The present French Minister of the Interior, M. de Fourtou,
continues to pose as a Napoleonist. In his speech last week, at Neuvic, he must have offended profoundly the feelings of the clerical party who support him. "You do not wish," he said, "tile representatives of the clergy to withhold observance of the law of the State, and to exert it the domain of temporal ajitirs the influence and authority belonging to them in the religious sphere. Your idea is the independence of the priest in his parish, the independence of the mayor in his commune. That is also our sen- timent. But 1 hasten to add that the clergy of France have no thought of menacing the independence of the State, and that we, who would never suffer that independence to be impugned, hasten to acknowledge the wisdom and independence of those who are unjustly accused of such aims." And again he declares for the ideas of 1789 ;—" We have been irrevocably a new France for nearly a century,—a France democratically constituted on a basis of political equality and of civil equality, of which universal suffrage is the expression. Nothing can turn back French society. We are henceforward the France of 1789. Far from repudiating that France, we rally beneath its-banner." In other words, the =ABM are to submit equally ; the politicians are to be silenced equally ; and the Government is to oppress equally. That is the Napoleonic form of "the ideas of 1789."
