THE NINETY YEARS' AGONY OF FRANCE. 



193 



THE NINETY YEAKS' AGONY OF FKANCE. 



By Pkof. GOLDWIN SMITH. 



inOR ninety years, since the time when Calonne 



F 



called together his Assembly of Notables, 



and when the voice of the Revolution was first 

 heard announcing a reign of hope, love, freedom, 

 and universal peace — for ninety years has France 

 struggled to attain a settled form of constitu- 

 tional government ; and apparently she is farther 

 from it now than she was in 1787 — apparently, 

 but not, we will hope, in reality. In this last 

 crisis the mass of her people have exhibited not 

 only a steadiness of purpose for which we were 

 little prepared, but a self-control which is full of 

 the highest promise. In spite of everything that 

 the conspirators who had seized the government 

 could do to provoke the nation to violence which 

 might have afforded a pretext for using the pub- 

 lic force against the public liberties, the nation 

 has conquered by calmness. Conspiracy and 

 illegality have passed from the side of the people 

 to that of the reactionary government. This 

 shows that considerable way has been made since 

 the days of the Faubourg St.-Antoine. 



Real progress is to be measured, not by 

 change of institutions, but by change of char- 

 acter. The Revolution made a vast change in 

 French institutions : it could not change French 

 character, which remained as servile under the 

 despotism of Robespierre as it had been under 

 that of Louis XIV. Character seems now, after 

 ninety years of desperate effort and terrible ex- 

 perience, to be coming up to the level of institu- 

 tions. Perhaps France has reason to be grateful 

 to De Broglie and his Marshal for giving her 

 assurance of that fact, though their names will 

 be infamous forever. 



The reasons of the political failure of 1789 

 are manifest enough ; we need not seek them in 

 any mysterious incapacity of the Celtic race in 

 general, or of the French branch of it in particu- 

 lar, for constitutional government. These mys- 

 terious capabilities and incapabilities of races in 

 truth are questionable things, and generally tend, 

 upon closer inspection, to resolve themselves into 

 the influence of circumstance perpetuated and ac- 

 cumulated through many generations. England, 

 guarded by the sea, has had comparatively little 

 need of standing armies, and she has thus escaped 

 military despotism, since fleets cannot interfere 

 with politics ; yet even she might have fallen 



49 



under a military despotism, and foreign critics 

 might now be moralizing on the inherent inca- 

 pacity of her people for any government but that 

 of force, if, when the army of James II. was en- 

 camped on Hounslow Heath, there had not been 

 a William of Orange to come over to our rescue. 

 France has had frontiers ; therefore she has had 

 standing armies, and her rulers have been mas- 

 ters of legions. She was exposed to foreign in- 

 vasion for a whole century, from the time of Ed- 

 ward III. to that of Henry VI. ; and again, at the 

 crisis of her destiny in 1791, she was assailed by 

 the arms of the coalesced powers of Reaction. 

 On each occasion her people, to secure national 

 independence, were compelled to renounce liber- 

 ty, and the Government was inevitably invested 

 with a military dictatorship of defense, which, 

 once acquired, was perpetuated in political des- 

 potism. It would be difficult to prove that, 

 under more auspicious circumstances, the States- 

 General, which, at one period in the fourteenth 

 century, entered on a course of reform as bold 

 and comprehensive as anything done by the 

 framers of the Great Charter or the Parliaments 

 of Henry III., might not have developed into a 

 British House of Commons. 



The political crisis of 1789 was in itself one 

 of the most tremendous kind ; it was nothing 

 less than the collapse, amid bankruptcy and gen- 

 eral ruin, of the hereditary principle of govern- 

 ment, the only principle which France or the 

 greater part of Europe up to that time had 

 known. But it was desperately complicated by 

 its connection with a social and a religious crisis 

 equally tremendous. It came upon a people 

 totally untrained to political action, without po- 

 litical instruction, without a political press, with- 

 out even the common information which a news- 

 paper gives about passing events ; without the 

 means of judiciously choosing its political lead- 

 ers, or even political leaders among whom a judi- 

 cious choice could be made ; without any good 

 political writers, except Montesquieu, whose au- 

 thority, as we shall presently see, was practically 

 misleading. At the same time this people had, 

 in common with all intellectual Europe, been ex- 

 cited by visions of boundless and universal hap- 

 piness, of new heavens and a new earth, to be 

 attained by a change of the social system and of 



