In the centre of the nave stood the bust of Washington, wreathed in flags and laurels. Years before, in Independence Hall at Philadelphia, on a spot now marked by an inscription, the flags taken at Yorktown had been laid at the feet of the President of Congress and of the minister from France, Gérard de Rayneval. Now General Lannes, the future marshal, came forth and with appropriate words laid before the image of the former commander ninety-six flags taken from the enemy by the troops of republican France.
A plan was formed thereupon, the realization of which troublous days did not allow, to erect a statue of Washington in Paris (he now has two there and one in Versailles, gratefully accepted gifts from America), and a decree was prepared by Talleyrand recalling, as a motive, the similitude of feelings between France and that "nation which is sure to be one day a great nation, and is even now the wisest and happiest in the world, and which mourns for the death of the man who did more than any, by his courage and genius, to break her shackles and raise her to the rank of independent peoples.... One of the noblest lives which have honored mankind has just passed into the domain of history.... Washington's fame is now imperishable; Fortune had consecrated his titles to it; and the posterity of a people which will rise later to the highest destinies continuously confirms and strengthens those titles by its very progress."
Châteaubriand, Lamartine, Guizot, Cornelis de Witt, Laboulaye, Joseph Fabre, many other French thinkers and writers, vied with each other in their praise and admiration throughout the century. Châteaubriand, who had seen the great man at Philadelphia in 1791, inserted in his Voyage en Amérique his famous parallel between Bonaparte and Washington: "The republic of Washington subsists; the empire of Bonaparte is no more; it came and went between the first and second journey of a Frenchman[217] who has found a grateful nation where he had fought for some oppressed colonists.... The name of Washington will spread, with liberty, from age to age; it will mark the beginning of a new era for mankind.... His fame rises like one of those sanctuaries wherein flows a spring inexhaustible for the people.... What would be the rank of Bonaparte in the universe if he had added magnanimity to what there was heroical in him, and if, being at the same time Washington and Bonaparte, he had appointed Liberty for the heiress of his glory?"
Lamartine, receiving an Italian delegation in 1848, asked them to hate the memory of Machiavelli and bless that of Washington: "His name is the symbol of modern liberty. The name of a politician, the name of a conqueror is no longer what is wanted by the world, but the name of the most disinterested of men, and the most devoted to the people." Guizot published his noteworthy study on the first President of the United States, and the American colony in Paris, to commemorate the event, had the portrait of the French statesman painted by Healy in 1841, and presented it to the city of Washington, where it is preserved in the National Museum.
Publishing, during the early years of the Second Empire, the series of lectures he had delivered at the Collège de France during our Second Republic, the great Liberal, Laboulaye, who did so much to make America and the Americans popular in France, wrote in his preface: "Washington has established a wise and well-ordered republic, and he has left to after-times, not the fatal example of crime triumphant, but a wholesome example of patriotism and virtue. In less than fifty years,[218] owing to the powerful sap of liberty, we have seen an empire arise, having for its base, not conquest, but peace and industry, an empire which before the end of the century will be the greatest state in the civilized world, and which, if it remains faithful to the thought of its founders, if ambition does not arrest the course of its fortune, will offer to the world the prodigious sight of a republic of one hundred million inhabitants, richer, happier, more brilliant than the monarchies of the old world. All this is Washington's work."[219]
Nearer our time, Joseph Fabre, the well-known historian of Joan of Arc, wrote: "This sage was a wonder of reasoned enthusiasm, of thoughtful intrepidity, of methodical tenacity, of circumspect boldness, facing from abroad oppression, at home anarchy, both vanquished by his calm genius."[220]
Once more now a republic has been established in France, which, having, we hope, something of the qualities of "coolness and moderation" that Washington wanted us to possess, will, we trust, prove perpetual. It has already lasted nearly half a century: an unexampled phenomenon in the history of Europe, no other republic of such magnitude having thus survived in the old world since the fall of the Roman one, twenty centuries ago.
If the great man were to come again, we entertain a fond hope that he would deem us not undeserving now of the sympathies he bestowed on our ancestors at the period when he was living side by side with them. Most of the leading ideas followed by him throughout life are those which we try to put in practise. We have our faults, to be sure; we know them, others know them, too; it is not our custom to conceal them, far from it; may this serve as an excuse for reviewing here by preference something else than what might occasion blame.
That equality of chances for all, which caused the admiration of the early French visitors to this country, which was one of the chief things for which Washington had fought, and continues to be to-day one of the chief attractions offered to the immigrant by these States, has been secured in the French Republic, too, where no privileges of any sort remain, the right to vote is refused to none, taxation is the same for all, and military service is expected from everybody. No principle had more importance in the eyes of Washington than that of "equal liberty." "What triumph for our enemies to verify their predictions!" Washington had written to John Jay, in a moment of depression, when he feared that what Genet was to call "monocracy" was in the ascendant; "what triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are unable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious."[221]