
 Seize Mai, the, 286-291 ; its constitu- 
 tional aspect, 288. 
 
 Semaine de Mai, 221. 
 
 Separation of the powers, 271, 309. 
 
 Septennate, the, of Marshal Mac- 
 Mahon, 264, 278, 281-283. 
 
 Serment du Jeu de Paume, 169, 221. 
 
 Sevigne', Mme. de, 254. 
 
 Shelley, 255. 
 
 Sheridan, H. B., 76. 
 
 Sidney, Algernon, 78. 
 
 Sieyes, Abbe', 107, 108. 
 
 Simon, M. Jules, 75, 99, 147, 188, 228, 
 264, 285-287. 
 
 Smith, Sidney, 255. 
 
 Socialism: in Germany, 70; and the 
 Revolution, 212 ; Socialist party in 
 Parliament, 304, 308; attitude of 
 Socialists to middle-classes, 306- 
 307; their definition of bourgeois, 
 313-315. 
 
 Society, French, 18, 49-53, 191-198. 
 
 Soissons, 263. 
 
 Solferino, battle of, 215. 
 
 Soult, Marshal, Due de Dalmatie, 
 121. 
 
 Spain, Invasion of, 112, 115. 
 
 Spanish Marriages, 61. 
 
 Spuller, M., 304. 
 
 Stael, Mme. de, 49, 91, 93, 94, 110, 115, 
 125,224. 
 
 Stanislas, College, 201. 
 
 States-General of 1789, 96, 232, 305. 
 
 Strasbourg, 12, 99, 101. 
 
 Suffrage, see Universal suffrage. 
 
 Suffren, Bailli de, 239.
 
 INDEX 
 
 345 
 
 Sulpicians, 141. 
 Sweden, Kings of, 69. 
 Swiss Guard, massacre of, 102. 
 Switzerland, 172, 217, 331. 
 
 TAGUS, the, 249. 
 
 Taine, M., 7, 15, 143-144, 147, 162, 196, 
 243 ; Cornets de Voyage, 5 ; Origines 
 de la France, 17, 21, 42, 71, 85-90, 
 142, 165, 245 ; on Macaulay, 77 ; his 
 influence, 41, 88; his method of 
 work, 86-87, 89, 244 ; on Napoleon, 
 35, 87, 108, 113, 124, 130; on Eng- 
 land, 5, 128, 132; on Voltaire, 142. 
 
 Talavera, battle of, 253. 
 
 Talleyrand, Prince de, 10, 46, 107, 
 111, 119, 122, 232, 279. 
 
 Tancred, 32. 
 
 Taxation, 23, 112 ; inequalities of, be- 
 fore the Revolution, 98-99, 167, 
 236. 
 
 Temps, Le, 149, 153, 155, 226. 
 
 Terror, Reign of (see also Jacobins, 
 Thermidor, Robespierre), 91-92, 101, 
 103, 106, 128, 163, 168, 199, 213, 217, 
 230,250. 
 
 Testamentary succession, law of, 200 ; 
 its effect on colonisation, 236. 
 
 The'atre Fran9ais, 90, 104, 113. 
 
 Thermidor, 75 ; Sardou's drama, 90. 
 
 Thiers, M., President of the Republic, 
 29, 51, 61, 86, 273 seq., 312, 316, 323, 
 330 ; his share in founding the Re- 
 public, 274 ; his dismissal from the 
 Presidency, 275. 
 
 Titles of nobility: abolition at Rev- 
 olution, 169; under Republic, 170- 
 171; attitude of Republic to, 181, 
 189 ; usage not regulated, 175, 177- 
 181 ; consequences of multiplication 
 of, 181-186; irregular assumption 
 of, 179, 182, 186 ; in the army, 182. 
 
 Tocqueville, A. de, 184: compared 
 with Arthur Young, 1-5; and the 
 Revolution, 81, 93, 96; on Revolu- 
 tion of 1848, 83; Democratic en 
 Amfrique, 1-6, 266-267, 269. 
 
 Toleration: in France and in Eng- 
 land, 138, 145 ; need for, in France, 
 144 ; forces of, in France, 154, 163. 
 
 Tonkin, 240, 251, 296. 
 
 Toulouse, 14. 
 
 Toulouse, battle of, 62. 
 
 Touraine, 6, 17, 152. 
 
 Trade Unions, 151. 
 
 Trafalgar, battle of, 255. 
 
 Treaties with foreign powers, 319. 
 
 Treaty of Berlin, 320. 
 
 Trianon, 192, 325. 
 
 Tricolour, the, 72, 124, 277. 
 
 Tricoteuses, the, 101, 207. 
 
 Tronchet, 129. 
 
 Tuileries, the, Massacre of, 101, 222 ; 
 
 coup d'etat of Brumaire, 110. 
 Tyndall, Mr., 145. 
 
 ULTRAMONTANES and Ultramontan- 
 ism, 138, 144. 
 
 Universal suffrage (manhood suf- 
 frage), 34, 39, 47, 82, 85; and arbi- 
 trary government, 83, 94, 267-268. 
 
 "University," the (see also Educa- 
 tion) : decentralisation, 37 ; teach- 
 ing body as a profession, 54, 204; 
 organised by Napoleon, 113, 114. 
 
 Unsettled government : a heritage of 
 the Revolution, 240-247, 257. 
 
 Uzes, Due d', 188 seq. 
 
 VALENCK, 16. 
 
 Valley, Baronne de, 74. 
 
 Valmy, battle of, 98, 130, 279. 
 
 Valois kings, 90. 
 
 Van Loo, Une halte de chasse, 193. 
 
 Vannes, 13, 202. 
 
 Varennes, the flight to, 72. 
 
 Vauban, 230. 
 
 Vendee, the, 20, 150-151, 207 ; war of, 
 
 223-225, 233. 
 Ventavon, M. de, 263. 
 Vergniaud, 77, 82. 
 Vernet, Carle and Horace, 225. 
 Versailles, Court of, 87, 98, 188, 192, 
 
 195, 324, 325 ; galleries of, 120, 225 ; 
 
 army of, 220, 230 ; Government and 
 
 National Assembly, 289, 296 ; Peace 
 
 of, 273. 
 Vesonl, 12. 
 Victoria, Queen (see alto England, 
 
 Queen of), 74, 242, 325. 
 Vienne, 16. 
 Vigny, A. de, 184. 
 Villaines, 152. 
 Villiers, Mr. C. P., 75. 
 Vizille, 305. 
 Vogue', M. de, 182.
 
 346 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Voland, Mile., 20. 
 
 Voltaire, 5, 89. 128-130, 138-140, 158, 
 
 241 ; attitude of Church to, 141-146 ; 
 
 his work, 142, 262. 
 Vosges, the, 12, 215, 263. 
 
 WADDINQTON, M. Richard, Preface. 
 
 Waddington, M. W. H., 7, 293. 
 
 Wagram, battle of, 96, 263. 
 
 Walcheren expedition, 253. 
 
 Waldeck-Rousseau, M., 309. 
 
 Walpole, Sir R., 193. 
 
 War : French dread of, 38, 64 ; salu- 
 tary effect of, on Revolution, 102 
 seq., 217; civil, 60, 219-222. 
 
 Warens, Mme. de, 141. 
 
 Waterloo, battle of, 31, 60, 62, 63, 116, 
 219, 249, 255, 261, 279. 
 
 Wellington, Duke of, 256, 279, 330. 
 
 Westermann, General, 224. 
 
 Weymouth, 256. 
 
 Whigs, the English, 77-78, 255. 
 
 White Flag, 277 seq. 
 
 White Terror, the, 116, 219. 
 
 Wilhelmshohe, 280. 
 
 William I. (German Emperor), 250. 
 
 William II. (German Emperor), 69. 
 
 William III. (of England), 78. 
 
 Wilson, M. Daniel, 295, 297, 326. 
 
 Women: in French society, 51, 197; 
 have no rank or title from hus- 
 band's decorations, 174. 
 
 Worth, battle of, 27. 
 
 YORK, Duke of, 253. 
 Young, Arthur, 1-6, 99, 195. 
 
 ZOLA, M., 206-207.
 
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