between the crown and the people, and a security to both. At that period, he might be hailed the arbiter of France; and, as Dumont truly observes, he is the only man to whom we can do the honour of believing, that, had he lived, the torrent of the Revolution might yet have been arrested. The legacy of M. Dumont furnishes the best answer to the silly stories and as silly theories of Lord John Russell. The noble Paymaster does not indeed attempt to prove, but he assumes as proved, that the French Revolution was only the natural consequence of corruption and oppression in the higher classes -that public indignation had gradually gathered against a century of royal despotism and aristocratical abuses, and at length broke forth in a defensive movement against them. Now all this we consider utterly opposed to contemporary evidence. It is very easy at present to cull out from the eventful annals of a century all the bad men, or bad women, or bad actions, to mould them into one mass of iniquity, and to blazon them forth as a heavy catalogue of grievances. It is very easy to say, that the French people of 1789 resented the pride of Louis XIV., or the profligacy of Louis XV. The real fact we believe to be, that the French people at that period were not even aware of half the acts of injustice which are now alleged as the motive and the for their excesses. Individual wrongs are keenly felt, but not long remembered, by the multitude. Still less does one generation ever rise up to avenge the injuries of another. The people of Paris (we say Paris, for the rest of France had comparatively little to do with the French Revolution) were impelled in 1789 by new theories rather than old grievances-by a jealousy of the kingly power, much more than by oppression under it;-they warmed, like a wheel, by the revolution of itself, and the machine took fire, and was destroyed by the velocity of its own motion, and not by the original weight which it carried. excuse We are not defending the government of the old French monarchy. Under the two immediate predecessors of Louis XVI. it was little short of despotism. But still it must be borne in mind, that till the latter part of Louis XV.'s reign, this government was in accordance with the feelings and wishes of the nation. There was no demand for the States General, still less for any new popular privileges. Exhausted with civil strife and bloodshed, the people gladly sought repose under the quiet shade of despotism; just as, after the anarchy of the Mountain, they were glad to repose themselves under the autocracy of Buonaparte. It is a common but a great mistake in modern political writers, to consider a government with reference, not to the public feelings of its own time, but to the public feelings of ours. We know despotic power to to be odious in France at present; we are, therefore, apt to conclude, that the despotic reign of Louis XIV. must have deeply galled the French people. But was this the real fact? Look to the language of all the eminent writers of that Augustan eratheir language, not merely in their public and avowed compositions, which might be influenced by fear or flattery, but in their most private and unguarded letters which have more lately come to light. They all speak of the arbitrary power of the King as of his undoubted privilege-they consider it a thing of course-they have no idea of sharing it-they say little of practical grievances, and nothing of the freedom of their forefathers or the abstract rights of men. The soberest and wisest, as well as the gayest and wittiest heads of the day, thought the revocation of the edict of Nantes the chef d'œuvre of national policy. Far from dreaming of resistance, these leaders of the public mind never even dreamt of murmurs. No one, we believe, can have looked attentively at the literature of those times without being greatly struck at the submissive feeling we have mentioned. The truth is, that the nation at that time connected their own greatness and glory with that of the King, and in exalting Le Grand Monarque, believed that they were exalting themselves. Even the parliaments, in their noble struggles against despotic registrations and Beds of Justice, had not always, nor strongly, the national feeling on their side. The same state of things continued through a great part of the reign of Louis XV. Lord Chesterfield, a keen observer surely, and one of the few who, at a later period, foresaw and foretold the Revolution, remarks, that a French soldier will venture his life with alacrity pour l'honneur du roi, but that if you were to change the object, and propose to him le bien de la patrie, he would probably run away. Thus when, in 1744, the illness of Louis at Metz was considered desperate, the public grief was so excessive and so evident, that the surname of Bien aimé was universally and not unjustly ascribed to him. Happy had it been for him, had he then died with the tears of the people on his memory, instead of being a few years afterwards followed by their hootings and curses to his grave! But with him, as once with Pompey, most urbes et publica vota vicerunt. He lived to bow under the yoke of the Duc d'Aiguillon and Madame du Barri-he lived to make his surname of Bien aimé a byeword and jest-he lived to bequeath-to a chaste, virtuous, economical, and reforming successor-an inheritance of danger and shame. But though his later years had raised up in France a new spirit of irritation against the kingly power-that feeling, had it stood alone, must quickly have yielded to the private worth and public disinterestedness of Louis XVI. That monarch was ready, at the slightest call, to strip his crown of some of its most valuable valuable prerogatives. He was more anxious to be a limited sovereign, than his subjects were to be a free people. While, therefore, we admit and condemn the despotism of the old monarchy, we cannot agree with Lord John in believing that either the burthen or the recollection of this despotism ought to be ranked among the great and efficient, and still less as the immediate, causes of the Revolution. Nor is it true that during the whole reign of Louis XV. the people were in a state of progressive and increasing wretchedness. During the first half of it we believe that the very reverse was the case. On this point we will quote the testimony of that most acute observer, Lady Mary Wortley Montague. One of her letters from Paris in 1718, (Oct. 10,) in giving an account of her journey from Lyons, describes the 'miserable starved faces and thin tattered clothes' of the peasantry. Twenty years afterwards she travelled over the same road again. In a letter to her husband from Dijon, August 18, 1739, we read, 'France is so much improved, it would not be known to be the same country we passed through twenty years ago. .. The roads are all mended. The French are more changed than their roads; instead of pale yellow faces, wrapped up in blankets, as we saw them, the villages are all filled with fresh-coloured lusty peasants, in good clothes and clean linen. It is incredible what an air of plenty and content is over the whole country.' Still less can we assent to the sweeping charge of degeneracy and corruption which our author brings forward against the nobility, the clergy, and the magistracy of France at that period. The two former were very numerous bodies, and as such comprised, of course, many worthless individuals. But these were well known as objects of the public reprobation, and, in the latter years of Louis the Fifteenth, as objects of the royal favour, whilst the unobtrusive virtues and retired lives of the greater number excited no particular attention. It is wonderfully easy for Lord John Russell to rip up a handful of the Chronique Scandaleuse, and tell us that ladies of the highest rank fell in love with actors and dancers, and did not scruple to make their passion known!'-p. 32. It is easy to say of the nobility in general, never were beggars more importunate than this proud race; and what they asked without shame, the king gave without generosity.'-p. 34. We humbly suggest that the French nobles, male and female, are not more to be confounded, as a body, with the profligate individuals Lord John dwells on, than our own nobility and gentry now-a-days are to be judged from the standing heroes and heroines of the Sunday newspapers-from high-born intriguantes, or coronetted courtezans-from great lords who who are horsewhipped as cheats—or from individual families enriched by plunder and confiscation. Of all these enormities English society could furnish some striking, though, we hope, rare examples; and it is from such, that some future Lord John is to justify the Reform Bill and the Revolution now in progress here! We, let it be observed, are but now in the second month of our States General: we are approaching the Night of Sacrifices, and by just the same steps which the French trod before us. It is well observed by the author of Emile, that we compute the worshippers of Baal, but take no note of the thousands who have never bowed down before the brazen image. We have seen the real qualities of the French nobility and clergy tried by the severest and truest of all tests-adversity. We have seen them during the revolution dragged to the scaffold as victims, or thrust from their homes as beggars. They had to feel, (in the words of another illustrious and heart-broken exile)— 'Come sa di sale Il pane altrui, e com'è duro calle Lo scendere e 'l salir per l' altrui scale.' * In all these trials, what high-minded patience, what unconquerable spirit was theirs! How heroically did they encounter an ignominious death,-how still more heroically did they bear a life of poverty and pain! and pain! Even the women, when the brutal fury of the jacobins showed no mercy to their sex, seemed to soar above its weakness. Only one lady is recorded to have shrunk or shown any terror on the scaffold, and that lady was Madame du Barri! Surely those who died so well cannot have lived so ill. But even before this dire extremity, how many amongst the higher orders, so far from deserving the reproach of obstinate resistance, seem rather to merit the opposite blame of too rash concessions, of too devoted personal sacrifices. A Montmorency proposing the abolition of hereditary rank! A Noailles proposing the abolition of seignorial rights! Are these, and such as these, the witnesses to the selfish and uncompromising spirit which Lord John Russell ascribes to the old nobility of France? Nor were many of the Bishops less remarkable for self-devotion. Our readers cannot have forgotten the affecting account given by M. Dumont of one of them—the kind-hearted, and only too liberal Bishop of Chartres; and we believe the character he ascribes to that unfortunate prelate was exemplified in very many from all ranks of the French clergy at that time. We believe in the virtue and dis * Dante Paradiso, Canto 17. † Quarterly Review, vol. xlvii., p. 266. interestedness interestedness of that much calumniated body. Unquestionably a profound impression of respect was produced in our own, as well as in other Protestant countries, from witnessing the patient meekness and truly Christian virtues of the exiled priests and bishops of France. The same praise of fortitude and patience may be as justly extended to the emigrant nobility; and their emigration, though a most grievous political blunder in those who directed it, was, in most cases of its execution, a most noble act of loyalty and sacrifice of private interests. It is well known how these emigrants cheerfully employed themselves in the lowest and most laborious means of livelihood. We have heard of cases amongst the more successful of these high-born artisans in London, where they, by denying themselves all but the merest necessaries of life, regularly laid by a portion of their scanty earnings, and transmitted them in token of duty and allegiance to their exiled royal family. Is it sible to believe of such men all the libellous tales of profligacy, heartlessness, and cowardice, which we find Lord John Russell so ready to heap upon their memories? We admit that in some, but only a secondary degree, adversity may have acted on their minds as a chastener and corrector. We may admit also that some of the emigrants did not bear the return of power so well as the pressure of adversity. One of them, at least, we think we could name, who appears to us in a far more venerable light when teaching the alphabet in Switzerland, or tilling a farm in America, than when restored to his rank and honours—meanly hoarding an overgrown income-cajoling a helpless old man for his inheritance-despoiling an innocent child of his birth-right-or trumpetting to a sneering world the frailty of a sister! pos As to the magistracy of France-it was, perhaps, during the two centuries preceding the Revolution, the most illustrious ever known, for talent as well as for integrity and public spirit. Always supporting the rights of the people, even when the people itself was insensible to freedom, always supporting the just prerogatives of the crown, even when suffering under kingly persecution-they were patriots without the aim of popularity, and royalists without the aim of kingly favour. History can record scarcely any other instances of struggles against arbitrary power, pursued with such perseverance, at so great personal sacrifice, and upon such slender foundations of authority. Even in the most corrupt of times, the latter days of Louis XV., the parliament of Paris stood firm and unshaken amidst exiles and imprisonments, domiciliary visits, lettres de cachet, and every other device of established power. Your Edict, Sire,' they said at the close of one of their addresses, is subversive of all law. Your parliament is sworn to maintain the law, and if the law perishes VOL. XLIX. NO. XCVII. |