Bismarck despises parliamentarianism, peace, arbitration, and even the Latin, or rather European, alphabet. Flaubert and Rossini had a dread of railways. The statesmen who govern Europe are not all geniuses, but they are men not destitute of intellectual culture; and yet how can it be explained that they so strive with ever increasing tenacity and zeal to increase armaments and armies, to the extent of causing ruin to their peoples,—a greater and more complete ruin perhaps, than that which even a disastrous war might occasion? And this for the purpose, they declare, (and it seems to be sincere,) of more surely escaping war, when as a fact one fourth of the money spent for that end would be sufficient to assure the happiness of the peoples governed by affording the social questions which they all pretend to have at heart, a solution which, as things now are, it is ever becoming more difficult to reach. The true cause is in the repugnance they experience to the idea of starting on a fresh path, in the tendency to adhere to old habits which go back even to the epochs of the warrior castes. Indeed in the minds of a very great number, at least among the Germans, a good corporal of the guard is more worthy of consideration than a great scholar; debate in parliament on the erection of a fortress is not permitted, however costly it may be, whilst every one may speak on the establishment of a school; in France, in Italy, and in Germany, to touch the war budget, unproductive and ruinous as it may be, is to raise the hand to the ark of the covenant,—a veritable state crime. But science is a new thing, while the art of war goes back to remotest antiquity; it descends from Achilles and from Cain.
I was not guilty of a self-contradiction when I said that the modern French love novelty as much as their ancestors did. I am too much the friend and too fond of the French to flatter them, and not to tell them exactly what I think. France is undeniably at the head of the Latin races, but to the same extent, and perhaps more than they, it prefers novelties to the new. It has always had the stormy agitations, rather than the useful results, of revolutions. The great religious reform, Protestantism, touched it without affecting it; the great constitutional reform has taken but slight root, and that two centuries and a half after it was accomplished in England.
Balzac wrote: "In France the provisional is eternal although the French are suspected of loving change."
Novelties to be accepted by the French must be such as do not interfere with their habits. And it is they who have invented the words routine, blague, and chauvinism. It is because they are still in the military period of Spencer. So far as that goes, they have cried out beware! to the English, then, beware to the Russians, now beware to the Germans and the Italians. They change voluntarily their dress, their ministers, their external form of government, but always there remains in them at bottom a slight attachment to the ancient druidical and Cæsarian tendencies. It is not many years since the priest still commanded in Vendée. We have seen the French, while extreme republican, make war for the Pope.
After having a Fourier and Proudhon and, what is more, universal suffrage, they have not yet a social law which gives satisfaction to the just demands of the indigent, or of workingmen, beyond that of the "probi viri."
It is true that they have had their peasant wars—their Jacquerie—and '89; but these were explosions that aroused them but for a moment only to allow them afterwards to fall much lower. Indeed, but a few centuries after the Jacquerie, they saw the same peasants who had raised the insurrection, kiss the horses of the couriers who brought good news of the health of the king. And what a king! Louis XV, who might rather be called the executioner, than the administrator of his people. And after having driven away so many Cæsars, little was wanting to make them fall again under such a trumpery Cæsar as Boulanger if the highest classes of the capital had not been opposed to it.
Moreover certain particular facts, which portray much better their physiognomy, show how fundamentally conservative they are.
Let us cite for example the veneration exhibited by the high classes for the Academies and the passion for heraldic titles and decorations. "France is academic," wrote De Goncourt in Manette Salomon.
Sarcey relates that during the siege of Paris, the flesh of the animals of the Jardin des Plantes, having been put up for sale, the common people preferred to suffer hunger rather than eat of it, so that the educated classes alone fed on it.
We know what resistance the French made, under a thousand pretexts, to the reform of their orthography, which is in part merely the relics of the old pronunciation.