Saturday, April 8.—The sun has been so scorching during our two last drives that we have given ourselves a holiday to-day, and only dawdled about Tours.
We went first to the cathedral, which I never see without increased pleasure. Though nearly four hundred years passed from its commencement in the twelfth century to its completion in the fifteenth, the whole interior is as harmonious as if it had been finished by the artist who began it. I know nothing in Gothic architecture superior to the grandeur, richness, and yet lightness of the choir and eastern apse. Thence we went to St. Julien's, a fine old church of the thirteenth century, desecrated in the Revolution, but now under restoration.
Thence to the Hôtel Gouin, a specimen of the purely domestic architecture of the fifteenth century, covered with elegant tracery and scroll-work in white marble. We ended with Plessis-les-Tours, Louis XI.'s castle, which stands on a flat, somewhat marshy, tongue of land stretching between the Loire and the Cher. All that remains is a small portion of one of the inner courts, probably a guard-room, and a cellar pointed out to us as the prison in which Louis XI kept Cardinal de la Balue for several years. The cellar itself is not bad for a prison of those days, but he is said to have passed his first year or two in a grated vault under the staircase, in which he could neither stand up nor lie at full length.
'It is remarkable,' said Tocqueville, 'that the glorious reigns in French history, such as those of Louis Onze, Louis Quatorze, and Napoleon ended in the utmost misery and exhaustion, while the periods at which we are accustomed to look as those of disturbance and insecurity were those of comparative prosperity and progress. It seems as if tyranny were worse than civil war.'
'And yet,' I said, 'the amount of revenue which these despots managed to squeeze out of France was never large. The taxation under Napoleon was much less than under Louis Philippe.'
'Yes,' said Tocqueville, 'but it was the want of power to tax avowedly that led them into indirect modes of raising money, which were far more mischievous; just as our servants put us to more expense by their jobs than they would do if they simply robbed us to twice the amount of their indirect gains.
'Louis XIV. destroyed all the municipal franchises of France, and paved the way for this centralized tyranny, not from any dislike of municipal elections, but merely in order to be able himself to sell the places which the citizens had been accustomed to grant.'
Sunday, April 9.—Another sultry day. I waited till the sun was low, and then sauntered by the side of the river with Tocqueville.
'The worst faults of this Government,' said Tocqueville, 'are those which do not alarm the public.
'It is depriving us of the local franchises and local self-government which we have extorted from the central power in a struggle of forty years. The Restoration and the Government of July were as absolute centralizers as Napoleon himself. The local power which they were forced to surrender they made over to the narrow pays légal, the privileged ten-pounders, who were then attempting to govern France. The Republic gave the name of Conseils-généraux to the people, and thus dethroned the notaires who had governed those assemblies when they represented only the bourgeoisie. The Republic made the maires elective. The Republic placed education in the hands of local authorities. Under its influence, the communes, the cantons, and the departments were becoming real administrative bodies. They are now mere geographical divisions. The préfet appoints the maires. The préfet appoints in every canton a commissaire de police—seldom a respectable man, as the office is not honourable. The gardes champêtres, who are our local police, are put under his control. The recteur, who was a sort of local Minister of Education in every department, is suppressed. His powers are transferred to the préfet. The préfet appoints, promotes, and dismisses all the masters of the écoles primaires. He has the power to convert the commune into a mere unorganised aggregation of individuals, by dismissing every communal functionary, and placing its concerns in the hands of his own nominees. There are many hundreds of communes that have been thus treated, and whose masters now are uneducated peasants. The préfet can dissolve the Conseil-général of his department and, although he cannot directly name its successors, he does so virtually.