"My humble opinion," said the Doctor, after listening to the foregoing pages—"my humble opinion is, that they manage matters better at Astley's."
SENTIMENTS AND SYMBOLS OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC.
When Lamartine, in the face of a mob still excited with battle and bloodshed, still drunken with the intoxication of victory, demanding, of those whom the chances of a destiny-fraught hour had placed at their head in the perilous post of command, they scarce knew what, and yet ready to recommence destruction and death were it not granted—when Lamartine tore aside the blood-red banner of terror, that had been seized on as the symbol of the newly proclaimed French Republic, and lifted aloft the tricolor flag as the true standard of the Republic of peace and order which he hoped to found, he did not only an act of personal courage—one to be mentioned among the great traits of heroism in the annals of history—but he consummated a deed upon which the destiny of France, perhaps of the whole world, for the moment depended. To those far away, who know not the strange compound that forms the character of the French, the mere change of one flag for another may appear a matter of but little moment: but in truth it was one of almost inestimable importance, for the destiny of the country depended on it. And this Lamartine knew. He knew his people too—he knew how easily they are led away by the outward show, how completely their sentiments would be engaged in the outward symbols; and he reared the symbol of order against the banner of violence and blood; though he raised it aloft at the hazard of his life. At that moment the poet-statesman stood forth a man ready to die for his convictions: at that moment, guns, pikes, swords, daggers, every instrument of death was directed at his head by a furious mob, screaming for that ideal, the Republic, from which it had been taught by demagogues to expect some vague, supernatural, at least wholly visionary good, as if it were a talisman to raise up a golden age by the mere power of its name; a mob, senseless, enraged, and deaf to reason, flushed with the acquisition of sudden and sovereign power, and yet goaded by the idea that treachery was at hand to snatch it from their grasp. In the face of such an assemblage, before the historical old building of the Hôtel de Ville of Paris,—upon those steps on which so many scenes of history had already passed, and none, perhaps, more important in its results than this,—he stood forth, pale, but erect and resolute: a single word from the crowd, the cry "he is a traitor! he deceives us!" might have been the signal for his massacre: a gesture might have done the deed: the wag of one nerve of a finger on the lock of the gun might have levelled him, and with him France, at once: and he knew it. He knew, too, that Fate was in his hands; he knew that in that seemingly senseless change of colours on a flag-staff lay the destiny of Paris; and he was prepared to fall a victim or to rise a hero. To the red flag popular fancy attached the idea of violence, war, revenge; it was the bloody pirate flag of propagandism by force of arms, by the terror of the scaffold. The tricolor flag, although it had waved over many a ruin, many a deed of horror, in the dreadful history of the past, had led on the nation to glory and military renown; for the last eighteen years it had typified the national watchwords of that time, "Liberty and Public Order;" and it was set forth once more, under a more democratic rule, but not a rule of anarchy—liberty, public order, peace. To each symbol was attached a sentiment. On the one symbol, on the one sentiment, Lamartine had staked the future destinies of France, as he had staked the hazard of his life. Unsupported he stood before those yelling, suspicious, infuriated thousands. He was the man of the moment. A powerful appeal to the feelings of such a mob—one of those appeals, one of those words of history that are carried down to all posterity—one of those electric touches of simultaneous sentiment, which often suddenly pervade great crowds, seemingly thrilling through all frames at once alike, coming as it were from some supernatural influence, but which few mortal men know how to direct, when, and far less as they would—such an appeal was to be made—such a word to be spoken—such a blow given. Again we repeat, he was the man of the moment—for he was the man of high poetic sentiment. Thence alone could come the electric stroke; and it was struck. The simple eloquence of the poet's heartfelt convictions fell over the crowd. He raised the tricolor banner; guns, swords, and pikes were lowered: "Vive Lamartine!" burst from every mouth: the cause of humanity was gained—for the time at least. That symbol stamped the sentiment of the future French Republic.
Spite of the frivolous, sceptical, denying, and, in latter years, positive and anti-poetical character of the French people, there is no nation more easily led away by a word, however incomprehensible—an idea, however vague; but when that word, that idea, is embodied in an outward symbol, it is remarkable with what blind tenacity the French will cling to it, hoist it on high, worship it. What the deism of the Encyclopedists could not effect in the revolution of the last century; what even the frantic political atheism of the sect that followed in their footsteps could not accomplish over the masses; what the persecution of the priesthood could not establish over the minds of the people, was wrought by the personification of atheism in the embodiment of the Goddess of Reason. When the reason that denied a Godhead stood before them in a living and material form, the people fell down and worshipped; the orgies of atheism in the face of that half-naked bacchante form became universal.
This spirit arises, probably, from the theatrical nature of the people. Individually each Frenchman seems to consider that he is born to act a part, not only in the stage of life in general, but in his own individual sphere, act a part as a comedian, a part he assumes, not the part that Providence has destined for him; in fact, to use a French expression, he must always poser et faire de l'effet. Louis XIV. acted the comedy of royalty, not as if he had a conviction of his real kingship, but as if he was "making believe;" he throned it always like a tragedy king—he posa on his throne. Even to the lower classes—and perhaps they more than any other—the Frenchman of this day, however quiet and estimable in private life, will poser as an actor, as soon as he has an audience, and shows himself "before the face of men," be it in the salon, or the tribune, or at the street corner. So strong is the desire for theatrical effect, especially among the lower classes, that each homme du peuple seems ever to be striving to set up for a hero on his own little stage of existence, even if that hero be a villain. Among the more reckless of them in latter years, the mania de faire parler de soi has frequently gone as far as committing suicide or atrocious crime, in order to die with eclat or a coup de théâtre. The opportunities afforded to the people by successive revolutions, of showing themselves off in characters that have been applauded "to the echo" as noble and sublime, have contributed to foster that craving for notoriety and part-acting in the eyes of the world, which an overweening vanity of character, and the desire for effect, have made a portion of their habitual life. It may be a question even, whether, in scenes of popular convulsion, the reckless courage of the French—unquestionable as is that courage—does not arise from a sort of fancy that the whole drama of contention they are acting is, in a manner, unreal—that they are but actors on a living stage—that the whole, in fact, is a theatrical part. To see them attitudinising on a barricade, with flag and sabre raised aloft, flinging up their arms in picture-like gesture, and sweeping back their hair to give effect to their tableau, it might be natural to suppose so. With this theatrical mania, then, so prevalent in all classes, it follows very naturally that the outward show, the embodied sentiment, the symbol, in fact, should assert such a powerful sway over their excitable minds.
Those, consequently, who know the character of the nation cannot but be aware of the importance, in the guidance of the people, of the symbol in which the sentiment is to be embodied. Those who do not even reason upon this fact, feel it instinctively; and the importance attached by both parties, the moderates and ultra-violent republicans, to the symbols which each party strives to make predominate, is visible in many of their acts. The one party is constantly endeavouring to remove all such as recall to mind the recollection of a bloody and destructive past; the other is as constantly using all its efforts to renew and adopt them, and to make them the rallying banner of the faction. The Republic, forced upon all France by the active violence of a small minority in the capital alone, has been accepted by the majority, partly from that feeling of resignation with which most meet a fait accompli—partly from the desire to maintain a statu quo, whatever it may be, for the sake of peace and order—partly from the conviction that, under the circumstances, when a dynasty so hastily fled in alarm before an insurrection, and left the country to its fate, no other form of government was possible for the moment. But let a symbol of the past be raised, of that past to which so many look back with horror, and, as yet at least, indignation and scorn will be shown by the better-thinking majority, by whom the importance of the act, slight as it may appear in our eyes, is instinctively felt and understood.
When Paris was, for many days and almost weeks, given up to the fanciful caprices of a mob, that pocketed the public money and repaid it by the fantastic diversions of its idleness—when it streamed about the streets with banners, and flags, and ribbons and music, carrying about bedizened may-poles, and grubbing holes on every Place, before every public monument, in every street, in almost every hole and corner of all Paris, in which to plant them, it was not the yelling of the crowd, it was not the incessant firing of guns and letting off of crackers by night as well as day, it was not the compulsory subscription à domicile for the expenses of a mob's fête of every moment, it was not the threatening cry of "des lampions—illuminate in our honour, or we break your windows," it was not the tumult, the constraint, the menace that cast a vague terror over the public mind;—it was the feeling that scenes of a terrible memory were about to be acted over again;—it was the knowledge that such had been in gone-by times the gay, green, laughing prologue to a hideous tragedy;—it was the consciousness that the so-called trees of liberty were symbols in the minds of a mob of an era of license, and riot, and carnage—that the pike, and the sabre, and the axe were the accessories of the gay picture, although still in the dimness of a dark background—that the leaves those bare stems might bear were to sprout, perchance, with spots of blood upon their young verdure. Men looked askance: the symbol of a people's drunkenness in power was waving before their windows: how far, they asked, was the sentiment that thus darkly arose in their minds, predominant also in the minds of the mob, when it raised that symbol? It was in vain they reasoned, that the France of the nineteenth century was no longer the France of the eighteenth—that the bloodthirstiness and the reckless cruelty had passed away from the character of a people advanced in civilisation—that the present had no analogy with the past: it was in vain they sought a reassurance in the fact that the pale priest was dragged from the church to bestow his blessing, with all the pomp of Catholic ecclesiastical ceremony, upon the symbol, and give a seemingly religious sanction to a people's fantastic rite of patriotism—that there was consequently a feeling of holiness in the people's mind in the accomplishment of that ceremony. On the contrary, the very mockery alarmed: the very compulsory attendance of the clergy seemed to prove that there was rather a desire in the mob to show its power than to attach a sanctity, which it needed not otherwise in common life, to the deeds it did: a terror, vague, ill-defined, unreasoned, but none the less real, floated over every mind. The symbol flaunted abroad the sentiment of the past. It was not until the authorities too late issued decrees, to prohibit the further practice of these fantastic allegorical popular manifestations, that confidence, or rather forgetfulness of the uneasiness that such demonstrations of popular sentiment had instinctively conveyed, began slowly to return to the public mind. The trees of liberty stand, it is true, and flourish, and put forth leaves, amid the flags, and ribbons, and withered wreaths, and tricolor streamers, which flaunt, and twine, and flutter around them; but it was not the fact—it was the sentiment that caused alarm. As a symbol, however, they remain: and may yet re-evoke the sentiment that for a while has been forgotten, and still act a part in the future troubled chronicles of the streets of Paris.