The decline and fall of the French aristocracy, as a political body, dates from a period long anterior to the Revolution of 1789. To find a race of nobles and landed proprietors leading an independent existence on their estates, and playing an independent part in the affairs of their country, we must go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to the time when a large portion of the best blood in France held the Protestant faith. The civil wars, the proscriptions of Richelieu, the bigotry of Louis XIV., and the corrupt court of his successor established the ascendency of the Crown, of the Catholic Church, and of Versailles. That important element in society which, in this country, has so often fought the battles of freedom against the encroachments of prerogative, perished in France; or if it retained its own privileges and possessions, these were rendered odious to the people, because they had ceased to be held for the general good. In the reign of Louis XV. the income of the noble consisted chiefly in the revenue he could draw, under various names and pretences, from those who held under him, not in the shape of rent but of charges on every form of rural labour. His agents harassed the tenants with fiscal rapacity, and were constantly at war with the customs that formerly protected the cultivators of the soil. The landed interest was everywhere poor. Nobles, ecclesiastics, ennobled citizens, and purchasers of fiefs were alike overwhelmed with debt. The rate of usury was enormous. Their condition was described by Forbonnais as that of men' reduced to extreme penury with immense nominal 'possessions. Accordingly wherever sales of land could be made, it was purchased with avidity. In 1760 it was computed that a quarter of the soil of France was held by the peasantry, a quarter by the bourgeoisie, two-tenths by the clergy, and three-tenths by the nobles. The subdivision of land was regarded as the best remedy for the deplorable condition of the country, and the creation of a peasant proprietary was already advocated as the panacea of the nation. D'Argenson, for instance, in a work published in 1740, which Voltaire described as the best book he had read for twenty years, insisted upon the expedient of reconstructing the edifice of society, shaken by bad laws, by the creation of a class of individuals who should be morally and economically inde'pendent.' His ideal was that the land should belong to those who cultivated it. We shall see in another page of this inquiry, what are the political and military results of this system. Suffice it here to say that it was loudly demanded at the outset of the Revolution by all classes of the community;

that the nobles themselves abandoned their feudal rights as untenable; and that the change of tenures was accomplished. To this hour, this is the result of the Revolution which is most loudly applauded by French writers of the greatest learning and authority, as for example, by M. Doniol, from whose instructive history of the rural classes in France we have borrowed the foregoing facts. It is equally admired by those English writers who seek in the democracy of France the model of the reforms they desire to introduce in this country in the tenure of property and the organisation of society. We may, therefore, assume that this state of things is regarded as highly beneficial, and so undoubtedly it has proved in the improvement of the condition of the peasantry, when liberated from feudal burdens, which have happily no parallel amongst ourselves. But our object at this moment is to point out, as a simple fact, that the change involved the extinction of the social and political influence of the upper classes; for the abuses of the feudal tenures and the vices of an aristocracy, identified by its sources of revenue and its habits of expenditure with the court, had engendered throughout France a fierce hatred of social inequality, which has gone on increasing to this day, though the causes in which it originated have long disappeared. The services, therefore, which may be rendered to a nation by a class of educated proprietors and capitalists, by the performance of the public duties of their station, by the improvement of cultivation and rural administration, and by the local influence of men solicitous for the common interest of those around them, are in a great measure lost to France. There is no public spirit,' to use a most emphatic and characteristically English term. Even on the larger estates in the hands of those who are capable of discharging the duties of a resident gentry, the good offices of the wealthy are regarded with suspicion and hostility, as great perhaps as when those duties wore the invidious shape of feudal privileges. The result has been, to a considerable extent, to displace the educated classes from their natural position as the leading servants of the public in local and political affairs. There is a chasm between them and the surrounding peasantry, which is rarely crossed: and the peasantry would certainly refuse to recognise in the gentry the champions or representatives of their own interests.

We think this fact, which is due partly to the spirit of the Revolution and partly to causes anterior to that event, explains in some measure the extraordinary deficiency of men capable of leading, governing, and guiding the nation at this great crisis. That many such men exist in so intelligent a country

as France is certain; but their position is singularly unfortunate, for they have been proscribed for the last twenty years by a Government they refused to serve, and they are equally thrust aside by the people. The dead level of equality has passed over their heads, and as none are conspicuous, none great, the country has no tried or natural chiefs and leaders when it most requires them. We have the astonishing fact before our eyes, that at this moment, with the exception of three or four great reputations surviving from the period of Parliamentary government, there is not known to be in France a general, a statesman, or an orator of the first rank. There is not a man on whom the eyes of the whole community rest with the confidence and deference paid elsewhere to high rank, to tried honour, and to genius. Society, and especially the society of the Empire, is barren. Nor is that of the Republic more fertile.

It will no doubt be said that the Revolution of 1789 was singularly prolific of great men. A generation of extraordinary energy burst forth at the call of freedom, and filled the world for fifty years with their exploits and their renown. They sprang alike from every rank and class of society. But the men whom the Revolution called into action were not its children. They had been born, reared, and educated under the old order of things. We have now before us the descendants of the revolutionary period in its third generation-men educated in its maxims and subjected to its social discipline. These are its true descendants and its legitimate heirs. Has then the influence of the Revolution raised or lowered the character and capacity of Frenchmen? Has it enlarged their sphere of action? Has it strengthened those ties between the upper and the lower classes of society, without which national action is paralysed? Has the growth of democracy, to the exclusion of every other element, given greater union, force, and power to the nation and to the State? Down to a very recent period it was believed, and would have been maintained by all French writers, that these results had been attained. But we leave our readers to answer for themselves these questions.

It is a melancholy reflection that but little has been done by modern democracy to dignify and exalt mankind. The area of human happiness has certainly been extended by the diffusion of freedom and knowledge, and we rejoice in that result. But the creative genius and power which enlarge the boundaries of thought and action thrive not upon that level plain on which every ant-hill is a mountain, and every thistle a forest'tree.' Democracy, it may be, bears with it the destiny or

the doom of civilisation; but nowhere as yet has it been favourable to greatness. Even in the United States, where it reigns without control, no man since Washington, who was certainly no democrat, can be said to have risen to true eminence, even under the pressure of a great crisis. The growth or manifestation of intellectual force bears no proportion at all to the spread of population and wealth. In like manner, France never was at any former time so populous, so rich in all material gifts, and apparently so prosperous as in last July; but never in all her varied history was she so destitute of greatness, whether in counsel or in arms. The same observation might be addressed to ourselves. Great Britain in 1805 had not half the population, probably not one-fifth of the wealth, and far less material culture, education, and freedom, than we enjoy at the present day. But we cannot boast that our age is more prolific of great men in statesmanship, war, literature, and science than the first decade of this century; and there are those who think, we trust erroneously, that the relative. strength of the nation as compared with that of so foreign States has declined.

The turning point in the history, both of England and in France, lay in the sixteenth century, which gave the one to the Protestant, the other to the Catholic cause-the one to free inquiry, free institutions, and the virility of self-government; the other to the Romish creed ingrafted by a Latin form of civilisation on a Celtic race. Upon a comparison of Catholic and Protestant nations by the test of social development, the advantage does not rest with the older creed; and even though that creed may have lost much of its ancient authority and intolerance, the soil in which it has flourished long gives signs of exhaustion. Nevertheless, the Church of France, the Church of Bossuet and Fénelon, of Pascal and Arnauld, of Port-Royal and Saint-Maur, fills a glorious and imperishable page in the annals of that nation and of the human race. The Gallican clergy maintained their rights against the Ultramontane pretensions of Rome. They were the depositories of the learning and the piety of the realm. They upheld with eloquence and fidelity the noble principles of Christian morals in presence of a corrupt Court and a pleasure-loving people; and they discharged with no mean results their important function of the educators of the nation. The Revolution swept all this away. It was impossible to attack the Church, says M. de Tocqueville in one of his letters, without touching every fibre of the State. In losing their endowments they lost their independence. The connexion between the clergy and the higher classes of society was broken. They

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became a stipendiary priesthood, without the advantages of an establishment and without the energy of free denominations. Their numbers are recruited chiefly from the ranks of the peasantry, who seek in holy orders a means of escape from the conscription, or a means of transferring to the rest of the family another parcel of the patrimonial estate. The modern parochial clergy of France are a virtuous and devout class of men. But they are narrow-minded and ignorant to excess. They are the tools of the most bigoted Ultramontane doctrines, even against the judgment of their own prelates. Their influence is confined to women and devotees, and they have almost entirely lost their control over the higher education of the country. The consequence is that the education of the upper classes of men is strangely divorced from a high system of moral and religious principle, based on the accountability of man to God, and that in place of it a course of secular instruction, regulated by the Imperial University, and based chiefly on the exact or natural sciences, has trained the minds and characters of modern Frenchmen. It is not true that the French are an immoral and irreligious people, as is too commonly supposed by those who take their notions of French life and society from the garbage of French literature, the novels of the day. In the towns and cities, and in the army, there is undoubtedly a great laxity of practice, arising from many causes. But we hold very cheap the pretensions of those who thank God they are not as those Sadducees. In the great mass of the rural population there is as much rectitude, chastity, and sobriety as in any other country. But they are a people who have lost their guides. A plain standard of faith and duty is not brought home to their doors and hearths. Their conception of duty is based on notions of filial piety and mutual interest. The sense and love of truth has been painfully weakened among them. They afford a speaking example of what an intelligent people may become when education is severed from religious principles and when the standard of those principles is lowered or obscured.

We make these remarks with diffidence and regret, for it is a most invidious task to comment on the failings of a neighbouring people, when we are conscious how far we ourselves fall short of the highest rule of life. We know how hard it is for education to combat the materialist tendency of the age, the density of population, the pressure of a thousand social ills. But though we fail--as all must fail-to reach the lofty ideal of a Christian people, we are not ashamed to avow our conviction that the greatness of a nation depends in no small degree.

VOL. CXXXIII. NO. CCLXXI.

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