From the Puritan son of New England, pass now to a different character. René Louis de Voyer, Marquis d’Argenson, a French noble, was born 18th October, 1694, and died 26th January, 1757; so that his life lapped upon the prolonged reigns of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth. At college the comrade of Voltaire, he was ever afterwards the friend and correspondent of this great writer. His own thoughts, commended by the style of the other, would have placed him among the most illustrious of French history. Notwithstanding strange eccentricities, he was often elevated, far-sighted, and prophetic, above any other Frenchman except Turgot. By the courtiers of Versailles he was called “the Stupid” (la Bête), while Voltaire hailed one of his productions, yet in manuscript, as the “work of Aristides,” and pronounced him “the best citizen who had ever reached the ministry,” and the Duc de Richelieu called him “Secretary of State for the Republic of Plato.”[322]
Except a brief subordinate service and two years of the Cabinet as Minister of Foreign Affairs, his life was passed in meditation and composition, especially on subjects of government and human improvement. This was his great passion. “If I were in power,” he wrote, “and knew a capable man, I would go on all fours and seek him, to pray him to serve me as counsellor and tutor.”[323] Is not this a lesson to the heedless partisan?
In 1725 he became an active member of a small club devoted to hardy speculation, and known, from its place of meeting at the apartment of its founder, as l’Entre-Sol. It is to his honor that he mingled here with the Abbé Saint-Pierre, and sympathized entirely with the many-sided, far-sighted plans of this “good man.” In the privacy of his journal he records his homage: “This worthy citizen is not known, and he does not know himself.… He has much intelligence, and has devoted himself to a kind of philosophy profound and abandoned by everybody, which is the true politics destined to procure the greatest happiness of men.”[324] In praising Saint-Pierre our author furnished a measure of himself.
His “Considérations sur le Gouvernement Ancien et Présent de la France,” a work which excited the admiration both of Voltaire and Rousseau, was read by the former as early as 1739, but did not see the light till some years after the death of the author. It first appeared at Amsterdam in 1764, and in a short time there were no less than four editions in Holland. In 1784 a more accurate edition appeared in France, and in 1787 another at the command and expense of the Assembly of Notables. Here was a recognition of the people, and an inquiry how far democracy was consistent with monarchical government. Believing much in the people and anxious for their happiness, he had not ceased to believe in kings. The book was contained in the epigraph from the “Britannicus” of Racine:—
“Que dans le cours d’un règne florissant,
Rome soit toujours libre, et César tout-puissant.”
Other works followed: “Essays in the Style of those of Montaigne”; and the “Journal and Memoirs,” in nine volumes, published tardily. There still remain in manuscript: “Remarks while Reading”; “Memoirs of State”; “Foreign Affairs, containing Memoirs of my Ministry”; “Thoughts since my Leaving the Ministry”; and especially, “Thoughts on the Reformation of the State.” In all these there is a communicativeness like that of Saint-Simon in his “Memoirs,” and of Rousseau in his “Confessions,” without the wonderful talent of either. The advanced ideas of the author are constantly conspicuous, making him foremost among contemporaries in discerning the questions of the future. Even of marriage he writes in the spirit of some modern reformers: “It is necessary to press the people to marriage, waiting for something better.”[325] This is an instance. His reforms embraced nothing less than the suppression of feudal privileges and of the right of primogeniture, uniformity of weights and measures, judges irremovable and salaried by the State, the dismissal of foreign troops, and the residence of the king and his ministers in the capital embellished by vast squares, pierced by broad streets, “with the Bois de Boulogne for country.” This is the Paris of latter days. Add to this the suppression of cemeteries, hospitals, and slaughter-houses in the interior of Paris,—and many other things, not omitting omnibuses, and even including balloons. “Here is something,” he records, “which will be treated as folly. I am persuaded that one of the first famous discoveries to make, and reserved perhaps for our age, is to find the art of flying in the air.” And he proceeds to describe the balloon.[326]
His large nature is manifest in cosmopolitan ideas, and the inquiry if it were not well to consider one’s self “as citizen of the world” more than is the usage. Here his soul glows:—
“What a small corner Europe occupies on the round earth! How many lands remain to be inhabited! See this immense extent of three parts of the world, and of undiscovered lands at the North and South! If people went there with other views than that tiresome exclusive property, all these lands would be inhabited in two centuries. We shall not see this, but it will come.”[327]
And then, after coupling morals and well-being, he announces the true rule: “An individual who shall do well will succeed, and who shall do ill will fail: it is the same with nations.”[328] This is just and lofty. In such a spirit he cherished plans of political reconstruction in foreign nations, especially in Italy. The old Italian cry was his: “The Barbarians must be driven from Italy”; and he contemplated “a republic or eternal association of the Italian powers, as there was a German, a Dutch, an Helvetic,” and he called this “the greatest affair that had been treated in Europe for a long time.” The entry of Italy was to be closed to the Emperor; and he adds: “For ourselves what a happy privation, if we are excluded forever from the necessity of sending thither our armies to triumph, but to perish!”[329]