Neither am I among those who accuse the France of the old régime of servility. Its love for royalty may have been excessive, but it was, at least, sincere; and if sincere it was not servile. We may be guilty of idolatry towards those we love, but we can be guilty of servility only towards those we love not. Royalty, I admit, was regarded as a demi-god, but they who really worship the false god do it in good faith. Our fathers were, perhaps, fanatics, but they were not slaves. The great English lords who, in the eighteenth century, traversed France in a post chaise, in order to attend the court at Versailles, and to pass several weeks in Parts, doubtless judged the country to be inhabited only by the cowardly slaves of an Asiatic despot;—they found no House of Commons, no speaker nor usher with the black rod. In the same way, Sterne, seeing at a play a man who annoyed his neighbors and whom the guard ordered to leave, was confounded by the arbitrary proceeding, and could not comprehend that the citizen did not maintain by his fists the right to disturb the performance. It was a country judged on the surface by the habits of mind of another country during About the same time, another Englishman, [Footnote 39] who did not journey in a post-chaise, who went on foot from village to village, playing the flute for the peasantry, holding disputations in the monasteries, and thus paying his reckoning, judged France a little differently. He came very near, God forgive him, envying it, and preferring it to his own country! He met here not miserable slaves, but happy men, satisfied with themselves, and satisfied with all the world. The current money in this country, according to him, was not silver; was not the material favors of the government; was not, or, at least, was not only, pension and place; it was a vain money, no doubt, like all human riches, but a money, at least, more delicate and more noble. "Society here finds its life in HONOR. Praise gained by merit, or obtained by an imaginary worth, is the money which passes current from hand to hand, and by a noble commerce passes from the court to the camp and the cottage." France, which for the others was the country of servitude, was for him the country of honor.
[Footnote 39: We need hardly tell our readers the person referred to here was an Irishman—Oliver Goldsmith. (Ed. C.W.)]
In reality it is hardly for us to be ashamed of the servitude of forefathers. It is true, more mature than they, we no longer either worship or respect authority; but we count it no fault to beg its favors. We crowd around the altar, though we no longer believe in the god. Every revolution has shown us the ante-chambers [{209}] invaded in turn by a cloud of conquerors, revolutionists, or conservatives, monarchists or republicans, all men have profound conviction, of a well-tried self-respect, a liberalism true as steel, and an independence as firm as iron, but who nevertheless came to beg their bit from the budget Since we came into the world, four times, at least, have we seeing this hideous quarry to which (we must render all justice to our equalitarians) all classes, high or low, rich or for, lettered or unlettered, have flocked with a harmony truly democratic. We now no longer conceive of a public service which is not paid for, a state function which is not an income, a position which has not its money value. Have we the right, in good faith, to be ashamed of the times when they said not places but charges, because the public service was considered not a position but duty? Have we the right to attack even that court and that finance of aforetime, stained, I grant, with cupidity and adulation, but not otherwise than in all times, and are still the classes that approach power? Have we the right, above all, to attack the whole of that society much less greedy of the favors of power, much more independent of it than we are ourselves, that bourgeoisie who loved so much its king from whom it had nothing to expect, except the suppression of a fourth of its revenue? Those magistrates who gave their last penny for the right to rise at five o'clock in the morning, and pass the forenoon in the audience, well to-day the lowest deputy finds himself poorly paid by two thousand francs for rising at ten o'clock? That provincial nobility, poor, obscure, disdained, who had all the charges of aristocracy without its benefits, and who esteemed themselves but too happy when, after twenty years of service in order, where they left their patrimony at first, then an arm, a leg, their brothers and cousins, they obtained from the bounty of the king their discharge, and permission to retire to their homes with the cross of St. Louis, and the brevet of Brigadier-General; crippled, impoverished, but endeavoring, if possible, to "preserve a fortune sufficient to enable their children to replace them"? We, citizens and freemen, do we even for much money, what those servile beings did for a little honor?
I have passed here a little beyond the work of M. de Carné, who stops with Mazarin. He will pardon me, even thank me, for not permitting myself to go farther still, and to broach the hackneyed subject of 1789. I have elsewhere had occasion to set forth my views on that subject, by the side of M. de Carné's, happy to agree with him in many respects, though more severe, perhaps, in my judgment of that revolutionary movement than he is. The tendency of minds toward reforms might have been legitimate, but the way taken to effect them was false, and in my eyes infected with evil from the first. In fact, the groundwork of French unity, which M. de Carné represents for us with so much love, what has been its use, if, after the labor of so many centuries, it could be attained only by a national convulsion, the most violent, perhaps, which has figured in history? Civil equality, unity of territory, reform in legislation, were they not already sufficiently prepared by St. Louis, Charles VII., Louis XI., Richelieu, and Louis XIV., and was it necessary that they should be purchased by the revolt of the jeu de paume, by the blood of Versailles, and by the crimes of the reign of Terror? Were our countrymen not criminal, at that epoch, in repulsing a past in which they might, on the contrary, have found a firmer support for the reforms needed?
Be that as it may, I cannot but thank M. de Carné, in the name of all those who still read, for the work which he achieved in 1848, and for the return which he has just made to his former studies. Whoever we may be, and whatever may be the present, it is not necessary that it should absorb us. As the spectacle of the present age serves to explain past ages, so should a return to the past cool and calm in our minds [{210}] the agitation of the present. Of this freedom from contemporaneous reflection, M. de Carné has given us a noble example. On two or three points, at most, the statesman of our times is a little too perceptible. I much doubt, for instance, if in the sixteenth century, the Balafré could have founded in France a dynasty and a citizen royalty like that of Louis Philippe. Still it might have been had the Balafré been a cadet of the Capetian family, and if the dynasty of the Valois had been for forty years shaken by two revolutions. What strikes me, on the contrary, in the history of the League, and what appears to me one of the greatest proofs of the spirit of nationality and of loyalty which then reigned in the commonalty, is the repugnance which they always manifested to accepting a foreign dynasty, the timid and reluctant manner with which the proposition was made, and the unpopularity with which it was received. At the time of the League, the nation wished two things which then seemed irreconcilable—Catholic royalty and French loyalty; it wished, so to speak, an impossibility, but it willed it with decision and perseverance, and that impossibility it obtained.
But, save these slight traces of the man of the present, M. de Carné has been able, with rare facility, to identify himself with past ages; he has known how to take from erudition what was necessary to enlighten his political point of view, without suffering it absorb him. He has been perfectly able in surveying all these different subjects to identify himself by turns with each of them. Without neglecting details and without losing himself in them, without disdaining to speak to the imagination, and without suffering himself to be carried away by the fascinations of the picturesque, without abandoning himself to political theories, and without dispoiling history of them, he has in turn as fully known his Abbot Suger, his St. Louis, is Du Guesclin, and each one of his heroes, as if he had never studied else. He makes himself master of each one of these subjects in brief time, but with a sagacity worth more than time, and with a quick perception of the dominant idea which often escapes the simple erudite. He has not me what is called a philosophical history, a task become facile and commonplace, and he has not made what is still more easy, purely contemporary politics à propos of the past; he has not made a history, if by history we understand the detailed recital of events; but he has known how to keep constantly at his disposition the philosophical view which illuminates history, the political sense which helps to judge it, and the knowledge of facts which is its foundation. He has not made a history, but he has made a luminous summary, and given us a necessary complement of all the theories of French history.
MY TEARS.
Ah me! how many precious tears for naught I've wept;
And thus my soul did cheat.
Would I, like Magdalene, had treasured them, and kept
Their wealth for Jesus' feet.