How is it that the French are such vandals with regard to their country and their institutions, seeing that the love for their family, respect for their parents, and veneration for souvenirs, are such marked features in their character? The fact is that France is towed unresistingly by Paris, and that we often have to say "the French," when in reality we only mean "the Parisians."
We are accused of no longer having much respect for anything. Alas! that it should be impossible to deny such an accusation!
A country, just like a family, lives by its traditions, its souvenirs, even by its prejudices. Destroy these souvenirs, some of which serve as examples and others as warnings, destroy these traditions, and you break the chain that binds the family together, and the past, though never so glorious, has been lived in vain. Is a country less dear to her sons because of her prejudices? Do we not love to find them in a dear old mother?
Do not the very prejudices and weaknesses, the thousand little failings of our friends, often endear them to us?
Then why are we not content with France as she is? Why be always wanting to change her? Is it possible that we Frenchmen, the most home-abiding men in the world, can be attacked by this ridiculous mania for change?
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The study of the French language furnishes of itself plain proof of our spirit of destruction, and the Dictionnaire des Significations, which, is shortly to be published, and is awaited with impatience by the learned world, will show, by the history of the changes of meaning that our words have undergone, that the character of the French people can be recognized to this very day by the descriptions that were given of it two thousand years ago.
The French word benît formerly meant "blessed."
Thanks to the jokes of the old Gauls, our ancestors, it now means "silly." Our forefathers heard in church: "Benedicti stulti quia habebunt regnum cœlorum."[7] Bénis seront les pauvres d'esprit, car ils auront le royaume des cieux. Now, in French, pauvre d'esprit means "silly," and, on their way home, the old jokers would indulge in merry remarks at one another's expense. When anyone gave proof of want of wit, he was congratulated on having his entry into the kingdom of heaven secured:
"You are stultus enough to be benedictus"; and the first adjective soon came to have the meaning of the second.