It might be imagined, from the advantages in the administration of criminal justice, that France was in this respect equal, if not superior to Britain.—This, however, is by no means the case. The written criminal code of France is indeed apparently more humane, and the civil code less intricate and voluminous than with us in England. But there is a wide and striking difference between this code, drawn up with all the luminousness of speculative benevolence, and the manner in which the same code is carried into execution: What signifies the purity of the code, if the executive part of the system, the nomination of the judges, the direction of the sentences, and the reversal of the whole proceedings, was submitted to the power, and constituted part of the iron prerogative, of a despotic Sovereign. It was the constant practice of the late Emperor to appoint, whenever it was necessary for the accomplishment of his own ends, what he denominated a cour prevoitale—a species of court consisting of judges of his own selection, who, with summary procedure, condemned or acquitted, according to the pleasure of its master. Not only was this court erected, which was in every respect under the controul of the Emperor, but by means of his police emissaries, of those pensioned spies whom he insinuated into all the offices, and the remotest branches of the political administration, he contrived to overawe the different judges, to keep them in perpetual fear of the loss of their official situation, and in this manner to beat down the evidence, to bias the sentence, and finally, to direct the verdict. The judicial situations became latterly so completely under the influence of the creatures of the Court, that I was informed by the lawyers, that no judge was sure of remaining for two months in his official situation.
Upon the important subject of criminal delinquency, I am sorry to say the only information I contrived to collect was extremely unsatisfactory. I had been promised, by an intelligent barrister, with whom I had the good fortune to become acquainted, a detailed opinion upon the state of criminal delinquency in France; but in the meantime Napoleon landed from Elba, and my friend was called away from his civil duties to join the national guard, who were marched, when it was too late, in pursuit of Bonaparte.
From the calendar of crimes, however, which I had the opportunity of examining at the Aix assizes, as well as from the decided opinion of many of the lawyers there, I should be induced to hazard the opinion, that the crimes of robbery, burglary, and murder, are infinitely less frequent than in England. The great cause of this is undoubtedly to be attributed to the excellence of their police. Wherever such a preventive as the system of Espionage, and that carried to the perfection which we find it possessing in that country, exists, it is impossible that the greater crimes should be found to any alarming decree. There is a power, a vigour and an omnipresence in this effective police, which can check every criminal excess before it has attained any thing like a general or rooted influence throughout the kingdom; and its power, under the administration of Napoleon, was exerted to an excessive degree in France. Such a mode, however, of diminishing the catalogue of crimes, could exist only under a state of things which the inhabitants of a free country would not suffer for a moment; and indeed, to anyone possessing but the faintest idea of what liberty is, there is something in the idea of a system of espionage which is dreadful. It is like some of those dark and gigantic dæmons, embodied by the genius of fiction, the form of which you cannot trace, although you feel its presence, which stalks about enveloped in congenial gloom, and whose iron grasp falls upon you the more terrible, because it is unsuspected. Fortunately such a monster can never be met with in a free country. It shuns the pure, and untainted atmosphere of liberty, and its lungs will only play with freedom in the foul and thick air of a decided despotism.
The effects of this system of espionage, in destroying every thing upon which individual happiness in society depends; the free and unrestrained communication of opinion between friends, and even the confidence of domestic society, can hardly be conceived by any one who has lived in a free country. Upon this subject, I had an opportunity of conversing with a most respectable and intelligent British merchant, who, previous to the revolution, had been a partner in a banking-house in the French metropolis; and afterwards had the misfortune of being kept a prisoner in Paris for the last twelve years. The accounts he gave us regarding the excessive rigour of the police, and the jealousy of every thing like intercourse, were truly terrible. It had become a maxim in Paris, an axiom whose truth was proved by the general practice and conduct of its inhabitants, to believe every third person a spy. Any matter of moment, any thing bordering upon confidential communication, was alone to be trusted entre quatre yeux. The servants in every family, it was well known, were universally in the pay of government. They could not be hired till they produced their licenses, and these licenses, to serve as domestics, they all procured from the office of the police. From that office their wages were as certain, and probably (if the information they conveyed was of importance), more regularly paid than those they received from their masters. Even, therefore, in the most secret retirement of your own family, you could never speak with perfect freedom. Mr B——, the gentleman above mentioned, informed me, that before he dared to mention, even to his wife or family, any subject connected with the affairs of the day, or when they wished to speak freely and unrestrainedly upon any point whatever, every corner of the room was first examined, the chinks of the doors, and the walls of the adjoining apartments underwent a similar scrutiny; and even then they did not dare to introduce any subject which was nearly connected with the political government of the country.
A lawyer, who lived upon the same floor with this gentleman, was astonished, one morning, by the entry of the police officers into his room at four in the morning, without the slightest previous warning. They pulled him out of bed—hurried him away to the police office, kept him in strict custody for several days, seized all his papers; and having at last discovered that their suspicions were ill-founded, and that he had been secured upon erroneous information, he was brought back to his lodgings by the same hands, and in the same summary manner in which he had been removed; and he is to this day ignorant of the cause of his detention, or the nature of the offence of which he had been suspected.
Amongst the few English who, along with Mr B. were detained in Paris, it was naturally to be expected, that the precautions taken to deceive the police, and to prevent the suspicion of any secret intercourse, were still more severe and rigorous than were used by the native French. As the subjects of this country, they naturally became the objects of continual suspicion, and were more strictly watched than any other persons. They contrived, however, to procure, although at distant intervals, the sight of an English newspaper. Nine or ten months frequently elapsed without their receiving any intelligence from England. When they had the good fortune to procure one, the precautions necessary to be adopted were hardly to be believed. The same gentleman informed me, that upon receiving an English paper, he did not venture to mention the circumstance even to his wife and children, lest, in their joy, some incautious words might have escaped from them before the servants of the family, in which case, detection would have been immediate, and imprisonment inevitable. Keeping it, therefore, entirely to himself, he concealed it from every eye during the day, and at night, after the family had gone to bed, he sat up, lighted his taper, and, when every thing was still and silent about him, ventured, only then, to read over the paper, and to get by heart the most important parts of the intelligence regarding England; and he afterwards transmitted the invaluable present to some secret friend, who, in the same manner, dared only to peruse it at midnight, and with the same precautions.
A very sensible distinction has been made in the French code, in the difference of punishment which is inflicted upon robbery, when it has or has not been accompanied by murder; and the consequence of such distinction is, that in that country the most determined robberies are seldom, as they often are with us, accompanied with murder; whilst the accurate proportionment of punishment to the crimes, encourages persons possessing information to come forward, and removes those natural scruples which all must feel, when they reflect that they may be the chief instruments in bringing down a capital penalty upon the head of an individual, whose trivial offence was in no respect deserving of this last and severest punishment of the law.
The crime of which I heard most frequently, and of which the common occurrence may be traced to the miserable condition to which trade and commerce were, during the last few years, reduced in France, and to that general laxity of moral conduct which even now distinguishes that country, was Fraudulent Bankruptcy. The merchant, no longer possessing the means of making his fortune by fair speculation, has recourse to this nefarious mode of bettering his condition. He settles with his creditors for a small per centage; disposes of his property by fictitious sales, ventes simulees, and thus enriches himself upon the ruin of his creditors. At a small town in the south of France, where I for sometime resided, there were several individuals, who, it was well known, had made their fortunes in this manner; and at Marseilles it had, as I understood, become in some measure a common practice. The crime is seldom discovered, attended at least with those circumstances of corroborative evidence which are necessary in bringing it to trial. Upon detection, accompanied by complete proof, the punishment is severe. It consists in being condemned for fourteen years, or for life, to the galleys, and in branding the delinquent with letters denoting his crime: B F for Fraudulent Bankruptcy. At one of the trials of the Aix assizes, at which I was present, a young man of excellent family, son of the Chevalier de St Louis, was convicted of this crime, and although it was proved that he had been deceived by his partner, a man of decidedly bad character, but possessed of deep cunning, he was condemned for fourteen years to the galleys: Owing to a flaw in the process, the sentence was set aside by the Cour de Cassation, or Supreme Court of Appeal at Paris, and a new trial was ordered.
From the same cause, which I have mentioned above, the perfection of their police, petty theft is not of such common occurrence in France as in England. The country, in short, at the time when we passed through it, was very quiet, and few crimes were committed; but on the disbanding of the troops, a great change may be expected. These restless creatures must find work, or they will make it for themselves. It is a hard question how the un-warlike Louis is to employ them. Many talk of the necessity of sending an immense force to St Domingo; and it would appear wise policy to devise some expedition of this nature, which would swallow up the restless, the profligate, and the abandoned.
It is not our intention, nor indeed would the limits of our work permit, of entering into the question of what ought to be the conduct of the King. But there is another question, from answering which we can scarcely escape.