THE first of the two works, of which we prefix the titles to this Article, is of little value. We adopt it merely as a name, and, having made this use of it, dismiss it. But the interest and importance of the subject which it treats cannot be exaggerated. The state of feeling and opinion in Paris, and generally on the Continent, has occupied our attention for some time, and we propose to give a brief summary of the results of our inquiries and observations. Imperialists, The Royalists may be again subdivided into Orleanists, Legitimists, and Fusionists; and the Fusionists into Orleanist-Fusionists, and Legitimist-Fusionists. The Imperialists do not require to be described. They form a small party in the salons of Paris, and much the largest party in the provinces. We must begin by stating that we sketch Those who are Royalists without being. only the educated classes. We do not pre- Fusionists are also comparatively insignifi tend to describe the epicier or the ouvrier: cant in numbers. There are a very few not because he is not worth describing, but Legitimists who pay to the elder branch the because we do not know him. It is very unreasoning worship of superstition: who difficult even for a native to understand well adore Henri V. not as a means but as an what are the objects, or the motives, or the end; who pray for his reign, not for their own principles, of any society but that in which interests, not for the interest of France, but he mixes familiarly. Who can tell what for his own sake; who believe that he deare the politics of his own servants' hall? rives his title from God, and that, when the When men of different castes converse, each proper time comes, God will restore him; wears a mask, each disguises his voice, each and that to subject his claims to the smallest tries to guess what the other will think of compromise-to admit, for instance, as the what he is saying. There is nothing spon- Fusionists do, that Louis Philippe was really taneous, nothing simple, nothing perfectly a king, and that the reign of Henri V. did unembarrassed, in such talk. If this be the not begin the instant that Charles X. excase between fellow-countrymen, how much pired,-would be a sinful contempt of Dimore must it be so between those who think vine right, which might deprive his cause of in different languages, who, to differences in Divine assistance. cultivation and knowledge and habits, add There are also a very few Orleanists who, differences in national wishes and fears and with a strange confusion of ideas, do not associations and prejudices? As we look perceive that a title founded solely on a rewith deep distrust on the pictures drawn by volution was destroyed by a revolution; those who profess to paint any class but that if the will of the people was sufficient own, we shall not imitate them." to exclude the descendants of Charles X., D-11 their VOL. XXII. 156 AP4 v. 222, 23,24 The Continent in 1854 LIBRARY OF GEORGIA [Feb., it also could exclude the descendants of sionists are Bourbonists on only from calculaLouis Philippe; and that the hereditary tion. They wish for the Comte de Paris for claims of the Comte de Paris cannot be e their king, not from any affection for him, urged except on the condition of admitting or for his family, but because they think the preferable claims of the Comte de Chambord. The bulk, then, of the Royalists are Fusionists; but though all Fusionists agree in believing that the only government that can be permanent in France is a monarchy, and that the only monarchy that can be permanent is one depending on hereditary succession, though they agree in believing that neither of the Bourbon branches is strong enough to seize the throne, and that each of them is strong enough to exclude the other, yet between the Orleanist-Fusionists and the Legitimist-Fusionists the separation is as marked, and the mutual hatred is as bitter, as those which divide the most hostile parties in England. that such an arrangement offers to France the best chance of a stable government in some degree under popular control: and they are ready to tolerate the intermediate reign of Henri V. as an evil, but one which must be endured as a means of obtaining something else, not very good in itself, but less objectionable to them than a Bonaparte dynasty or a Republic. The loss of her aristocracy is a misfortune from which France has not even begun to recover. The Legitimists are the territorial successors of their ancestors of the eighteenth century; they are their successors in their manners, in their loyalty, and in their prejudices of caste, but they are not their successors in cultivation, or intelliThe Orleanist-Fusionists are generally gence, or energy, or, therefore, in influence. roturiers. They feel towards the Noblesse There existed in the highest Parisian society the hatred which has accumulated during towards the close of that century a compretwelve centuries of past oppression, and the hensiveness of curiosity and inquiry, a freeresentment excited by present insolence. Of dom of opinion, an independence and soundall the noble families of France the most ness of judgment never seen there before or noble is that of Bourbon. The head of that since. Its pursuits, its pleasures, its admihouse has always called himself "le premier rations, its vanities, were all intellectual. gentilhomme de France." The Bourbons Let us recollect the success of Hume: his therefore suffer, and in an exaggerated de- manners were awkward, he was a heavy, gree, the odium which weighs down the though an instructive converser, he spoke caste to which they belong. Gay and bril- bad French; he would pass in Paris now liant as the reign of the house of Bourbon for a most intelligent bore; but such was looks in the histories and memoirs of the worship then paid to talents and knowFrance, the recollections which it has left ledge, especially to knowledge and talents are eminently painful. Detestation of the employed in the destruction of received opinold régime is almost the only feeling that ions, that Hume was for years the lion of has survived sixty-five years of revolution. all the salons of Paris. The fashionable The French can bear oppression, they can beauties quarrelled for the fat philosopher. bear to see their children carried off by the Nor was their admiration or affection put conscription, and their neighbours transport- on, or even transitory; he retained some of ed to Cayenne, but they cannot bear the them as intimate friends for life. We may petty vexations and social distinctions of infer, indeed, from the autobiographies of feudalism. It was this detestation of privi- that time-from those of Marmontel, for lege, and precedence, and exclusiveness, or, instance, and Rousseau-that even the infeas it is sometimes called, this love of equali-rior bourgeoisie were then educated. Every ty, which raised the barricades of 1830. It country town had its literary circles; many was to flatter these feelings that Louis Phi- of them had Academies in which the great lippe sent his sons to the public schools and writers of France and Italy were studied. to the National Guard, and tried to estab- The French were not so engrossed with the lish his government on the narrow founda- serious cares of life as to disregard its ornation of the bourgeoisie. Louis Philippe, ments. Now, the time that is not devoted and one or two of the members of his fami- to the struggle for wealth or power, to ly, succeeded in obtaining some personal place-hunting, or to money-making, is spent popularity, but it was only in the compara- at the café or the spectacle. Few read anytively small class, the "Pays légal," with which they shared the emoluments of Government, and it was not sufficient to raise a single hand in their defence when the masses, whom the Court could not bribe or caress, rose against it. The Orleanist-Fu thing but the newspapers, or, of them, anything but the feuilleton. If the brilliant talkers and writers of that time were to return to life, we do not believe that gas, or steam, or chloroform, or the electric telegraph, would so much astonish them as the ment was doomed. Its destruction in 1848 was an accident, but sooner or later some such accident was inevitable. ance of the Constituent Assembly in June 1848. A few of them were members both of that assembly and of its successor. Some took their places in the Conseils Généraux. They joined the bourgeoisie in local administration, the only means by which men of different classes can coalesce. comparative dulness of the greater part of modern French society, and the comparative mediocrity of the greater part of modern French books. The Republic had few friends, but it had Between the noblesse and the bourgeoisie few bitter enemies. It was not trusted or there is a chasm which shows no tendency respected, but neither was it hated. It was to close. Nothing but a common interest wise enough to impose no oaths. It did not and a common pursuit will bring them to- require those who were willing to serve it gether. If the murder of the Duc d'En- to begin by publicly disavowing their tra ghien had not made the nobles recoil in ditionary opinions and principles. Under terror and disgust from Napoleon, they its lax sway the Legitimists shewed a tenmight perhaps have been welded into one dency to return to public affairs. They led mass, with his new aristocracy of services, the country people who came to the assisttalents, and wealth. They were ready to adhere to him during the Consulate. During the Restoration they were always at war with the bourgeoisie, and therefore with the Constitution, on which the power of their enemies depended. When the result of that war was their defeat, and the expulsion of their leader, Charles X., their hostility The socialist tendencies which are imputed extended from the Constitution and the to this second empire, the oath which it most bourgeoisie up to the crown. Louis Phi- imprudently imposes, its pretension to found lippe, as we have already remarked, tried or to continue a dynasty, and its assertion to govern by means of the middle classes of the principle most abhorrent to them, alone. Perhaps it was inevitable that he elective monarchy, have thrown them back should make the attempt. It certainly was into disaffection. But they have been so ininevitable that the attempt should fail. By jured in fortune and in influence, have been condescending to be the founder of an usurp- so long a conquered caste, excluded from ing dynasty, by recognising the right of a power, and even from sympathy, that they Parisian mob to be a setter up and puller have acquired the faults of the oppressed, down of kings, Louis Philippe set one of the have become timid, or frivolous, or bitter. few precedents which are absolutely certain Their retirement from public life has made to be repeated. Sooner or later the Or- them unfit for it. The older members of leans dynasty would have been overthrown, the party have forgotten its habits and its even if it had reposed on a really democra-duties, the younger ones have never learned tic basis. But it was built on the narrowest them. Their long absence from the chambers possible foundation. It did not rest on and from the departemental and municipal numbers or on wealth, or on education, or councils, from the central and from the local on antiquity, or on prejudice, or on respect, government of France, has deprived them of It was despised by the lower classes, and all aptitude for business. The bulk of them detested as well as despised by the higher are worshippers of wealth, or ease, or plea classes, and it offered no prizes to either. sure, or safety. The only unselfish feeling There were no nomination-seats for the no- which they cherish, is attachment to their bles, no scot-and-lot boroughs for the agita- hereditary sovereign. They revere Henri V. tors, no venal ones for the millionnaires. as the ruler pointed out to them by ProviThe road to power lay along one flat level dence: they love him as the representative terrace of bourgeoisie, looked up to with of Charles X., the champion of their order, envy and dislike by the multitude below it, who died in exile for having attempted to and looked down on with scorn, amounting restore to them the government of France. to disgust, by the better-born and better They hope that on his restoration the canaille educated classes above it. The Pays légal of lawyers, and littérateurs, and adventurers, were the electors and the elected; they were who have trampled on the gentilhommes the donors and the recipients of office and pa- ever since 1830, will be turned down to tronage. They made the laws as deputies; their proper places, and that ancient descent they applied them as administrators and will again be the passport to the high offices as jurymen; and their legislation and their of the State and to the society of the Soveadministration were a series of jobs for their reign. The advent of Henri V., which, to own petty interests, or for their handfuls of the Orleanist branch of the Fusionists, is a constituents. Their whole conduct excited painful means, is, to the Legitimist branch, suspicion, contempt, envy, in short, every a desirable end. The succession of the hostile feeling, except fear. Such a Govern- Comte de Paris, to which the Orleanists |