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L'Union is a journal in the interest of pure legitimacy, spurning all compromises, and caring little for the fusion. It succeeded La Quotidienne; but is little known, and has a very limited circulation.

La Presse was founded in 1836, and soon reached a circulation of 10,000. After various fluctuations, it printed in 1853 nearly 25,000 copies, and in 1855 (it says) 45,000. It is, in that case, the most widely-read newspaper in France. But it does not owe this distinction solely or chiefly to its politics. It is cheaper than any other, costing only three sous; it appears in the evening; and its feuilleton is usually of a superior and exciting character. At present the Mémoires de George Sand are appearing in its columns, and constitute one of its chief attractions. La Presse can scarcely be said to have any distinct or settled political opinions; it draws its inspiration from M. de Girardin, and follows all the vagaries of that extraordinary brain. Emile de Girardin is one of the most remarkable men in France. For twenty years he has been a prominent, enthusiastic, violent politician, preaching the wildest doctrines, leading the most inconsistent life. Advocating one day the most unlimited degree of liberty, if you can get it; advocating on the morrow the most unbounded despotism as the next best thing, if the other be unattainable; announcing as eternal and indisputable truths each shallow paradox that passes through his volatile mind; the soidisant friend of the poor and the oppressed, while amassing thousands in virtue of his intimacy with the men in power; brave, speculative, undoubting, and audacious; unquestionably clever, but reckless, flighty, and unscrupulous," aussi roué que chimérique," as was said by one who knew him well,—he is in our judgment about the most dangerous and mischievous man who ever wielded a public journal in any country. For a considerable time he was an energetic adherent of the present Emperor, as long as he could influence him, or fancied that he could. He is now the intimate friend and counsellor of Prince Napoleon, whose prime minister he will assuredly be, if for the misery of Europe and the disgrace of France that disreputable man should ever succeed his cousin on the throne; and then adieu to the entente cordiale between the two countries, for Girardin hates England as much as the vulgarest Frenchman of them all.

With the Patrie, a semi-official evening paper, of little weight, conducted by M. Delamare, and L'Univers, a religious organ, devoted to exciting the violent passions of the priests and the priest-ridden, and written with great eloquence by M. Veuillot(having about 3000 abonnés)—we must close these details of the newspaper press of France. The official organ of government,

the Moniteur, we need not describe. Its circulation,-to a great extent a forced one-varies enormously.

To return from this digression. In forming our opinion of the condition of France, and of the character of the man who rules it, we must not forget the existence in that country of elements of danger and disorder which are not found, or are found only in a greatly modified and mitigated form, with us. The "dangerous classes" in the two countries differ considerably, both in their nature and their numbers. Here they consist of the squalid poor, the "Arabs of the streets," the regular malefactors and depredators,-thieves and burglars, to whom larceny is a calling and a profession, but not a creed. The prevalence of the former is a reproach to the wisdom, if not to the warmth, of our zealous charity; the strength and numbers of the latter are the greatest opprobrium of our administrative vigilance and skill. But though they prey upon the community, they do not make war against it. The criminal and the wretched trouble and disgrace society; they cannot be said to menace peace and order. They constitute an intestine malady, rather than a domestic foe. They have a social, but scarcely a political existence. In France it is otherwise. In addition to the numbers who live disreputably by their wits, by criminal practices and petty depredations, there are thousands of liberated gaol-birds and galley-slaves, often banded together in most formidable union, who detest every thing settled and respectable with the whole force of their malignant souls, to whom any government and all order is abhorrent, and who look upon society not as an oyster to be opened, or a mine to be exploité, but as an institution to be undermined and overthrown. Such men of course are ready tools for any political party which seeks to excite and profit by popular commotion; and that parties do exist in France unscrupulous enough to enlist such infamous allies experience has too often shown. Independently of these, who are malefactors in grain, are many thousands more who are not bad, but only violent and weak,-whom poverty, disappointment, ill-success, and ignorance, have prepared to listen eagerly to any theory which accounts flatteringly for their sufferings, and to any scheme which holds out a prospect of redress; who are easily misled by the sophistry, inflamed by the eloquence, and duped by the promises of demagogues, and who constitute, in fact, their victims and their armies. These are the SOCIALISTS of France,-men scattered over all the land, in the provinces and the rural districts as well as in the metropolis and the other large towns,-not professionally criminals, but facile to bend and stimulate to the most enormous atrocities of outrage and of plunder; and the more perilous to the commu

nity because fanatical as well as criminal, and able in a manner to gloss over their passions of greed, of vengeance, and of envy with the glistening varnish of a political crusade. It suits the views of the Orleanists and the Republicans to question the numbers and prevalence of this formidable sect; but we cannot share their doubts. We have heard too much from men of all political predilections and of no political predilections to feel any hesitation in regarding the numbers, the fanaticism, the organisation, and the occasional brutality of the socialists as one of the greatest internal dangers against which the authorities of France have to guard; and the intense gratitude expressed by all classes of possessors to Louis Napoleon, when the peril was recent and their fears were fresh, for showing a vigour and resolution which would always insure victory to the side of property and order, was proof enough of the reality, or at least of the general conviction, of the formidable nature of the menacing danger. And when to all this we add, what we fear cannot be denied, the existence of a widespread jealousy and bitter animosity on the part of the working classes against their richer and more fortunate brethren,-against those who are above them in the social scale, but whom they fancy have no right to be so, and moreover, the prevalence among political factions of an excess of fierce and unscrupulous party-spirit, which values victory so much, and principle and patriotism so little, that few would hesitate to employ any tools or to bargain with any agitators for the sake of recovering their lost ascendency;-when we embrace all these considerations in a panoramic view of France, we shall feel more disposed than perhaps we hitherto have been to make vast allowances for the most unbending rigidities of power, even where apparently excessive and superfluous, and to admit that despotism may conscientiously believe itself to be patriotism, if it would but regard itself as only temporary, transitional, and the regretable means to a better end. We are not always just to our neighbours, from ignoring or losing sight of normal differences between the social position of the two nations. In England neither liberty nor order are ever really endangered; the government is always stronger than the insurgent masses; the police is always an enormous overmatch for the malefactors; the friends of order are out of all proportion more powerful, more united, and more courageous than the disorderly and turbulent. In France this is far from being the case. Over and over again have governments and dynasties been upset by a hasty and improvised émeute; more than once have the lowest classes got the upper hand; more than once has the organised strife of parliamentary parties degenerated into a sanguinary conflict of savages in the open streets; and in June 1848, when the grand struggle between

socialism and society was fought out, for three fearful days did victory tremble undecided in the balance. If we had seen such a fight in our metropolis, and won so doubtful a conquest, how long would the recollection have made us tolerant of even the whims and the blunders of a dictatorship?

The feature in the Emperor's course, however, upon which it is impossible to look without suspicion and disapproval is this, that it presents no sign of regarding its arbitrary sternness as exceptional and transient, no appearance of approaching enlargement or mitigation. The municipal element in the provinces has not been encouraged nor set free,-on the contrary, it has been snubbed and crushed; the abrupt interfer. ences of centralisation have not been diminished or abandoned; the forms of constitutionalism contained in the new system have not yet been endowed with real life; the action of the corps législatif has not been emancipated; books, indeed, are published without nominal control, but the severe restrictions originally established on public discussion in the higher organs of the press have not been relaxed. This absence of any incipient moves in a right direction looks ill: it makes the defence of Louis Napoleon difficult to his English admirers; it will prevent the more sober lovers of liberty in France from rallying round his government. It keeps up the conviction in the minds of patriots that so hard a dynasty ought not to last, and in the minds of politicians that it cannot last ;-both therefore stand aloof, and reserve themselves for more genial and hopeful days.

The sentiments of the French people in reference to the war it is not easy to discover with certainty, where the utterance of extreme differences is so rigidly repressed. But it seems neither popular with, nor interesting to any large or influential class. The army has never been very enthusiastic for it, because, though much glory has been won, the bloodshed has been terrible and the hardships excessive. There has been much suffering and little fun; and vast numbers both of men and officers, while lying in the trenches before Sebastopol in the inclemency of last winter, were sighing audibly for the amusements and luxuries of Paris. A large part of the army, moreover, was Orleanist in its sympathies, and murmured at the absence of its favourite and famous generals. The commercial and moneyed classes naturally looked with uneasiness on a contest involving such an enormous expenditure, threatening monetary difficulties, and promising an increase of taxation in the distance. The peasantry felt the conscription severely; in many districts it operated as a most opvressive and inconvenient drain: the nature and objects of the war were little understood, and its victories only faintly echoed in the provinces. The whole features, too, of the contest per

plexed their untrained minds,-ignorant of the present, and filled with traditions of the past. A war against England or Prussia, a war for Belgium or the Rhine, a war on their own frontier, they would have comprehended and been interested in; but a war 3000 miles off, a war to preserve Turkey, and above all, a war with the English as allies and comrades, presented an ensemble utterly bewildering to their understanding;-they could make nothing of it, and they saw their children go to swell the number of its victims without enthusiasm and without hope. The success of the LOANS was no indication whatever of the popularity of the war, though it has often been represented in that light. Every one who had any little hoard to lend hastened to offer it to the Emperor, not in the least because he approved of the purposes to which it was to be applied, not even because he had any decided confidence in the stability of his dynasty, but simply because a liberal interest was offered, because in France it is singularly difficult to find lucrative investment for small sums-the high price of land yielding scarce any interest at all; and because it was held for certain that no future government would ever dream of repudiating a debt deliberately and formally contracted by its predecessor, or tampering with the national credit. We entertain no doubt that the Comte de Chambord or the Comte de Paris, if either succeeded to the throne to-morrow, might borrow fifty millions in the same way and on the same terms;-if, indeed, the loans already contracted have not, as some begin to suspect, exhausted the hoardings and spare capital of France.

We confess that our wish is for the present continuance, at least, of the actual régime in France; and that wish would be still stronger did we see in the head of the government any indications-for the disposition to which we at one time gave him credit-to abate of the narrow sternness of his rule as he felt his country more settled and his seat more secure, and to admit into his constitution that expansion and life of which it is susceptible. Had he kept his despotic proceedings within the limits of the indispensable, and manifested an anxiety or a willingness to give even small, gradual, and tentative powers of self-government to the people as they seemed likely to use them wisely and with moderation, we should have had better hopes and warmer wishes for his permanence than we can now profess. We will not be rash enough to venture on any thing like a prediction. On one account we desire the duration of Louis Napoleon's reign: we incline to think that it affords the best security for the maintenance of the Anglo-French alliance, and we hold that alliance to be the surest guarantee for progress, peace,

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