Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Volume 2

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Besides all these there is another class, comparatively small, having neither the prestige of fashion, rank, or wealth, but true, humble, evangelical Christians, in whom the simplicity and spirituality of the old Huguenot church seems revived. These men are laboring at the very foundation of things; laboring to bring back the forgotten Bible; beginning where Christ began, with preaching the gospel to the poor. If any would wish to see Christianity in its loveliest form, they would find it in some of these humble laborers. One, with whom I conversed, devotes his time to the chiffoniers, (rag pickers.) He gave me an account of his labors, speaking with such tenderness and compassion, that it was quite touching. "My poor people," he said, "they are very ignorant, but they are not so very bad." And when I asked him, "Who supports you in your labors?" he looked upward, with one of those quick, involuntary glances by which the French express themselves without words. There was the same earnestness in him as in one of our city missionaries, but a touching grace peculiarly national. It was the piety of Fénélon and St. John. And I cannot believe that God, who loves all nations alike, and who knows how beautifully the French mind is capable of reflecting the image of Jesus, will not yet shine forth upon France, to give the light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Christ.

It was the testimony of all with whom I conversed, that the national mind had become more and more serious for many years past. Said a French gentleman to me one evening, "The old idea of l'homme d'esprit of Louis XIV.'s time, the man of bon-mots, bows, and salons, is almost passed away; there is only now and then a specimen of it left. The French are becoming more earnest and more religious." In the Roman Catholic churches which I attended, I saw very full audiences, and great earnestness and solemnity. I have talked intimately, also, with Roman Catholics, in whom I felt that religion was a real and vital thing. One of them, a most lovely lady, presented me with the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis, as a ground on which we could both unite.

I have also been interested to see in these French Catholics, in its most fervent form, the exhibition of that antislavery spirit which, in other ages, was the boast of that church. One charming friend took me to the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, pointing out with great interest the statues and pictures of saints who had been distinguished for their antislavery efforts in France. In a note expressing her warm interest in the cause of the African slave, she says, "It is a tradition of our church, that of the three kings which came to worship Jesus in Bethlehem, one was black; and if Christians would kneel oftener before the manger of Bethlehem they would think less of distinctions of caste and color."

Madame Belloc received, a day or two since, a letter from a lady in the old town of Orleans, which gave name to Joan of Arc, expressing the most earnest enthusiasm in the antislavery cause. Her prayers, she says, will ascend night and day for those brave souls in America who are conflicting with this mighty injustice.

A lady a few days since called on me, all whose property was lost in the insurrection at Hayti, but who is, nevertheless, a most earnest advocate of emancipation.

A Catholic lady, in a letter, inquired earnestly, why in my Key I had not included the Romish clergy of the United States among the friends of emancipation, as that, she said, had been always the boast of their church. I am sorry to be obliged to make the reply, that in America the Catholic clergy have never identified themselves with the antislavery cause, but in their influence have gone with the multitude.

I have received numerous calls from members of the Old French Abolition Society, which existed here for many years. Among these I met, with great interest, M. Dutrone, its president; also M. ——, who presented me with his very able ethnological work on the distinctive type of the negro race. One gentleman, greatly distressed in view of the sufferings of the negro race in America, said, naively enough, to Mrs. C., that he had heard that the negroes had great capability for music, dancing, and the fine arts, and inquired whether something could not be done to move sympathy in their behalf by training them to exhibit characteristic dances and pantomimes. Mrs. C. quoted to him the action of one of the great ecclesiastical bodies in America, in the same breath declining to condemn slavery, but denouncing dancing as so wholly of the world lying in wickedness as to require condign ecclesiastical censure. The poor man was wholly lost in amazement.

In this connection, I cannot but notice, to the credit of the French republican provisional government, how much more consistent they were in their attachment to the principles of liberty than ever our own has been. What do we see in our own history? Our northern free states denouncing slavery as a crime, confessedly inconsistent with their civil and religious principles, yet, for commercial and pecuniary considerations, deliberately entering into a compact with slaveholders tolerating a twenty years' perpetuation of the African slave trade, the rendition of fugitives, the suppression of servile insurrections, and allowing to the slaveholders a virtual property basis of representation. It should qualify the contempt which some Americans express of the French republic, that when the subject of the slave colonies was brought up, and it was seen that consistency demanded immediate emancipation, they immediately emancipated; and not only so, but conferred at once on the slaves the elective franchise.

This point strongly illustrates the difference, in one respect, between the French and the Anglo-Saxons. As a race the French are less commercial, more ideal, more capable of devotion to abstract principles, and of following them out consistently, irrespective of expediency.

There is one thing which cannot but make one indignant here in Paris, and which, I think, is keenly felt by some of the best among the French; and that is, the indifference of many Americans, while here, to their own national principles of liberty. They seem to come to Paris merely to be hangers on and applauders in the train of that tyrant who has overthrown the hopes of France. To all that cruelty and injustice by which thousands of hearts are now bleeding, they appear entirely insensible. They speak with heartless levity of the revolutions of France, as of a pantomime got up for their diversion. Their time and thoughts seem to be divided between defences of American slavery and efforts to attach themselves to the skirts of French tyranny. They are the parasites of parasites—delighted if they can but get to an imperial ball, and beside themselves if they can secure an introduction to the man who figured as a roué, in the streets of New York. Noble-minded men of all parties here, who have sacrificed all for principle, listen with suppressed indignation, while young America, fresh from the theatres and gambling saloons, declares, between the whiffs of his cigar, that the French are not capable of free institutions, and that the government of Louis Napoleon is the best thing France could have. Thus from the plague- spot at her heart has America become the propagandist of despotism in Europe. Nothing weighs so fearfully against the cause of the people of Europe as this kind of American influence. Through almost every city of Europe are men whose great glory it appears to be to proclaim that they worship the beast, and wear his name in their foreheads. I have seen sometimes, in the forests, a vigorous young sapling which had sprung up from the roots of an old, decaying tree. So, unless the course of things alters much in America, a purer civil liberty will spring up from her roots in Europe, while her national tree is blasted with despotism. It is most affecting, in moving through French circles, to see what sadness, what anguish of heart, lies under that surface which seems to a stranger so gay. Each revolution has cut its way through thousands of families, ruining fortunes, severing domestic ties, inflicting wounds that bleed, and will bleed for years. I once alluded rather gayly to the numerous upsets of the French government, in conversation with a lady, and she laughed at first, but in a moment her eyes filled with tears, and she said, "Ah, you have no idea what these things are among us." In conversation nothing was more common than the remark, "I shall do so and so, provided things hold out; but then there is no telling what will come next."