Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 368, June 1846

by Various

"Recevez-le donc, ce livre du Peuple, parce qu'il est vous, parce qu'il est moi. Par vos origines militaires, par la mienne, industrielle, nous représentons nous-mêmes, autant que d'autres peut-être, les deux faces modernes du Peuple, et son récent avénement."

There is, in truth an extensive amount of cant afloat just now, both here and elsewhere, on this subject of The People. It is the staple commodity of your newspaper-mongers, and the catchpenny song of the streets. Agitators feed upon it, politicians play upon it, our needy brethren of the quill pay outstanding debts with it. It is one of the few things that pay at all in an age of fearful competition, and one that always will pay whilst poor human nature holds the purse-strings. The wretched beggarman of Ireland famishes for a crust, yet he has his farthings to spare for the greedy hypocrite who flatters his vanity, and heaps laudations on his social importance. John Howard made four pilgrimages to Germany, five to Holland, three to France, two to Italy, with the simple object of mitigating the physical sufferings of his fellow creatures; he visited Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Turkey, with the same practical and praiseworthy purpose. He passed days in pest-houses and lazarettos, and finally laid down his life in the blessed work of charity at Cherson in the Crimea. Nous avons changé tout cela. Philanthropy is a luxurious creature now-a-days. She is passive rather than active; she does not work—she talks. Her disciples take no journeys, unless it be to Italy for their own pleasure; they sit at home in satin dressing-gowns, supported on velvet, feeding on turtle. They tell the labouring classes—whom they style the bone and sinew of the land—that though they talk prose, and lead prosaic lives, they are nevertheless first-rate poets, that though rough at the surface, they are the gentlest of creation "at the core;" that though dull, they are quick; though ugly, handsome; though stupid, vastly clever; though commoners in the last degree, yet nobles of God, and nature's grandees of the very first class. It is gratifying to believe all this, and the charge is only threepence a-week, or a shilling a-month. Open as we all are to flattery, who would not pay so trifling a sum for the pleasure of so sweet a dream? If you cannot relieve our sufferings, it is something to create an inordinate self-esteem. If you cannot afford us a shilling from your pockets, it is much that your goose-quill can convert us into birds of Paradise. The successful writers of the day are those who have nauseously fawned upon the million for the sale of their "sweet voices" and their halfpence.

There is not one of these popular authors who has had the manliness to suggest, supposing that he has the head to discover, a remedy for the evils which every honest mind perceives in the social condition of the humbler classes. The most they have done is to drag further into the light miseries which every one saw without their aid—to point out exultingly distinctions of rank, which have always been, and can never cease to be—to remove bonds of sympathy, that united for mutual benefit one class with another—and to widen as far as possible the breach that has arisen between the governed and the governing of this great empire. We do them injustice—they have accomplished more. In seasons of difficulty and trial, in those periods of convulsion and danger, to which all great societies are liable, and a large mercantile community like our own is especially subject, they have assuaged alarm and appeased hunger by writing books with a moral; such a moral as that upon which The Chimes was founded, and which the snarling author of Mrs Caudle's Lectures loves to inculcate: we mean the moral that teaches the loveliness of all that lies in the hovel, the hatefulness of all that dwells in the palace; the sublimity of vulgarity, and the ridiculousness of high birth; the innate virtues of ignorance and poverty, and the equally essential wickedness of wealth and rank. Such are the exertions of modern philanthropy! Such are the self-denying, humble, and glorious achievements of the successors of John Howard!

There are two classes of philanthropists very busy just now on this side the English Channel: viz., that composed of men who are particularly anxious that no laws whatever should be passed for the effectual punishment of the midnight assassin in Ireland; and that which stands up for the murderer in England, denying the right of the legislator to punish any man with death, and the expediency of the punishment, provided the right be conceded. Should society be restored to tranquillity, and crime be expurgated by the success of these gentlemen's endeavours, it is very clear that France will take the wrong track, by following the counsel of the belligerent M. Michelet, according to whose views, peace and order are to be obtained only by the proclamation of war, and the shedding of blood for the glory of his native country. "My only hope," says the valiant historian, "is in the flag." Every time, he tells us, that he sees the bayonets of the French army, his heart bounds within him. "Glorious army! pure swords! holy bayonets!" upon which the eyes of the world are fixed, and which will eventually save that world by—cutting the throats of all the enemies of France.

M. Michelet has obtained some celebrity in Europe: amongst the learned and the reading public by his histories; amongst the masses by that remarkable work styled Priests, Women, and Families, which met with many readers and elaborate notices in this country, and was reviewed in the pages of this Magazine as recently as August last. We paid our tribute of respect to an effort which, whatever might be its faults—and serious faults it had—was distinguished by a commanding eloquence, a manly energy, and an uncompromising zeal worthy of the cause which the historian had undertaken; viz., the restoration of woman to her spiritual and social rights—rights invaded by the stranger, trampled upon by priestcraft. We did not stay to inquire into the motives by which the indignant professor of the College of France had been actuated. It may have been, that, to avenge a slight inflicted upon him by the Jesuits, the learned teacher aimed a blow at the entire Roman Catholic Church; that having repudiated the sentiments of his early life—sentiments which attached him affectionately to the religion, poetry, and traditions of the middle ages—he burned with the new fire of a convert or an apostate, and sought to establish the sincerity of his conversion by deadly home-thrusts at the party he had forsaken. It was sufficient for us that a scholar and a Frenchman had manfully advanced to the rescue of his fellow-countrywomen; that he had detected the errors that lay at the heart of their social condition; that he had noted the hindrances that affected domestic purity and peace; and bravely undertook, if possible, to remove, at all events to expose and brand them.

There is great peril attending the career of any man who acquires the reputation of a reformer of abuses. It is easier to acquire that reputation than to sustain it. It is well when the necessity gives birth to the reformer; but it is ill when the reformer, in order to live, is forced to create the necessity. There was ease and grace, simplicity and truthfulness, honesty and ardour, in that defence of woman, to which the champion was urged by the conviction that he entertained of her wrongs. Few of these qualities remain in the work now before us—a work suggested by any thing rather than the crying evils of the community to which the author belongs; a work that may have been written for money—with the mere object of book-making—to bamboozle the million, to inspire it with cock-like crowing; certainly, with no hope of regenerating France, of removing one feather's weight from the load of calamity to which her people, in common with the people of all the nations of the earth, are mysteriously doomed.

We do not pretend to understand the motives which have carried M. Michelet to his task; neither can we distinctly discern the object which it is his purpose to reach. His book is divided into three parts, which are again subdivided into chapters. There is a great appearance of connexion, and indeed an affectation of logical cohesion in the structure, but there is really and essentially no union whatever of the several divisions. Part I. is styled, "Of Bondage and Hatred;" Part II., "Enfranchisement by Love—Nature;" and Part III., "Friendship." Each part is an essay, complete, so to speak, in itself, more or less distinct; intelligible at times, but as often vague, dark, and paradoxical; most satisfactory where it treats of simple, well-known facts—least successful where it deals in the crudest theories, which are not tedious only because they are ridiculous and amusing.

The spirit that pervades the entire book is that of intolerable conceit—individual and national. We can pardon the author of The History of France much, but we will never forgive in him a vice that has ceased to be supportable in the most ignorant of his countrymen. It is impossible to conceive a philosopher and scholar so irritated and perverted by thin-skinned vanity as M. Michelet appears throughout this volume; and indeed we cannot do his intellect the injustice of supposing him to believe the jargon that has fallen from his pen. The heart, we fear, rather than the intellect, is at fault, when he who has the ear of the people approaches it with accents that inflame its lowest passions, rather than correct and guide, and bring to usefulness and good, its best and noblest instincts.

Every thing is perfect in France; nothing is perfect elsewhere. This is the theme of the song which M. Michelet circulates throughout the empire. The people are nevertheless wretched, in poverty, and in bondage; they are doomed to evil government; their social state is one of tyranny and cruel persecution. An historian, sprung from the people, has deemed it his duty to proclaim these facts, and to write a book which shall go far to remove the evils he complains of; yet, at the outset of the work, he announces, to our astonishment, that France is beyond all other lands the favoured land of heaven, the mistress of the world, the paragon of countries. We turn back a page, and ask—Was it for this that the student stepped from his retirement, or was it to prove facts the very opposite to these? If France be indeed so pre-eminently good and great, why write so many pages to prove that she lies in bondage? If the literature of France be perfect, her army pure, her people great, her religion the only true revelation of God's purposes and will, wherefore complain and cry aloud, and seek to remedy a condition already so enviable, to elevate a character already so super-eminent? Is it that France is too self-loving to hear of her faults even from her own offspring, or that she will not take her wholesome medicine without the gilding that removes its flavour, and hides its ugliness? Is she a child, and must the teacher flatter her as a child; coax, pacify, and bribe her as a child, in order to work her reformation and secure her happiness?

Let us for awhile follow the author of The People, as he traces bondage and hatred throughout the social scheme of France, and gather from him, as well as we may, the remedies he has for their destruction; so shall we do him greater justice, and obtain, if they be within grasp, the intention and the object of his undertaking.