THE WORLD'S DEBT TO FRANCE 



497 



crat in the name of democracy; a man 

 of war in the interests of peace. The 

 tragedy of his death, however, did more 

 for the cause he inspired than the tri- 

 umphs of his life ; for long after the 

 glories of the Bourbon dynasty have 

 passed into oblivion the shades of the 

 great captain will still haunt the soul of 

 France, whose heart he has stamped with 

 his own character." 



It is a long story that one might tell of 

 the military strength of the French peo- 

 ple under the leadership of Napoleon, 

 and of his wonderful victories and his 

 great defeats. But if he left behind him 

 a trail of blood and carnage, he also be- 

 queathed to his race the Code Napoleon, 

 in which the doctrines of the laws of 

 human relations set up by the French 

 Revolution were restated, redirected, and 

 secured for all times. This Code swept 

 away the iniquities of absolutism, recog- 

 nized the equality in the eyes of the law 

 of noble and peasant, and sent out into 

 the world the invading forces of the ideas 

 of liberty, equality, and fraternity, for 

 which France suffered so much and to 

 which the world owes so much. 



If the history of France before Water- 

 loo was a strange combination of wars 

 and warring policies, internal and exter- 

 nal, since Waterloo we have seen many 

 remarkable gravitations of the pendulum 

 of the sentiment from one form of gov- 

 ernment to another. 



The accession of Charles X to the 

 French throne, after the death of Touis 

 XVIII, who had succeeded Napoleon 

 Bonaparte upon his second abdication, 

 brought there a reactionary policy of the 

 deepest type. It was Charles X who 

 made it said, through his blind and stub- 

 born course, that "a Bourbon learns 

 nothing and forgets nothing." 



THE REASON ERANCE DREADS A POPULAR 

 HERO 



From that day forward, until after the 

 Franco-Prussian War, France gravitated 

 between monarchy and republic, as the 

 pendulum between the two ends of its 

 arc. But through it all the people con- 

 tinued to struggle for their rights, and 

 inspired the masses of all the monarchies 

 of Europe by their example. The con- 

 stitutions of so many of the surrounding 



States underwent great changes in keep- 

 ing with that of France that it came to be 

 declared that during the month of March, 

 1848, not a single day passed without a 

 constitution being granted somewhere. 



Although a generation has now passed 

 since the last monarchy flourished, under 

 the Third Napoleon in France, the 

 French people are eternally watchful lest 

 a monarchy should, rise again. Recall- 

 ing how Napoleon III was elected dic- 

 tator by a vote of 12 to 1, the French 

 people live out that doctrine of the Amer- 

 ican people, "Eternal vigilance is the 

 price of liberty." 



America has no fear of a dictatorship 

 or the rise of a monarchical rule, for re- 

 publicanism has such a deep-seated hold 

 upon our people that the doctrine is as 

 solid in their hearts as the eternal hills. 

 But France Understands that only less 

 than half a century has passed since the 

 last monarchy, and that therefore she 

 must be watchful lest the coup which 

 turned the Third Napoleon from a 

 Prince President into an Emperor should 

 be practiced again. For this reason the 

 brilliant, dashing, popular hero, likely to 

 be possessed of an ambition to wear the 

 cloak of a Caesar, is invariably rejected 

 in favor of men like Toubet, Fallieres, 

 and Joffre, who, descended from good 

 peasant stock, have no other wish than 

 to carry out their duties with simple and 

 unostentatious devotion. 



ERENCH LITERATURE 



While it is impossible to overestimate 

 the debt that the world owes to France 

 for the suffering and sorrow she has 

 borne in behalf of the cause of human 

 liberty, her other contributions to civili- 

 zation have not been less notable. The 

 world, indeed, owes much of its literary 

 tenets and tendencies of the twentieth 

 century to France. 



The roll of great French writers is a 

 long one and their contributions to litera- 

 ture very rich. Corneille, Moliere, Rabe- 

 lais, Diderot, Descartes, Chateaubriand, 

 Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, the 

 Balzacs, and Alexander Dumas are names 

 that will live as long as polite society and 

 republican government endure upon the 

 earth. 



"There is no really great epic in 



