From the London Examiner.
GUIZOT AND MONTALEMBERT.
The greatest novelty now in Paris is a speech. Any specimen of oratory that the police will first allow to be spoken, and then to be printed, is quite an attraction. Indeed there is but one remaining chance of perpetrating a speech, and that is by achieving your election as a member of the Institute, or being appointed as an old member to welcome the newly-elected academician. These are the only legitimate opportunities for making one's voice heard in public that M. Bonaparte's code has left to the Frenchman.
In pursuance of this solitary permission on the part of the authorities, the Paris journals have contained reports of two remarkable speeches, the one uttered by Count Montalembert on his being elected to the seat in the Academy, rendered vacant by the death of M. Droz; the other spoken by M. Guizot, in the form of an address of welcome to the new academician, M. de Montalembert. Now in the speeches of these, the first authorized orators of the new despotic regime, we find so little to awaken the susceptibilities of even M. Bonaparte's police, that we have heard with unaffected wonder of the scissors of the censorship having been applied even to them. The philosophy of the speeches is terribly Conservative. M. Bonaparte himself could have desired no other. If his highness the President had embraced the two academicians after their speeches, and decorated them with the Grand Cordon of his new Order, it would have been but a tribute justly due to these lay preachers of absolutism.
Eulogy of Droz was the theme which afforded Count Montalembert the opportunity to ventilate his opinions, as M. Guizot's theme was the eulogy of Montalembert. Montalembert depicted how Droz, who had reached youth at the commencement of the great revolution, joined in all its theories, its hopes, and its excesses, anathematizing kings and priests, and believing in the happy and final reign of pure democracy; and how all this the same Droz lived to unlearn and to correct, and to settle down as quiet and as arrant a Conservative as ever supported monarchic government and a restored church. This is the true path of repentance, exclaimed Montalembert, and the only road to wisdom.
The compliment to tergiversation, which M. Montalembert thus paid to Droz, M. Guizot applied to Montalembert himself, whom he (M. Guizot) had remembered commencing his political career in full opposition, thundering against corrupt majorities, against kingly influence, and even against that want of spirit which preferred being at peace with neighbors to provoking them. But all that sort of constitutional opposition leads, as the people have seen, to the triumph of socialism; and so all wise people, like M. Montalembert, naturally become sick of it, and abandon it, betaking themselves for a preference to the old political religion of legitimacy and worship of absolutism. Of all the national disgraces inflicted upon France by M. Bonaparte's triumph, we know of none greater than such a hymn to servility, such anathemas and farewells to constitutional freedom, uttered by these two Talleyrands of the professorial and ecclesiastical schools, who have been changing principles all their lives, and now proclaim at last that absolutism is the only anchor to hold by.
On one point M. Montalembert impugned the philosophy of M. Droz, and in doing so impugned not less the opinion of M. Thiers, and most of the eminent men who have written histories or judgments upon the great events of the Revolution. Droz, relating these events in after life, saw in their march and series the influence of stern necessity. Such was the congregated mass of evils of all kinds produced by the long misgovernment of the despotism and corrupt regime of the Bourbons, that a catastrophe like that of the Great Revolution was, according to Droz, not to be avoided. No human power could stop it, no moderation, no wisdom. In its path men were like the mere vegetable growth of a valley down which a torrent comes in inundation, sweeping all before it.
But M. Montalembert, for his own part, has another way of viewing the events of the Revolution. He denies the doctrine of fatalism or of necessity. He will not allow that the follies of the monarchy drew down after them the crimes of the Republic as a natural consequence. He sees in all those events, on the contrary, a direct intervention of Providence, who inflicted the sufferings of the Revolution upon the French simply as retribution for their crimes and a punishment for their sins. Providence, in the imagination of Count Montalembert, is a Nemesis with sword and scourge in hand, exercising its chief duty in castigating humanity; and thus doth the French Academy in the middle of the nineteenth century proclaim the philosophy of history.
M. Guizot avoided the recognition of any assertion so extravagant as this, and so very unfair to poor Jaques Bonhomme. The crimes of the old monarchy were confined to the court, the clergy, the aristocracy, and the financiers; whereas the poor peasant was ground to poverty, yet a proverbially honest and cheerful fellow amidst his ignorance and privations. But, according to Montalembert, Providence sent the Revolution to punish the crimes of duchesses; and this Revolution decimated, arrested, and sent to perish all over the world poor Jaques Bonhomme. Was this justice? M. Guizot did not, as we say, endorse this portion of the Montalembert philosophy. But he warned the Count of having in his early life made one grand mistake, in allying religion with liberalism, and putting the names of both combined on the banners of opposition. M. Guizot could hardly mean that religion, like fortune, should be always on the side of the greatest number of battalions. For should not this be the creed of M. Bonaparte, rather than of his illustrious Academicians?