CHAPTER XII[ToC]
A formidable proportion of the grand concourse which filled the fashionable boulevards from curb to curb this beautiful Sunday afternoon was composed of the so-called "boulevardiers," "flâneurs," and "badauds," who invariably appear on occasion offering excitement. For the Parisian world loves to be amused, and to have the pulse quickened by riot and bloodshed is to very many the highest form of amusement. It is better than a bull-fight.
To most of this very large class of Parisians it is immaterial what form of government they live under, provided that in some way or another it furnish plenty of excitement. No other country in the civilized world, unless Spain is to be included under this head, produces this peculiar class, the unseen influence of which seems to have escaped the brilliant French writers who have recorded the turbulent history of France.
The cardinal characteristic of the French individually and as a people is love of and admiration for theatrical display. This finds such ample illustration in all of their known domestic as well as international affairs that even the mere statement seems unnecessary. It permeates every social rank, and it enters into the performance of the simplest private as well as public duties. In higher governmental affairs it was accurately represented by the late President of the republic, Felix Faure, who went among his countrymen in a coach and four preceded by trumpeters and accompanied by a regiment of cuirassiers, and who required of his entourage all of the formalities of royalty. The hundreds of thousands who enjoyed his kingly funeral would have been equally entertained by a public execution.
In the French nature, as has been said, is implanted a keen zest for excitement. The Frenchman is ravenous for the theatrical situation,—a perfect gormandizer of the dramatic event. Whatever or whoever lacks this gilded framework is neither remembered nor noted. The supply invariably follows the demand; without spectators there would be no spectacle,—just as there is no sound where there are no ears.
Any Frenchman, therefore, who has any theatrical novelty to offer, whether as a political mountebank, or a bogus hero, or a peculiarly atrocious crime, is sure of a large audience. For there is a wide range of appreciation in that mercurial nature which, according to Voltaire, is half monkey and half tiger.
The evident pleasure with which vast Parisian crowds view riots and revolution and the various phases of alternate anarchy and absolutism may be easily and naturally accepted by the actors in these living dramas as tacit if not positive approval. The professional patriot does not perform to empty seats, and the few hundred hired assassins of the public peace and private liberty would be out of a job but for the hundred thousand passive and more or less amused spectators who scramble for the best places to witness and make merry over the show.
That this curious crowd is greatly swelled by what in other lands is recognized as the gentler or softer sex increases its responsibility. The civilization which has produced so many women of the heroic type, so many of the nobler masculine brain and hand, has also generated a vast brood which poisons the germs of human life and hands down bigotry, intolerance, revengefulness, cruelty, and love of turbulence and bloodshed from generation to generation.