"Secondly.—Another awful disadvantage, in my opinion, is, the tradesman is obliged to please. The workman gives his time, the manufacturer his merchandise, for so much money: that is a simple contract which is not humiliating, neither has occasion to flatter. They are not obliged, often with a lacerated heart and tearful eyes, to be amiable and gay on a sudden, like the lady behind the counter. The tradesman, though uneasy, and tormented to death about a bill that falls due to-morrow, must smile, and give himself up by a cruel effort to the prating of some young fashionable lady, who makes him unfold a hundred pieces, chats for two hours, and, after all, departs without a purchase. He must please, and so must his wife. He has staked in trade, not only his wealth, his person, and his life, but often his family."
We need not ask, is bondage here? or stay to inquire whether the condition of the tradesman thus described is likelier to engender love or hatred towards mankind.
The Official, too, is enslaved. A vast proportion of men on the Continent are officials. Great efforts and great sacrifices are undergone to make the hope of the humble house a government servant. And in France what does this mean? It means to serve a hard master, and to receive ill wages for the service, to be subject to instant dismissal at the will of an arbitrary overseer, to pass a life of changes, journeys, and sudden transportations. A baker's boy at Paris earns more than two custom-house officers, more than a lieutenant of infantry, more than many a magistrate, more than the majority of professions; he earns as much as six parish schoolmasters.
"Shame! infamy! The nation that pays the least to those that instruct the people (let us blush to confess it) is France. I speak of the France of these days. On the contrary, the true France, that of the Revolution, declared that teaching was a holy office, that the schoolmaster was equal to the priest. I do not conceal it; of all the miseries of the present day, there is not one that grieves me more. The most deserving, the most miserable, the most neglected man in France is the schoolmaster. The state, which does not even know what are its true instruments and its strength, that does not suspect that its most powerful moral lever is this class of men—the state, I say, abandons him to the enemy of the state—bondage; heavy bondage! I find it among the high and the low in every degree, crushing the most worthy, the most humble, the most deserving!"
The Rich Man and the Bourgeois do not escape the curse that attaches to every other class: they too are in bondage. The ancient bourgeoisie was characterized by security, the present has no such characteristic. It lives in timidity and fear. It has risen from the Revolution, aspires to nobility, feels none, and is jealous of the advancing masses. The ancient bourgeois was consistent. "He admired himself in his privileges, wanted to extend them, and looked upwards. Our man looks downwards: he sees the crowd ascending behind him, even as he ascended; he does not like it to mount; he retreats, and holds fast to the side of power. Does he avow to himself his retrograde tendency? Seldom, for his part is adverse to it; he remains almost always in this contradictory position—a liberal in principle, an egotist in practice, wanting, yet not willing. If there remain any thing French within him, he quiets it by the reading of some innocently growling, or pacifically warlike newspaper."
The rich man of to-day was poor yesterday. He was the very artisan, the soldier, the peasant, whom he now avoids. He has the false notion, that people gain only by taking from others. He will not let his companions of yesterday ascend the ladder by which he has mounted, lest in the ascent he should lose something. He does not know that "every flood of rising people brings with it a flood of new wealth." He shuts himself up in his class, in his little circle of habits, closes the door, and carefully guards—a nonentity. To maintain his position, the rich man withdraws from the people—is insulated—and, therefore, in bondage.
Here let us stop. What is it that we have seen? The peasant in fetters, the workman oppressed, the artisan crippled, the manufacturers embarrassed, the tradesman corrupted, the official in misery, the rich man exiled—all in bondage, all hating one another, and all constituting the life and marrow of the great and civilized country, to whose deplorable condition M. Michelet especially invites our attention. Deplorable, said we? Oh, far from it! The calamity that would crush any other nation, has a far different effect upon France. Bondage and hatred may exist, misery may eat like a canker-worm at the heart of the empire; but France, great, glorious, military, and beautiful, is consumed only to rise phœnix-like, fairer and younger, from her ashes. The French peasant may be in fetters, but he is also the nobleman of the world—the only nobleman remaining, "whilst Europe has continued plebeian." (!) "It is said the Revolution has suppressed the nobility, but it is just the reverse; it has made thirty-four millions of nobles. When an emigrant was boasting of the glory or his ancestors, a peasant, who had been successful in the field, replied, 'I am an ancestor.'" "The strongest foundation that any nation has had since the Roman empire, is found in the peasantry of France." "It is by that that France is formidable to the world, and at the same time ready to aid it; it is this that the world looks upon with fear and hope. What, in fact, is it? The army of the future on the day the barbarians appear." If such is the picture of a peasantry in bondage, what must we expect from a peasantry at liberty? The workmen, as we have seen, are vicious enough, yet they are the most sociable and gentlest creatures in the universe. Nothing moves them to violence; if you starve them, they will wait; if you kill them, they are resigned; they are the least fortunate, but the most charitable; they know not what hatred is; the more you persecute, the more they love you. If in our haste we called these men degraded, we recall our words, for M. Michelet says that they stand amongst the highest "in the estimation of God." We told you just now, always upon the authority of our author, what rascals the French manufacturers were; and how the unfeeling masters of to-day are paying the penalty of their fathers' frauds and evil practices. We hinted, too, at the symptoms of decay already visible in their condition. But we did not tell you that France manufactures, in a spirit of self-denial that cannot be too strongly commended, for the whole world, who come to her, "buy her patterns, which they go and copy, ill or well, at home. Many an Englishman has declared, in an inquiry, that he has a house in Paris to have patterns. A few pieces purchased at Paris, Lyons, or in Alsatia, and afterwards copied abroad, are sufficient for the English and German counterfeiter to inundate the world. It is like the book-trade. France writes and Belgium sells." It was stated that the official is cruelly paid for his labour, and M. Michelet further hints, that peculation is but too often the grievous consequence. In England this would be fatal to a man's self-respect, and subject him to bondage in more ways than one. But, across the Channel, Providence miraculously interposes, and even rescues the official in the hour of difficulty, for the honour and glory of la belle France. "Yes, at the moment of fainting, the culprit stops short without knowing why——because he feels upon his face the invisible spirit of the heroes of our wars, the breath of the old flag!!"
It is really very difficult to go on satisfactorily with such a writer as this. If there be truth in the picture which he draws of his country's misery, there must be falsehood in the language with which he paints her pre-eminence, and battles for her unapproachable perfection. If she be perfect, the vital sores that have been presented to us exist not in her, but only in the imagination of the enthusiastic and deluded writer. Upon one page it is written that the situation of France is so serious, that there is no longer room for hesitation. France is "hourly declining, engulfed like an Atalantis." Five minutes afterwards, "the idea of our ruin is absurd, ridiculous. For who has a literature? Who still sways the mind of Europe? We, weak as we are. Who has an army? We alone." What is the conclusion which any unprejudiced reader would draw from the painful details which M. Michelet has deemed it his paramount duty to bring before the notice of mankind, and especially to the consciences of the French nation itself? Simply this—that France, disabled and diseased, is weak, and feebler than many other nations of the world. The conclusion of M. Michelet is the very opposite one. "Let France be united for an instant, she is strong as the world. England and Russia, two feeble bloated giants, impose an illusion on Europe. Great empires, weak people!" So it is throughout. M. Michelet leaves far behind him the butcher, who would not suffer any man to call his dog an ugly name but himself. You must not only utter no syllable of condemnation against his glorious country, but you must be prepared to regard the abuse of the author as so much panegyric.
The means of enfranchisement suggested by the poetic historian are as fanciful as the bondage itself appears to be. Freedom for every class is to be gained by LOVE. Love for the native country: in other words, Frenchmen of every class are to believe that there never existed, that there never will exist, a country so great as their own; and then, as if by a charm, all their troubles will cease, their sorrow will be turned into joy—their imprisonment to liberty, such as mankind have never yet witnessed, such as no children of the great human family are capable of enjoying, but the darlings and favourites of God—beloved France. In the nursery, we do not correct the young by flattery and cajolery. The surgeon does not hesitate to cut to the marrow, if the safety of the patient depend upon the bold employment of the knife; but neither monitor nor doctor in France may approach the faults and corruptions of her people without doing homage to the one, and viciously tampering with the other. What but insult is the following balderdash offered to a great people as a remedy for physical suffering—cruelty—oppression—want?
"Say not, I beseech you, that it is nothing at all to be born in the country surrounded by the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine, and the ocean. Take the poorest man, starving in rags, him whom you suppose to be occupied solely with material wants. He will tell you it is an inheritance of itself to participate in this immense glory, this unique legend, which constitutes the talk of the world. He well knows that if he were to go to the most remote desert of the globe, under the equator or the poles, he would find Napoleon, our armies, our grand history, to shelter and protect him; that the children would come to him, that the old men would hold their peace, and entreat him to speak, and that to hear him only mention those names, they would kiss the hem of his garment."