28 AUGUST 1847, Page 13

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

THE DISEASE OF FRANCE AND ITS SPECIFIC.

THE morbid state of France is too apparent and too serious not to indicate an approaching crisis; and the root of the disease is to us scarcely leas apparent, in the want of a truly national policy— a vocation for the people—something worthy to concentrate their desires, their convictions, and their energies. It is true that in England, by a dull kind of coxcombry, which it is to be hoped we are outgrowing, we are prone to regard as disease all that is not natural to our own state when healthy, and that we have a silly habit of using the word " French" as an epithet indicating cer- tain kinds of vicious frivolities; as though there were but one standard of manners, and we had monopolized social perfection. But the symptoms of the disease in France are not confined to the ordinary national characteristics which we so readily set down as " morbid'': the sweeping extent of official cor- ruption, the alienation of the Royal Family from the affections of the people, the criminal tendencies among the high-born and wealthy, of which the world has just had so flagrant an ex- ample, are evidences of the social disorder. Still more unmistake- able proof is the manner in which the people treat those overt acts. Princes are assailed with scandalous reports which the whole people circulate with a relish ; the reverses and disappoint- ments of royal persons are noted with glee ; to be a Minister is to be hailed in the streets with cries of " Stop thief!" a murder committed by a Peer is denounced as no more than the turpitude generally characteristic of his class. And if there were a doubt as to the gravity of these popular manifestations, it is removed by the bearing of the Government : the "laws of September," a glaring infraction of the compact of July, are enforced with the lavish frequency of reckless desperation. If the people have lost confidence in the institutions under which they live, the admi- nistrators of those institutions have lost confidence in the public opinion by which they exist. It is well said by the Morning Chronicle, that the cement of the social fabric is gone. We believe that the primary cause of this disorder in society has been for some time at work, and that it is the absence of any settled purpose for the national activity. Nations, as well as in- dividuals, demand a purpose to keep them in a safe and healthy state of moral activity. The man who lives without an object for the exercise of his tastes, energy, and ambition, is not only useless, but is ever open to temptation, and is almost certain to take to mischief for "something to do." With nations, the temp- tations are still more manifold and vast ; the energies that must

be turned to some action, to mischief in default of anything else, are proportionately gigantic—the need for action commensurate.

Accordingly, all nations, so long es they were great, have had some determined work chalked out for them. To Greece fell the task of developing intellectual civilization in the early days of

history : self-development, philosophy, and art, were national ob-

jects, the more vast and glorious for the rudeness and imperfec- tion of the means at hand. Rome set herself the task of con- quering the world, and began to decay when her work was done. From mythic ages, India and Egypt have handed down to us immense monuments, the product of some vocation, which, dark and rude though it may have been, must have been national in its scope and influence. The propagation of creeds and conquest of territory have been common objects which have excited the nations, Christian and Mussulinan ; have exalted great powers like that of Christian Rome in Europe, of Islam in Turkey, of the Moors in Spain, of the Normans in England, of the Spanish and English races in America. Even under the corrupt monarchy of France, a national worship of " la gloire " maintained a certain unity of action, which enabled the dominant classes to continue that incredible oppression of the bond classes until the day of its ceasing was regarded as the thing incredible, and the master sneered at the threat that his extravagant refinement of tyranny, would make the slave rise. When the fact did come, he would not have believed his senses under evidence less than that of the horrible Revolution.

But the Monarch is no longer the State ; and circumstances have combined to debar France from having any recognized na- tional purpose. The present Monarch, appointed as the repre- sentative of a national policy, as the deputy of a distinct popular opinion, has forgotten the duty which he undertook in the pre- sence of the people, to maintain that policy and opinion, and has at last compelled his most sincere admirers to confess that the business of his old age has shrunk to purely family objects and interests. Nodding with the drowsiness of the tomb, the old man thinks now of nothing but keeping quiet in his palace and settling his sons. As to the Minister, the progress of time, the very success of

his own policy, has developed a defect in the political theory of the philosophical historian who rules France. His main object is to preserve ; to improve if forced, but less as a means of preserving institutions than as a means of contenting the restless. What the King desires for family purposes, is the same thing as the principle of M. Guizot's administration-7 quiet, mere passive quiet. The last session was a triumph of his policy: nothing was done—all was neutralized, hushed, post- poned, shelved, set at rest. Algeria is a mere vent for the vulgag restlessness : too paltry for a truly national object, it makes s place for one of the King's sons, a subject for the annual speech,

patronage for the Ministers, and a road for those loose fish who like to " go to the Devil" their own way, and who would make a noise if prevented. M. Guizot hates a noise. His policy seemed excellent, and so far was excellent, while war was the shape of danger which most threatened France and Europe. The war that was threatened in 1840 was a contest between the powers which must lead Europe in all peaceful advancement, and would have been nothing but calamitous. The danger to France now is the internal corruption incident to political inertia. Prance has no vocation : her King is thinking only of family in- terests; her Minister wants only quiet ; her statesmen are bribed and corrupted ; great interests are compromised to purchase si- lence ; paltry interests and corrupt intrigues supersede political activity ; her writers cannot speak, for they are silenced by "the laws of September." The philosophical historian understands the people among whom he was born less than the mongrel ad- venturer from Corsica : when Napoleon planted the standard of France on the Po, on the Rhine, amid the snows of the Alps or of Moscow, and told his people to march, he proved himself more of a Frenchman than M. Guizot. He too might say " L'etat, c'est moi "—until in personal objects he forgot the national objects, and left the nation without a purpose that engaged its own affections. M. Guizot's very aim is to keep the country without an active pur- pose. And he has been so far helped by circumstances—by the in- feriority of his opponents, the levity and triviality which prevail among the statesmen of the day—that public opinion itself is effectually unsettled and distracted. It is not that the favourite purpose of France is thwarted by her rulers; she has no great and determined purpose. Hence political scepticism, official corrup- tion, and popular revolution—for that is what it amounts to. Nor is it that there is no great work in Europe worthy of the enlightened active intellect of Trance and her vigorous energies. To mention one alone, there is the emancipation of Italy. Were a Napoleon to arise—still better, were a statesman animated by the love of his race, instead of mere military ambition, to declare that France would once more gather her faculties and strength to assert and vindicate the opinions of Western Europe beyond the Alps—were France to help in establishing once more a " regno d'Italia" but not as a French province, to guarantee the Monarch of Rome not in the person of its Emperor's son but in that of the great man who is so popular with the people of France, to give support wherever the Italians claim it, in a spirit worthy of the July of 1830, for Italian objects—France would again recover her healthy activity, her generous loyalty. Corruption would once more be left to the base alone; and revolution would be forgotten.