The great and durable interests of society, which the indulgence of such passions inevitably ruins, are the barrier which, in ordinary circumstances, is opposed to these disorders; and it is this influence which has so long prevented any serious outbreak of anarchy in Great Britain. But the immense extent of the confiscation of landed property during the first Revolution, and the total ruin of commercial and movable wealth, from the events of the maritime war, and the effects of the enormous issue of assignats, has prevented the construction of this barrier in anything like sufficient strength to withstand the forces which pressed against it. Nine-tenths of the realised wealth of the country was destroyed during the convulsion; what remained was for the most part concentrated in the hands of a few bankers and moneyed men, who aimed at cheapening everything, and depressing industry, in order to augment the value of their metallic riches. The influence of the natural leaders of the producing class, the great proprietors of land, was at an end, for they were almost all destroyed. The six millions of separate landed proprietors, who had come in their place, had scarcely any influence in the state; for the great majority of them were too poor to pay 200 francs a-year (£8) direct taxes—the necessary condition towards an admission into the electoral body—and as individuals they were in too humble circumstances to have any influence in the state. The returns of the "Impôt foncière," or land-tax, showed that above four millions of this immense body had properties varying from £2 to £10 a-year each—not more than is enjoyed by an Irish bogtrotter. In these circumstances, not only was the steadying influence of property in general unfelt in the state, but the property which did make itself felt was of a disturbing rather than a pacifying tendency; for it was that of bankers and money-lenders, whose interests, being those of consumers, not producers, went to support measures calculated to depress industry rather than elevate it, and thereby augment rather than diminish the distress which, from these causes, soon came to press so severely upon the urban population.
These causes were the necessary results of the dreadful waste of property, and ruin of industry, which had taken place during the first Revolution. The multitude of little proprietors with which France was overspread, could furnish nothing to the metropolis but an endless succession of robust hands to compete with its industry, and starving mouths to share its resources. What could the six millions of French landowners, the majority of them at the plough, afford to lay aside for the luxuries of Paris? Nothing. You might as well expect the West-End shopkeepers of London to be sustained by the starving western Highlanders of Scotland, or the famished crowds of Irish cottars. The natural flow of the wealth of the land to the capital of the kingdom, which invariably sets in when agricultural property is unequally distributed, and a considerable part of it is vested in the hands of territorial magnates, was at once stopped when it became divided among a multitude of persons, not one of whom could afford to travel ten miles from home, or to buy anything but a rustic dress and a blouse to cover it. At least sixty millions sterling, out of the eighty millions which constitute the net territorial produce of France, was turned aside from Paris, and spent entirely in the purchase of the coarsest manufactures or rude subsistence in the provinces. The metropolis came to depend mainly on the expenditure of foreigners, or of the civil and military employés of government. This woful defalcation in its resources occurred at a time, too, when the influx of needy adventurers from the country was daily increasing, from the impossibility of earning a livelihood, amidst the desperate competition of its squalid landowners, and the decline of agriculture, which necessarily resulted from their inability to adopt any of its improvements. Thus the condition of the working classes in Paris went on getting constantly worse, during the whole reign of Louis Philippe; and it was only in consequence of the vast influx of foreigners, which the maintenance of peace and the attractions of the court occasioned, that they were not reduced many years before to the despair and misery which at once occasioned and followed the last revolution.
Amidst a population excited to discontent by these causes, another circumstance has operated with peculiar force, which we do not recollect to have seen hitherto noticed in disquisitions on this subject—this is the prodigious number of natural children and foundlings at Paris. It is well known that ever since the close of the first Revolution the number of illegitimate births in Paris has borne a very great proportion to the legitimate; they are generally as 10,000 to 18,000 or 19,000. For a long time past, every third child seen in the streets of Paris has been a bastard. Hitherto this important feature of society has been considered with reference to the state of morality in regard to the relation of the sexes which it indicates; but attend to its social and political effects. These bastards do not always remain children; they grow up to be men and women. The foundlings of Paris, already sufficiently numerous, are swelled by a vast concourse of a similar class over all France, who flock, when they have the means of transport, to the capital as the common sewer of the commonwealth. There are at present about 1,050,000 souls in the French metropolis. Suppose that a third of these are natural children, there are then 350,000 persons, most of them foundlings of illegitimate birth, in that capital. Taking a fourth of them as capable of bearing arms, we have 85,000 bastards constantly ready to fight in Paris.
Consider only the inevitable results of such a state of things in an old and luxurious metropolis, teeming with indigence, abounding with temptation, overflowing with stimulants to the passions. The enfant trouvé of Paris, when grown up, becomes a gamin de Paris, just as naturally and inevitably as a chrysalis becomes a butterfly. He has obtained enough of instruction to enable him to imbibe temptation, and not enough to enable him to combat it. He has in general received the rudiments of education: he can read the novels of Victor Hugo, Eugene Sue, and George Sand; he can study daily the Réforme or National, or Démocratie Pacifique. He looks upon political strife as a game at hazard, in which the winning party obtain wealth and honour, mistresses, fortunes, and enjoyments. As to religion, he has never heard of it, except as a curious relic of the olden time, sometimes very effective on the opera stage; as to industry, he knows not what it is; as to self-control, he regards it as downright folly where self-indulgence is practicable. The most powerful restraints on the passions of men—parents, children, property—are to him unknown. He knows not to whom he owes his birth; his offspring are as strange to him as his parents, for they, like him, are consigned to the Foundling Hospital: he has nothing in the world he can call his own, except a pair of stout arms to aid in the formation of barricades, and a dauntless heart ready at any moment to accept the hazard of death or pleasure. Hanging midway, as it were, between the past and the future, he has inherited nothing from the former but its vices, he will transmit nothing to the latter but its passions. Whoever considers the inevitable results of eighty or ninety thousand men in the prime of life actuated by these dispositions, associating with an equal number of women of the same class, affected by the same misfortune in their birth, and influenced by the same passions, constantly existing in a state of indigence and destitution in the heart of Paris, will have no difficulty in accounting for the extraordinary difficulty which, for the last half century, has been experienced in governing France, and will probably despair of ever succeeding in it but by force of arms.
We hear nothing of these facts from Lamartine, whose mind is essentially dramatic, and who represents revolutions, as he evidently considers them, as the work of individual men, working upon the inevitable march of society towards extreme republican institutions. He gives us no statistics; he never refers to general causes, except the universal progress towards democracy, which he regards as irresistible. Least of all is he alive to the ruinous effects of the first great disruption of the bonds of society which naturally followed the Revolution of 1789, or disposed to regard the subsequent convulsions, as what they really are—the inevitable result and just punishment of the enormous sins of the Revolution. And—mark-worthy circumstance!—these consequences are the obvious result of the great crimes committed in its course; the confiscation of property which it occasioned, the overthrow of religion and morals with which it was attended. They have fallen with peculiar severity upon Paris, the centre of the revolutionary faction, and the focus from which all its iniquities emanated, and where the blood of its noblest victims was shed. And if revolutions such as we have witnessed or read of in that country are indeed inevitable, and part of the mysterious system of Providence in the regulation of human affairs, we can regard them as nothing but a realisation of that general tendency to evil which is so clearly foretold in prophecy, and indications of the advent of those disastrous times which are to be closed by the second coming of the Messiah.
We have all heard of the mingled treachery and irresolution—treachery in the national guard, irresolution in the royal family—which brought about the revolution which Lamartine has so eloquently described. It is evident, even from his account—which, it may be supposed, is not unduly hostile to the popular side—that it was the bar-sinister in its birth which proved fatal, in the decisive moment, to the Throne of the Barricades; and that the revolution might with ease have been suppressed, if any other power had been called to combat it but that which owed its existence to a similar convulsion.
"The King was lost in thought, while the tocsin was sounding, on the means by which it might yet be possible to calm the people, and restrain the revolution, in which he persisted in seeing nothing but a riot. The abdication of his external-political system, personified in M. Guizot, M. Duchatel, and the majority of the Chambers entirely devoted to his interests, appeared to him to amount to more than the renunciation of his crown; it was the abandonment of his thoughts, of his wisdom, of the prestige of his infallibility in the eyes of Europe, of his family, of his people. To yield a throne to adverse fortune, is little to a great mind. To yield his renown and authority to triumphant adverse opinion and implacable history, is the most painful effort which can be required of a man, for it at once destroys and humbles him. But the King was not one of those hardy characters who enjoy, with sang-froid, the destruction of a people for the gratification of their pride. He had read much of history, acted much in troubled times, reflected much. He could not conceal from himself, that a dynasty which should reconquer Paris by means of grape-shot and bombs would be for ever besieged by the horror of the people. His field of battle had always been opinion. It was on it that he wished to act; he hoped to regain it by timely concessions. Only, like a prudent economist, he higgled with opinion like a Jewish pawnbroker, in the hopes of purchasing it at the smallest possible sacrifice of his system and dignity. He flattered himself he had several steps of popularity to descend before quitting the throne."—(Vol. i., p. 102.)
The immediate cause of the overthrow of the throne, it is well known, was the fatal order which the delusion of M. Thiers, when called to the ministry, extorted from the weakness of the King, to stop firing—to cease resistance—to succumb to the assailants. Marshal Bugeaud was perfectly firm; the troops were steady; ample military force was at their command; everything promised decisive success to vigorous operations. Marshal Bugeaud's plan was of the simplest but most efficacious kind.
"Marshal Bugeaud, with his military instinct, matured by experience and the habit of handling troops, knew that immobility is the ruin of the morale of soldiers. He changed in a moment the plan of operations submitted to him. He instantly called around him the officers commanding corps. The one was Tiburie Sebastiani, brother of the marshal of the same name, a calm and faithful officer; the other, General Bedeau, whose name, made illustrious by his exploits in Africa, carried respect with it, to his companions in arms in Paris. He ordered them to form two columns of 3500 men each, and to advance into the centre of Paris—the one by the streets which traverse it from the Boulevards to the Hôtel de Ville, the other by streets which cross it from the quays. Each of the columns had artillery, and their instructions were to carry, in their advance, all the barricades, to destroy these fortresses of the insurrection, to cannonade the masses, and concentrate their columns on the Hôtel de Ville, the decisive point of the day. General Lamoricière was to command a reserve of 9000 men, stationed around the palace."—(Vol. i., pp. 136, 137.)
The despair of the troops when compelled to retire before a tumultuous mob—to confess defeat in their own capital, and in the face of Europe, is thus described:—